The Incomplete Amorist

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"I'm very sorry," she said, "but it's only water colour. It will wash
out."

"You are nearly twenty, are you not?" the Vicar inquired with the dry
smile that always infuriated his step-daughter. How was she to know
that it was the only smile he knew, and that smiles of any sort had
long grown difficult to him?

"Eighteen," she said.

"It is almost time you began to think about being a lady."

This was badinage. No failures had taught the Reverend Cecil that his
step-daughter had an ideal of him in which badinage had no place. She
merely supposed that he wished to be disagreeable.

She kept a mutinous silence. The old man sighed. It is one's duty to
correct the faults of one's child, but it is not pleasant. The
Reverend Cecil had not the habit of shirking any duty because he
happened to dislike it.

The mutton was taken away.

Betty, her whole being transfigured by the emotions of the morning,
stirred the stewed rhubarb on her plate. She felt rising in her a sort
of wild forlorn courage. Why shouldn't she speak out? Her step-father
couldn't hate her more than he did, whatever she said. He might even
be glad to be rid of her. She spoke suddenly and rather loudly before
she knew that she had meant to speak at all.

"Father," she said, "I wish you'd let me go to Paris and study art.
Not now," she hurriedly explained with a sudden vision of being taken
at her word and packed off to France before six o'clock on Monday
morning, "not now, but later. In the autumn perhaps. I would work very
hard. I wish you'd let me."

He put on his spectacles and looked at her with wistful kindness. She
read in his glance only a frozen contempt.

"No, my child," he said. Paris is a sink of iniquity. I passed a week
there once, many years ago. It was at the time of the Great
Exhibition. You are growing discontented, Lizzie. Work is the cure for
that. Mrs. Symes tells me that the chemises for the Mother's sewing
meetings are not cut out yet."

"I'll cut them out to-day. They haven't finished the shirts yet,
anyway," said Betty; "but I do wish you'd just think about Paris, or
even London."

"You can have lessons at home if you like. I believe there are
excellent drawing-mistresses in Sevenoaks. Mrs. Symes was recommending
one of them to me only the other day. With certificates from the High
School I seem to remember her saying."

"But that's not what I want," said Betty with a courage that surprised
her as much as it surprised him. "Don't you see, Father? One gets
older every day, and presently I shall be quite old, and I shan't have
been anywhere or seen anything."

He thought he laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought
his laugh the most contemptuous, the cruelest sound in the world. "He
doesn't deserve that I should tell him about Him," she thought, "and I
won't. I don't care!"

"No, no," he said, "no, no, no. The home is the place for girls. The
safe quiet shelter of the home. Perhaps some day your husband will
take you abroad for a fortnight now and then. If you manage to get a
husband, that is."

He had seen, through his spectacles, her flushed prettiness, and old
as he was he remembered well enough how a face like hers would seem to
a young man's eyes. Of course she would get a husband? So he spoke in
kindly irony. And she hated him for a wanton insult.

"Try to do your duty in that state of life to which you are called,"
he went on: "occupy yourself with music and books and the details of
housekeeping. No, don't have my study turned out," he added in haste,
remembering how his advice about household details had been followed
when last he gave it. "Don't be a discontented child. Go and cut out
the nice little chemises." This seemed to him almost a touch of kindly
humour, and he went back to Augustine, pleased with himself.

Betty set her teeth and went, black rage in her heart, to cut out the
hateful little chemises.

She dragged the great roll of evil smelling grayish unbleached calico
from the schoolroom cupboard and heaved it on to the table. It was
very heavy. The scissors were blunt and left deep red-blue
indentations on finger and thumb. She was rather pleased that the
scissors hurt so much.

"Father doesn't care a single bit, he hates me," she said, "and I hate
him. Oh, I do."

She would not think of the morning. Not now, with this fire of
impotent resentment burning in her, would she take out those memories
and look at them. Those were not thoughts to be dragged through the
litter of unbleached cotton cuttings. She worked on doggedly,
completed the tale of hot heavy little garments, gathered up the
pieces into the waste-paper basket and put away the roll.

