Then there was the sound of a quick footstep, and Tante Helena had come to meet them. As a child, Alethea had always thought her aunt the prettiest person she knew, but in those days she had not really appreciated the quality of her beauty. Or perhaps, when Tante Helena wore the fashionable clothes of the hour, she had merely looked a little more charming than other people. Now she was completely individual. She wore the dress of the country, and in it she might have been an empress unsuccessfully trying to hide her royal bearing beneath the disguise of a peasant woman. Yet she seemed entirely simple and unsophisticated. She walked with the ease and dignity of some proud wild creature, and her bright blue eyes looked out with a happy challenge. They seemed wider open than most eyes are, and yet there was nothing staring about them. They looked freely at you, as blue flowers do. Tante Helena’s skin was clear and healthy, but Alethea thought she had never before seen so sunburnt a face. She herself had been taught to protect her skin with veils and parasols, so that no weather should spoil its whiteness, and this brown glow struck her as very foreign. Countess Friedenbach’s head was nobly set on her shoulders, and she carried it nobly. Grandly as she moved, she also moved with an amazing swiftness, and Alethea had barely time to recognize her and so to make sure that they had reached the right house before she was in Tante Helena’s arms.
‘My darling Alethea! This is the loveliest surprise of my life!’ And never did a joyous voice convey more completely a joyous welcome. ‘And you have brought your baby. This is better than my dreams. My dear, he is indeed ein sternchen.’
The ‘little star’ twinkled very prettily at this compliment. He looked up at Tante Helena, twisted his face into a most comical smile, and then laughed outright.
‘O, the angel!’ said Tante Helena. ‘He loves me already.’ And she took him to her heart.
The Friedenbachs had no children, and they were delighted to have a baby in the house. Tante Helena was a woman of tact and she asked no questions, treating it as the most natural thing in the world that her niece should arrive out of the blue, with scarcely any warning, with very scanty luggage, and with a little boy in her arms. They began again where they had left off when Tante Helena left England: and with this plunge back into her girlhood, Alethea could hardly believe herself to be the same woman who had made that agonized journey across Europe. The last few days fell from her like the memory of a book read in the train. She was no longer the person who had endured them. They existed for her in the remoteness of a tale that has been told, while she herself lived in the person of the girl who had loved Tante Helena all those years ago.
And so began a visit touched by magic. Alethea was transported into the past to find again her gay youthfulness. The weight of the past year fell from her. She forgot the misery of Hans’ misfortune: she forgot the pall of enmity which had fallen over her happy love for Nicholas, making of their marriage a long drawn-out funeral: she even forgot her marriage itself. And with these memories had gone her love for her husband. He ceased to exist for her. When she thought of him, he seemed an imaginary person read of in some fantastic romance. She could not believe that still, in England, in a house which she had always known, and which had been for nearly four years her home, there actually lived the man who had become for her so shadowy a figure. It was impossible too, that there could be, living with this man, a child of her own. She sometimes thought that she was dead. These must surely be the Elysian Fields, a land of peace which the world cannot touch, and where the memory of it is no more than a picture seen in a faded tapestry.
Alethea began to feel that she had always lived in this cool sunlit valley. Her life there was entirely carefree. Hans was her only occupation. She did everything for him—bathed him, dressed him, gave him his meals, took him for walks; and his crib was beside her bed at night. She never left him, except in the evening when he was asleep, and then she sometimes listened for an hour or so to Tante Helena’s exquisite piano playing, or refreshed her German by hearing the Count read Schiller to his wife. Time stood still. Alethea recalled no past: she looked on to no future. And because each day was exactly like the last, she rested in a timeless present. No clock ever sounded in that valley. It was true that the morning sun rose over the hills which faced her window, to sink, at night, on the other side of the house; but each day that he brought with him might have been the same day, and at night he took nothing away.
