She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach:
“You wouldn’t be allowed to stay.”
“Why not?”
“You committed a crime this morning. Nature’s taken possession of Olympia, and you struck at her.”
“D’you know why I did that?”
“No.”
But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her. When the heat had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature have helped the hands of man to overthrow man’s work, and where nature has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful. And presently Rosamund said:
“I want to know exactly where Hermes was found.”
“Come, and I’ll show you.”
He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple of Greece. Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric columns of a warm golden-brown color.
“The Hermes was found in this temple. It stood between two of the columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found.”
“It’s difficult to imagine him between such columns as these.”
“Yet you love Doric.”
“Yes, but I don’t know——”
She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to clasp them.
“It must have been right. The Greeks knew. Strength and grace, power and delicacy, that’s the bodily ideal. So the Hermes stood actually here.”
She looked all round, she listened to the distant sheep-bells, she drew into her nostrils the green scents of the valley.
“And left his influence here for ever,” she added. “His quiet influence.”
“Let me come to see him with you on the way home.”
And this time she said, “Yes.”
At a little after four they left the sweet valley, and, passing over the river ascended the hill to the Museum. The door was open, and the guardian was sitting profoundly asleep in the vestibule of the Emperors.
“You see, that’s the picture-frame,” Rosamund whispered, when they were inside, pointing to the doorway. “The branch came just there in my picture.”
She had lifted her hand. He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her hand down.
“You mustn’t show me that.”
“Don’t let us wake him.”
A fly buzzed outside on the sunny threshold of the door, making a sleepy sound like the winding of a rustic horn in the golden stillness, as they went forward on tiptoe between the dull red walls of the hall of the Victory, and came into the room beyond, where the Hermes stood alone but for the little Dionysos on his arm.
There a greater silence seemed to reign—the silence of the harmony which lies beyond music, as a blue background of the atmosphere lies beyond the verges of the vastest stretch of land that man’s eyes have power to see; he sees the blue, but almost as if with his soul, and in like manner hears the harmony. Both Rosamund and Dion felt the difference in the silence directly they entered that sacred room.
There was no room beyond it. Not very large, it was lighted by three windows set in a row under a handsome roof of wood. The walls were dull red like the walls in the hall of the Victory. On the mosaic pavement were placed two chairs. Rosamund went straight up to one of them, and sat down in front of the statue, which was raised on a high pedestal, and set facing the right-hand wall of the chamber. Dion remained standing a little way behind her.
He remembered quite well his first visit to Olympia, his first sight of the Hermes. He had realized then very clearly the tragedy of large Museums in which statues stand together in throngs, enclosed within roaring cities. From its situation, hidden in the green breast of this valley in Elis, the Hermes seemed to receive a sort of consecration, a blessing from its shrine; and the valley received surely from the Hermes a gracious benediction, making it unlike any other valley, however beautiful, in any land of the earth. Nowhere else could the Hermes have been so serenely tender, so exquisitely benign in its contemplation; and no other valley could have kept it safe with such gentle watchfulness, such tranquilly unwearied patience. Surely each loved the other, and so each gained something from the other.
Through all the months since his visit, Dion had remembered the unique quality of the peace of Olympia, like no other peace, and the strange and exquisite hush which greeted the pilgrim at the threshold of the chamber in which the Hermes stood. He had remembered, but now he felt. Again the silence seemed to come out of the marble to greet him, a remembered pilgrim who had returned to his worship bringing another pilgrim. He entered once more into the peace of the Hermes, and now Rosamund shared that peace. As he looked at her for a moment, he knew he had made a complete atonement; he had sent the shadow away.
How could any shadow stand in the presence of the Hermes? The divine calm within this chamber had a power which was akin to the power of nature in the twilight of a windless evening, or of a beautiful soul at ease in its own simplicity. It purified. Dion could not imagine any man being able to look at the Hermes and feel the attraction of sin. Rosamund was right, he thought. Surely men have to go and fetch their sins. Their goodness is given to them. The mother holds it, and is aware of it, when her baby is put into her arms for the first time.
For a long while these two watched Hermes and the child in the silence of Elis, bound together by an almost perfect sympathy. And they understood as never before the beauty of calm—calm of the nerves, calm of the body, calm of the mind, the heart and the soul; peace physical, intellectual and moral. In looking at the Hermes they saw, or seemed to themselves to see, the goal, what struggling humanity is meant for—the perfect poise, all faculties under effortless control, and so peace.
“We must be meant for that,” Dion said to himself. “Shall we reach that goal, and take a child with us?”
Then he looked down at Rosamund, saw her pale yellow hair, the back of her neck, in which, somehow, purity was manifested, and thought:
“I might perhaps get there through her, but only through her.”
She turned round, looked at him and smiled.
“Isn’t he divine? And the child’s attitude!”
Dion moved and sat down beside her.
“If this is Paganism,” she continued, “it’s the same thing as Christianity. It’s what God means. Men try to separate things that are all one. I feel that when I look at Hermes. Oh, how beautiful he is! And his beauty is as much moral as physical. You know the Antinous mouth?”
“Of course.”
“Look at his mouth. Could any one, comparing the two, honestly say that purity doesn’t shine like a light in darkness? Aren’t those lips stamped with the Divine seal?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Dion, I’m so thankful I have a husband who’s kept the power to see that even physical beauty must have moral beauty behind it to be perfect. Many men can’t see that, I think.”
“Is it their fault?”
“Yes.”
After another long silence she said:
“Spirit really is everything. Hermes tells me that almost as plainly as the New Testament. Lots of people we know in London would laugh at me for saying so, the people who talk of ‘being Greek’ and who never can be Greek. And he stood between Doric columns. I’m trying to learn something here.”
“What?”
