After My Fashion (13 page)

She felt convinced that he didn't believe that all was as well in her relations with Canyot as she had tried to make out. She had practically lied about it. Canyot had never suggested taking her to America. And she divined that Richard suspected her of lying. But what could she do? She
had
, at all costs, to protect both Richard and herself from the humiliation of her being driven into his arms by Robert and her father!

Life was certainly much more cruel to women than she had had any idea of before these last months. And it had been so lovely, so indescribably lovely, that first delicious vague consciousness that there was ‘something' between herself and Richard different from anything else in the world!

And now this wretched money business, and the question of her father, had come in to spoil it all! And of course, poor darling Robert. But curiously enough it wasn't, just now, her anxiety over any broken heart of Robert that filled her with gloom. She had a queer instinctive feeling that she could always ‘deal with' Robert, whether she married him or not; ‘deal with' him and quiet him and satisfy him and make him happy or at least content. It was as though she felt that merely for her to be alive on the earth at all was in a sense enough for Robert!

The case of Richard was completely different.

And what, when it came to that, had she appealed to Richard for in her desperation? He had come to her and they had quarrelled. He was so tiresomely touchy and vain. And was that to be the end?

What was it, when she had written that letter, that she had had in her mind? He was by her side now and she must protect him from herself, from pity for herself, by making it seem that all was well between her and the painter. Why must she do this? Because she was a woman; and women were not allowed to say straight out,
from a clear unclouded sky, ‘I, Nelly Moreton, love you, Richard Storm.'

Instead of this they had to protect these impulsive susceptible creatures from their own emotions, from
their
emotions too!
Why
had they to do this? Why was the whole weight and burden of everything put upon them? Because they were women; and life had been arranged in that manner, by God, by nature, and by men!

‘Well,' she said to her companion as they observed the figure of her father crossing the garden to meet them, ‘you must give me your magician's advice very quickly; because I know Father intends to walk back with you to Selshurst after lunch. He has to make his final settlement today with the people there.'

She turned to him as she spoke and he noticed that though she lifted her eyebrows with a touch of quizzical humour her underlip was trembling.

‘The magician's advice to the enchanted princess,' said he, ‘had to be given in parables:
It's better to get drenched by the rain than
to shelter where the lightning is attracted. But it's best of all to wait
under the nearest hedge till the rain is over
.'

Her response to this was that same puzzled, bewildered, appealing look that had followed him in his first departure from her after she had watched him light the candles in Littlegate church and they had waited behind the bolted door.

The look with which Nelly had received his evasive parable haunted Richard all the next day and the day after.

He set himself to examine his own feelings and to try, if he could, to sound hers.

He was unable to write a line; and was thankful enough when his correspondence arrived from Paris and gave him something definite to do apart from poetry.

He had learnt from what John Moreton said, as they walked to
the town together, that in no less than a month's time they would have to move from the vicarage, so that the place might be made ready for his successor.

It was a wretched situation and the one thing that would have made his own way clearer, if not quite clear, a definite knowledge that Nelly really cared for him and did
not
care for Canyot, remained as obscure as ever.

He saw shrewdly enough the diabolical trap in which the girl was caught, with nothing except immediate marriage as an escape from a struggle for bare life with a helpless parent on her hands. He saw too that whoever
did
step in and rescue her, whether it were Canyot or himself, there would stiil be the difficulty of her pride and that horrid suspicion –
was it out of pity
?

On the third day after his walk with the old man, Richard set out, in the morning, to see Nelly again. He was in a bitter, miserable frame of mind; for a letter had reached him from Paris with that signature he knew so fatally well and he had broken his resolution by reading it. He had meant to destroy it, but he had read it, and it punished him cruelly now with its sweet passionate clinging sentences, soft and electric, like the fingers that had penned it.

This letter and the vibrations it had stirred, coming on the top of his trouble about Nelly, wrecked completely his peace of mind.

He tore the great dancer's characteristic syllables into tiny bits and flung them from him into the hedge as he went along.

The contradictory emotions that swayed him – Nelly's white face and great childish eyes and those monumental heathen gestures of the body born to kindle undying desire – broke up his whole inner integrity.

In vain he sought to associate first one and then the other with his new mystical faith.

‘I am nothing in myself,' he said to his heart, seeking to quiet its angry agitation. ‘I am merely one momentary pulse of consciousness of the great earth-life that struggles to purge itself, to free itself, to enrich itself with a thousand new subtleties, to pass into the
something
else for which there is no name but the name of God.

