He looked at her appeasingly.
“No, I suppose they don’t. But I’m the victim of rather extraordinary circumstances. My name’s Vance. I’ve got rather a good post with Killick & Paul. I’m not a cad. If you would allow that I might be able to explain.”
She looked at him intently and then turned away.
“Think it over.”
He said:
“I will—if you will. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
But she did not answer his question. She went in and closed the door.
For the next three weeks Vance dined regularly at the Pantheon; the same table was reserved for him; and the same young woman attended with polite impressiveness. He behaved to her just as he had behaved before their meeting in old March’s bedroom. He was the perfect patron; she the perfect head-waitress. The same ritual was continued with every attention to detail.
With unsmiling courtesy he could allow himself to wish her good evening. She allowed him the echo.
“Good evening, sir.”
And yet, there was a something back of the eyes of both of them, a watchfulness, interrogation, conflict.
The ceremony of life continued.
“Thick or clear soup, sir?”
Vance was gazing intently at the menu.
“Oh—clear, I think. Am I allowed to have clear soup?”
“Just as you choose, sir.”
“Clear soup then, please. And some sole. And—when am I to be allowed—to explain?”
He looked up at her. She was busy with her pencil and her pink paper slip. Her face was unreadable.
“That particular dish is not on the menu, sir.”
“No. But I have been waiting three weeks for it to turn up.”
She continued to scribble with her pencil.
“The manager and the chef are responsible.”
“But won’t you put in a word?”
Deliberately she placed one of the slips from her book close to his bread plate, and turned to the next table. Vance glanced at the slip of paper, and then crumpled it up, and with an air of self-conscious innocence—slipped it into his pocket.
THE THREE TREES
It was a stormy September with huge clouds piling themselves in an intense blue sky, and scuds of rain and floods of sunshine following fast upon each other, but to Pauline Marsac, the artist who was staying at Yew Tree Farm, this wet September was a glory and a delight.
She had come down to the Wealden country for atmosphere and an inspiration for one of her typical landscapes, England in one of its many moods, and though the weather made her expeditions somewhat patchy, never had she felt happier in her work. These stormy skies: blue, white and black; these woods and hills of green and gold and amethyst; these sudden gushes of yellow light; the grey smoke of the rain! She revelled, for in colour and the mystery of colour she saw the mystic garments of her god.
One evening she came back past Mount Hall, smokeless and tragic among its oaks and beeches, its two great cedars black against a green blue sky. The old, red, Queen Anne house surprised her. It was her first glimpse of it; and as she stood looking at it across the park she realized its emptiness. Another English home, she supposed, killed by the great war.
At the farm Mrs. Hathaway suggested a fire.
“It might be winter, Miss.”
A sudden shower was beating against the windows, and the quick clouds had shut out a transiently gleaming sun.
“Yes; a fire. I’m rather wet. What a comfortable woman you are, Mrs. Hathaway.”
She drew up a chair, delighting in the thought of a blaze, while Mrs. Hathaway knelt down, matchbox in hand.
“Who does the old red house belong to?”
“What, Mount Hall, Miss?”
“Is that its name? It looks empty and unhappy.”
The farmer’s wife was holding a match to the paper.
“Miss Orchardson lived there.”
“Not Miss Eleanor Orchardson who wrote the famous book that caused all that scandal?”
“I don’t know much about the book, Miss, save that after her death it was found out that she had written it; and that a man—a friend—had pretended——”
“Yes—I know. Hangard. It was one of our last year’s sensations. A very dirty affair. But when did Miss Orchardson die?”
“She didn’t die; she was killed.”
“Oh!”
“Thrown off her horse. Yes; she was queer, a tall woman with big black eyes. Hated men—they say—and loved horses. Lived alone there—with a cousin—Miss Horn. That fellow who tried to thieve her book used to come——”
Pauline was watching the kindling fire.
“A character! Yes; I heard a good deal. We were interested. Didn’t Miss Orchardson paint?”
“What, her face, Miss? No; she had one of those white faces.”
“I meant pictures.”
“Oh, pictures. I believe she did. And wrote poetry, and used to go riding about the country at all hours. A wild woman. She liked wild horses, and it was a wild horse that killed her.”
“How old was she?”
“How old? Oh, well—what you would call thirtyish.”
“That means thirty-nine. And what about the house?”
Mrs. Hathaway got up, with a lift of the shoulders.
“Ah, there you are! They say her will was the queerest thing. The house was to be left just as it was, furniture and all, though once a month two women from the village have the job of cleaning it up a bit. Empty. Yes. Uncomfortable—I call it. And that’s to go on for twenty years. Leastways—that’s the gossip.”
Pauline Marsac spread her hands to the fire.
“This is lovely. But what a queer story. And where did her money go?”
“To a home for worn-out horses, most of it. Though I suppose Miss Horn—the cousin—had some. She’s got a little house in the village.”
“That’s the woman who showed up Stephen Hangard when he had stolen ‘Mary Wilberforce.’ ”
“I never heard he stole a lady, Miss.”
