Dance of the Years Read online

  Some minutes later when he was leaving and the manservant was again conducting him across the marble chessboard, he saw something which reminded him of the conversation. Just before he reached the threshold a girl came hurrying in. She was about sixteen, he judged, but tall and well developed for her age. He guessed who she was, for she was startlingly like her father and had the same short nose and ingenuous blue eyes. She was hatless and breathless, and her hair, which was silken with much brushing, was slightly disarranged. Her muslin skirts were dimpled round the hems with the little sweethearts which grow on the jack-by-the-hedge, and her round, white collar was crumpled.

  James observed all these things casually, but her expression held his attention. There is a certain look, which in very young people is apt to be nothing short of transfiguring; it is an expression of intoxication, of unconcealable, inexpressible, overpacked happiness. There was blood in Miss Lizzie’s face, a shine in her eyes, and an unhidden smile on her mouth.

  James, who was not given to poetic thought, fancied that if flowers had sprung up between the marble blocks underneath her feet it would hardly have been astonishing.

  She ignored him and quite possibly did not see him, but ran on past him and up the stairs. The two men, James and the servant, had seen her though, and James, looking sharply at the other, intercepted the same wary glance from him.

  James rode off thinking of Mrs. Timson and wondering if she could be as much of a fool as she appeared, and too, idly, who it was Miss Lizzie had been meeting among the jack-by-the-hedge.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Miss Lizzie lay in her bed (which was small, and wore muslin flounces to hide its legs), and pulled the sheet up over her shoulders because she was not undressed. She was in great distress. Sin is a truly awful thing if one is honestly not used to it, and she was all but suffocated by fear of the uncontrollable urge which had sprung up in her to deceive Mama (who was now no longer Dear Mama but one of the Enemy) and go into the garden as she had promised Frank Castor. Her red and white room was as fussy and cluttered as a work-basket, but to-night its windows were wide open to a very different world.

  The air was warm and scented, and the garden was alive with whispers and a sort of breathy sighing she never remembered hearing before. The moonlight was very palely gold and had the magic property of making lovely things like trees lovelier, and commonplace things like wheelbarrows and potting sheds invisible. It was an hour of enchantment.

  At that moment she only meant to go out into the garden, really only that, only out in the garden. At the time Miss Lizzie was two people, two distinct girls; one of them, the more familiar Lizzie, was in a state of panic, terrified by the warning instincts which chattered inside her like voices just too far off to be heard. But the other Lizzie was astonishingly confident, entirely happy and possessed of alarming ingenuity in devising practical methods to attain her end. This new Lizzie was a frightening girl. She had a whole stream of logic to back her up, too, and had a way of suddenly producing fine arguments to which the yammering instincts of the good, everyday Lizzie could bring only vague, unsatisfactory replies. This had been shown very clearly in the battle they had just had over the Bible reading.

  When Lizzie had come in from her walk this afternoon her usual bout of silent day-dreaming had not satisfied her, and she had felt the need of liberating words to free her of some of the shattering excitement which was torturing her so unmercifully. Having no one in the world to whom she could talk she had tried to read, and it had been then that the new dominant Lizzie had decided on a certain passage, while the old Lizzie had protested feebly. To this objection the other Lizzie had taken up the Bible and let her finger run over the word “Holy” embossed in gold on the crimson morocco. So until the light failed, the two of them struggling in one little girl had sat and read the beautiful Eastern wedding idyll. Miss Lizzie read the verses just under her breath.

  “My beloved is mine and I am his:

  He feedeth his flock among the lilies

  Until the day be cool and the shadows flee away,

  Turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or young hart

  Upon the mountains of Bether.

  By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth,

  I sought, but I found him not.”

  Beautiful, kind words to one in great pain. There was one recurring phrase which rather frightened her, it came so often and was like a spell or a chant in a fairy tale:

  “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the hinds of the field that you stir not up nor awaken love until it please.”

  Miss Lizzie did not want it to say what she thought it might, and so she put it out of her mind and went on with the interchange of the main love song.

  As she had sat by her window catching the last dregs of the light on the tiny print, she looked like a picture from a Christmas Supplement, her hair was so smooth, her snood was in place, and the folds of her blue dress hung softly to the floor as she bent over the Book, yet no roe or hart on the mountains of Bether ever lifted his head with more eagerness than she did to look out of the window at the green leaves as she heard for the first time the dreadful calling music of the insistent earth.

  The normal Miss Lizzie Timson, who until three weeks ago had lived and suffered and been happy in a child’s way for over sixteen years, was a very good, if very ingenuous and affectionate little girl. She was not quite ordinary, however. She had her father’s gentle interest in the next human being, and had added to it a trick of her own, by which she was able to identify herself with almost anyone who might be near her. This was more than sympathy; it was a power to link up with, to suffer as, to enjoy for, to love in fact, practically anybody. It is a comparatively rare attribute, and since what it actually amounts to in sober fact is the gift for pooling human emotional force, it is the secret of man and highly dangerous if the rest of the human mechanism surrounding it is not ready for it.

