 Chapter 1 of Not Withstanding—Anette leaned against the low parapet and looked steadfastly at the water, so steadfastly that all the brilliant, newly washed, tree-sprinkled city of Paris, lying spread before her, left by the wide river with its many bridges, was invisible to her. She saw nothing but the same, so tranquil yesterday, and today chafing beneath its bridges and licking ominously round their great stone supports, because there had been rain the day before. The same was the only angry sinister element in the suave September sunshine, and perhaps that was why Annette's eyes had been first drawn to it. She also was angry, with the deep, still anger which invades once or twice in a lifetime placid, gentle-tempered people. Her dark eyes, under their long, curled lashes, looked down over the stone bastion of the small nerf at a yellow eddy just below her. They were beautiful eyes, limpid, deep, with a certain tranquil mystery in them. But there was no mystery in them at this moment. They were fixed, dilated, desperate. Annette was twenty-one, but she looked much younger, owing to a certain slowness of development and immaturity of mind and body. She reminded one not of an opening flower, but of a big, loose-limbed cult, ungainly still, but every line promising symmetry and grace to come. She was not quite beautiful yet, but that clearly was also still to come, when life should have had time to erase a certain ruminative solidity from her fine, still countenance. One felt that in her school-droom days she must have been often tartly desired not to moon. She gave the impression of not having wholly emerged from the chrysalis, and her bewildered face, the face of a dreamer, wore a strained expression, as if some cruel hand of mockingly renters under the veils behind which her life had been moving and growing so far, and had thrust her, cold and shuddering, with unready wings, into a world for which she was not fully equipped. Annette, pale, gentle Annette, standing on the threshold of life, unconsciously clutching an umbrella and a little handbag, was actually thinking of throwing herself into the water. Not here, of course, but lower down, perhaps near Saint-Germain. No, not Saint-Germain. There were too many people there, but Mélan, where the same was fringed thick with reeds and rushes, were in the dusk a determined woman might wade out from the bank till the current took her. The remembrance of a certain expedition to Mélan rose suddenly before her. In a kind of anguish, she saw again his little red and white houses sprinkled on the to-slope of its low hill, and the river below, winding between its willows and poplars, amid meadows of butter-cups, scattered with great poses of maythorn. She and he had sat together under one of the May trees, and Mariette, poor Mariette, with Antoine at her feet, had sat under another, close at hand, and Mariette had sung in her thin, reedy voice the song with its ever-recurring refrain. Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne me rendra fou, oui, me rendra fou. And it shuddered, and then was still. It must have been a very deep wound, inflicted with a jagged instrument, which had brought her to this pass, which had lit this stony defiance in her soft eyes. For though it was evident that she had rebelled against life, it was eagerly evident that she was not of the egotistic temperament of those who rebelled or cavill or are discontented. She looked equable, feminine, the kind of woman who would take life easily, bend to its naturally, as the grass grows on the weirs, who might indeed become a tigress in defence of her young, but then what woman would not. But it is not only in defence of its babes of flesh and blood that the protective fierceness of women can be aroused. There are spiritual children, ideals, illusions, romantic beliefs in others, the cold-blooded murder of which arises the tigress in some women. Perhaps it had been so with the net. For the instinct to rend and tear was upon her, and it had turned savagely against herself. Strange how in youth our first crushing defeat in the experiment of living brings with it the temptation of suicide. Did we then imagine, in spite of all we saw going on around us, that life was to be easy for us, painful for us, joyful for us, so that the moment the hour enters our soul we are so affronted that we say, if this is life we will have none of it. Several pastors by had cast a backward glance at her net. Presently someone stopped with a little joyous exclamation. She was obliged to raise her eyes and return his greeting. She knew him, the eccentric rich young Englishman who rode his own horses under a French name which no one believed was his own. He often came to her father's cabaret in the Rue Dubac. Good-morning, mademoiselle. Good-morning, Musilagie. He came and leaned on the parapet beside her. Are you not riding to-day? Riding to-day? Ride on the flat? Is it likely? Besides, I had a fall yesterday schooling. My neck is stiff. He did not add that he had all but broken it. Indeed, it was probable that he had already forgotten the fact. He looked hard at her with his dancing, irresponsible blue eyes. He had the good looks which he shared with some of his horses of extreme high-breeding. He was even handsome in a way with a thin, reckless, trivial face and a slender, wiry figure. He looked as light as a leaf and as if it were being blown through life by any chance wind, the wind of his own vagaries. His manner had just the shade of admiring familiarity which to some men seems admissible to the pretty daughter of a disreptable old ink-keeper. He peered down at the river and then at the houses crowding along its yellow keys, mysterious behind their paint as a French woman behind her pommade and powder. Then he looked back at her with mock solemnity. I see nothing, he said. What did you expect to see? Nothing that had the honour of engaging your attention completely. I was looking at the water. And just so, but why? She paused a moment and then said without any change of voice, I was thinking of throwing myself in. Their eyes met. His full-hardy, inquisitive, not unkindly. Hers, somber, sinister, darkened. The recklessness in both of them rushed out and joined hands. He laughed lightly. No, no, he said. Sweet Annette, lovely Annette, the sane is not for you. So you have quarrelled with Falkenhurst already. He's managed very badly. Or did you find out that he was going to be married? I knew it, but I did not say. Never mind. If he is, it doesn't matter. And if he isn't, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. You're right. Nothing matters," said Annette. Her face always pale and become livid. His became suddenly alert, flushed, as hers paled. He sighted a possible adventure. Excitement blazed up in his light eyes. One tear, he said. Yes, you may shed one tear. But the sane, no. The sane is made up of all the tears which women have shed for men. Men have no account worthless riches like Falkenhurst and me. You must not add to that great flood. Leave off looking at the water, Annette. It is not safe for you to look at it. Look at me instead, and listen to what I'm saying. You're not listening. Yes, I am. I'm going down to Fontainebleau for a bit. The doctor says I must get out of Paris and keep quiet, or I shall be able to ride at Fontainebleau. I don't believe a word he says, croaking old woman. But hang it all, I'm bound to ride Sam Snickerdotille. Kirby can look after the string while I'm at Fontainebleau. I'm going there this afternoon. Come with me. I'm not much, but I'm better than the sane. My kisses will not choke the life out of you, as the saints will. We will spend a week together and talk matters over and sit in the sun, and at the end of it we shall both laugh. We shall laugh when you remember this," and he pointed to the swirling water. A thought slid through Annette's mind like a snake through grass. He will hear of it. He's sure to hear of it. That will hurt him worse than if he were drowned. I don't care what I do," she said, meeting his eyes without flinching. It was he who for a moment winced when he saw the smouldering flame in them. He laughed again, the old light consequent laugh which came to him so easily with which he met good and bad fortune alike. When you are as old as I am, he said not unkindly, you will do as I am doing now. Take the good that the gods provide you, and trouble your mind about nothing else. For there's nothing in the world or out of it that is worth troubling about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. A coat of net, hoarsely. CHAPTER II The train was crawling down to Fontainebleau. Annette sat opposite her companion, looking not at him, but at the strange country through which they were going. How well she knew it. How often she had gone down to Fontainebleau. But today all the familiar lines were altered. The tanlets, up to their eyes and trees, seemed alien, dead. Presently the forest, no longer fretted by the suburbs, came close up on both sides of the rail. What had happened to the oaks that they seemed drawn up in serried lines to watch her pass like soldiers at a funeral. A cold horror brooded over everything. She looked at her companion and withdrew her eyes. He had said he was better than the sane. But now she came to meet his eyes fixed on her. Was he better? She was not sure. She was not sure of anything, except that life was unendurable and that she did not care what happened to her. There had been sordid details and there would be more. He had said it would be better if she had a wedding-ring and he had bought her one. The shopman had smiled offensively as he had found one to fit her. She set her teeth at the remembrance. But she would go through with it. She did not care. There was nothing left in the world to care about. It was Dick Legay, who, thoughtless as he was, had shown some little thought for her, had taken to her to a restaurant and obliged her to eat. Had put her into the train, and then had waylaid and dismissed his valet, who bought his luggage to the station and who seemed at first determined not to let his master go without him, and he was hardly to be shaken off, until Dick whispered something to him, when the man shrugged his shoulders and turned away. And Ed looked again at her companion. He had fallen suddenly asleep, his mouth ajar. How old and shrunk and battered he looked, and how strangely pinched! There was something unnatural about his appearance. A horrible suspicion passed through her mind that he had been drinking. She suddenly remembered that she had once heard a rumour of that kind about him, and that he had lost a race by it. She had to waken him when they reached Fontainebleau. And then, after a moment's will-buildement, he resumed all his alertness and feather-headed promptitude. Presently she was in a bedroom in an old-fashioned inn, and was looking out of the window at a little garden, with tiny pebbled walks and a fountain, and four stunted, clipped acacia trees. The hotel was quite full. She'd been asked some question as to whether the room would do, and she'd said it would. She'd hardly danced at it. It was the only room to be had. And Dick's luggage was carried up to it. The hotel people took for granted his baggage was hers as well as his. She remembered that she had none, and smoothed her hair mechanically with her hands, while at a marring little chamber remained whisked in with hot water. And presently in the hot taudry salamanger there was a meal, and she was sitting at a little table with Dick, and all the food was pretense, like the tiny wooden joints and puddings in her doll's house which she used to try to eat as a child. These were larger, and she tried to eat them, but she could not swallow anything. She wondered how the others could, and the electric light flickered, and once it went out and Dick laughed, and he ordered champagne for her and made her drink some. And then, though he said he must not touch it, he drank some himself, and became excited, and she was conscious that a spectacle youth with projecting teeth turned to look at them. There was a grey-haired English woman sitting alone at the nearest table, and Ed saw her eyes rest on her for a moment with veiled compassion. All her life afterwards she remembered that evening as a nightmare. But it was not a nightmare of the time. She was only an onlooker, a dazed, callous spectator of something grotesque which did not affect her, a mirthless, sordid farce which for some obscure forgotten reason it was necessary for her to watch. The chibos herself, the principal actor in the farce, and that the farce had the makings of a tragedy, did not occur to her. She was incapable of action and of thought. Later in the evening she was in her bedroom again, sitting with her hands at her lap, vacantly staring at the wall with its mustard-colored roses on a buff ground. When two grinning waiters half carried, half hustled in, Dick, gesticulating and talking incoherently. They helped him