“No; that was the name of Miss Orchardson’s book. Well—I think I will have China tea to-day, Mrs. Hathaway. And I’ll make myself some toast.”
At ten o’clock Pauline Marsac went to bed in a room whose ceiling was a crisscross of beams and joists. The floor undulated, tilting her towards the mirror, and back again towards the mahogany bedstead, with its orange-coloured quilt. The quilt belonged to Pauline. Happy in her craft she went to bed like a child, ready for the next day’s game, and as she grew drowsy she had the impression that the wind had dropped, and that stars were shining in a clear sky.
At Yew Tree Farm there was nothing to disturb you save the natural noises: chanticleer saluting the grey dawn, twittering sparrows, the wind in the trees; but Pauline slept less well than usual. She dreamed, and yet it was not quite a dream. Something seemed to be pressing through the portals of sleep. She woke twice with the impression that a voice had been calling her, an urgent voice.
“Pauline Marsac—Pauline Marsac?”
On the second occasion she lay and stared at the blind which was neither black nor grey, but a tint between the two, and as she lay there she saw projected upon the blind a very distinct picture. Three trees on a big and swelling mound. The mound had the shape of an old round tumulus, and the trees were Scotch pines, tall of trunk, with wind-blown, spreading tops.
An hallucination!
She sat up. The thing on the blind had vanished, but it hung vividly before the eyes of her mind, so vividly that she saw the characteristic gestures of the trees.
One of them had a very long, flat branch stretching out horizontally. She got out of bed and pulled up the blind, finding the first greyness of a still, September morning, with a moon low down towards the sea, and no wind moving.
A ghost world.
She was aware of a peculiar impulse. A sketch book and pencil lay on a round table near the window, and they seemed to offer themselves.
Thos
e three trees on the mound!
She had never seen them, and might never see them, but she felt impelled to put them on paper. She slipped on her dressing-gown, sat down, and sketched the tumulus and the Scotch pines as she had seen them on the blind.
Her comments were practical.
“Of course—it was some sort of projection. My subconsciousness. I must have seen three such trees and forgotten them. But where?”
In the morning, when Mrs. Hathaway came in with the breakfast tray, Pauline Marsac showed her the sketch.
“Have you ever seen anything like that?”
Mrs. Hathaway had an immediate answer.
“You have got it exact, Miss.”
“What?”
“Why, The Mount.”
She looked at Pauline as though to say:
“Why, of course you know it. You’ve drawn it, and you have eyes in your head.”
Pauline said nothing. She picked up the teapot, and glanced for a moment at the window.
“The weather looks better.”
“Sure. There’s a change. And about time, I think.”
It was a day of blue and gold, and Pauline went out with the deliberate purpose of discovering those three Scotch pines. She asked Mrs. Hathaway no questions beyond an enquiry as to the Mount Hall park and gardens.
“Are visitors allowed in?”
“Sure. You would be. Ask at the lodge; there’s someone in charge.”
Pauline’s frank face and her happy smile carried her through most gateways, and the lodge-keeper proved friendly. In this wild Wealden country few people troubled to trespass over a derelict estate, and as the lodge-keeper put it and considering the state of the fences—a stranger might get in and go anywhere without a “by-your-leave.” The lady from Mrs. Hathaway’s could paint what she pleased. The only person likely to make trouble would be Miss Horn who lived down in the village: “An obstropolous—funny-tempered sort of woman,” but she was away at the moment.
Pauline invaded the park. The beauty of it delighted her for it was a place of many vistas that ended in the blue of the hills or the blue of the sea. She wandered, glancing now and again at the white window frames and red walls of the house. Glycine and roses and a vine hung there, and the vine was turning colour. But she had come to discover those three trees; they should form an obvious and a conspicuous landmark, and yet she could not find them.
She wandered for an hour before she tried a narrow green valley running between hanging beechwoods. It took her up and up, curving westwards, to open upon rolling bluffs and great sweeps of turf and bracken, and as she climbed the slopes she saw suddenly before her on the sky line a mound and three tall trees.
“Of course I must have seen it before and not taken it in—consciously,” she reflected.
But the knoll and the trees puzzled her. They formed so distinct and arrestive a feature, a landmark not likely to be missed by an artist’s eyes. Their wind-blown isolation, their tinted trunks and dark outline would have made her pause, and pause with a little exultant thrill.
“Queer!” she thought.
She climbed the slope behind them. Yes; there was that flat, projecting bough spread like a big hand. The outlines seemed exact, and she was studying the towering tops of the trees when she realized the presence of the man.
He was sitting with his back to one of the trees, his face towards the great sweep of country that ended in the sea. He was quite unaware of her. He had no hat and was dressed in rough tweeds. He just sat and stared seawards with a kind of melancholy fixity as though all the life of the landscape lay in the past, and he was nothing more than a sad spectator of the present. He was dark and clean shaven, and sombre, a man who would take sorrow hardly, who would not struggle and protest. Weak, yes, in a way, but with elements of fineness, of quixotry. She felt that she had seen him before.
