THE PEACOCK FEATHER (continued 2)

“London,

“June 3rd.

“The day after to-morrow I shall be in my garden, revelling in its beauty and in the perfume of my night-stocks. The scent of ballrooms and theatres will be left behind in this big noisy London. It has its fascination, though. This morning the streets were bathed in sunlight, and crowded with women in gay dresses till they looked like a great restless nosegay. We talk of ‘Spring in the country,’ but here its note is just as insistent. In February the Parks were brilliant with crocuses, their hardy little yellow, white, and purple flowers spreading far under the trees. They were followed by daffodils and tulips, masses of glorious colour. And for sheer beauty give me a sunset across the Parks, or the blue mists veiling the great masses of building. Or, again, the river between sunset and night. Have you ever walked along the Embankment in the evening? I walked there yesterday. Westward the river and sky flamed purple, crimson, and gold; eastward a silver haze covered land and water, with pale lights shining through and reflected in the river. A small boy walking with his mother exclaimed in rapture, ‘Oh, mother, look at the lights!’ ‘What about them, dear?’ came the reply. The matter-of-fact tone of the words was indescribable. Thus is the early glimmering of poetry effaced from the infant mind. I write of it lightly. At the moment indignation and tears struggled for the mastery.

“I read the following advertisement in a paper the other day:

“‘Wanted, a bright sympathetic woman, not necessarily under 25, as Companion-Help in a family of three. No children, no washing, but the ordinary work of the house to be done. Must be educated, as she is wanted to be one of the family and help in philanthropic work. Will be needed to do plain cooking, and a “sense of humour” will be appreciated. Salary a matter of arrangement. Protestant.’

“Then followed the address. Doesn’t it strike you as rather funny? Can you imagine any one sitting down solemnly to answer it? Testimonials re a sense of humour!

“‘Dear Madam, in my former situations my sense of humour proved a great attraction. I enclose extracts from references. “Jane Smith is the soul of wit.” “Our Companion-Help kept us through meal-time in one perpetual roar of laughter.” “Laughter is the best digestive sauce. Jane Smith’s humour provides that sauce!”’

“I am glad you think I may at times discard my garment of tradition. Now I come to think of it, I believe I did discard it when I first wrote to you. I do not think at that moment the ancestral garment can have been upon me. Talking of that first letter, will you do me a favour? I want you to burn it. It was too solemn, too serious, written with altogether too heavy a pen. Something made me write it, and I am glad of it; but I was so anxious to place myself above the possibility of a snub that my sense of humour was for the moment obliterated. I took myself and my own importance too seriously. Therefore please destroy it, though it is quite possible that you have already done so.

“I want to read the thoughts of your Wanderer. They should be untrammelled thoughts, wide as the open spaces he is traversing. When the gods are good to you I shall look for a copy of the book. I prefer my word to your ‘if.’

“My next letter shall be written from my terrace if the sunshine continues in this glory. Good-night.”

The letter read, Peter repeated the little ceremony of dining with, and toasting, his Lady. He then proceeded to write to her.

“June 5th.

“Dear Lady,—Thank you for your letter. Doubtless the Muses join with you in your tears and indignation when they see their children stifled at birth. I wonder what ‘Mrs. Be-done-by-as-you-did’ will have in store for those parents. Yet their intentions are probably of the very best.

“I should like to see the answers that advertisement will receive. Protestant and philanthropic work, when advertised as such, seem inconsistent with a sense of humour. The person who answers the advertisement will either be devoid of it, or possess it in a very marked degree.

“Why should the first favour you ask of me be one I have not the heart to grant! I cannot burn that letter. I should watch it shrivel and twist in the flames like some protesting living thing. It would be like burning the photograph of a friend. Call me superstitious, idiotic, any name you choose, but I can’t do it. I will, however, return it to you, though with great reluctance, and you can do with it as you will. Send me in exchange one of your night-stocks. It will be less shrivelled than your letter had I done as you ask.

“Dear Unknown Lady, when my next book is published—you see, I accept your correction—have I your permission to dedicate it to you? With the exception of the first two chapters, which were written before I knew you, it is written to you and for you alone. My Wanderer speaks his thoughts directly to you, believing that they will find favour in your sight.

“Though I have churlishly refused the favour you asked of me, will you grant me this one?

“Robin Adair.”

Peter put the letter into an envelope and addressed it. After a few minutes he came out of the cottage into the little copse.

The June night was very still. The after-glow from the sunset still lingered in the west; the darkness would be of short duration.

Suddenly the sound of wheels struck on Peter’s ear, and the quick clear tang of horses’ hoofs on the dry road. A few moments later a carriage came into sight, and drove past him towards the village. In spite of the dusk Peter saw that the men on the box wore livery, and a lamp inside the carriage gave him a glimpse of two women’s forms. A couple of boxes were strapped at the back of the carriage.

“Without doubt,” said Peter to himself, “it is Lady Anne returning.”

CHAPTER X

THE LADY ANNE

Lady Anne Garland was sitting by a rosewood writing-desk in her morning-room. She had finished her letters, and was now sitting idle, gazing through the window on to the terrace, and away to the distant woods and hills, which lay serenely blue in the sunlight.

She was dreaming rather than thinking, and a pleasant little dream it would seem, by the half smile in her grey eyes. The sunshine lay along the floor in a broad, vivid patch. It fell across her white dress and on her dark hair, which held the blue-black sheen of a rook’s plumage. Her skin was creamy-white, and her mouth, modelled like the mouth of a Greek statue, was of geranium red. In fine, Lady Anne was beautiful.

The sound of the door opening made her turn her head. A small thin woman entered. She was dressed in a tailor-made dress of some pepper-and-salt material, and wore a black straw hat, rather floppy, and distinctly out of keeping with her otherwise tailor-made appearance. Her hair was grey, and her skin somewhat like parchment, but her eyes and mouth were kindly.

“Finished your letters?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Anne, getting up from her desk. “Come into the garden. It is too lovely a day to waste indoors.”

She led the way through the French window on to the terrace, and sat down on one of two deck-chairs. Miss Haldane followed her example.

“You should have a hat,” she said abruptly.

“No,” replied Anne lazily, “I like the sun. I think my skin is too thick to burn. Look at the blueness on those woods and hills; isn’t it glorious?”

Miss Haldane put up her eyeglasses and looked at the landscape.

“Very nice, my dear. Jabez said the hay harvest was unusually good this year.”

Jabez was the head gardener.

Anne laughed softly. “You are so delightfully practical, Matty dear. If the sun shines you think of the crops, if the rain falls you think of the crops, if the wind blows you still think of the crops. You missed your vocation when you took up the post of companion to a sentimental dreamer; you should have been a farmer.”

“Had the good Lord made me a man, I should have been one,” replied Miss Haldane instantly. “As it is, I take an interest in the farming of your tenants. And you must allow that weather is of the first importance to them.” She dropped her eyeglasses and looked at Anne.

“I know,” owned Anne; “but turnips do not appeal to me. I love my flowers to have their needs supplied, however; and that shows that I am selfish enough to be merely interested in what interests me.”

There was a pause.

“The cottage in the copse has found an inhabitant,” said Miss Haldane suddenly and abruptly. “I can’t call him a tenant because the man pays no rent. I suppose no one knows to whom the rent would be due.”

“Really!” exclaimed Anne, replying to the first part of Miss Haldane’s speech. “Who has been bold enough to venture there?”

“A vagabond of sorts, I believe,” said Miss Haldane. “Of course, the villagers are looking upon him with suspicion and distrust. He wears a peacock feather in his hat and plays the penny whistle.”

“How pleasant!” said Anne.

Miss Haldane snorted. “Can’t you have him turned out?” she demanded. “I don’t think it is a good plan to have a vagabond settling in the village.”

“The cottage is not mine,” replied Anne; “as far as I know, it is no man’s property. Besides, does he do any harm—poach, or anything like that?”

“Not that I know of,” returned Miss Haldane. “In fact, they say he buys, and pays for, certain provisions at the village shop.”

“Then,” said Anne lazily, “he is not a vagabond. A vagabond is one without visible means of subsistence; this man evidently has visible means. I wonder what he is like. I fancied no man would have braved that cottage after nightfall even if he had ventured within at daylight. At all events, superstition has been very rife around it.”

“They say he plays the penny whistle beautifully,” remarked Miss Haldane.

Anne’s eyes twinkled. “You have culled much information since our arrival last night, Matty dear. The man shall come and give us a concert.”

“My dear!”

“Why not?” asked Anne carelessly. “An unstudied simple concert on the penny whistle would, I am sure, be full of charm. Burton shall go down to-morrow and request him from me to come up to the terrace.”

Miss Haldane was shocked, perturbed. In a word, she fluttered in a manner not unlike an elderly hen with a duckling chick.

“You cannot do it, Anne. You cannot send a footman to the cottage and ask the man to come up here. In the first place, he is probably a socialist, and wouldn’t come. In the second place—well, it isn’t nice.”

Anne laughed outright. “Dear Matty, your favourite adjective! With the negative prefix it applies equally to a burnt pudding, or to a woman who leaves her husband in order to run away with another man. But you’re a dear, and I won’t laugh at you; and you shan’t be present at the concert if you’d rather not.”

Miss Haldane spoke a little stiffly. “If you will be foolish, Anne, I must be present at your folly. It is the only way in which I can merit the liberal salary you give me.”

“Dear Matty, what nonsense!” said Anne.

