The Mating of Lydia Part 22

"Oh, but we're coming too, mother and I!" she said, in surprise. "Mr.

Faversham sent us a note. I don't believe he ought to have two sets of visitors just yet."

Tatham too was surprised. "How on earth Faversham is able to entertain anybody, I can't think! Undershaw told me last week he must get him away, as soon as possible, into decent quarters. He doesn't get on very fast."

"He's been awfully ill!" said Lydia, with a soft concern in her voice, which made the splendid young fellow beside her envious at once of the invalid. "Well, good-bye! for the moment. We have ordered the pony in half an hour."

"You'll see a queer place; the piggery that old fellow lives in! You didn't know Faversham--I think you said--before that day of the accident?" He looked down on her from the saddle.

"Not the least. I feel a horrid pang sometimes that I didn't warn him of that hill!"

"Any decent bike ought to have managed that hill all right," said Tatham scornfully. "Scores of tourists go up and down it every day in the summer."

Lydia bade him speak more respectfully of his native hills, lest they bring him also to grief. Then she waved good-bye to him; received the lingering bow and eager look, which betrayed the youth; thought of "young Harry with his beaver on," as she watched the disappearing horseman, and went back for a while to her needlework and cogitation.

That she was flattered and touched, that she liked him--the kind, courteous boy--that was certain. Must she really a.s.sume anything else on his part--take his advances seriously--check them--put up restrictions--make herself disagreeable? Why? During her training in London, Lydia had drunk of the modern spring like other girls. She had been brought up in a small old-fashioned way, by her foolish little mother, and by a father--a stupid, honourable, affectionate man--whom she had loved with a half-tender, half-rebellious affection. There had been no education to speak of, for either her or Susy. But the qualities and gifts of remoter ancestors had appeared in them--to the bewilderment of their parents. And when after her father's death Lydia, at nineteen, had insisted on entering the Slade School, she had pa.s.sed through some years of rapid development. At bottom her temperament always remained, on the whole, conservative and critical; the temperament of the humourist, in whose heart the old loyalties still lie warm. But that remarkable change in the whole position and outlook of women which has marked the last half century naturally worked upon her as upon others. For such persons as Lydia it has added dignity and joy to a woman's life, without the fever and disorganization which attend its extremer forms. While Susy, attending lectures at University College, became a Suffragist, Lydia, absorbed in the pleasures and pains of her artistic training, looked upon the suffrage as a mere dusty matter of political machinery.

But the ideas of her student years--those "ideas" which Tatham felt so much in his way--were still dominant. Marriage was not necessary. Art and knowledge could very well suffice. On the whole, in her own case, she aspired to make them suffice.

But not in any cloistered world. Women who lived merely womanish lives, without knowledge of and comradeship with men, seemed to her limited and parochial creatures. She was impatient of her s.e.x, and the narrowness of her s.e.x's sphere. She dreamed of a broadly human, practical, disinterested relation between men and women, based on the actual work of the world; its social, artistic, intellectual work; all that has made civilization.

"We women are starved"--she thought, "because men will only marry us--or make playthings of us. But the world is only just--these last years--open to us, as it has been open to men for thousands of generations. We want to taste and handle it for ourselves; as men do.

Why can't they take us by the hand--a few of us--teach us, confide in us, open the treasure-house to us?--and let us alone! To be treated as good fellows!--that's all we ask. Some of us would make such fratchy wives--and such excellent friends! I vow I should make a good friend! Why shouldn't Lord Tatham try?"

And letting her work fall upon the gra.s.s, she sat smiling and thinking, her pale brown hair blown back by the wind. In her simple gray dress, which showed the rippling beauty of every line, she was like one of these innumerable angels or virtues, by artists ill.u.s.trious or forgotten, which throng the golden twilight of an Italian church; drawing back the curtains of a Doge; hovering in quiet skies; or offering the Annunciation lily, from one side of a great tomb, to the shrinking Madonna on the other. These creations of Italy in her early prime are the most spontaneous of the children of beauty. There are no great differences among them; the common type is lovely; they spring like flowers from one root, in which are the forces both of Greece and the Italy of Leonardo.

It was their harmony, their cheerfulness, their touch of something universal, that were somehow reproduced in this English girl, and that made the secret of her charm.

She went on thinking about Tatham.

Presently she had built a castle high in air; she had worked it out--how she was to make Lord Tatham clearly understand, before he had any chance of proposing (if that were really in the wind, and she were not a mere lump of conceit), that marrying was not her line; but that, as a friend, he might rely upon her. Anything--in particular--that she could do to help him to a wife, short of offering herself, was at his service. She would be eyes and ears for him; she would tell him things he did not in the least suspect about the s.e.x.

But as to marrying! She rose from her seat, stretching her arms toward the sky and the blossoming trees, in that half-wild gesture which so truly expressed her. Marrying Duddon! that vast house, and all those possessions; those piles of money; those county relations, and that web of inherited custom which would lay its ghostly compulsion on Tatham's wife the very instant he had married her--it was not to be thought of for a moment! She, the artist with art and the world before her; she, with her soul in her own keeping, and all the beauty of sky and fell and stream to be had for the asking, to make herself the bond slave of Duddon--of that formidably beautiful, that fond, fastidious mother!--and of all the ceremonial and paraphernalia that must come with Duddon! She saw herself spending weeks on the mere ordering of her clothes, calling endlessly on stupid people, opening bazaars, running hospitals, entertaining house parties, with the _clef des champs_ gone forever--a little drawing at odd times--and all the meaning of life drowned in its trappings. No--no--_no!_--a thousand times, no! Not though her mother implored her, and every creature in c.u.mbria and the universe thought her stark staring mad. No!--for her own sake first; but, above all, for Lord Tatham's sake.