  Lizzie’s ignorance of the ordinary reproductive machinery of the animal world was very nearly complete. Early and continuous assurances that certain matters were “not quite nice subjects for a young lady,” had convinced her that there was virtue in not knowing a great many things, and with some effort she had succeeded in making herself blind to much.

  Meanwhile everyone who met her loved her in the end, if only because she loved him. She never demanded anything from them, and was neither jealous or possessive; moreover, her affection was diffused, and thus never ugly or importunate. Always with her it was a giving and not a taking. Now she was grown and as artificially ignorant as if she had been reared in a padded bandbox; a very vulnerable, very dangerous young person.

  To-night as she pressed her head into the pillow and pulled the coverlet closer round her shoulders, she was trembling with the agony of the passion which was burning in her. She was a strong, healthy young thing for all her slenderness. Moreover, she was very feminine, very normal, and for six weeks now she had met Frank Castor nearly every day.

  Their acquaintance had progressed from deliciously exciting beginnings, through the miseries of doubt, and the delights of certainty to the crisis of a declaration. Since then there had been worry in it. New problems had arisen; new responsibilities; new urgencies. For ten days now he had been pleading with her to meet him in the garden at night where they could talk and kiss alone quietly without the constant fear of being overlooked. It seemed to them they wanted so little from the world, only that they should be left alone just for an hour, just for a breathing space.

  To-day Lizzie had consented, and now she was two-fifths afraid while the rest of her was a bundle of breathless anxiety for Mama to come in and get her good-night kiss over and done with.

  At last far down the corridor Mama’s door opened. The candle Mrs. Timson carried shed a thin stick of light under the door at first, and then as she came softly in, her dressing gown of gophered linen whispering over the shining boards, it made a wide, sharp shaft like the blade of a scimitar
.

  Mama was hardly thinking of Lizzie, and certainly not of her as a human being, and she said the things she always said in these days.

  “My darling not yet asleep? Surely the windows are too wide? Mama would not like Elizabeth to take cold!”

  Lizzie begged for them to be left open, and as usual Mrs. Timson was acquiescent. She sat on the end of the bed, her square face lit by the candle-light, and began to question gently. Where had Lizzie gone for her walk? To the mill? That was a pretty walk. As she came back through the water meadows had she met anybody? Only young Mr. Castor? Oh, with his tutor? Oh, not with his tutor? Had they spoken? Just for a moment no doubt? What a good-looking boy he was, wasn’t he? So reserved and shy, and yet so distinguished! Mama had heard his poor Papa was unwell. Perhaps when he grew better he would call upon Lizzie’s dear Papa, and they could all be friends. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Perhaps when Lizzie went out to-morrow she had better wear her grey merino with the wine braid. It was very becoming, and more formal than her muslin. Mama liked her little girl to be a credit to her, although Lizzie must never be vain. Vanity was not becoming in a woman. Gentlemen like her dear Papa did not like vain girls. A very charming gentleman called on Mama to-day—a Mr. James Galantry. It was an odd name, wasn’t it? Mama fancied she had heard of the Galantrys somewhere, they were some connection of Lord Driffield’s. Mr. Galantry was a very good-looking person, extraordinarily dark, though. Had Lizzie seen him? He was riding a very nice horse.

  Lizzie, who was well nigh fainting with guilt and its weariness, said she had seen him, and wasn’t he very old?

  This made Mama laugh. She said Mr. Galantry was a comparatively young man, younger than Mama, but not so young, of course, as Frank Castor. Frank Castor was really remarkably fair, wasn’t he? Well, little Lizzie must go to sleep now, and have a nice walk to-morrow!

  It was criminal of course, cruel to the point of insanity, but to do Mrs. Timson justice, she had no idea of it. She herself had been brought up very strictly but not in complete ignorance, and it simply had not occurred to her that the added grace in the marriage market which she had so carefully bestowed upon her daughter might easily have altered the entire make-up of the product. Had her own mother indulged in little day dreams before her, she would even at sixteen have followed the elder woman’s plan of campaign. The notion that Lizzie did not do so merely struck her as pleasant.

  Very happy in her own wisdom, she kissed Lizzie and trailed away to her own room. As soon as the last flicker of the candle-light slid away from under the door, Lizzie sprang out of bed and began to straighten her hair in a misery of haste. The Enemy had kept her too long. Perhaps Frank had thought she was not coming, and had gone home in despair. This very practical worry swept away any nattering of conscience, and she was free of it until she was safely in the garden.

  It was warm out of doors, and the turf deadened her footsteps. The avenue of small hollies and cedars, which would one day make two stuffy walls, was now broad and spacious. The hollyhocks and standard roses nodded between, and the shivering of the poplars made a noise like the sea a long way off.

  Lizzie walked unsteadily across the grass, and at last reached the new plaster temple which his architect had persuaded Mr. Timson was a necessity in any well-appointed garden. Once there she clung to one of its smooth pillars and struggled to get her breath, which would not come properly because of the thunderous beating of her heart.

  She had no mind left; nothing to think with at all. She was a quivering, disorganized, purely emotional machine. Tremendous forces, unlike anything it had ever before encountered, battled amid it. At one moment her body was racked with physical pain and the next was alive with pleasure, and all the while the “child in charge,” the owner of this paralysing phenomena, sat wide-eyed and silent among it.

