Secret Bread Part 21

"Is Phoebe another sister?"

"Oh, no; she's the daughter of Mr. Lenine, the miller. She was at boarding-school in Plymouth with Va.s.sie, and they're just like sisters,"

said Ishmael in the simplicity of his heart.

"How nice!" said Blanche Grey.

So it was settled between them that Blanche should renew her acquaintance with the country that summer at Cloom, and when Ishmael left he walked on air. It was not that he was excited so much as that a deep content filled him; life seemed full of promise and even more worth living than he had thought it. The distrust which that news of Carminow's had engendered drifted to the back of his brain; he wandered through the streets, picturing the days to come at Cloom. He came to a pause at last, aware that he had missed the way to the hotel where he was to sup with Carminow and Killigrew. He looked at the name of the street he was in, and saw that it was the name Carminow had mentioned as being that of the street where Hilaria was lodged.

He stood between the rows of houses and tried to realise that one of them sheltered Hilaria. He stood quite still, beset by the same thoughts as on the first evening he had been told of her. He looked up at the houses and wondered which it was; it seemed odd that the bricks and stone which hid so much of sadness should not declare it in some way unmistakable to him. Odd that he could no more tell at what elevation, whether just above him or nearer the roof, she lay, as odd that, wherever it might be, she was equally unknowing that someone was thinking of her with such intensity so near. He walked along, looking for the number Carminow had mentioned, found he had pa.s.sed it, and turned back to see it was the house one door further down than that at which he had first stopped. He looked at the door as though it could fly open and bid him enter; he pictured with a vividness he could not suppress her entrance there, carried, her head lolling on her breast.

Several times he walked up and down, wondering if she would care to see him, trying to remember if she had ever shown any predilection for him which could make him think she would. Then he turned away and went on, the thought of her and the pity of her going with him. He was not surprised when at supper Carminow began to speak of her; it seemed as though it would not be possible to sit so near to himself and not feel the trend of his thoughts.

"I saw Hilaria yesterday," said Carminow, "and I asked her if she wanted to see you two. I thought she might, but she waited a minute and then let me know most unmistakably that she would rather not. She can only speak very queerly now--most painful business--and make a few gestures, but there was no mistaking her. I expect it would have been too much for her anyway."

Both his listeners felt a half-guilty relief, and that night when alone in his room Ishmael, aided by that glimpse of the exterior of her surroundings and by Carminow's words, was a.s.sailed again by the thought of her, but not as keenly as before. Shocked senses had been responsible for that first keenness, and imagination, however aided, could not sting to the same depth. He thought as he fell asleep of Blanche and Cloom.

Life had ugly, unthought-of things in it, but, thinking of her steady radiance, he could not believe that any fate would dare to dim its l.u.s.tre.

Blanche sat long at the window of her bedroom that evening, her ashen fair hair about her shoulders and her brush idle in her hand. As it was Sunday and she had no engagement, she was going to bed early, so early that it was still sunset-light.

She stood at the open window of the bedroom, staring with unseeing eyes; her thoughts were revolving round her own problems, but gradually the sights and sounds without won her to notice of them. The back windows of the house looked on to other house-backs that formed a square well, wherein smaller, much lower roofs and flat expanses of ribbed leads and stable yards all huddled together in soft blue shadow. Only an occasional chimney-pot, higher than its fellows, made a note of glowing orange where it pierced the slant of the evening sun: To Blanche's left there showed a pale gleam from the Thames between the house-backs of brownish-grey brick; to her right roof-tops and fantastic cowls were patterned in a flat purple tone against the luminous sky. In the eaves the sparrows were chirping shrilly; one flew downwards so swiftly between Blanche's eyes and the sky that his little body seemed nothing but a dark blot with a flickering upon either side of it. The sight caught at her memory, and she had a quick vision of a day when she had lain upon a sloping cliff and watched the gulls wheel far above her, the light of the setting sun making their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the underneath of their wings flash like silver. A smaller bird had darted past, and then, as now, she had noted the curious effect of the solid little body flanked by that flickering which meant wings invisible through their own speed. The surface of her mind was quick to respond to suggestion, and the thought of the country struck her as being an answer to the unspoken questionings that were p.r.i.c.king at her. The West--the land of ready sleep and sweet dreams. So Ishmael had told her, and the way lay open if she chose to take it, a way that would not necessarily commit her to anything. When she saw Ishmael in his own environment, then she would know whether it were worth it or not....

To blot herself out of existence for a few weeks, that was what it amounted to; there should be no such person as the town-ridden Blanche Nevill on the face of the earth. She felt a delightful stirring of antic.i.p.ation, and nothing had had power to awaken that emotion in her for several years. Her own surroundings once shed, she would, she felt, meet a new world with all the hopes and dreams that had once been hers.