Again there was silence, and it lasted some time. Butterflies flitted in the still air, bees droned lazily in a lime-tree to the west of the terrace, and once or twice a dragonfly skimmed past with a flash of iridescent wings.

Miss Haldane looked at Anne lying back in the deck-chair, which was placed at its lowest angle. Her own was as upright as was consistent with its nature. She had a piece of crochet in her hands, and was working industriously. Matilda Haldane was never idle, and she never lolled. From her earliest years she had been told to “get something useful to do,” if there happened to be a single spare moment in the ordinary routine of walks, meals, and lessons. Later she was obliged, on her own account, to get something useful to do, and to keep doing it, if she was to live in the smallest degree as she imagined a lady should live. There had been nothing extravagant about Miss Haldane’s ideas, either, but they had included a seat in a church where sittings were rented and threepence to be placed Sunday morning and evening in the offertory-bag.

The useful occupation which provided her with a means of livelihood had been monotonous—how monotonous only Miss Haldane knew. Then suddenly, and by some intervention of providence, Lady Anne Garland came across her path, and at a moment when Lady Anne was—to use her own parlance—tired of companions who were either entirely opinionated or entirely deprecating, or, worse still, who dissolved into floods of injured tears if told that Anne wished to receive a guest alone.

Something about the little dried-up woman—probably her quiet and indomitable pluck under adverse conditions—appealed to Anne. A month after their first meeting, Miss Haldane found herself transplanted to Anne’s London house, with a salary that far exceeded her wildest dreams. The only fly in her ointment was the thought that she did nothing to merit it. Merely to live in a house, to be waited upon by servants, to eat dainty food, and to drive with Anne in the Parks, seemed to her an utterly inadequate return for the money she received. It was, however, all that Lady Anne wished her to do. After a time she grew accustomed to the fact that this was all that was expected of her. Her own innate dignity and Anne’s charming and frank manner prevented her from feeling herself a dependent, and an odd but very sincere friendship was the result.

This was now the third summer that she had sat on the terrace and watched Anne lazing in the sunlight. Her beauty, her youthful vigour, in spite of her present indolent pose, struck Miss Haldane anew.

Suddenly Miss Haldane spoke. “Anne,” she said, “I wonder you have never married.”

The sound of the luncheon gong followed on the speech. Anne rose from her chair with panther-like grace.

“So do I, Matty dear—sometimes.”

“But why don’t you?” asked Miss Haldane.

Anne walked to the window. At the window she turned. “Because,” she said, mock-solemnity in her voice, “though few people realize it, I have a soul.”

“Of course you have,” replied Miss Haldane seriously; “but what has that got to do with marriage?”

Anne laughed. “Nothing, of course,” she replied; “and all the men I happen to know would agree with you. Don’t look puzzled, Matty dear, but come and have lunch.”

CHAPTER XI

A CONCERT—AND AFTER

I

Peter was partaking of a noonday meal of bread and cheese and beer when a knock came on his cottage door. For a moment or two he thought his ears must have deceived him, and he did not move. But the knock was repeated.

Peter got up and opened the door. A man in footman’s garb was standing outside. He looked Peter up and down with a slightly supercilious expression.

“Well?” demanded Peter.

“The Lady Anne Garland wishes you to bring your penny whistle-pipe to the terrace at four o’clock this afternoon, and be punctual,” he announced.

It was not precisely the formula in which Lady Anne had worded the message, but Burton considered it an exact enough paraphrase to be delivered to a mere vagabond. It was in his eyes an even over-courteous method of delivering the message.

“Indeed!” said Peter.

“Four punctual,” repeated the man with a slightly insolent air. And he turned from the door.

Had he lingered a moment longer Peter would quite probably have kicked him. Astonishment on Peter’s part and a swift retreat on his alone saved him.

“Upon my word!” ejaculated Peter, looking after the retreating figure. Then he went into the cottage and shut the door.

“Insolence or fame,” remarked Peter to his glass of beer, “in which light shall I regard it?” And then suddenly he laughed.

After all it smacked finely of medieval days, this command from the lady of the manor to appear before her. Annoyance began to vanish; even the insolence of the flunkey was in the picture. It was fame, there was no question about it.

“And, Robin Adair, you writer of tales, here’s a subject made to your hand,” he quoted.

Oh, he’d act the part well! A hint more disarray than usual about his costume, his oldest coat and trousers—he had two day suits now, this possessor of a cottage—must certainly be worn, with the peacock feather at its jauntiest angle. He must also allow himself a slight air of swagger, as of one conferring a favour; in appearance the vagabond they regarded him, in manner a Kubelik stepping with assurance before his audience.

Peter began to be pleased; to look forward to the appointed hour with interest. It was the writer in him, the man who sees, in any novel situation in which he may find himself, new material for his pen.

“Fate,” quoth Peter to himself, “is thrusting another rôle upon me.” And then as children—and grown-ups for the matter of that—count cherry stones, he ticked them off on his fingers. “Gentleman, scamp, jail-bird, tramp, author, writer of letters to an Unknown Fair One, and piper to the lady of the manor. Peter, my son, what else have the Fates in store for you?” And then he gave a little involuntary sigh, for after all, was not the chief rôle assigned to him—the one which superseded all others—that of a lonely man?

“Fool!” cried Peter to his heart. “Does not the sun shine for you, the wind blow for you, and the birds sing for you? Have you not free and untrammelled communion with Nature in all her varying moods?”

But all the same the very enumeration of the many rôles seemed to have emphasized the one more strongly.

At a quarter to four Peter, in his oldest and shabbiest garments, with the peacock feather extremely jaunty in his shabby felt hat and his whistle-pipe in his pocket, set off for the white house on the hill.

It was a still sunny day, like many of its predecessors that summer. June had taken the earth into a warm, peaceful grasp. There was a restfulness about the atmosphere, a quiet assurance of continued heat and sunshine. A faint breeze came softly from the west, barely stirring the leaves on the hedges. To the east were great masses of luminous cloud, piled like snow-mountains, motionless and still. The dust lay thick and powdery in the lane, whitening Peter’s boots; the grass, too, was powdered, but slightly, for there was little traffic this way. Peter, to whom the passing of a vehicle was somewhat of an event, barely ever counted more than two or three in the day.

He left the lane behind him and came out on to the village green. As he passed across it men looked at him suspiciously, and a woman carrying a basket stepped hastily to one side as if she feared contact with him. Peter smiled brilliantly, and raised his hat with an air of almost exaggerated courtliness. One man spat on the ground and muttered something that sounded like a curse, but Peter went on his way apparently unheeding.

He passed the lodge gates and went up the drive, under beeches green, copper, and purple, their trunks emerald and silver in the sunlight. On the terrace to the right of the house he saw two figures, one in white and one in some neutral colour. As he drew near the white-robed figure raised her hand, beckoning him to approach.

Peter came up to the terrace, standing just below on the gravel path. He swept off his hat and stood bareheaded. Then he looked up and saw Lady Anne Garland watching him.

Peter’s heart gave a jump, and for no reason in the world that he could ascribe, beyond the fact that she was beautiful, oh! but undeniably beautiful. She was a young woman, tall and slender, in a white dress, and a crimson rose tucked in her waist-belt. She wore no hat. Her hair shone blue-black, warm and lustrous in the sun.

Of the other woman Peter took little note, beyond observing that she was elderly and looked at him with evident disapproval.

“So you are Peter the Piper?” said Lady Anne in her low, distinguished voice.

“At your service,” said Peter.

Lady Anne looked at him curiously. He was altogether different from what she had expected, this man in the shabby clothes, with the brilliant peacock feather, and with the bronzed clear-cut face and sad eyes.

“We have heard,” said Anne, and there was an air of royal graciousness in the words, “that you are a marvellous piper. Are you willing to pipe for us?” She smiled at him as she spoke. And again Peter’s heart jumped, and began to beat at a fine rate.

“With all the pleasure in the world,” he replied, and he drew the pipe from his pocket.

Anne watched him as he laid his fingers lovingly around it. For a moment or so he stood motionless. And then he began to play.

First Anne heard an ordinary little march, quite conventional, but sufficiently gay and lively. Then it broke into curious discords played in rapid succession. Next followed a minor passage, tense, constrained, as if the strange little air running through it were struggling for greater liberty of expression. Suddenly it found it, blending into a Te Deum, grand and glorious. All at once it stopped, breaking again into a succession of strange discords which hurt Anne to hear. There was an instant’s pause, as if the first half of his theme were finished. Then, played in the minor key, came a gay song with an under note of marching feet, and through it a wistful yearning as for something lost. The air changed to the major, and was repeated. Then came a little melody played quite separately and on its own account, a little rocking melody, not unlike a cradle song. It ceased, and a new theme began quite unlike anything that had preceded it. Anne listened with suspended breath. She made no attempt to classify it as she had classified his previous themes. But above and beyond all the others it spoke directly to her heart.

Suddenly she was aware that the music had stopped, and that Peter was looking at her like a man who has just come out of a trance.

Anne’s eyes were full of tears.

“Thank you,” she said, and she held out her hand.

Peter came forward and took it. Then—it seemed that the action was almost involuntary—he raised it to his lips.

Miss Haldane fairly gasped, sitting upright and grasping the supports of the deck-chair with both hands. The effrontery! the audacity! the—the—she had no further word in her vocabulary with which to express her indignation.