Whereat she repentantly reminded herself that after all, if she despised the world and the flesh, there was no need to give herself airs; for certainly Harry Tatham was giving proof--stronger proof indeed, of doing the same; if it were really his intention to offer his handsome person, and his no less handsome possessions to a girl as insignificant as herself. Custom had not staled _him_. And there was his mother too; who, instead of nipping the silly business in the bud, and carrying the foolish young man to London, was actually aiding and abetting--sending gracious invitations to dinner, of the most unnecessary description.

What indeed could be more detached, more romantic--apparently--than the att.i.tude of both Tatham and his mother toward their own immense advantages?

Yes. But they were born to them; they had had time to get used to them.

"It would take me half a lifetime to find out what they mean, and another half to discover what to do with them."

"And, if one takes the place, ought one not to earn the wages? Lady Tatham sits loose to all her social duties, scorns frocks, won't call, cuts bazaars, has never been known to take the chair at a meeting. But I should call that shirking. Either refuse the game; or play it! And of all the games in the world, surely, surely the Lady Bountiful game is the dullest! I _won't_ be bored with it!"

She went toward the house, her smiling eyes on the gra.s.s. "But, of course, if I could not get on without the young man, I should put up with any conditions. But I can get on without him perfectly! I don't want to marry him. But I do--I _do_ want to be friends!"

"Lydia! Mother says you'll be late if you don't get ready," said a voice from the porch.

"Why, I am ready! I have only to put on my hat."

"Mother thought you'd change."

"Then mother was quite wrong. My best cotton frock is good enough for any young man!" laughed Lydia.

Susan descended the garden steps. She was a much thinner and dimmer version of her sister. One seemed to see her pale cheeks, her dark eyes and hair, her small mouth, through mist, like a Whistler portrait. She moved very quietly, and her voice was low, and a little dragging. The young vicar of a neighbouring hamlet in the fells, who admired her greatly, thought of her as playing "melancholy"--in the contemplative Miltonic sense--to Lydia's "mirth." She was a mystery to him; a mystery he would have liked to unravel. But she was also a mystery to her family.

She shut herself up a good deal with her books; she had written two tragedies in blank verse; and she held feminist views, vague yet fierce.

She was apparently indifferent to men, much more so than Lydia, who frankly preferred their society to that of her own s.e.x; but Lydia noticed that if the vicar, Mr. Franklin, did not call for a week Susan would ingeniously invent some device or other for peremptorily inducing him to do so. It was understood in the family, that while Lydia enjoyed life, Susan only endured it. All the same she was a good deal spoilt. She breakfasted in bed, which Mrs. Penfold never thought of doing; Lydia mended her stockings, and renewed her strings and b.u.t.tons; while Mrs.

Penfold spent twice the time and money on Susan's wardrobe that she did on Lydia's. There was no reason whatever for any of these indulgences; but when three women live together, one of them has only to sit still, to make the others her slaves. Mrs. Penfold found her reward in the belief that Susan was a genius and would some day astonish the world; Lydia had no such illusion; and yet it would have given her a shock to see Susan mending her own stockings.

Susan approached her now languidly, her hand to her brow. Lydia looked at her severely.

"I suppose you have got a headache?"

"A little."

"That's because you will go and write poetry directly after lunch. Why it would even give _me_ a headache!"

"I had an idea," said Susan plaintively.

"What does that matter? Ideas'll keep. You have just to make a note of them--put salt on their tails--and then go and take a walk. Indigestion, my dear--which is the plain English for your headache--is very bad for ideas. What have you been doing to your collar?"

And Lydia took hold of her sister, straightening her collar, pinning up her hair, and generally putting her to rights. When the operation was over, she gave a little pat to Susan's cheek and kissed her.

"You can come with us to Threlfall, that would take your headache away; and I don't mind the back seat."

"I wasn't asked," said Susan with dignity. "I shall go for a walk by myself. I want to think."

Lydia received the intimation respectfully, merely recommending her sister to keep out of the sun; and was hurrying into the house to fetch her hat when Susan detained her.

"Was that Lord Tatham who came just now?"

"It was." Lydia faced her sister, holding up the note from Lady Tatham.

"We are all to dine with them next week."

"He has been here nearly every other day for a fortnight," said Susan, with feminine exaggeration. "It is becoming so marked that everybody talks."

"Well, I can't help it," said Lydia defiantly. "We are not a convent; and we can hardly padlock the gate."

"You should discourage him--if you don't mean to marry him."

"My dear, I like him so!" cried Lydia, her hands behind her, and tossing her fair head. "Marrying!--I hate the word."

"He cares--and you don't," said Susan slowly, "that makes it very unfair--to him."

Lydia frowned for a moment, but only for a moment.

"I'm _not_ encouraging him, Susy--not in the way you mean. But why should I drive him away, or be rude to him? I want to put things on a proper footing--so that he'll understand."

"He's going to propose to you," said Susan bluntly.

"Well, then, we shall get it over," said Lydia, reluctantly. "And you don't imagine that such a golden youth will trouble about such a trifle for long. Think of all the other things he has to amuse him. Why, if I broke my heart, you know I should still want to paint," she added, flippantly.