It was the night of one of her famous little dinners, and she was sitting at the head of her own table, contemplating her guests. The moment was one of those, before the ice cream comes to promote thought by checking digestion, when the conversation is merriest and most intimate; and she knew that she should be satisfied, if not amused and pleased, yet there was no feeling of satisfaction in her heart. It was all so accustomed to her, so stale – foods, fruits, flowers, lights, harmonious colours, luxurious appointments, conventional people – all that goes to secure social success. How well she knew it! and how weary she was of the monotony – the monotony of wealth, than which nothing is more stultifying!
Mere social distinction had been her ambition. To shine in society – that had been her one aim in life – to rival women, to conquer men; and everything – money, position, personal appearance – had been in her favour. Her idea had been to perk about in new clothes and trifle with men; and the idea of the men with whom she trifled had also been to perk about in new clothes and trifle with women. She counted her conquests, boasting of them to her rivals, in satin boudoirs, while her conquests counted her in to their intimates at their clubs just in the same way. Kiss and tell was the practice of men and women alike in that set. With rare exceptions they all lived lives of treachery and intrigue, breaking the sacred laws of hospitality and otherwise betraying their friends, and there was neither love, loyalty nor satisfaction in any of them. For fifteen years she had pursued her pitiful purpose, and had had her triumphs; but now, at thirty-three, sitting there surveying her guests, she was suddenly seized upon by a great distaste for the present, a terrible dread of the future. What had it profited her? So many rivals humiliated, so many men at her feet, and her costumes described in the ladies’ papers! The men in her set were too easy of conquest; the women – mere butterflies of fashion and frivolity – were not worth wasting her energies upon, and it is not history they make in the ladies’ papers. Yes, certainly; she had shone in her set; but she knew well enough that her set was but a small clique, quite provincial in its narrowness, and altogether discredited by honourable people at home and abroad. So what was the use of it all? And what would be the end of it all? She had done no good in her time, she had made no name for herself. Old age would be upon her by and by; she would have to outlive youth and beauty, which were her stock-in-trade; she would have to descend into joyless oblivion, courted to the last for her money, no doubt, but ending unhonoured, unloved and unregretted.
There was a pause in the chatter. She felt she had been remiss. She should have borne her part in the conversation as hostess, and not snatched that moment for reflection.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she remarked to the man on her right, ‘I’ve been thinking that I need a new sensation.’
‘And how do you propose to procure such a thing?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows and languidly perusing her face, on which her life had written some tell-tale lines that he perfectly understood.
‘You think it not possible?’ she said, in the gentle, well-bred way that made her manner so charming.
‘I think it would be difficult,’ he answered without emphasis, his manner, in its easy indifference, being very much the counterpart of her own.
She turned to the man on the left.
‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Have I exhausted all the pleasures of all the spheres?’
‘The pleasure of being yourself can never be exhausted,’ he answered gallantly.
‘Fatuous ass!’ she thought. ‘I knew he would say something to that effect. Why do men expect a woman to be pleased with empty insincerities which are an insult to her intellect?’ She caught the eye of a lady opposite, who asked if she had any idea in her mind; but the question was so evidently put for the sake of saying something that she merely smiled archly in response, and the smile carried her easily over the necessity of answering.
When her guests had gone she strolled through the empty rooms. They were decorated to excess and reeked of luxury of the stifling kind reflected from France. Everywhere were hangings, everywhere was silk or satin, even on the ceilings. The house was lined like a bonbon box, and it suddenly seemed to her ridiculous. She felt the artificiality, the stuffiness of it, and her impulse was to tear down the hangings and fling the windows wide open. It would have done her good to use her idle arms, to rouse herself to action, to rise to a burst of energetic enthusiasm, even if only for a moment, and expend it on wrecking the place. But there were servants about. One of them in the hall was rearranging a curtain which had fallen away from the pillar it should have been draping. He looked at the lady as she strolled past him, but saw no sign on her placid face of the turmoil of discontent that was raging within.
She went to her own room and caught her maid yawning.
‘I suppose you would be glad to go to bed?’ she said, with unwonted consideration.
The woman made an ineffectual attempt to deny her weariness.
‘Well, go,’ said the lady. ‘I don’t want you tonight – or, stay – give me the “ABC”.’
The maid brought it from an adjoining room.
Her mistress turned over the pages hurriedly, then glanced at the clock. It was too late for a train that night.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’m dying for a breath of fresh air. Pack up and we’ll go into the country the first thing tomorrow morning.’