She was twenty-six years of age, though with her bland face she looked much younger; and the truth was she had no love for any work in itself, but only for the praise it brought her--a temperament which can never make the artist, but results in the brilliant amateur.

She was sick of the stage, for no worthy captive of her bow and spear had presented himself, and she detected the dawning of criticism in the friends that had been so warm when she first met them in town. Blanche was always posing, and people had found it out. As a child she had played the misunderstood genius or shy mother's darling as occasion demanded; she had posed with others till she was unable to do anything but pose with herself. A few years, a very few years, ago, and even her own s.e.x had had to admit her charm; now she was beginning to be played out, and she knew it. Her triumphant personality always attracted attention, even when prettier and cleverer women were present, but it was a very critical attention she attracted now.

When the light faded she moved to the bed and began to brush out her hair. The sun had set, and she had drawn the dark, narrow blinds; down their edges showed the gleam of the outside world steeped in a cold blue-green light like the depths of the sea, and the faded curtains wavered slowly in the breeze like long swaying strips of seaweed.

Blanche, swathed in a pale wrapper and sitting on the bed whose whiteness was dimmed by the greenish dusk, was suggestive of a stage mermaid combing her locks upon a property sandbank.

She lit her lamp, and at once the gleam without turned a deep, soft blue. She knotted her pale hair on the nape of her neck, and, chin up, hands on hips, stared critically at herself in the gla.s.s, and, as she looked her lips parted a little in pleasure. s.n.a.t.c.hing up the hand-gla.s.s, she poised from one foot to the other, craning her neck to see herself from every possible point of view.

"Yes," she decided, "I'll go. And then--a new life. Miss Blanche Nevill will vanish into thin air, and hurrah! for Blanche Grey, who will be--herself."

She slept, thinking of Ishmael and herself, as he of her, while in a dim room, lying perforce motionless in her hot bed, a girl thought, with the brain left clear amidst all her failing senses, of two boys who stood as symbols of a happy time when life was unclouded by even the least conscious hints of the creeping Thing. She felt, in her thick confusion of tongue and ear and eye, more uncouth than she was, and not for any good life could still hold for her would she have had either see her--Killigrew because he had been fond of her, Ishmael because she had been fond of him.

A week later Ishmael arrived back at Cloom. As he walked along on the first evening after his return the feel of the country smote him as never before. Ecstasy welled in him, clear and living; the strong, pure air made him want to shout with joy. And more than the sight of the swelling land, more than the feel of the springy turf beneath his feet, or the wind on his eyelids, it was the smell of the country that woke in him this ecstasy. Sweet as the breath of cows came its mingled fragrance of gra.s.s and earth and of the fine dust on the roadway, of the bitter-sweet tang of the bracken and faint aftermath of hay; the breath at his nostrils was drunken with sweet odour. He had come back to face Archelaus, it was true, but he came back a man.

It was a good world, and he would make his corner of it still better....

How splendid it was to be alive and tingling with the knowledge that everything lay before one! Pain and sorrow were only words that fell away into nothingness before the joy of merely living....

So he felt as, late that night, he leant upon his window sill and stared out at the darkness that was the background for his imagings of what was to come. Upon his thoughts there broke the chattering scream of a rabbit caught by a stoat, tearing the velvet tissues of the night's silence. On and on it kept, always on one high note, with a horrible persistence.

Ishmael listened, sorry that even a rabbit should suffer on this night of nights, and was glad when the screaming wavered and died into a merciful stillness. As he dropped asleep the sardonic laughing bark of a full-fed fox came echoing from the earn.

CHAPTER XI

GLAMOUR

Full summer had come, and with it Miss Grey. She was not staying at the Manor, as Annie had taken a violent dislike to the idea of visitors, and Ishmael dreaded possible unpleasantness, so that he had been thankful when Blanche of her own accord suggested going into lodgings. She wanted to bring a friend with her, she said, a girl who was peaky after too long nursing of a sick mother in London. Therefore Va.s.sie interviewed Mrs. Penticost, a cheery soul who rejoiced in a little old Queen Anne house called "Paradise," a mile along the cliff-path, where it gave on the outskirts of the village. Blanche was in raptures over the names Penticost and Paradise, and would have been in raptures over her landlady too if that worthy woman had not chosen to be rather unresponsive towards her, though frankly adoring the little friend Judith Parminter.

Judy was only nineteen, a slim, awkward girl with high cheekbones and deep-sunk hazel eyes that gave her a look not unlike that of a beautiful monkey--so Killigrew, when he came down to take up his quarters at the inn, for a summer's painting, declared. He swore that Judy would be a great beauty, but that she would always be like a monkey with those deep, sad eyes and the bistre stains below them that were the only tinge of colour upon her dark skin. She was a shy, wild creature, given to solitary roaming and much scribbling of astonis.h.i.+ngly good poems in a little note-book. Blanche said she had genius, and, though Blanche would have said it just then if it had been true or not, there was something not without a touch of genius animating the rough, vivid verses of the monkey-girl. Blanche was "very fond of the little thing," but did not see much of her. Ishmael not unnaturally absorbed the forefront of her attention.

