“My dear, do you see no happy, pleasant faces?”
“Oh, yes; but there are so many that are horrible. And the passions, the terrors, the greeds of London so agitate me——I feel that I must rush away into the green solitudes——”
There was a pause, and the old man’s still eyes were looking at the trees in the square.
Suddenly, she said quite simply—
“Tell me what I ought to do.”
He did not answer her at once, but got up and stood looking at the portrait of a woman hanging on the wall. It was as though he always looked at that picture when he wished to be calmed or helped.
“You must go back.”
“And the solitude? But—I begin to feel——”
“There is no solitude—no utter solitude. This green place you speak of should have something sacred about it. And presently—friends will come; I—for one—if you will let me?”
She held out a hand.
“Oh, you are giving me back hope. And perhaps—this power of mine may prove helpful?”
“Did it come to you—for nothing?” he asked her. “Try to think that it was meant to come.”
Together they went out into the sunlight of the square, and as Lyall helped her into the car her eyes became suddenly smiling.
“How different you have made things. And now—the green country.”
“You go back—at once?”
“Yes; I started at six this morning. I had to find you, you know. You will come——?”
“Of course. We shall not let you alone in that green solitude.”
“Good-bye,” she said; “I suppose one is less afraid of life when one begins to think less of one’s self.”
Lyall watched the car drive away, and then, returning to the house, stood for awhile looking at his wife’s portrait upon the wall.
“She smiles,” he thought. “How much I owe to the man who painted that picture.”
X
An “inspired boy,” Lionel Strange, had painted the portrait of Lyall’s wife, but that had happened more than twenty years ago, and so far as his enthusiasms were concerned, Strange had remained the eternal boy.
He had grey in his hair, and in his heart a whimsical and playful tenderness for all things that were not meanly ugly. As for life, he had learnt to hold the hot metal of it in his hand, nor could it scorch him. He had had his romance, and he had had his tragedy. He looked at life as the artist, living in the intimate glow of his world of beauty, for the metal of him was pure.
Lyall loved the man. There was no guile in him, and the treacherous urge of sex had been transmuted into the love of his craft and all that it symbolized.
Lyall had had his own word for it.
“A man will never do his best work until he gets away from the sex obsession.”
“Or sublimates it?”
“I don’t like that word.”
“Nor do I.”
It was about the end of June when Sir Roger Lyall dropped in on Strange in his studio and found him sitting in a chair facing a picture on his easel. His long legs were stretched out, and his thin hands resting on the arms of the chair. He got up with the air of a man who was tired.
“Slack water,” he said.
Lyall looked at the picture on the stand. It was a fanciful thing, a suggestion of moonlight and of dim white shapes under old trees, but there was something wrong with the picture, though it was difficult to say what was wrong with it. Strange’s hand had gone astray.
“Look at that,” he said.
His sensitive nostrils curved.
“All wrong. And yet—where is it wrong? One’s craft is a queer thing. These sudden lapses, as though—like Christ—one feels that the virtue has gone out of us.”
He stood with his fine head tilted, the boyishness of it strangely mellowed by his tawny grey hair.
“So tantalizing—these lapses!”
“My dear lad,” said Lyall, “you are tired.”
Strange flicked a curtain across the picture.
“Perhaps that’s it. The fact is—I am getting old.”
“Nonsense.”
“Or lonely! When the flame dies down—there should be a comrade spirit to breathe upon it and revive it.”
Lyall took him by the arm, and wheeled him out of the studio into the long room with the big eighteenth-century window overlooking the river. It was a noble room, and yet strangely triste, a room in which a man had begun to look at life with too much resignation.
“I have always said, my dear chap, that you have had enough of London.”
Strange laughed softly, but with a twinge of melancholy in his laughter.
“Oh—no doubt. A place in the country! How can one begin all over again? One’s so helpless.”
“Slack water—as you said.”
They stood and looked at the river, and in Lyall’s still blue eyes a kind of divine and mischievous cunning showed.
“You never paint portraits now?”
“They bore me.”
“Especially—women?”
“More especially women. One asks to be impersonal.”
“Supposing I told you that I had found a woman whose face would not transfer itself to canvas?”
Strange was drumming on the window ledge with his fingers.
“Le jardin sou le pluis,” he said. “It is raining down in the west. But this hypothetical woman of yours, does she matter?”
“She is rather remarkable.”
“Oh, my dear man! A beauty!”
“She is a live spirit dressed transiently in the flesh. I don’t believe you could render her——”
“Perhaps not.”
“You see, I don’t think you could paint a spirit, Strange. Not even you. She might terrify you, make your craft inarticulate. On the other hand——”
Strange turned his head with a sudden smile.
“Look here, old man, what’s the esoteric significance of all this?”
“I’ll tell you about her, if you like. Live water, you know.”
“Well, light your pipe.”
Had any other man but Lyall told him the tale Strange would not have believed it. He had his moments of irreverence, but this yarn was so queer and appealing that he absorbed it with the sensitiveness of the artist. Moreover, Strange knew his friend too well to refer to him even incidentally as a sentimental fool. The case had phenomena that could be examined and verified.
