The Return of the Prodigal Part 56

XIV

After seven weeks in England Maurice Durant began to look back with longing on the seven years he had spent away from it, and so turned his back on Dover and his face to the South of France. Those three weeks in Coton Manor had disgusted him with the country, another three weeks in London had more than satisfied his pa.s.sion for town.

It was there that he realized more keenly than anywhere else that he was a foreigner in England, and he went abroad in order to feel himself an Englishman again.

Restless as ever, he spent two years wandering the world, then shut himself up for three more in a little villa in the Apennines, and worked as he had never worked before, with the result that at the end of the five years, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to England again. Gradually--very gradually--England was waking to the fact that Maurice Durant was a clever painter; still more gradually it had dawned on Maurice that he was becoming famous. His name had traveled to London, as a name frequently does, via Paris and New York, and Fame had lured him to London by dint of taking it up and incessantly sounding it, not with a coa.r.s.e and startling blast from her favorite instrument, the trumpet, but with a delicate crescendo, lyrically, subtly, insinuatingly, like a young siren performing on a well-modulated flute. The trumpet, no doubt, would have deafened or irritated him; but before he got sick of it the softer music was by no means disagreeable to his ear.

It seemed that he had scored a double success, being equally happy in his landscapes and his portraits. The critics were divided. One evening it would appear that, within the limits of his art, Maurice Durant was the subtlest, the finest exponent of modern womanhood; the next morning he would be told that he had rendered the beauty of the divine visible world more imaginatively, more individually, than any living artist, but that as a portrait painter he had yet to find himself. These were the variations on the one familiar theme; for as to his modernity, which was obvious, they were all agreed. But at last he came across an account of himself which he acknowledged to be more or less consistent and correct. It was the final appreciation, the summing up of a judge who was said to be the only man in England who had a right to his opinion. And this was his opinion of Maurice Durant:

"He stands in a unique and interesting position. On his right hand, the hand he paints with, are the heights unattainable by any but the great artists; on his left, the dizzy verge of popularity. As a matter of fact, he is neither popular nor great. His just horror of vulgarity will save him from the abyss; his equal fear of committing himself, of letting himself go, the fear, shall I say, of failure, of the fantastic or ridiculous att.i.tudes a man necessarily a.s.sumes in falling from a height, will keep him forever from the loftier way. It is not that his temperament is naturally timorous and cold; if he is afraid of anything, he is afraid of his own rashness, his own heat. There are about him delicacies and repugnances, a certain carefully cultivated restraint, and a half-critical, half-imaginative caution which, we submit, is incompatible with greatness in his art. But he has imagination."

A little more praise or a little more blame, and he would have suspected himself of genius; as it was, he was content to stand distinguished from the ruck of the popular and the respectable by virtue of that imagination which his critic had allowed to him. He was not a great painter, and he knew it; but he was a brilliantly clever one, and he knew that also, and in the fact and his intimate knowledge of it lay the secret of his success. He kept a cool head on his shoulders, and thus his position and the personal dignity depending on it were secure. He would never tumble from his height through the giddiness of vanity; and when the same high authority kept on a.s.suring the world, on the word of a critic, that Maurice Durant was branded with the curse of cleverness, that he was the victim of his own versatility, and that he had just missed greatness, Maurice merely remarked that he was glad to hear it, for he was sure that greatness would have bored him.

Whether it was the same ungovernable terror that restrained him from marrying, or whether he was the friend of too many women to be the lover of one, or whether he really was self-contained and self-sufficient, all this time he had remained single. His singleness had many advantages; it kept him free; it made it easy for him to get about from place to place and obtain an uninterrupted view of the world; it left an open way for his abrupt incalculable movements, his panic flights.

And as he had always fled from everything that disturbed and irritated him, so now, in the very middle of an English summer and a London season, he was flying from the sound of his own fame. Not far this time; only from the center to the verge, from Piccadilly pavement to the south coast. He had hired a small cutter for a month, and lived on board in much physical discomfort and intellectual peace. He hardly knew it by sight, that beautiful full face of his own country; but he was learning to know it as he sailed from the white cliffs to the red, from the red to the gray and black, the iron slopes and precipices of the Land's End.

