Part 18

She was in a very serious mood. Like most people who have not the gift of “taking things in their stride” new orientations were a heavy business. At school, as a little girl, she had shed many tears over her arithmetic. The process of mind improvement was not to be undertaken lightly. She could never be a Miss Babraham, but her ambition, in the words of her favourite song, was to be as like her as she was able to be.

Like true poets, however, Miss Babrahams were born. Such graces came from an inner harmony of nature. All the best fairies must have flocked to her christening. One minor gift she had which June allowed herself to covet, since it might fall within the scope of common mortals; it was the way in which her maid arranged her hair. June’s own famous mane, which indirectly had brought such suffering upon her, had mercifully been spared; it had not even been “bobbed,” and with careful tendence might again achieve its old magnificence. As shyly she confessed this ambition, which sprang less from vanity than simple pride in her one “asset,” Miss Babraham assured her that nothing could be nicer than her own way of doing it.

From hair and the art of treating it they passed to other intimate topics; frocks and the hang of them; the knack of putting things on, in which Miss Babraham’s gift of style filled June with envy since that, alas, she would never be able to copy; and above all, her friend’s wonderful faculty of looking her best on all occasions.

As the good fairy, after a stay of a full hour, rose to go, she said, “If to-morrow morning is as fine as this morning, do you think you could come over to us? You know the way. It’s an easy walk of less than half a mile.”

June was sure she could.

“Please do, if you won’t find it trying. Come about eleven. And I hope,” said the good fairy, casting back her charming smile as she was about to pass out of the sitting-room door, “there may be a pleasant little surprise for you.”

During the last few weeks June had known in abundance the agreeably unexpected. And though at intervals during the rest of the fair spring day, her mind toyed with this new “surprise,” she was not able to guess what it was going to be.

LVIII

ELEVEN o’clock the next morning saw June, dressed very carefully indeed, before the portals of the House. She had come well. Excitement had made her feel quite strong again; moreover she had been promised a reward for the effort she was making. Apart from that besides, it was the biggest feat of her social life, so far, to press the bell of such a noble door.

The servant who answered it was not too proud to shew by his air of prompt courtesy that her coming was anticipated. She was led across a glorious hall--all black oak, family portraits, heads of deer and suits of armour, with an open gallery running round the top, like a scene on the movies--up a wide staircase, laid with a carpet thick and subtle to the tread, along a corridor into a room of great length whose glass roof gave a wonderful light. Many pictures hung upon its walls. June was thrilled at the moment she found herself in it, for this she felt sure, was the famous Long Gallery.

The thrill was not confined, however, to the room. When she entered, June thought it was empty, but a look round disclosed at the far end a tall young man in a familiar attitude of rapt absorption. Only one person since the world began could have been so lost to the present in sheer force of contemplating a mere relic of the past.

It was a rare bit of contrivance, all the same, on the part of Miss Babraham. Here, before June, was the Sawney, raised to his highest power. The fairy godmother had made a pass with her magic wand and William the amazing stood before her in the flesh.

He was too far from the door and too rapt in adoration of the masterpiece at which he was gazing, to have heard June come in. And so, before he saw her, she had time to grow nervous and this was a pity. For so effectively had the mine been sprung that she had need just now of all her courage.

A good deal of water had recently flowed under the bridge. It was as if a hundred years had passed since she had dared to label him a Sawney. He had grown up and she had grown down. So far away was the time of their equality, if such a time had ever really been, that she was just a shade in awe of him now.

Many hours had he spent by her bed. It was perhaps due to him that she had emerged at last from the chasm which so long and so grimly threatened to engulf her. His royal yet gentle nature had a true power of healing. The look in his eyes, the music of his voice, the poetry of his thoughts, the charm of his mere presence, had borne him to a plane far above that of common people like herself. If Miss Babraham was a fairy godmother, this young man was surely the true prince.

Beyond anyone she had ever known he had a perception of those large and deep things of sky and earth, which alone, as it seemed to her now, made life worth while. He was the prophet of the beautiful in deed as in word. During the long night through which she had passed, the sense of her inferiority had been not the least of her sorrows.