Not till the paint had been washed from her hands, and the crumbled
print dress exchanged for a quite respectable muslin did she
consciously allow the morning's memories to come out and meet her
eyes. Then she went down to the arbour where she had shelled peas only
that morning.

"It seems years and years ago," she said. And sitting there, she
slowly and carefully went over everything. What he had said, what she
had said. There were some things she could not quite remember. But she
remembered enough. "Brother artists" were the words she said oftenest
to herself, but the words that sank themselves were, "young and
innocent and beautiful like--like--"

"But he couldn't have meant me, of course," she told herself.

And on Monday she would see him again,--and he would give her a
lesson!

Sunday was incredibly wearisome. Her Sunday-school class had never
been so tiresome nor so soaked in hair-oil. In church she was shocked
to find herself watching, from her pew in the chancel, the entry of
late comers--of whom He was not one. No afternoon had ever been half
so long. She wrote up her diary. Thursday and Friday were quickly
chronicled. At "Saturday" she paused long, pen in hand, and then wrote
very quickly: "I went out sketching and met a gentleman, an artist. He
was very kind and is going to teach me to paint and he is going to
paint my portrait. I do not like him particularly. He is rather old,
and not really good-looking. I shall not tell father, because he is
simply hateful to me. I am going to meet this artist at 6 to-morrow.
It will be dreadful having to get up so early. I almost wish I hadn't
said I would go. It will be such a bother."

Then she hid the diary in a drawer, under her confirmation dress and
veil, and locked the drawer carefully.

He was not at church in the evening either. He had thought of it, but
decided that it was too much trouble to get into decent clothes.

"I shall see her soon enough," he thought, "curse my impulsive
generosity! Six o'clock, forsooth, and all to please a clergyman's
daughter."

She came back from church with tired steps.

"I do hope I'm not going to be ill," she said. "I feel so odd, just as
if I hadn't had anything to eat for days,--and yet I'm not a bit
hungry either. I daresay I shan't wake up in time to get there by
six."

She was awake before five.

She woke with a flutter of the heart. What was it? Had anything
happened? Was anyone ill? Then she recognized that she was not
unhappy. And she felt more than ever as though it were days since she
had had anything to eat.

"Oh, dear," said Betty, jumping out of bed. "I'm going out, to meet
Him, and have a drawing-lesson!"

She dressed quickly. It was too soon to start. Not for anything must
she be first at the rendezvous, even though it were only for a
drawing-lesson. That "only" pulled her up sharply.

When she was dressed she dug out the diary and wrote:

"This is terrible. Is it possible that I have fallen in love with
him? I don't know. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'
It is a most frightful tragedy to happen to one, and at my age too.
What a long life of loneliness stretches in front of me! For of
course he could never care for me. And if this _is_ love--well, it
will be once and forever with me, I know.

"That's my nature, I'm afraid. But I'm not,--I can't be. But I never
felt so unlike myself. I feel a sort of calm exultation, as if
something very wonderful was very near me. Dear Diary, what a
comfort it is to have you to tell everything to!"

It seemed to her that she must certainly be late. She had to creep
down the front stairs so very slowly and softly in order that she
might not awaken her step-father. She had so carefully and silently to
unfasten a window and creep out, to close the window again, without
noise, lest the maids should hear and come running to see why their
young mistress was out of her bed at that hour. She had to go on
tiptoe through the shrubbery and out through the church yard. One
could climb its wall, and get into the Park that way, so as not to
meet labourers on the road who would stare to see her alone so early
and perhaps follow her.

Once in the park she was safe. Her shoes and her skirts were wet with
dew. She made haste. She did not want to keep him waiting.

But she was first at the rendezvous, after all.

She sat down on the carpet of pine needles. How pretty the early
morning was. The sunlight was quite different from the evening
sunlight, so much lighter and brighter. And the shadows were
different. She tried to settle on a point of view for her sketch, the
sketch he was to help her with.

Her thoughts went back to what she had written in her diary. If that
_should_ be true she must be very, very careful. He must never guess
it, never. She would be very cold and distant and polite. Not
hail-fellow well-met with a "brother artist," like she had been
yesterday. It was all very difficult indeed. Even if it really did
turn out to be true, if the wonderful thing had happened to her, if
she really was in love she would not try a bit to make him like her.
That would be forward and "horrid." She would never try to attract any
man. Those things must come of themselves or not at all.