Yet if Lady Anne were displeased she did not show it. She looked at Peter long and curiously, as if seeking for something she might find, something that escaped, eluded her.

“You will come and play to me again?” she asked.

“Perhaps,” said Peter thoughtfully. He seemed not yet fully recovered from what had appeared like a trance.

Miss Haldane made an inarticulate sound in her throat. This assuredly surpassed everything. She had been right, quite right, when she had considered he might be a socialist.

“It must of course,” said Anne courteously, “be exactly as you wish.”

Peter bowed, and the next moment moved away, walking down the avenue of beeches. Anne looked after his retreating figure thoughtfully, wonderingly.

“Impudence!” gasped Miss Haldane. She felt that her goddess, her divinity, had been insulted.

“No, Matty dear,” said Anne, “the man is an artist.”

“An artist!” said Miss Haldane. She was unwilling to allow that the music had appealed to her.

“Yes,” replied Anne, musing, “an artist! Heaven knows how many faults of construction there may not have been in his theme. Possibly had I been educated in the technical knowledge of music I should have found it positively bristling with them. I am glad I know nothing of the technique of music. I could listen and appreciate. Don’t you understand, Matty dear, how wonderful it was! The man’s a genius!”

“Well!” ejaculated Miss Haldane. She got up and moved towards the French window. Before entering she turned suddenly.

“My dear,” she exclaimed, “you never paid him!”

“I know,” said Lady Anne quietly.

II

Peter walked back to his cottage with his mind in a turmoil.

It had been utterly, entirely different from the scene he had pictured to himself. He had not swaggered, he had not stepped on to his platform with an air of assurance. Something had gripped him, something indefinable and powerful, and he—Peter—had lost the strength to assert his own personality.

It had been there, sure enough, but swayed, dominated, by something outside, beyond him. It had come out from himself, forced out it would seem, into the music of his piping. He had played himself, his own story, to this woman on whom he had never before set eyes.

Yet did he not know her? Had he never before seen her? Peter searched the recesses of his memory, penetrating to its remotest corners, but with no avail.

No; in spite of all searching memory remained a blank. Instinct, intuition—call it what you will—said, “You know this woman.” Reason said as firmly, “You do not.”

He had reached his cottage by now. He went in and shut the door. He would work. He wanted to soothe his mind. He would throw himself into the quiet calm thoughts of his Wanderer.

He pulled paper, pen, and ink towards him and turned resolutely to his manuscript. For over an hour he sat with it before him, then suddenly realized that he had written no single word. It was useless to attempt to write in this mood. A vague unrest was upon him.

Peter pushed the papers aside, and leaving the cottage, set off to walk across the moorland.

CHAPTER XII

A DISCLOSURE

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair

“The Terrace,

“June 8th.

“Here, Robin Adair, is a night-stock from below my terrace. I enclose it while it is white and fragrant. It will reach you brown and shrivelled; but, as you say, less shrivelled than my letter would have been—in fact, as it now is. It lies on the terrace beside me, a little heap of grey powdered ashes. This flower is its resurrected form. It is slighter, subtler, more fragrant than that letter. I began to re-read it, but did not get far; it was too serious, Robin Adair.

“I am, as the above will have told you, writing from my terrace in the cool of the evening. A lamp in the window of my morning-room affords me light. The sky is grey-blue, and away in the west, Venus, who is an evening star at the moment, is shining calm and peaceful.

“I had a concert on this very terrace yesterday afternoon. A so-called vagabond piped to me, wearing shabby clothes and a peacock feather in his hat....”

Peter laid down the letter a moment. His brain was whirling. Not even on the receipt of the first letter from his Lady had it whirled with such rapidity. Here, then, was the explanation. Of course, he had known her before. He had had glimpses of her mind, her soul, her delicate fanciful imaginings. She had embodied suddenly before him, and unconsciously his soul had recognized her, though reason had urged to the contrary. It was incredible, marvellous! In actual everyday life such things did not happen. Yet here was the proof thereof, finely, clearly traced with black ink on a sheet of bluish note-paper.

He picked up the letter again, and began to read further.

“It was a wonderful concert. Music has never before so stirred, so moved me. Picture to yourself an ordinary penny whistle, from which divine music was produced. He told a life-story in his piping, yet fragmentary sentences alone reached me. It was as if I were reading a book in a language of which I knew but a few words. Can you understand?

“What there was in the first part of his theme, I know not; but he, that strolling player, had suffered. Part of his theme beat and struggled for liberty like a caged bird, or like an imprisoned mind—a fettered expression. And when the expression, the liberty came—that was what hurt—it was smashed, broken. Can you picture a caged skylark, longing, pining for liberty, then seeing the cage door open, and flying forth into the sunlight, its throat bursting with rapture, only to find itself seized by some ruthless hand, wings torn from its body? Yet the bird was not dead; there was the horror. It lay still, bleeding, apparently lifeless, then lifted its head. Maimed though it was, it would still sing; and its song should be no complaint, but one to encourage and cheer all other injured things. I could have wept for the pluck, the courage of the little creature. And after a time it began to grow wings—little young wings that carried it just above the earth into the open it loved. It was only a little way, but it meant such a lot to that skylark. It was here, at the end, that the music spoke most directly to my heart. The song the partially healed skylark sang seemed to be sung for me alone, and yet here the translation of the words most failed me.

“The man is an artist. I wish he would play for me again. Yet I dare no more ask him now than I would dare ask Sarasate to come to my terrace and play.

“He—this piper—is living on the outskirts of the village, in a cottage reputed to be haunted. Doubtless he has charmed and soothed the restless spirits by his piping. This is a great deal to write to you regarding an unknown strolling player—though he is not strolling now—but the man himself is unusual, while his music is superb. He struck me as one of gentle birth. His speech was educated, and his whole appearance, in spite of his shabby clothes, refined. I am sure he has a story—one, Robin Adair, that might be worthy of your pen.

“My companion—a dear, but very old-fashioned—resented his behaviour. She thought he did not treat me with sufficient respect, mainly because he did not jump at the proposal of playing to me again. I did suggest I should like to hear him; but to send for him again, to send a footman to fetch him as I did before, would be impossible. I hope Burton delivered my message nicely. I worded it courteously, at all events.

“How goes your Wanderer, and are his thoughts progressing? That you should dedicate those thoughts to me pleases me immensely. I think it an honour that you should care to do so.

“I am glad you did not burn my letter. I am glad you cared enough about it—poor dull thing though it was—to refuse to do so. I did not mean to say this to you, yet I have.

“Good-night.”

Peter (alias Robin Adair) to the Unknown Critic, whom he now knows to be the Lady Anne Garland

“June 10th.

“Dear Lady,—I am in a contrary frame of mind to-night. I want to write to you, yet am in no mood to do so.

“I have met your vagabond piper, and know him more intimately than you might suppose. He is an impostor, though a harmless one, I grant. His music is not bad, but I doubt his playing to you again. The fellow has a good conceit of himself.

“After all, I find I cannot write to-night. Thank you for the flower.

“Robin Adair.”

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair

“The Terrace,

“June 18th.

“Why are you so hard on my Piper? I do not believe he is an impostor. And as for his music being not bad! Robin Adair, are you one ‘who has no music in him, and is not moved by concord of sweet sounds,’ or in what way has this man vexed you? The latter I believe to be the solution, Robin Adair, and it is not worthy of you. But I will not write more of him. I have not seen him again, and the villagers speak of him with bated breath as a friend of the Evil One. If he were of my faith, I would ask Father Lestrange, a kindly man, to call at the cottage. But as he never hears Mass he is evidently of another way of thinking, and might regard the visit as an intrusion. And for some reason he desires solitude. One dare not therefore intrude. I feel, however, that he is lonely, and have had, perhaps foolishly, a desire to lessen that loneliness.

“The country is very peaceful after London, and I am revelling in my flowers, more especially my roses. They are adoring this unwavering sunshine and the warm nights. The gardeners keep their roots well watered, so they—the roses—do not suffer from thirst.

“I had a letter from a friend of mine the other day, a woman with a surplus of relations all eager and willing to offer good advice and to point out various neat and narrow little paths in which she should walk and from which her soul recoils. After remarking on their latest suggestions, she writes succinctly: ‘The patience of Job was over-estimated. His relations died.’

“Why are some people so sure that their plan is the right one, and why cannot they allow others to go their own way, provided, of course, the way does not run strictly counter to the law? In that case, of course, there might be complications.

“Am I being very unoriginal when I lament the little originality there is in the world, or, at all events, in that portion of it which I know? And what little there is, is so frequently mere eccentricity. I believe some people would call it original to discard one’s clothes and walk down Bond Street in war-paint and feathers, though certainly there would be a large majority who would call it merely indecent, and in that case the majority would doubtless be right. I believe I am in a discontented mood this afternoon. There is a discord somewhere in my harmonies.

“Are you in a better mood for recording the thoughts of your Wanderer than for writing to me? I hope so. I am looking forward to reading them. I want something to soothe me. In spite of the peace that lies around me—the quiet peace of Nature—I am restless.

“Write to me, Robin Adair; tell me of your Wanderer.”

Robin Adair to his one time Unknown Critic, or Peter the Piper to the Lady Anne Garland

“June 20th.

“Dear Lady,—I was churlish when I last wrote. I know more of your Piper than you suppose. Do not write to me of him, I beg.

