by Grant Allen
‘You’re tired, dear,’ Geraldine said to her friend, as she turned to mount the stairs to the second floor. ‘The girls and I’ll go up and look at the things in the gallery there. Mr. Vanrenen, you’ll stop down here with Psyche, and find her a chair, for she mustn’t fatigue herself.’
‘Why, certainly,’ Cyrus answered, nothing loath. He had a vested interest in Psyche now. He had seen a good deal of the pink-and-white English girl during these last few days — more white than pink, of late, unhappily; and what with Sirena’s hints and Geraldine Maitland’s obduracy, he had almost begun to consider with himself the leading question whether one high-toned Englishwoman might not do at a pinch almost as well in the end as another. So he sat and talked with her with a very good grace, while Corona and Sirena cheapened trays and Koran stands with Abd-er-Rahman himself in the upper gallery.
They waited long, and Cyrus at last began to covet in turn some of the pretty embroideries that lay heaped in piles on one another around them. He turned a few over carelessly with his hands.
‘There’s a beauty, now,’ he said, taking up a long strip of antique Tunisian needlework and holding it out at arm’s-length before Psyche. ‘I expect Corona wouldn’t mind that bit, Miss Dumaresq.’
‘It is lovely,’ Psyche said— ‘as lovely as a picture. How much — an artist — would admire a piece like that now, Mr. Vanrenen!’
She said ‘an artist’; but she meant in her heart Linnell. Her mind went back at a bound to those old days at Petherton. Cyrus threw it lightly and gracefully round her shoulder. Your American, even though unskilled in the courtesy of words, has always a certain practical gracefulness in his treatment of women. He regards them as something too fragile and costly to be roughly handled.
‘It becomes you, Miss Dumaresq,’ he said, gazing at her admiringly. ‘You look quite a picture in it. It’d make up beautifully for evening dress, I expect.’
Psyche trembled lest he should buy that too.
‘Papa wouldn’t like me to wear it, though,’ she put in hastily. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t let me. It’s against his principles.’
Cyrus leaned back on his chair and surveyed her with a certain distant chivalrous regard.
‘That’s a pity,’ he answered, ‘for I’d like to give it to you.’
Psyche made haste to decline the kindly-meant suggestion.
‘Oh, how good of you!’ she cried. ‘But you mustn’t, please. I’d rather you wouldn’t. Why, you seem to buy everything that takes your fancy. How awfully rich you must be, Mr. Vanrenen!’
‘Well, I ain’t in want,’ Cyrus admitted frankly. ‘I can afford most anything I feel I’m in need of.’
‘I’ve never known any rich people before,’ Psyche said abstractedly, for want of something better to say. ‘Papa thinks poor people are more the right sort for us to know.’
‘No?’ Cyrus murmured with genuine regret. He liked Psyche, and he wanted her to like him.
Psyche played with the corner of the embroidery, embarrassed. She felt she had said one of the things she had rather have left unsaid.
‘But he likes you,’ she went on with her charming smile. ‘In fact, we both like you.’
‘No?’ Cyrus said again, in a very pleased voice. ‘Now, I call that real nice and friendly of him, Miss Dumaresq.’
Psyche folded up the embroidery and replaced it on the heap. This interview was beginning to get embarrassingly long. Just as she was wondering what on earth she could say next, Geraldine Maitland came down the steps with Corona and Sirena to relieve her from her painfully false position.
‘Where next?’ Cyrus exclaimed, jumping up from his seat. ‘Sirena always goes the rounds of the stores regularly when she comes into the city.’
‘To the photographer’s,’ Sirena said; ‘I want some of those lovely views of the ragged boys. These little Arab chaps are just sweet, Miss Maitland.’
So they went to Famin’s in the Rue Bab-Azoun, where Sirena had seen the particular photographs she so specially coveted.
Psyche’s eyes gave her no trouble. She entered the shop and gazed around it fearlessly. On an easel in the corner was a painting of an Arab girl standing under a doorway in the native town. Psyche’s heart came up into her mouth as her gaze fell upon it. She was no judge of art, but love had taught her better than years in museums or galleries could ever have done to know one artist’s hand. She recognised in a moment that unmistakable touch. It was a specimen of Linnell’s Algerian subjects!