She arranged her skirt in more effective folds, and wondered how it
would look as one came up the woodland path. She thought it would look
rather picturesque. It was a nice heliotrope colour. It would look
like a giant Parma violet against the dark green background. She hoped
her hair was tidy. And that her hat was not very crooked. However
little one desires to attract, one may at least wish one's hat to be
straight.

She looked for the twentieth time at her watch, the serviceable silver
watch that had been her mother's. Half-past six, and he had not come.

Well, when he did come she would pretend she had only just got there.
Or how would it be if she gave up being a Parma violet and went a
little way down the path and then turned back when she heard him
coming? She walked away a dozen yards and stood waiting. But he did
not come. Was it possible that he was not coming? Was he ill--lying
uncared for at the Peal of Bells in the village, with no one to smooth
his pillow or put eau-de-cologne on his head?

She walked a hundred yards or so towards the village on the spur of
this thought.

Or perhaps he had come by another way to the trysting place? That
thought drove her back. He was not there.

Well, she would not stay any longer. She would just go away, and come
back ever so much later, and let him have a taste of waiting. She had
had her share, she told herself, as she almost ran from the spot. She
stopped suddenly. But suppose he did _not_ wait? She went slowly back.

She sat down again, schooled herself to patience.

What an idiot she had been! Like any school-girl. Of course he had
never meant to come. Why should he? That page in her diary called out
to her to come home and burn it. Care for him indeed! Not she! Why she
hadn't exchanged ten words with the man!

"But I knew it was all nonsense when I wrote it," she said. "I only
just put it down to see what it would look like."

* * * * *

Mr. Eustace Vernon roused himself, and yawned.

"It's got to be done, I suppose. Buck up,--you'll feel better after
your bath! Jove! Seven o'clock. Will she have waited? She's a keen
player if she has. It's just worth trying, I suppose."

The church clock struck the half-hour as he turned into the wood.
Something palely violet came towards him.

"So you _are_ here," he said. "Where's the pink frock?"

"It's--it's going to the wash," said a stiff and stifled voice. "I'm
sorry I couldn't get here at six. I hope you didn't wait long?"

"Not very long," he said, smiling; "but--Great Heavens, what on earth
is the matter?"

"Nothing," she said.

"But you've been--you are--"

"I'm not," she said defiantly,--"besides, I've got neuralgia. It
always makes me look like that."

"My Aunt!" he thought. "Then she _was_ here at six and--she's been
crying because I wasn't and--oh, where are we?" "I'm so sorry you've
got neuralgia," he said gently, "but I'm awfully glad you didn't get
here at six. Because my watch was wrong and I've only just got here,
and I should never have forgiven myself if you'd waited for me a
single minute. Is the neuralgia better now?"

"Yes," she said, smiling faintly, "much better. It was rather sharp
while it lasted, though."

"Yes," he said, "I see it was. I am so glad you did come. But I was so
certain you wouldn't that I didn't bring any of my traps. So we can't
begin the picture to-day. Will you start a sketch, or is your
neuralgia too bad?"

He knew it would be: and it was.

So they merely sat on the pine carpet and talked till it was time for
her to go back to the late Rectory breakfast. They told each other
their names that day. Betty talked very carefully. It was most
important that he should think well of her. Her manner had changed, as
she had promised herself it should do if she found she cared for him.
Now she was with him she knew, of course, that she did not care at
all. What had made her so wretched--no, so angry that she had actually
cried, was simply the idea that she had been made a fool of. That she
had kept the tryst and he hadn't. Now he had come she was quite calm.
She did not care in the least.

He was saying to himself: "I'm not often wrong, but I was off the line
yesterday. All that doesn't count. We take a fresh deal and start
fair. She doesn't know the game, _mais elle a des moyens_. She's never
played the game before. And she cried because I didn't turn up. And so
I'm the first--think of it, if you please--absolutely the first one!
Well: it doesn't detract from the interest of the game. It's quite a
different game and requires more skill. But not more than I have,
perhaps."