“As for my Wanderer, he has escaped me. I intended to keep him entirely to the fields and lanes, but he is off now to a hilltop. He has caught a glimpse of a star, and thinks to gain a closer vision of it from the hill. Poor fool! What will the height of an ant-heap advantage him? There are millions of miles between him and the star. On the hill he will be restless and miserable that he is no nearer. Why could he not keep his eyes to the attainable?—the wayside flowers, the green leaves of the hedges, all that which is common property to prince and peasant alike.

“Long ago in his past—I told you he had a past which he had thrown behind him—he cut himself off from communion with his fellow-men. He did not realize at the moment how complete the severance would be; yet, if he had, I believe he would have acted as he did. There seemed then nothing else that he could do; even now there appears to him nothing else. Maybe he made a great mistake. If he did, he did not suffer alone, there were others who suffered too; there’s the rub. He did not realize that they would suffer. His optimism in human nature was too great. Now he realizes that there are only the fields and roads for him, only the companionship of birds, beasts, and flowers, to whom his past is unknown and can never be disclosed. His wings were torn from him like the wings of that skylark of which your vagabond Piper piped. True, he, too, grew new wings with which he could rise just far enough above the earth to see the star. But he can never reach it, and, unlike your skylark, he cannot sing cheerfully. Perhaps before he saw the star he might have done so, but now his song lacks buoyancy.

“I fancy I shall have to leave him for a while gazing disconsolately at his star, and start a new book. He has endowed me with too much of his present mood, and who will care to hear the pinings of a wanderer for the unattainable? I might bring him from the hilltop, blot out the star from the sky. I have, indeed, already tried to do so, but my Wanderer has moped and sulked. That is the worst of these fiction people. You feed them with your heart’s blood, you give them life of your life that they may move as living creatures and not as mere puppets pulled by strings, and suddenly they escape you. The path you have carefully chosen, in which they are to tread, is refused by them. ‘It is the way you have chosen,’ they will cry, ‘not the way we choose!’ And if you protest that their path will be of little interest to the public, they sulk, insisting that, interest or no interest, it is the true path. I will leave this flesh and blood creature on the hilltop. If he bewails the distance of his star from him, I will not record his wailings. I will fashion a puppet, and merely a puppet, and from first to last chapter I will pull the strings myself.

“Therefore I fear that the thoughts of my Wanderer will never be printed to soothe you, nor, I fear, can I be of much use in the matter. I told you he had endowed me with his thoughts. I might be the man himself. He has obsessed me. I tell myself that I will look at his star and worship it from afar, thankful for its benign rays. But his restlessness is upon me. I want to get near it, though I recognize the futility of my desire. I am a fool.

“May I take your friend, with her many relations, as the puppet for my next story? I will pull the strings deftly, and she shall dance away from them or frolic on their mangled corpses. Which think you she would prefer?

“I find that again my mood for letter-writing is not of the most cheerful.

“Good-night.

“Robin Adair.”

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair, or the Lady Anne Garland to Peter the Piper

“The Terrace,

“June 27th.

“Dear Robin Adair,—What is it, I wonder, that has disturbed us both? Some small and unpleasant breeze has ruffled the surface of our mind’s lake. Yet your course seems clear. Since your Wanderer desires his star, let him attain it. Let him build a ladder of moonbeams and climb up to it, or if he is too much flesh and blood, too material, for such a feat, let the star descend to him. Are there not falling stars?

“Since writing last I have had a letter from a friend of mine. She is not well, and is feeling lonely. I go to town next Thursday to stay with her for three weeks, till her sister-in-law can come and join her. Perhaps when I return I shall have regained my old calm. At all events, the stir, the movement of London will serve to shake me out of this mood, which I cannot define, but which is foreign to my nature.

“I wish the vagabond Piper would give me another concert before I go, but I dare not ask him.”

CHAPTER XIII

A MOONLIGHT PIPING

Lady Anne Garland was sitting by her bedroom window. It was wide open, and the perfume of the night-stocks below the terrace rose fragrant in the still air. The atmosphere was darkly luminous, blue and purple, in which the shapes of the trees and bushes stood out softly black in the light of a half-moon.

Away across the park, with its scattered oaks and beeches, she could see masses of woodland lying like dark patches on the distant hills. In the valley the lights in the cottages had been extinguished. One by one they had dropped into the darkness, and now the whole village lay asleep.

Anne leaned her arms on the window-sill and looked out into the night. She had not yet begun to prepare for bed, and she still wore the silver-grey dress she had put on for dinner. The light from two candles on the dressing-table behind her illumined the room, glinting on silver-backed brushes and silver-topped bottles. The walls of the room were white, and above the bed hung an ebony crucifix with a silver Figure. The black cross stood out in startling relief on the white wall-paper. A table beside her bed held a bowl of crimson roses, an unlighted reading-lamp, and a green-covered book, the title printed in gold letters. Between the leaves was an ivory paper-cutter. The leaves, however, had long since been cut; and for the sixth—the seventh—time Anne was reading Under the Span of the Rainbow.

Suddenly Anne’s ear was arrested by a sound—a faint sound, but the unmistakable crunch of feet on gravel. The sound came from the drive. She drew back into the room, extinguishing one candle and moving the other so that its light did not illumine the square of open window. Then from behind the curtain she watched and listened.

The sound of the feet drew nearer, and a man emerged from the shadow of the trees in the drive. He walked unfalteringly. It was not the wary approach of one who fears to be seen.

Below the terrace he halted. Anne quickly extinguished the second candle, and leant a little from her hiding-place by the curtain. The man looked up, the moonlight falling full on his face, and Anne saw that it was Peter the Piper. Her breath came quickly and she watched, herself unseen.

She saw him lift his pipe to his lips, and then the still night became full of music. This time Anne made no attempt to classify his theme—to read a story in the melody. Probably it held none. It was music—music pure and simple, which the Piper was playing for her alone.

Breathless, entranced, she stood and listened. Surely never was such a piping since King Midas of old listened to the flutes of Pan. It was truly Nature’s music, the instrument which produced it forgotten. Liquid, caressing, it rose and fell in soft cadences, yet faintly through it throbbed the undernote of pain.

How long it lasted Anne did not know. Suddenly there was a pause. Then came the nightingale’s song, one short phrase of pure rapture. Then silence. Anne saw Peter standing still in the moonlight.

On a sudden impulse she moved and pulled a half-blown crimson rose from the bowl on the table near her bed. She threw it from the window and saw it fall at his feet. She saw him stoop and raise it from the ground to his lips. He looked up, and once more she saw his face.

Anne turned swiftly into the room. A moment later there was again the sound of feet on the gravel, a clear, crisp crunching which receded in the distance.

CHAPTER XIV

LE BEAU MONDE

Lady Anne Garland was sitting in Mrs. Cresswell’s drawing-room. It was a charming room, with its domed ceiling, its panelled walls, its long windows, its curtains and brocades of dull orange and glowing brown, with its porcelains, its bronzes, and its masses of yellow and white roses in old china bowls and slender glasses.

Anne herself, in a dress of some gleaming material, pale primrose in colour, was sitting on an Empire sofa. The warm brown of its brocade made a delightful harmony with the colour of her dress—in fact, she looked entirely in keeping with her surroundings. A white-haired man, with blue eyes and wearing faultless evening clothes, was sitting on the sofa beside her; and Anne was asking herself where in the name of wonder she had seen him before. Something in his manner seemed familiar, or was it, perhaps, his eyes, his keen old blue eyes under their shaggy eyebrows? He had been introduced to her early in the evening, and somehow there had seemed at once a curious and indefinable sympathy between them, one which had sprung to life with the first conventional words they had uttered. Throughout the evening he had monopolized her—unquestionably monopolized her—yet entirely without appearing to do so. And over and over again Anne was asking herself when and where she had seen him before.

She glanced at him now as she slowly waved her fan—a delicate thing of mother-of-pearl and fine old cobwebby lace softly yellow with age. Anne possessed the trick of fan-waving in its subtlest form, a trick—or art—she had inherited from an ancestor of more than a century ago, one Dolores di Mendova, a very noted beauty of the Spanish court, from whom Anne had also inherited her hair, her creamy skin, and her panther-like grace.

General Carden turned and saw that she was watching him. A faint rose colour tinged the ivory of Anne’s face.

“I was wondering,” she said, explanatory, “where it was that I had seen you before.”

General Carden smiled, a gay old smile. “I can tell you where I have seen you, though whether you have deigned to notice me is quite another matter.”

“Yes?” queried Anne the fan fluttering to and fro.

“I have frequently seen you driving in the Park,” said General Carden. “You in your carriage, I in my car.”

“Yes?” mused Anne, still doubtful.

“You do not remember?” asked General Carden. He was frankly disappointed.

“On the contrary, I remember perfectly. I confess I had forgotten the fact till you mentioned it. Yet somehow it does not quite explain—” She broke off.

“Explain?” asked General Carden.

Anne laughed. “Explain the quite absurd notion that I have actually spoken to you before. Something in your manner, your speech, seems almost familiar. I fancied I must have known you—not intimately, of course, but slightly.”

“I fear,” he regretted, “that I have not had that pleasure. I shall hope now to be able to make up for my previous loss. You live in town?”

“The greater part of the year,” said Anne. “I spend three or four months in the country.”

“Which, no doubt, you like,” replied General Carden courteously. “Being young, you are able to enjoy it. I prefer London. I only leave town during August, when I go abroad. And the whole time I wish I were in England. An unprofitable method of spending a yearly month of one’s life. Once I—” He broke off. “I am too old for travelling now,” he ended.