The colour fled from her cheek all at once. She gazed at it hard, and took it all in slowly. Then, all of a sudden, as she still looked, for the first time since she arrived in Algeria, the shop and the picture faded away before her. She groped her way over to a chair in her distress. Thick darkness enveloped the world. Cyrus, astonished, led her over to a chair.
‘Thank you,’ she said, as she seated herself upon it. ‘Geraldine — my eyes — —’
She could get no further.
Geraldine understood it all with feminine quickness. She beckoned Cyrus out of the shop quietly.
‘Run for a fiacre,’ she said, herself all trembling. ‘You’ll find one opposite the mosque in the square. Her eyes have gone again. I know what’s the matter. That’s one of the pictures Mr. Linnell painted. Psyche was very much attached to him indeed, and he died at Khartoum. I tell you this to secure your help. Don’t say anything more about it than you can avoid at the Orangers. And tell Corona and Sirena to keep it quite quiet.’
Cyrus nodded assent.
‘You may depend upon me,’ he said; and he was off at full speed to get the fiacre. When it arrived, he led out Psyche with tender care, and placed her like a brother in the corner of the cushions. They drove up in silence, for the most part, Geraldine alone having the courage to make occasional pretences at conversation. By the time they reached the gate of the Orangers, the veil had fallen again from Psyche’s eyes. But her father, who met her at the door with his searching glance, was not to be deceived.
‘Your sight went again,’ he said with awe as he scanned her pallid face. And Psyche, too truthful to try to hide it, answered merely, ‘Yes, papa,’ and hid her sorrow straightway in her own little bedroom.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A NEW SUITOR.
Time marched on, as indeed it often does in this prosaic world of ours; and Psyche’s life at the Pension des Orangers grew daily more and more like her life at Petherton. The first flush of freshness in the African world wore gradually away; and even as it disappeared Psyche’s eyesight returned once more to something of the same deplorable condition as at the Wren’s Nest. Only, a general dimness began at last to supervene. Instead of periods of occasional loss of sight, interspersed with periods of perfect vision, Psyche was conscious of a constant decrease in visual power, so that she only saw with clearness and distinctness now when she made a definite effort of attention towards any particular object. The fact was, the change was but evanescent. The cause of her malady still remained untouched. Her sight was failing.
She passed much of her time all those days with Geraldine Maitland: much also with Cyrus, Sirena, and Corona. Geraldine, indeed, did all she could to throw the four together. The girls, she thought, were nice lively companions for poor broken-hearted Psyche: they roused and stimulated her: and Geraldine even cherished some faint hope that Cyrus’s good-nature and kindliness of heart might at last engage Psyche’s passing interest. For Geraldine had a genuine affection — of a sort — for Cyrus: knowing his profound admiration for ‘high-toned’ Englishwomen, she would have been delighted — if only she could have handed him over to Psyche.
With this end in view, she had concocted from the beginning a little scheme of her own to create in the genial young American’s mind an interest in the pretty and shrinking English girl. Before the Dumaresqs’ arrival she had arranged with Cyrus that he should pay nearly one-half their bill at the pension, in the utmost secrecy; and so had created a proprietary feeling by anticipation towards b
oth father and daughter in the generous Westerner’s chivalrous soul. For Cyrus, though engaged, like all the rest of Cincinnati, in the fluctuating concerns of the wholesale pork market, had a nature as tender as any English gentleman’s; and his feeling of protection towards Psyche might easily ripen under these peculiar circumstances into one of a far more intimate and personal kind.
