Saint's Progress

Leila rose and drew down a blind.

“This sun,” she said. “Does Jimmy Fort come to you – often?”

“Oh! no; very seldom. But still – I can see.”

‘You bat – you blunderer!’ thought Leila: ‘See! You can’t even see this beside you!’

“I expect he’s sorry for her,” she said in a queer voice.

“Why should he be sorry? He doesn’t know:”

“Oh, yes! He knows; I told him.”

“You told him!”

“Yes,” Leila repeated stubbornly; “and he’s sorry for her.”

And even then “this monk” beside her did not see, and went blundering on.

“No, no; it’s not merely that he’s sorry. By the way he looks at her, I know I’m not mistaken. I’ve wondered – what do you think, Leila. He’s too old for her; but he seems an honourable, kind man.”

“Oh! a most honourable, kind man.” But only by pressing her hand against her lips had she smothered a burst of bitter laughter. He, who saw nothing, could yet notice Fort’s eyes when he looked at Noel, and be positive that he was in love with her! How plainly those eyes must speak! Her control gave way.

“All this is very interesting,” she said, spurning her words like Noel, “considering that he’s more than my friend, Edward.” It gave her a sort of pleasure to see him wince. ‘These blind bats!’ she thought, terribly stung that he should so clearly assume her out of the running. Then she was sorry, his face had become so still and wistful. And turning away, she said:

“Oh! I shan’t break my heart; I’m a good loser. And I’m a good fighter, too; perhaps I shan’t lose.” And snapping off a sprig of geranium, she pressed it to her lips.

“Forgive me,” said Pierson slowly; “I didn’t know. I’m stupid. I thought your love for your poor soldiers had left no room for other feelings.”

Leila uttered a shrill laugh. “What have they to do with each other? Did you never hear of passion, Edward? Oh! Don’t look at me like that. Do you think a woman can’t feel passion at my age? As much as ever, more than ever, because it’s all slipping away.”

She took her hand from her lips, but a geranium petal was left clinging there, like a bloodstain. “What has your life been all these years,” she went on vehemently – “suppression of passion, nothing else! You monks twist Nature up with holy words, and try to disguise what the eeriest simpleton can see. Well, I haven’t suppressed passion, Edward. That’s all.”

“And are you happier for that?”

“I was; and I shall be again.”

A little smile curled Pierson’s lips. “Shall be?” he said. “I hope so. It’s just two ways of looking at things, Leila.”

“Oh, Edward! Don’t be so gentle! I suppose you don’t think a person like me can ever really love?”

He was standing before her with his head down, and a sense that, naive and bat-like as he was, there was something in him she could not reach or understand, made her cry out:

“I’ve not been nice to you. Forgive me, Edward! I’m so unhappy.”

“There was a Greek who used to say: ‘God is the helping of man by man.’ It isn’t true, but it’s beautiful. Good-bye, dear Leila, and don’t be sorrowful.”

She squeezed his hand, and turned to the window.

She stood there watching his black figure cross the road in the sunshine, and pass round the corner by the railings of the church. He walked quickly, very upright; there was something unseeing even about that back view of him; or was it that he saw-another world? She had never lost the mental habits of her orthodox girlhood, and in spite of all impatience, recognised his sanctity. When he had disappeared she went into her bedroom. What he had said, indeed, was no discovery. She had known. Oh! She had known. ‘Why didn’t I accept Jimmy’s offer? Why didn’t I marry him? Is it too late?’ she thought. ‘Could I? Would he – even now?’ But then she started away from her own thought. Marry him! knowing his heart was with this girl?

She looked long at her face in the mirror, studying with a fearful interest the little hard lines and markings there beneath their light coating of powder. She examined the cunning touches of colouring matter here and there in her front hair. Were they cunning enough? Did they deceive? They seemed to her suddenly to stare out. She fingered and smoothed the slight looseness and fulness of the skin below her chin. She stretched herself, and passed her hands down over her whole form, searching as it were for slackness, or thickness. And she had the bitter thought: ‘I’m all out. I’m doing all I can.’ The lines of a little poem Fort had showed her went thrumming through her head:

“Time, you old gipsy man
Will you not stay
Put up your caravan
Just for a day?”

What more could she do? He did not like to see her lips reddened. She had marked his disapprovals, watched him wipe his mouth after a kiss, when he thought she couldn’t see him. ‘I need’nt!’ she thought. ‘Noel’s lips are no redder, really. What has she better than I? Youth – dew on the grass!’ That didn’t last long! But long enough to “do her in” as her soldier-men would say. And, suddenly she revolted against herself, against Fort, against this chilled and foggy country; felt a fierce nostalgia for African sun, and the African flowers; the happy-go-lucky, hand-to-mouth existence of those five years before the war began. High Constantia at grape harvest! How many years ago – ten years, eleven years! Ah! To have before her those ten years, with him! Ten years in the sun! He would have loved her then, and gone on loving her! And she would not have tired of him, as she had tired of those others. ‘In half an hour,’ she thought, ‘he’ll be here, sit opposite me; I shall see him struggling forcing himself to seem affectionate! It’s too humbling! But I don’t care; I want him!’

She searched her wardrobe, for some garment or touch of colour, novelty of any sort, to help her. But she had tried them all – those little tricks – was bankrupt. And such a discouraged, heavy mood came on her, that she did not even “change,” but went back in her nurse’s dress and lay down on the divan, pretending to sleep, while the maid set out the supper. She lay there moody and motionless, trying to summon courage, feeling that if she showed herself beaten she was beaten; knowing that she only held him by pity. But when she heard his footstep on the stairs she swiftly passed her hands over her cheeks, as if to press the blood out of them, and lay absolutely still. She hoped that she was white, and indeed she was, with finger-marks under the eyes, for she had suffered greatly this last hour. Through her lashes she saw him halt, and look at her in surprise. Asleep, or-ill, which? She did not move. She wanted to watch him. He tiptoed across the room and stood looking down at her. There was a furrow between his eyes. ‘Ah!’ she thought, ‘it would suit you, if I were dead, my kind friend.’ He bent a little towards her; and she wondered suddenly whether she looked graceful lying there, sorry now that she had not changed her dress. She saw him shrug his shoulders ever so faintly with a puzzled little movement. He had not seen that she was shamming. How nice his face was – not mean, secret, callous! She opened her eyes, which against her will had in them the despair she was feeling. He went on his knees, and lifting her hand to his lips, hid them with it.

“Jimmy,” she said gently, “I’m an awful bore to you. Poor Jimmy! No! Don’t pretend! I know what I know!” ‘Oh, God! What am I saying?’ she thought. ‘It’s fatal-fatal. I ought never!’ And drawing his head to her, she put it to her heart. Then, instinctively aware that this moment had been pressed to its uttermost, she scrambled up, kissed his forehead, stretched herself, and laughed.

“I was asleep, dreaming; dreaming you loved me. Wasn’t it funny? Come along. There are oysters, for the last time this season.”

All that evening, as if both knew they had been looking over a precipice, they seemed to be treading warily, desperately anxious not to rouse emotion in each other, or touch on things which must bring a scene. And Leila talked incessantly of Africa.

“Don’t you long for the sun, Jimmy? Couldn’t we – couldn’t you go? Oh! why doesn’t this wretched war end? All that we’ve got here at home every scrap of wealth, and comfort, and age, and art, and music, I’d give it all for the light and the sun out there. Wouldn’t you?”

And Fort said he would, knowing well of one thing which he would not give. And she knew that, as well as he.

They were both gayer than they had been for a long time; so that when he had gone, she fell back once more on to the divan, and burying her face in a cushion, wept bitterly.

V

1

It was not quite disillusionment that Pierson felt while he walked away. Perhaps he had not really believed in Leila’s regeneration. It was more an acute discomfort, an increasing loneliness. A soft and restful spot was now denied him; a certain warmth and allurement had gone out of his life. He had not even the feeling that it was his duty to try and save Leila by persuading her to marry Fort. He had always been too sensitive, too much as it were of a gentleman, for the robuster sorts of evangelism. Such delicacy had been a stumbling-block to him all through professional life. In the eight years when his wife was with him, all had been more certain, more direct and simple, with the help of her sympathy, judgment; and companionship. At her death a sort of mist had gathered in his soul. No one had ever spoken plainly to him. To a clergyman, who does? No one had told him in so many words that he should have married again – that to stay unmarried was bad for him, physically and spiritually, fogging and perverting life; not driving him, indeed, as it drove many, to intolerance and cruelty, but to that half-living dreaminess, and the vague unhappy yearnings which so constantly beset him. All these celibate years he had really only been happy in his music, or in far-away country places, taking strong exercise, and losing himself in the beauties of Nature; and since the war began he had only once, for those three days at Kestrel, been out of London.

He walked home, going over in his mind very anxiously all the evidence he had of Fort’s feeling for Noel. How many times had he been to them since she came back? Only three times – three evening visits! And he had not been alone with her a single minute! Before this calamity befell his daughter, he would never have observed anything in Fort’s demeanour; but, in his new watchfulness, he had seen the almost reverential way he looked at her, noticed the extra softness of his voice when he spoke to her, and once a look of sudden pain, a sort of dulling of his whole self, when Noel had got up and gone out of the room. And the girl herself? Twice he had surprised her gazing at Fort when he was not looking, with a sort of brooding interest. He remembered how, as a little girl, she would watch a grown-up, and then suddenly one day attach herself to him, and be quite devoted. Yes, he must warn her, before she could possibly become entangled. In his fastidious chastity, the opinion he had held of Fort was suddenly lowered. He, already a free-thinker, was now revealed as a free-liver. Poor little Nollie! Endangered again already! Every man a kind of wolf waiting to pounce on her!

He found Lavendie and Noel in the drawing-room, standing before the portrait which was nearing completion. He looked at it for a long minute, and turned away:

“Don’t you think it’s like me, Daddy?”

“It’s like you; but it hurts me. I can’t tell why.”

He saw the smile of a painter whose picture is being criticised come on Lavendie’s face.

“It is perhaps the colouring which does not please you, monsieur?”

“No, no; deeper. The expression; what is she waiting for?”

The defensive smile died on Lavendie’s lips.

“It is as I see her, monsieur le cure.”