“Isn’t that rather—nonsense?” said Anne, with a faint hint of a smile, and glancing at the upright figure beside her.

General Carden straightened his shoulders. She was candid—absolutely candid—in her remark.

“Very charming of you to suggest it, Lady Anne,” he said, and he tried unavailingly to keep the pleasure out of his voice. “Perhaps after all——”

“Yes,” smiled Anne, “after all, you don’t find it quite as disagreeable as you pretend.”

“Ah, well!” he said.

There was a pleasant little silence. Anne watched the groups of people in the room, sitting or standing in intimate conversation. There was an atmosphere of airy gaiety about the place, a lightness, an effervescence. Listlessness or boredom was entirely absent. In one of the farthest groups was her friend, Muriel Lancing, with whom she was staying. She was an elfin-like, dainty figure in a green dress, on which shone a brilliant gleam of diamonds. Muriel herself was sparkling to-night like a bit of escaped quicksilver.

Rather nearer was another woman, tall and massive. Her figure was undoubtedly good, but her pose gave one the faintest suspicion that she was conscious of that fact. She reminded one of a statue which had become slightly animated by some accident. Apparently, too, she had never forgotten the fact of having been a statue, and wished other people not to forget it either. Her face was a faultless oval, and her hair worn in a Madonna-like style. But beyond the oval and the hair the Madonna-like impression ceased. Her face was hard, there was none of the exquisite warmth, the tender humanity seen in the paintings of the Virgin Mother.

General Carden was also looking at Mrs. Sheldon, whom, it may be remembered, he had seen on a previous occasion in the Park, a day now three or four weeks old. Anne noticed the direction of his glance.

“Do you know her?” she asked suddenly, then added as an afterthought, “She is a friend of mine.” Anne did not state that it was a friendship of only two years’ standing, and one which existed infinitely more on Mrs. Sheldon’s side than on her own.

“I once had the honour of knowing her fairly intimately,” replied General Carden. “We still exchange bows and civil speeches, but—well, I fancy I remind her of an episode she wishes to forget—a perfectly unimpeachable little episode as far as she was concerned, of course.”

Anne glanced at him sideways. There was almost a hard note in his voice, which had not escaped her. She saw his profile clean-cut against the dark panelling of the room. And then a sudden little light of illumination sprang to her eyes. She had all at once discovered of whom it was he reminded her. There was in his fine old face a very distinct look of the vagabond Piper. It was one of those indefinable likenesses which nevertheless exist, at all events in the eyes of those who chance to see it. It was faint, elusive, and to the majority it probably would not be the least apparent, but Anne now knew that it was this which had puzzled her throughout the evening.

And with the discovery came a sudden mental picture of a man standing in the moonlight with a crimson rose against his lips. It was a picture that had presented itself many times to her mental vision during the last few days, and as many times had been dismissed. It was apt to make her heart beat a trifle faster, to make the warm colour surge faintly to her face. Being unable—or unwilling—to account for a certain picturesque, if too impetuous, impulse which had moved her that moonlight night, she wished to forget it. Yet it had a disturbing way of representing itself before her mind.

In banishing it now her thoughts turned into another trend, which was apt to absorb them quite a good deal, the thought of that writer of letters and books—Robin Adair. Anne was perfectly aware that this unknown writer occupied a large amount of her mind; it swung and see-sawed between him and the vagabond Piper in a way that was almost uncomfortable and altogether unaccountable. She was not accustomed to have her thoughts encroached on in this way without her will being consulted, and she could not understand it, or she told herself that she could not understand it, and that possibly came to the same thing. At all events, she was undoubtedly in a slight puzzlement of mind. It is the only word to describe her vaguely perplexed state. As now Robin Adair had swung uppermost, his book presented itself to her as a subject of conversation.

She asked General Carden if he had read it. She fancied—it was probably pure fancy—that he started slightly. He glanced, too, at Mrs. Cresswell, who was only a few paces away and quite possibly within earshot.

“Ah, yes,” he replied indifferently. “Mrs. Cresswell recommended it to me—a fairly promising book, I thought.” He was adhering faithfully to the expression.

“Fairly promising!” Anne’s voice held a note akin to indignation. “I thought it delightful; clever, cultured, quite admirably written.”

General Carden experienced a sensation which might be described as a glow of satisfaction. “Isn’t that,” he said, “rather high praise?”

“Not an atom more than the book deserves!” responded Anne warmly. “And the reviews on it—I saw two or three—were excellent.”

“Indeed!” said General Carden politely. The old hypocrite had no mind to mention that every review ever penned on it was now lying safely locked in his desk, that he knew them all nearly verbatim, that he had gloated over them, exulted over them though with many a little stab of pain in the region called the heart.

“Of course,” pursued Anne thoughtfully, “it isn’t merely a surface book, full of adventure, movement, and incident; and what incident there is might be termed improbable by those who don’t realize that nothing is improbable, nothing impossible. It’s in its style, its finish, its—its texture that the charm and beauty of it lie.”

“It has certainly some well-turned phrases,” conceded General Carden magnanimously. He liked her to talk about the book; he longed for her to continue, though for the life of him he could not give her a lead. Yet his grudging admiration—all a pretence though it was, though Anne could not know that—fired her to further defence of the writing, stimulated her to fresh praise.

“There are delightful phrases!” she said emphatically. “It is a modern book, yet with all the delicacy, the refinement, the porcelain-air of the old school. For all that the scenes are laid mainly in the open, and are, as I said, quite modern; it breathes an old-world grace, a kind of powder-and-patches charm, which makes one feel that the writer must have imbibed the finish, the courtesy of the old school from his cradle, as if it must have come to him as a birthright, an inheritance.”

General Carden drew himself up. His blue eyes were shining. “Your praise of the book,” he said, “is delightful. The author”—his eyes grew suddenly sad—“would, I am sure, be honoured if he knew your opinion.”

Anne flushed. Did he not know? Had she not told him? Though perhaps not in those very words.

“It does surprise me,” she, allowed, after a second’s pause, “that you are not more enthusiastic about it. I should have fancied somehow—slightly as I know you—that it would have entirely appealed to you.”

General Carden gave a little cough. “It does appeal to me,” he said. “It appeals to me greatly—so much, in fact, that I assumed a certain disparagement in order that I might have the pleasure of hearing you refute me.” He had forgotten Mrs. Cresswell, but the words had not escaped her, absorbed though she appeared to be in conversation, and there was the tiniest—the very tiniest—expression of triumph in her eyes.

“Oh!” said Anne, at once puzzled and debating. And then she said, “I am longing to read his next book.”

“He has not published another, then?” queried General Carden carelessly. Double-faced that he was, he knew perfectly well that no second book had appeared as yet. Had he not advised Mudie’s—naturally not in Mrs. Cresswell’s presence—to supply him with a copy the moment one appeared?

“No,” replied Anne. And she stopped. Had not Robin Adair himself told her that his Wanderer had escaped him, and Heaven knew whether he would ever again be caught, chained, fettered, and imprisoned in the pages and between the covers of a book?

Later in the evening General Carden, taking his departure, said to Anne, “I should like to have the honour of calling on you, if you will allow me to do so.”

And Anne replied: “I should be quite delighted. I am staying now with Mrs. Lancing, and go down to the country in a few days, but I shall return to town to my own house in the autumn.”

“In the autumn, then,” said General Carden, bowing over her hand.

CHAPTER XV

CONFIDENCES

Muriel Lancing, having partaken of breakfast in her own room, was now lying in luxurious and dainty négligé among a pile of extremely snowy pillows. Anne, who had breakfasted in the dining-room some half hour previously, was sitting by the open window talking to her.

“Anne,” said Muriel suddenly, glancing at her from beneath lowered eyelashes, “I believe I owe you a confession and an apology.”

“Yes?” queried Anne, smiling. “And for what?”

“I wasn’t,” confessed Muriel, “one bit ill when I wrote to you. I was only mentally sick because I wanted Tommy, and he had to go away on horrid business where I couldn’t accompany him—at least, he said I couldn’t; and that comes to the same thing—with Tommy.” Muriel heaved a prodigious sigh.

“Darling!” laughed Anne.

Muriel wrinkled her porcelain-like brows. “Oh, Anne, life is heavenly! There’s only just one long big beautiful moment with me and love and Tommy. But there are ten million years of purgatory to get through when he is away from me, and then I’m soul-sick. And I tell myself I’m a sentimental little fool, but it doesn’t do one bit of good. So I wrote to you to come to me till Patricia, who is a cheerful soul, can join me. And I didn’t want to tell you it was sheer silly loneliness, so I told you a little white lie,” she ended tragically.

“Of course,” said Anne serenely. “I knew.”

“Did you?” Muriel was half incredulous.

“Yes; your letter just breathed ‘I want Tommy’ all through it. And as a kind of postscript it added, ‘But you’re better than nothing to this poor moping person, so for Heaven’s sake come.’”

“And I,” murmured Muriel pathetically, “thought my letter the height of diplomatic lying.”

“On the contrary,” Anne assured her, “it was as transparent as a crystal bowl.”