‘This perilous woman and this rare child are mere incidents in the love life of a wretched chance-driven wanderer. I take one. I
take the other. I leave them both. It matters nothing in the final issue. All that matters is that this personal life of mine should lose itself in the larger life that flows down the generations; that I should
become
that life and let it become me. And then that I should express its beauty, its tragic wonderful cool-breathing eternal beauty, in such words as I can hammer out!'

He said these things to himself as he strode the now well-known lane. But these things brought him no peace. That white face with the troubled eyes remained more important to him than any earth-soul. And those noble limbs moving in incomparable rhythms against the black curtains of the Théâtre des Arts refused to be reduced to the temporary and the irrelevant.

They pressed upon him, that girl's face and that woman's form. They demanded that his philosophy should include them, account for them, reconcile them. Ah! it could never
reconcile
them. That was, he thought with a bitter smile, precisely where philosophy broke down.

He half expected, as lovers do, that he would meet the girl where he had met her before; but he arrived at the vicarage without having caught a glimpse of her.

He found the door of the house open and he could see the buxom Grace at the further end of the kitchen garden pulling up lettuces.

He knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still there was no answer. He wondered if he should shout to Grace and command her to announce his presence. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve.

‘They must both be out,' he said to himself. Then it occurred to him to look into the church, where he had first seen her.

Yes! There she was; kneeling in the very spot where he had sat when he had lighted those candles to the memory of Benjamin and Susanna.

The old atheist priest – if so reverent a worshipper of Christ could be called an atheist – was celebrating what was certainly an unorthodox and probably an illegal Mass.
Maybe for the last time
too!
thought Richard, as he slipped quietly into the building and knelt down at the girl's side. She had lifted her head at the sound of his footsteps and as he took his place and she moved further into the pew to make room for him she gave him a smile so radiant, so full of spontaneous happiness, that it redeemed in one moment all
the past days. It was certainly from a sincere and contrite heart that he muttered his ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa' during that ancient rite, the one flawless work of art, whatever else it might be, of the passionate mutterings of the old man – and Richard noticed how often his heretical old lips blundered inevitably into the great word he loathed – it seemed to both of them that in a sense beyond anything they had ever felt they were lifted above the troubles of brain and flesh and nerves. ‘Lifted into what?' the man asked himself, as they remained on their knees, with the passion of the thing upon them, as the unfrocked priest carried away the vessels he had used. ‘Not into any mere soul of the earth! Into something that belonged to the whole stellar system. Yes! and beyond that! Into something that belonged to the life which was behind and within life, from whose unknown heart the souls of men and gods and planets and stars drew the rhythm that sustained the universe.'

By a mutual impulse they moved out together without waiting for the old man. Nelly showed him her mother's grave, upon which the
orchis maculata
now put forth tiny red buds. ‘
Cecily
', murmured Richard, ‘what a delicious old-fashioned name! It seems to smell of herbaceous borders and box hedges!'

‘It's my name!' cried Nelly, laughing. ‘Eleanor Cecily Moreton,' she repeated solemnly.

‘I should like to have known your mother,' he said earnestly.

‘You'd have liked her much better than me,' she responded. ‘She would have never said horrid things to you.'

They moved on to the grave of Benjamin and Susanna. It gave them both a peculiar satisfaction to feel how they were linked by this churchyard.

‘Why didn't they call you Talbot?' she asked.

‘They must have known what a rebel I was going to be. It wouldn't do for a friend of revolutionaries to be called Talbot.'

‘Are you a revolutionary?' she inquired. ‘You seem to me most awfully conservative – much more conservative than I am.'

‘I don't know what I am,' said Richard. ‘I met a man in Paris who'd have made a Red of me if I'd seen much more of him. I'm afraid I'm too easily influenced.'

‘I like people who can be influenced,' she said gravely. ‘Father certainly can't and I don't think Robert can – except by me!'

This last phrase was thrown in after a pause and was accompanied by that mischievous elfish smile which had puzzled Richard before.

Leaving the grave of Dr Storm they moved together towards the house, Nelly silent and preoccupied, pondering something.

Suddenly she turned to him with shining eyes. ‘Do you know what I'm going to do with you?' she cried. ‘I'm going to take you for a picnic! I often do that with my best friends – with Mrs Shotover for example–' and she shot a whimsical glance at Richard which was received, this time, very amiably. ‘Grace will look after Father. He hates picnics. Besides, he'll want his rest after lunch. And we'll go off and have all the afternoon to ourselves till tea time! Shall we do that? Would you like to? Unless you'd prefer to look at the painted ladies again!'

Richard's contentment at this proposal was so evident that it did not need his feeble joke, ‘I prefer them unpainted!' to show her what he was feeling.