That sense returned upon her now as she stood timidly by the door through which she had come, watching the beams of an April sun, almost as shy as herself, weave an aureole for him. Here was the god of her dreams; she who lately had known no god and who long ago had taught herself to despise all forms of dreaming.

At last he turned and saw her.

“You!” He sprang towards her with an eager cry.

Brilliant stage management. But by fate’s perversity, the players, somehow, were not quite equal to their parts. June’s shy timidity communicated itself at once to this sensitive plant. There was not a ghost of a reason why he should not have taken her in his arms, for he had come to love her tenderly. The act had been devised for him, the deed expected, but this young man was less wise in some things than in others. Deep as he could look into hidden mysteries, there was certainly one mystery whose heart he could not read.

June’s odd confusion summoned a mistaken chivalry. Broken in spirit, poor soul, by what she had been through, she could no longer defend herself; he must be, therefore, very gentle. It would have been easier to tackle the Miss June of New Cross Street, the rather imperious and sharp-tongued niece of his late employer, than this quivering storm-beaten flower.

With all his genius it was to be feared he would always be a Sawney.

“How are you getting on Miss June?” he said lamely. “You look very thin, but you’ve got quite a colour.”

Something of the gawklike New Cross Street manner, which compared ill with Miss Babraham’s tact and finesse was in this greeting. Phœbus Apollo took a sudden nose-dive. He came, in fact, within an ace of a crash.

June’s cheeks grew flame-colour. An idiot less divine would have given her a kiss and have had done with it, but in some ways he was a shocking dunce.

“I expect you are surprised to see me here, aren’t you?”

She could but stammer that she was very much surprised.

“Sir Arthur has asked me to re-hang some of these.” A rather proud wave of the hand towards those august walls shewed that he was human. “And he has commissioned me”--She heard again that dying fall which always touched her ear with ecstasy--“to go over this Jan Vermeer most carefully with warm water and cotton wool.”

June knitted her brow in order to accompany his finger in its mystical course.

“A Jan what?” she said, achieving a frown. Had it been possible at this early stage of convalescence to achieve a note of reproof, that authentic touch would not have been lacking.

William’s the blame for a lost opportunity. But life is full of _gaffes_ on the part of those who ought to know better. The ability of William was beyond dispute. Miss Babraham had acclaimed it, whereby she was no more than the mouthpiece of her father, that famous connoisseur who said openly that the discoverer of the Van Roon was a genius. To Sir Arthur it was miraculous that a tiro should expose the treasure to the view in a fashion so accomplished. It hardly seemed possible to remove the burdens of overgrowth laid by time and the vandal fingers of inferior artists upon that delicate surface without damage to the fabric. Yet experts had declared the thing to be not a penny the worse for all the processes it had been through; and on the strength of this amazing skill, the owner of Homefield had decided to entrust to those inspired hands, one of his cherished Vermeers.

LIX

TOGETHER they went round the Long Gallery, gazing at the treasure on its walls, which to him meant so much, to her so little. She tried to see it with his eyes or if this could not be, at least get some clue to the quality which made quite ordinary looking objects the things they were.

Who could have believed that an old and dirty thing which she had heard even Uncle Si describe as a daub, would turn out to be a fortune? Other fortunes were here to gaze upon, but why they were so precious would always be for June a mystery of mysteries. Even with William’s help it was a subject on which she could never be really wise. She had now a great desire to reach out after Culture; the “Mill on the Floss” was most stimulating to the mind; but just now she felt, in Blackhampton phrase, that already “she had bitten off more than she could chew.”

Perhaps it was the presence of William which had induced a mood of great complexity. Old unhappy things were flooding back. And as they walked slowly round the Gallery, an object at its extreme end suddenly sprang into view, which brought her up with an icy gasp. The Hoodoo was grinning at her.

