The Return of the Prodigal Part 49

"What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want to see--the things----" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me so intolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can hardly bear to look at them."

He glanced at the drawings. _He_ could hardly bear to look at them either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of longing.

She took up the picture she had just laid down. "But _this_--it's not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world.

It would bring it so horribly near me--don't you see?"

He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered her eyelids. On to the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt.

She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by a tumult of vision and desire.

"If only I could get away--get away from this!"

It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight.

Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too.

"And why not get away?" he asked gently.

"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves.

If I once go, I shall never come back--never. There's no use thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking at it and touching it and letting it go."

"Do you apply that principle to everything?"

"Nearly everything."

"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise."

"Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to starvation after luxury?"

"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw a day. But in the end, you know, it dies."

"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it might not look pretty."

At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he forgave her because of her evident sincerity.

She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections.

So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm.

It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal effort not to be.

He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire her courage. That uncompromising att.i.tude was more dignified than the hesitations of weaker natures. When women set out with the bold intention of living resolutely in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful, they sometimes find themselves brought up sharply midway at the threshold of the Good; and there they stand vacillating all the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser values, there was something in her which would always mark her from Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or nothing; either four bare walls or the open road where there is no returning.

She would go no way where the Colonel could not follow.

Durant, on his way to bed that night, saw something that told him so much. Father and daughter stood with their backs to him at the end of the long corridor. The Colonel was putting out the lights.

Frida had just nodded good night to him at her bedroom door, when she turned impetuously and flung her arms round the little gentleman. She pressed his head against her neck and held it there an instant, a pa.s.sion of remorse and tenderness in the belated caress. The Colonel was, as it were, taken off his feet; he was visibly embarra.s.sed. Durant saw his eyes staring over her shoulder, in their profound stupidity helpless and uncomprehending.

VIII

It was Sunday afternoon, and they had been taking tea with Mrs.

Fazakerly. This was the second time that Durant had had the opportunity of studying Mrs. Fazakerly at home, of filling in the little figure on its own appropriate background. The first thing that struck him was that the background was not appropriate, or rather that it was inadequate. Mrs. Fazakerly's drawing-room had an air of uneasy elegance, of appearances painfully supported on the thin edge of two hundred a year. It was furnished with a too conspicuous care; the most insignificant details were arranged so as to lead up to and set off her good things, which were few and far between. There was no rest in it for the eye that was perpetually seized and riveted on some bit of old silver, or Oriental drapery, some Chippendale cabinet or chair. Such things were the commonplaces of Coton Manor, and there they fell un.o.btrusively into their place.

Here they were touched up and handled, posed out of all simplicity; they bore themselves accordingly with a shining consciousness of their own rarity; they made an unblushing bid for praise. In Mrs.

Fazakerly's drawing-room the note of taste was forced.

The invitation had come as a sort of farewell attention to Durant.

Its valedictory character was further emphasized by Mrs. Fazakerly's proposing to walk home with them, and finally falling into the rear with Durant.

As a turn in the drive brought them within sight of Coton Manor, Mrs. Fazakerly balanced her _pince-nez_ on the bridge of her nose.

It remained there, and he judged that Mrs. Fazakerly was in no mood for mirth.

"That house," said Mrs. Fazakerly, "annoys me."

"Why?"

"Because it hasn't had justice done to it."

"I should have thought that was a ground for pity rather than resentment."

Mrs. Fazakerly shrugged her shoulders ever so little. "That drawing-room--did you ever see anything like it? And such possibilities in it, too. I can't bear to think of all those beautiful things wasted, just for want of a little taste, a little arrangement--the right touch."

The widow's white fingers twitched. It was not vulgar cupidity; it was the pa.s.sion of the born genius, of the lover of art for art's sake, who sees his opportunity given into the hands of an inferior.

If only she had the ordering, the decoration of Coton Manor! Durant thought of the cottage at the gates, her cramped and humble sphere; it was not her fault so much as the defect of her instrument, that forcing of the note of taste; no wonder that she longed for the rich harmonies of Coton Manor under "the right touch," the touch of the master.

She continued, "But poor dear Miss Tancred, you know, she will have it left just as it was in Mrs. Tancred's time; she won't change a picture or a chair in it. That's Frida all over. She's made that house a monument to her mother's memory. And think what she might have made it."

"I'm thinking what she might have made of her life. She seems to be making that a monument to her father's memory."

"Ah! and the things she could have done with it."

Impossible to say whether Mrs. Fazakerly referred to Miss Tancred's house or her life. Durant smiled at her probable conception of Coton Manor, with its tragedy of splendid possibilities gone to waste; but Mrs. Fazakerly's idea cut both ways.

She sighed wearily.

"These drives were not made to be walked up. There's another mile and a half of it, and I'm half-dead already. I shall sit down."

She led the way to an elm tree fallen in the gra.s.s, examined it critically, sat down, and made a place for him at her side.

"So you're going to-morrow? Is that so?"

"It is--probably."

"It's a pity--just as you and Miss Tancred have made friends."

"The best of friends must part," said he lightly.

"Yes. Well, I'm glad you've managed to be nice to her, after all.

She's come out in the most astonishing manner since you came. What have you been doing to her?"