They parted with another tryst set for the next morning. The brother
artist note had been skilfully kept vibrating.

Betty was sure that she should never have any feeling for him but mere
friendliness. She was glad of that. It must be dreadful to be really
in love. So unsettling.

CHAPTER III.

VOLUNTARY.

Mr. Eustace Vernon is not by any error to be imagined as a villain of
the deepest dye, coldly planning to bring misery to a simple village
maiden for his own selfish pleasure. Not at all. As he himself would
have put it, he meant no harm to the girl. He was a master of two
arts, and to these he had devoted himself wholly. One was the art of
painting. But one cannot paint for all the hours there are. In the
intervals of painting Vernon always sought to exercise his other art.
One is limited, of course, by the possibilities, but he liked to have
always at least one love affair on hand. And just now there were
none--none at least possessing the one charm that irresistibly drew
him--newness. The one or two affairs that dragged on merely meant
letter writing, and he hated writing letters almost as much as he
hated reading them.

The country had been unfortunately barren of interest until his eyes
fell on that sketching figure in the pink dress. For he respected one
of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of
painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking a vulgar love-affair. He
was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn
in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare
with him in which one finds anything to say to a little milliner. He
wanted the means, not the end, and was at one with the unknown sage
who said: "The love of pleasure spoils the pleasure of love."

There is a gift, less rare than is supposed, of wiping the slate clean
of memories, and beginning all over again: a certain virginity of soul
that makes each new kiss the first kiss, each new love the only love.
This gift was Vernon's, and he had cultivated it so earnestly, so
delicately, that except in certain moods when he lost his temper, and
with it his control of his impulses, he was able to bring even to a
conservatory flirtation something of the fresh emotion of a schoolboy
in love.

Betty's awkwardnesses, which he took for advances, had chilled him a
little, though less than they would have done had not one of the
evil-tempered moods been on him.

He had dreaded lest the affair should advance too quickly. His own
taste was for the first steps in an affair of the heart, the delicate
doubts, the planned misunderstandings. He did not question his own
ability to conduct the affair capably from start to finish, but he
hated to skip the dainty preliminaries. He had feared that with Betty
he should have to skip them, for he knew that it is only in their
first love affairs that women have the patience to watch the flower
unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He
bit his lip and struck with his cane at the buttercup heads. He had
made a wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet." his "young and
innocent and beautiful like--like." If the girl had been a shade less
innocent the whole business would have been muffed--muffed hopelessly.

To-morrow he would be there early. A ship of promise should be--not
launched--that was weeks away. The first timbers should be felled to
build a ship to carry him, and her too, of course, a little way
towards the enchanted islands.

He knew the sea well, and it would be pleasant to steer on it one to
whom it was all new--all, all.

"Dear little girl," he said, "I don't suppose she has ever even
thought of love."

He was not in love with her, but he meant to be. He carefully thought
of her all that day, of her hair, her eyes, her hands; her hands were
really beautiful--small, dimpled and well-shaped--not the hands he
loved best, those were long and very slender,--but still beautiful.
And before he went to bed he wrote a little poem, to encourage himself:

Yes. I have loved before; I know
This longing that invades my days,
This shape that haunts life's busy ways
I know since long and long ago.

This starry mystery of delight
That floats across my eager eyes,
This pain that makes earth Paradise,
These magic songs of day and night,

I know them for the things they are:
A passing pain, a longing fleet,
A shape that soon I shall not meet,
A fading dream of veil and star.

Yet, even as my lips proclaim
The wisdom that the years have lent,
Your absence is joy's banishment
And life's one music is your name.

I love you to the heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How can one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!

When he read it through he entitled it, "The Veil of Maya," so that it
might pretend to have no personal application.

After that more than ever rankled the memory of that first morning.

"How could I?" he asked himself. "I must indeed have been in a gross
mood. One seems sometimes to act outside oneself altogether. Temporary
possession by some brutal ancestor perhaps. Well, it's not too late."

Next morning he worked at his picture, in the rabbit-warren, but his
head found itself turning towards the way by which on that first day
she had gone. She must know that on a day like this he would not be
wasting the light,--that he would be working. She would be wanting to
see him again. Would she come out? He wished she would. But he hoped
she wouldn't. It would have meant another readjustment of ideas. He
need not have been anxious. She did not come.