As for Geraldine, her own attitude towards her American admirer was very peculiar. She liked Cyrus immensely; but, as Cyrus himself rightly divined, the money alone stood in the way. She could never endure the world should think she had sold herself for Cincinnati gold. A little wholesome opposition, indeed, on Mrs. Maitland’s part might have worked wonders for Cyrus’s chance of success; but Mrs. Maitland, sharp woman of the world as she was by nature and training, was yet not quite sharp enough to perceive that opportunity for carrying her point. Her tactics had less of finesse about them than of sheer persistence. She saw her end clearly, and made for it, with most unwomanly directness, by what seemed to her the plain straight path. And Geraldine, who could be led but could not be driven, found her mother’s advocacy of Cyrus’s claims a considerable factor against the honest and manly young American’s chances.
A month or two had passed, and Sirena sat one day in the garden on the hillside slope under the pleasant shade of a drooping pepper-tree. The full African sun was pouring down his splendour on terraces rich with rose and geranium. Tall irises flaunted their beauty in the air, and bees hummed busily around the heavy-scented loquat trees. Psyche and Corona were seated on the bench in the tennis court below, watching a set between some others of the visitors; for the irrepressible Briton, wherever he goes, must have his tennis lawn. Sirena laid down her novel with a yawn. A shadow from behind fell across the path. She looked up suddenly. It was Haviland Dumaresq.
The old man seated himself by her side with a fatherly air. He had learned to like Sirena by this time; she was always so kind to his precious Psyche. When Psyche’s eyes were most seriously affected, it was Sirena who came to her bedroom to read to her; when Psyche couldn’t see to guide a pen, it was Sirena who helped her to write her letters. Haviland Dumaresq could pardon for that even Sirena’s name; no siren she, indeed, but a simple-hearted, kindly-natured, rough, self-satisfied, self-sufficing Western girl. Besides, was she not Cyrus Vanrenen’s sister; and were not Haviland Dumaresq’s ideas for the moment beginning vaguely to fix themselves upon Cyrus Vanrenen’s future? Anything on earth, now, to turn the current of Psyche’s mind into fresh directions!
‘My darling grows no better, Miss Sirena,’ he said pathetically, as he glanced at Psyche sitting with that settled resigned air of hers on the bench far below. ‘I had hoped much from this trip to Africa. Every day I stop here my hopes grow slenderer. As the novelty palls, the evil increases. She’s fading like a flower. I know not what next to try to rouse her.’
Sirena glanced back at him with tears in her eyes.
‘Do you think she’ll go blind, then, sir?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Unless we can change the set of her thoughts,’ Dumaresq answered in a very slow voice, ‘purely functional as the evil is, I begin to fear it. An effort would suffice to make her see as well as ever, to be sure; but she seems incapable even of making that effort. Her will-power’s gone. She lacks initiative. She has nothing left to live for, I’m afraid, just now. I wish to God we could find something to interest her in life. At her age, such a want of living-power’s simply unnatural.’
‘That’s so, sir,’ Sirena answered, half afraid, for she could never quite conquer her instinctive terror of the famous thinker.
‘You know the cause?’ Haviland Dumaresq suggested tentatively.
‘I guess so, in part,’ Sirena answered with what might (for an American girl) be almost called timidity. ‘Miss Maitland’s enabled me to draw my own conclusions.’
Haviland Dumaresq paused for a moment, irresolute. Then he went on dreamily, in his half-soliloquizing fashion:
‘It would be a great thing, though, if we could make her take some living interest in something or somebody else, instead of leaving her to this perpetual brooding over her buried grief.’
‘It would so,’ Sirena assented eagerly.
Dumaresq started at the cordiality of this assent. Her tone, he felt sure, said more than her words. She had thought it over — thought it over before. Here, surely, was an ally — a ready-made ally. If only the current of Psyche’s thought could be turned! It wasn’t only for her happiness nowadays, alas! it was for her eyes, her sight, her health, her very life almost.
‘Nothing will ever give her a chance now, I fear,’ he said slowly, still fixing his gaze on Psyche in the distance, ‘except the slow growth of a fresh affection. It would have to be slow — it would have to be long — it would have to be all begun from without, for Psyche herself, in her present frame of mind, would never begin it. She’s lost the impetus. Her heart’s too much bound up now in that unknown grave. But if anybody should ever happen to fall in love with her, and to press his suit upon her by gentle degrees — she’s young still — nature and instinct are all on her side — it isn’t natural at her age to grieve for ever — well, I almost fancy he might have a chance — he might yet prevail upon her. And if, however slowly, Psyche could only be brought to feel that some new object in life was dawning on her horizon and growing up before her, her eyesight, I believe, would at last come back. All the doctors are agreed as to that: all she needs now is power to make the effort.’