The next evening saw her settled at a little country inn, looking out over an old, wild common into a lovely lonely land. She had been there before with a picnic party in the height of summer; but she knew that the place had not been at its best then, because summer was like her own set – full-blown, that is to say, as to all its possibilities. Now early spring with its infinite promise was upon the land, and she had come expecting to find that delicious spot at its freshest and fairest, and had not been disappointed.
The evening was heavenly still. She had the long low lattice-window of her rustic parlour wide open, and was lounging on the broad window seat, with her elbow resting on the sill, and her head on her hand, looking out. The pure air held the delicate faint perfume of primroses. It fanned her cheek in gentle gusts intermittently, and when it subsided it was as if it had withdrawn to renew its freshness between each gust.
The tender saffron of the sunset, shading to green, lingered low down in the west. Below, to the left, was a clump of tall trees, whence there came at intervals the first sweet, soft, tentative notes of a nightingale, newly arrived, and not yet in full song. Above at the zenith, out of the clear dark indigo of the sky, a few white stars shone resplendent.
The nightingale! the nightingale!
As the lady sat there it seemed as if something evil and oppressive slipped like a cloud of cobwebs from her jaded soul, releasing it from contamination, and making way for her to come into possession of her better self.
The next morning the sun shone on the white wonder of cherry and pear trees all in full flower. She strolled out early. Dewdrops hung on every blade and branch; birds were building; sweetbriar scented the breeze. She took her way across the common slowly, inhaling deep breaths of the delicious air; looking; listening. Everywhere was colour, freshness, beauty; every little healthy creature was active and occupied; and the birds sang, full-throated, their morning songs. She picked the fragrant flowers from the yellow gorse, handfuls of them, all wet with dew, and felt that her youth was renewed.
At the further side of the common there was a ploughed field, surrounded by a quickset hedge which was all aflush with green where the young buds were bursting – the children’s ‘bread and cheese’.1 She picked some of the buds and ate them in memory of the time when she was a little child.
On the other side of the hedge, in the ploughed field, the rooks were busy. Three of them rose and flew away. She saw their bright, dark, glossy wings shine iridescent against the cloud-flecked blue as they passed.
‘Three for a wedding!’ she said to herself blithely.
Then she turned and found herself face to face with a tall young man in a light tweed suit, and, being surprised, she flushed and dropped her parasol from under her arm where she was carrying it to have her hands free.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, raising his hat; ‘I’m afraid I startled you.’ He stooped and picked up her parasol for her.
Then he stared into her face with sudden intentness, as if he were taken aback or astonished by something he saw there; and, although she was accustomed to admiring glances, she flushed again, and smiled, and looked young.
Some little hard thing hit her face, then fell on the bosom of her dress. She looked down. It was a scarlet ladybird, speckled with black.
‘That’s for good luck,’ she said.
‘It’s for fine weather, I should think,’ he remarked prosaically.
And she was thankful for his sober prose. One of her own men would have turned the occasion to the usual kind of account with one of the usual fatuous compliments. But he was moving off with another salute.
‘Stay,’ she exclaimed – ‘stay a moment, please! Can you tell me—’
He paused two paces from her and looked at her again with an odd expression.
‘Can you tell me where I am?’ she pursued. ‘For I did not mark my road as I came, and now I don’t see mine hostelry; and I doubt if I can find my way back.’
‘Ah!’ he answered, ‘you must pay attention when you wander among the heights and hollows of the common.’
‘Heights and hollows?’ she exclaimed. ‘I see none! Surely it is all one long level, with only shallow undulations?’
‘Not shallow,’ he said, ‘but deep and difficult to find your way among if you are not observant. I’ve lost myself more than once. But I’m going to the inn now. If you will follow me, I’ll show you the shortest cut.’
He strode on as he spoke, leaving her to follow him or not as she chose. She did choose. And as they pursued their way in silence she wondered mightily what manner of man this was, in well-cut clothes – she was apt to measure a man’s worth by the cut of his clothes – who spoke with the accent of a gentleman, and lived not so very far from town, yet was so – unexpected. That was the word. But how refreshing it was to meet one such after the sophisticated club men whose every move and mood she could foresee accurately, whatever happened!
‘I am staying here. Will you come in and rest?’ she said, when they reached the inn, acting thoughtlessly on a hospitable impulse.
‘I am coming in,’ he answered in his slow way. ‘I have some business here.’
