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The Master Mummer, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book 3 - Chapter 11 |
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_ BOOK III CHAPTER XI A miracle of white daintiness, from the spotless muslin of her gown to the creamy lace which hung from her parasol. So far as toilette went, Lady Delahaye was always an artist. Yet my pulses were unmoved, and my heart unstirred, as she stood under my dark cedar-tree and welcomed me with all the expression which her tone and eyes could command. "So you see, Sir Hermit," she murmured, "what happens to those who will not go to the mountain? Seriously, I hope you are glad to see me." "Why not?" I answered calmly. "Will you come inside, or shall we sit here in the shade?" "Here, by all means," she answered, subsiding gracefully into a wicker chair. "You will let me order you some tea?" She checked my movement towards the house. "For Heaven's sake, no! I have been paying calls all the afternoon with Mrs. Jerningham, and you know what that means. She has gone to the Hall now, and I am to pick her up in half an hour." "You are staying at Eastford House, then?" I remarked. "For a few days. Can you guess why?" "The house parties there have the reputation of being amusing," I suggested. She shook her head. "It was not that. Can you make no better guess?" "I am a dunce at riddles," I admitted. "You are a dunce at many things," she replied. "The reason I came was because I knew that you were living in these parts, and I had a fancy to see you again." "You are very good," I remarked. She looked at me critically. "You have not changed," she said slowly. "One would almost say that the life of a recluse agrees with you. You have by no means the white and wasted look which I expected. Is it fame which you have found so potent a tonic?" I laughed lightly. "Don't call it fame," I answered. "Success, if you will. My profession is so much of a lottery. A whiff of public opinion, a criticism which hits the popular fancy, and the bubble is floated. I'm not pretending that I don't appreciate it, but it was a stroke of luck all the same." She was silent for a few moments. From outside we could hear the jingling of harness as Mrs. Jerningham's fat bays resented the onslaught of officious flies. Nearer at hand there was only the lazy humming of bees to break the stillness of the summer afternoon. Lady Delahaye sighed. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it," she said. "I do not want to flatter you. Any man who has the trick of the pen, and chooses to give himself wholly and utterly away, can write a powerful story." "I am afraid that I do not understand you," I protested. "Yes, you do. You cut open your own heart, and you offered the world a magnifying glass to study its wounds. You wrote your own story. You told the tale of your own suffering. Of course it was strong, of course it rang with all the truth of genius. So you loved that child, Arnold! You, a man of the world, not a callow schoolboy. You loved her magnificently. Did she know?" "She did not know," I answered. "She never will know." "She may read the book!" "She may read it, and yet not know," I answered. "It is true," she murmured. "Unless she loved herself she might not understand." Again we were silent for a while. The perfume of the cedars floated upon the hot breathless air. Lady Delahaye half closed her eyes and leaned back. "You read the newspapers, Sir Hermit?" "Sometimes." "You have heard the news from Waldenburg?" "I read of the King's death." "And of the betrothal of the Princess Isobel?" "Yes. I have read also of that." "The cousins will both be the consorts of reigning sovereigns, small though their kingdoms may be. One reads great things of Adelaide. Her people call her already 'the well-beloved.'" A swift rush of thought carried me back to the dark stormy crossing, when the rain had beaten in our faces, and the wind came booming down the Channel. Adelaide stood once more by my side. I heard the quiet, bitter words, the low, passionate cry of her troubled heart. "The well-beloved" of her people! After all, race tells. "I spoke but twice alone to the Princess Adelaide," I said. "I learnt enough of her, however, to be sure that in any position she would do the thing that was right and gracious." "And so will Isobel," Lady Delahaye said. "I know the race well. The men are degenerates, but the women have nerve to rule and courage to hold their own against the world. Isobel's future may well be the more brilliant of the two. Can you realize, I wonder, that Isobel of Waldenburg was once the child who filled your brain with such strange fancies?" "I never think," I answered, "of Isobel of Waldenburg." "You are wise," she answered. "She is as surely separated from us eternally as though she had made that little journey from which one does not return. Yet you--you are going to hug your wounds all your life. Is that wise, my friend?" I laughed softly. "You are mistaken," I assured her. "I have no wounds--not even regrets. I believe that there are few men happier. Look at my home!" "It is beautiful," she admitted. "My gardens, my flowers, my cedar-tree and my books," I said. "These are all a joy to me. What more can a man want? Friends have moods, and they pass away out of one's life. The friends who smile from my study wall are patient and always ready. There is one to fit every hour. They do not change. They are always ready to show me the way into the