The Way of Ambition Part 22

"I--I wish you'd tell me where you got that coat and skirt," said Charmian.

"I will. I got it at Folkestone. I'll give you the address when we go on board again. My mother lives at Folkestone. She is a companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins, so I go down there whenever I have time."

One's mother companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins! How extraordinary!

And why did it make Charmian feel as if she were almost fond of Susan Fleet?

"And I get really well-cut things for a very small price there, so I'm lucky."

"I think you are lucky in another way," hazarded Charmian.

"Yes?"

"To be as you are."

After that day in the garden Charmian knew that she was going to be fond of Susan Fleet. Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, of course, did not return on the following afternoon.

"I daresay she'll be away for a week," Susan said. "If you feel better we might go and see the town and visit some of the villas. There are several that are beautiful."

Quite eagerly Charmian acquiesced. But she soon had reason to be sorry that she had done so. For much that she saw increased her misery. Boldly now she applied that word to her condition, moved perhaps to be at last frank with herself by the frankness of her quite unintrusive companion.

Algiers affected her somewhat as the _Pet.i.te Fille de Tombouctou_ had affected her, but much more powerfully. This was exactly how she put it to herself: it made her feel that she was violently in love with Claude Heath. What a lie that had been before the mirror after Max Elliot's party. How dreadful it was to walk in these exquisite and tropical gardens, to stand upon these terraces, to wander over these marble pavements and beneath these tiled colonnades, to hear these fountains singing under orange trees, to see these far stretches of turquoise and deep blue water, to watch Arabs on white roads pa.s.sing noiselessly by night under a Heaven thick with stars, and to know "He is not here and I am nothing to him!"

Charmian's romantic tendency, her sense of, and desire for, wonder were violently stirred by the new surroundings. She was painfully affected.

She began to feel almost desperate. That terrible sensation, known perhaps in its frightening nightmare fulness only to youth, "My life is done, all real life is at an end for me, because I cannot be linked with my other half, because I have found it, but it has not found me!"

besieged, a.s.sailed her. It shook her, as neurasthenia shakes its victim, squeezing as if with fierce and powerful hands till the blood seems to be driven out of the arteries. It changed the world for her, making of beauty a phenomenon to terrify. She looked at loveliness, and it sent a lacerating ache all through her, because only the half looked at it and not the whole, some hideous astral shape, not the joyous, powerful body meant for the life of this splendid world, at home in the atmosphere specially created for it. She began to be frightened and to think, "But what can I do? How will it end?" She longed to do something active, to make an exertion, and struggle out of all this a.s.sailing strangeness.

Like one attacked in a tunnel by claustrophobia, she had an impulse to dash open doors and windows, to burst arching, solid walls, and to be elsewhere.

At first she carefully concealed her condition from Susan Fleet, but when three days had gone by, and no word came from Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, she began to feel that fate had left her alone with the one human being of whom she could make a confidante. Again and again she looked furtively at Miss Fleet's serene and practical face, and wondered what effect her revelation would have upon the very sensible personality it indicated.

"She'll think it is all nonsense, that it doesn't matter at all!"

thought Charmian. And more than ever she wanted to tell Miss Fleet. In self-restraint she became violently excited. Often she felt on the verge of tears. And at last, very suddenly and without premeditation, she spoke.

They were visiting "Djenan el Ali," the lovely villa of an acquaintance of Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney's who was away in Europe. Miss Fleet had been there before and knew the servants, who gladly gave her permission to show Charmian everything. After wandering through the house, which was a pure gem of Arab architecture, five hundred years old, and in excellent preservation, they descended into the garden, which was on the slope of the hill over which the houses of Mustapha Superieur are scattered. Here no sounds of voices reached them, no tram bells, no shrieks from motors buzzing along the white road high above them. The garden was large and laid out with subtle ingenuity. The house was hidden away from the world that was so near.