‘Thank you for guiding me,’ she jerked out, taken aback and flushing hotly; and she hurried upstairs, leaving him on the doorstep. She entered her little parlour, panting, and threw herself into a chair, feeling horribly humiliated.
Presently there came a knock at the door.
‘Come in!’ she exclaimed irritably.
‘I beg your pardon’ – she looked round in surprise – ‘you asked me in?’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly; ‘and I thought you took the invitation – oddly.’
‘You had gone before I could thank you,’ he answered. ‘You seem to be a very – sudden – lady. Or is it that I am clownishly slow?’
She looked into his honest, serious face and broke into a smile herself involuntarily, to which he instantly responded. ‘What nice teeth he has!’ she thought. The physical aspect of the man pleased her immensely. He was such a splendid young animal, so strong and healthy! But beyond that – the mere external man – if there were anything beyond, she was unaware of it.
‘If you are clownishly slow, then I am shrewishly quick,’ she said. ‘Come in now and sit down. Do you live in this neighbourhood?’
He crossed the room in his deliberate way and settled himself in the window seat.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘You pass my house on your way from the station.’
‘On the way from the station? There is only one house – at least, I only saw one – a great castle sort of place on the other side of a hill, with beautiful gardens all about it.’
‘That is my house,’ he said absently.
He was looking at her with grim intentness. Then, as if with an effort, recollecting himself, he turned his head and looked out over the lovely landscape.
Her respect for him, which had been hovering down about zero, flew up to a hundred when she heard he was the master of a house like that. The man himself she could hardly appreciate, except in the outward aspect of him; but his commercial value, his position and house and acres – those things appealed to her. There is no more commercial-minded person in the world than your fashionable lady of good birth. She would barter her own soul if she could. This one had sold herself in marriage. Her husband, now dead, was an honest old City man, whom she had in her heart despised; but of the two, though his manner lacked the grace and charm of hers, he had been the pleasanter person to live with.
There was a silence after that last remark, but it was one of those silences which are strangely full of meaning; and she felt that there was that in it which was of deeper significance than anything which she had ever heard expressed in words. When those to whom she had hitherto been accustomed were silent, she knew they were searching their shallow pates for more material to make up into idle chatter. They were all effervescence, and cheap at that; but this was still wine of the rarer sort. What was he thinking of ? What was he feeling? How strangely still it was! A bird called softly, ‘Sip-sip-sip’. Her companion roused himself.
‘That’s the lesser white-throat,’ he remarked. ‘I expect he has his nest down there.’
‘You must show it to me,’ she answered dreamily.
A small copper butterfly and a little blue argus came fluttering into the room, fighting. The copper butterfly was buffeting the argus and spoiling its beauty.
‘They fight wherever they meet, those two,’ he said, watching the combat. ‘They have fought since the beginning of time, and will fight on to the end, I should think. Would you believe that two such pretty creatures could be so pugnacious?’
She only smiled. But she was thinking cynically that she knew some pretty creatures of another species who were quite as bad. The butterflies, still buffeting each other, fluttered once more out into the open.
He rose. ‘I must go,’ he said.
‘You will come again, I hope,’ she answered, looking up at him without rising from her chair. The oval of her face showed to advantage in that attitude, and in the contemplation of it he forgot for a moment to answer her.
Then he said in his slow way, ‘Yes. Yes. I will come again, thank you. For whom shall I ask?’
‘My name is De Vigne,’ she answered. ‘Lady Flora de Vigne. Do you think it a pretty name?’
He considered a little, and then said ‘Humph!’ expressively. After which he drew a card-case from his pocket, took out a card, and laid it on the table. Then he bowed and left her.
She sat still for some time after he had gone, with her eyes shut, curiously conscious of everything – the sunshine, the sweet air, the scent of flowers, the ‘sip-sip-sip’ of the white-throat in the hazel bushes below; but above all of the little white card on the table. Who was he, this young knight of the open countenance, lord of that castle on the hill, and those fair grounds all dappled with spring flowers?
‘They are his and he is – mine,’ she ventured – reasoning by induction.
A little longer she rested with her eyes shut, giving way to ecstatic feeling. Then she rose, sighed, took up the card and read, ‘Adam Woven Poleson, Market Gardener’.
