The Return of the Prodigal Part 44

Miss Tancred rose. She just raised the black accent of her eyebrows as she surveyed the disenchanted table, the awful disorder of the cards. She looked at Durant and Mrs. Fazakerly with a pa.s.sionless, interrogatory stare. Then suddenly she seemed to catch the infection of their dreadful mirth. It wrung from her a deeper note. She too laughed, and her laughter was the very voice of Ennui, a cry of bitterness, of unfathomable pain. It rang harsh upon her silence and was not nice to hear.

This unlooked-for outburst had the happy effect of bringing the evening to an end. It seemed to be part of the program that the Colonel should go home with Mrs. Fazakerly to take care of her, and that Miss Tancred should go with them both to take care of the Colonel. They had not far to walk; only through the park and across the road to a little house opposite the lodge gates.

While they were looking for their hats Durant was left for a moment alone with Mrs. Fazakerly. She sank into a seat beside him, unstrung, exhausted; she seemed to be verging on that state of nervous collapse which disposes to untimely confidence.

"I like whist," said Mrs. Fazakerly; "but it must be an awful game to play if you don't like it."

He followed her gaze. It was fixed on Miss Tancred's retreating figure.

"Why on earth does she play if she doesn't like it?"

Mrs. Fazakerly turned on him, suddenly serious.

"She plays because the Colonel likes it--because she is the best girl in the world, Mr. Durant."

He stood reproved.

IV

Three days pa.s.sed; they brought nothing new; each was a repet.i.tion of the other; each merged itself in whist. No relief came from the outside world; the outside world must have found out long ago that it was not worth while driving many miles to call on the Tancreds.

Three days at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the ap.r.o.n-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in; there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him lover-like, with the awful pa.s.sion of the bore for his victim.

These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up, too.

He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naf and entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be interesting, that he had done anything worth mentioning. Not that he was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this att.i.tude of theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark, where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's G.o.dson. The Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.

The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.

To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.

When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed (rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return.

As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rus.h.i.+ng pa.s.sionately from one end of London to the other, looking up his various acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him a nod or a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," and turned from him with a preoccupied air. He remembered them as they were seven years ago, when they were all Bohemians together. They had no manners, good or bad, in those days, those young men; they called you by strange names; they posed you in peculiar att.i.tudes and made abominable caricatures of your n.o.ble profile; but they would lend or borrow a five-pound note with equal readiness; they would give you a supper and a shake-down at any time of the night or morning. Now it seemed they thought twice about asking you to dinner, if indeed they thought about it at all. So Durant had been pleasantly surprised at his G.o.dfather's genial letter. Why, bless his little heart, the old boy had actually pressed him to stay for a fortnight.

Well, how was he to get through that fortnight? He decided that he would not get through it at all. He kept himself awake devising schemes for his liberation; he would find some business to take him up to town to-morrow; or, if he could not find it, he would invent it; he would send himself a telegram. And then, against his will, his mind began running on Miss Tancred. As he had been possessed by the ideal, so now he was haunted by the reality; it had a horrible fascination for him. He wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been young; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever made a joke; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been in love. This third idea was so incongruous, so impossible, that at last he found himself dallying with it for the mere extravagant humor of the thing.

If he had only been able to make himself agreeable to Miss Tancred--for Miss Tancred, if she had the will, had certainly the power to help him. The unhappy young man had made a careful inspection of the stables to see if there was a lingering chance for him there. The sleek bays that brought him from the station--impossible; the Colonel's cob, a creature too safe to be exciting; and--yes, there was Miss Tancred's mare. The sight of the fiery little beast dancing in her stall had affected him with an uncontrollable desire to ride her. The groom, not without sympathy, had interpreted his longing glances.

"There's a-many casts sheep's eyes at that there mare, sir; but it 'ud be as much as my place is worth, sir, to let you or any other gentleman get atop of her. n.o.body lays a 'and on that annymal but Miss Tancred. Miss Tancred's orders, sir."

He might have known it. Miss Tancred was good for nothing, not even for the loan of a mount.

Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton Manor, or in that vaster ent.i.ty, the Colonel.

By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's att.i.tude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.

He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a side window. There was one hope for him. Rain had fallen over night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.

"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you propose to do with yourself this morning?"

Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of trying to sketch something.

The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in those of the house.

"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than that."

And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.

He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, pa.s.sionless heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as Durant loved her, for her s.e.x with its divine caprices, its madness and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wicks.h.i.+re. In Wicks.h.i.+re Mother Nature is no dubious Aphrodite; she is indissolubly married to man, and behaves like an ordinary British matron, comely and correct. Durant saw in the immediate foreground a paddock dotted with young firs, each in a ring fence, beyond the paddock a field of b.u.t.tercups s.h.i.+ning with a polished gleam, beyond the b.u.t.tercups a horizon of trees. Before him to the southeast, soaring above the roofs of Whithorn-in-Arden, a church spire pointed the way to heaven; beyond that, traveling low above the railway cutting, a thin line of smoke indicated the way into the world. Behind him were more trees; the green crescent of the woods with the white front of Coton Manor s.h.i.+ning in their arms like a heavy, foolish face. He had no patience with the landscape, with this Nature trimmed and tamed, these shaven meadows and clean-cut hedges and little rectangular plantations. It was a typical English landscape, a landscape most unnecessarily draped, where the bosom of the hills was always covered, and the very elms were m.u.f.fled to their feet. A landscape dest.i.tute of pa.s.sion and sensual charm, a landscape like Miss Tancred.

Miss Tancred. He no longer felt any wild resentment against that poor girl; he had learned to judge her leniently. If you live with bores you inevitably become a bore; at the same time, he admitted that she was doing her best not to bore him. Meanwhile he transferred his hatred to her surroundings.

This young man had no philosophy beyond the general impression that the universe was under infinite obligations to be good to him, a belief that had found itself rather rudely shaken. He chose his view and pitched his easel and relieved himself by one deep, metaphysical, soul-satisfying curse at the devilry of things. Then he set to work, and with the instinct of a born painter he tried to find possibilities in the despised landscape. Before long he had discovered mystery in the woods that lifted their heavy rounded contours to the sky, gathered and ma.s.sed and piled on one another like clouds; deep mystery in their green, green drenched with liquid and aerial gray, pierced by thick black veins and hollowed into caverns of darkness and blue dusk. And, though he knew that he was tying himself to the place by taking it seriously, in an hour's time he was absorbed and happy.

He was startled by a voice behind him. "Do you think that it's so very beautiful?"

He turned round. Miss Tancred stood looking over his shoulders, not at him nor at his sketch, but at the distant prospect.

"It's--nice and open," he answered absently.

"Open? Wait till you've lived in it. To me it's like living with all the doors shut."

"Too many woods, perhaps. And yet there's always a charm about a wooded country; it's English."

"Yes, and, like everything English, it's much too serious, too conventional, too"--she paused for her epithet--"too disgustingly rich."

He was more startled than ever; she had put his own feeling about it into words.

"And then it's so painfully proper and respectable. Look at those ridiculous trees in their petticoats. English to a degree."

"Ah!--if you've been abroad----"

"I haven't been abroad."

"Proud insular boast!"

"I wasn't boasting. I was stating a fact."

"Well, you've some cause to boast. Not to have been abroad is distinction nowadays."

"If it comes to that I've never been out of this county, except to London now and then. You wouldn't think it."

He smiled, for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable provincial. To be sure, her sentiments were somewhat at variance with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she was going to go. She did not go.

"I'm glad you've discovered something to do here. It must be so deadly dull."

He found relief in ambiguity. "I am never dull"; adding irrelevantly, "it's a glorious view."