He worked steadily, masterfully. He always worked best at the
beginning of a love affair. All of him seemed somehow more alive, more
awake, more alert and competent. His mood was growing quickly to what
he meant it to be. He was what actors call a quick study. Soon he
would be able to play perfectly, without so much as a thought to the
"book," the part of Paul to this child's Virginia.

Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the step-father whom
she so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink? Relations who might
interfere and pray and meddle and spoil things?

However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be
concealed. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan she
sometimes pretended to herself to be. She had aunts--an accident that
may happen to the best of us.

A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth
left Harrow and went to Ealing where he was received in a family in
the capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his
daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who
knew exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had
taught her to know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly of
youth--not her own youth--taught her how to get it. There were several
pups. She selected the most eligible, secretly married him, and to the
day of her death spoke and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He
was a dreamy youth, who wrote verses and called the Crammer's daughter
his Egeria. She was too clever not to be kind to him, and he adored
her and believed in her to the end, which came before his twenty-first
birthday. He broke his neck out hunting, and died before Betty was
born.

His people, exasperated at the news of the marriage, threatened to try
to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been
needed to get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four.
Egeria was frightened. She compromised for an annuity of two hundred
pounds, to be continued to her child.

The passion of this woman's life was power. One cannot be very
powerful with just two hundred a year, and a doubtful position as the
widow of a boy whose relations are prepared to dispute one's marriage.
Mrs. Desmond spent three years in thought, and in caring severely for
the wants of her child. Then she bought four handsome dresses, and
some impressive bonnets, went to a Hydropathic Establishment, and
looked about her. Of the eligible men there Mr. Cecil Underwood
seemed, on enquiry, to be the most eligible. So she married him. He
resisted but little, for his parish needed a clergywoman sadly. The
two hundred pounds was a welcome addition to an income depleted by the
purchase of rare editions, and at the moment crippled by his recent
acquisition of the Omiliac of Vincentius in its original oak boards
and leather strings; and, above all, he saw in the three-year-old
Betty the child he might have had if things had gone otherwise with
him and another when they both were young.

Mrs. Desmond had felt certain she could rule a parish. Mrs. Cecil
Underwood did rule it--as she had known she could. She ruled her
husband too. And Betty. When she caught cold from working all day
among damp evergreens for the Christmas decorations, and, developing
pneumonia, died, she died resentfully, thanking God that she had
always done her duty, and quite unable to imagine how the world would
go on without her. She felt almost sure that in cutting short her
career of usefulness her Creator was guilty of an error of judgment
which He would sooner or later find reason to regret.

Her husband mourned her. He had the habit of her, of her strong
capable ways, the clockwork precision of her household and parish
arrangements. But as time went on he saw that perhaps he was more
comfortable without her: as a reformed drunkard sees that it is better
not to rely on brandy for one's courage. He saw it, but of course he
never owned it to himself.

Betty was heart-broken, quite sincerely heart-broken. She forgot all
the mother's hard tyrannies, her cramping rules, her narrow bitter
creed, and remembered only the calm competence, amounting to genius,
with which her mother had ruled the village world, her unflagging
energy and patience, and her rare moments of tenderness. She
remembered too all her own lapses from filial duty, and those memories
were not comfortable.

Yet Betty too, when the self-tormenting remorseful stage had worn
itself out, found life fuller, freer without her mother. Her
step-father she hated--had always hated. But he could be avoided. She
went to a boarding-school at Torquay, and some of her holidays were
spent with her aunts, the sisters of the boy-father who had not lived
to see Betty.

She adored the aunts. They lived in a world of which her village world
did not so much as dream; they spoke of things which folks at home
neither knew of nor cared for; and they spoke a language that was not
spoken at Long Barton. Of course, everyone who was anyone at Long
Barton spoke in careful and correct English, but no one ever troubled
to turn a phrase. And irony would have been considered very bad form
indeed. Aunt Nina wore lovely clothes and powdered her still pretty
face; Aunt Julia smoked cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long
Barton did not use. Betty was proud of them both.

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