into bed. The older one waited a moment, arms a Kimbo, till Dick fell suddenly asleep, and then said cheerfully and reassuringly, Sissah, madame, and withdrew. Annette got up instinctively to go too, but she remembered that she had nowhere to go, that it was close on midnight, that she was in her own room with which she had expressed herself satisfied, that she and her companion were passing at the hotel as husband and wife. She felt no horror, no sense of the irremediable folly she had committed. She stood a moment, and then drew the curtain and sat down by the window, looking out, as she had sat all the previous night in her little bedroom in her father's cabaret, out of which she had slunk like a thief as soon as it was light. Her spellbound faculties were absorbed in one mental picture, which was to her the only reality, as the cobra is the only reality to the dove. She forgot where she was. She forgot the heavy breathing of her companion, stirring uneasily in his sleep. She saw only, as she had seen all day, the smoking, hideous ruin of that wonderful castle of dreams which she had built stone by stone during the last year, into the secret chamber of which she had walled up that shy, romantic recluse, her heart. That castle of dreams in which she paced on a rainbow mosaic, which she had tapestryed with ideals and prayers and aspirations, in the midst of which there was a shrine. There was nothing left of it now. Worse than nothing. Only a smoking, evil-smelling hump of debris, with here and there a flapping rag of which had once been stately arrows or cloth of gold. It had reeled and crashed down into the slime in a moment's space. The thunder of its fall had deafened her to all other noises. Its smoke had blinded her to all other sites. Oh, why had she let herself be dissuaded from her only refuge against his unendurable vision seared in upon her brain? It had been agony. It would be agony again. If Dick had left her alone, she would be at rest now, quite away from it all. Her body floating down to the sea in the keeping of the kind, cool river, and her outraged soul escaped. But she would do it still. She would creep away a second time at dawn as soon as the house was stirring. There must be a river somewhere. If not a big river, a little one with deep pools. She would find it. And this time she would not let herself be dissuaded. This time she would drown herself if the water only knee deep. And her mind being made up, she gave a little sigh and leaned her aching forehead against the glass. The man in the bed stirred and feebly stammered out the word, her net, once and again. But her net did not hear him. And after a time he muttered and moved no more. And when the dawn came up at last, it found a net who watched for it wide-eyed all night, sunk down asleep, with her head upon the sill. CHAPTER III A net stared at last when a shaft of sunlight fell upon her head. She set up stiffly, and stared round the unfamiliar chamber, with the low sun slanting across the floor and creeping up the bottom of the door. Nothing stirred. A chill silence made itself felt. The room seemed to be aware of something to be beforehand with her. Sun-nameless instinct made her get up suddenly and go to the bed. Dickner Gay was lying on his back, with his eyes wide open. There was a mute appeal in his sharp-featured face, sharper feature than ever before, and in his thin, outstretched hands with the delicate, nervous fingers crooked. He had needed help, and he had not found it. He perhaps called to her, and she had not listened. She had been deaf to everything except herself. A sword seemed to pierce a net's brain. It was as if some tight bandage were cleft and violently driven from it. She came shuddering to herself from out of the waking swoon of the last two days. Hardly knowing what she did, she ran out of the room and into the passage. But it must be very early yet. No one was afoot. What to do next? She must row someone at once, but whom? She was about to knock at the nearest door when she heard a horrid movement within, and the door opened. A gray-haired woman in a dressing-gown looked out, the same whom she had seen the night before, at dinner. I thought I heard someone call, she said. Is anything wrong? Then, as a net leaned trembling against the wall, can I be of any use? I net pointed to her own open door, and the woman went in with her at once. She hastened instantly to the bed and bent over it. She touched the forehead, the wrist, with rapid business-like movements. She put her hand upon Dick's heart. Is he dead? asked the net. No, she said. But he is unconscious, and he is very ill. It is some kind of seizure. When did your husband become like this? I—don't know, said a net. The woman turned indignantly upon her. You don't know. Yet surely you set up with him. You look as if you've been up all night. I sat up, but I did not look at him, said a net. I never thought he was ill. The elder woman's cheeks reddened at the callousness of Annette's words, as at a blow. She's silent for a moment, and then said coldly, We have only one thing to think of now, and that is how to save his life, if he can be saved. And in a moment, as it seemed to a net, the house was awakened, and a doctor and a sister of mercy appeared, and were installed at Dick's bedside. After a few hours, consciousness came back intermittently. But Dick, so excitable the day before, took but little heed of what went on around him. When, at the doctor's wish, Annette spoke to him, he looked at her without recognition. The doctor was puzzled and asked her many questions as to his condition on the previous day. She remembered that he'd had a fall from his horse a day or two before, and had hurt his neck. And the doctor established some mysterious link between the accident and the illness, which he said had been terribly aggravated by drink. Had Monsieur taken much stimulant the night before? Yes, Monsieur had appeared to be intoxicated. Mrs. Doddart's steel eyes softened somewhat as she looked at Annette. She and the doctor noticed the extreme exhaustion from which she was suffering, and exchanged to glances. Presently, Mrs. Doddart took the guard to her own room, and helped her to undress and made her lie down on her bed. I will bring you your dressing-garn if you would tell me where it is. I don't know, said Annette. And then she recollected and said, I haven't any things with me. Not even a handkerchief? I think not a handkerchief. How long is it since you have slept? I don't know. These words seemed to a whole stock in trade. Mrs. Doddart frowned. I can't have you a hill on my hands, too, she said briskly. One is enough. And she left the room and presently came back with the glass with a few drops in it. She made Annette swallow them and put her warm rug over her and darkened the room. And presently Annette's eyes closed, and the anguish of the last two days was lifted from her as a deft hand lifts her burden. She sighed and leaned her cheek against a pillow which was made of rest. And presently she was wandering in a great peace in a wide meadow beside a little stream whispering among its forget-me-nots. And across the white clover and the daisies and the little purple orchids came the feet of one who loved her. And they walked together beside the stream, the kind, understanding stream, he and she, he and she together. And all was well, all was well. Many hours later Mrs. Doddart and the doctor came and looked at her, and he thrust out his underlip. I can't bear to wake her, she said. One little hour, then, he said, and went back to the next room. Mrs. Doddart sat down by the bed, and presently Annette, as if conscious of her presence, opened her eyes. I see now, she said slowly, looking at Mrs. Doddart with the fixed gravity of a child. I was wrong. How wrong, my dear? Rivers are not meant for that, nor the little streams, either. They are not meant to drown oneself in. They are meant to run and run, and for us to walk beside and pick forget-me-nots. Mrs. Doddart's scrutinizing eyes filled with sudden tears. What tragedy was this into which she had thrust herself? She drew back the curtain and let the afternoon light fall on Annette's face. Her eyelids trembled, and into her peaceful, wrapped face, distress crept slowly back. Mrs. Doddart felt as if she had committed a crime. But there was another to think of beside Annette. You have slept? Yes, I ought not to have gone to sleep while Dick was ill. You needed sleep? Is he better? He is some more better. I will go to him. He does not need you just now. Has the Doctor found out what is the matter with him? He thinks he has. Mrs. Doddart spoke very slowly. As far as I understand there is a cerebral lesion, and it is possible that it may not be as serious as he thought at first. It may have been aggravated for the moment by drink, the effects of which are passing off. But there was always a risk, in this case a great risk, that the injury to the brain may increase. In any case, his condition is very grave. His family ought to be communicated with at once. Annette stared at her in silence. They must be summoned, said Mrs. Doddart. But I don't know who they are, said Annette. I don't even know his real name. He is called Monsieur Leger. It is the name he rides under. Mrs. Doddart reddened. She had her doubts. Her wife should know her husband's name, she said. But you see, I am not his wife. There was a moment of silence. Mrs. Doddart's eyes fell on Annette's waiting-ring. Oh, that is nothing, said Annette. Dick said I had better have one, and he bought it in a shop before we started. I think I'll take it off, I hate wearing it. No, no, keep it on. There was another silence. But you must know his address. No, I know he is often in Paris, but I've only met him at a cabaret. Could you trust me? said Mrs. Doddart humbly. Annette trembled, and her face became convulsed. You are very kind, she said, very kind, getting the nurse, and helping on this nice warm rug and everything. But I'm afraid I can't trust anyone any more. I've left off trusting people. It was the second day of Dick's illness. Annette's life had revived somewhat, though the long sleep had not taken the strange look from her eyes. But Mrs. Doddart's fears for her were momentarily allayed. Tears were what she needed, and tears were evidently a long way off. And Annette fought for the life of poor Dick, as if he were indeed her bridegroom, and Mrs. Doddart abetted her as if he were her only son. The illness was incalculable, abnormal. There were intervals of lucidity followed by long lapses into unconsciousness. There were hours in which he seemed to know them, but could neither speak nor move. There were times when it appeared as if the faint flame of life had flickered quite out, only to waver feebly up again. Together the two women searched every article of Dick's effects, but they could find no clue to his address or identity. Annette remembered that he had had a pocket-book, and seen him and take a note out of it to pay for the tickets. But the pocket-book could not be found, or any money. It was evidence that he had been robbed that first evening when he was drinking. Some of his hackities were marked with four initials—R, L, G, M. Richard Legay M. Then he had another name as well, said Mrs. Doddart. You can't recall ever having heard it? Annette shook her head. He's supposed to be an English lord, she said, and very rich, and he rides his own horses and makes and loses a great deal of money on the turf. And he is peculiar, very depressed one year and very wild the next. That is all that people like us who are not his social equals know of him. I do not even know what your name is, so Mrs. Doddart tentatively, as she rearranged Dick's clothes in the drawers, and took up a bottle of lotion which had evidently been intended for his strained neck. My name is Annette. Well, Annette, I think the best thing you can do is to write to your home and say that you are coming back to it immediately. I have no home. Mrs. Doddart was silent. Any information which Annette found safe about herself always seemed to entail silence. I have made up my mind, Annette went on, to stay with Dick till he is better. He is the only person I care a little bit about. No, Annette, you do not care for him. It is remorse for your neglect of him that makes you nurse him with such devotion. I do not love him, said Annette, but then how could I hardly know him? But he meant to be kind to me. He was the only person who was kind. He tried to save me, though not in the right way. Poor Dick, he does not know much. But I must stay and nurse him till he is better. I can't desert him. My dear, said Mrs. Doddart impatiently, that is all very well, but you cannot remain here without a scandal. It is different for an old woman like myself. And though we have not yet gotten to touch with his family, we shall directly. If I can't get her to otherwise, I shall apply to the police. You must think of your own character. I do not care about my