Act 3 — INCIDENTAL

All things are changing; and thou thyself art perpetually altering and, so to speak, wasting away always.—Marcus Antoninus.

The time of ripened fruit had come, and the grass was yellow and sere. Change was upon the face of the country, the prospect was mantled in mists, and the shortened evenings were dark with rain-clouds. The note of Nature’s song had altered. Autumn had taken the lyre out of summer’s reluctant hand, and as she struck her fiercer notes the foliage turned from green to gold, and the migratory birds went away.

The spirit of change had settled upon the Bethel of Thorlund. The interior was in better order than formerly. The spider had been routed, and the mouse discomfited; the strong coarse flowers of autumn glimmered dimly at the east, where the old hangings had been replaced by new; the brass-work shone, and the damp altar itself awoke one day from a long lethargy to find itself resplendent in a new green mantle. The sleep which hung so long upon the rector’s eyes had been in some part dissipated. Foolish Maude was the murderess of that slumber. Through her trivial and wholly terrestrial mind Dr. Berry perceived that one side of his environment lacked the beauty which was requisite for his bodily peace. Hitherto his mind had been so fully occupied in its strange flights that his charge the church had been but lightly included. But, subsequent to that memorable evening in the churchyard of ruined Queensmore, his lower self noted, with a distinct uneasiness, a certain lack of harmony between dreamland and the earthly vision. His manner of life had made stains which he would willingly have seen eliminated. The neglected church was one of these blots. He opened his eyes, and removed this reproach, in order that his poetic soul might no longer receive offence. This partial awakening was not spiritual, because at the same time he attended more carefully to his own appearance. His hair was more thoughtfully arranged, and his shoes were more elegant. Selfishness was the root, pride the stem, and vanity the bloom of this sudden growth, which had been raised into being and propagated as a pastime by Maude.

Change had come also over the spirit of the influence. It was stronger, more assertive, and more binding. It was at the same time more sinister. Conway and Drayton had become drifting particles controlled by the house, the instruments of its will, like electrons imprisoned within the atom. They roamed the garden in a perpetual state of dreams, responding to every breath from the hidden chamber, where the heart of the Strath was beating. Had Drayton been able to remind his companion of those past days of profligacy, Conway might have shaken his head with a perplexed smile. Had the older man been told of his former struggles to keep oil in the lamp of life, he would probably have replied, “I am thankful such misfortunes have never occurred to me.”

As for Lone Nance she was noisy no longer. The Strath supplied what had been wanting in her. Had she wandered again into the country, she would doubtless have been seized by the former wildness, and claimed by the old evils; the borrowed reason would have left her; she would have sunk again to the level of the animals. Conway would often sit and gaze upon her face. Though she was brown and tanned, she brought back for him fair-haired Winifred, walking sadly through the orchard in glimmering white, her small pale face set towards the road, watching the night for the lover who did not come.

Flora too had changed since that evening when her soul had been stripped bare. She had the feeling that youth was departing from her, and that her woman’s pride of beauty was beginning to wane. Mr. Price regarded her with apprehension, believing her to be ill. But she was not ill. She was only undergoing her punishment for having defied the first principles of the drama. She had come to regard her former opinions with a sort of loathing akin to fear. She confessed that she was an unnatural woman, after all her boastings of having made a step in advance of the remainder of her sex. What had actually occurred during her visit to the house of the drama she did not know; but she carried away a dream that evening which became a cloud darkening her life.

Upon a cheerless afternoon when a mass of grey vapour spread across the sky dropping warm rain at intervals, Conway brought his fellow-dreamer to Kingsmore vicarage.

Flora flushed when the leading character of the Strath entered. She had never been backward in speaking to any man, but then she was afraid. She knew that she desired to attract Conway, that she would still draw back if she could make him approach, but the knowledge came to her that power was wanting. She had lost the old art. At a glance she understood that he had no real affection for her. Could she have come to the Strath with a pure mind, as a humble heroine seeking development, as one anxious to discharge the high, if seemingly commonplace, functions of a woman, even as Nancy Reed had unwittingly approached the house, it might have been otherwise.

Mr. Price sought possession of Drayton, and Flora stood in the garden with the man whom she desired to shrink from, but could not. The rain had ceased, but the grass was mantled with film, and all the trees dripped moisture. The girl was cold; she was wearing white, which did not suit her. She might have recalled to him Winifred, as she had done once before, because she too was fair-haired, but she did not. Conway appeared to have forgotten that she was near. Once Flora would have been enraged at being thus slighted, but now she was pitying herself. A cluster rose, still showing a few blooms, wreathed an old-fashioned archway, and Flora in passing brushed against one of the flowers, and shivered when it became immediately resolved into a number of wet petals about their feet.