Hans was as happy as a baby could be. He was now able to walk, and he tumbled about and played in the meadows, trying to catch the little mountain butterflies. Alethea used to lie on the grass, her hands behind her head as she watched him lurching about; and when he was tired she would draw him down onto the ground beside her, and make up baby stories to amuse him till he went to sleep. Then Alethea would sit for hours holding him in her arms, while her eyes moved from the little face so near to her, away to the great soft outlines of the mountains on the horizon. Two years ago she would have thought such a life unbearably dull: now she could imagine no other.
Countess Friedenbach was puzzled. In spite of the unquestioning manner in which she had accepted Alethea’s sudden descent upon her, she had of course guessed from the first that something tragic lay behind it. She quickly divined that the trouble was concerned with Hans and his pathetically dwarfed body, and she waited for Alethea to speak of it in time. Then, the weeks passed, and no confidence came. Instead Alethea quite lost the unhappy look which had been on her face when she arrived, and she seemed to have entirely forgotten her trouble, whatever it was. She obviously had no desire to make a confidence; and yet, equally obviously, there must be a confidence to be made. There must exist an explanation of Alethea’s having left her husband without any wish ever to mention his name, and of her having left England to hide in the Bavarian uplands with a charming little dwarf baby.
Tante Helena became anxious, and told the Count that she thought Alethea was suffering from loss of memory.
The Count declared that she was certainly not ‘suffering’ from it.
‘She may have fled from England because there is something she wishes to forget. Do not spoil her peace here by forcing her to “suffer” from unpleasant memories.’
‘Still, if a husband is among those unpleasant memories, I don’t know if I can altogether acquiesce in his being buried alive.’
‘If he acquiesces, and he seems to do so, he’s not worth digging up,’ replied the Count, and he would help no more. He liked to see Alethea happy, and he was quite willing that she and Hans should stay at Friedenbach as long as they lived.
It was true that at the back of Alethea’s mind there was a complete numbness. She had reached Friedenbach haunted by the prospect that she would have to explain to Tante Helena what had happened in England. No explanation was asked for and she let that go. Then she had thought that she would have to come to a decision as to her own future, but for this too, there seemed no immediate hurry. Nothing mattered in this timeless place. She lay in the meadows and allowed the days to drift over her.
They drifted too over Hans, although, unlike his mother, he did not lie still. He tumbled and rolled about in the short flower-prankt grass, and with every day, he grew more elfin in appearance. He was, of course, much smaller than an ordinary child of nearly two years old, but he seemed far more active. He flitted about all day with movements as erratic as those of the butterflies he was always trying to catch. When Alethea turned her head to look for him (and this was often the limit of her activities in a day) she always found him bobbing about in a completely unexpected place. He was here, there, and everywhere, and when he tumbled down, as he often did, he never cried. Instead, he jabbered away to the tangled grass which had tripped him up, using a language of his own, quite incomprehensible to Alethea. She sometimes thought that she detected a German word, but at last she decided that he was speaking Danish, and that he must have absorbed it from his namesake Hans Andersen. Absurd fancies like this filled her mind. Her thoughts travelled no further than the ring of mou
ntain tops which made her horizon. That world was enough.
Chapter Twelve
I DON’T think we have spoken to you of Lady Uffcote, have we?’ said Tante Helena one morning. ‘She has heard that you are staying here and she wants to see you.’
‘To see me? Why? Who is she?’
Alethea looked agitated.
‘She is a very old English lady, who has lived for many years in a wonderful old house up in the mountains. The present peer is her step-son, and she apparently doesn’t care much about him. She has heard nothing of England for years, but when I told her that I had an English guest, she seemed to long to hear something of her native land.’
‘I wish you hadn’t told her about me. I’m sure I couldn’t tell her anything that would interest her. I know nothing about her or her relations.’
‘Do go and see her,’ said Countess Friedenbach. ‘It really would be a kindness, for she is very old and lonely, and rather sad. It would do her good to see someone young, and to hear her own language spoken again.’
