Chapter III

MAGGIE was sitting up as usual one evening in June for Marion's return from the Opera. Certainly it disorganised her Rule of Life deplorably, for it was extremely difficult to be punctual at the Carmelite church next morning at seven, if she didn't get to bed till half-past twelve or one; but she had begun by declaring that Marion should never come home and find herself lonely; and having declared so, Maggie would have died sooner than omit the ceremony. The ceremony was sometimes very short, and consisted in no more than two sentences and a kiss, followed by an immediate departure upstairs, staggering with sleep, while Marion supped alone: but it was done. On very special occasions, such as that on which no less than eight Royal-ties had occupied the Royal Box, and the whole place had been hung with loyal paper roses, Maggie had been compelled to remain while Marion ate and drank and talked: she even watched her smoke a single cigarette. Plainly, therefore, Maggie, on the two evenings a week on which Marion sang, had a great deal of time on her hands. She did some extra spiritual reading, and recited the whole of her rosary all over again for her friend's success: but one cannot spiritually read forever. Therefore sheTiad time to think, interrupted only by Rhadamanthus muttering oaths in his sleep, and ruffling his feathers with a rattle.

She was beginning to be faintly uneasy, and, fatally enough, thought she knew why. The reason for her uneasiness she maintained was that Marion's manner had developed secretiveness. Yet she did not honestly suspect that Marion had anything whatever to be secretive about; it was the manner, not the matter, that troubled her. What secrets could such a child have?

This particular evening, between snatches of sleep, she had been rehearsing, for her own comfort, the extraordinary number of things in which Marion had been especially nice to her.

First there had been the affair of the motor, six weeks ago. Marion had not breathed a word of it, until suddenly one morning after breakfast, she had said that she had bought a little present. Maggie had inquired what this might be; and had been bidden to go and look in the street; and there was the shining gift, with a man in livery, electric lights inside, a pocket with innumerable road maps, a wolf-skin rug, and a bunch of real lilies of the valley in a little crystal tube set in silver. Maggie had not yet nearly got over the shock.

Then there had been the photograph. Maggie had mentioned one evening, when she had gone to fetch Marion from Covent Garden, and had waited a long time in the entrance-hall, that she particularly liked that particular photograph which, nearly life-size, hung at the foot of the stairs. Nothing had happened at all for a week; and then Marion, who said she had been to Farm Street, added that a replica of the photograph would arrive in a day or two.

But those were only outward signs of inward grace. That which really appealed to Maggie far more was Marion's delightful reasonableness about Mr. Merival.

It was true that he had dined with them once or twice on off -nights; but they had both been exceedingly friendly, and had not even hinted that they wished to have a private talk. Really Mr. Merival was charming, thought Maggie — so frank and open in everything. But, above all, what delighted the poor lady was that Marion hardly ever asked leave to ride with him; and once, on the occasion of an evening party at Cheriton House in May, had come back and confessed frankly that she had sat with Mr. Merival for a few minutes in the garden, but that she thought that oughtn't to count, as it was in his mother's house.

Then how, Maggie demanded of herself at the end of all those reflections, for the fiftieth time, could she dare to suspect her friend of even a shadow of secretiveness?

She awoke with a start, ten minutes later, and there was Marion laughing at her.

*' My dearest darling," said the girl, coming forward, still in her light silk and swansdown hood. " You look an absolute angel when you're asleep."

Rhadamanthus chuckled ironically under his green baize cover.

" Have you come back already? " demanded Maggie feebly.

" No: not yet," said Marion with complete gravity. " I'm still in my dressing-room at Covent Garden taking off my things. I shall arrive in about twenty minutes, so you'd better be waking up. Cucumber sandwiches! How delicious and how unwholesome! "

She sat down at the little round table drawn up on the bearskin in front of the great hearth with the portrait of Richard Wagner over it.

" Everything well? " asked Maggie, rubbing her eyes.

" Everything supreme. But Kurvenal is really too fat. He went up and down like a bellows after he was supposed to be dead. / saw him."

Maggie was awake at last.

" Kurvenal! " she said. " I remember him perfectly at Bayreuth, too. He was a fat man there, too. Perhaps it's the same. He had a very short tunic on, too, which made him look all the fatter. My dearest, you're eating too many of those sandwiches. And did you sing well? "

" I sang exquisitely," said Marion. " An old gentleman in front sobbed like a... like a... like an old gentleman at the Liebestod. Old gentlemen always like me: I'm sure I can't think why. A German old gentleman knelt right down in the street the other night, and kissed the edge of my cloak as I got into the motor."