  The boy came out of the little temple clumsily and almost fell in her arms. They were both aware of their awkwardness, and both brushed it aside as negligible. His first kiss missed her mouth altogether, and hurt the thin bone of her chin, but the next was more successful, and they clung together like drowning things, wretched, in desperate need and terribly afraid.

  Frank Castor was just seventeen. He was like his father, but had most of his mother’s discontent in his face, which was otherwise at this age beautiful and fair-skinned as a woman’s. He was quite as much in love as Lizzie and because of his sex very much more reckless. In stealing out at such an hour he was running a greater risk even than she was. He had been driven to more desperate shifts, and now that she was actually with him, his physical unease was greater.

  When they could speak, they walked up and down the little upper lawn which was hidden by the trees, and kept very close to each other, since parting was an agony.

  Their conversation was terrifying. They gabbled wearily through matters which in the normal way would have been interesting to both. There were details of Lizzie’s descent over the porch roof to be mentioned, and the important fact that Frank’s tutor, who actually slept in the room leading out of his own, was still drunk.

  “They,” their parents, the Enemy, were scarcely mentioned.

  The matter which absorbed the two was the mighty phenomenon itself.

  The boy was better educated than the girl, but he, too, had led something of the life of carefully fostered innocence which was coming into fashion. However, whereas she had only the Bible and certain carefully selected contemporary authors for information, he had had the Classics, but even so he was astounded. In all the books, in all the teachings, there had been no indication that love was like this. Agony and exultation are only words until the heart has spoken them, and no mind in the world can discover alone what the harts and the roes on the hillside know without any minds at all.

  The two went on whispering under the leaves, and presently the fatal words were said, as they are always said sooner or later, by the very young indeed.

  “Perhaps we are different.” The phrase slipped in as it was bound to, and the ancient towers of fantasy rose up on the insane, too-human surmise.

  After a little while they gave up talking. They were still desperately shy of one another, still in terror lest either should inadvertently offend; still appalled by the unexpected behaviour of their own bodies. Lizzie was fighting against a frightening weariness, and an overwhelming impulse to sit down; her waisted stays hurt her, and her legs ached, they were so heavy. Frank, on the other hand, felt himself possessed of superhuman strength, and a vast bounding energy which would not let him rest.

  They stood for a moment under one of the beeches which rose intensely black against the moon, A single shaft of the enchanted light sliding through the leaves fell on Lizzie’s face. Frank felt his heart move in him, so that he knew exactly where in his chest it hid. He thought her more beautiful than anything ever in the world. The discovery filled him with a sort of holy rapture, and he dropped on his knees in front of her, hiding his face against her hard little waist.

  The argument which convinced them both, as it has convinced millions of very young people ever since God started making them, was that nothing which produced such a passionate desire to be kind could possibly be wrong.

  After a while Lizzie bent over him and he, raising his head, found that her bodice was undone.

  Very tenderly, very sweetly, and with his ears burning for shame, he kissed her breast. It was an innocent crisis, a moment of satiety.

  Later, when they parted, he hugged her close to him protectingly and childishly. He would have liked to carry her in in triumph, and have rung all the bells and summoned all the lights. A rage against the Enemy, and the great compressing harness of civilized society, seized him.

  “To-morrow,” he said fiercely. “You’ll come again to-morrow?”

  “Every to-morrow,” she said, unaware of futility. “Always. I love you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was on the day after James had bought his new house, and before he had even thought of telling
her about it, that Phœbe told him of the proposal of marriage from the elderly Sir Robin Carver. The old man had been ogling her from his box all through the autumn season. James had seen him.

  Secretly James was rather full of the house. It was not the first he had bought by any means, for he liked to acquire property, and always put his money into it when he could; but this was the first purchase he had ever thought of living in himself. It was in Penton Place, off the Walworth Road, then in its youth and a highly select thoroughfare. It was not very big, eight or nine rooms at the most, but very elegant with double doors to throw the two parlours into one. It had two little gardens; a paved one in front with figures and dwarf shrubs, and a long one at the back, containing a pear tree, a mulberry tree, and a syringa with a seat round it.

  James had felt the pride of personal ownership when he mounted the stairs, and had suddenly imagined the wall was covered with red velvet paper, and had seen long sweeping curtains of bright red plush, with cords and tassels and great pelmets against expensive cream paint.

  The picture had suggested manageable elegance to his mind, and it had attracted him enormously.

  Now Phœbe had produced her news and stood watching him. They were in the big upstairs sitting-room of her lodgings in Drury Lane, in the house next door to the doctor’s shop. The room had a certain lazy grace, and was far older than the house in Penton Place. The window where they stood was big, and although it bulged out across the narrow road until one could almost lean out and shake hands with the bookbinder working in his shop opposite, yet there was plenty of yellow London light in the room, and the noise and the colour of the Lane ran along always, just below, like a pageant.

  Although James and Phœbe had been lovers for fifteen years, living always near if not actually with each other, yet anywhere that she was still filled him with that mixture of exultation, curiosity and surprise which is romance.