Alethea resisted. Just then, she had only one strong emotion, and that was a desire to forget that she had ever lived anywhere but here. As long as the past was shut out, she was entirely at peace. She shrank from being questioned by an unknown old woman.
But Tante Helena insisted, which seemed unlike herself. Hitherto, she had allowed Alethea to do just as she pleased; but now she felt that the time must come to rouse her from the sleep into which she seemed to have fallen. The Countess was not at all anxious to write to Sir Nicholas, at any rate until she knew more about him, and about the relations between him and his wife; but, on the other hand, she knew that it was impossible for the present situation to be indefinitely prolonged. She could not permanently join in a conspiracy to hide a wife from her lawful husband, at any rate without knowing why she was doing it. She saw that Alethea had had a shock, and she thought that the gentlest way of calling her back to reality might be to persuade her to speak of England with somebody who knew nothing at all about her, and who therefore could say nothing which might recall the past too abruptly.
She had already said something of this kind to the Count, who told her that she spoke as if she thought that Alethea was mad.
‘I think she is,’ Tante Helena had then said. ‘Though her brain isn’t affected.’
‘What then?’
‘Her heart has been broken.’
The Count told his wife that English women were not sentimental enough to allow their hearts to be broken; but in consequence of this conversation, both he and his wife were curious to see how Alethea would take the suggestion that she should go to see Lady Uffcote. When, she so obviously disliked it, the Count was disposed to let the matter drop. He did not want his guest to be worried. However, the Countess for once was obstinate. She had resolved that the present deadlock must cease, and she thought that Lady Uffcote might be used as the thin end of the wedge. Gentle as she appeared to be, Tante Helena had far too great a sense of responsibility to remain inactive while anyone she cared for was drifting towards disaster. She was beginning to think that if Alethea’s state of lethargy went on much longer her mind might be permanently affected by it. She had great determination when once she had made up her mind, and she generally carried her point. So it came about that a few days later, Alethea drove off after luncheon in the Count’s carriage, to call on the unknown English woman, leaving Hans to the care of Tante Helena.
They drove away into the mountains. Up and up they went—through summer woods of every shade of green, through forests of firs, through treeless mountain spaces where the snow still lay in heaps. Alethea looked back over the way they had come. It was true that they had left the Friedenbach valley far below them, but this fellow countrywoman of hers evidently shared her own desire to leave the world behind. Although it was now possible to see a far greater distance than could be seen in the valley, yet the great view only revealed how many mountains there were in the world among which one could lose oneself.
At last they reached the mountain fortress in which Lady Uffcote had made her home. It was a mediæval castle standing in a commanding position at the head of a great gorge. A magnificent view was spread below it, and not another sign of human habitation could be seen. No birds seemed to have flown so high as this. The castle might almost have been a natural formation of the rocks among which it was set. It stood like a prehistoric monument, motionless among the winds.
Inside, the air was still and very cold. Alethea was led down a narrow stone passage to the room where Lady Uffcote sat, and when she came upon the old woman she thought she had never before seen anyone so like a corpse.
‘Could it be possible,’ she thought, ‘in these heights, to live on for centuries after the world would call one dead, changed, oneself, into the thin air which is all there is to breathe?’ It seemed that something like this must have happened to Lady Uffcote. She looked immensely old, and she was very thin and haggard. Her skin had turned to faded rice-paper, and there was no colour in her lips. Her eyes were sunk very deep in their old sockets, and in them was the only colour to be seen in her face. Yet even this could hardly be called a colour. It was rather a shadow—a very dark shadow. Those eyes had the tone of very old bronze, which in the course of centuries has accumulated a patina of indescribable shades of earthy blue and green. They would have been startling, in their contrast with the pallor of Lady Uffcote’s skin, but for the blue hollows which surrounded them, and which merged gradually into the deathlike whiteness of the rest of the face. A black lace veil was thrown over the white hair, and fastened by a brooch which was made of a single emerald. The green stone shone like an evil eye. Lady Uffcote sat very still, in a vast armchair, its high back upholstered in dark blue brocade and, with the gesture of a blind woman, she spread two astonishingly thin hands in the direction of her guest, as Alethea was announced.