Anyway, he was there, very much in possession, though judging by the look of him he would easily be dispossessed. Her intuition was to sketch these trees and to compare the sketch made from the original with the vision of them she had seen projected upon her bedroom blind.
She walked round the base of the mound, realizing that the man would be in the picture, and she hated being watched when she was at work. Some silly little human figure dotted in the foreground! She glanced up at him. He was staring at her.
She withdrew until she had the mound and the trees at the right distance, and then seated herself on the grass. She was busy with her sketch-book, and when her glance returned to the mound she found that the man had risen and was coming down the hill towards her.
He looked annoyed, but his annoyance included curiosity. And his curiosity had an element of fierceness. She wondered why he made her think of a man who was starving.
His obvious intention was to pass her, but an interchange of glances appeared to make him pause.
“I’ll get out of your way,” he said.
Pauline Marsac smiled at him.
“Thank you. But I have no right here.”
His eyes gave her their melancholy and self-conscious stare.
“Nor have I.”
It was his business to walk on, but he hesitated, and she felt that he wanted to ask her some question. The thing that surprised her was that she found herself feeling suddenly and unexplainably sorry for the man, which was absurd, so she took it upon herself to ask him a question.
“I suppose this is The Mount?”
He looked startled.
“Oh—yes——” and his glance touched her sketch-book.
“Thank you. It took me quite a long while to find it.”
His eyes narrowed. He stood fidgeting one foot against a grass tussock.
“I suppose you are doing this for Miss Horn?”
Her surprise was obvious.
“I beg your pardon? I am doing it for myself.”
“Oh—I thought she might have commissioned you; illustrations—you know—for a book.”
Pauline had begun to be more interested in the man than in the trees.
“Is Miss Horn writing a book?”
“I have heard so.”
“Let me see, she was Miss Orchardson’s cousin, wasn’t she?”
“That’s so.”
“Is it a life of the woman who wrote ‘Mary Wilberforce?’ ”
He gave her a queer, flaring look as though he were a wild creature and she had shot an arrow into him.
“She didn’t write it,” he said.
And then he went past her and down the hill like a man running away from something, leaving her to grope at the meaning of it all. For she felt sure now that she had seen his face somewhere, in a crowd, or in a magazine or picture paper.
She made her sketch of The Mount, and on comparing it with the rough drawing that she had made in the farmhouse bedroom she found an almost complete correspondence between them, though the finished sketch had more atmosphere.
“Well, it’s a rum incident,” she reflected.
That evening Pauline Marsac decided to paint The Mount, and she went to bed thinking of it, and fell asleep almost at once. Something woke her at the same hour, just between the black and the grey, and she saw The Mount projected upon the blind, but this time there was a figure in the picture, the seated figure of a man.
“Oh, hang it,” she thought; “I’m not a sentimentalist. I don’t want him there.”
She sat up in bed, and it occurred to her with peculiar suddenness that the man had a right to be there, more right than she had.
“Well—anyway—I’ll paint those trees,” she decided.
When she set out next morning for The Mount Pauline Marsac wondered whether she would find him there. It seemed to her improbable yet likely—fated almost. And he was there, sitting at the foot of the big flat branch spread out like a huge hand or a sounding-board.
He got up and came down to meet her, and she thought that his eyes looked queer. He glanced at all her artist’s paraphernalia that she had brought with her.
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“Excuse me—are you going to paint this?”
In spite of her curiosity she was annoyed with him for being here. He distracted her.
“I am.”
“But what right have you——?”
If there was going to be an argument, she thought that she would get it over straight away.
“No legal right. Do you happen to be the agent or something?”
“I’m nothing!” he said with a touch of dramatic self-pity.
She put down her belongings.
“Yet you seem to suggest——”
“I?”
“Yes—a sort of authority. You seem to come here often—but I’ll bet you that the cause of my coming was much more curious. I’ll tell you if you are out to question my right to come here.”
“I thought that Miss Horn——”
“I know nothing about Miss Horn, save that she was Miss Orchardson’s cousin, and took the principal part in proving that Hangard had purloined——”
And then she paused, for she saw on his face a kind of exasperated despair.
“I happen to be Hangard,” he said, “and I wrote that book. That’s the irony of it—that they should have thought me capable. You see—I loved her.”
He looked over her head towards the sea, and she saw that he was smiling, a tormented smile.
“Of course—I don’t expect you to believe it. No one does. I’m just a shabby and ingenious cad. The woman got back at me as she always said she would.”
“What, Eleanor Orchardson?”
“Good God! no. Kate Horn. Jealousy. But I should never have dreamed——”
Pauline Marsac looked at the three trees.
“Why not tell me about it,” she said. “I don’t suppose it will take long.”
His eyes faltered.
“You wouldn’t believe. It sounds too queer.”
“Queer things happen. Let’s sit under the trees.”
She climbed to the top of the mound and he followed her, and stood hesitating.
“Do you mind if I sit there——?”
“Where?”
“At the foot of this tree. She—used to sit here, and I used to lie at her feet. It was here that I told her the plot of ‘Mary Wilberforce.’ ”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 40