" My dear! How dreadful for you! "

" Not at all. I liked it. I nearly kissed the top of his head in return: only it was too bald.... Maggie, I've got an idea. I've been thinking about it all today, and made up my mind just before I died. The poisoned cup was still in my hand. What about those maid-servants of yours? "

" Well, my dear; what about them? They're very good little souls. I wish I was as sure of heaven as they are. Why, there was one the other day "

" Yes: all right. But what I want to know is this. Haven't you got some sort of Home for them when they're out of work? You said something about it the other day. Only you're always so secretive, you know."

Maggie jumped.

" Secretive — why, there never was any one who talked more than I do! "

" I know. That's the cleverest sort. You don't really say what you think, you know. You just escape under a torrent of words: you go creeping along underneath..Well, that's not the point. I suppose the Home is hard up, isn't it? Catholic charities always are, it seems to me. And the moment you give them anything, they just go and build another wing, or take in seventy-five more orphans, and are worse off than ever; and then you have to give them some more. Well, look here, will a hundred pounds a year — so long as I'm in proper work myself — be of any use? "

Maggie sprang up.

*' My darling; you're mad. You've... you've eaten too many sandwiches. I couldn't dream "

" Just as you like," said Marion serenely. " The fact is I've come to the conclusion that I'm avaricious: and I don't see why I shouldn't save my soul as much as you."

" But my dearest, there's not the slightest need. The Lord will provide, you know; that's our motto, in Latin: only I forget at this moment "

" That seems to me exactly what He's doing. At least I hope so."

" My dear! "

" Well: there's the hundred pounds. We can argue it out to-morrow if you like. Of course if you don't want it, you needn't have it. It shall go somewhere

LONELINESS? 17T else. Perhaps to the Society for converting Irish Roman Catholics. I'm sure they need it terribly badly. Just as you like. Only, if you take it, remember it's a gift to you — to you, you understand, you darling; not to those nasty little servant-maids."

Rhadamanthus chuckled again. Then he rattled his feathers and spoke.

" Come now! " said Rhadamanthus sarcastically.

" My darling," said Max. " Of course you've got a perfect right to do exactly as you like. But, you know you did ask my opinion; didn't you? "

" I did," said Marion. " But never again. And I'm going to do it just the same."

A stroke of really amazing luck had fallen upon the two lovers. Sir Robert Mainwaring and his wife had been bidden to Farley for a week-end; and Sir Robert, in accepting, had actually asked whether by any chance Miss Tenterden was to be there. Obviously the only thing for Lady Merival to do was to say she had been asked, but hadn't yet replied, and, simultaneously to write to Miss Tenterden with that very invitation. It was the only thing to do, because Lord Merival had told her so. So here was Marion; and in no conceivable way could Max be suspected of any responsibility or connivance.

The argument as to Marion's new schemes of charity was being conducted in the Farley woods on the Sunday afternoon. These schemes were very considerable indeed. At present she was drawing from Covent Garden just three hundred pounds a week: and as the season was twelve weeks, it is obvious that her income for that period was between three and four thousand pounds. There was also an autumn season to be considered; but, for the present she was leaving that out of her calculations.

Her proposal was to devote one thousand pounds to various charities, of which Maggie's servant-maids' Home was to be the first; and it was against the whole idea that Max had set his face.

" You've got to remember," he said, " that prima donnas have to make hay while the sun shines — in other words, to lay up something, particularly if they haven't much money already."

" I've got close on five thousand pounds from my father," she said.

" Well: but you must look too at the other expenses. You're living considerably above your ordinary income, as it is, aren't you? There's the chauffeur you've got: there's the purchase of the car, in fact."

" That's Maggie's. That doesn't count," said Marion hastily.

" Well, you bought it. There's five hundred gone slick."

" But I'm going to sing for years and years," explained the girl. " Look at Melba. Look at Albani."

" Oh! well," said Max. " That's what I think, anyhow."

They walked on in silence.

The woods were in superb condition. Sixty feet overhead rustled the great beech-canopies, through which the burning June sky showed in patches and glimpses; and the air between was a gulf of mellow light, dusty with insects and motes, and busy with the sound of a myriad wings. Wood-pigeons answered one another; or, rather, conducted melancholy and liquid soliloquies, as if brooding on the happy hot peace of the Sunday afternoon. The bracken stood green and straight on either side of the long soft rides of grass and dead leaves that cut and intersected one another in every direction as far as the eye could reach.