“How to bring him up if he ever comes.”
Dion felt for her hand.
They stayed on for a week at Drouva. Each evening Rosamund shot with the boy of the wilderness, and they ate any birds that fell, at their evening meal. The nights were given to the stars till sleep came. And all the days were dedicated to Hermes, the child, and the sweet green valley which served as a casket for the perfect jewel which the earth had given up after centuries of possession. Since Rosamund had told the dear secret of her heart, what she was trying to learn, Dion was able to see her go in alone to the inner chamber without any secret jealousy or any impatience. The given confidence had done its blessed work swiftly and surely; the spring behind the action, revealed so simply, was respected, was almost loved by Dion. Often he sat among the ruins alone, smoking his pipe; or he wandered away after the call of the sheep-bells, passing between the ruined walls overgrown with brambles and grasses and mosses, shaded here and there by a solitary tree, and under the low arch of the Athletes’ entrance into the great green space where the contests had been held. Here he found the wearers of music feeding peacefully, attended by a dreaming boy. With the Two in the Garden of Eden there were happy animals. The sheep-bells ringing tranquilly in his ears made Eden more real to him, and also more like something in one of the happy dreams of a man.
A world that had risen to great heights of emotion in this valley was dead, but that did not sadden him. He found it impossible to be sad in Olympia, because his own life was so happy.
A delicious egoism, the birthright of his youth, had him safe in its grasp. But sometimes, when Rosamund was alone in the room of the Hermes, learning her lesson, and he was among the ruins, or walking above the buried Stadium where the flocks were at pasture, he recalled the great contests of the Athletes of ancient Greece; the foot-races which were the original competitions at the games, the races in armor, the long jumps, the wrestling matches, the discus and dart-throwing, the boxing and the brutal pankration. And he remembered that at the Olympic Games there were races for boys, for quite young boys. A boy had won at Olympia who was only twelve years old. When Dion recalled that fact one golden afternoon, it seemed to him that perhaps his lesson was to be learnt among the feeding sheep in the valley, rather even than on the hill where the Hermes dwelt. The father surely shapes one part of the sacred clay of youth, while on the other part, with a greater softness, a perhaps subtler care, the mother works.
He would try to make his boy sturdy and strong and courageous, swift to the race of life; he would train his boy to be a victor, to be a boy champion among other boys. Her son must not fail to win the crown of wild olive. And when he was a man——! But at that point in his dreams of the future Dion always pulled up. He could not see Rosamund as the mother of a man, could not see Rosamund old. She would, of course, be beautiful in old age, with a perhaps more spiritual beauty than she had even now. He shut his eyes, tried to imagine her, to see her before him with snow-white hair, a face perhaps etherealized by knowledge of life and suffering; once he even called up the most perfect picture of old age he knew of—the portrait of Whistler’s mother, calm, dignified, gentle, at peace, with folded hands; but his efforts were in vain; he simply could not see his Rosamund old. And so, because of that, he could only see their child as a very young boy, wearing a boy’s crown of wild olive, such as had once been won by the boy of twelve in the games at Olympia.
The last day of their visit to the green wilds and the hilltops dawned, still, cloudless and very hot. There was a light haze over Zante, and the great plain held a look of sleep—not the sleep of night but of the siesta, when the dreams come out of the sun, and descend through the deep-blue corridors to visit those who are weary in the gold. Rosamund, bareheaded, stood on the hill of Drouva and gazed towards the sea; her arm was round her olive tree; she looked marvelously well, lithe and strong, but her face was grave, held even a hint of sadness.
“Our last day here!” she said to Dion. “One more night with the stars, only one! Dion, when you brought me here, you did a dangerous thing.”
“Gave you opportunities for regret? D’you mean that?”
She nodded, still gazing towards Zante.
“Such opportunities!”
“It couldn’t be helped. I had to bring you.”
“Of course. I know. If you had let me leave Greece without coming here, and I had ever come to understand what I had missed, I don’t believe I could have forgiven even you.”
“I always meant to bring you here.”
“But you had a sudden impulse, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why exactly did it come?”
He hesitated. Suddenly he felt reserved; but he broke through his reserve and answered:
“I saw I had made you feel sad.”
“Did you? Why was that?”
“Don’t you remember?”
She was catching the dream of the plain, perhaps, for she replied, with an almost preoccupied air:
“I don’t think so.”
“I wanted to make you happy again, very happy, to give you a treat as quickly as possible. The idea of this”—he flung out a brown hand—“came to me suddenly. That’s how it was. You—you don’t know how I wish to keep every breath of sorrow out of your life.”
“I know you do; I feel it. But you’ve put a sorrow in.”
She spoke with a half-whimsical smile.
“Have I?”
“The sorrow of leaving all this, of leaving the Hermes. I didn’t know it was possible to grow to care for a lifeless thing as I care for him. Sometimes I believe the marble has actually retained nothing of Praxiteles as a man. I mean as apart from a sculptor. But he must have been full of almost divine feelings and conceptions, or he could never have made my Hermes. No man can make the divine without having divinity in him. I’ve learnt more here in these few days than I have learnt in all my years.”
“From the statue of a Pagan. Isn’t that strange?”
“No, I don’t think so. For I was able to see the Christianity in it. I know what Praxiteles was only able to feel mysteriously. Sometimes in London I’ve heard people—you know the sort of people I mean—regretting they didn’t live in the old Greek world.”
“I’ve regretted that.”
“Have you? But not in their way. When I look at the Hermes I feel very thankful I have lived since.”
“Tell me just why.”
“Because I live in a world which has received definitely and finally the message the Hermes knew before it was sent down.”
She took away her arm from the olive tree and sighed.
“Oh, Dion, I shall hate going away, leaving the tent and Drouva and him. But I believe whenever I think of Olympia I shall feel the peace that, thank God, doesn’t pass all understanding.”
