Deadham Hard Part 26

Her cue to-day was to offer information rather than to require it.

Curious about many things she might be; but gratification of her curiosity must wait. Damaris, on her part, listened eagerly, asking nothing better than to be kept amused, kept busy, helped to forget.--Not Faircloth's letter--very, very far from that!--but the inward conflict of opposing loves, opposing duties, which meditation upon his letter so distractingly produced. Relatively all, outside that conflict and the dear cause of it, was of small moment--mere play stuff at best. But her brain and conscience were tired. She would be so glad, for a time, only to think about play stuff.

"I want you to go on being kind to Marshall Wace," Henrietta in the course of conversation presently said. "He told me how charmingly you received him yesterday, when he called with my note. He was so pleased.

He is exaggeratedly sensitive owing to unfortunate family complications in the past."

Damaris p.r.i.c.ked up her ears, family complications having latterly acquired a rather painful interest for her.

"Poor man--I'm sorry," she said.

"His mother, a favourite cousin of my husband, General Frayling, married an impossible person--eloped with him, to tell the truth. Her people, not without reason, were dreadfully put out. The children were brought up rather anyhow. Marshall did not go to a public school, which he imagines places him at a disadvantage with other men. Perhaps it does. Men always strike me as being quaintly narrow-minded on that subject. Later he was sent to Cambridge with the idea of his taking Orders and going into the Church. My husband's elder brother, Leonard Frayling, is patron of several livings. He would have presented Marshall to the first which fell vacant, and thus his future would have been secured. But just as he was going up for deacon's orders, Marshall, rather I can't help feeling like a goose, developed theological difficulties. They were perfectly genuine, I don't doubt; but they were also singularly ill-timed--a little earlier, a little later, or not at all would have been infinitely more convenient.

So there he was, poor fellow, thrown on the world at three-and-twenty with no profession and no prospects; for my brother-in-law washed his hands of him when the theological difficulties were announced. Marshall tried bear-leading; but people are not particularly anxious to entrust their boys to a non-public school man afflicted by religious doubts. He thought of making use of his really exquisite voice and becoming a public singer; but the training is fearfully expensive, and so somehow that plan also fell through. For a time I am afraid he was really reduced to great straits, with the consequence that he broke down in health. Through friends, my husband got to hear of Marshall's miserable circ.u.mstances--shortly after our marriage it was--and felt it inc.u.mbent upon him to go to the rescue."

Henrietta paused, thereby giving extra point to what was to follow, and pulled the fur rug up absently about her waist.

"For the last eighteen months," she said, "Marshall has practically made his home with us. The arrangement has its drawbacks, of course.

For one thing the General and I are never alone, and that is a trial to us both. Two's company and three's none. When a husband and wife are really devoted they don't want always to have a third wheel to the domestic cart."

Then, as if checking further and very natural inclination to repining, she looked round at Damaris, smiling from behind her thick white net veil with most disarming sweetness.

"No--no--I'm not naughty. I don't mean to complain about it," she prettily protested. "For I do so strongly feel if one sets out to do good it shouldn't be by driblets, with your name, in full, printed in subscription lists against every small donation. You should plump for your _protege_, and that with the least ostentation possible. The General and I are careful not to let people know Marshall stays with us as a guest. It is rather a slip speaking of it even to you; but I can trust you not to repeat what I say. I am sure of that."

Damaris laid a hand fondly, impulsively upon the elder woman's knee.

"For certain you can trust me. For certain anything you say to me is just between our two selves. I should never dream of repeating it."

"There speaks the precious downy owl of long ago," Mrs. Frayling brightly cried, "bustling up in defence of its own loyalty and honour. Ah!

Damaris, how very delicious it is to have you with me!"

For, her main point having been made, she now adroitly discarded pathos.

Another word regarding her philanthropic harbourage of the young man, Marshall Wace, remained to be spoken--but not yet. Let it come in later, naturally and without hint of insistence.

"We must be together as much as possible during the next few weeks," she went on--"as often as Sir Charles can be persuaded to spare you to me.

Whether the General and I shall ever make up our minds to settle down in a home of our own, where I could ask you to stay with us, I don't know.

I'm afraid we are hopelessly nomadic. Therefore I am extra anxious to make the most of the happy accident which has thrown us together, anxious to get every ounce possible of intercourse out of it.--We quite understand you have luncheon with me on Thursday, don't we?--and that you stay and help me through the afternoon. I am always at home on Thursdays to the neighbours. They aren't all of them conspicuously well-bred or exciting; but I have learnt to take the rough with the smooth, the boring along with the gifted and brilliant. India is a good school in which to learn hospitality. The practise of that virtue becomes a habit. And I for one quite refuse to excuse myself from further exercise of it on coming back to Europe. The General feels with me; and we have laid ourselves out to be civil to our compatriots here at St. Augustin this winter. A few people were vexatiously stiff and starched at first; but each one of them has given in, in turn. They really do, I believe, appreciate our little social efforts."