Then Max suddenly broke the silence with the words recorded at the beginning of the chapter; and Marion answered, just as they came up to the wooden seat that faced down towards the house and gardens.

" Let's sit down," said Max.

Ill

The worst of it was that Marion could not tell Max, even if she had been capable of putting it into words or even into a coherent arrangement to herself, of the odd mixed motives that were impelling her to this lavish kind of charity.

First there was her perfectly natural desire to share this sudden torrent of good things with other people. There are two types of character in people who unexpectedly receive a large access of fortune: there is that which immediately begins to hand money about in all directions; and there is that which first gathers its wealth together, and secures it firmly, and then considers what should be done: sometimes this kind never gets beyond consideration. Marion, like most of those who possess the dramatic or artistic temperament, emphatically was of the first class. The first class is certainly the more attractive; and the second, if it is honest, the more effective. It was a merely spontaneous instinct, without any calculation at all, that had impelled her to give the motor-brougham to Maggie.

But a new instinct had developed in Marion since her agitating interview at Farm Street. It is a very great crisis when a person determines to break with the society in which he has been educated; and perhaps the most critical form of it is when that society is a spiritual one. Above all is it critical when that spiritual society happens to be the Catholic Church; for no religion has greater power in penetrating and saturating the minds of its adherents. The seceder therefore has every impulse to reduce the shock as much as possible, and to make the fracture superficial and not profound.

Now Marion knew perfectly well that what she intended to do meant at any rate a temporary and external breach with Catholicism. At present she would not allow that it was more than temporary or external. She did not propose formally to join any other body: she intended, at present at least, to continue to hear mass on Sundays and to call herself a Catholic; and she nurtured, of course, a desperate kind of hope that after a while she could talk to Max, and get his consent to the stipulations of which Father Franklin had spoken so plainly; and that somehow the thing could be patched up. Meanwhile, however, it was but natural that she should feel that the breach with her past had a considerable reality about it, and that she should strive to modify this reality as far as she could. The scheme that had come into her mind, therefore, was that she should give large sums away in charity — and particularly to Catholic charities, and thus make terms, of a sort, with her own conscience, or, let us say, with her old associations. It is a very old story. Many centuries before Christianity came into the world, a king threw a gold ring into the sea, lest the gods should be jealous of his fortune.

Other schemes, too, were slowly maturing in her mind: and of one of them she presently spoke, as she heard the far-off church bells ringing for a children's service.

" That's enough about that," she said. " You must let me have my way at any rate this year. There's something else."

Max lit a cigarette. He was just a little sore. He had not forgotten that Marion herself had proposed that if the worst came to the worst, her income would be a very considerable help to them both. Obviously he could not speak of this; but he wondered that Marion did not.

"Well?" he asked.

" Do you ever go to church in the evening? "

"Good gracious, no! Why? Once is enough, isn't it? Mother goes pretty often. My father likes her to, in the country."

"You aren't a bit religious, are you, Max? "

" Why: not particularly: at least not in that way. That's not the important part of religion, anyhow. As long as one keeps straight — at least fairly straight — that's the chief thing, isn't it? It seems to me it's just as religious to sit out here and talk as to sit in a stuffy church "

Marion suddenly burst into a delicious spout of laughter, and put her hand on his knee.

" My dearest! Who's making Bromides now? That's what every person who doesn't want to go to church always says. Oh! don't look so offended! Now, don't they?"

" I don't see why you should suddenly attack me "

" Oh! " cried Marion. " I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There: I've apologised. But it is dreadfully funny, you know. It's all so entirely convenient — now, isn't it? But that's not the point. I want to go to church this evening."

"Well, of course you can have the motor again if you want; but "

" No: no: I don't mean my church, but yours. I want to go and see what it's like."

" But I thought you weren't allowed "

" Oh! we aren't, strictly. But people do go sometimes, you know, to hear the music. And I don't see why I shouldn't go — let's say, to hear the music, too."

" But, my dear, it's too frightful. Twelve ghastly little boys "

" That doesn't matter. I feel Sundayish. I want to... to sit in the village church, as that man says, and hear the parson pray and preach."

"Oh, well!"

" Will you come with me? If you won't, I daresay Sir Robert will."

" Of course I'll come. But you won't want that sort of thing too often, will you? "

He spoke in genuine alarm. She made haste to reassure him.

