The Way of Ambition Part 29

"I suppose so. Why not?"

"Oh!" she said petulantly. "You remind me of Oliver Cromwell--somebody of that kind--you ought to have lived in Puritan days. It's England--England--England in you shrivelling you up. I'm sure in all Algiers there isn't one person (not English) who thinks as you do. But if you were to travel, if you were to give yourself a chance, how different you'd be!"

"Charmian, you impertinent child!" said Mrs. Mansfield, smiling, but in a voice that was rather sad.

"It's the Channel! It's the Channel! I'm not myself to-night!"

Heath laughed and said something light and gay. But as he went out of the room his face looked troubled.

As soon as he had gone, Charmian got up and turned to her mother.

"Are you very angry with me, Madre?"

"No. There always was a touch of the minx in you, and I suppose it is ineradicable. What have you been doing to your face?"

Charmian flushed. The blood even went up to her forehead, and for once she looked confused, almost ashamed.

"My face? You--you have noticed something?"

"Of course, directly you came down. Has Adelaide taught you that?"

"No! Are you angry, mother?"

"No. But I like young things to look really young as long as they can.

And to me the first touch of make-up suggests the useless struggle against old age. Now I'm not very old yet, not fifty. But I've let my hair become white."

"And how it suits you, my beautiful mother!"

"That's my little compensation. A few visits to Bond Street might make me look ten years younger than I do, but if I paid them, do you know I think I should lose one or two friendships I value very much."

Mrs. Mansfield paused.

"Lose--friendships?" Charmian almost faltered.

"Yes. Some of the best men value sincerity of appearance in a woman more than perhaps you would believe to be possible."

"In friendship!" Charmian almost whispered.

Again there was a pause. Mrs. Mansfield knew very well that a sentence from her at this moment would provoke in Charmian an outburst of sincerity. But she hesitated to speak that sentence. For a voice within her whispered, "Am I on Charmian's side?"

After a moment she got up.

"Bedtime," she said.

"Yes, yes."

Charmian kissed her mother lightly first on one eyelid then on the other.

"Dearest, it is good to be back with you."

"But you loved Algiers, I think."

"Did I? I suppose I did."

"I must get a book," said Mrs. Mansfield, going toward a bookcase.

When she turned round with a volume of Browning in her hand Charmian had vanished.

Mrs. Mansfield did not regret the silence that had saved her from Charmian's sincerity. In reply to it what could she have said to help her child toward happiness?

For did not the fact that Charmian had made up her face because she loved Claude Heath show a gulf between her and him that could surely never be bridged?

CHAPTER XI

Heath was troubled and was angry with himself for being troubled.

Looking back it seemed to him that he had taken a false step when he consented to that dinner with Max Elliot. Surely since that evening he had never been wholly at peace. And yet on that evening he had entered into his great friendship with Mrs. Mansfield. He could not wish that annulled. It added value to his life. But Mrs. Shiffney and Charmian in combination had come into his life with her. And they began to vex his spirit. He felt as if they represented a great body of opinion which was set against a deep conviction of his own. Their motto was, "The world for the artist." And what was his, or what had been his until now? "His world within the artist." He had fed upon himself, striving rather to avoid than to seek outside influences. After Charmian's return from Africa a persistent doubt a.s.sailed him. His strong instinct might be a blind guide. The opinion of the world, represented by the shrewd married woman and the intelligent girl, might have reason on its side.

Certainly Charmian's resolute a.s.sertion of herself on the evening of her return had been surprisingly effective. In an hour she had made an impression upon Heath such as she had failed to make in many weeks of their previous acquaintanceship. Her attack had gone home. "If you were to give yourself a chance how different you'd be!" And then her outburst about the island! There had been truth in it. Color and light and perfume and sound are material given out to the artist. He takes them, uses them, combines them, makes them his. He helps them! Ah! That was the word! He, as it were, gives them wings so that they may fly into the secret places, into the very hearts of men.

Heath looked round upon his hermitage, the little house near St.

Petersburg Place, and he was companioned by fears. His energies weakened. The lack of self-confidence, which often affected him when he was divorced from his work, began to distress him when he was working.