They went down to the valley that day to pay their final visit to the Hermes. Twilight had not yet come, but was not very far off when, for the last time, they crossed the threshold of his chamber. More silent than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion; more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he seemed to be afar.
“Rosamund!”
“Yes?”
“This evening I have a feeling about the Hermes I’ve never had before.”
“What is it?”
“That he’s taking the child away, quite away.”
“But he’s always been here, and not here. That’s what I love so much.”
“I don’t mean quite that. It’s as if he were taking the child farther and farther away, partly because of us.”
“I don’t like that. I don’t feel that at all.”
“We belong to this world, you see, and are subject to all its conditions. We are in it and of it.”
“Well?”
“He belongs to such a different world.”
“Yes, the released world, where no ugly passions can ever get in.”
“The way he looks at Dionysos tells one that. He hasn’t any fear for the boy’s future when he grows up and comes to know things. It just strikes me that no human being who thinks could ever look at a human child like that. There would always be the fear behind—‘What is life going to do to the child?’”
She looked at him, and her face was very grave.
“D’you think we should feel that?”
“Surely.”
“Unless we got the serene courage of the Hermes.”
“But he lived among gods, and we live among men.”
“Not always.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps some day you will,” she answered.
Into her eyes there had come a strange look of withdrawal.
At that moment the atmosphere in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an atmosphere. He felt separated from Rosamund by a gulf, perhaps very narrow, but probably very deep.
Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight sylvan and very ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees; it crossed the shallow river, and made its way to the garden of ruins where once the Hermes had stood between Doric Columns in the Heraeon. Through the colonnade of the echoes it passed, and under the arch of the Athletes. Over the crude and almost terrible strength of the ruins of the temple of Zeus it let its green garments trail down, as it felt its way softly but surely to the buried Stadium where once a boy of twelve had won the crown of wild olive. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture. They were making their way up the valley now at the base of the Kronos Hill, and the chime of their little bells mingled with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine trees. Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew what the twilight knew.
The tall oblong of the Museum doorway on the hill framed a tiny picture of Elis, bathed in green and tremulous light; a small section of hillside, a fragment of empty, poetic country—Pan’s world rather hinted at than revealed—a suggestion of evening sky, remote, with infinity lost in its distance. But there was no branch of wild olive flickering across the picture.
Rosamund missed it as she looked from the room of the Hermes out to the whispering evening and the quiet vale of Olympia. But she did not say so to Dion. He thought of it too, as he looked at her, and he tried to forget it. The picture framed by the doorway strangely grew dimmer and yet more full of greenish light; the country of Pan was fading in light. Presently details were entirely lost. Only an oblong of green, now almost emerald, light showed from the chamber of the Hermes. And in that chamber the two marble figures were gradually fading; the athletic, yet miraculously graceful, messenger of the gods with the winged sandals, the tiny child clinging to his shoulder with one little arm stretched out in an enchanting gesture of desire. Still the child nestled against Hermes, and still Hermes contemplated the child, with a celestial benignity, a half-smiling calmness of other worlds than this.
In the vestibule of the Emperors the guardian waited patiently. He was not accustomed to visitors who lingered on like these two English, when the light was failing, and surely it must be difficult, if not impossible, to see the statues properly. But Rosamund, with her usual lack of all effort, had captivated him. He had grown accustomed to her visits; he was even flattered by them. It pleased him subtly to have in his care a treasure such as the Hermes, to see which beautiful women, the Rosamunds of the world, traveled from far-off countries. Rosamund’s perpetual, and prolonged, visits had made him feel more important than he had ever succeeded in feeling before. Let the night come, she might stay on there, if she chose. He took very little account of Dion. But Rosamund was beginning to assume a certain vital importance in his quiet life.
The green light faded into a very dim primrose; the music of the sheep-bells drew near and died away among the small houses of the hamlet at the foot of the hill of Drouva; Elis withdrew itself into the obscurity that would last till the late coming of the waning moon. Of Hermes and Dionysos now only the attitudes could be seen faintly. But even they told of a golden age, an age from which everything ugly, everything violent, everything unseemly, everything insincere, everything cruel was blotted out—an age of serenity of body and soul, the age of the long peace.
“He’s gone,” said Dion at last.
Rosamund got up slowly.
“You think he’s taken away the child because of us?”
There was an almost pathetic sound in her voice, but there was a smile in it too.
“You remember my stupid remark?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t stupid. I think those who dare to have a child ought to keep very near to the world Hermes walks in. They mayn’t wear wings on their sandals, but the earth oughtn’t to hold their feet too fast. Hermes has taught me.”
“No one could ever want to take a child away from you,” he answered.
In the vestibule of the Emperors they bade good-by to the guardian of the Museum, and made him understand that on the morrow they would be gone.
As he looked at Dion’s gift he felt for a moment almost depressed. He was accustomed to his constant visitor. Surely he would miss her. She smiled on him with her warm and very human cordiality for the last time, and went away, with her companion, into the dimness towards the hill of Drouva. Then the guardian pulled the great door. It closed with a final sound. The key was turned. And Hermes was left untroubled in that world where wings grow out of the sandals.
BOOK II — ECHO
CHAPTER I
Robin, whose other name was Gabriel, arrived at the “little house,” of which Rosamund had spoken to Dion upon the hill of Drouva, early in the following year, on the last night of February to be exact. For a long time before his coming his future home had been subtly permeated by an atmosphere of expectancy.