character, said Annette in the same tone in which she might have said she did not care for black coffee. But I do, said Mrs. Doddart to herself. And I have a little money, Annette continued, at least not much money, only a few Louis, but I have these. And she drew out from her neck a row of pearls. They were not large pearls, but they were even and beautifully matched. They were mothers, she said. They would be enough for the doctor and the nurse and the hotel bill, weren't they? Mrs. Doddart put down the bottle of lotion and took the pearls in her hand and bent over them, trying to hide her amazement. They are very good, she said slowly, beautiful colour and shape. Then she raised her eyes and they fell once more on the bottle. But what am I thinking of? she said sharply. There is the clue I need staring me in the face. How incredibly stupid I am! There is the parish chemist's name on it and the number of the prescription. I can water him for the address to which he sent the bottle. Dick has a valet at his address, said Annette, and of course he would know all about his people. How do you know he has a valet? He met Dick at the station with the luggage he was to have come to Fontainebleau with him, but Dick sent him back at the last moment, I suppose, because of me. Would you know him again if you saw him? Yes. I watched Dick talking to him for several minutes. He would not go away at first. Perhaps he knew Dick was ill and needed care. Most likely, did he see you? No. Are you certain? Quite certain. There is then one microscopic mercy to be thankful for. Though no one knows that you are here with Monsieur Leger. No one, but I dare say it will be known presently, said Annette apathetically. Not if I can prevent it, said Mrs. Doddott to herself, as she put on her poor snare and went out to telegraph to the chemist. Annette went back to the bedside, and the sister withdrew to the window and got out her brevarier. Annette sat down and leaned her tired head against the pillow with something like envy of Dick's unconsciousness. Would a certain hideous picture ever be blotted out from her aching brain? Her only respite from it was when she could minister to Dick. He was her sole link with life, the one fixed point in her shifting quicksand. She came very near to loving him in these days. Presently he stirred and sighed and opened his eyes. They wandered to the ceiling, and then fell idly on her without knowing her, as they had done a hundred times. Then recognition slowly dawned in them, clear and grave. She raised her head and they looked long at each other. Annette, he said in a whisper. I am sorry. She tried to speak, but no words came. Often when I've been lying here, he said feebly, I've been sorry, but I could never say so. Just when I saw your face clear I always went away again, a long way off. Would you mind holding my hand so that I may not be blown away again? She took it in both of hers and held it. It was a long silence. A faint colour fluttered in his leaden cheek. I never knew such a wind, he said. Stronger than anything in the world, and it blows and blows, and I go hopping about before it like a leaf. I have to go. I really can't stay. You are much better. You will soon be able to get up. I don't know where I'm going, but I don't care. I don't want to get up. I'm tired, tired. You must not talk any more. Yes, I must. I have things to say. You are holding my hand tight, Annette. Yes, look, I have it safe in mine. I ought not to have brought you here. You were in despair, and I took advantage of it. Can you forgive me, Annette? Dear Dick, there is nothing to forgive. I was more to blame than you. It was instead of the same. That was the excuse I made to myself. But the wind blows it away. Blows everything away. Everything. Everything. Don't be angry again like that, Annette. Promise me you won't. You were too angry, Annette. I took a mean advantage of it. I once took advantage of a man's anger with a horse. But it brought me no luck. I thought I wouldn't do it again, but I did. And I haven't got much out of it this time, either. I'm dying or something like it. I'm going away for good and all. I'm so tired I don't know how I should ever get there. Rest a little, Dick. Don't talk any more now. I—I want to give you a tip before I go. An old trainer put me up to it, and he made me promise not to tell anyone. And I haven't till now. But I wanted to do you a good turn to make up for the bad one. He said he'd never known it fail, and I haven't either. I've tried it scores of times. When you're angry, Annette, look at a cloud. Dick's blue eyes were fixed for the great earnestness of hers. Not just for a minute. Choose a good big one, like a lot of cotton wool, and go on looking at it while it moves. And the anger goes away. Sounds rot, doesn't it? But you simply can't stay angry. Seems as if everything were too small and footling to matter. Try it, Annette. Don't look at water any more. That's no use. But a cloud—the bigger the better. You won't drown yourself now, will you? No. Annette, rolling down to the sea over and over, knocking against the bridges, I can't better think of it. Promise me. I promise. He sighed, and his hand fell out of hers. She let it down. The great wind of which she spoke had taken him once more. Wither he knew not. She leaned her face against the pillow, and longed that she too might be swept away wither she knew not. The doctor came in and looked at them. Eyes family coming soon, he asked Mrs. Toddard outwards, and Madame Lague, can Madame's mother be summoned? There has been some great shock. Her eyes show it. It is not only Monsue who is on the verge of the precipice. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Not Withstanding by Mary Trumley This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers Chapter 5 And he the wind whipped any wither-wave crazily tumbled on a shingle grave to waste in foam. George Meredith Towards evening Dick regained consciousness. And it—that was always the first word. Here—that was always the second. I lost the way back, he said breathlessly. I thought I should never find it, but I had to come. He made a little motion with his hand, and she took it. You must help me. I have no one but you. His eyes dwelt on her. His helpless soul clung to hers as hers did to his. They were like two shipwrecked people. Were they not indeed shipwrecked? Carrying on a raft together alone in the great ring of the sea. What can I do? she said. Tell me, and I will do it. I have made no provision for Mary or the little one. I promised her I would when it was born, but I haven't done it. I thought of it when I fell on my head, but when I was better next day I put it off. I always put things off. And it's not only Mary, there's Halver and the Scotch property and all the rest. If I die without making a will, it will all go to poor Harry. He was speaking rapidly, more to himself than to her. And when Father was dying he said, Roger ought to have it. Father was a just man, and I like Roger, and he's done his duty by the place which I haven't. He ought to have it, and Ed helped me to make my will. I was on my way to the lawyers to make it when I met you on the bridge. Half an hour later, in the waning day, the notary arrived, and Dick made his will in the doctor's presence. His mind was amazingly clear. Is he better? asked Mrs. Doddart of the doctor, as she and the nurse left the room. Better? That is the last flare up of the lamp to the doctor. He is right when he says he can't get back here again. He's riding his last race, but he is riding to win. Dick rode for all he was worth, and urged the doctor to help him, to keep his mind from drifting away into the unknown. The old doctor thrust out his underlip and did what he could. By Dick's wish, Annette remained in the room, but he did not need her. His French was good enough. He knew exactly what he wanted. The notary was intelligent, and brought with him a draught for Dick's signature. Dick dictated and whispered earnestly to him. Evive, said the notary at intervals, Parfaitement, Monsieur Persefier à moi. At last it was done, and Dick, panting, had made a kind of signature, his writing dwindling down to a faint scrawl after the words Richard Legate, which were fairly legible. The doctor attested it. She must witness it too, said Dick insistently, pointing to Annette. The notary glanced at the will, realized that she was not a legatee, and put the pen in her hand, showing her where to sign. Madame will write here? He indicated the place under his own crammed signature. She wrote mechanically her full name, Annette Georges. But Madame, said the notary, bewildered, is not them Madame's name the same as Monsieur's? Madame is so lately married that she sometimes signs her old name by mistake, said the doctor, smiling sadly. He took a pained interest in the young couple, especially in Annette. I am not Monsieur's wife, said Annette. The notary stared, bowed, and gathered up his papers. The doctor busied himself with the sick man, spent and livid on his pillow. Approached them, Madame, he said, with great respect. It is you, Monsieur Leeds. And he withdrew with the notary. Annette groped her way to the bed. The room had become very dark. The floor rose in long waves beneath her feet, but she managed to reach the bed and sink down beside it. What mattered now, if she were tired? She had done what he asked of her. She had not failed him. What matter if she sank deeper still, down and down, as she was sinking now? Annette! Dick's voice was almost extinct. Here! The wind is coming again across the sea, across the mountains, over the plains. It is the wind of the desert. Can't you hear it? She shook her head. She could hear nothing but his thin thread of voice. I am going with it, and this time I shan't come back. Goodbye, Annette. Goodbye, Dick. His eyes dwelt on hers with a mute appeal in them. The forebreath of the abyss was upon him, the shadow of the outer dark. She understood, and kissed him on the forehead with a great tendice, and leaned her cold cheek against his. And as she stooped, she heard the mighty wind of which she spoke. Its rushing filled her ears, it filled the little chamber where those two poor things had suffered together, and had, in a way, ministered to each other. And the sick room, with its guilt-mirror and its toldry wallpaper, and the evil picture never absent from Annette's brain, stooped and blended into one, and wavered together as a flame wavers in a draught, and then together vanished away. The wind is taking us both, Annette thought, as her eyes closed. End of Chapter 6 I was as children be who have no care. I did not think or sigh, I did not sicken. But lo! love beckoned me, and I was bare, and poor and starved and dry, and a fever stricken. Thomas Hardy It was five months later, the middle of February. Annette was lying in a deck chair by the tank in the shade of the orange trees. All was still, with the afternoon stillness of Tenerife, which will not wake up till sunset. Even the black goats had ceased to bleed and ring their bells. The Hooper, which had been saying guck guck guck all the morning in the peppetry, was silent. The light air from the sea, bringing with it a whiff as from a bride's bouquet, hardly stirred the leaves. The sunlight trembled on the yellow stone steps, and on the training, climbing Bougainvillea, which have flung its mantle of purple over the balustrade. Through an opening in a network of almond blossom, Annette could look down across the white water-courses and green terraces to the little town of Santa Cruz, lying glittering in the sunshine, with its yellow and white and mauve walls and flat roofs and quaint cupillers, outlined as if cut out in white paper, sharp white, against the vivid blue of the sea. A grey lizard came slowly out of a clump of pink verbena near the tank, and spread itself in a patch of sunlight on a little round stone. Annette, as she lay motionless with thin folded hands, could see the pulse in its throat rise and fall as it turned its dueled eyes, now to this side, now to that, considering her as gravely as she was considering it. A footfall came upon the stone steps, but as it did not move, it was gone. Mrs. Doddart, an erect lilac figure under a white umbrella, came down the steps with a cup of milk in her hand. Her forcible, incongruous countenance with its peaked, indomitable nose and small, steady, tawny eyes under tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of having been knocked to pieces at some remote period, and casually put together again. No features seemed to fit with any other. If her face had not been held together by a certain shrewd benevolence which was spread all over it, she would have been a singularly forbidding-looking woman. Annette took the cup, and began due to flit to sip it, while Mrs. Doddart sat down near her. "'Do you see the big goldfish?' Annette said. Her companion put up her pence-née and watched him for a moment, swimming lazily near the surface. "'He seems