He had just returned from a fortnight's cruise, and was wondering what he would do with the weeks that remained to him--whether he would explore the west coast of England or set sail for the Channel Islands--when he found himself, very lazy and very happy, lying at anchor in a certain white-walled harbor in the south of Cornwall. A neighboring regatta had carried off, the fleet of yachts that had their moorings there, and the harbor was dotted with fishing-boats, pilot-boats, ocean steamers, steam tugs, wherries, and such craft.

The little _Torch_, rocking madly on miniature waves as she played with her chain, was almost alone in her lightness and frivolity.

About an hour before midnight Durant woke in his berth, and felt this vivacity of hers increasing; larger waves lapped her and broke against her sides, but overhead, on deck, there was no sign of a wind. He got up, climbed the companion ladder, and put his head out over the hatch. A schooner yacht had come in, and lay straining at her cable in the narrow channel between the _Torch_ and a Portsmouth pilot. She had only just put into harbor, for her crew were still busy taking down her sails. As if it were her own movement alone that made her visible, she swayed there, dimly discerned, while she slipped her white canvas like a beauty disrobing in the dark, sail by sail, till she stood naked under a veil of dusk, and the light went up above her bows.

A restless thing that schooner yacht; her canvas was hardly lowered before it was up again. She had not long lain dreaming, pa.s.sive to the will of the tide. At sunrise she awoke, and what with her own swinging and vibration, and the voices and trampling of her joyous, red-capped, blue-jerseyed crew, there was no sleep for anyone in her neighborhood after three o'clock. So Durant rolled out of his berth, dressed hastily, and went on deck, eager to see her in her beauty, robed for the morning and the wind. There she was, so near now that he could almost have tipped a rope-end down her skylight from the skylight of the _Torch_, every line of her exquisite body new-washed in gold and shivering under the touches of the dawn. She was awake, alive; the life that had still beaten through her dreams in the night, stirred by the drowsy fingering of the harbor tide, was throbbing and thrilling with many pulses as she shook out her streamers to the wind. And now her mainsail went slowly up, and she leapt and shuddered through all her being, pa.s.sionate as though the will of the wind was her will.

Durant stared at her with undisguised admiration. She was a fair size for her kind, and from the sounds that came up through her cabin skylight he judged that she had a party on board. Standing on the deck of the _Torch_ in his light flannels, Durant looked much too long for his own ridiculously tiny cutter. He was so deeply absorbed in spelling out the letters on the yacht's life-belts--_Windward_--that he was quite unaware that he himself was an object of considerable interest to a lady who had just come on deck. Literally flying as he was from the sound of his own name, he was unprepared to hear it sung out in cheerful greeting.

"Mr. Durant!"

He started and blinked, unable to recognize the lady of the voice.

a.s.suming that he had once known, and since forgotten her, he had raised his cap on the chance.

She was trying to say something to him now, but the noise of the struggling sail cut off her words. She turned, and seemed to be calling to somebody else. Another lady, whom the sail had hidden from his sight till now, came forward and leaned eagerly over the rail, steadying herself by the shrouds. This lady did not shout his name; but, as her eyes met his across the narrow channel, she smiled--a smile he could not place or recognize or understand; he could only raise his cap to it blindly as before.

She was smiling still, while the first lady laughed, if possible in a more bewildering manner than before. "Don't you know us?" She seemed to be whispering across the gulf.

He shook his head in desperation, whereupon the second lady gave orders to the men to stop hoisting the mainsail.

"If you _are_ Mr. Durant, come on board!"

This time the voice was distinct in the silence that followed the hoisting of the sail. He knew that lady now.

And he knew the other also, though there was nothing but the turn of her head and the black accent over her eyes to remind him of Frida Tancred.