For a few moments there was a silence. The warm sun was pouring through the open window, falling across the bed and the slightly tumbled bedclothes, and glinting on the fair hair of the woman who lay among the pillows. Strictly speaking, Muriel Lancing was not beautiful, she was not even pretty. But there was an odd charm about her thin little face, her great grey-green eyes, and her wide mouth. She had a curious, almost elfin-like appearance. She was not at all unlike Arthur Rackham’s pictures of Undine as she lay there in some flimsy and diaphanous garment suggestive of sea-foam. Herself—her whole surroundings—held a suggestion of elusiveness, a kind of cobwebby grace and charm. Tommy—adored of Muriel—once said that the house was like an oyster-shell, rough and ugly on the outside, but inside all soft and shimmery with a pearl in it. It was his most brilliantly poetical effusion, and never likely to be surpassed by him. The only single thing in the room that struck an incongruous note was a large—a very large—photograph frame on a table by Muriel’s bed. It was a rough wooden frame, distinctly crooked, and with the glue showing somewhat in the corners. It held a full-length photograph of an ugly, snub-nosed, but quite delightful-faced young man with a wide mouth and an appearance that rightly suggested red hair and freckles. This was the adored Tommy, and the frame was his own manufacture. Next to the man himself they were Muriel’s most treasured possessions.

Anne looked across at it. She had often seen it before, but finding it difficult to discover the most tactful observation to make regarding it, had refrained from making any. This time, however, Muriel seemed to notice the direction of Anne’s eyes.

“Tommy made it himself,” she said, stretching out one white arm, from which a flimsy covering of lace and gauze-like material fell away, disclosing its slender roundness. She moved the frame to an angle better calculated to show off its superior qualities.

“Really!” said Anne, politely incredulous, but understanding. It explained what had hitherto been a cause for wonderment, namely, why Muriel should choose to disfigure her room with such a piece of furniture. Its size almost calls for the designation.

“Yes,” said Muriel proudly, “himself. I think,” she continued, contemplating the picture with her head at as one-sided an angle as her recumbent position would allow, “that it is a beautiful frame.” There was the faintest suspicion of a challenge in her voice.

“I am quite sure,” said Anne in a perfectly grave voice, “that you could not possibly have a frame which you would value more. I know I couldn’t if I happened to be you.”

Muriel laughed like a contented child. “Anne, you’re several kinds of angels, and you have the heavenliest way of saying the right thing and yet speaking the truth. Of course I know that its sides are crooked, and that there are little mountains of glue in the corners. But you should have seen Tommy’s face when he brought it to me. The darling was so afraid it was not of quite the most finished workmanship. Oh, Anne, between the comicality of his face and the lop-sided expression of the sticky frame—the glue wasn’t quite dry—and the little lump in my own throat for the darlingness of the thought, I very nearly had hysterics. But I hid them on Tommy’s waistcoat, and I adore the frame.”

“Of course,” said Anne, smiling.

Again there was a little pause. Then Muriel spoke suddenly.

“What do you think of General Carden? He monopolized you in the most disgraceful way last night.”

“I liked him,” returned Anne, calmly ignoring the question of monopoly. “It is delightfully refreshing to meet a man so entirely of the old school of thought and manners.”

“I think he’s quite a dear,” returned Muriel comfortably. “I’ve known him since I was in short frocks and a pigtail. He was a friend of my father’s. They were at Harrow together and afterwards in the same regiment in India. He thinks me—well, just a little flighty, but he doesn’t altogether hate me; and he’s quite paternally fond of Tommy,” she ended with a gay little laugh.

“By the way,” asked Anne, curious, “why does he so dislike Millicent Sheldon? It is quite obvious he does dislike her.”

Muriel gave a little start. Then she looked at Anne, doubtful, hesitating. “Oh, my dear Anne, don’t you know? Somehow I fancied that every one—” She stopped.

“Know what?” queried Anne idly, but interested.

“It’s really gossip—if true things are gossip,” said Muriel half apologetically; “still, some one is sure to tell you sooner or later since you’ve met General Carden.” Again she stopped.

“But tell me what!” demanded Anne. “Since you’ve said so much, had you not better give me the rest? Besides, since you say some one is sure to tell me, why not let me hear the story from you? You can sweeten it, add sugar and cream, if you will, or vinegar and spice, if those ingredients will flavour it better.”

Muriel laughed. “I’ll omit the garnishings; you shall have the facts plain and simple. Millicent was once upon a time engaged to General Carden’s son. Then—for certain reasons—she threw him over, and married the highly respectable and bald-headed Theobald Horatio Sheldon, whose money—of which he has a very considerable quantity—was made by inventing those little brush things that are fixed on behind carts and sweep up the dirt in the roads.”

“I see,” mused Anne, comprehending. “But of course, as I had never met General Carden before, I naturally did not know that he possessed a son. He did not, either, happen to mention him to me.”

“But of course not,” said Muriel tragically. “That’s exactly where the reasons and the real gossip come in. He spent three years in Portland prison for forgery, or embezzlement, or something of the kind. He’s out now, but he was in.”

“Oh!” said Anne seriously.

“And,” ended Muriel, still more tragically, “General Carden has never seen his son again nor forgiven Millicent for throwing him over. It’s rather contradictory, isn’t it?”

Anne looked down into the street where a flower-girl was standing on the pavement with a basket full of great white lilies. She contemplated her for a few moments in silence, and seemingly drew conclusions from the flowers. She looked round again at Muriel.

“I think I understand,” she said quietly.

Muriel looked at her curiously. “Then it’s quite remarkably intelligent of you.”

“No,” said Anne calmly. “He loves his son and has never forgotten him. She has forgotten him and probably never loved him. That’s why he can’t forgive her.”

“Oh!” said Muriel. “I’m sure you’re right that he has not forgotten. He’s eating his heart out for him, or I’m much mistaken, and he’s too proud to own it by the quiver of an eyelash. We women have the easier time. It’s our rôle to keep our arms and hearts open to sinners, and thank Heaven for it.”

Anne was again looking at the flowers. She had said she understood, but in reality it was only partly. She did understand General Carden, but Millicent with her serious speeches on nobility and bigness of character was another matter. She voiced her perplexity to Muriel.

“Oh, but Millicent!” said Muriel in a tone that quite disposed of the question.

“Yet,” said Anne, “Millicent has always talked as if she would help any one re-make his life, as if it were the one thing she would do, and—” She broke off.

Muriel gurgled. “Oh, Anne darling, you’re so big-minded and truthful—in spite of your occasional woman-of-the-world airs, which are only a veneer—that you accept people at their own valuation. The things that people say they will do are the very things that at a crucial moment they do not do. I think crucial moments are a kind of revolution which turns the other side of the person completely to the fore.” And then her tone changed to one of solemn warning. “You, Anne, doubtless consider yourself a luxury-loving woman, to whom the bare prospect of coarse underclothes, cold rooms, ill-cooked food, and commonplace surroundings would be appalling. Yet I firmly believe that if the crucial moment came you would tramp the roads with your man.”

“Mmm!” said Anne. And that rose colour stole into the ivory of her face, a colour not unnoticed by the watchful eyes of Muriel. “Perhaps, the roads; but do you think it would carry me to a suburban house with a glass fanlight over the front door? It would be the bigger test. But, and there I think you’ve omitted a point, how about the second moment, the moment when the crucial moment is passed?”

Muriel raised herself on one arm and spoke firmly. “Love—real love—is one long crucial moment. I speak from experience because I love Tommy.” She tumbled flat again among her pillows, and looked across at Anne to challenge her experience if she dared.

Anne, being of course an unmarried woman with no experience of the kind, merely smiled, a tiny smile which ended in a half sigh.

CHAPTER XVI

LETTERS

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair, or the Lady Anne Garland to Peter the Piper

London,

July 7th.

Dear Robin Adair,—I have met another admirer of your book, a delightful old man of courtly manners of the style of the eighteenth century. At first he assumed disparagement of it, or at the best a faint half-hearted kind of praise, which would, I believe, in any case have roused a spirit of contradiction in me. With your book as the subject I waxed eloquent. I took up the cudgels of defence, and I flatter myself wielded them with dexterity. When at last the flow of my discourse ceased—and I trust I was not too didactic in my observations—he confessed calmly that he had merely assumed disparagement in order that he might have the pleasure of hearing me refute him! It knocked the wind completely out of my sails. I was left helpless, stranded, entirely at a loss for a suitable reply. I hope I carried off the situation with at least a passable degree of savoir-faire, but I have my doubts.

I so frequently find myself addressing really witty and brilliant remarks to my bedpost fully an hour or so after the opportunity of making them has passed, when the witticism, the brilliance, might have been delivered in the presence of another, and have covered me with a dazzling glory. It is humiliating to contrast what one has said with what one might have remarked. You writers have the better time. In silence and solitude you can consider your epigrams, and then place them in the mouths of your fictional people at the psychological moment, and the world is left to marvel at your brilliance.

But to return to my old courtier. He has a sad history, which he hides under a mask of urbane and suave courtliness. He has a son, who—so the story runs—has disgraced their name. The old man being too proud to overlook the disgrace—too proud, perhaps, to stoop and delve for extenuating circumstances—has cut the son out of his life; but fortunately, or unfortunately, he cannot cut him out of his heart, which is aching, pining, for the lack of him. Why can he not put pride in his pocket and ease his heartache? It’s a pitiful little story, and one which has caused my own heart to ache, though quite possibly I should have dismissed it without a second thought if I had not met the old courtier.

The friend with whom I am staying has soothed the spirit of discontent which was awake in me when I last wrote. Her method is entirely unobvious. I think it lies in her own incurably good spirits, and her optimism, both of which are infectious. There is an “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” air about her which is exhilarating.

