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The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 9. The Land Of Enchantment |
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_ CHAPTER IX. THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT "I do not think," the girl with the blue eyes said, diffidently, "that I gave you permission to sit down here." "I do not believe," Burton admitted, "that I asked for it. Still, having just saved your life--" "Saved my life!" "Without a doubt," Burton insisted, firmly. She laughed in his face. When she laughed, she was good to look upon. She had firm white teeth, light brown hair which fell in a sort of fringe about her forehead, and eyes which could be dreamy but were more often humorous. She was not tall and she was inclined to be slight, but her figure was lithe, full of beautiful spring and reach. "You drove away a cow!" she exclaimed. "It is only because I am rather idiotic about cows that I happened to be afraid. I am sure that it was a perfectly harmless animal." "On the contrary," he assured her seriously, "there was something in the eye of that cow which almost inspired me with fear. Did you notice the way it lashed its tail?" "Absurd!" "At least," he protested, "you cannot find it absurd that I prefer to sit here with you in the shadow of your lilac trees, to trudging any further along that dusty road?" "You haven't the slightest right to be here at all," she reminded him. "I didn't even invite you to come in." He sighed. "Women have so little sense of consequence," he murmured. "When you came in through that gate without saying good-bye, I naturally concluded that I was expected to follow, especially as you had just pointed this out to me as being your favorite seat." Again she laughed. Then she stopped suddenly and looked at him. He really was a somewhat difficult person to place. "If I hadn't a very irritable parent to consider," she declared, "I think I should ask you to tea." Burton looked very sad. "You need not have put it into my head," he objected gently. "The inn smells so horribly of the beer that other people have drunk. Besides, I have come such a long way--just for a glimpse of you." It seemed to her like a false note. She frowned. "That," she insisted, "is ridiculous." "Is it?" he murmured. "Don't you ever, when you walk in your gardens, with only that low wall between you and the road, wonder whether any of those who pass by may not carry away a little vision with them? It is a beautiful setting, you know." "The people who pass by are few," she answered. "We are too far off the beaten track. Only on Saturdays and holiday times there are trippers, fearful creatures who pick the bracken, walk arm in arm, and sing songs. Tell me why you look as though you were dreaming, my preserver?" "Look along the lane," he said softly. "Can't you see them--the wagonette with the tired horse drawn up just on the common there--a tired, dejected-looking horse, with a piece of bracken tied on to his head to keep the flies off? There were three men, two women and a little boy. They drank beer and ate sandwiches behind that gorse bush there. They called one another by their Christian names, they shouted loud personal jokes, one of the women sang. She wore a large hat with dyed feathers. She had black, untidy-looking hair, and her face was red. One of the men made a noise with his lips as an accompaniment. There was the little boy, too--a pasty-faced little boy with a curl on his forehead, who cried because he had eaten too much. One of the men sat some distance apart from the others and stared at you--stared at you for quite a long time." "I remember it perfectly," she declared. "It was last Whit-Monday. Hateful people they were, all of them. But how did you know? I saw nobody else pass by." "I was there," he whispered. "And I never saw you!" she exclaimed in wonder. "I remember those Bank Holiday people, though, how abominable they were." "You saw me," he insisted gently. "I was the one who sat apart and stared." "Of course you are talking rubbish!" she asserted, uneasily. He shook his head. "I was behind the banks--the banks of cloud, you know," he went on, a little wistfully. "I think that that was one of the few moments in my life when I peered out of my prison-house. I must have known what was coming. I must have remembered afterwards--for I came here." She looked at him doubtfully. Her eyes were very blue and he looked into them steadfastly. By degrees the lines at the sides of her mouth began to quiver. "Why, that person was abominable!" she declared. "He stared at me as though I were something unreal. He had taken off his coat and rolled his shirt sleeves up. He had on bright yellow boots and a hateful necktie. You, indeed! I would as soon believe," she concluded, "that you had fallen, to-day from a flying-machine." "Let us believe that," he begged, earnestly. "Why not? Indeed, in a sense it is true. I am cut adrift from my kind, a stroller through life, a vagabond without any definite place or people. I am trying to teach myself the simplest forms of philosophy. To-day the sky is so blue and the wind blows from the west and the sun is just hot enough to draw the perfume from the gorse and the heather. Come and walk with me over the moors. We will race the shadows, for surely we can move quicker than those fleecy little morsels of clouds!" "Certainly not," she retorted, with a firmness which was suspiciously emphasized. "I couldn't think of walking anywhere with a person whom I didn't know! And besides, I have to go and make tea in a few minutes." He looked over her shoulder and sighed. A trim parlor maid was busy arranging a small table under the cedar tree. "Tea!" he murmured. "It is unfortunate." "Not at all!" she replied sharply. "If you'd behave like a reasonable person for five minutes, I might ask you to stay." "A little instruction?" he pleaded. "I am really quite apt. My apparent stupidity is only misleading." "You may be, as you say, a vagabond and an outcast, and all that sort of thing, but this is a conventional English home," the girl with the blue eyes declared, "and I am a perfectly well-behaved young woman with an absent-minded but strict parent. I could not think of asking any one to tea of whose very name I was ignorant." He pointed to the afternoon paper which lay at her feet. "I sign myself there 'A