She found herself in the garden that night, after dinner, alone with Sir Robert Mainwaring. From end to end of the great house stretched a long terrace beyond the lawn, with the ground falling swiftly away in meadowland on the further side, down to the village where she had attended Evening Prayer a couple of hours before. (Quite a considerable party had decided to go, on hearing Miss Tenterden ask at tea what time church was; and the Rector had been agreeably surprised, if a little agitated, on seeing from his reading-desk the Hall pew entirely filled with worship-pers.) Overhead the moon was up — (it was the moonlight that had drawn the party out of doors) — and the country lay pale and smiling, in fold after fold, away to where the dark masses of Ashdown Forest lay grey and shadowed on the slopes opposite. The beds below the terrace were thick with growth and scents; and the moths were hovering like ghosts above the luminous flowers of the tobacco-plants that leaned against the low wall. The party had broken up into groups: Lady Merival was walking in the light from the drawing-room windows with the Rector's wife and a couple of girls. Max was with Lady Mainwaring under the cedars; in gusts, came the voices of the Rector and Lord Merival discussing high matters of village politics, and the desirability of a working-men's club-room; two or three men were smoking together in the corner by the bee-hives.

Again, Marion's reasons for having suddenly gone to church were as incoherent as those for her charitable schemes, and came from the same direction. When one is on thin ice that is beginning to crack, one desires to distribute one's weight as widely as possible. She had an idea that her role in future was to be that of general goodness and broad-mindedness. She was moving, as most people do (except the disillusioned), by a series of poses, adapted to her shifting situation. To give large sums away in charity, and to attend the worship of denominations other than her own, seemed to be parts of her present attitude: she was severing herself from the Church for broad and generous reasons: therefore by all means let her be broad and generous. Yet she was as faintly uneasy as is a child who for the first time walks out into the garden after nightfall.

Sir Robert was speaking of her successes at the Opera House.

" You have a wonderful gift, Miss Tenterden," he was saying. " It must be extraordinary to feel that you are giving the highest possible happiness to thousands of people — a happiness that is above all dispute — undenominational, if I may say so."

She looked at his kindly furrowed face in the moonlight and his deep eyes; and wondered whether he used the metaphor on purpose.

" The Italian opera people wouldn't say so," she said. " They are most denominational."

" But you are not? With regard to them, I mean? "

" I see their place," she said, " though I don't think it's a very high one. It's narrow. Now German opera is as wide as... as life. Life isn't made up of melodies, according to rule: it's made up of broad effects."

She felt that here was a man who really wanted to know what she thought; and there is nothing more stimulating. She did not even know, till she said it, that that was what she thought about the Italian and German schools!

" That's an extremely interesting point of view," he said. " Wouldn't you say that this was a melody, though? " (He indicated the sleeping moonlit countryside with his lean hand.)

"Well: there's plenty of melody in Wagner," she said, rearranging her wrap. " Look at the Swan-motif — the Liebestod — heaps of things. But they slide off and mix with other things, exactly as this will, when the dawn comes."

" Well: that's an undenominational thing to say," he said. " That's just what I mean. You are broad-minded enough to take in the Italian school: but they are not broad enough to take you in."

Again the question crossed her mind as to whether he was saying all this on purpose. The next moment he answered it.

" You'll forgive me, Miss Tenterden, won't you, if I say that your going to the Anglican church to-night gave me very great pleasure. I know it was only a little thing in itself: but I've seen so many fine souls ruined through narrowness that it gives me great satisfaction to see a fine soul that can be broad. I don't like the Italianate mind, either. You don't think me impertinent? "

" Not in the least, Sir Robert. I'm only honoured that you should care to talk to me at all."

" That, if you will forgive me again, is sheer nonsense, Miss Tenterden. You must know that every one is interested in you. Well: I was saying; I was brought up in a very narrow school of thought myself: and it took me years to get out of it. Your own Faith, of course, is very much larger: but you know, even a large thing can be very narrow: it's the shape, not the size, that matters. I am, I hope, a good Christian, and I always shall be, please God, for the little space of time that remains to me on earth; but I do not count myself attached to any particular sect."

It was amazing how what this gallant old gentleman said, expressed precisely — more precisely than she had dared to express them to herself — the thoughts that were forming so rapidly in her own mind during these last few days: and his personality, and his reputation, and all that he stood for made what he said a thousand times more impressive. This was the man that had been the friend of Gordon, that other apostle of broad; intensity, and, like him, a great soldier. Could there be a better height from which to view the world sanely?

" I am very grateful to you," she said. " You have done me good."

He put his hand ever so tenderly on her arm for a moment.

" Don't let them spoil you, Miss Tenterden," he said.