XV

"Well, is it all that you expected? Does the reality come up to the dream?"

"It does. I never knew a dream that tallied so exactly with the reality."

Frida was leaning back in a deck-chair, looking at Durant, who sat beside her on the schooner's rail.

For three days the _Windward_ had sailed up and down the coast of Cornwall; for three days the little _Torch_, with all sails set, wheeled round her moorings or followed her flight. Durant had accepted Miss Tancred's invitation to join them in a week's cruise in English waters. He spent his mornings in his own yacht, his afternoons and evenings on board the schooner. The proposal had been a G.o.dsend to him in his state of indecision. After his aimless wanderings he was exhilarated by this eager challenge and pursuit, absurdly pitting the speed of his own small craft against the swiftness and strength of the larger vessel. But he enjoyed still more sitting on the rail of the _Windward_ and talking to Frida.

There was something infinitely soothing in the society of a woman who knew nothing and cared nothing about his fame. He was not the only guest. Besides Miss Chatterton there was Mr. Manby, a little middle-aged gentleman, who called himself an artist; Miss Manby, a little middle-aged woman, who seemed to be his sister; and two little girls with their hair down their backs, his daughters, Eileen and Ermyntrude Manby. Durant was a good deal alone with Frida, for a stiff breeze had kept the artist and his sister much below, and Georgie and the little girls hardly counted.

They were alone now.

Frida had smiled as she spoke, a smile of intelligence and reminiscence; and he was irresistibly reminded of the first and last occasion when he had discoursed to her about realities.

"And what are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"With what? With the reality or the dream?"

"With both, with life--now you've got it?"

"Why should I do anything with it? Unless you're talking of moral obligations, which would be very tiresome of you."

"I'm not thinking of moral obligations."

"What were you thinking of, then?"

"I was thinking--of you."

Frida lay back a little further on her cushion as if she were withdrawing herself somewhat from his scrutiny. She clasped her hands behind her head; her face was uptilted to the sky.

His eyes followed her gaze. Over their heads the wind had piled up a great palace of white clouds; under the rifted floors the blue sky ran shallow in a faint milky turquoise, while above, between, beyond those aerial roofs and pinnacles and domes it deepened to _lapis lazuli_, luminous, transparent, light behind color and color behind light. The green earth looked greener under the low-lying shafts of blue and silver; far off, on the sea, the shadows of the clouds lay like the stain of spilt red wine.

"Who was the great man?" she asked with apparent irrelevance, "who said that women were incapable of a disinterested pa.s.sion for nature?"

He knitted his brows. Frida had proved a little disconcerting at times. He had had to begin all over again with her, aware that, though ostensibly renewing their old acquaintance, he was actually making a new one, to which faint recognitions and perishing reminiscences gave a bewildering, elusive charm. But Frida remembered many things that he had forgotten, and a certain directness and familiarity born of this superior memory of hers puzzled him and put him out. This time, however, he had a dreamy recollection.

"Fancy your remembering that!"

"I remember everything. At any rate, I remember quite enough to see that you're just the same; you haven't changed a little bit. Except that you don't look as you did the first night I met you."

"And how did I look then?"

She paused, carefully selecting her phrase. "You looked--as if--I'd given you a shock. You had expected something different. That dream did _not_ tally with the reality."

"How on earth----"

"How on earth did I know? You may not be aware of it, but you have a very expressive face."

"I was not aware of it."

Poor Durant. His face was expressive enough now in all conscience.

She held out her hand and laid it on his sleeve, and he remembered how she used to shrink from his touch.

"My dear Mr. Durant, don't look like that; it makes my heart bleed.

Of course I saw it. I saw everything. I saw your face looking over the banisters as I was going downstairs, when I've no doubt you thought you'd caught sight of a very pretty woman; and I saw it with a very different expression on it when you shook hands and found that the woman wasn't a bit pretty, after all. Of course it was a shock to you, and of course I understood. I knew so exactly how you felt, and I was so sincerely sorry for you."