No. 5 Little Market Street was in Westminster, not far from the river and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries of life. Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become quickly fond of it. It was a house with white paneling, graceful ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak. There was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing on the first floor suggested potpourri, chintz-covered settees, and little curtains of chintz moved by a country wind coming through open windows. There were, in fact, chintz-covered settees, and there was potpourri. Rosamund had taken care about that; she had also taken care about many other little things which most London housewives, perhaps, think unworthy of their attention. Every day, for instance, she burnt lavender about the house, and watched the sweet smoke in tiny wreaths curling up from the small shovel, as she gently moved it to and fro, with a half smile of what she called “rustic satisfaction.” She laid lavender in the cupboards and in the chests of drawers, and, when she bought flowers, chose by preference cottage garden flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells. Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration. An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house. Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.
She opened her windows. In this she was almost too rigorous for her maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her. “Plenty of warmth but plenty of air,” was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, “and not too much or too many of anything.” Dust, of course, was not to be known of in her dwelling, but “blacks” were accepted with a certain resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London. “They aren’t our fault, Annie,” she had been known to observe to the housemaid. “And dust can’t be anything else, however you look at it, can it?” And Annie said, “Well, no, ma’am!” and, when she came to think of it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.
Rosamund never “splashed,” or tried to make a show in her house, and she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large, income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she provided them. Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason, that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body as the linen on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows. Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of “blacks,” but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants. The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than respectful distance.
She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose enthusiasm was matched by her competence. At first Dion had been rather surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this development. Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the “Paradiso” was a door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost mysteriously into regions he knew nothing of; but he had not seen in her one capable of absolutely reveling in the humdrum. Evidently, then, he had not grasped the full meaning of a genuine joie de vivre.
To everything she did Rosamund brought zest. She kept house as she sang “The heart ever faithful,” holding nothing back. Everything must be right if she could get it right; and the husband got the benefit, incidentally. Now and then Dion found himself mentally murmuring that word. A great love will do such things unreasonably. For Rosamund’s joie de vivre, that gift of the gods, caused her to love and rejoice in a thing for the thing’s own sake, as it seemed, rather than for the sake of some one, any one, who was eventually to gain by the thing. Thus she cared for her little house with a sort of joyous devotion and energy, but because it was “my little house” and deserved every care she could give it. Rather as she had spoken of the small olive tree on Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living thing confided to her keeping. She possessed a faculty not very common in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of some human being—perhaps a man. If she boiled an egg—she went to the kitchen and did this sometimes—she seemed personally interested in the egg, and keenly anxious to do the best by it; the boiling must be a pleasure to her, but also to the egg, and it must, if possible, be supremely well done. As the cook once said, after a culinary effort by Rosamund, “I never seen a lady care for cooking and all such-like as she done. If she as much as plucked a fowl, you’d swear she loved every feather of it. And as to a roast, she couldn’t hardly seem to set more store by it if it was her own husband.”
Such a spirit naturally made for comfort in a house, and Dion had never before been so comfortable. Nevertheless—and he knew it with a keen savoring of appreciation—there was a Spartan touch to be felt in the little house. Comfort walked hand in hand with Rosamund, but so did simplicity; she was what the maids called “particular,” but she was not luxurious; she even disliked luxury, connecting it with superfluity, for which she had a feeling amounting almost to repulsion. “I detest the sensation of sinking down in things,” was a favorite saying of hers; and the way she lived proved that she spoke the sheer truth.
All through the house, and all through the way of life in it, there prevailed a “note” of simplicity, even of plainness. The odd thing, perhaps, was that it pleased almost every one who visited the young couple. A certain well-known man, noted as a Sybarite, clever, decadent and sought after, once got into the house, he pretended by stealth, and spent half an hour there in conversation with Rosamund. He came way “acutely conscious of my profound vulgarity,” as he explained later to various friends. “Her house revealed to me the hideous fact that all the best houses in London smack of cocotte-try; the trail of cushions and liqueurs is over them all. Mrs. Leith’s house is a vestal, and its lamp is always trimmed.” Daventry’s comment on this was: “Trimmed—yes, but trimmings—no!”
Even Esme Darlington highly approved of the “charming sobriety of No. 5 Little Market Street,” although he had had no hand in its preparation, no voice in the deciding of its colors, its stuffs, its rugs, or its stair-rods. He was even heard to declare that “our dear Rosamund is almost the only woman I know who has the precious instinct of reticence; an instinct denied, by the way, even to that delightful and marvelous creature Elizabeth Browning—requiescat.”
The “charming sobriety” was shown in various ways; in a lack of those enormous cushions which most women either love, or think necessary, in all sitting-rooms; in the comparative smallness of such sofas as were to be seen; in the moderation of depth in arm-chairs, and in the complete absence of footstools. Then the binding of the many books, scattered about here and there, and ranged on shelves, was “quiet”; there was no scarlet and gold, or bright blue and gold; pictures were good but few; not many rugs lay on the polished wooden floors, and there was no litter of ornaments or bibelots on cabinets or tables. A couple of small statuettes, copies of bronzes in the Naples Museum, and some bits of blue-and-white china made their pleasant effect the more easily because they had not to fight against an army of rivals. There was some good early English glass in the small dining-room, and a few fine specimens of luster ware made a quiet show in Dion’s little den. Apart from the white curtains, and outer curtains of heavier material, which hung at all the windows, there were no “draperies.” Overmantels, “cosy-corners,” flung Indian shawls, “pieces” snatched from bazaars, and “carelessly” hung over pedestals and divans found no favor in Rosamund’s eyes. There was a good deal of homely chintz about which lit up the rather old-fashioned rooms, and colors throughout the house were rather soft than hard, were never emphatic or designed to startle or impress.
Rosamund, indeed, was by far the most vivid thing in the house, and some people—not males—said she had taken care to supply for herself a background which would “throw her up.” These people, if they believed what they said, did not know her.