In its new setting the monster was merely grotesque. Retrieved from the morose interior of Number Forty-six, New Cross Street, which it had darkened so long with its malice, it was no longer an active embodiment of evil. The force of its ugliness was less, yet for June, in a subtle way, the implication of its presence was more.

It was as if the Fates were saying to her: “We are watching you, my girl. This young man, whom now you dare to love, have you not tricked him out of his patrimony by your pretended worship of beauty? Share his ecstasy, if you please, of his Peter This and his Mathew That, but don’t forget that Our eye is still upon you. What you have already received you will long remember, but you may get another dose if you are not careful.”

Hearing words to this sinister effect in the secret places of her soul, June could only shiver. William, now as conscious of the invalid’s frailty as of the imperious challenge of beauty, led her at once to a seat without seeking the cause of her distress.

He saw she was still very weak and hastened therefore to set her down on a chair of the Empire, heedless of the fact that she was almost cheek by jowl with the Hoodoo.

“Mustn’t tire yourself,” he said in a voice of rare sympathy which did but add to the feeling of misery that crept upon her. “I’m afraid you’ve walked a bit too far.”

Again June shivered. The old unhappy things were threatening once more to submerge her. “How I wish That had not come here,” she said dismally. There was no need to point at the Image; she was sure that he knew what she meant.

But amazing young man that he was, this was trying him a little too highly.

“Oh, you mean the James,” he said pointing to a windmill opposite. “He isn’t a Mathew, is he? I’m so glad, Miss June, you think that too, because with you to back me, I may be able to break it to Sir Arthur, that this isn’t quite the place for him.”

Divine humility! Mad confusion! Had she but felt a little stronger, a little less unhappy, she really could have shaken him.

“I mean the Hoodoo,” she said woefully.

Her wild bird’s heart went quick and high as she saw him turn casually and enfold That with a slow smile. “Right again,” he said, his head a little to one side in pure connoisseurship, a trick she had learned to watch for. “I quite agree with you--the old fool swallows more than his share of this beautiful light.”

June was not thinking of the beautiful light. She was trembling in spirit; but one of his nature could not be expected to know what demons from the abyss were invading her. “How I wish it was somewhere else.”

His laugh of gay agreement was suddenly checked as he caught the look in her eyes and in the next instant he saw the old man lying dead at the foot of the Hoodoo.

It was like the passing of a cloud across the sun. Life for him, also, had found another notation in these terrible months. He had been through a hard school. Certain lines in his face were deeper and there were hollows under his eyes. Never again must he allow the ideal to run so far ahead of the real. Yet in this harsh moment the power of his nature kept him up.

He was able to pierce to the true reason for June’s deadly pallor. It was not wholly due to the fact that she was still weak or that she had walked too far. Trolls even now were in her brain. With his instinct for healing he must do his utmost to cast them out.

“We’ll try to persuade Miss Babraham to have him put in the garden.”

Scarcely had he spoken the words when the fairy godmother, accompanied by Sir Arthur Babraham, entered the Long Gallery.

LX

“SO here you are!”

But the light note of Miss Babraham’s greeting changed to a quick concern as a feminine eye saw at a glance that June was looking “done.”

“Now don’t get up, please. I am going to be quite angry with myself if your walk has made you over-tired.”

June, a new shyness upon her, which the presence of Sir Arthur made much worse, found it very difficult to speak.

“I hope you are cultivating a taste for chicken and new laid eggs,” said the kindly gentleman. “And for a glass of wine to your meals--which I always say is what has made Old England the country she is.” Finding his jolly laugh was less effective than usual, he pointed to the Hoodoo in the tactful hope of putting an embarrassed girl at her ease. “There’s an old friend I’m sure you recognize.” June’s distress, however, grew rapidly worse and Sir Arthur made a fresh cast. “I’m not sure all the same,” he said to William in a laughing aside, “that the old fellow can be allowed to stay here. Tell me, what is your candid opinion?”

“We’ve been wondering, sir, if he wouldn’t look better in the garden.”

Miss Babraham caught gaily at the suggestion. “The very place for the jar of Knossos. And perhaps Miss June and Mr. William will plant a myrtle in it.”