Passer-by.' My real name is Burton. Until lately I was an auctioneer's clerk. Now I am a drifter--what you will." "You wrote those impressions of St. James's Park at dawn?" she asked eagerly. "I did." She smiled a smile of relief. "Of course I knew that you were a reasonable person," she pronounced. "Why couldn't you have said so at once? Come along to tea." "Willingly," he replied, rising to his feet. "Is this your father coming across the lawn?" She nodded. "He's rather a dear. Do you know anything about Assyria?" "Not a scrap." "That's a pity," she regretted. "Come. Father, this is Mr. Burton. He is very hot and he is going to have tea with us, and he wrote those impressions in the Piccadilly Gazette which you gave me to read. My father is an Oriental scholar, Mr. Burton, but he is also interested in modern things." Burton held out his hand. "I try to understand London," he said. "It is enough for me. I know nothing about Assyria." Mr. Cowper was a picturesque-looking old gentleman, with kind blue eyes and long white hair. "It is quite natural," he assented. "You were born in London, without a doubt, you have lived there all your days and you write as one who sees. I was born in a library. I saw no city till I entered college. I had fashioned cities for myself long before then, and dwelt in them." The girl had taken her place at the tea-table. Burton's eyes followed her admiringly. "You were brought up in the country?" he asked his host. "I was born in the City of Strange Imaginings," Mr. Cowper replied. "I read and read until I had learned the real art of fancy. No one who has ever learned it needs to look elsewhere for a dwelling house. It is the realism of your writing which fascinates me so, Mr. Burton. I wish you would stay here and write of my garden; the moorland, too, is beautiful." "I should like to very much," said Burton. Mr. Cowper gazed at him in mild curiosity. "You are a stranger to me, Mr. Burton," he remarked. "My daughter does not often encourage visitors. Pray tell me, how did you make her acquaintance?" "There was a bull," he commenced,--"A cow," she interrupted softly. "On the moor outside. Your daughter was a little terrified. She accepted my escort after I had driven away the--animal." The old gentleman looked as though he thought it the most natural thing in the world. "Dear me," he said, "how interesting! Edith, the strawberries this afternoon are delicious. You must show Mr.--Mr. Burton our kitchen gardens. Our south wall is famous." This was the whole miracle of how Alfred Burton, whose first appearance in the neighborhood had been as an extremely objectionable tripper, was accepted almost as one of the family in a most exclusive little household. Edith, cool and graceful, sitting back in her wicker chair behind the daintily laid tea-table, seemed to take it all for granted. Mr. Cowper, after rambling on for some time, made an excuse and departed through the French windows of his library. Afterwards, Burton walked with his young hostess in the old-fashioned walled garden. She treated him with the easy informality of privileged intimacy. She had accepted him as belonging, notwithstanding his damaging statements as to his antecedents, and he walked by the side of his divinity without a trace of awkwardness or nervousness. This world of Truth was indeed a world of easy ways! . . . The garden was fragrant with perfumes; the perfume of full-blown roses--great pink and yellow and white blossoms, drooping in clusters from trees and bushes; of lavender from an ancient bed; of stocks--pink and purple; of sweetbriar, growing in a hedge beyond. They walked aimlessly about along the gravel paths and across the deep greensward, and Burton knew no world, nor thought of any, save the world of that garden. But the girl, when they reached the boundary, leaned over the iron gate and her eyes were fixed northwards. It was the old story--she sighed for life and he for beauty. The walls of her prison-house were beautiful things, but not even the lichen and the moss and the peaches which already hung amber and red behind the thick leaves could ever make her wholly forget that they were, in a sense, symbolical--the walls of her life. "To live here," he murmured, "must be like living in Paradise!" She sighed. There was a little wistful droop about her lips; her eyes were still fixed northwards. "I should like," he said, "to tell you a fairy story. It is about a wife and a little boy." "Whose wife?" she asked quickly. "Mine," he replied. There was a brief silence. A shadow had passed across her face. She was very young and really very unsophisticated, and it may be that already the idea had presented itself, however faintly, that his might be the voice to call her into the promised land. Certain it is that after that silence some glory seemed to have passed from the summer evening. "It is a fairy story and yet it is true," he went on, almost humbly. "Somehow, no one will believe it. Will you try?" "I will try," she promised.
"Tell me again what your wife is like?" she asked. He told her the pitiless truth and then there was a long silence. As he stood before her, a little breath of wind passed over the garden. He came back from the world of sordid places to the land of enchantment. There was certainly some spell upon him. He had found his way into a garden which lay beyond the world. He was conscious all at once of a strange mixture of spicy perfumes, a faint sense of intoxication, of weird, delicate emotions which caught at the breath in his throat and sent the blood dancing through his veins, warmed to a new and wonderful music. Her blue eyes were a little dimmed, the droop of her head a little sad. Quite close to them was a thick bed of lavender. He looked at the beans in his hand and his eyes sought the thickest part of the clustering mass of foliage and blossom. She had lifted her eyes now and it seemed to him that she had divined his purpose--approved of it, even. Her slim, white-clad body swayed towards him. She appeared to have abandoned finally the faint aloofness of her attitude. He raised his hand. Then she stopped him. The moment, whatever its dangers may have been, had passed. "I do not know whether your story is an allegory or not," she said softly. "It really doesn't matter, does it? You must come and see me again--afterwards." _ |
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