“Rather a spookish young woman.”
“Don’t scoff, my dear chap.”
“God forbid. I’m cynical and sceptical only when I’m tired. But how excessively uncomfortable—to be able to look into the mental interior of your butcher and your baker——”
He became aware of the mild severity of Sir Roger’s eyes.
“I am going to convince you. Consider a moment what this means. No man—knowing her to be what she is—would dare to face this extraordinary insight of hers—unless——”
Strange understood.
“It is as though you were daring me to meet her.”
“I am.”
The artist sat up in his chair with the air of a man who has seen some startling incident happening outside his window.
“Good heavens! But if she is what you say——An ordeal! Why, worse than facing a firing party. This insight of hers shooting right through you.”
“But can you imagine a more splendid adventure?”
“An adventure!”
“Say peril. Would you dare it?”
Strange’s eyes swept slowly to Lyall’s face.
“I don’t know. People must shock her pretty horribly, I suppose?”
“Of course. But think of it—from her point of view. Loneliness was driving her mad. I admit that I was a little scared. Like going to one’s last judgment, you know. But it was a thing that had to be faced. Apparently—I do not hurt her.”
“And you want me to go down there?”
“Dare you?”
Strange st
ood up and went to the window.
“How often have you been there?” he asked.
“Three or four times.”
“But why ask me?”
“Simply—because—you are the only living man I can think of—who—might be able to help her.”
“Help her!”
Strange’s face had grown infinitely solemn.
“I might do the other thing,” he said.
XI
Sybil Carberry received two letters, with an interval of three or four days between them.
The first was from Sir Roger Lyall.
“I wonder if you would let a friend of mine paint your garden—Lionel Strange——? You should have heard of him.
“He will not bother you. In fact, if you give him permission—he won’t expect you to do the social thing. You can regard him as part of the garden.”
She replied, after some reflection, that Mr. Strange could paint what he pleased in the Vine Court garden, provided it was understood that she need not interview him.
“It sounds churlish, my friend, but I have such a fear of strangers. You may tell Mr. Strange that I am rather eccentric.”
The second letter was a formal note from Lionel Strange himself.
“Dear Miss Carberry,
“Our mutual friend tells me that I have your permission to spend a few hours making studies of your garden. Please accept my thanks. I assure you that I shall take every care not to make myself a nuisance.
“Believe me,
“Yours truly,
“Lionel Strange.”
In spite of its formality the letter interested her. Sitting in the dusk among her roses, she held the letter against her forehead, but it gave her no vision of the man who had written it. And yet it roused in her an awareness of the writer as of a person not to be feared. She wondered how much Lyall had told him? But did it matter? She was free to be as aloof as she pleased.
There was no time in the year when Vine Court was not beautiful, for Ignatius Carberry had realized that for an English garden to be satisfying it must be regarded as a stage set for the performance of a perpetual winter.
“Why plan for three days of summer, when you should scheme for nine months’ rain?”
But at the end of June, summer or no summer, the exuberance of colour would not be discouraged. It bubbled and frothed in the green spaces, and ran like fire up trellises and over architraves, and veined the crevices between the stones of the paths. Beautiful in winter, with something of the Italianesque love of stone and masses of deep green conifers, it became in summer a pleasaunce of ordered and shy splendour.
Lying in bed Sybil could see the Penzance briars running in flame along the beams of the stone pergola. The sun was shining; there had been rain in the night, and the breath of the morning was tranquil and fragrant.
Kate arrived in the room with her mistress’s early tea.
“That gentleman’s come, Miss.”
“What gentleman, Kate?”
“The artist gentleman—Mr. Strange. The one you told me might go into the garden.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes; Mr. Boggis told me he was here at half-past six. Walked over from Spellford. He came up to the house when we were drawing up the blinds, and rang the bell. Asked me to take his compliments to you, and to say that you were not to trouble. Said he might be gone by the time you had finished breakfast.”
Sybil was sitting up in bed, groping for something at the back of Kate’s mind, but since Kate was a person who could be treated intimately, Sybil asked her a question.
“A friend of Sir Roger Lyall’s. Rather like Sir Roger?”
“Oh, not so old, Miss. Might be quite young—though he’s going grey. A quiet sort of gentleman. Looks as though he thought much more than he said.”
“I did not hear his voice.”
“You wouldn’t, Miss. The sort of voice that talks to itself.”
Sybil’s feeling was that Kate had fallen to Lyall’s friend. “The sort of voice that talks to itself.” And curiosity is piqued by the little human touches, so surely that her curiosity brought Carberry’s daughter out of bed when the door had closed on the faithful Kate. She crossed to the window, and keeping close to one of the curtains, looked out to see if she could catch a glimpse of this man who got up at five in the morning and walked two miles in order to sketch a garden.