“A myrtle,” said Sir Arthur. “In that chap--a myrtle?” He plucked at his moustache and looked at the laughing Laura. “Why--pray--a myrtle?”

“Papa, how dense you are!”

A hit clean and fair, which after a very little thought Sir Arthur was man enough to own. His one excuse, and a poor one, was that in certain things the sex to which he had the misfortune to belong, was notoriously “slow in the uptake.”

It was now William’s turn to acclaim the idea. Blushing deeply said that quaint and whimsical young man: “Yes, Miss Babraham, with your permission we will plant a myrtle in the jar of Knossos.”

In the laugh which followed June did not share; just now her feeling was that she would never be able to laugh again.

Sir Arthur, still tactful, now conceived it to be his duty to cheer the poor girl up. “By the way,” he said, “has my daughter told you what we propose to do with your Van Roon? Of course with your permission.”

June simply longed for the power to say that it was not for her to give the permission as the Van Roon was not hers. But she was living just now in a kind of dream in which action and speech had no part. The only thing she could do was to listen passively to the voice of Sir Arthur, while it leisurely unfolded a tale of fairyland.

“I must tell you,” he said, “subject to your approval--always, of course, subject to _that_--we have formed a sort of committee to deal with this picture of yours. It has given rise to a rather curious position. We think--three or four of us--that it ought to be acquired for the nation; but of course there’s the question of price. If the work is put up at auction, it may fetch more than we should feel justified in paying. Sentiment of course; but nowadays sentiment plays a big part in these matters. On the other hand, having regard to the obscurity of its origin, it might be knocked down for considerably less than it is intrinsically worth. All the same we are quite convinced that it is a very choice example of a great master, and that the place for it is the National Gallery, where another Van Roon is badly needed. Now I hope you see the dilemma. If the nation enters the market a definite buyer, the thing may soar to a preposterous sum. At the same time, we don’t want the nation to acquire it for less than its real value. So the question in a nutshell is, will you accept a private arbitration or do you prefer to run the risk of getting comparatively little in the hope of obtaining an extra ten thousand pounds or so?”

June followed the argument as closely as she could, and at the end of it burst into wild tears.

“The picture is not mine,” she sobbed. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

It was a moment of keen embarrassment. Sir Arthur, who had doubted from the first, was hardly to be blamed for beginning to doubt again. Such an outburst was the oddest confirmation of his first suspicion, which conspiring Circumstance had enabled him perhaps too easily to forget. But Laura’s faith was quite unshaken. For her the question of ownership had been settled once and for all. The poor thing was overwrought, overdriven; it was so like the tactless father of hers, to worry the girl with all kinds of tiresome details when he should have known that she was not strong enough to grapple with them.

“Come, papa,” said Laura Babraham with reproof in a clear grey eye. “If we don’t go at once and look at that herbaceous border we shall certainly be late for luncheon.”

LXI

LEFT to themselves once more, it became William’s task to comfort June’s distress. Like Sir Arthur, he too, it seemed, could be tactful. Instead of discussing the question of the Van Roon’s ownership or the unlucky presence of the Hoodoo, he began gently to discourse of Mathew Maris.

As far as June was concerned he might as well have discoursed of the moon. In the first place she had never heard of Mathew Maris; and in the second she was consumed by a desire to settle forever the question of the Van Roon which was now tormenting her like a fire. This was a dynamic moment, when great decisions are reached with startling abruptness and half a lifetime may be lived in half a minute.

Mathew Maris was not for June just now. Suddenly she broke again into wild sobs.

“I cheated you, I tricked you over that picture.”

Again, good honest fellow, he tried to change the current of this mind distraught. But it was not to be.

“You gave it me, didn’t you, because I made you think I had fallen in love with it? But I hadn’t. It meant nothing to me--not in that way.”

He stood an image of dismay, but he had to listen.