I have, though, been disappointed in another friend, if I may use the word. Personally I feel there should be another to use. An acquaintance signifies one of whom we have but a passing and superficial knowledge, and a friend some one much closer—very close—the word in its real sense. Am I drawing too fine a point? Perhaps one might use the terms I have heard children use, “friends,” and “truly friends.” So, to use the first term in application to this woman, I have been disappointed in a friend. She is not what I believed her to be, what I believe she wished me to believe her. It has spoilt, as far as I am concerned the intimacy between us. I cannot re-adjust myself towards her, and I feel myself acting the part of a hypocrite. I have picked up her broken pieces as best I may, and mended them, but I am conscious of the cracks. My mending has not been as neat a job as I could wish. Is it any use trying to mend? Tell me what you think, O Man!

The worst of it is that before she broke I asked her to spend a few days with me in August. During those days I shall be terribly, hideously conscious of the cracks. I shall find myself staring at them with a kind of awful fascination. Pray Heaven she’ll not observe it, for if she did I—in the rôle of hostess—would be forever disgraced in my own eyes.

I do not know why I should write all this to you; why I should trouble you with what, I am fully aware, are mere absurdities which any sane and reasonable person would assuredly dismiss without a second thought. May I plead in excuse that somehow you have taken the position of a “truly friend,” one to whom trivialities—which after all make up the greater part of one’s life—may be mentioned without fear of a laugh or a snub?

I went to a Beethoven concert the other day. To me he stands head and shoulders above every other composer, living or dead. Does music give you the sensation of colour and form? It does me. That was a purple concert, sphere-shaped. Mozart’s music is sapphire blue and shaped like a star. Bach’s is dark green and square. Grieg’s is pale green with a hint of pink and a slim oval, Wagner’s is crimson and purple and shaped like a massive crown. I might go on enumerating, if I did not fear to bore you.

Have you read Conard’s life of Beethoven? Do you know Beethoven’s own words: “Oh hommes, si vous lisez un jour ceci, pensez que vous avez été injustes pour moi; et que le malheureux se console, en trouvant un malheureux comme lui, qui, malgré tous les obstacles de la nature, a cependant fait tout ce qui était en son pouvoir, pour être admis au rang des artistes et des hommes d’élites?”

Grand, glorious Beethoven! the struggle over all infirmity, the victory, and his lonely yet dramatic death! “Il mourut pendant un orage—une tempête de neige—dans un éclat de tonnerre. Une main étrangère lui fermer les yeux.” If I am a hero-worshipper, and it would seem that I am, Beethoven stands in the front rank of my heroes. Read his life—by Conard—if you have not already done so. It is one which every artist, of whatever branch his art, should know.

How goes it with your Wanderer? Is he reconciled to his distance from his star? Or have you let the star fall to his hilltop?

Good-night.

Robin Adair to the Unknown Critic, or Peter the Piper to the Lady Anne Garland

July 9th.

Dear Lady,—I have re-read your letter more than once. It is—dare I say?—somewhat illogical, and therein most delightfully feminine.

You suggest that your old courtier should ease his heartache. Do you not see that in so attempting he could only bring into his life a thing which is in his eyes broken? And, however carefully he might mend it, would he not be—as you are—painfully and terribly aware of the cracks? Men, I fancy, choose the wiser way; they throw aside the broken pieces into a neat little dustbin, making no attempt to mend. For, after all, is not the glue which holds the thing together a certain sophism which is always apparent to the repairer, and which is, frequently, not very adhesive? Once broken—in spite of the glue—it is apt to fall to pieces on the slightest handling. No, the dustbin, in my opinion, is the better solution. You, as a woman, doubtless will not agree with me. Women invariably mend, and the majority—less critical than you—fancy they make of the mending a neat job.

Let me offer you one piece of advice. Do not let your heart ache for the story you have heard. It was, no doubt, related to you by another than your courtier, and was soothed, softened, rendered pathetic in the telling. You, in your tenderness, have imagined your courtier as hankering after the broken pieces of his image in the dustbin. Your tender imagination removed, the glamour of pathos round the story would be removed also, and you would find heartaches and such-like non-existent.

I do not believe that the wind is ever so completely knocked out of your sails—as you say—that you are unable to find some appropriate reply. That is merely your modesty. I picture you as talking with charm, with ease, with brilliance. Witticisms I leave outside the category. They belong to older men and women, and are apt to have a poignant edge foreign to my idea of your words.

I like to think that you count me, as the children say, a “truly friend.” Your friendship—disembodied though it is—has brought me refreshment, happiness. Though for a time my Wanderer had obsessed me with his mood, the obsession is passed. It has passed with him also. He does not desire that the star should fall to him. Its very charm lies in its altitude. Perhaps one day, when he has cast off the mantle of his flesh, he will build himself that ladder of moonbeams, and mount to it. As it is—his mood of discontent passed—he is worshipping, grateful that it shines in his otherwise empty firmament. From the little hilltop—which he found was but an ant-heap—from the lanes, from the fields, he looks up to it, and addresses to it his thoughts, his fancies. He is once more a cheerful soul, appreciating the earth, the wind, and the flowers. His love and worship he keeps for his star.

I have not read Conard’s life of Beethoven, nor, I confess, any writer’s life of him. I will make up for the omission without delay. His music I know and love. Your little discourse on colour and shapes in music interests me. I should like to hear more about them. Unknowingly I believe I have had the same thoughts, and I agree with the colours and shapes you assign, with, perhaps, the exception of Grieg’s shape. His colour—yes; but I have a fancy that his form is less simple, more a variety of curves. I think I should give the oval—slightly broadened—to Schumann, and in its slim form to Heller. Schumann, by the way, is blue—darker than Mozart, and, though soft in colour, less transparent. Heller is pale yellow. Do you agree?

Write again soon, and tell me everything you will about yourself.

Good-night.

Robin Adair.

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair, or the Lady Anne Garland to Peter the Piper

The Terrace,

July 16th.

Dear Robin Adair,—Here I am once more on my terrace, looking across the garden and the park land towards a small village—whose name I will not disclose—lying half-hidden among the trees in the valley. Occasionally, when I am in a ruminative mood, I wonder at the lives of the inhabitants thereof—the routine of them, with no greater excitement than a visit to the market-town some eight miles distant. True, there is the yearly fair at that place, which is an event of the greatest importance. Every man, woman, and child, except the extremely old and the extremely young, flocks to the town on that day. Every available vehicle is requisitioned and packed with a mass of humanity to the fullest extent of its capacities, and those unable to find conveyance in them, and more stalwart, walk. There are at the fair, so I am told, booths, coco-nut shies, merry-go-rounds, and peep-shows of a fat woman whose age is unknown, but who apparently must be akin to Methuselah, since she has been regarded, it would seem, by the fathers, the grandfathers, and the great-grandfathers of the present generation. But with the exception of the fair there is absolutely nothing to break the monotony of their lives but the weather and a wedding or a funeral. It’s rather appalling to contemplate, isn’t it? But they seem content and happy, and that after all is the main thing.

Do you believe in fortune-tellers? I went to one before I left town. I do not think it was great credulity in the art that urged me to consult the sibyl, but merely the fact that the friend with whom I was staying persuaded me into the consultation. I had what is termed a “full reading.” The palm of my hand was conned, the cards spread out, and the crystal gazed into. I confess that the affair was, to a certain degree, uncanny. Her description of my house—this one—was extraordinary. It might have been before her as she spoke, and she actually saw me listening to a concert by the vagabond Piper—and not only the concert of which I have told you, but another concert, one he gave me the night before I went up to town, and of which I believe no one was aware but he and I. He came to the terrace and played below my window. It was quite medieval, and entirely delightful. She saw, too, letters which I was receiving and which were a source of great pleasure to me, and therein she was very assuredly right. But—and I hope you will not be offended—after that she began to mix the Piper and the writer of letters, speaking of them with confidence as one and the same person. I did not enlighten her as to her mistake, as with these sibyls it is better to let them say what they see without interruption, otherwise they are apt to try and tell you what they think you wish to know, what they think you desire to have said. It was curious. And here I will make a confession. I myself have occasionally, and in quite an absurd fashion, confounded the two in my thoughts. Do not be vexed, Robin Adair, for you dislike—or pretend to dislike—the Piper. But it seems to me that the sibyl must have been extraordinary telepathic, and have somehow read my thoughts, and their occasional confusion, in a remarkable degree. She told me a good deal more, no doubt the usual fortune-telling jargon, which would be, I am sure, of little interest to you. Certainly it is not worth repetition. But what I have told you struck me as distinctly queer.

I am rejoiced to hear that your Wanderer—and consequently you—are once more soothed and peaceful. And now that he is so, let him continue to recount his thoughts by the hand of Robin Adair, that I may shortly have the benefit of them.

One day—not to-day—I will write you all my fancies on colour, and I have a good many. Perhaps you are right as to Grieg’s form. It is probably more intricate than the oval. Possibly it is a design of many curves. As regards Schumann and Heller, I agree.

I fancy you are wrong about my courtier. He has, no doubt, acted on your dustbin principle, but, all the same, I believe he regrets the action. Of course, I see the justice of your accusation that my letter was illogical, but I cannot begin an argument and a defence now. The day is too warm and lazy for such exertion. The heat-shimmer is bathing the gardens, and the top of my silver ink-bottle is almost too hot to touch. The sun has slanted round, and is frizzling me in a diabolical fashion. Hitherto I’ve been too indolent to move, but now, if I don’t intend to be entirely melted, I must get up and pull my chair into the shade.