She had on the first floor a little sitting-room all to herself; in this were now to be found the books which had been in her bedroom in Great Cumberland Place; the charwoman’s black tray with the cabbage rose, the mug from Greenwich, the flesh-colored vase, the china cow, the toy trombone, and other souvenirs of her girlhood to which Rosamund “held.” On the brass-railed shelf of the writing-table stood a fine photogravure of the Hermes of Olympia with little Dionysos on his arm. Very often, many times every day, Rosamund looked up at Hermes and the Child from account books, letters or notes, and then the green dream of Elis fell about her softly again; and sometimes she gazed beyond the Hermes, but instead of the wall of the chamber she saw, set in an oblong frame, and bathed in green twilight, a bit of the world of Pan, with a branch of wild olive flickering across the foreground; or, now and then, she saw a falling star, dropping from its place in the sky down towards a green wilderness, and carrying a wish from her with it, a wish that was surely soon to be granted. Her life in the little house had been a happy life hitherto, but—she looked again at the little Dionysos on the arm of Hermes, nestling against his shoulder—how much happier it was going to be, how much happier! She was not surprised, for deep in her heart she always expected happiness.
People had been delightful to her and to Dion. Indeed, they had flocked to the small green door (the Elis door) of 5 Little Market Street in almost embarrassing numbers. That was partly Mr. Darlington’s fault. Naturally Rosamund’s and Bruce Evelin’s friends came; and of course Dion’s relations and friends came. That would really have been enough. Rosamund enjoyed, but was not at all “mad about,” society, and had no wish to give up the greater part of her time to paying calls. But Mr. Darlington could not forbear from kind efforts on behalf of his delightful young friends, that gifted and beautiful creature Rosamund Leith, and her pleasant young husband. He, who found time for everything, found time to give more than one “little party, just a few friends, no more,” specially for them; and the end of it was that they found themselves acquainted with almost too many interesting and delightful people.
At first, too, Rosamund continued to sing at concerts, but at the end of July, after their return from Greece, when the London season closed, she gave up doing so for the time, and accepted no engagements for the autumn. Esme Darlington was rather distressed. He worked very hard in the arts himself, and, having “launched” Rosamund, he expected great things of her, and wished her to go forward from success to success. Besides “the money would surely come in very handy” to two young people as yet only moderately well off. He did not quite understand the situation. Of course he realized that in time young married people might have home interests, home claims upon them which might necessitate certain changes of procedure. The day might come—he sincerely hoped it would—when a new glory, possibly even more than one, would be added to the delightful Rosamund’s crown; but in the meanwhile surely the autumn concerts need not be neglected. He had heard no hint as yet of any—h’m, ha! He stroked his carefully careless beard. But he had left town in August with his curiosity unsatisfied, leaving Rosamund and Dion behind him. They had had their holiday, and had stayed steadily on in Little Market Street through the summer, taking Saturday to Monday runs into the country; more than once to the seacoast of Kent, where Bruce Evelin and Beatrice were staying, and once to Worcestershire to Dion’s mother, who had taken a cottage there close to the borders of Warwickshire. The autumn had brought people back to town, and it was in the autumn that Rosamund withdrew from all contact with the hurly-burly of London. She had no fears at all for her body, none of those sick terrors which some women have as their time draws near, no premonitions of disaster or presages of death, but she desired to “get ready,” and her way of getting ready was to surround her life with a certain stillness, to build about it white walls of peace. Often when Dion was away in the City she went out alone and visited some church. Sometimes she spent an hour or two in Westminster Abbey; and on many dark afternoons she made her way to St. Paul’s Cathedral where, sitting a long way from the choir, she listened to evensong. The beautiful and tenderly cool singing of the distant boys came to her like something she needed, something to which her soul was delicately attuned. One afternoon they and the men, who formed the deeply melodious background from which their crystalline voices seemed to float forward and upward, sang “The Wilderness” of Wesley. Rosamund listened to it, thankful that she was alone, and remembering many things, among them the green wilderness beneath the hill of Drouva.
Very seldom she spoke to Dion about these excursions of hers. There was something in her feeling for religion which loved reserve rather than expression; she who was so forthcoming in many moments of her life, who was genial and gay, who enjoyed laughter and was always at home with humanity, knew very well how to be silent. There was a saying she cared for, “God speaks to man in the silence;” perhaps she felt there was a suspicion of irreverence in talking to any one, even to Dion, about her aspiration to God. If, on his return home, he asked her how she had passed the day, she often said only, “I’ve been very happy.” Then he said to himself, “What more can I want? I’m able to make her happy.”
One windy evening in January, when an icy sleet was driving over the town, as he came into the little hall, he found Rosamund at the foot of the staircase, with a piece of mother’s work in her hand, about to go into the drawing-room which was on the ground floor of the house.
“Rose,” he said, looking down at the little white something she was holding, “do you think we shall both feel ever so much older in March? It will be in March, won’t it?”
“I think so,” she answered, with a sort of deeply tranquil gravity.
“In March when we are parents?”
“Are you worrying about that?” she asked him, smiling now, but with, in her voice, a hint of reproach.
“Worrying—no. But do you?”
“Let us go into the drawing-room,” she said.
When they were there she answered him:
“Absolutely different, but not necessarily older. Feeling older must be very like feeling old, I think—and I can’t imagine feeling old.”
“Because probably you never will.”
“Have you had tea, Dion?”
“Yes, at the Greville. I promised I’d meet Guy there to-day. He spoke about Beattie.”
“Yes?”
“Do you think Beattie would marry him if he asked her?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat down in the firelight near the hearth, and bent a little over her work on the tiny garment, which looked as if it were intended for the use of a fairy. Dion looked at her head with its pale hair. As he leaned forward he could see all the top of her head. The firelight made some of her hair look quite golden, gave a sort of soft sparkle to the curve of it about her broad, pure forehead.
