durant had a grievance against miss chatterton. he had been induced to lengthen his visit in order to entertain her, and miss chatterton refused to be entertained. his position at coton manor had thus become a humiliating sinecure. there was no earthly reason why he should stay any longer, and yet he stayed.
the fact was, that by this time he was really interested in other things beside the landscape. he had wondered how long miss chatterton would keep it up. he watched her, as one haunted guest watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the house, observing her manner and her appetite at breakfast, the expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning and good-night. on the third day he thought he could detect a slight flagging; miss chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative than before. by the evening she was positively serious, and he judged that the iron had entered into her soul. her manner to her cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more maternal. she had begun to pity frida, as he had pitied her.
the two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads together, always exchanging confidences. and it was not only confidences but characters that they exchanged. it was a positive fact that as miss chatterton flagged miss tancred revived, she seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older. not that miss tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she had led was against that. she looked like a woman recovering from a severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about in a flush and fever of convalescence; it [pg 294] was a struggle for health under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating disease, disease counterfeiting recovery.
a wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch. durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he was now left completely to himself. miss tancred's manner intimated that she had done with him,—put him away in some dark cupboard of the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,—that she was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength. if durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finishing the studies and sketches he had begun. he had made none of miss tancred.
one morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge on the far slope of the fir plantation. a thorn bush sheltered him from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of grass above him.
he had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt the stir of footsteps in the grass, and a voice rang out clear from the terrace.
"if it would only make papa happy. i want him to be happy."
durant could not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by the dread of hearing.
"my poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know what you want; but you want something more than that."
durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too much absorbed to heed his warning, and frida even raised her voice in answering:
"yes, i'm afraid i do want something more. i know [pg 295] what you're thinking, georgie. when women of my age go on like this it generally means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or both."
durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point miss tancred had continued:
"i am not in love."
she spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting fact.
"you are in love, frida. you're in love with life, and life won't have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly shame, too! you're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart."
frida did not deny the accusation. they passed on, and in the silence durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn bush. he could only pray now that he might remain invisible.
he felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in passing.
"do you think he heard?"
this time it was miss chatterton who raised her voice.
"it doesn't matter if he did. he's not a fool, whatever else he is."
durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his admiration of miss chatterton's masterly analysis and comprehension. she had, so to speak, taken frida tancred to pieces and put her together again in a phrase—"dying for love of life." beside her luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies and undermined by monstrous assumptions. at the same time he persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps, of [pg 296] all. in spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a certain humble spectator of existence. according to the view he had once expounded to her the two passions were inseparable.
before very long he received a new light on the subject. it was his last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the colonel was in bed with a bilious attack, and durant was alone in the drawing-room.
he had not been alone long before miss chatterton appeared. she came into the room with an air of determination and sat down beside him. she went straight to her point, a very prickly one; there was no beating about the thorn bush with miss chatterton.
"mr. durant," said she, "i want to talk to you—for once. when you first came here what did you think of miss tancred?"
"i'm afraid i didn't think anything of miss tancred."
"did you dislike her?"
"n-no. i only found her a little difficult to talk to."
"oh. well, that's not what i came to consult you about. i want you to help me. i am going to elope——"
"you don't mean to say so——"
"to elope with miss tancred—run away with her—take her out of this. it's the only way."
"the only way to what?"
"to save her. but i shall do nothing rash, nothing that would cause a scandal in the county. i shall simply take her up to town with me when i go back on monday. my week isn't up; but—well—my temper is. so far it's all open and aboveboard——"
"yes—yes. and where do i come in?" [pg 297]
"oh, you—if you wouldn't mind staying where you are and keeping the colonel in play till we've got safe across the channel——"
"the channel?"
"the channel, my friend. where else should we be safe?"
"that means that i've got to stick here till——"
"till wednesday."
"good heavens! another week! not if i know it."
"yes; it's awful, i know; but not as bad as it might have been. you won't have to talk to miss tancred. by the way, she says you are the only man who ever tried to talk to her—to understand her. what a dreadful light on her past! think what her life must have been."
"not very amusing, i imagine."
"amusing! think of it. thirty years in this hole, where you can't breathe, and without a soul to speak to except the colonel. not that the colonel is a soul—he's much too dense."
"to be anything but a body?"
"and all the time she has loathed it—loathed it. you see, she's got cosmopolitan blood in her veins. her mother—you know about her mother?"
"i know nothing about her except that she did a great many bad things—i mean pictures—for which i hope heaven may forgive her."