There was something terrible in her appearance. She might have been the one survivor of a bye-gone world, washed up on to this mountain top, by some deluge long ago, and left there alone and forgotten by the abating waters. Alethea was overwhelmed by the horror of such loneliness,
‘I hardly remember how to speak English,’ said Lady Uffcote, ‘but the name of Roxerby I have not forgotten.’
This unexpected welcome alarmed Alethea. What could be Lady Uffcote’s connection with the family of Roxerby?
‘It is kind of you to invite me to come to see you,’ was what she said.
‘I hardly know why I did,’ replied her hostess. ‘As a rule, I wish to be left alone; but when I heard of you, you seemed to me to be a solitary like myself, and I thought we might understand each other.’
‘I am afraid that you will think me a very stupid visitor,’ said Alethea. ‘I seem to have nothing fresh to say to anyone. I do nothing but take my baby for walks.’
‘Ah! You have a baby. Then you at least are not solitary.’
‘Does that mean that we have less in common than you thought?’ asked Alethea.
‘I think not; for I suppose you came to Bavaria in search of solitude, as I did, years ago.’
‘And in this lovely place you have lived alone for years?’
‘In this lovely place I have lived alone for years.’
‘It is very beautiful,’ said Alethea, turning to look through the long narrow window upon the unbelievable magnificance of the panorama spread below them.
‘It is very beautiful.’
Silence fell. Alethea felt that there was something uncanny in the way in which the old woman repeated her phrases. She began to be impatient. What had made Lady Uffcote wish to see her? They had nothing to say to each other.
Lady Uffcote seemed to be looking at her, but it was impossible to tell whether there was any sight in the sunken old eyes.
Alethea stared at the distant hills. She was resolved not to make another remark. If this old woman wished to avoid society, she at least would not inflict upon her more conversation than was necessary.
At last Lady Uffcote broke the silence.
‘Are you happy in the solitude you have come so far to find?’ she asked.
‘Happy?’ said Alethea. The word seemed meaningless to her.
‘Happy,’ Lady Uffcote repeated.
Alethea made no reply.
‘It was a long way to come,’ Lady Uffcote went on, after a pause.
‘You came as far,’ said Alethea, ‘and I suppose it satisfies you. You did not regret it.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You stayed here all these years.’
‘I stayed here all these years.’
‘Then you do not regret coming?’
‘I do not regret coming,’ Lady Uffcote gazed for some time into space. ‘But I regret the need for coming,’ she then said.
She lapsed into silence.
A servant brought in some coffee and cakes.
Lady Uffcote roused herself from what appeared to be a long searching look into an invisible past. She gave Alethea a cup of coffee, foaming with whipped cream. The little cakes, had a curious flavour. They were scented with herbs.
The meal passed silently. Alethea had by now decided that her hostess was rather pleasantly mad. Such insanity did not alarm her. She would have been far less at ease with a sane and intelligent compatriot who might have questioned her as to why she had left England. It was obvious that Lady Uffcote was only interested in her own reasons for having hidden herself in the mountains.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, suddenly and unexpectedly.
Alethea started.
‘I am Lady Roxerby.’
‘You are Lady Roxerby.’ Once more the voice might have been a sinister echo of her own words.
‘I knew the Roxerbys,’ Lady Uffcote said. ‘And Brokeyates.’
She seemed to wish the subject closed. She poured herself out some more coffee, and she ate two little cakes. Alethea watched her. She felt that she was being hypnotized by the movements of those thin, claw-like hands, by the long silences, and by the utterances of that dead voice.
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