He disliked what he was doing. Music, always the most evasive of the arts, became like a mist in his sight. There were moments when he hated being a composer, when he longed to be a poet, a painter, a sculptor.

Then he would surely at least know whether what he was doing was good or bad. Now, though he was inclined to condemn, he did not feel certain even of inept.i.tude.

Mrs. Searle noted the change in her master, and administered her favorite medicine, Fan, with increasing frequency. As the neurasthenic believes in strange drugs, expensive cures, impressive doctors, she believed in the healing powers of the exceedingly young. Nor was Fan doubtful of her own magical properties. She supposed that her intense interest in herself and the affairs of her life was fully shared by Heath. Her confidences to him in respect of Masterman and other important matters were unbridled. She seldom strove to charm by listening, and never by talking to Heath about himself. Her method of using herself as a draught of healing was to draw him into the current of her remarkable life, to set him floating on the tides of her fate.

Heath had a habit of composing after tea, from five or five-thirty onward. And Fan frequently appeared at the studio door about half-past four, turned slightly sideways with an expectant glance into the large room with the book-lined walls, the dim paintings, and the orange-colored curtains. A faint air of innocent coquetry hung about her. After a pause and a smile from Heath, she would move forward with hasty confidence, sometimes reaching the hearthrug with a run. She was made welcome, petted, apparently attended to with a whole mind. But while she delivered her soul of its burden, at great length and with many indrawn breaths and gusts of feeling, Heath was often saying to himself, "Am I provincial?"

The word rankled now that Charmian had spoken out with such almost impertinent abruptness. Had he then lost faith in Mrs. Mansfield? She had never said that she wished him different from what he was. And indirectly she had praised his music. He knew it had made a powerful impression upon her. Nevertheless, he could not forget Charmian's words. Nor could he help linking her with Mrs. Shiffney in his mind.

Fan pulled at his sleeve, raising her voice. He was reminded of a little dog clawing to attract attention.

"Yes, Fantail! I mean no, of course not! If Masterman refuses to take a bath, of course you are obliged to punish him. Yes, yes, I know. Wear something? What? What's that? Like you? But he's a man. Very well, we'll get him a pair of trousers. No, I won't forget. Yes, like mine, long ones like mine. It'll be all right. Take care with that cup. I think mother must be wanting you. Press the bell hard. Well, use your thumb then. That's it--harder. There, you see, mother does want you. Harriet says so."

Harriet, discreet almost to dumbness though she was, was capable of receiving a hint conveyed by her master's expressive eyebrows. And Fan pa.s.sed on, leaving Heath alone with his piano. He played what he had played to Mrs. Mansfield to rea.s.sure himself. But he was not wholly rea.s.sured. And he knew that desire for a big verdict which often tortures the unknown creator. This was a new and, he thought, ugly phase in his life. Was he going to be like the others? Was he going to crave for notoriety? Why had the words of a mere girl, of no unusual cleverness or perception, had such an effect upon him? How thin she had looked that day when she emerged from her furs. That was before she started for Africa. The journey had surely made a great difference in her. She had come back more of a personage, more resolute. He felt the will in her as he had not felt it before. Till she came back he had only felt the strong soul in her mother. That was like an unwavering flame.

How Mrs. Mansfield's husband must have loved her.

And Heath's hands slipped from the piano, and he dreamed over women.

He was conscious of solitude.

Susan Fleet was now in town. After the trip to Algiers she had been to Folkestone to visit her mother and dear old Mrs. Simpkins. She had also combined business with pleasure and been fitted for a new coat and skirt. A long telegram from Adelaide Shiffney called her back to London to under-take secretarial and other duties. As the season approached Mrs. Shiffney's life became increasingly agitated. Miss Fleet was an excellent hand at subduing, or, if that were impossible, at getting neatness into agitation. She knew well how to help fashionable women to be absurd with method. She made their silliness almost business-like, and a.s.sisted them to arrange their various fads in apple-pie order. Amid their often hysterical lives she moved with a coolness that was refreshing even to them. She never criticized their actions except sometimes by tacitly declining to join in them. And they seldom really wanted her to do that. Her value to them would have been diminished, if not destroyed, had she been quite as they were.

For the moment she was in Grosvenor Square.