much as usual,' she said. "'This is not my fault if he is. I threw a tiny bit of stick at him a few minutes ago, and he bolted at once, and then just when I was beginning to feel anxious, he spat it out again to quite a considerable distance. He must have a very strong pop-gun in his inside.' Mrs. Doddart took the empty cup from her and put it down on the edge of the tank. "'You have one great quality, Annette,' she said. "'You are never bored.' "'How could I be with so much going on round me? I've just had my first interview with a lizard. And before that a mantis caught upon me. Look, there he is again on that twig. Doesn't he look exactly like a child's drawing of a dragon?' A hideous gray mantis, about three inches long, walked slowly down an almond-blossomed branch. "'He really walks with considerable dignity, considering his legs bend the wrong way,' said Mrs. Doddart. "'But I don't wish for his society.' "'Oh, don't you? Look, now he's going to pray.' And the mantis suddenly sat up and appeared to engage in prayer. Annette watched him, fascinated, until his horizons were over, and he slowly went down again on all fours, and withdrew himself into the bucumvillea. Mrs. Doddart looks certainly at her, not without a certain pride. She had still the bruised, sunken eyes of severe illness, and she rolled them slowly at Mrs. Doddart, at the mantis, at the sky, at everything in turn, in a manner which exasperated the other occupants of the porcelain, two ladies from Hampstead, who considered her a mass of affectation. The only thing about Annette which was beautiful was her hands, which were transparent, blue-veined, ethereal. But her movements with them also were so languid, so studied, that it was impossible for spectators as impartial as the Hampstead ladies, not to deplore her extreme vanity about them. To Mrs. Doddart, who knew the signs of illness, it was evident that she was still weak, but it was equally evident that the current of health was surely flowing back. I remember, so Mrs. Doddart, being once nearly bored to extinction, not by an illness, but my convalescence after it. I have no time to be bored, said Annette, even though there is no mantis and no lizard. Since I have been better, so many things come crowding into my mind, that though I lie still all day, I hardly have time to think of them all. The day is never long enough for me. There was a short silence. I often wonder, said Annette slowly, about you. About me? Yes, why do you do everything for me as if I were your own child? And most of all, why you never ask me any questions, why you never even hinted to me that it is my duty to tell you about myself. Mrs. Doddart's eyes dropped, her heart began to beat violently. When you took charge of me, you knew nothing of me except email. I knew the one thing needful. What do you mean? That you were in trouble. For a long time, said Annette, I have been wanting to tell you all about myself, but I couldn't. Don't tell me if it distresses you. Nothing distresses me now. The reason I could not was because for a long time I did not rightly know how things were or who I was, and I saw everything distorted, horrible, and was as if I were near, might be in a cage of hot iron, and beating against the bars, first on one side and then the other, till it seemed as if one went mad. You once read me, long ago, that perm of Verlaine's ending, Eloublie d'Cibar. And I thought that was better than any of the promises in the Bible, which you read sometimes. I used to say it over to myself like a kind of prayer. Eloublie d'Cibar. That would be heaven. At least it would have been to me. But since I've got better, everything has gone a long way off, like that island. And she pointed to the Grand Canary, lying like a cloud on the horizon. I compared to think about it and to look at it. I understand that feeling. I have known it. It does not burn me now. I thought it would always burn while I lived. That is the worst of pain that one thinks it will never lessen, but it does. Yes, it lessens, and then one can attend to other things a little. An Annette told Mrs. Stoddard the long story of her life. For at twenty-two we have all long, long histories to unfold of our past if we can find a sympathetic listener. It is only in middle age that we seem to have nothing of interest to communicate. Or is it only that we realise that when once the talisman of youth has slipped out of our hand our part is to listen? Mrs. Stoddard certainly listened. She had been ready to do so for a long time. An Annette told her of her childhood spent in London under the charge of her three spinster aunts. Her mother, an English woman, had been the only good-looking one of four sisters. In the thirties, after some disappointment, she had made a calamitous runaway marriage with a French courier. I always thought I could understand mother running away from that home, said Annette. I would have run away too, if I could. I did once as a small child, but I only got as far as Bethnal Green. Then your mother died when you were quite small. Yes, I can just remember being with her in lodgings after she left father, for she had to leave him. But he got all her money from her first, at least all she had in her power to give up. I can remember how she used to sob at night when she thought I was asleep. And then my next remembrance is the aunts and the house in London. They meant to be kind. They were kind. I was their niece after all. But they were nevels. It seems it is a very noble, mysterious thing to be a nevel. Now, I was only half a nevel, and only half English, and dark like father. I take after father. And, of course, I'm not quite a lady. They felt that. You look like one, said Mrs. Doddart. Do I? I think that is only because I hold myself well and know how to put on my clothes. My dear Annette, as if those two facts could deceive me for a moment. But I'm not one all the same, said Annette. Gentle people. I don't mean only the aunts, but others. Don't regard me as an equal or treat me so. She was silent for a moment, and her lip quivered. Then she went on quietly. The minute I was twenty-one and independent, I came into a hundred a year, and I left the aunts. I made them a sort of little speech on my birthday. I could see them now all three staring at me. And I thanked them for their kindness, especially Aunt Kathy, and told them my mind was quite made up to go and live with my father and become a professional singer. I meant to do it since I was twelve. Did they mind much? I did not think so at the time, but I see now they were so astonished that for the moment it overcame all other feelings. They were so amazed that my wish to make any movement go anywhere, do anything. Aunt Harriet, the Invalid, wrung her hands and said that if only she had not been tied to a sofa, my upbringing would have been so different that I should not have wished to leave them. And Aunt Maria said that she of all people would be the last to interfere with the vacation, but she did not consider the stage was a suitable profession for a young girl. Aunt Kathy did not say anything. She only cried. I felt leaving Aunt Kathy. She had been kind. She had taken me to plays and concerts. She hated music, but she sat through long concerts for my sake. Aunt Maria never had time, and Aunt Harriet never was well enough to do anything she did not like. Aunt Kathy used to slay for them both, and when she had time, for me. I used to think that if the other two died, I could have lived with Aunt Kathy. But existing in that house was like just not suffocating under a kind of moral bindweed. When you were vexed with me the other day for tiring myself by tearing the convolvulus off that little orange tree, it was because I could not bear to see it choked. I had been choked myself. But I broke away at last, and I found father. He married again, a woman in his own rank of life, and was keeping a cabaret in the Rudebacke. I lived with them for nearly six months till last September. I liked the life at first. It was so new and so unaccustomed, and even the slip shortness of it was pleasant after the dry primness of my upbringing. And after all, I am my father's daughter. I never could bear her, but he was kind to me in a way while I have money. He had been the same to mother. Unlike mother, I did not find him out at first. I was easily taken in. And he thought it was a capital idea that I should become a singer. He was quite enthusiastic about it. I had a pretty voice. I don't know whether I have it still. But the difficulty was the training and the money for it. And he found a man, a well-known musician, who was willing to train me for nothing when he had heard me sing. And I was to pay him back later on. And father was very keen about it, and so was I, and so was the musician. He was rather a dreadful man somehow. But I did not mind that. He was a real artist. But after a little bit, I found he expected me to pay him another way. And I had to give up going to him. I told father he laughed at me for a fool and told me to go back to him. And when I wouldn't, he became very angry and asked me what I had expected, and said all English were hypocrites. I would have known from that that I could not trust father. And then, when I was very miserable about losing my training, an English gentleman began to be very kind to me. And his voice faltered and stopped. Mrs. Toddott's thin cheeks flushed a little. Across the shadow of the orange trees, a large yellow butterfly came floating. Annette's eyes followed it. It settled on a crimson hibiscus, hanging like a flame against the pale stem of a coral tree. The two ardent colors quivered together in the vivid sunshine. Annette's grave eyes watched the yellow wings, close and expand, close and expand, and then rise and float away again. He seemed to fall in love with me, she said. Of course now I know he didn't really, but he seemed to. And he wasn't real gentleman, not like father, nor that other one, the man who offered to teach me. He seemed honourable. He looked upright and honest and refined. And he was young, not much older than myself, very charming looking. He was unlike any of the people in the cut year later. I fell in love with him after a little bit. At first I hung back because I thought it was too good to be true, too like a fairy story. I'd never been in love before. I fell in, very deep. And I was grateful to him for loving me, for he was much above me, the heir to something large and a title, I forget exactly what, when his old uncle died. I thought it was so kind of him not to mind the difference of rank. I'm sure you know what is coming. I suppose I ought to have known, but I didn't. I never thought of it. The day came when he asked me very gravely if I loved him. And I said I did. And he told me he loved me. I remember when I was in my room again alone thinking that whatever life took from me it could never take that wonderful hour. I should have that as a possession always when I was old and white-headed. I'm afraid now I shall have it always. I net past her blue-veined hand over her eyes in a manner that would have outraged the other residents and then went on. We sat a long time together that evening with his arm round me, and he talked and I listened, but I was not listening to him. I was listening to love. I knew then that I had never lived before, never known anything before. I seemed to have waked up suddenly in paradise, and I was dazed. Perhaps he did not realise that. It was like walking in a long, long field of lilies under a new moon. I told him it was like that, and he said it was the same to him. Perhaps he thought he had said things to show me his meaning. Perhaps he thought father had told me, but I did not understand. And then, a few hours later, I had to understand suddenly without any warning. I thought he had gone mad, but it was I who went mad. I locked myself into my room and crept out of the house at dawn, and all was quiet. I realised, father had sold me. That was why I told you I had no home to go to. And I walked and walked in the early morning in the River Mist, not knowing what I was doing. At last, when I was worn out, I went and sat where there was a lot of wood stacked on a great wharf. No one saw me because of the mist. And I sat still and tried to think. But I could not think. It was if I had fallen from the top of the house. Part of me was quite inert, like a stupid wounded animal staring at the open wound. And the other part of me was angry with a cold anger that seemed to mount and mount, that jeered at everything, and told me I made a fuss about nothing, and I might just as well go back and be his mistress, anybody's mistress, that there was nothing true or beautiful or pure or clean in the world. Everything was a seething mass of immorality and future faction, and he was only the same as all the rest. And all the time I could hear the river speaking through the mist, hinting at something it could not quite say. At last, when the sun was up, the mist cleared, and