Enthusiasm! Enthusiasm counts. Or, in this case, was she to look for a very delicate consideration, the kind of consideration one might expect from a man whose voice talked to itself? How different from the John Bull bellow! She stood at the window and played the spy.
“Now—I wonder?” she thought. “On a morning like this, with the sun where it is, I should choose the moat—and the grey bridge—and the big cedar in the background.”
A moment later she caught a glimpse of him in the distance, a long-legged, brown-coated creature with slightly bent and appreciative shoulders, idling across the grass beyond the trees. He wore no hat; his hands were in his trouser pockets. He drifted, pausing now and again to stand quite still, absorbing things, letting his eyes wander. The figure had a curious tranquillity; it moved with a restful leisureliness. She saw him cross to the pergola; he bent down and touched the flowers in the long border, and she could tell that his touch was very gentle. It made her think of a hand playfully taking the faces of children and tilting them to be looked at with a secret smile.
“He is in no hurry to begin,” she reflected.
He was not. Either he was getting his atmosphere, or the atmosphere of the garden had got him. He was part of it, as the birds and the insects and the flowers were part of it. Instead of sitting down on a stool to splash colours upon a canvas he wandered about letting life impress its aliveness upon him.
“He can’t be very young,” she thought; “for the young want to snatch things for themselves, pull the apple from the tree, paint a picture that shall make people exclaim.”
She felt a queer thrill of pleasure.
He was coming across the grass. She saw him pause under one of the trees and look up into the green dome of it. A flicker of sunlight touched his head and face and made them luminous. He had a rapt air, as though he had found himself in a world of dreams.
He walked on. She noticed that he did not glance at the house; it appeared that he could observe without staring, and she understood this more sensitive receptivity. He came to the end of the long walk between the lawns, and stood there looking along the grey repose of the broad and paved path stretching between the statues. He walked along it towards the square opening in the yew hedge, and it seemed to her he floated slowly on those long legs of his. He disappeared.
She felt a strange stillness within herself, a premonitory holding of the breath.
She dressed and went downstairs.
In the middle of breakfast she rang for Kate.
“Oh, Kate. I wonder if Mr. Strange would like us to send him out some breakfast.”
“Shall I go and ask him, Miss?”
“You might.”
She sat and waited for Kate’s return, touching nothing—meanwhile—upon the table.
Kate came back.
“The gentleman thanks you, Miss, but he says that he has had breakfast.”
“Is he painting?”
“No, Miss, not exactly. I found him sitting on the bridge, looking at the water. He didn’t seem to know I was there until I spoke to him.”
“Oh!”
“And then he gave a sort of start and looked at me as though he had been asleep.”
“Or had come out of another world, Kate.”
“Yes, Miss, just like that.”
All that morning Sybil Carberry remained a creature of indecision. She felt drawn towards the garden, and yet she did not venture into it, for her desire for the garden was mingled with the dread of having to come to some decision. Strange was out there, painting, or at least she presumed him to be out there, and her absurd shrinking from comi
ng into personal contact with the man was a confession that her meeting with him would matter.
Yet—why should it matter?
She was shut up in the castle of her loneliness, and she could conceive of no knight-errant coming to rescue her, and even were he to come her eyes would pierce right through the armour of the flesh—and see——Yes; what would she see?
That was the reason why she feared to meet Lyall’s friend.
In the afternoon she went out by way of the kitchen garden and the orchard into the park, and wandered there for a while, wondering if Strange was painting still. She could see no sign of him on the bridge or terrace; and, in returning through the orchard, she came upon old Boggis spreading fresh straw on one of the strawberry beds.
She stopped and spoke to him.
“Is the gentleman still in the garden?”
Boggis, crouching, looked up at her under the brim of his old straw hat.
“Him, Miss? He didn’t do no painting, so far as I saw. He went hours ago.”
“Quite early—then?”
“Must have been about ten o’clock. He came and asked me the name of one of them Hybrid Teas.”
“He’s fond of flowers—then?”
“You can tell if a pusson’s fond o’ flowers, Miss, by their way of touching ’em.”
So Strange had come at half-past six and had left at ten o’clock. And he appeared to have done nothing with his brushes. What was the meaning of this idle elusiveness? Had he found nothing that he cared to paint, or had he been persuaded to enjoy the beauty of the place without the trouble of painting it? And was she to consider his behaviour as delicately courteous and self-effacing, and that this early arrival and departure had been so arranged that he should not trespass upon her solitude?
Or, was it possible that he was a shy man and afraid of meeting her.
Had Lyall told him anything about her?
Could there be any likeness between his fear of meeting her, and her fear of meeting him?
The day that followed was as still and as sunny as its predecessor, and as Sybil Carberry stood at her window and watched the sunlight sifting through the trees, it seemed to her absurd that she should fear anything on such a day. She had had news of Mr. Lionel Strange. He had wandered up to the house about half-past six, carrying all his professional paraphernalia, and had exchanged a few words with Kate. Rumour had it that he was somewhere on the terrace above the moat, and that Pedro the spaniel was attending him while he worked.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 70
