Chapter 21

SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells above the nets.

“You heard me call?” he said at last, almost roughly.

She nodded.

“How did you--?” she began, and stopped.

“I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I was under the shadow of the woods.”

“Why?”

All this time she was gazing into Carey’s eyes, and had not seen in them that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The expression in his eyes made her forget it.

“I wanted something of you.”

“What?”

He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her question.

“I know I’ve no business to speak to you,” he said. “No business to come after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong brute, and it seems I can’t change.”

“But what do you want with me?”

Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.

“What do you want?” she repeated.

“I want a saviour,” he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking without tenderness.

“A saviour!”

For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.

“Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?” she said.

And she began to laugh.

“But don’t you see me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I am now?”

Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the dreadful change in her appearance.

“Don’t you think I want a saviour too?” she exclaimed.

“I don’t think about you,” he said with a sort of deliberate brutality. “I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women.”

“Or go away from them,” she said.

She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.

“Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?” she asked.

“Yes. I saw him leave you.”

“You saw--but how long have you been watching?”

“A long time.”

“Where do you come from?”

He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.

“Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I’m staying with him over there.”

“With Sir Donald?”

“Yes. He’s ill. He wants somebody.”

“Sir Donald’s afraid of me now,” she said, watching him closely. “I told him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?”

“I think he will. Poor old chap! he’s had hard knocks. They’ve made him afraid of life.”

“Why didn’t you keep your memory of me?” she said, with sudden nervous anger. “You too? If you hadn’t come to-night it would never have been destroyed.”

Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of fierce bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he had loved her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he come? He might have remembered her as she was.

“I hate you for coming,” she said, almost under her breath.

“I don’t care. I had to come.”

“Why? Why?”

“I told you. I want a saviour. I’m down in the pit. I can’t get out. You can see that for yourself.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I can see that.”

“Give me a hand, Viola, and--you’ll make me do something I’ve never done, never been able to do.”

“What?” she half whispered.

“Believe there’s a God--who cares.”

She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It was not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm hand laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a travelling flood.

“What are you saying?” she said in a low voice. “You are mad to come here to-night, to say this to me to-night.”

“No. It’s just to-night it had to be said.”

Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well, the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to practise subterfuge.

“You don’t know,” she said, and her voice was quiet now. “You don’t know why it was mad of you to come to-night. I’ll tell you. I’ve come out here and I’m not going back again.”

He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.

“I’m going to stay out here,” she said.

And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers touched the water.

“No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

“Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water.”

“Give me a hand first, Viola.”

Again the warmth went through her.

“Nobody else can.”

“And you’ve looked at me!” she said.

There was a profound amazement in her voice.

“It’s only when I look at you,” he said, “that I know there are stars somewhere beyond the pit’s mouth.”

“When you look at me--now?”

“Yes.”

“But you are blind then?” she said.

“Or are the others blind?” he asked.

Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.

“What do you see?” she asked. “But--but it’s so dark here.”

“Not too dark to see a helping hand--if there is one,” he answered.

And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from the oar it was holding.

“And there is one,” he added.

She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her face. How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it was so. No woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it loves--she knows.

“What are you going to do, Viola?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.

“I can’t do anything,” she murmured. “You would know that to-morrow, in sunlight.”

“To-morrow I’ll come in sunlight.”

“No, no. I shall not be there.”

“I shall come.”

“Oh!--good-night,” she said.

She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy--what it was. But it mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves and beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a throne and a woman in the dust--radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one beaten.

“Good-night, good-night,” she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.

Her hand struggled in his hand.

“Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people.”

She scarcely heard him speaking.

“D’you understand?”

“No, no. Not to-night. I can’t understand anything to-night.”

“Then to-morrow.”

“Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow.”

He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a master rather than of a lover.

“You won’t dare to murder me,” he said.

“Murder--what do you mean?”

He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost as the attention of a madwoman wanders.

“If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above the pit’s mouth.”

“I can’t help it--I can’t help anything. It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.”

“It will be your fault. It will be your crime.”

“Your hand is driving me mad,” she gasped.

She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night, was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator bending down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond human life there was life compared with which human life was as death. And now she told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human passion coming suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that this cry for salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as destroyed had deafened reason within her.

His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the archway into the darkness. Somehow--how, she did not know--she guided it to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit, gazing up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he could not see them.

“Go away,” she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might say, do, be anything in that moment.

“I can’t bear it.”

She did not know what she meant she could not bear.

He made a strange answer. He said:

“If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me--the last song I heard you sing--I’ll go. But to-morrow I’ll come and touch my helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day.”

“Sing--?” she said vacantly. “To-night!”

“Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you.”

He spoke almost sternly.

She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She took it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness. There was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the lake. She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred the shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound of oars as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She drew back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands on the keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While he was there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not--She struck a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action, had a strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear consciousness after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did he want? The concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips the poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found the meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of the women who are the saviours of men.

When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.

“When you sing I can see those stars,” he said. “Do you understand?”

She bent down.

“I don’t know--I don’t think I understand anything,” she whispered. “But--I’ll try--I’ll try to live.”

Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.

And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only by the faint voices of the fishermen’s bells, and said to herself again and again, like a wondering child:

“There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!”

EPILOGUE

IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in Society, were the actors.

In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a great number of persons to be “a very strange one;” but it was not this which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from club to club.

It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no longer a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost a legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her, after the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it was argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to do was to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from the fray in which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had indeed retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and pinched regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken commandments.

One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady Holme’s conduct, and finally remarked:

“It’s grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any rate was, a drunkard! Really it’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard of!”

Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.

“I don’t think we know very much about it,” she said, and her voice was rather louder than usual.

“But Lord Holme is going to--” began the lady who had been speaking.

“He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He left his wife when she needed him.”

“But what could he have done for her?”

“He could have loved her,” said Lady Cardington.

The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as ivory.

There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting up to go, added:

“Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I wish there were many more men like him in the world.”

She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.

Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found, had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.

In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama of human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful because the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate, had suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them well pariahs--Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her misfortune.

Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin Pierce that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing something great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the greatest things a human being can do--of winning a soul that is in despair back to hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back to belief in love. It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing it in a strange way. He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet of this woman whom he was resolved to help, and he said, “Help me!” He came to this woman who was on the brink of self-destruction and he said, “Teach me to live!”

It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day, were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation. Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.

There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes. Viola’s love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in, he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the meaning of the world’s voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance once more.

Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in the growing radiance that played about the angel’s feet. But it knew, and Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in Casa Felice, slow but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul, till there came a time when not merely the white angel, but the whole woman, angel and that which had perhaps been devil too, was able to accept the yoke laid upon her with patience, was able to say, “I can endure it bravely.”

Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.

When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible, he wished that he had been born with his friend’s nature; that, instead of the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be. And yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against Carey’s seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey had judged and loved.

Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a God. Robin wondered if he believed now.

Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake of Como.

The man said:

“Do you remember Robin’s ‘_Danseuse de Tunisie_’?”

“The woman with the fan?”

“Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps, but without it she is--”

“What is she without it?”

“Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!”

There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.

“You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the great thing.”

“And do you know what you have done?”

“I?”

“Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond the stars.”

“No, it was not I.”

Again there was a silence. Then the man said:

“No, thank God--it was not you.”

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens