A Witch of the Hills Volume II Part 13

'You seem very busy, Mr. Maude,' said she, smiling.

Surely it was my very witch herself again, only a little thinner and whiter, who spoke to me thus in the old sweet voice, and held out her hand with the half-frank, half-shy demureness of those bygone, painful-pleasant days when we were 'engaged,' and when the new and proud discovery that she was 'grown-up' had given a delicious piquancy to her manner of taking her lessons! I shook hands with her, and she pointed to her old chair; as she took it quite simply and thus had the full light of the windows on her face, I noticed with surprise and pleasure that, in spite of the excitement of the night before, the atmosphere of her old home was already taking effect upon her, the listless expression she had worn in London was disappearing from her face, and the old childlike look which blue eyes were meant to wear was coming back into them again.

'You are better,' said I gently, taking no notice of her remark upon my occupation. 'You have been lazy, madam. I am sure you might very well have come down to breakfast. You had a good night, I suppose?'

Ta-ta, who had followed her into the room, pushed her nose lovingly into her old companion's hand, and Babiole hid a sensitively flushing face by bending low over the dog's sleek head. I think she must have found out that morning by the confusion in her room that something had happened the night before, the details of which she could not remember; perhaps also she had a vague remembrance of her expedition downstairs, and wanted to find out what I knew about it. But of course I knew nothing.

'Yes, I--I slept well--thank you. Only I had dreams.'

'Did you? Not bad ones, I hope?'

She glanced at me penetratingly, but could discover nothing, as I was fighting with To-to over the fragments of the morocco ring case.

'No-o, not exactly bad, but very strange. Do you know--I found--my travelling hat and cloak--lying about--and I wondered whether--in my sleep--I had put them on--thinking I was--going back to London!'

All this, uttered very slowly and with much hesitation, I listened to without interruption, and then, standing up with my back to the fire, nodded to her rea.s.suringly.

'Well, so you did, Mrs. Scott, and a nice fright your sleep-walking propensities gave me, I can tell you. It was by the luckiest chance in the world that I didn't brain you with the poker for a burglar when I heard footsteps in the hall in the middle of the night!'

'You did!' cried she, pale to the lips with apprehension.

'Yes; and when I saw you, you muttered something I couldn't understand, and then you half woke up, and you went back quickly to your room again, leaving me considerably wider awake than before.'

'Is that all?' asked Babiole, the faint colour coming back to her face again.

'It was quite enough for me, I a.s.sure you. And I hope you will take your walking exercise for the future in the daytime, when my elderly nerves are at their best.'

Babiole laughed, much relieved. She evidently retained such a vivid impression of the thoughts which had preyed upon her excited mind on the previous evening that she was tormented by the fear or the dim remembrance of having given them expression. She now looked with awakening interest at the odd collection on the table.

'Are you making preparations for a fancy bazaar, Mr. Maude?' she asked, taking up a case which contained a gold thimble.

But she knew what the exhibition meant, and she was glad, though neither of us looked at the other as she put this question, and I made my answer.

'No; the bazaar is over, and these are the things left on my hands.'

'Then I am afraid--the bazaar--has not been very successful?' she hazarded playfully, but in a rather unsteady voice.

'Not very. My customers were discontented with their bargain, and wanted their money back.'

Babiole's sensitive face flushed suddenly with hot indignation.

'How dare she----' she began pa.s.sionately, and stopped.

'My dear Mrs. Scott, these girls dare anything!' said I lightly, in high spirits at the warmth with which she took up my cause. 'There is no respect left for the superior s.e.x now that ladies out-read us, out-write us, outshoot us, and out-fish us. And the end of it is that I wash my hands of them, and have made up my mind to die a bachelor!'

If she could have known how clearly her fair eyes showed me every succeeding emotion of her heart and thought of her brain, as I glanced with apparent carelessness at her face while I spoke, she would have died of shame. I had thought, on that night when I met her in London when she had charmed and yet pained me by her brilliant, graceful, but somewhat artificial manner, that she was changed, that I should have to learn my Babiole over again. But it was only the pretty little closed doors I had seen outside her shut-up heart. When the heart was called to, the doors flew open, and here was the treasure exposed again to every touch, so that I had read in her mobile face indignation, affection, jealousy, sympathy, and finally contentment, before she remarked in a very demure and indifferent manner--

'On the whole I am not sorry, Mr. Maude, that it is broken off. She wasn't half good enough for you.'

'Not good enough for me?' I cried in affected surprise. I was thirsting for her pretty praises. 'I'm sure everybody who knew me thought me a very lucky man.'

'n.o.body who knew both well could have thought that,' she answered very quietly. 'Wasn't she rude to mamma, whom you treated as if she were a queen? Is she not hard and overbearing in her manner to you, who have offered her the greatest honour you could give? And wasn't she, for all the cold charity she prides herself upon, distant and contemptuous to me when she knew I had been the object of _your_ charity for seven years?'

'Not charity, child----'

'Oh, but it was. Charity that was real, full of heart and warmth and kindness, that made the world a new place and life a new thing. Why, Mr. Maude, do you know what happened that night when you met us in the cold, outside the theatre at Aberdeen, when the manager had told us he didn't want us any more, and we knew that we had hardly money enough when we had paid for our lodging for that week to find us food for the next?'

There was colour enough in her face now, as she clasped her hands together and leant forward upon the table, with her blue eyes glistening, her sensitive lips quivering slightly, and a most sweet expression of affection and grat.i.tude illuminating her whole face. I gave her only an inarticulate, guttural murmur for answer, and she went on with a thrill in her voice.

'You spoke first, and mamma hurried on, not knowing your voice, and of course I went with her. But though I scarcely looked at you, and certainly did not recognise you, there was something in your manner, in the sound of your voice, though I couldn't hear what you said--something kind, something chivalrous, that seemed to speak to one's heart, and made me sorry she didn't stop. And then, you know, you came after us, and spoke again; and I heard what you said that time, and I whispered to mamma who you were. And then, while you were talking to her, and I only stood and listened, I felt suddenly quite happy, for a minute before I had wondered where the help was coming from, and now I knew. And I was right you see.' She bent her head, with an earnest face, to emphasise her words. 'So that when poor mamma used to warn me afterwards of the wickedness of men it all meant nothing to me. For I only knew one man, and he was everything that was good and n.o.ble, giving us shelter and sympathy and beautiful delicate kindness; and to me time and thought and care that made me, out of a little ignorant girl, a thinking woman. If that was not charity, what was it?'

Now I could have told her what it was; indeed with that little tender flower-face looking so ardently up into mine it did really need a strong effort not to tell her. In the flow of her grateful recollections she had forgotten that, the grandfatherly manner I had cultivated for so long perhaps aiding her; but I think, as I kept silence, a flash of the truth came to her, for she grew suddenly shy, and instead of going on with the list of my benefactions, as she had been evidently prepared to do, she took up the lace pocket-handkerchief which had been one of my gifts to Miss Farington, and became deeply interested in the pattern of the border. After a pause she continued in a much more self-controlled manner.

'If Miss Farington's charity had been real, she would have been interested in the people you had been kind to.'

'Now you do the poor girl injustice. She took the greatest possible interest in you, for she was jealous.'

'Jealous! Oh no,' said Babiole with unexpected decision; and she caught her breath as she went on rapidly. 'One may hate the people one is jealous of, but one does not despise them. One may speak of them bitterly and scornfully, but all the time one is almost praying to them in one's heart to have mercy--to let go what they care for so little, what one cares for one's self so much. One's coldness to a person one is really jealous of is only a thin crust through which the fire peeps and flashes out. Miss Farington was not jealous!'

It was easy enough to see that poor Babiole spoke from experience of the pa.s.sion; and this conviction filled me with rage against her husband, and against myself for having brought about her marriage with such an unappreciative brute. It is always difficult to realise another person's neglect of a treasure you have found it hard to part with; so I sat silently considering Fabian's phenomenal insensibility for some minutes until at last I asked abruptly--

'Who did he make you jealous of?'

Babiole, who had also been deep in thought, started.

'Fabian?' said she in a low voice. Then, trying to laugh, she added hastily, 'Oh, I was silly, I was jealous of everybody. You see I didn't know anything, and because I thought of n.o.body but him, I fancied he ought to think of n.o.body but me--which of course was unreasonable.'

'I don't think so,' said I curtly. 'Unless I gave a woman all my affection I shouldn't expect all hers.'

'Ah, _you_!' she exclaimed with a tender smile. 'There was the mistake; without knowing it I had been forming my estimate of men on what I felt to be true of you.' I did not look at her; but by the way in which she hurried on after this ingenuous speech, I knew that a sudden feeling of womanly shame at her impulsive frankness had set her blushing. 'But really Fabian was quite reasonable,' she went on. 'He only wanted me to give to him what he gave to me--or at least he thought so,' she corrected.

'And what was that?'

'Well, just enough affection to make us amiable towards each other when it was impossible to avoid a _tete-a-tete_.'

'But he can't have begun like that! He admired you, was fond of you.

No man begins by avoiding a bride like you!'

'Ah, that was the worst of it! For six weeks he seemed to worship me, and I--I never knew whether it was wet or fine--warm or cold. Every wind blew from the south for me, neither winter nor death could come near the earth again. We were away, you know, in Normandy and Brittany--when I try to think of heaven I always see the sea with the sun on it, and the long stretches of sand. Before we came back I knew--I felt--that a change was coming, that life would not be always like that; but I did not know, of course I could not know, what a great change it would be. Fabian said, "Our holiday is over now, dearest, we must get to work again! My Art is crying to me." Well, I was ready enough to yield to the claims of Art, real Art, not the poor ghost of it papa used to call up; and I was eager for my husband to take a foremost place among artists, as I knew and felt he could do.

But when we got back to England--to London--to this Art which was calling to us to shorten our holiday, I found--or thought I found--that it had handsome aquiline features, and a t.i.tle, and that it wore splendid gowns of materials which my husband had to choose, and that it found its own husband and its own friends wearisome, and--well, that Fabian was painting her portrait, which was to make his fortune and proclaim him a great painter.'

'Who was she?' I asked in a low voice.

She named the beautiful countess whose portrait I had seen on Scott's mantelpiece on the morning when I visited him at his chambers.

'She came to our rooms several times for sittings, as she had gone to his studio before he married me. But she found it was too far to come--Bayswater being so much farther than Jermyn Street from Kensington Palace Gardens!--and he had to finish the picture in her house. How the world swam round me, and my brain hammered in my head on those dreadful days when I knew he was with her, glancing at her with those very glances which used to set my heart on fire and make me silent with deep pa.s.sionate happiness. I had seen him look at her like that when he gave her those few sittings which she found so tiresome because, I suppose, of my jealous eyes. I never said anything--I didn't, indeed, Mr. Maude, for I knew he was the man, and I was only the woman, and I must be patient; but the misery and disappointment began to eat into my soul when I found that those looks I had loved and cherished so were never to be given to me again. At first I thought it would be all right when this portrait was painted and done with; this brilliant lady's caprice of liking for my clever husband would be over, and I should have, not only the careless kindness which never failed, but the old glowing warmth that I craved like a child starving in the snow. But it never came back.' A dull hopelessness was coming into her voice as she continued speaking, and her great eyes looked yearningly out over the feathery larches in the avenue to the darkening sky. 'When that picture was finished there were other pictures, and there were amateur theatricals to be superintended, where the "eye of a true artist" was wanted, but where there was no use at all for a true artist's wife. And there were little scented notes to be answered, and their writers to be called upon; and as I had from the first accepted Fabian's a.s.surance that an artist's marriage could be nothing more than an episode in his life, and that the less it interrupted the former course of his life the happier that marriage would be, there was nothing for me but to submit, and to live on, as I told you, outside.'

'But you were wrong, you should have spoken out to him--reproached him, moved him!' I burst out--jumping up, and playing, in great excitement, with the things on the mantelpiece, unable to keep still.