“Guy’s getting desperate,” he said. “But he’s afraid to put his fortune to the test. He thinks even uncertainty is better than knowledge of the worst.”
“Of one thing I’m certain, Dion. Beattie doesn’t love Guy Daventry.”
“Oh well, then, it’s all up.”
Rosamund looked up from the little garment.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But if Beattie—but Beattie’s the soul of sincerity.”
“Yes, I know; but I think she might consent to marry Guy Daventry.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know exactly. She never told me. I just feel it.”
“Oh, if you feel it, I’m sure it is so. But how awfully odd. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it really is rather odd in Beattie. Do you want Beattie to marry Guy Daventry?”
“Of course I do. Don’t you?”
“Dear Beattie! I want her to be happy. But I think it’s very difficult, even when one knows some one very, very well, to know just how she can get happiness, through just what.”
“Rose, have I made you happy?”
“Yes.”
“As happy as you could be?”
“I think, perhaps, you will have—soon.”
“Oh, you mean——?”
“Yes.”
She went on stitching quietly. Her hands looked very contented. Dion drew up a little nearer to the fire with a movement that was rather brusk. It just struck him that his walk home in the driving sleet had decidedly chilled his body.
“I believe I know what you mean about Beattie,” he said, after a pause, looking into the fire. “But do you think that would be fair to Guy?”
“I’m not quite sure myself what I mean, honestly, Dion.”
“Well, let’s suppose it. If it were so, would it be fair?”
“I think Beattie’s so really good that Mr. Daventry, as he loves her, could scarcely be unhappy with her.”
Dion thought for a moment, then he said:
“Perhaps with Guy it wouldn’t be unfair, but, you know, Rose, that sort of thing wouldn’t do with some men. Some men could never stand being married for anything but the one great reason.”
He did not explain what that reason was, and Rosamund did not ask. There was a sort of wide and sweet tranquillity about her that evening. Dion noticed that it seemed to increase upon her, and about her, as the days passed by. She showed no sign of nervousness, had evidently no dread at all of bodily pain. Either she trusted in her splendid health, or she was so wrapped up in the thought of the joy of being a mother that the darkness to be passed through did not trouble her; or perhaps—he wondered about this—she was all the time schooling herself, looking up, in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon. He was much more strung up, much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to notice it. Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this period to be also unobservant of those about her. He felt that she was being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet intensity because of the child.
“She is right,” he said to himself, and he strove in all ways in his power to aid her beautiful selfishness; nevertheless sometimes he felt shut out; sometimes he felt as if already the unseen was playing truant over the seen. He was conscious of the child’s presence in the little house through Rosamund’s way of being before he saw the child. He wondered what other women were like in such periods, whether Rosamund was instinctively conforming to an ancient tradition of her sex, or whether she was, as usual, strongly individualistic. In many ways she was surely not like other women, but perhaps in these wholly natural crises every woman resembled all her sisters who were traveling towards the same sacred condition. He longed to satisfy himself whether this was so or not, and one Saturday afternoon, when Rosamund was resting in her little sitting-room with a book, and the Hermes watching over her, he bicycled to Jenkins’s gymnasium in the Harrow Road, resolved to put in forty minutes’ hard work, and then to visit his mother. Mrs. Leith and Rosamund seemed to be excellent friends, but Dion never discussed his wife with his mother. There was no reason why he should do so. On this day, however, instinctively he turned to his mother; he thought that she might help him towards a clearer knowledge of Rosamund.
Rosamund had long ago been formally made known to Bob Jenkins, Jim’s boxing “coach,” who enthusiastically approved of her, though he had never ventured to put his opinion quite in that form to Dion. Even Jenkins, perhaps, had his subtleties, those which a really good heart cannot rid itself of. Rosamund, in return, had made Dion known to her extraordinary friend, Mr. Thrush of Abingdon Buildings, John’s Court, near the Edgware Road, the old gentleman who went to fetch his sin every evening, and, it is to be feared, at various other times also, in a jug from the “Daniel Lambert.” Dion had often laughed over Rosamund’s “cult” for Mr. Thrush, which he scarcely pretended to understand, but Rosamund rejoiced in Dion’s cult for the stalwart Jenkins.
“I like that man,” she said. “Perhaps some day——” She stopped there, but her face was eloquent.
In his peculiar way Jenkins was undoubtedly Doric, and therefore deserving of Rosamund’s respect. Of Mr. Thrush so much could hardly be said with truth. In him there were to be found neither the stern majesty and strength of the Doric, nor the lightness and grace of the Ionic. As an art product he stood alone, always wearing the top hat, a figure Degas might have immortalized but had unfortunately never seen. Dion knew that Mr. Thrush had once rescued Rosamund in a fog and had conveyed her home, and he put the rest of the Thrush matter down to Rosamund’s genial kindness towards downtrodden and unfortunate people. He loved her for it, but could not help being amused by it.
When Dion arrived at the gymnasium, Jenkins was giving a lesson to a small boy of perhaps twelve years old, whose mother was looking eagerly on. The boy, clad in a white “sweater,” was flushed with the ardor of his endeavors to punch the ball, to raise himself up on the bar till his chin was between his hands, to vault the horse neatly, and to turn somersaults on the rings. The primrose-colored hair on his small round head was all ruffled up, perspiration streamed over his pink rosy cheeks, his eyes shone with determination, and his little white teeth were gritted as, with all the solemn intensity of childhood, he strove to obey on the instant Jenkins’s loud words of command. It was obvious that he looked to Jenkins as a savage looks to his Tribal God. His anxious but admiring mother was forgotten; the world was forgotten; Jenkins and the small boy were alone in a universe of grip dumb-bells, heavy weights, “exercisers,” boxing-gloves, horizontal bars, swinging balls and wooden “horses.” Dion stood in the doorway and looked on till the lesson was finished. It ended with a heavy clap on the small boy’s shoulders from the mighty paw of Jenkins, and a stentorian, “You’re getting along and no mistake, Master Tim!”