workmen came, and I had to go. And I wandered away again near the water. I clung to the river, it seemed to know something. And I went and stood on the poor nerf, and made up my mind. I would go down to Mellon, and drown myself there. And then Monsieur Laguille came past, whom I knew a little, or very little, and he asked me why I was looking at the water, and I said I was going to drown myself. And he saw I meant it, and made light of it, and advised me to go down to Fontainebleau with him instead, for a week. And I did not care what I did. I went with him. I was glad in a way. I thought he would hear of it. I wanted to hurt him. You did not know what you were doing. Oh, yes I did. I didn't misunderstand again. I was not so silly as that. It was only the accident of Dick's illness which prevented my going wrong with him. Mrs. Doddard started. Then you never—she said differently, but with controlled agitation. No, said Annette. But it's the same if I had. I meant it to. There was a moment of silence. No one thought Mrs. Doddard, but Annette would have left me all these months, believing the worst had happened, not because she was concealing the truth purposefully, but because it did not strike her that I could regard her as innocent, when she did not consider herself so. It is not the same as if you had, said Mrs. Doddard sternly. If you mean to do a good and merciful action, and something prevents you, is it the same as if you had done it? Is any one the better for it? No. Well, then remember, Annette, that it is the same with evil actions. You were not actually guilty of it. Be thankful that you were not. I am. When I saw you that first night of Fontainebleau, I thought you were on the verge of brain fever. I never slept for thinking of you. Well, you were right, said Annette, tranquilly. I suppose that is what you nursed me through. But that night I had no idea I was ill. You were absolutely desperate. Was I? I was angry. I must never be angry like that again. Dick said that, and he was right. Do you know what I was thinking of when you came out to me with the milk? Once, long ago, when I was a child, I was sent to a country farm after an illness, and I saw one of the farm-hands moving some faggots. And behind it, on the ground, was a nest with a hen, a common hen, sitting on it, and a little baby chicken looking out from under her wing. She was just hatching them out. I was quite delighted. I had never seen anything so pretty before. And the stupid men frightened her, and she thought they were coming for her young ones. At first, she spread out her wings over them, and then she became angry. A kind of dreadful rage took her over. And she trod down the eggs with her great feet, the eggs she had sat on patiently for so long. And then she killed the little chickens with her strong beak. I could see her now standing at bay in her broken nest with her bill streaming, making a horrible, low sound. Don't laugh at me when I say that I thought just like that old hen. I was ready to rend everything to pieces, myself included, that night. When I was a child I thought it so strange of the hen to behave like that. I laughed at her at the time, just as Dick laughed at me. But I understand her now. Poor thing. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of Not Withstanding by Mary Chumley The larger the nature, the less susceptible to personal injury. It was a few days later. Annette, leaning on Mrs. Stoddart's arm, had made a pilgrimage as far as the low garden wall, to look at the little golden brown calf on the other side, tethered to a twisted shrub of Plumbago, the blue flowers of which spread themselves into a miniature canopy over him. Now she was lying back, exhausted but triumphant, in her long chair, with Mrs. Stoddart knitting beside her. I should be walking up there to-morrow," she said audaciously, pointing to the fantastic cactus-sprinkled volcanic hills, writing steeply behind the house on the northern side. Mrs. Stoddart felt safe, no reply. Annette, more tired than she would allow, leaned back. Her eyes fell on the same view, which might have been painted on a drop scene so fixed was it, so identical in colour and light day after day. But today it proved itself genuine by the fact that a large German steamer, not there yesterday, was moored in the bay, so placed that it seemed to be impaled on the spike of the tallest tower, and keeping up the illusion by making from time to time a rumbling and unseemly noise as if in pain. You must own now that I am well," said Annette. Very nearly. You shall come up to the tomato gardens to-morrow, and see the Spanish women working in their white trousers. My head never aches now. That is a good thing. Has the time come when I may ask a few questions? Mrs. Stoddart hardly looked up from her knitting, as she said tranquilly. Yes, my child, if there is anything on your mind. I suppose Declogate is dead. I felt sure he was dying that last day at Fontainebleau. It were many shocked to me to know that he is dead. He is not dead. A swift glance showed Mrs. Stoddart that Annette was greatly surprised. How is he? she asked after a moment. Did he really get well again? I thought it was not possible. It was not. Then he is not riding again yet? No, I am afraid he will never ride again. Then his back was really injured after all. Yes, it was spinal paralysis. He did enjoy life so, said Annette, portick. I made inquiries about him again a short time ago. He is not unhappy. He knows nothing and nobody takes no notice. The brain was affected and it is only a question of time. A few months, a few years. He does not suffer. For a long time I thought he and I had died together. You both all but died, Annette. Where is he now? In his aunt's house in Paris she came down before I left. I hope she seemed a kind woman. She seemed a silly one. She bought her own doctor at Missilegais Valley with her. She evidently distrusted the Fontainebleau doctor and me. She paid him up and dismissed him at once, and she as good as dismissed me. Perhaps, said Annette, she thought you and the doctor were in collusion with me. I suppose some lurid story with me in the middle of it reached her at once. No doubt. The valet had evidently told her that his master had not gone down to Fontainebleau alone. She arrived prepared for battle. And where was I all this time? You were in the country a few miles out of Fontainebleau at a house the doctor knew of. He helped me to move you there directly before you became unconscious. Until you fell ill you would not leave Missilegais. But fortunately you were not there when his aunt arrived. I should not have cared? No. You were past caring about anything. You were not in your right mind. But surely, Annette, Mrs. Doddard spoke very slowly, you care now. Annette evidently turned the question over in her mind, and then looked doubtfully at her friend. I am grateful to you that I escaped the outside shame, she said. But that seemed such a little thing beside the inside shame that I could have done as I did. I had been carefully brought up. I was what you call good. And it was easy to me. I never felt any temptation to be otherwise, even in the irresponsible milieu at Fathers, where there was no morality to speak of. And yet, all in a minute, I could do as I did, throw everything away, which only just before I had got him was such a passion. He was bad, and Father was bad. I see now that he had sold me. But since I have been lying here, I have come to see that I was bad, too. There was six of one and a half a dozen of the other. There was nothing to choose between the three of us. Poor Dick, with his unpremeditated escapade, was snow-white compared to us. The one kindly person in the sordid drama of lust and revenge. Where do I come in? asked Mrs. Doddott. As an unwise angel, I think, who snatched a brand from the burning. You are the first person who has had the advantage of my acquaintance who has called me unwise, said Mrs. Doddott, with the grim benevolent smile which your net had learned to love. And now you have talked enough. The whole island is taking its siesta. It is time you took yours. Mrs. Doddott fought long over a net and her future that night. She made every effort, left no stone unturned at Fontenblur, to save the good name which the girl had so recklessly flung away. When a net succumbed, Mrs. Doddott, quick to see whom she could trust, confided to the doctor that a net was not Musilla Gay's wife, and appealed to him for help. He gravely replied that he already knew that fact. But did not mention how, during the making of the will, it had come to his knowledge. He helped her to remove a net instantly to a private lodging kept by an old servant of his. There was no luggage to remove. When Musilla Gay's aunt and her own doctor arrived late that night, together with Musilla Gay's valet, Annette had vanished into thin air. Only Mrs. Doddott was there, and the nurse to hand over the patient, and to receive the cautious, suspicious thanks of Lady Jane Cranbrook, who continually repeated that she did not understand the delay in sending for her. It was, of course, incidentally known in the hotel that the pretty lady who had nursed Monsieur so devotedly was not his wife, and that she fled at the approach of his family. Mrs. Doddott herself left very early next morning, before Lady Jane was up, after paying Annette's hotel bill as well as her own. She had heard since through the nurse that Musilla Gay, after asking plaintively for Annette once or twice, and relapsed into a state of semi-consciousness, in which she lay day after day, week after week. It seemed as if his mind had made one last effort, and then had finally given up a losing battle. The stars in their courses had fought for Annette, and Mrs. Doddott had given them all the aid she could, with systematic perseverance and forethought. She had obliged Annette to write to a friend in Paris as soon as she was well enough, rather before she was well enough to hold a pen, telling her she had been taken ill suddenly at Fontainebleau, but was with a friend, and asking her to pack her clothes for her, and send them to her at Milan. Later on, before embarking at Marseille, she made a right of line to her father, saying she was travelling with her friend, Mrs. Doddott, and would not be returning to Paris for the present. After a time she made her resume communications with her aunts, and informed them who she was travelling with, and where she was. The aunts wrote rather frigidly in return at first, but after a time became more cordial, express themselves pleased that she was enjoying herself, and a pint that they had had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Doddott's sister, Lady Brandon. They were evidently delighted that she had left her father, and even graciously advised chafed fragments of information about themselves. Aunt Maria had just brought out another book, Crooks and Coronets, a copy of which found its way to Tenerife. Aunt Harriet, the Invalid, had become a Christian scientist. Aunt Catherine, the only practical one of the family, had developed a weak heart, and they had all decided to leave London, and was settling in a country farm in Lausia, where they had once spent a summer years before. Mrs. Doddott, with infinite care, had re-established all the links between the net's past life and her present one. The hiatus, which, after all, had only occupied six days, was invisible. Her success had apparently been complete. Only apparently, she said to herself, something may happen which I cannot foresee. Monsieur Le Gai may get better, though they say he never will, or at any rate he may get well enough to give her away, which he would never do if he were in full possession of his faculties. Or that French chambermaid, who was so endlessly kind, may take service in England and run up against a net. Or the valet, who, she says, did not see her at the station, may have seen her after all, and may prove a source of danger. Almost likely, of all, a net may tell against herself. She is quite capable of it. Next day, she said to a net, Remember your reputation is my property. You threw it away, and I picked it up off the Dung Hill. It belongs to me, absolutely. Now promise me on your oath that you will never say anything about this episode in your past to any one, to any living creature except one, the man you marry. I would rather not promise that, said a net. I feel as if for some time or other I might have to say something. One never can tell. Mrs. Doddard cast at her a lightning glance in which love and proplexity were about to evenly mixed. This strange creature amused and angered her, and constantly aroused in her opposite feelings at the same moment. The careful scotch of one felt a certain kindly scorn for a net's want of self-protective prudence, and her very slight realisation of the dangers Mrs. Doddard had worked so hard to avert. But mixed in with the scorn was a pinch of respect for something unworldly in a net, uncalculating of her own advantage. She was apparently one of that tiny band who were not engrossed by the duty of looking after number one. Mrs. Doddard, who was not easily nonplussed, decided to be wounded. You are hard to help, a net, she said. I do what I can for you, and you often say how much it is, and yet you can tranquilly talk of all my work being thrown away by some chance word of yours which you won't even promise not to say. An epistartal. I had not meant that, she said humbly. I will promise anything you wish. No, my dear, no. Then Mrs. Doddard ashamed of her subterfuge and its instant success. I was unreasonable. Promise me instead that, except to the man you are engaged to, you will never mention this subject to anyone without my permission. I promise, said a net. Mrs. Doddard, who never kissed anyone if she could help it, kissed her on the forehead. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 It was the middle of April. The ginger-tree had at last unsheathed the immense buds which had been guarding among its long, sword-like leaves, and had hung out its great pink and white blossoms at all their length. The coffee-trees had mingled with their red berries the dearest little white wax-flowers. The paradise-tree which Annette had been watching day by day had come out in the night. And this morning, among its innurable hanging golden balls, were cascades of five-leaved white stars with violet centers. Annette was well again. If so dull and tame a word can be used to describe the radiance which healthened shed upon her, and upon the unfolding petal by petal of her beauty. The long rest, the slay recovery, immense peace which had unfolded her life for the first time. The grim, tender mothering of Mrs. Doddard had altogether fostered and sustained her. Her life, cut back to its very root by a sharp frost, had put out a superb new shoot. Her cultishness and a certain heavy, naive immaturity had fallen from her. Her beauty had shaken them off, and stood clear of them. And Mrs. Doddard recognized, not without anxiety, that the beauty which she was now revealed was great. But in the process of her unduly delayed and then unduly forced development, it was plain that she had lost one thing which would have made her mother's heart ache if she had been alive. Annette had lost her youth. She was barely twenty-two, but she had the dignity and the bearing of a woman of thirty. Mrs. Doddard watched her standing, a gracious, slender figure in her white gown under the paradise tree, with a wild baby canary in the hollow of her hands, coaxing it to fly back to its parents, calling shrilly to it from a neighboring thicket of lemon-coloured honeysuckle. She realized the pitfalls that lay in wait for persons as simple and as inapprehensive as Annette, especially when they are beautiful as well. And she sighed. Presently the baby canary flooded into the honeysuckle, and Annette walked down the steep garden path to meet Victor, the butler, who could be seen in the distance coming slowly on the donkey up the white high road from Santa Cruz with the letters. Mrs. Doddard sighed again. She had safeguarded Annette's past, but how about her future? She had pondered long over it, which Annette did not seem to do at all. Tenerife was becoming too hot. The two ladies from Hampstead had already gone, much modified towards Annette, and even anxious to meet her again, and attributing her more alert movements and now quite unrolling eyes to the fact that they had made it clear that they were not standing on nonsense or take heirs from any one. Mrs. Doddard was anxious to get home to London to her son, her one son, Mark. But what would happen to Annette when they left Tenerife? She would gladly have kept her as her companion till she married, for, of course, she would marry one day. But there was Mark to be considered. She could not introduce Annette into her household without a vehement protest from Mark to start with, who would probably end up by falling in love with her. It was hopeless to expect that Annette would take an interest in any man for some time to come. Would she be glad or sorry if Annette eventually married Mark? She came to the conclusion that in spite of all the drawbacks of Annette's parentage and the legue episode, she would rather have her as her daughter-in-law than any one. But there was Mark to be reckoned with, a very uncertain quantity. She did not know how he would regard that miserable episode, and she decided that she would not take the responsibility of throwing him and Annette together. Then what was to be done? Mrs. Doddard got through her own troubles with such a seduous determination earlier in life that she was now quite at liberty to attend to those of others, and she gave a close attention to Annette's. She did not have troubled her mind, for Annette was coming towards her up the steep path between the high hedges of flowering geraniums with a sheaf of letters in her hand, and her future neatly mapped out in one of them. She sat down at Mrs. Doddard's feet in the dappled shade under the scarlet flower pomegranate tree, and they both opened their letters. Annette had time to read her to several times, while Mrs. Doddard selected one after another from her bundle. Presently she gave an exclamation of surprise. Mark is on his way here. He will be here directly. Let me see, the furtsin is due to-morrow or next day. He sends this by the English mail to warn me. He's not been well, overworked, and he's coming out for the sake of the cheese journey and to take me home. Mrs. Doddard's shrewd eyes shone. A faint colour came to her thin cheeks. Then I shall see him, said Annette, when he did not come out for Christmas I was afraid I should miss him altogether. Does that mean you are thinking of leaving me, Annette? Yes, said Annette, and she took her friend's hand and kissed it. I've been considering it some time. I'm thinking of staying here and setting up as a dressmaker. As a dressmaker? Almost gasped, Mrs. Doddard. Yes, why not? My aunt is a very good dressmaker in Paris, and she would help me. At least she would if it was worth her while. And there's no one here to do anything, and all that exquisite work the peasant women make is wasted on coarse or inferior material. I should get them to do it for me on soft fine nainsuke, and make a speciality of summer morning gowns and children's frocks. Every one who comes here would buy a gown of tannerif work for me, and I can fit people quite well. I have a natural term for it. Look how I can fit myself. You said yesterday that this white gown I have on was perfect. Mrs. Doddard could only gaze at her in amazement. My dear Annette, she said at last, you cannot seriously think I would allow you to leave me to become a dressmaker. What have I done that you should treat me like that? You've done everything, said Annette, more than anyone in the world since I was born, and I have accepted everything, haven't I? As it was given, freely. But I felt the time has come meaning when I must find a little hole of my own to creep into. And I thought this dressmaking might do. I would rather not try to live by my voice. It would throw me into the kind of society I knew before. I'd rather make a fresh start on different lines. At least I thought all these things as I came up the path ten minutes ago. But these two letters have shown me that I have a place of my own in the world after all. She put two black-edged letters into Mrs. Doddard's hand. Aunt Catherine is dead, she said. You know she's been failing. That was why they went to live in the country. Mrs. Doddard took up the letters and gave them her whole attention. Each of the bereaved aunts had written. My dear Annette, wrote Aunt Maria the eldest, I grieve to tell you that our beloved sister, your Aunt Catherine, died suddenly yesterday from heart failure. We'd hoped that the move to the country undertaken entirely on her account would have been beneficial to her, entailing as it did a great sacrifice on my part who knew the inspiration of a congenial literary milieu so much. She had always fancied that she was not well in London, in which belief her doctor encouraged her, very unwisely, as the event has proved. The move, with all the inevitable paraphernalia of such an event, did her harm as I had feared it would. She insisted on organising the whole affair, and though she carried it through fairly successfully, except that several of my manuscripts had been mislaid, the strain had a bad effect on her heart. The doctor said that she ought to have gone away to the seaside while the move was done in her absence. This, she did low, was quite impossible, and though I wrote to her daily from Phoenix Towe begging her not to over fatigue herself and to superintend the work of others rather than to work herself, there is no doubt that in my absence she did more than she ought to have done. The heart attacks have been more frequent and more severe ever since, culminating in a fatal one on Saturday last. The funeral is to-morrow. Your aunt Harriet is entirely prostrated by grief, and I may say that unless I summoned all my fortitude, I should be in the same condition myself. For, of course, my beloved sister Catherine and I were united by a very special and uncommon affection, rare even between affectionate sisters. I do not hear any more of your becoming a professional singer, and I hope I never shall. I gather that you have not found living with your father quite as congenial as you anticipated. Should you be in need of a home when your tour with Mrs. Doddart is over, we should be quite willing that you should return to us. For though the manner of your departure left something to be desired, I have since realised that there was not sufficient scope for yourself and Aunt Catherine in the same house. And now that we are bereaved of her, you would have plenty to occupy you in endeavouring, if such is your wish, to fill her place. Your affectionate aunt Maria Neville, Mrs. Doddart took up the second letter. My dear Annette, how can I tell you? How can I begin to tell you of the shattering blow that has fallen upon us? Life can never be the same again. Death has entered our dwelling. Dearest Cathy, your Aunt Catherine has been taken from us. She was quite well yesterday, at least well for her. At a quarter past seven, when she was rubbing my feet, and by seven-thirty, she was in a precarious condition. Maria insisted on sending for a doctor, which of course I greatly regretted. Realising as I do full well that the ability to save life is not within them, and that all drugs have only the power in them which we by wrong thought have given to them. However Maria had her way as always, but our dear sister succumbed before he arrives, so I do not in any way attribute her death to him. We were both with her, each holding one of her dear hands, and the end was quite peaceful. I could have wished for one last word of love, but I do not rebel. Maria feels it terribly that she always has great self-control. But of course the loss cannot be to her immersed in our writing, which it is to me, my darling Cathy's constant companion and advisor. We were, all in all, to each other. What I shall do without her I cannot even imagine. Maria will naturally expect, she always has expected, to find all household matters arranged without any participation on her part. And I am alas so feeble that for many years past I have had to confine my aid to that of consolation and encouragement. My sofa has indeed, I am thankful to think, been a centre from which sympathy and love have flowed freely forth. This is as it should be. We, invalides, live in the lives of others. Their joys are our joys, their sorrows are our sorrows. How I have rejoiced over your delightful experiences at Tenerife, the islands of the blessed. When it has snowed here, how often I have said to myself, Annette is in the sunshine. And now, dear Annette, I am wondering whether, when you leave Tenerife, you could make your home with us again for a time. You would find one very loving heart here to welcome you ever ready with counsel and support for a young girl's troubles and perplexities. I never blamed you for leaving us. I know too well that spirit of adventure. Though my lot bid me sternly silence its voice. And, darling child, does it not seem pointed out for you to relinquish this strange idea of being a professional singer for a life to which the call of duty is so plain? I know from experience what a great blessing attends those who give out their own will to live for others. The surrender of the will. That is where true peace and happiness lie. If the young could only believe it. I will say no more. With fondest love, your affectionate aunt Harriet. Ah, said Mrs. Doddart, and said the only one of the trio whom you could tolerate is the one who has died. They have killed her between them. That is sufficiently obvious. And what do you think, Annette, of this extremely cold-blooded suggestion that you should live for others? I think it is worth a trial, said Annette, looking gravely at her. It will have the charm of novelty at any rate. And I haven't made such a great success of living for myself so far. Mrs. Doddart did not answer. Even she, accustomed as she was to them by now, always felt a tremor when those soft veiled, violet eyes were fixed upon her. Sweetest eyes were ever seen, she often said to herself. Annette went on. I see that I have been like the man in the parable. When I was bitten to the feast of life, I wanted the highest seat. I took it as my right. I was to have everything—love, honour, happiness, rank, wealth. But I was turned out, as he was. And I was so angry that I flung out of the house in a rage. If Dick had not stopped me at the door, I should have gone away altogether. The man in the parable behaved better than that. He took with shame the lowest seat. I must do like him. Try and find the place intended for me, where I shan't be cast out. Well, this is the lowest seat with a vengeance. Yes, that is why I think it may be just what I can manage. You are sure you are not doing this from a false idea of making an act of penance? No. Directly I read the letters. I thought I should like it. I wish now I had never left them. And I believe now that I have been away, I can make a success of it. I have no doubt you could, but I should like to make a success of something after being such a failure and—and—and what, my child? I begun to think there was no call in the world for me, as if the giver of the feast had forgotten me altogether. And this looks as if he hadn't. I've often thought lately that I should like, if I could, to creep into some little place where I should not be thrust out, where there wouldn't be any more angels with flaming swords to drive me away. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Not Withstanding by Mary Chumley This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers. Oh! is the water sweet and cool, gentle and brown above the pool, and laughs the immortal river still under the mill—under the mill? Rupert Brooke I do not think you ever heard of the little village of Riff in Losia, reader, unless you were born and bred in it, as I was. If you were, you believe, of course, that it is the centre of the world. But if you were not, it is possible you may have overlooked it in your scheme of life, or hurried past it in the train reading a novel, not even looking out, as I have done a hundred times, to catch a glimpse of it lying among its water meadows behind the willows. But unless you know exactly where to look, you can only catch a momentary glimpse, because the ribbon with its fringe of willows makes a half circle round Riff, and guards it from inquisitive eyes. Parallel with the ribbon, but half a mile away from it on higher ground, runs the great white high-road from London to Yarmouth, and between the road and the river lies the village of Riff. But you cannot see it, or even the top of its church tower from the road, because the park of Halver Manor comes in between, stretching in long leafy glades of oak and elm and open sward, and hiding the house in its midst, the old Tudor house which has stood closed and shuttered so long, ever since Mr. Manvers died. When at last the park comes to an end, a deep lane breaks off from the main road, and pretending that it is going nowhere in particular, and that time will be lost in following it, edges along like a homing cat beside the park wall in the direction of Riff, skirting a gate and a cluster of buildings, Lathley, Barn, and Dovecott, which are all you can see of red Riff farm from the lane. I point it out to you as we pass, for we shall come back there later on. Riff is much nearer than you think, for the ground is always falling a little towards the Riban, which is close at hand, though invisible also. And between the park and the river lies the hidden village of Riff. You come upon it quite suddenly at the turn of the lane, with its shallow ford and its pink plastered cottages sprinkled among its high trees, and its thatched vicarage, and the hermitage with the honeysuckle over the porch, and the arms houses near the great Italian gates of Halver Manor, and, somewhat apart in its walled garden among its twisted pines, the Dowerhouse, where Lady Louisa Manvers was living, poor soul, at the time this story was written. I have only to close my eyes and I can see it all. I can imagine myself sitting with the mis-blinkets in their little parlour at the hermitage, with the daguerreotype of the defunct pear-blinket over the mantelpiece, and Miss Amy's soft voice saying, They do say Lady Louisa's cook is leaving to be married, but they will say anything at Riff, I never believe more than half I hear. The hermitage stood on a little slice of ground which fell away from the lane. So close was the hermitage to the lane, and the parlour windows were so low, and the lane beyond the pailings so high, that the inmates could only guess at the identity of the passers-by by their legs. And rare guests and rarer callers arriving in the wagonnet from the manvers' arms could actually look into the bedroom windows, while the mis-blinket's eyes, peering over the parlour muslins, were fixed upon their lower limbs. And if I keep my eyes tightly shut and the eyes of memory open, I can see as I sit stroking Miss Blinket's cat, the legs of the new vicar pass up the lane outclined against a lighted skirt. A Miss Amy, who is not a close observer of life, opines that skirt belongs to Miss Janey Manvers. Miss Blinket's senior instantly identifies it as a net's new spotted muslin, which she had seen Mrs. Nicholl's getting up last week. But that was twenty years ago. I can only tell you what Riff was like then, for it is twenty years since I was there, and I'm not going there any more. For I don't want to see any of the changes which time must have wrought there. And if I walked down the village street now, I should feel like a ghost, for only a few of the old people would remember me. And the bright-eyed, tire-headed little lads whom I taught in Sunday school are scattered to the four winds of heaven. The Boer War took some of them, and London has engulfed more. Only a few remaining at Riff has sad-looking middle-aged men, farm-hands, and hedges, and ditches, and carmen. And I hear now that the motors go banging along the Yarmouth High Road day and night, and the Riff actually has a telegraph office of its own, and that the wires go in front of the hermitage. Only the bliss-blinkets are not there to see it. A literary lady lives there now, and I hear she's changed the name to Quill Cottage, and has made a garden in the orchard where Old Nan's cottage was by the twisted pear tree. Old Nan the Witch, who grew mistletoe in all the trees in her domain, and cured some vitous dance with it. No, I will not go to Riff any more. For I do not want to see any of these things. At least of all the literary lady who is writing her novels in the quiet rooms, where my two old friends knitted and read Thomas a Tempest. Twenty years ago, in the days when my father was doctor at Riff, and when Annette came to live there, we could not help noticing—indeed Mrs. Nichols often mentioned it—what a go-ahead place Riff was, far more up-to-date than Sweet Appletree, and even than Mervely Mill. We measured everything in those days by Sweet Appletree, and the measurement was always in our favour. We did not talk much about Riban Bridge, where the sizes were held and the new silam had just been built. We were somewhat awed by Riban Bridge, but poor lag behind Sweet Appletree, lost amid its reads together with the Riban, was the subject of sincere pity to the Riff folk. The Sweet Applers, according to Mrs. Nichols, were that clunch they might have been brought up in a wood. At Riff everything was cast in a superior and more modern mould. Riff had a postman on a bicycle with an enormous front wheel, and if he brought a letter in the morning, you could have necessary post an answer to it the same day in the red slit in the churchyard wall. Now at Sweet Appletree, the old man in a donkey-cart, blowing on a little horn, who brought the sweet apple-letters, took away directly the donkey was rested, those which the inhabitants had just composed. And he even heeded not call if the water was out. Before I was born, when the Miss Blinkets were young and crindle-in'd, and their father was vicar of Riff, Sweet Appletree, as they have often told me, had no qua, and the old rector held a service once or twice a year in his bath-chair. After he took to his bed, there was no service at all for twenty years. No wonder the Sweet Apple-Floke were clunch. How different from Riff, with its trombone and fiddle inviting the attention of its creator every Sunday, and Mr. Blinket, whose watchword was no-popery. It was Mr. Jones, Mr. Blinket's successor, that lamentable person, meaning well, but according to the Miss Blinkets, quite unable to perceive when a parish was worked on the right lines. It was young Mr. Jones from Oxford, who did not marry either of the Miss Blinkets, but who did put a stop to the trombone and fiddle, and actually brought the qua out of the gallery, and took away the aardlast from the south window below the pulpit, and preached in his surplus, and made himself very unpopular by forbidding the congregation to rise to its feet when the manva's family came into church, almost as unpopular as by stopping the fiddle. You can see the old fiddle still in the cottage of Hesketh the Carrier, next to the village stocks. His father had played on it, and turned chapel when his services were no longer required. And it was young Mr. Jones who actually had the bad taste openly to deplore the saintly Blinkets' action in demolishing all the upper parts of the ancient carved and gilded screen, because at eighty he could no longer make his voice heard through it. It was, of course, Mr. Jones who started the mixed qua sitting in the chancel behind the remains of the screen. In the last days of the mixed qua, when first Mr. Black came to Riff, after Mr. Jones was made a bishop, Annette sang in it, with a voice that seemed to me, and not to me only, like the voice of an angel. With the exception of Annette and the under-housed maid from the D'Arhaz, it was mainly composed of admirable domestic characters of portly age, the elite of Riff, subcommitted by a small gleaning of deeply virtuous, non-fruit-stealing little boys. We're told nowadays that heredity is nothing. But when I remember how those starched white-collar juvenile singers were nearly all the offspring of the tenors and bases, out of Mrs. Nichols and Mrs. Cox, who were trebles, I feel the last word still remains to be said about heredity. Annette did not sing in it long, not more than a year, I think. It was soon after she left it that Mr. Black, so I am told, started a surplus qua. And here am I talking about her leaving the qua, when I'm not yet told you of her arrival in Losia, or anything about Red Riff Farm, where her two aunts lived, and where Aunt Maria wrote her famous novel, The Silver Cross, of which you have, of course, often heard, and which, if you are of a serious turn of mind, you've doubtless read and laid to heart. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Notwithstanding by Mary Chumley This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers Chapter 10 Nothing Is So Incapacitating as Self-Love Red Riff Farm stands near the lane, between the village and the high-road, presenting its back to all corners with British song-frois. To approach it you must go up the wide path between the barn and the dove-cut on one side, and on the other the long low laitery standing above its wall, just able to look at itself in the pool, where the ducks are breaking up its reflection. When you pass through the narrow arne gateway in the high wall which protects the garden on the north side, the old Jacobean house rises up above you, all built of dim rose red and dim blue brick, looking benignly out across the meadows over its small enclosed garden, which had once been the orchard, in which some of the ancient bent apple trees are still like old pensioners permitted to remain. When a net first passed through that gateway, the beautiful dim old building with its lattice windows peered at her through a network of apple blossom. But now the apple trees have long since dropped their petals, and you can see the house clearly with its wavering, tiled string-courses, and its three-rounded gables, and the vine half across it. The low square oak door studied with nails stands wide open, showing a dimps of a small panelled hall with a carved black staircase coming down into it. We need not peer in through the windows of the Shakespeare calendar on Aunt Maria's study table to see what time of year it is, for everything tells us. The masses of white pinks crowding up to the threshold, and laying their sweet heads against the stone edging of the domain. The yellow lichen in flower on the roof. The sered ranks of sweet William full out. It is certainly early June, and the black-faced sheep moving sedately in the long meadows in front of the house confirm us in our opinion, for they have shed their becoming woollen overalls and are straddling about hideous to behold in their summer tights. Only the lambs, now large and sedate, keep their pretty February coats, though by some unaccountable fatality they have all, poor deers, lost to their tales. Loser is a sedate place. I have never seen those solemn locher lambs jump about as they do in Hampshire. A Hampshire lamb among his contemporaries with the juice of the young grass in him—high friskings and caperings—that is a sight to make an old ram young. But the locher lambs seem ever to see the shadow of the blue-coated butcher in the sunshine. They move in decorous bands as if they were going to church, hastening suddenly altogether as if they were late. Loser is a sedate place. The farm lads still in their teens move as slowly as the creeping rivers, much slower than the barges. The boys early leave off for scurrying and shouting bands down the lanes in the dusk. The little girls peep to meorly over the garden gates, and walk slowly indoors if spoken to. We have abstained that it is early June, and we need no watch to tell us what o'clock it is. It is milking time. The hour when good little boys, whom mother can trust, are to be seen hurrying in an important banner with milk and cans. Half-past four it must be, for the red cows, sweet-breathed and soft-paced, have passed up the lane half an hour ago, looking gently to right and left, with the lustrous, none-like eyes, now and then putting out a large red tongue to lick of the hedgerow. Sometimes, as to-day, the bull precedes them, hustling along, surly, affairey, making a low, continuous grunting, which is not anger, for he is kind as bulls go, so much as awkwardness, the desire of the egotists to make his discontentment public, and his disillusionment with his pasture and all his gentle-tempered wives. Annette came down the carl to staircase, and stood a moment in the doorway in a pale, lilac gown, the same that you will remember the Miss Blinkett's saw half an hour later. Her ear caught the sound of a manly voice mingled with Aunt Maria's dignified tones, and the somewhat agitated accompaniment of the clink of tea-things. Aunt Harriet was evidently more acutely undecided than usual, which cupped a fill first, and was rattling them in the way that always irritated Aunt Maria, though she made heroic efforts to dissimulate it. Annette came to the conclusion that she should probably late for choir practice if she went to the drawing-room, so she walked noiselessly across the hall and slipped through the garden. A dog-cart was standing hoarseless in the courtyard, and the delighted female laughter which proceeded from the servants-hall showed that a male element in the shape of a groom had been added to the little band of women servants. What a fortunate occurrence that there should be a caller! For on this particular afternoon Aunt Maria had reached a difficult place in her new book. The hero having thrown over his lady love because she, foolish modernist that she was, toying with her life's happiness, would not promise to leave off smoking. The depressed authors needed a change of thought. And it would be pleasant for the whole household if Aunt Harriet's mind could be diverted from the fact that her new air-cushion leaked, not the old black one that would not have mattered so much, but the new round red society one which she used when there were visitors in the house. Aunt Harriet's mind had brooded all day over the air-cushion as mournfully as a heart's tongue over a well. Annette hoped that it was a cheerful caller. Perhaps it was Canem Weatherby from Ribanbridge, an amiable widower and almost as great an admirer of Aunt Maria's works as of his own stalker of anecdotes. In the meanwhile, if she, Annette, missed her own lawful tea at home, to which of the little colony of neighbours in the village should she go for a cup on her way to the church, where a choir-practice was held. To the dow-house? Old Lady Louisa Manvers had ceased to come downstairs at all, and her daughter Janey, a few years older than herself, poor downtrodden Janey, would be only too glad to see her. But then her imbecile brother Harry, with his endless copy-book remarks, would be certain to be having tea with her, and Lady Louisa's trained nurse, whom Annette particularly disliked. No, she would not go to the dow-house this afternoon. She might go to tea with the Miss Blinkets, who were always kind to her, and whose cottage lay between her and the church. The two Miss Blinkets were about the same age as the Miss Neville's, and regarded them with deep admiration, not un-mixed with awe, coupled with an evident hope that a pleasant intercourse might presently be established between the hermitage and Red Riff's farm. They were indeed quite excited at the advent among them of one so gifted as the author of Crooks and Coronets, who they perceived from her books took a very high view of the responsibility created by genius. Annette liked the Miss Blinkets, and her knowledge of Aunt Maria's character had led her to hope that this enthusiastic deference might prove acceptable to a wearied authoress in her hours of relaxation. But she soon found that the Miss Neville's, with all the prestige of London and a literary milieu resting upon them, were indignant at the idea that they should care to associate with a couple of provincial old maids. Their almost ferocious attitude towards the amiable Miss Blinkets had been a great shock to Annette, who neither at that nor at any later time learned to make the social distinctions which occupied so much of her two aunt's time. The Miss Neville's acceptance of a certain offering of ferns peeping through the meshes of a string-bag bought by the Miss Blinkets had been so frigid, so patrician, that it made Annette more friendly than she would naturally have been. She had welcomed the ferns with enthusiasm, and before she had realised it, had become the object of a sentimental love and agonised interest on the part of the inmates of the Hermitage which threatened to have its embarrassing moments. No, now she came to think of it she would not go to tea with the Miss Blinkets this afternoon. Of course she might go to the vicarage. Miss Black, the vicar's sister who kept ties for him, had often asked her to do so before choir practice. But Annette had vaguely felt of late that Miss Black, who had been very cordial to her on her arrival and was still extremely polite, did not regard her with as much favour as at first. In fact, that as Miss Black formed a high and ever higher opinion of her, that of his sister was steadily lowered to keep the balance even. Annette knew what was the matter with Miss Black. Though that gentleman had not yet discovered what it was, that was affecting his usually placid temper, causing him on his parochial rounds so frequently to take the short cut past Red Riff Farm. She had just decided, without emotion, but with distinct regret, that she must do without tea this afternoon, when a firm step came along the lane behind her and Mr. Black overtook her. For once he had taken that short cut to some purpose, that his face, fixed in a dignified preoccupation, gave no hint that he felt fortune had favoured him at last. The Miss Blinkett's attorney, affirmed, by one who knew a wide sweep of clergy, was therefore competent to form an opinion, that Mr. Black was the handsomest vicar in the diocese. But possibly that was not high praise, for the clergy had evidently deteriorated in appearance since the ancient Blinkett, that type of aristocratic beauty, had been laid to rest under the twisted U in the Riff Churchyard. But anyhow, Mr. Black was sufficiently good-looking to be called handsom, in a countryside where young, unmarried men were rare as water-oosles. He was tall and erect, and being rather clumsily built, showed to great advantage and a surplus. In a procession of clergy you would probably have picked out Mr. Black at once as its most impressive figure. He was what the Miss Blinkett's called stately. When you looked closely at him you saw that his nose was a size too large, that his head and ears and hands and feet were all a size too large for him. But the general impression was pleasant, partly because he always looked as if he had that moment emerged as speckless as his surpluses from Mrs. Nicholl's wash-tub. It was an open secret that Mrs. Nicholl's thought but little of Miss Black, who wasn't so to call a lady, and washed her flannels at home. But she had a profound admiration for the vicar, though her fear of the truth were known it was partly because he set off a surplice so as never was. Mr. Black allowed his thoughtful expression to lighten to a grave smile as he walked on beside Annette, determined that on this occasion he would not be commonplace or didactic as he feared he had been after the Bhutan shoe-club. He was under the illusion, because he had so often said so, that he seldom took the trouble to do himself justice socially. It might be as well to begin now. Are you on your way to choir practice? What a question, of course I am. Have you had tea? No. Neither have I. Do come to the vicarage first, and Angela will give us some. Angela was Miss Black. Annette could not find any reason for refusing. Thank you, I will come with pleasure. I would rather go without any meal than tea. Mr. Black felt as he said it that this sentiment was for him inadequate, but he was relieved that Annette did not appear to find it so. She smiled and said, It certainly is the pleasantest meal in the day. At this moment the Miss Blinkets and I saw, as I have already told you, the legs of the vicar pass up the lane outlined against a lilac skirt. We watched them pass in silence, and then Miss Blinkets said solemnly, If anything should come of that, if he should eventually make up his mind to marry, I consider Annette would be in every way a worthy choice. Papa was always against to sell a bit clergy, said Miss Amy, as if that settled the question. Annette and her possible future nearly reached the vicarage when a dog-cart passed them, which she recognized as the one she had seen at Red Riff. The man in it waved his hand to Mr. Black. That was Mr. Reginald Sterling, the novelist. Mr. Black volunteered. The man who wrote the magnet. Yes, he has rented noise court from Lady Louisa. I hear he never attends divine service at noise, but I am glad to say he has been to Riff several times lately. I am afraid Bartlett's sermons are not calculated to attract an educated man. Mr. Black was human, and he was aware that he was a good preacher. I have often heard of him from Mrs. Doddart, said Annette, with evident interest. I suppose he lived in Losia because some of the scenes in the magnet are laid in this country. Are they? I had not noticed it, said Mr. Black frigidly. He had often wished he could interest Annette in conversation, often wondered why he seemed unable to do so. Was it really because he did not take enough trouble, as he sometimes accused himself? But now that she was momentarily interested, he stopped short at once, as at the entrance of a blind alley. What he really wanted was to talk not about Mr. Sterling, but about himself, to tell her how he found good in everyone, how attracted he was to the ignorant and the simple. No, he did not exactly desire to tell her these things, but to coerce the conversation into channels which would show indubitably that he was the kind of man who could discover the good latent in everyone, the kind of man who fostered the feeble aspirations of the young and the ignorant, who entered with wide-minded sympathy into the difficulties of stupid people, who was better read and more humorous than any of his clerical brethren in Losia, to whom little children and dogs turned intuitively as to a friend. Now it is not an easy thing to enter lightly into conversation if you bring with you into its so many impedimenta. There was obviously no place for all this heavy baggage in the discussion of Mr. Sterling's novels. So that eminent writer was dismissed at once, and the subject was hitched, not without a jolt, onto the effect of the lotious scenery on Mr. Black. He transpired that Mr. Black was the kind of man who went for inspiration to the Heathery Mall, and who found that the problems of life are apt to unravel themselves under a wide expanse of sky. And yet listened dutifully and politely till the vicarage door was reached. It seemed doubtful afterwards, when he reviewed what he had said, whether he had attained to any really prominent conversational peaks during that circumscribed parley. He felt, with sudden exasperation, that he needed time, scope, opportunity, lots of opportunity, that if he missed one there would be plenty more, and above all, absence of interruption. He never got a chance of really talking to her. End of chapter 10