Lady Flora laughed. Every time she looked at the card she laughed. But not mirthfully, for she was all ruffled. It was too absurd! And such a liberty into the bargain! Really things socially were coming to a pretty pass when a market gardener lived in a castle, looked lordly in Scotch tweed and spoke like a gentleman! More than anything she resented the cut of those clothes; any gentleman might have worn them. There was no telling now what sort of person one was speaking to. It was fatuous of her to have asked him to call again – and call again he certainly would. That sort of person is always pushing. Well, there were two ways out of it. Let him come, and then order some vegetables from him, or pack up and go.
She rang for her maid and ordered her to pack. They would catch the evening train after dinner.
Then she strolled out into the old inn garden and threw herself into a chair. Above, the sky was radiant blue, with great masses of snow-white cloud that drifted across it slowly, casting their shadows on the earth, and changing their shape continually.
Behind her the hill rose abruptly, covered with trees. About her were bushes budding and beds bright with spring flowers. In front was the long low house, and high above it, on the other side, appeared some grand old elms. There were bronze buds on the beeches. The horse chestnuts were well out in leaf. Tufts of purple anthers hung from the slender branches of the ash. The thick, rugged boles of the Scotch firs reflected warm, ruddy lights, and their canopies of deep blue-green showed dark against the tenderer foliage of the spring. Little flycatchers flitted in and out among the shrubs, a shy bullfinch piped unseen in an undertone, while a bold thrush on the topmost twig of an elm sang out at intervals divinely. The lady looked and listened without rendering an account of anything to herself; but by degrees the heavenly peace possessed her. What does anything matter so that we are at ease, sitting alone, untroubled, silent and satisfied? This was the first stage. But as the day declined there came a second, when thought was suspended, replaced by an exquisite sensation of well-being, a glow as of warmth and light and colour, and at intervals little shivers of delicate delight when the bird sang – the thrush, the thrush!
‘Unpack again, please. I shan’t go till tomorrow.’ So she announced when she went in to dinner. But for two days after that she wandered about alone with a set countenance, restlessly, in a state of indecision. She wanted to go, and she wanted to stay – she didn’t know what she wanted. Only, when she wanted to go, the birds and the butterflies, the trees and flowers, and fresh air, the outlook over the lovely lonely land, and the blue vaulted sky above, held her enchanted; but when she wanted to stay, the sight of that little white card, which she left lying on the table for an object lesson, moved her to joyless mirth, and impelled her forth. Had it but been ‘My knight’! But ‘My market gardener’! Impossible! She must go. Yet, why should she go? – driven away by the market gardener. Absurd! No! she would stay. She owed it to herself to put the market gardener in his place – that clown, indeed!
‘I shall stay. Unpack, please.’
That was her final decision, and her weary maid, accustomed to her senseless caprices, for the third time patiently unpacked.
The next morning Lady Flora awoke in the grey dawn – awoke expectant, though she knew not of what. The spring was rapidly advancing. Cherry and pear tree whitened the ground with their snowflake flowers, and the apple trees in the orchard were tinged with a delicate pink. The little birds were trying their voices softly before they burst out into the full chorus with which they saluted the sunrise. She rose from her bed and leant out of the open window. There was new life in the air, and her pulses throbbed in response to the sweetness and joy of it.
Late in the afternoon she went out and found a bank all blue with angel’s eyes; and there she sat, sunk in sensuous delight. She took an unwonted interest now in the world about her, the exquisite world of Nature, the healthy, happy world of tree and flower and bird and beast. It was as if her eyes had been opened to behold a new heaven and a new earth.2 She had never seen such a spring before, never heard such songbirds. Every day brought its change of scene; they might have been numbered each by its own beauty. Only yesterday the buds of the beeches blushed red against the old grey boles; today their branches shone in the sunshine, all on a sudden bright-tinted with the tenderest green. And there were more butterflies, large white and orange-tip—
She had heard no footfall, but her daylight was darkened, and she looked up – looked up and flushed, and forgot the vegetables.
‘I saw your red parasol,’ he said. ‘At first I thought it was a flower.’
He sat down beside her, very much at his ease, yet not more so than seemed natural. Now that she saw him again, well-dressed, if carelessly, and noted the intonation of his voice and the grace of his manner, she could not think of the incongruous market garden – at least, she did not find it weigh with her in her estimation of the man.
He held a book in his hand.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked.
He answered dreamily, gazing into the blue distance as if the words were there—
‘Far flickers the flight of the swallows,
Far flutters the weft of the grass,
Spun dense over desolate hollows,
More pale than the clouds as they pass:
Thick-woven as the web of a witch is
Round the heart of a thrall that hath sinned,
Whose youth and the wreck of its riches
Are waifs on the wind.’