"don't be brutal. she's dead now and can't do any more. when she was alive she was a russian or a pole or something funny, and mad on traveling, always going from one place to another—a regular rolling stone; till one day she rolled up to the colonel's feet, and then——"
"well?" [pg 298]
"he picked her up and put her in his pocket, and she never rolled any further. he packed her off to england and made her sit in this dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. that's the sort of woman miss tancred's mother was, and miss tancred takes after her mother. she's a cosmopolitan, too."
"rubbish! no woman can be a cosmopolitan." he said it in the same tone in which he had told frida that no woman could have a pure passion for nature. "and miss tancred, though nice, strikes me as peculiarly provincial. i shouldn't have thought——"
"there are things in her you'd never have thought of. it's wonderful how she comes out when you know her."
"she certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the scene." (the words he used had a familiar ring. it was exactly what mrs. fazakerly had said to him.)
"i? i've not had anything to do with it. it was you; she told me. it wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her."
"i don't understand you," he said coldly.
"well, i think if you can understand miss tancred you might understand me. compared with frida i'm simplicity itself."
"when did i do these things?"
"why, when you told her to let herself go. when you showed her your sketches and talked to her about the places, and the sea, all the things you had seen; the things she had dreamed of and never seen."
the young girl spoke as if she was indignant with him for reveling in opportunities that were frida's by right. [pg 299]
"but she shall see them. she shall go away from this, and be herself and nobody else in the world."
"it's too late—it's not as if she were young."
"young? she's a good deal younger than i am, though she's thirty and i'm twenty-four—twenty-five next september. frida's young because she's got the body of a woman, the mind of a man, and the soul of a baby. she'll begin where other women end, will frida. wait till she's been abroad with me, and you'll see how her soul will come on, in a more congenial climate."
"where are you going?"
"we're going everywhere. venice—rome—florence—the mediterranean—the regular thing. and to all sorts of queer outlandish places besides—scandinavia, the hebrides, and iceland; everywhere that you can go to by sea. the sea——that's you again."
"the deuce it is! i doubt if i've done the kind thing, then. i seem to have roused passions which will never be satisfied. when she comes back——"
miss chatterton's voice sank. "she never will come back."
"never? how about the colonel?"
miss chatterton smiled. "that's the beauty of it. it's the neatest, sweetest, completest little plot that ever was invented, and it's simplicity itself, like its inventor—that's me. i suppose you know all about mrs. fazakerly?"
"well, not all. who could know all about mrs. fazakerly?"
"you know enough, i daresay. by taking her away—i mean frida—we force the colonel's hand."
"you might explain."
"i never saw a man who wanted so many things explained. don't you see that, as long as frida stays [pg 300] at home, petting and pampering him and doing all his work for him, he'll never take the trouble to marry; but as soon as she goes away, and stays away——"
"i see, i see; he marries. you force his hand—and heart."
"exactly. and, if he marries, frida stays away altogether. she's free."
"yes; she's free. if she goes; but she'll never go."
"won't she? she's going next monday. it's all arranged. i've told her that she's in her father's way, that he wants to marry, and keeps single for her sake. and she believes it."
he walked up and down with his hands in his pockets, a prey to bewildering emotions.
"it's ingenious and delightful, your plot," said he. "but i can't say that i grasp all the minuti?, the practical details. for instance (it's a brutal question, but), who's going to provide the—the funds for this expedition to scandinavia—or was it abyssinia?"
"funds? oh, that's all right. she's got any amount of her own, though you wouldn't know it."
"i didn't know it." he champed his upper lip. he could not in the least account for the feeling, but he was bitterly, basely disappointed at this last revelation. miss tancred was independent. up till now he could not bring himself to believe in her flight; he did not want to believe in it; it would have been a relief to him to know that the strange bird's wings were clipped.
"it was her mother's; what the poor lady traveled on, i suppose. frida might have been enjoying it all the time, only, you see, there was the colonel. that's why she wants him to marry mrs. fazakerly, though she'd rather die than own it."
"why shouldn't she own it?" [pg 301]
"because she can't trust her motives, trust herself. i never saw a woman fight so shy of herself."
"then that's what she was thinking of when she said she was afraid of her own feelings."
"oh! so she did say it, did she?"
"she said that or something very like it. you think that's what she must have meant?" he appealed to her humbly, as to one who had mastered the difficult subject of frida tancred.
"why, whatever else could she have meant, stupid?"
there was an awkward silence, broken, or rather mended, by miss chatterton saying, as she stood with her hand on the door:
"look here, you're not going to back out of it. you've promised to stand by and see us through with it, honor bright."
"i promised nothing of the sort, but i'll stand by all right."
"you may have a bad time. the colonel will kick up an awful fuss; but remember, you're not in the least responsible. i'm the criminal."
it was as if she had said, "don't exaggerate your importance. i, not you, am miss tancred's savior and deliverer."
he stiffened visibly. "i shall not quarrel with you for the role."