Gay and radiant, with a happiness in their hearts only permitted once or twice in a lifetime to the sons and daughters of men, they went together into the kitchen and assisted Grace, who leered at them both like the sly Shakespearean wench she was and even winked at her young mistress, in preparing sandwiches and cake and bread and butter and jam.

Hearing their voices and laughter the old naturalist came in too after a while. Richard was surprised at the friendly humorous chuckles he bestowed on the expedition and at the alacrity with which he added to their basket of provisions, a flask of wine from his study cupboard.

‘A shame to leave any of this for the good man who comes after me!' he said, with chuckling unction and maliciously twinkling eyes. ‘It's what I use in
my
Mass; and if you young people drink it up, there won't be any left for the
Eidolon Vulgaris
!'

He escorted thme to the gate and wished them good luck with such mellow and ironic benevolence that Richard could not help thinking of the dignified
bonhomie
of the Rabelaisian Grangousier.

Nelly did not hesitate for a moment as to the direction they should take. She led him along a little secluded path bordered by blossoming elders which emerged after a mile or two of circuitous ascent
upon a high ridge of arable upland, covered at the season by a waving sea of green rye and barley.

She led him across these cornfields, walking with swinging youthful steps in front of him along the narrow chalk path; every now and then stopping and turning round to point out to him how red-bright the fumitory was and to indicate to him some little plant associated with her earlier memories.

When they reached the further brink of this ridge, where the ryefield ended in a thickset hedge and the path in a three-barred well-worn stile, Richard cried aloud with delight at the beauty of the valley that lay stretched before them. It was enclosed on the further end by a wood of oaks and hazel; and the edges of it, sloping down by soft degrees to a grassy level floor, were covered with thyme and cistus, milkwort and trefoil.

‘Don't you like it?' cried the girl in a voice of such thrilling happiness that it made even the turtle dove's crooning seem less golden in contentment. ‘I call it the Happy Valley. I never come here unless I'm in my best mood of all.' And she added after a pause, ‘I haven't been here for two years!'

Richard helped her over the stile and they lifted the basket across. ‘How heavy it is!' she said with a quick frown of solicitude. ‘I oughtn't to have let you carry it all that way. How thoughtless I am! I quite forgot the old thing. Here, let's hide it under the hedge. We don't want it yet do we? We can come back for it when I've shown you the Happy Valley.'

Richard was certainly relieved to get rid of the weight when it actually was out of his hands, but he had not been conscious of it as a burden. He felt that day as if all the baskets in the world might be piled on his back and he would be oblivious to it.

They ran down the thyme-scented slope hand in hand, and when they reached level ground he pressed her fingers so tightly in his own before releasing them that poor Canyot's engagement ring hurt her severely.

It may have been the sharpness of the ring bringing melancholy thoughts, or it may have been the shy happiness of a heart too full for expression, but she walked very silently by his side through the rest of the Happy Valley. It was Richard, not she, who exclaimed with astonished delight at the huge masses of budding honeysuckle that overspread the bushes above them. It was Richard, not she, who
pointed to the sprays of wild roses, the first he had seen that year.

When they reached the end of the valley, where the path they were following entered the wood, they stopped by mutual consent and leaned over the old weather-worn gate covered with a minute grey lichen and looked into the cool leafy shadows.

‘Why don't you take off your hat?' he said suddenly, in a voice that to himself sounded strange and forced. ‘Like you did in the Selshurst garden,' he added in a louder tone, making an effort, so it seemed to himself, to conceal the wild beating of his heart.

As he spoke he flung down his own hat and stick on to the bracken fronds beside them.

Her breath came unevenly, in funny little gasps. She put her hands feebly up to her head and pulled out the hat pins one by one; and then holding the hat on the top of the gate stuck the pins she had removed into it, one by one again, her fingers visibly trembling. High up in a beech tree above them a little invisible warbler kept uttering its own name in a monotonous chant, as if drunk with the sunshine and the pride of its well-hidden nest. ‘Chiff-chaff! Chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff!' that invisible owner of those leafy solitudes kept repeating.

Richard took her hat and laid it gently down, balancing it carefully upon a last year's plant of hart's tongue fern, still glossy and unfaded.

As he did so one of those weakly fluttering pale-coloured moths, which frequent shadowy places and move so helplessly when they're disturbed, flew against his face.

When he turned to her again he noticed that her eyes were so large and bright that it was as if a disembodied spirit was gazing into his very soul. The slight movement he instinctively had made towards her was stopped suddenly by that look and he clutched the top of the gate and drew a deep breath.

Then it was that the brightness in her eyes softened, melted, grew infinitely passive and tender, and by an impulse that seemed to come from some power outside themselves they threw their arms around each other and clung together, their lips joined and their hearts beating as if they were two hearts in one body.