Miss Fleet strolled on, descending by winding paths, closely followed by Charmian, till she came to a sheet of artificial water, whose uneven banks were covered with ma.s.ses of azaleas, rhododendrons, bamboos, and flowering shrubs. In the midst of this lake there was a tiny island, just big enough to give room for the growth of one gigantic date palm, and for a ma.s.s of arum lilies from which it rose towering toward the delicate blue of the cloudless sky. The lilies and the palm--they were the island, round which slept greenish-yellow water guarded by the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the bamboos, and the shrubs. And on the path where Charmian and Miss Fleet stood there was a long pergola of roses, making a half-moon.

Charmian stood still and looked. The ground formed a sort of basin sheltering the little lake. Even the white Arab house was hidden from it by a screen of trees. The island, a wonderfully clever thing, attained by artificiality a sort of strange exoticism which almost intoxicated Charmian. Perhaps nothing wholly natural could have affected her in quite the same way. There was something of the art of a Ferdinand Rades in the art which had created that island, had set it just where it was.

It had been planned to communicate a thrill to highly civilized people, to suggest to them--what? the Fortunate Isles, perhaps, the strange isles, which they dream of when they have a moment to dream, but which they will certainly never see. It was a suggestive little isle. One longed to sail away, to land on it--and then?

Charmian stood as if hypnotized by it. Her eyes went from the lilies up the great wrinkled trunk of the palm to its far away tufted head, then travelled down to the big white flowers. She sighed and gazed. And just at that moment she felt that she was going to tell Susan Fleet immediately.

On the sh.o.r.e of the lake there was a seat.

"I must tell you something," Charmian said, sinking down on it. "I'm very unhappy."

She looked again at the island and the tears came to her eyes.

"He never has even let me hear a note of his music!" she thought, connecting Claude Heath's talent with the lilies and the palm in some strange way that seemed inevitable.

Susan Fleet sat down and folded her white-gloved hands in her neat tailor-made lap.

"I'm sorry for that," she said.

"And seeing that island, seeing all these lovely places and things makes it so much worse. I didn't know--till I came here. At least, I didn't really know I knew. Oh, Miss Fleet, how happy I could be here if I wasn't so dreadfully wretched."

A sort of wave of desperation--it seemed a hot wave--surged through Charmian. All the strangeness of Claude Heath flowed upon her and receded from her, leaving her in a sort of dreadful acrid dryness.

"Surely," she said, "when you are in places like this you must feel that nothing is of any real use if one has it alone."

"But I'm with you now," returned Miss Fleet, evidently wis.h.i.+ng to give Charmian a chance to regain her reserve.

"With me! What's the use of that? You must know what I mean."

"I suppose you mean a man."

Charmian blushed.

"That sounds--oh, well, how can we help it? It is not our fault. We have to be so, even if we hate it. And I do hate it. I don't want to care about him. I never have. He's not in my set. He doesn't know anyone I know, or do anything I do, or care for almost anything I care for--perhaps. But I feel I could do such things for him, that he will never do for himself. And I want to do them. I must do them, but he will never let me."

"I hope he's a gentleman. I don't believe in mixing cla.s.ses, simply because it seems to me that one cla.s.s never really understands another, not at all because one cla.s.s isn't just as good as another."

"Of course he's a gentleman. Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney asked him to come on the yacht."

"Oh! Mr. Heath!" observed Miss Fleet.

Charmian thought she detected a slight change in the deep chest tone of her companion's voice.

"D'you know him?" she asked, almost sharply.

"No."

"Have you seen him?"

"No, never. I only heard that he might be coming from Adelaide, and then that he wasn't coming."

"He knew I was coming and he refused to come. Isn't it degrading?"

"Is he a great friend of yours?"

"No, but he is of my mother's. What must you think of me? What do you think of me?"

Charmian put her hand impulsively on Miss Fleet's arm.

"I didn't know till I came here. I thought I disliked him, I almost thought I hated him."

"That's always a bad sign, I believe," said Miss Fleet.

"Yes, I know. But he doesn't hate me. He doesn't think about me. He's mother's friend and not even my enemy. Do tell me, Miss Fleet--or may I call you Susan to-day?"

"Of course, and to-morrow, too."