"Who wouldn't give in to you Henrietta?" Damaris murmured.

Whereupon Mrs. Frayling delicately beamed on her; and, agreeable unanimity of sentiment being thus established, conversation between the two ladies for a while fell silent.

The little chestnut horses, meantime, encouraged with "Oh he-s" and "Oh la-s" by their driver, trotted and climbed, climbed and trotted, until the woodland lay below and the Signal de la Palu was reached. A wide level s.p.a.ce on a crest of the foot-hills--with flag staff bearing the valorous tricolor, and rustic log-built restaurant offering refreshment--opening upon the full splendour of the Maritime Alps.

Damaris stepped out of the carriage, and, patting the near horse on the neck in pa.s.sing, went forward across the spa.r.s.e turf, starred with tiny clear coloured flowers, to the edge of the platform.

The Provencal coachman, from his perch on the box-seat of the victoria, his rough-caste crumpled countenance sun-baked to the solid ruddy brown of the soil of his own vineyard, followed her movements with approving glances.--For she was fresh as an opening rose the young English _Mees_, and though most elegant, how agile, how evidently strong!

Innocent of the admiration she excited, Damaris stood absorbed, awed even, by the grandeur of the scene. Many hundred feet below, the rent chasm down which it took its course steeped in violet gloom, the milk-white waters of an ice-fed river impetuously journeyed to the fertile lowlands and the sea. Opposite, across the gorge, amazingly distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the undefiled, untrodden and eternal snows. Azure shadow, transparent, ethereal, haunted them, bringing into evidence enormous rounded shoulder, cirque, crinkled glacier, knife-edge of underlying rock.

They belonged to the deepest the most superb of life, this rent gorge, these mountains--like Faircloth's letter. Would beautiful and n.o.ble sights, such as these, always in future give her an ache of longing for the writer of that letter, for the romance, the poetry, of the unacknowledged relation he bore to her? Tears smarted hot in Damaris'

eyes, and resolutely, if rather piteously, she essayed to wink them away.

For to her it just now seemed, the deepest, the most superb of life was also in great measure the forbidden. The ache must be endured, then, the longing go unsatisfied, since she could only stay the pain of them by doing violence to plain and heretofore fondly cherished, duties.

But her tears defied the primitive process of winking. Not so cheaply could she rid herself of their smart and the blurred distorted vision they occasioned. She pulled out her handkerchief petulantly and wiped them. Then schooled herself to a colder, more moderate and reasonable temper.

And, so doing, her thought turned gratefully to Mrs. Frayling. For mercifully Henrietta was here to help fill the void; to, in a manner, break her fall. Henrietta didn't belong to the depths or the heights, that she regretfully admitted. With the eternal snows she possessed little or nothing in common. But, at a lower, more everyday level, had not she a vast amount to offer, what with her personal loveliness, her social cleverness, her knowledge of the world and its ways? She might not amount to the phoenix of Damaris' childhood's adoration; but she was very friendly, very diverting, delightfully kind. Damaris honestly believed all these excellent things of her.--She had been stupidly fastidious three days ago, and failed to do Henrietta justice. What she had learned--by chance--this afternoon, of Henrietta's unselfishness and generous treatment of Marshall Wace bore effectively convincing witness to the sweetness of her disposition and kindness of her heart. Damaris felt bound to make amends for that unspoken injustice, of which she now repented. How better could she do so than by giving herself warmly, without reserve or restraint, in response to the interest and attention Henrietta lavished upon her?--At eighteen, to be wooed by so finished and popular a person was no mean compliment.--She wouldn't hold back, suspicious and grudging; but enjoy all Henrietta so delightfully offered to the uttermost.

And there, as though clenching the conclusion thus arrived at, Mrs.

Frayling's voice gaily hailed her, calling:

"Damaris, Damaris, here is our tea--or rather our coffee. Come, darling child, and partake before it gets cold."

So after a brief pause, spent in determined looking, the girl bowed her head in mute farewell; and turned her back perhaps courageously, perhaps unwisely and somewhat faithlessly, upon the mountains, and the rare mysteries of their untrodden snows. She went across the spa.r.s.e turf, starred with tiny clear, coloured flowers, her face stern, for all its youthful bloom and softness, her eyes meditative and profound.

The owner of the log-built restaurant, a thick-set, grizzled veteran of the Franco-Prussian war, the breast of his rusty velveteen jacket proudly bearing a row of medals, stood talking to Mrs. Frayling, hat in hand. His right foot had suffered amputation some inches above the ankle, and he walked with the ungainly support of a crutch-topped peg-leg strapped to the flexed knee.