There was a little pause, then she laughed her silent, mirthless laugh. ‘I scent something ominous,’ she said. ‘What is that thing?’
‘Swinburne – By the North Sea.’3
She had never even heard of the poem. ‘Ah! it is beautiful!’ he said, and then he broke out, and half-read, half-recited, one wonderful passage after another; and as she listened she glowed gradually with something like his own enthusiasm. He made little pauses between the passages – silences full of significance.
‘It is strange,’ he said at last, ‘how this poem gets hold of one and sets up a sudden sea-hunger. Out here on the common sometimes I am so seized upon by it that I rush on and on, I don’t know why, I don’t know where – a sort of reindeer-rush to the sea.’
‘You make me feel it, too,’ she said.
But she deceived herself. The great yearning she had at her heart was not for the sea.
Alone in the garden late that night, listening to the nightingale now in full song, she said to herself tentatively, ‘Adam! And why not – Adam? What was Adam the First but a gardener?’
The grand old gardener and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent.4
And so would she – for the time being, at all events. She would stay and play the idyll out to the end. Exactly what the end would be she forbore to enquire of her inner self. But before it came, all the trees were out of flower, and the young green of the early summer was over the land. And there was no reason why it should have come to an end even then. It might have gone on for ever had she not become impatient of the pastime. It lingered too long in the early stage, however. An idyll to be interesting must swell up into a climax, and the climax must not be too long delayed else the interest flags.
She saw him – saw him continually – meeting him always in the same accidental way, walking and talking with him on terms of easy intimacy; satisfied with his companionship, and yet not satisfied – always expectant of a word that was never pronounced, of the climax that did not come. When would he speak? Naturally he was diffident (my market gardener!), she must encourage him delicately. And she tried, but she did not succeed. Her little, fashionable artifices, which never failed of their effect in her own set, all passed unheeded here. When her shoe came off he put it on again for her stolidly. When her ring stuck on her finger he prosaically suggested soap. If she appeared in a new costume he took not the slightest notice of it, never paid her a compliment, never alluded to her personal appearance at all. Yet she often caught him looking at her with curious intentness, just as all the others had done. What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he speak? At last it occurred to her that she might startle him out of his bucolic apathy by announcing suddenly that she was going away. In the restful country people seemed indifferent to change; they were content to let themselves get into a groove and to stay there for ever if only the groove were easy. He must be roused.
The next time he came to the inn she waylaid him. It was towards evening and they strolled into the garden together and sat there side by side, not talking or thinking, just feeling the tranquil, happy beauty of the hour.
‘How exquisite it is!’ she sighed suddenly. ‘And to think that tomorrow at this time I shall be in the whirl of the great wicked city once more! I shall think – I shall long – for – all this.’
‘Are you going away?’ he exclaimed.
Then there was a pause – that she had expected.
When he did speak it was very slowly. ‘I am sorry,’ he said simply. ‘It has been a great pleasure to me – to come and see you – to talk to you. No lady – like you – had ever come into my life before.’
She rose nervously and they began to pace the garden path together. The nightingales answered each other in the trees above, the darkness deepened and the stars shone out.
He spoke again. ‘Before you go I should like to tell you—’ he began, then paused, greatly embarrassed. ‘You will not think it a liberty?’
‘I shall not think anything you may have to say to me a liberty,’ she answered in a low voice, plucking at the laurel leaves as she spoke.
‘You must have noticed how I stare at you sometimes?’
Noticed it? Her heart leaped. My market gardener!
‘I feel,’ he pursued in his deliberate way, ‘I feel, now that you are going away, that I ought to apologize – I ought to explain. That first day that I saw you on the common it struck me – the likeness – an astonishing likeness – which made it a delight to look at you. You are exactly like the girl I am going to marry – older, of course, and with a different expression, but still wonderfully like.’
She stopped short, gasping – the clown!
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked with concern.
‘Nothing – nothing,’ she answered.
‘But you don’t seem well?’
‘It was nothing, really. It has passed – a sudden pang – unexpected, indescribable – a new sensation, in fact. So you are going to be married? Well, I hope you will be very happy. You must introduce the lady to me. And write to me sometimes, won’t you? Now I must go back. Goodbye! Goodbye!’
She waved her hand to him gaily and was gone.