Sirena looked up at him with a vague wistfulness.
‘If Cyrus — —’ she began; then she broke off suddenly, appalled to herself at her own exceeding boldness.
Dumaresq interrupted her with a sudden return of his native haughtiness.
‘Mr. Vanrenen,’ he said, drawing himself up as if he had been stung, ’is a very young man for whom I have slowly conceived — well, a certain regard, in spite, I will confess, of some initial prejudice. But I most assuredly didn’t intend, in what I have just said, to allude either to him or to any other particular person. If you thought I meant to do so, you entirely misunderstood me. It is an inherent, perhaps an ineradicable, vice of the feminine mind always to bring down general propositions to an individual instance.’
He said it in his grand impersonal, kingly manner, like a monarch in his own philosophic realm, dismissing for the moment the pourparlers of some friendly power on a matter affecting his daughter’s interests. His condescension was so evident, indeed, that Sirena herself — unabashed, wild Western American that she was — felt constrained to answer humbly in her smallest voice:
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Dumaresq. I — I didn’t know what I was going to venture to suggest would be likely to offend you.’
She was awed by the solemn dignity of the old man’s attitude. In her own heart, she felt tolerably sure he meant to hint, in his obscure way, that if Cyrus made love to Psyche, he, for his part, would have no serious obstacle of his own to offer. But she also felt that, penniless and aged as the great philosopher was, a cipher in the worldly society of rank and wealth, he still considered and knew himself a power in the world — a power of a kind that could hardly bear to stoop to the vulgar trivialities of Cincinnati pork-merchants. And he made Sirena recognise his position too. That frank and fearless young daughter of an irreverent dollar-worshipping Western Republic yet recognised in her own heart, as she sat there that morning under the weeping pepper-tree, that the gray philosopher in the threadbare coat would be conferring an undoubted honour on her house if he were to admit, however grudgingly, and with whatever reserves, that Cyrus Vanrenen might conceivably pay his court unopposed to so great a lady as Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter.
The old man rose, as if to conclude an interview that embarrassed him. Sirena rose too, and moved towards the court, where Psyche was sitting. At the self-same moment, Cyrus and Geraldine Maitland came in sight from the opposite direction.
Cyrus was in a humour particularly disposed to think
and hear anything good of Haviland Dumaresq and his daughter; for in truth he had just been conferring a favour upon them. Geraldine had called on her weekly errand of paying the other half of Mrs. Holliday’s bill, for which Cyrus unobtrusively supplied the money. To him it was nothing — less than nothing, for he was really one of the richest men in Cincinnati: if out of the superfluity of his wealth he could do anything to make Haviland Dumaresq or his daughter the happier, he was ready with all good-will to do it, not letting his left hand know what his right hand was doing. Americans are more public-spirited in the use of their money than we are; and Cyrus took to himself no special credit for this graceful act. Society and the world, he had been told, owed Haviland Dumaresq an immense debt: and part of that debt, by the favour of circumstances, he, Cyrus Vanrenen, was privileged to discharge for it. It was one of the many advantages of wealth that money could so bring him into pleasing personal relations, however one-sided, with his natural betters.
Psyche, looking up, was dimly conscious of somebody approaching. She moved aside a little, and made room for the young man on the bench. Cyrus noted the natural courtesy with keen pleasure. She wanted him to sit beside her, then! And she so very high-toned! Such a singular honour from Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter!
They sat and watched out the set together, Psyche seeing nothing, and Cyrus talking gaily enough to her about nothing in particular. Yet she listened gracefully. The full-flowing murmur of his trivialities soothed her. Mr. Vanrenen was always so kind and nice: she liked him so much for his simple good-nature.