world beautiful, to cheer me when I am sad, to laugh with me when I am gay. You must not waste any sympathy on me, Lady Delahaye. The man who has learnt to live alone is the man who has learnt the greatest lesson life has to teach. He is the man for whom the sun shines always, who carries with him for ever the magic key." Lady Delahaye disturbed the smoothness of my turf with the point of her parasol. "Are there no times," she asked in a low tone, "when these things fail you? No times when like calls for like, when the human part of you finds the comfort of ashes a dead thing? You and your books and your flowers!" she cried scornfully, raising her head and looking at me with heightened colour. "Bah! You are a man, are you not, like the others? How long will these content you? How long will you stop your ears and forget that life has passions and joys which these dead things can never yield to you?" "Until," I answered, "the magician comes who can make me believe it. And I am afraid, Lady Delahaye, that he has passed me by." She rose to her feet. "I am answered," she said. "I promise you that I will not intrude again into this Paradise of wood and stone. Give me a cigarette to keep off these flies, and take me down to the carriage. Thanks! If one might venture upon a prophecy, my dear Arnold, I think that I can see your fate very clearly written. I do not even need your hand to read it." "Would the spell," I asked, "be broken if I shared the knowledge?" "Not in the least," she answered, with a hard little laugh. "You will become one of those half-mad sort of creatures whom people call cranks, or you will marry your housekeeper. In either case you will deserve your fate." So Lady Delahaye drove away down the white dusty road, and I walked back to the study from whence her coming had brought me. As I sat down to my interrupted work I smiled. How little she understood! I wrote till seven o'clock. Punctually at that hour there was a discreet knock at the door, and my servant reminded me that it was time to change. At a quarter before eight I strolled into the garden and selected a piece of heliotrope for the buttonhole of my dinner coat. A few minutes later my dinner was served. My table was a small round one set in front of the open French windows. Looking a little to the right I could see the extent of my domain--a low laurel hedge, a sloping field beyond, in which my two Alderneys were standing almost knee-deep amongst the buttercups; a ring fence, a paddock, and, beyond, the road. To the left were my gardens, the sweetness of which came stealing through the window with the very faintest breath of the slowly moving air, bordered by that ancient red brick wall, mellowed and crumbling with the sun and west winds of generations, and in front of me my lawn and the cedar-tree under which Lady Delahaye had sat an hour or so ago and prophesied evil things. My lips parted into a smile as I thought of her words. Did she indeed think me a creature so weak as to pile gloom on the top of sorrow, to shut my eyes to all the joys of life, because supreme happiness was denied me, to play skittles with my self-respect, and--marry a kitchen-maid? I, who had turned over great pages in the book of life! I, who had known Feurgeres! Wallace had left the room for a moment, and I raised my glass full of clear amber wine, and drank silently my evening toast. I drank to the memory of the greatest love I had ever known, to the man whose strong and beautiful life had taught me how to fashion my own. Perhaps my thoughts flashed a little further afield. It was so always when I thought of Feurgeres, but it was to the joyous and wonderful memory of those earlier days, to Isobel the child I drank. Isobel of Waldenburg had passed away into the world of shadows. I courted no heartaches by vain thoughts of her. I pored over no papers to find mention of her name. I was content with what had gone before. I morbid! Lady Delahaye had judged me wrongly indeed. I, before whom two great worlds stretched themselves continually, full of countless treasures, always changing, yet always beautiful. Only yesterday I had seen the sun rise. I had seen the still slumbering world break into quivering life. I had seen the curtain roll up on a new act of this most wonderful of all plays to the music of an orchestra hidden indeed in my grove of chestnuts, but sweeter, more joyous, more full of the promise of perfect things than ever a violin touched by human fingers. Then the thrushes had hopped out on to my dew-spangled lawn, where before the hot sun the grey, gossamer-like mist was vanishing like breath from a mirror; my roses raised their heads, and the breeze from the west--a lazy, fluttering breeze--borrowed their sweetness; my peaches cracked through their full skins upon the wall, and the bees commenced their eternal lullaby of murmuring sounds. Then at night--such a night as this, too, promised to be--I had watched the shadows come creeping over the land when the sun had set and the moon had barely risen; a new order of things had come. The fire of the day was replaced by the infinite peace of night. Beyond the confines of my little domain the whole world lay hushed and hidden. There were few stars as yet to mock with their passionless serenity the toilers of the earth, worn out with the long day's struggle. Only a great quiet--a great, peaceful quiet--and the shadows of dim things! I morbid, with eyes to see these things, with a whole room full of waiting friends, ready