The face of Master Tim at this moment was a study. All the flags of triumph and joy were hung out in it and floated on the breeze; a soul appeared at the two windows shining with perfect happiness; and, mysteriously, in all the little figure, from the ruffled primrose-colored feathers of hair to the feet in the white shoes, the pride of manhood looked forth through the glowing rapture of a child.
“What a jolly boy!” said Dion to Jenkins, when Master Tim and his mother had departed. “It must be good to have a boy like that.”
“I hope you’ll have one some day, sir,” said Jenkins, speaking heartily in his powerful voice, but looking, for the moment, unusually severe.
He and Bert, his wife, had had one child, a girl, which had died of quinsy, and they had never had another.
“Now I’m ready for you, sir!” he added, with a sort of outburst of recovery. “I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it’s all the same to you.”
It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne’s Mansions in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his step.
Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at home. Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly, softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.
Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so many years, in the intimate life of his mother. But to-day, as he opened the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment. His mother was in her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire. She was doing nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves, folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking. Dion thought of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely emptied of expression. All of his mother seemed to him for just the one instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known—loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant—had been poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother’s black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.
Even as Dion realized this, his mother was poured back into the round face and plump figure beside the fire, and greeted him with the usual almost saccharine sweet smile, and:
“Dee-ar, I wasn’t expecting you to-day. How is the beloved one?”
“The beloved one” was Mrs. Leith’s rendering of Rosamund.
“How particularly spry you look,” she added. “I’m certain it’s the Jenkins paragon. You’ve been standing up to him. Now, haven’t you?”
Dion acknowledged that he had, and added:
“But you, mother? How are you?”
“Quite wickedly well. I ought to be down with influenza like all well-bred people,—Esme Darlington has it badly,—but I cannot compass even one sneeze.”
“Where’s Omar?”
Mrs. Leith looked grave.
“Poor little chap, we must turn down an empty glass for him.”
“What—you don’t mean——?”
“Run over yesterday just outside the Mansions, and by a four-wheeler. I’m sure he never expected that the angel of death would come for him in a growler, poor little fellow.”
“I say! Little Omar dead! What a beastly shame! Mother, I am sorry.”
He sat down beside her; he was beset by a sensation of calamity. Oddly enough the hammer of fate had never yet struck on him so definitely as now with the death of a dog. But, without quite realizing it, he was considering poor black Omar as an important element in his mother’s life, now abruptly withdrawn. Omar had been in truth a rather greedy, self-seeking animal, but he had also been a companion, an adherent, a friend.
“You must get another dog,” Dion added quickly. “I’ll find you one.”
“Good of you, dee-ar boy! But I’m too old to begin on a new dog.”
“What nonsense!”
“It isn’t. I feel I’m losing my nameless fascination for dogs. A poodle barked at me this afternoon in Victoria Street. One can’t expect one’s day to last for ever, though, really, some Englishwomen seem to. But, tell me, how is the beloved one?”
“Oh—to be sure! I wanted to talk to you about Rose.”
The smile became very sweet and welcoming on Mrs. Leith’s handsome round face.
“There’s nothing wrong, I’m sure. Your Rosamund sheds confidence in her dear self like a light all round her.”
“Nothing wrong—no. I didn’t mean that.”
Dion paused. Now he was with his mother he did not know how to explain himself; his reason for coming began to seem, even to himself, a little vague.
“It’s a little difficult,” he began at last, “but I’ve been wondering rather about women who are as Rosamund is just now. D’you think all women become a good deal alike at such times?”
“In spirit, do you mean?”
“Well—yes, of course.”
“I scarcely know.”
“I mean do they concentrate on the child a long while before it comes.”
“Many smart women certainly don’t.”
“Oh, smart women! I mean women.”
“A good definition, dee-ar. Well, lots of poor women don’t concentrate on the child either. They have far too much to do and worry about. They are ‘seeing to’ things up till the very last moment.”
“Then we must rule them out. Let’s say the good women who have the time.”
“I expect a great many of them do, if the husband lets them.”
“Ah!” said Dion rather sharply.
“There are a few husbands, you see, who get fidgety directly the pedestal on which number one thinks himself firmly established begins to shake.”
“Stupid fools!”
“Eminently human stupid fools.”
“Are they?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“Perhaps. But then humanity’s contemptible.”
“Extra-humanity, or the attempt at it, can be dangerous.”
“What do you mean exactly by that, mater?”
“Only that we have to be as we are, and can never really be, can only seem to be, as we aren’t.”
“What a whipping I’m giving to myself just now!” was her thought, as she finished speaking.
“Oh—yes, of course. That’s true. I think—I think Rosamund’s concentrating on the child, in a sort of quiet, big way.”
“There’s something fine in that. But her doings are often touched with fineness.”
“Yes, aren’t they? She doesn’t seem at all afraid.”
“I don’t think she need be. She has such splendid health.”
“But she may suffer very much.”
“Yes, but something will carry her gloriously through all that, I expect.”
“And you think it’s very natural, very usual, her—her sort of living alone with the child before it is born?”
Mrs. Leith saw in her son’s eyes an unmistakably wistful look at this moment. It was very hard for her not to take him in her arms just then, not to say, “My son, d’you suppose I don’t understand it all—all?” But she never moved, her hands lay still in her lap, and she replied:
“Very natural, quite natural, Dion. Your Rosamund is just being herself.”
“You think she’s able to live with the child already?”