“I have changed a little lately,” she said with a new timidity. “I can touch a rose now.”

Conway stopped when she spoke, and looked fixedly into the mist.

“Could you never hold a rose?” he said. “That is unnatural.”

It was the cruellest word he could have uttered. She shrank from him again, but gathered courage to say, as they moved on, “It is not easy to conquer any antipathy. Last summer I would faint, if I came into a room where roses were. Next year, perhaps, I shall be able to wear them.”

Nancy wore roses in her hair. Indeed she was always fragrant with flowers. Conway had been sorry to see the grass flaked all over with shell-like petals; but Nance assured him that at the Strath roses bloomed all the year round. When Flora confessed that the fragrance of the queen of blossoms had caused her to faint the gulf between them became wider.

“There is a rose-bush at Queensmore, close beside the ruins of the church,” he went on, in the abstracted manner which had been his of late. “I walked there early in the summer, when the flowers were at their best. It was close upon evening, and as I looked through the trees I thought I saw a woman, clothed in white, leaning over a tomb. When I came nearer I saw it was this bush covered with blooms. I went back and tried to make out the white woman again, but could not.”

“I drove through Queensmore once by moonlight,” said Flora.

“The ruins show us what a small thing life is,” Conway answered sagely. “They teach us that no trouble is worth taking very much to heart, because suffering, like our time here, does not last for long. You know my house?” he added sharply.

“I have been inside it once,” the girl faltered.

“Why is not that a ruin? Queensmore flourished for years after my house was abandoned, but the village has fallen, and the Strath stands. It has defied wind and weather. Its foundations are secure, and its walls sound, although creepers were rotting the bricks before any man now living was born. Do you know the secret of its strength?”

“They built for eternity in those days,” said Flora more lightly.

“It is because the house has a soul,” went on Conway, as though she had not answered. “Because it lives and breathes, and has its moods like us. If it were to die it would crumble in a day. You would understand if you lived there. The Strath resembles you and me, in that it contains a spirit, which, while it remains, preserves the fabric from corruption.”

Flora was about to reply, as pleasantly as she dared, when to her great relief little bells sounded through the damp air, and Maude Juxon came to join the party, as pink and fresh as ever, although her curls were limp, and her hat saddened by raindrops. She tripped to her friend and embraced her daintily with sympathetic comments upon her appearance.

“You are white, and thin, and ghostly,” she declared. “My dear, you should do as I tell you and take a glass of warm milk, with an egg beaten up in it, every morning directly you wake up. I have been quarrelling with myself all day,” she ran on, “because I was dull; and now I’m damp and cold. Mr. Conway, say something to make me laugh.”

“I am no comedian,” said the owner of the house, which was just then very far removed from the fantastic mood. “I live, you must remember, in a valley, and it is the inhabitants of the mountains who laugh and sing.”

“But now you are out of your valley you might laugh and sing,” suggested the beauty. “Well, I shall go into the house and search diligently for a fire. It is shivery out here. Come along, Flora. How is your mother’s cold? It is so stupid to catch colds. I never do, but then I take care of myself. A cold is so unbecoming, but of course when one is old that doesn’t matter.”

Frivolous Maude rendered her society one service. It was not easy to be depressed in her presence, and her pretty face, always laughing at nothing, quickly changed the atmosphere of any room which had been dark and dull before her arrival. When all that could be said against her had been urged, the fact remained that she was always full of life and sound, like a shallow stream bubbling with bright waters unceasingly.

Her husband came frequently on the Saturday evening, leaving early on the Monday. He too had changed; he had stopped “worrying,” to use Maude’s expression, and talked no longer of a house in the country. The careless wife would possibly have laughed as usual, had anyone suggested to her that she was spending more money than her husband could afford. When he gave up persuading her to return, she believed he had accepted his defeat. As a matter of truth Juxon was hard hit; he was in a tight corner; he had ceased begging his wife to come back because there was no longer a home to offer her. His lease had run out, and he could not afford to renew it; and while Maude fared luxuriously in her farm-house, the husband lived and slept in his office, where there would be a light showing until the small hours of morning.