Of course fortune-telling is absurd really, at least as far as regards the future. Though I grant that this woman’s reading of my thoughts was clever.

Good-bye for the present. The bees are droning a lullaby, and I believe I shall sleep.

Robin Adair to the Unknown Critic, or Peter the Piper to the Lady Anne Garland

July 18th.

Dear Lady,—I have no theories as to fortune-tellers beyond a, no doubt absurd, dislike to them. I do not care to think of you consulting them. Forgive me for saying so. I am perfectly well aware that I have no smallest right to express an opinion, but—it will out—I wish you wouldn’t, and long to beg you not to do it again.

When you are in a less melted mood write me a letter of argument and defence. You will not be able to explain away your illogical statements, but I should much enjoy hearing you try to do so.

I must certainly contradict flatly about your courtier. I am sure you are wrong. And as I shall cry “Knife” every time you cry “Scissors,” let us abandon him as a topic of discussion. Write to me of colours instead.

This is a rude letter, and I know it. But a little incident has rubbed my mental fur the wrong way, and I am—well, cross with myself I believe. Perhaps it would be wiser not to write at all, but not to do so would be to discontinue a little ceremony which I have put in practice since the first day I heard from you. Will you laugh at me, I wonder, if I tell you that every evening your letter arrives I become a host, and toast an invisible Lady who has condescended to dine with me, and after dinner we talk together—through the medium of pen, ink, and paper. Sometimes I like to imagine that the medium is less material, and that my thoughts are carried straight on the wings of fancy to the Lady’s terrace. But if they go, can she perceive them? Are they not too clumsy, too material, to find response in her thought-cells? After all, it is but a fancy, and you may quite well smile at both it and my dream dinner-party.

To-night I have not been a good host. I apologize to the Lady. Being the sole guest I ever receive, I might have treated her with greater courtesy.

Robin Adair.

The Unknown Critic to Robin Adair, or the Lady Anne Garland to Peter the Piper

The Terrace,

July 20th.

Dear Robin Adair,—I did not smile—at any rate not ironically. If there was a little smile it was verging close on tears. Are you really so lonely? Somehow I had fancied that when you spoke of yourself as a recluse it was a mere figure of speech. Have you no friends who dine with you, who visit you—no material friends?

The little mental picture your letter called up was pathetic. I wish—well, never mind what I wish. Probably it would be no atom of good. I believe—I am sure—your thoughts do reach me. Send them to me, and I will send mine to you.

Robin Adair to the Unknown Critic, or Peter the Piper to the Lady Anne Garland

July 22nd.

Dear Lady,—Forget my letter. I did not mean to drivel. I did not mean to cause you the faintest suspicion of tears. I am not, I believe, a sociable person. My disembodied Lady is more to me than hundreds of material friends. I am utterly and entirely grateful for her invisible presence—and the thoughts she sends me. Whatever you wish must be of benefit. Whatever that unexpressed wish was, I endorse it.

Thank you for your letter.

Robin Adair.

CHAPTER XVII

A THUNDERSTORM

sang Peter, in a pleasant tenor voice.

He was sitting by the window of his cottage, engaged—truth will out—in darning a pair of green socks. Occasionally he lifted his head from his work and gazed through the window. It was intensely still outside; not a leaf, not a blade of grass was stirring. It was almost overpoweringly close and sultry. Peter had set both door and window open in invitation to a non-existent breeze to enter.

From the north, where a great bank of ominous black clouds was piled, came a low, sinister rumble.

“It’s coming,” said Peter aloud, looking through the window. “The storm, the tempest, the whole wrath of the furious elements will shortly be loosed upon us. The clouds are coming up with extraordinary rapidity, considering there’s no wind at all down here. Up there it must be blowing half a gale. We’ll get rain soon.”

He returned to his darning.

he sang, sticking his needle carefully in and out of the heel of the sock.

“And the green of the wool doesn’t match the green of the sock one little bit!” he said ruefully. “But, after all, no one looks at me; and I certainly can’t look at my own heels—at least, not without a certain amount of effort, so n’importe, as they say in France.”

Peter cut the wool with his pocket-knife, and contemplated the sock with his head on one side. Then he threw it on to the table. There was a little laugh in his eyes, not caused by the contemplation of the sock.

“I believe,” he said whimsically, “that that fellow—what was his name?—Neil Macdonald, was right after all, and that Chaucer is—well, an old fraud. Yet,” and a wistful look crept into his blue eyes, “I might have done much better if I’d gone on believing in him. Yet, I don’t know. After all, Peter, my son, isn’t the joy worth a bit of heartache!”

He got up from his chair and went towards the door. He could look over the hedge and up and down the lane from his position. A couple of big drops, large as half-crowns, had just fallen on his spotlessly white doorstep—Peter was proud of his doorstep. They were followed by another and another. There was a flash, a terrific peal, and then with a sudden hiss came the deluge. Straight down it fell, as if poured from buckets, and the lightning played across the sky and the thunder pealed.

“Ouf!” said Peter, drawing in a huge breath as the refreshing scent of the grateful earth came to his nostrils. “That’s really quite the very best smell there is, and worth all your eau-de-colognes, and your phulnanas, and—and your whatever you call ’em put together. It really is—” And then he broke off, for down the lane came running a woman, her head bent, the rain beating, drenching down upon her. Peter was at the gate in a moment.

“Come in here!” he called.

She paused, hesitated. Peter saw her face. His heart jumped, and then started off klip-klopping at a terrible rate.

“I—” she began. A blinding flash of lightning, followed by a terrific peal right overhead, stopped the words.

“Come at once!” said Peter imperatively, sharply almost. “It’s not safe.”

She ran up the path, he following. In the shelter of the cottage she turned and faced him. The colour in her face was not, perhaps, quite to be accounted for by the rain and her own haste.

“You’re drenched,” said Peter abruptly. “You can’t stay in those wet things a moment longer than absolutely necessary. With your permission, I shall go to your house and order your carriage to be sent immediately. But first—” He had put her a chair by the fireplace; he was on his knees applying a match to the pile of sticks and fir-cones already laid therein.

“But,” protested Lady Anne, “I cannot give my permission. You will yourself be soaked—drenched—if you venture out in this downpour.”

Peter laughed lightly. “It will not be the first time, nor, I dare to say, the last. Rain has but little effect on me.” He rose from his knees. The flames were twining and twisting from stick to stick in long tongues of orange and yellow and blue. There was a merry crackling, there were flying sparks.

Peter crossed to the cupboard. From it he brought a black bottle and a wineglass.

“I have, alas! no brandy to offer you, but port wine will, I hope, prove as efficacious against a chill.” Without paying the smallest heed to her protestations he poured her out a glass, which he held towards her. “Drink it,” he said, in somewhat the tone one orders a refractory child to take a glass of medicine.

Anne took the glass, meekly, obediently, with the faintest gurgle of laughter. “To your health!” she said as she sipped the wine.

Peter’s heart beat hotly, madly. Here was She, actually She in the flesh, toasting him in his own room. He poured out another glass.

“To you,” he said, and under his breath he added, “My Lady, my Star, my altogether Divinity!” Then he moved firmly to the door.

“I cannot allow you to go,” said Anne quickly.

“Alas!” said Peter, smiling, “then I must forego your permission. In less than half an hour, in twenty minutes perhaps, your carriage will be here.” And he vanished into the sluice without.

“And now,” he said, as he set off at a half-canter down the lane, “if she does glance round the room and find it sleeping-apartment as well as sitting-room, she will, I trust, be less embarrassed. For Heaven knows whether in some particulars she may not bow to old Dame Grundy’s decrees. Bless her!” And it is to be conjectured that it was not on Mrs. Grundy’s head that Peter’s blessing was invoked.

Anne, left to solitude, a blazing fire, and a glass of port, sat for a moment or so deep in thought. Who was this man, with his little imperative ways, his abrupt speech, hiding, she was well aware, a certain embarrassment? He was well-born, there was no doubt about that fact. His voice, in spite of its abruptness, had the pleasant modulation of breeding. His hands—she had noticed his hands—were long-fingered, flexible, and brown. They were also well kept. Who was he? But who was he?

The fire offering her no solution, she finished her glass of port, and, kneeling down by the hearth, let the warmth of the flames play upon her wet blouse. She unpinned her hat and shook the rain from it. The drops sizzled as they fell among the flames and glowing sticks. She put her hat on the ground beside her and turned towards the room. She scrutinized it with interest. It was barely furnished but spotlessly clean. Against the farther wall she saw a truckle-bed covered with a blanket of cheerful red and blue stripes; she saw a cupboard on which were tea-things; a table; two chairs; and the chair on which she had been sitting. And that was all.

Then on the table she saw lying a pair of green socks; softly green they were, and somewhat faded, and beside them was a card of green—virulently green—mending wool.

“O-oh!” said Anne, with a little shudder. But after a moment she rose from her knees in order to examine them closer. One sock had a patch of virulent green in the heel, a neat darn enough.

“Long practice,” said Anne, with a little shake of the head. In the other was a hole—quite a good-sized hole.

For a moment Anne hesitated, then, with a little smile, took up the card of excruciatingly green wool and broke off a strand. She threaded the needle she found stuck into the wool, and fitted the sock on her hand.