Mrs. Leith hesitated for a moment. In that moment certainly she felt a strong, even an almost terrible inclination to tell a lie to her son. But she answered:
“Yes, I do.”
“That must be very strange,” was all that Dion said just then; but a little later on—he stayed with his mother longer than usual that day because poor little Omar was dead—he remarked:
“D’you know, mater, I believe it’s the right thing to be what’s called a thorough-paced egoist at certain moments, in certain situations.”
“Perhaps it is,” said his mother incuriously.
“I fancy there’s a good deal of rot talked about egoism and that sort of thing.”
“There’s a good deal of rot talked about most things.”
“Yes, isn’t there? And besides, how is one to know? Very often what seems like egoism may not be egoism at all. As I grow older I often feel how important it is to search out the real reasons for things.”
“Sometimes they’re difficult to find,” returned his mother, with an unusual simplicity of manner.
“Yes, but still——Well, I must be off.”
He stood up and looked at the Indian rug in front of the hearth.
“When are you coming to see us?” he asked.
“Almost directly, dee-ar.”
“That’s right. Rosamund likes seeing you. Naturally she depends upon you at such——” He broke off. “I mean, do come as often as you can.”
He bent down and kissed his mother.
“By the way,” he added, almost awkwardly, “about that dog?”
“What dog, dee-ar?”
“The dog I want to give you.”
“We must think about it. Give me time. After a black pug one doesn’t know all in a moment what type would be the proper successor. You remember your poor Aunt Binn?”
“Aunt Binn! Why, what did she do?”
“Gave Uncle Binn a hairless thing like a note of interrogation, that had to sleep in a coating of vaseline, when his enormous sheep-dog died who couldn’t see for hair. She believed in the value of contrast, but Uncle Binn didn’t. It would have led to a separation but for the hectic efforts of your aunt’s friend, Miss Vine. When I’ve decided what type of dog, I’ll tell you.”
Dion understood the negative and, in spite of his feeling of fitness, went away rather uncomfortably. He couldn’t forget the strange appearance of that emptied woman whom he had taken unawares by the fireside. If only his mother would let him give her another dog!
When he got home he found Beatrice sitting with Rosamund.
Dion had grown very fond of Beatrice. He had always been rather touched and attracted by her plaintive charm, but since she had become his sister-in-law he had learnt to appreciate also her rare sincerity and delicacy of mind. She could not grip life, perhaps, could not mold it to her purpose and desire, but she could do a very sweet and very feminine thing, she could live, without ever being intrusive, in the life of another. It was impossible not to see how “wrapped up” she was in Rosamund. Dion had come to feel sure that it was natural to Beatrice to lead her life in another’s, and he believed that Rosamund realized this and often let Beatrice do little things for her which, full of vigor and “go” as she was, she would have preferred to do for herself.
“I’ve been boxing and then to see mother,” he said, as he took Beatrice’s long narrow hand in his. “She sent her best love to you, Rosamund.”
“The dear mother!” said Rosamund gently.
Dion sat down by Beatrice.
“I’m quite upset by something that’s happened,” he continued. “You know poor little Omar, Beattie?”
“Yes. Is he ill?”
“Dead. He was run over yesterday by a four-wheeler.”
“Oh!” said Beatrice.
“Poor little dog,” Rosamund said, again gently.
“When they picked him up—are you going, Rose?”
“Only for a few minutes. I am sorry. I’ll write to the dear mother.”
She went quietly out of the room. Dion sprang up to open the door for her, but she had been sitting nearer to the door than he, and he was too late; he shut it, however, and came slowly back to Beatrice.
“I wonder——” He looked at Beatrice’s pale face and earnest dark eyes. “D’you think Rosamund disliked my mentioning poor Omar’s being killed?”
“No.”
“But didn’t she leave us rather abruptly?”
“I think perhaps she didn’t want to hear any details. You were just beginning to—”
“How stupid of me!”
“You see, Rosamund has the child to live for now.”
“Yes—yes. What blunderers we men are, however much we try—”
“That’s not a blame you ought to take,” Beatrice interrupted, with earnest gentleness. “You are the most thoughtful man I know—for a woman, I mean.”
Dion flushed.
“Am I? I try to be. If I am it’s because—well, Beattie, you know what Rose is to me.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Dearer and dearer every day. But nobody——Mother thinks a lot of her.”
“Who doesn’t? There aren’t many Roses like ours.”
“None. Poor mother! Beattie, d’you think she feels very lonely? You know she’s got heaps of friends—heaps.”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t as if she knew very few people, or lived alone in the country.”
“No but I’m very sorry her little dog’s dead.”
“I want to give her another.”
“It would be no use.”
“But why not?”
“You see, little Omar was always there when you were living there.”
“Well?”
“He was part of her life with you.”
“Oh—yes.”
Dion looked rather hard at Beatrice. In that moment he began to realize how much of the intelligence of the heart she possessed, and how widely she applied it. His application of his intelligence of the heart was, he feared, much less widespread than hers.
“Go to see mother when you can, will you?” he said. “She’s very fond of you, I think.”
“I’ll go. I like going to her.”
“And, Beattie, may I say something rather intimate? I’m your brother now.”
“Yes.”
She was sitting opposite to him near the fire on a low chair. There was a large shaded lamp in the room, but it was on a rather distant table. He saw Beatrice’s face by the firelight and her narrow thoroughbred figure in a dark dress. And the firelight, he thought, gave to both face and figure a sort of strange beauty that was sad, and that had something of the strangeness and the beauty of those gold and red castles children see in the fire. They glow—and that evening there was a sort of glow in Beatrice; they crumble—and then there was a pathetic something in Beatrice, too, which suggested wistful desires, perhaps faint hopes and an ending of ashes.