One day, when Blanche had been two weeks at Paradise, a morning more golden, of a stiller warmth than any yet, dawned, and she knew it would bring Ishmael over early with some plan for a picnic. The little garden lay steeped in suns.h.i.+ne that turned the stonecrop on the roof to fire and made the slates iridescent as a pigeon's breast. The rambler that half-hid the whitewashed lintel threw over it a delicate tracery of shadow which quivered slightly as though it breathed in a charmed sleep.

Fuchsias drooped their purple and scarlet heads, dahlias, with a grape-like bloom on their velvety petals, stood stiffly staring, and against the granite wall giant sunflowers hung their heavy heads on a curve of sticky green stem. In the sloping fields beyond the lane the stubble stood glittering and the great golden arishmows cast over it blue pools of shade. Beyond the fields could be seen the sparkling blue of the lazily-heaving Atlantic, merging into a heat-haze which glistened with a jewel-like quality at the world's rim.

Blanche opened the door of the cottage and stood upon the threshold, swinging her hat in her hand. A white b.u.t.terfly fluttered down aimlessly as a sc.r.a.p of torn paper, and a bee hung buzzing on a sustained note of content, drowned for a moment as it swung with arched body in the cup of a flower, then booming forth as it shot out and poised on wings that seemed nothing but a glistening blur. Blanche stood with eyes half shut and sniffing nostrils, and as she felt the warm caress of the sun, so positive as to seem almost tangible, on her bare head, she stretched herself, cat-like, with a deep sigh of content.

Life was good here, away from the old faces and the old pursuits. She had been at Paradise only two weeks, but they had been weeks of sun and soft winds and sweet smells, and the impressionable surface of her mind, that beneath was so shallow and so unmalleable, was gradually responding to the influences around her.

Almost imperceptibly to herself her point of view had been changing; a group of white foxgloves, like ghost-flames, that she had seen in a coppice, the creeping of a bright eyed shrew mouse through last year's leaves at her feet, the hundreds of little rabbits with curved-in backs that ran with their curious rocking action over the dewy fields at evening--all these things gave her a shock of pleasure so keen it surprised her. Till now she had not admitted her own artificiality even to herself; now that she was regaining directness she told herself she could afford to be more candid.

Nearly every day she and Ishmael, with Va.s.sie and sometimes Killigrew or Judy, or even the Parson, would go on long expeditions to the cromlechs and carns of the country around; but sometimes she and Ishmael would slip away together, defying convention, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a light market-gig--casual wanderings with no fixed goal, and inexpressibly delightful to both. On sunny days they put up the pony at some farm, and lay upon the short, warm gra.s.s of a cliff-face watching the foam patterns form and dissolve again beneath a diamond scatter of spray. When the sea-mist rolled up steadily over Cloom like blown smoke, here opaque, there gossamer-thin, they would sally forth and tramp the spongy moors, the ground sobbing beneath their feet and the mournful calling of the gulls sounding in their heedless ears. And all the while her turns of head and throat, the inflections of her low, rich voice, were being registered on a mind free till now of all such impressions and tenacious as a child's. Small wonder that as the days drifted past Ishmael felt that he, too, was drifting on a tide of golden waters to some sh.o.r.e of promise in a golden dawn.

Blanche, too, was slipping into something like love these days; the beauty of their surroundings and something simple and primitive in the boy himself both made the same appeal to her. Was it possible that after all her flirtations, all her insincerities, she should capture the birthright of the single-hearted? It seemed so, for Blanche had this much of grace left--she was responsive to simplicity. There was something more than the instinct of the coquette in the fullness with which she gave him all he asked, step by step; she had thrown away calculation and was letting herself be guided by her own instinct and the finer instinct she felt to be in him. Each demand his moods made on her she met, each thing his reverent hand unconsciously asked of hers as he helped her over the rough places, each expression his eyes looked for in hers--she gave them all. For here was that rarest of rare things, a man to whom all could be given without his prizing less highly gift or giver.

Long after she had gone to bed he would walk the fields and make sweet picture-plans, all centred tenderly round her. He would stand and look up at her window when the light in it was out, picturing the room, the freshness, the delightful girlishness of it, and at this intimacy of thought he would redden in the dark. His sense of humour was in abeyance, and the reality, could he have seen it, would have been a shock to him--the dressing-table a litter of cosmetics and pin-curls; and on the pillow the face of Blanche surrounded by wavers and s.h.i.+ny with cold-cream.