at a touch of my fingers, the turning of a page, to take me by the hand and lead into even other worlds as beautiful as this, to scale with me the mountains, or to wander along the flower-strewn valleys. Lady Delahaye was a very foolish woman. She had seen nothing of my well-ordered household, of the ease, the luxury--simple, yet almost Sybaritic--with which I had surrounded myself. She did not understand life from my point of view--life as Feurgeres had lived it. The life sentimental, but not passionate; the life to be evolved by will from the tangle of bruised hopes and hot desires. The life---- I set down my glass empty. The last drop had tasted like vinegar. Always one has to fight, and for a while I sat in silence before my table piled now with dishes of fruit. My hands gripped the sides of my chair, my eyes were fixed upon a twinkling light which had shot out from the distant hillside. Always one has to fight for the things worth having--and the pain soon passes. In a few minutes I rose. I lit a cigarette from the box which Wallace had placed at my elbow, and with a handful more in my pocket I stepped outside. On the lawn under the cedar-tree something was lying--something pink and fluffy, and very soft to the fingers. As I held it at arm's length a faint, familiar perfume stole up from its flouncy depths. The pain was all gone now. I smiled as I looked at it. It was Lady Delahaye's parasol! I turned it over meditatively. The fancy seized me that it had been left there on purpose--my last chance! Eastford House was barely a mile and a half away--a very reasonable after-dinner stroll. I smiled to myself as I summoned Wallace from the dining-room. "Take this parasol over to Eastford House as soon as you have served my coffee," I directed. "Lady Delahaye must have left it here this afternoon." "Very good, sir," Wallace answered, relieving me of my burden and carrying it into the house. Then I departed on my usual evening pilgrimage. I entered the flower garden by a little iron gate, and walked slowly amongst my roses. Here the air was full of delicate scents--lavender insistent; mignonette faint, but penetrating; homely wall-flowers, sweet even as the roses themselves. Night insects now were buzzing around me; the bushes took to themselves phantasmal shapes; even the path, very narrow and overgrown, was hard to find. I filled my hand with flowers and made my way slowly back to the cedar-tree. The shadows were deeper now. It was the one hour of darkness before the rising of the late moon. I threw myself into a low chair, and the flowers on to the seat which encircled the cedar-tree. Oh, wonderful Feurgeres, who had taught me the sweetness of such moments as this! Always she came the same way; yet to-night it seemed to me that a startling note of reality heralded her coming. The ghostliness of her movements, that noiseless flitting across the lawn were changed. Almost I could have sworn that the little iron gate had indeed been opened and closed, that real footsteps had fallen lightly enough, but, with actual sound, upon the gravel path, that I could hear the soft swish of a real dress from the slim white figure which came hesitatingly across the lawn. Oh, Feurgeres was a great man! It was a great thing which he had taught me. My pulses were thrilled with expectant joy. Reality itself could be no more real. But to-night--to-night was a triumph indeed! She was dressed differently. She wore a long white travelling cloak, a veil pushed back from her hat. I did not understand. My fancy had never dressed her like this. That little cry, her pause. Had I indeed done greater things than Feurgeres, and summoned to my side real flesh and blood? "Arnold!" I gripped the sides of my chair. I felt my breath coming shorter. A cry. I could not keep it back from my quivering lips. "Isobel!" I could not move. I was afraid of what I had done. And then she dropped on her knees by my side, and real arms were about my neck, real kisses were upon my lips. Then I no longer had any fear, for from whatever world she had come the joy of it was like a foretaste of heaven. I drew her to me, held her passionately, and I knew that this was no creature of my mind's fashioning, but a live woman, whose heart beat so wildly against my own.... "It was all Adelaide," she murmured presently. "She brought me your book, and afterwards we talked. She was alone with my grandfather--and then he sent for me. I was afraid, for this was in his last days. Shall I tell you what he said, Arnold?" "Yes," I answered, tightening my grasp upon her. "Go on talking!" For I was fighting still for belief. "He took my hand quite calmly, and I knew at once that I had nothing to fear. 'Isobel,' he said, 'they tell me that you have your mother's blood in your veins, that freedom means more to you than ambition, that you are a woman first and a Waldenburg afterwards. Is this true?' Then I told him everything, and he kissed me. 'Go your own way, Isobel,' he said, 'but stay with me while I live. Adelaide has shown me many things which I did not understand. Poor child!' He sent for his lawyers, Arnold, and he made me a poor woman. I am much too poor to be a princess any longer--unless I may be yours." Then I believed--this, the strangest of all things that may happen to a man. My garden of fancies, which Feurgeres had shown me so well how to cultivate, passed away into the mists. Before the moon rose, Paradise was there. [THE END] _ |
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