“Why do you suppose I did that? I’ll tell you. I overheard Uncle Si talking to a dealer. You remember, don’t you, the funny crooked little man in the knitted comforter and the brown billycock whom I used to call Foxy Face? One morning when you were out he offered Uncle Si five pounds for it and Uncle Si said it might be worth a good deal more. That’s why I decided to get hold of it if I could, before Uncle Si got it from you. And that’s why I cracked it up and made you think I could see all sorts of wonders in it, when all the time I saw no more beauty in it than there is in That.” And she pointed to the Hoodoo.

William gave a little gasp. June heard the gasp. And in the mad unhappiness of that moment she determined to spare herself nothing. She would strip herself bare so that the whip might be better laid on.

“Beauty means no more to me than it does to that Thing there. All your talk about Hobbemas and Marises and Vermeers and Cromes are to me just sloppy. They bore me stiff every time. I hate the sight of all these things.” The wave of a wildly tragic hand included all the masterpieces in the Long Gallery. “I hate them! I hate them! So now you know the mean and dirty liar that I am.”

No longer able to bear the sound of her strange and terrible words he turned sickly away. It was almost as if they had opened a vein in his heart. He remembered again the cry that had haunted him after his seeing her first at the Hospital. “Am I struck? Am I like Uncle Si? Am I like the Hoodoo?”

Poor soul! It was not for him to judge her. He could only think of her sufferings. And it was cruel indeed to realize what they must be now.

“That’s why I don’t want the money. And that’s why I don’t mean to have it. I burn when I think of it. Now you know how low down I am. I hope you like the way I’ve cheated you.”

He sought to take her hand, but she withdrew it fiercely. His very goodness almost made her hate him.

LXII

BY the advice of Miss Babraham they planted a myrtle in the jar of Knossos. Some days later the Hoodoo was haled into a convenient corner of the Italian garden. Here, by the marge of a tiny rock-strewn lake, the momentous rite was performed with a high solemnity. Much displacement of mould and a considerable wheelbarrowing of the same was necessary and Mr. Chrystal, the head gardener, had to advise in the use of the trowel, an art in which neither June nor William was quite so adept as they might have been. But at last, after some honest digging and shovelling on the part of William who was not afraid to take off his coat to the job, and timely help from Mr. Chrystal’s George who was uncannily wise, although to be sure he had the experience of a lifetime and a fairly long one to bring to bear on such matters, the thing was done.

June and William then retired to the fragrant shade of a budding lime, feeling rather hot, yet not dissatisfied with their labours. It was a perfect morning. Larks were hovering in the bright air. Blackbirds and thrushes were trying out their grace-notes, and once June thought she heard a nightingale.

For a little they reclined in poetic comfort in two wicker chairs. Fauns in marble, and Cupid, complete with bow and arrows lurked hard by. At last June broke a delicious silence.

“You must put your coat on,” she said suddenly.

“But----” said William who really had delved and shovelled to some purpose.

June was not to be Butted--not this golden day.

“If you don’t you might get a bad chill,” she said severely.

William rose and did her bidding. And in the midst of that simple act, a certain piece of confidential information, which Sir Arthur and Miss Laura had been kind enough to supply at frequent intervals during the last few days, recurred forcibly to his mind. It was to the effect that “Miss Gedge was so practical she would make an ideal wife for an artist.”

As far as the major premise was concerned it was less irrelevant than at first it might seem, for William had recently decided that an artist was what he was going to be. In the very act of putting on his coat he now recalled the high and sacred mystery to which his life was vowed. And further he recalled that before entering the garden he had taken the precaution of slipping a neat little sketching book and pencil into his coat pocket. Thus, upon sitting down, in solemn silence he took them forth and proceeded to draw.

June it was who broke the silence, after some little while.

“If you are drawing that myrtle,” she said, “it looks a bit potty to me stuck up there. There’s nothing to it.”

She was more her true self this happy morning than for many a tragic month.

“It’ll grow,” said the artist.

“Won’t seem much if it doesn’t in that great jar. It was Miss Babraham’s idea to stick it there, so it’s all right of course. She said it was an emblem of what was it?”