He had been hard pressed before to meet his obligations on settling day, but had escaped, and made the running as strongly as ever, and he trusted that energy and ingenuity would pull him through again. He was made of tough material, this stout little stockbroker. His only fear was lest Maude might stumble across the truth. When he found it impossible to allow her all the money she asked for, he stinted himself and did his best; while she sulked and called him stingy, and told him to his face that he did not deserve her. He only smiled in his quiet way, instead of shaking her as she deserved; and refreshed by the hill breezes, went back to work, pouring all his energies into a final struggle which should decide whether he was fitted to survive, or fated to go to the wall. His work would have been less arduous, had he married a wife who would have shared his burden, and assisted him with sympathy.

That very day Maude had received a message which, stated concisely, ran thus: “Could you obtain a more inexpensive cottage? I have suffered an unexpected reverse. Nothing to worry about, but clients have been more dilatory than usual in paying purchase price of their investments and differences owing on speculations. And when they are behindhand I must find the money.” The little lady had driven into Kingsmore to send a telegram in reply. A telegram was so much less troublesome than a letter. On this occasion she was not extravagant, as all she had to say in response to her husband’s note was the single word, “Nonsense.” It was very inconsiderate of Herbert, she thought. She had told him so often that she did not want to be troubled with business matters. As for that reverse, if it was of no importance, as he implied, why on earth did he want to mention it to her? She was most distinctly an injured person and a long-suffering wife.

The influence of the Strath extended even to Kingsmore vicarage. Conway and Drayton had brought it with them, and the heartless little lady was no doubt its object. So far Maude had escaped. She had come, as she thought, to visit her friend that day by mere chance, not knowing that she had been led to that place by the destiny which was then weaving her idle phrases into a net through the meshes of which she would not escape until she had learnt to know herself.

It was natural, she thought, that she should speak to Conway concerning the house of which she had heard so much. She longed to behold for herself its china and pictures. The garden, she owned, did not interest her in the least, because she liked order as represented by carpet-bedding and level lawns. Then she knew that Drayton was a writer. Dr. Berry had spoken kindly of him.

“I can criticise,” Maude declared, with wicked confidence. “I must see your work and give you my opinion, Mr. Drayton.”

The scribe muttered something which sounded complimentary, but he did not display any of Dr. Berry’s enthusiasm. He was not in the least a clever man, but his eyes were open, and he was well aware that Maude was sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

“Is it true you have a stone floor in the hall?” went on the lady frivolous, turning to Conway.

“And the floor of what you call the saloon is of real solid oak?” she went on, when he had replied.

“It is not solid now,” he said.

“Marvellously preserved,” interpolated Mr. Price, swamping his saucer by adding to the contents of his tea-cup his customary three lumps of sugar.

“And there are mirrors round the walls, and candlesticks—what do you call those things with a lot of branches?—and old pictures, and windows with those quaint diamond panes of yellow glass,” Maude cried. “Oh, Mr. Conway, you shall give a dance. Just a little dance for us.”

“Don’t, Maude,” said Flora.

“Be quiet, Flora. Mr. Conway, it would be perfect, and we will wear fancy costumes and masks, and believe we are those wicked people of the eighteenth century one reads about—yes, a masked ball, and I will help you with the supper.”

“My dear lady, the place would frighten you to death,” said Mr. Price.

“Of course I know the house is haunted,” said Maude flippantly. “But these gentlemen have not been frightened to death, and I don’t mind groans and rattling of chains and all that sort of thing, so long as I don’t see real ghosts in white sheets. Besides we shall be making such a noise the ghosts won’t be given a chance. I shan’t be frightened. Why, with people all round me I believe I might endure one glimpse at the wicked baronet himself.”

“The Strath is not haunted,” said Drayton stolidly.

“Then we must have that dance,” cried Maude. “Yes, Mr. Conway, you have promised. No outsiders. Just us, and Dr. Berry, of course.”

“Certainly we might have a dance,” agreed Conway with some spirit.

“At the end of the month,” cried Maude. “You need not worry, Mr. Conway. Flora and I will attend to all the preliminaries, and I know we shall have a lovely time.”

“I do not see the use of wearing masks,” objected the squarson. “As there are to be so few of us it will be impossible to conceal our identity.”

“Masks will be appropriate,” said Drayton almost sharply; and his voice settled the matter.

When the two men who were bound for Thorlund left the vicarage rain was again falling. On this return journey they talked incessantly; but it was not until they reached the summit of the hill, and saw the ivied roof of the Strath among the wet trees, that the thought of the proposed masquerade recurred to their minds. It was Conway who touched upon the subject by remarking:

“Do you imagine that a dance would give offence?”

Drayton understood and answered, as he inclined his head towards the dreamy hollow, “Not if the suggestion came from there.”