As Damaris approached the carriage, he swept back the fur rug in gallantly respectful invitation; and, so soon as she ensconced herself on the seat beside Henrietta, bending down he firmly and comfortably tucked it round her. He declared, further, as she thanked him, it an honour in any capacity to serve her, since had not Madame, but this moment, so gracefully informed him of the commanding military career of the Mademoiselle's father, possessor of that unique distinction the Victoria Cross--a person animated, moreover, as Madame reported, by sincere sympathy for the tragic sorrows of well-beloved and so now cruelly dismembered France.

Damaris heard, in this singing of her father's praises, a grateful reconciling strain. She found it profitable, just now, to recall the heroic deeds, the notable achievements which marked his record. Her coffee tasted the more fragrant for it, the b.u.t.ter the fresher, the honey the sweeter wherewith she spread the clean coa.r.s.e home-baked bread.

She ate, indeed, with a capital appet.i.te, the long drive and stimulating air, making her hungry. Possibly even her recent emotion contributed to that result; for in youth heartache by no means connotes a disposition towards fasting, rather does diet, generous in quant.i.ty, materially a.s.sist to soothe its anguish.

This meal, in fact, partaken of in the open, alone with Henrietta, object of her childhood's idolatry--the first they had shared since those remote and guileless years--a.s.sumed to Damaris a sacramental character, though of the earthly and mundane rather than transcendental kind. Its communion was one of good fellows.h.i.+p, of agreement in cultivation of the lighter social side; which, upon our maiden's part, implied tacit consent to conform to easier standards than those until now regulating her thought and action, implied tacit acceptance of Henrietta as example and as guide.

Whether the latter would have found cause for self-congratulation, could she have fathomed the precise cause of this apparently speedy conquest and speedy surrender, is doubtful; since it, in fact, took its rise less in the fascination of devotion given, than in that of devotion denied.

She happened to be here on the spot at a critical juncture, and thus to catch the young girl's heart on the rebound. That was all--that, joined with Damaris' instinctive necessity to play fair and pay in honest coin for every benefit received.

So much must be said in extenuation of our nymph-like damsel's apparent subjection to levity--a declension which, in the sequel and in certain quarters, went neither unnoticed nor undeplored. But to labour this point is to forestall history. Immediately her change of att.i.tude announced its existence innocently enough. For the sacramental meal once consumed, and courteous parting words bestowed upon the valiant soldier broken in his country's wars, the coachman mounted the box, and gathering up the reins, with "Ho he's" and "ho la's," swung his horses half round the level and plunged them over the hill-side, along a steep woodland track, leading by serpentine twists and curves down to join the Corniche Road--a blonde ribbon r.i.m.m.i.n.g the indentations of the five-mile distant coast.

Damaris steadied herself well back on the seat of the carriage as it swayed and b.u.mped over ruts and tree-roots to the lively menace of its springs. She studiously kept her face turned towards her companion, a myrtle-green shoulder as studiously turned towards the view. For she found it wiser not even to glance in that direction, lest rebellious regrets and longings should leap on her across the violet-blotted abyss from out those s.h.i.+ning Alpine citadels. While to strengthen herself in allegiance to Mrs. Frayling and to, what may be called, the lighter side, she pushed one hand into that lady's m.u.f.f and coaxed the slender pointed-fingers hiding in the comfortable p.u.s.s.y-warmth within.

"Tell me stories, Henrietta, please," she entreated, "about all the people whom you've asked to your party on Thursday. Dress them up for me and put them through their paces, so that I may know who they all are when I see them and make no mistakes, but behave to them just as you would wish me to."

"Gradate your attentions and not pet the wrong ones?"

Mrs. Frayling gave gentle squeeze for squeeze in the p.u.s.s.y-warmth, laughing a trifle impishly.

"You sinful child," she said--"Gracious, what jolts--my spine will soon be driven through the top of my skull at this rate!--Yes, sinful in tempting me to gibbet my acquaintances for your amus.e.m.e.nt."

"But why gibbet them? Aren't they nice, don't you care for them?"

"Prodigiously, of course. Yet would you find it in the least interesting or illuminating if I indexed their modest virtues only?"

"I think the old soldier found it both interesting and illuminating when you indexed my father's virtues just now."

"Sir Charles's virtues hardly come under the head of modest ones," Mrs.

Frayling threw off almost sharply. "Give me someone as well worth acclaiming and I'll shout with the best! But you scarcely quote your father as among the average, do you?--The people whom you'll meet on Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye on the Church, the other on the world. The permanent inconsistency of her att.i.tude, as I may say her permanent squint, gives her a certain _cachet_ without which she'd be a positive blank.--She is most anxious to meet you, by the way, and Sir Charles--always supposing he is self-sacrificing enough to come--because she knows connections of his and yours at Harchester, a genial pillar of the Church in the form of an Archdeacon, in whom, as I gather, her dear dead Lord Bishop very much put his trust."

"Tom Verity's father, I suppose," Damaris murmured, her colour rising, the hint of a cloud too upon her brow.

"And who may Tom Verity be?" Mrs. Frayling, noting both colour and cloud, alertly asked.