On this golden morning Ishmael found Blanche, as she had meant him to, in the garden at Paradise, the sun turning her ashen hair to fire.

"Don't let's waste a minute of to-day," he said. "We'll have the cart out and not come back till the evening--that is, if you care about it?"

"Of course I care about it," she told him, and ran upstairs to pin on a shady hat and powder her face.

"Shall I speak now? Shall I speak now?" thought Ishmael as he drove down the lane; but with a thrill of antic.i.p.ation came "No--my hands aren't free." For Mrs. Penticost's cob, a nervous, spirited creature, newly broken in, was between the shafts.

"Will he speak yet?" thought Blanche; "and if he does, what shall I say?" She glanced up at the set, earnest face, and, sensitive to her look, his eyes met hers. He averted his gaze quickly, but his heart sang, "She cares! she cares!" And quite suddenly he felt he wished to postpone speaking as long as possible, that the savour of this suspended bliss was too sweet to lose. A tremor ran through Blanche as their eyes met. She recognised that in him was an austerity against which even she could beat in vain.

It was evening by the time they drove back, and the shadows lay cool and long across the roads. Urged on by visions of his snug stall, the pony went like the wind; neither of the two in the cart spoke much: once he bent down to tuck the rugs more closely round her and his hand, touching hers, lingered a moment. When they drove into the little yard, Lylie, the dairymaid, was mixing barley-meal and scald-milk for the pigs and carrying on bucolic flirtation with Billy Penticost. With the sheepishness of his s.e.x, that youth made a great business of setting off to the well, his pails slung outwards on a hoop. The rustic comedy touched a long-atrophied fibre in Blanche. On an impulse of simplicity, she told herself, "Yes, this is the best thing. I won't go back to town; I'll live down here, close to the things that matter, and we'll just be happy." In the rush of warm feeling she turned her eyes on Ishmael, her love for him expanding because of the love she felt for the unsentient things about her. His heart leapt to the look.

"Will you come out into the big field after everyone has gone to bed?"

he asked her, busy unfastening a trace; and as she bent over a buckle on her side of the pony she whispered, "Yes."

She ate her supper in a state almost too placidly joyous for excitement, and afterwards went up to her room and sat with her elbows on the window-sill and her chin on her hands, looking out. The corn had been cut and stacked in great Cornish arishmows, and Blanche, watching the orange moon swim up, told herself, "When that shadow has reached the nearest stook I will go." The shadow lay, finger-like, touching the stook, but still she sat on, reluctant to go out and make sure of her happiness. The moon, paling to pearl as it rose, shone clearly into the room, making sharp shadows under the bed-curtains and lying slantwise on the white counterpane; Blanche rose and slipped off her frock; she moved as in a dream--her affectations of thought fell away, leaving her instinctive. She felt as though this lover were her first, and, without reasoning about it, knew she must be fitly dressed to meet him. She bathed her face and hands in cold water, then put on a fresh muslin gown, moving to and fro in full view of anyone who might be in the sloping field outside. She half hoped, quite innocently, that Ishmael was there watching; it seemed to her nothing unclean could live in the white light that permeated the very air of the room. Overcome for a moment by the strength of her own emotions, she sat on the bed and buried her face in her hands. As she looked at herself in the gla.s.s before leaving the room she smiled for pleasure that she was unpowdered and unrouged, not pausing, in her exalted mood, to wonder whether she would have faced the daylight so. It was a better, an honester, Blanche, trans.m.u.ted by happiness, that crept down the stairs, through the small garden and across the road into the field. He was awaiting her by the hedge.

"How late you are!" he said, not reproachfully, but in relief that she should have come at all. "I thought you must have changed your mind. Do you know it is past eleven?"

"Have I been as long as that?" Blanche hugged herself to think that she had been so genuinely wrapped in dreams as to let so much time slip by unheeded. Together they went down the moonlit field, where the arishmows seemed like the pavilions of a long-dead Arthurian host conjured up by some magician's spells. In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled the corn out lavishly as a throne for her and installed her on it.

"You look like the spirit of harvest sitting there on your golden throne," he told her, and, leaning back against the rustling stook, she smiled mysteriously at him, all the glamour of the moonlight and her own womanhood in her half-shut eyes.

"Blanche ...!"

He was kneeling beside her, his hands on her shoulders. Her eyelids dropped before his gaze and she shook slightly.

"You are the most beautiful thing on earth! I love you with all my heart and soul, with every bit of me. Say you can care--Blanche, say you can...!"

She raised her eyes: the sphinx-like look of her level brows and calm mouth held for an instant, then her face quivered, grew tremulous and tender. Her hands made a blind, pa.s.sionate movement, and as he caught her to him he heard her sobbing that she loved him.