Mummery Part 19

She leaned forward and gazed over the edge of the crag, and Sir Henry, who was so deeply moved that all his ordinary mental processes were dislocated, thought with a horrid alarm that she was going to throw herself down. Such perfection might rightly end in tragedy, and he thought with anguish of Mann and Verschoyle, thought that they had besmirched and dishonoured this loveliness, thought that this sudden exaltation and abstraction must come from the anguish that was betrayed in her eyes so often and so frequently.

'Take care! Take care!' called Sir Henry.

She leaped down into the heather by his side, and he said,--

'It seems a crime to take you back into the house. What have you to do with whether or no we are asked to the next garden-party in Downing Street? You are Ariel and can put a girdle round the earth.... I am almost afraid of you. Can't we run away and become strolling players?

You may think I am to be envied but my life has been a very unhappy one.... I want to help you....'

It was obvious to Clara that he did not know what he was saying, and indeed he was light-hearted and moonstruck, lifted outside his ordinary range of experience. He babbled on,--

'If I could feel that I had done the smallest thing to help you, I should be prouder of it than of any other thing in my career.'

'But I don't want help....'

'Ah! You think so now. But wait three years.... You think an actor can know nothing of life, but who knows more? Has he not in himself to reproduce every fine shade of emotion, the effect of every variety of experience.... The people who know nothing of life are your cloistered artists like Mann, or your Verschoyle drowned in money.... You have not known me yet.'

Really he was getting rather ridiculous with his boyish romanticism.

He had been married twice and his two families numbered seven. But Clara, too, was under the spell of the moon, and his gauche response to her mood had touched her.

'Life is a miserable business for a woman,' said Sir Henry. 'I live in dread lest you should be dragged down into the common experience.'

(Did he or did he not know about Charles?)

Clara laughed. This was taking her too seriously.

'Ah, you can laugh now while you are young, but youth attracts, it is drawn into the whirlpool and is lost.... Is there more in you than youth?'

'Much, much more,' said Clara exultantly. 'There has never been anybody like me before.'

'By Heaven!' swore Sir Henry. 'That is true.... You have bewitched me--and we had better be going back to the house.... Will you let me carry you down?'

Without waiting for her permission, he lifted her, and she suffered him to carry her down the last stony path, because her flimsy shoes were already wet through. He did not guess that she had good reason, and his heart thumped in his large bosom.

It had been a night of nights for him. Years of uneasy distraction had melted away. Not even at the height of his success had he felt so confident, so entirely superior to the rest of mankind as both to command and to deserve their homage. In no play had he ever devised a more romantic finale than this in which he carried his conquered sprite--for so he thought her--back to earth. As he put her down, he threw out his chest and turned to the stars as it was his habit to turn to his audiences, and bowed thrice, to the right, to the left, to the centre, with his hand upon his heart.

Verschoyle was very angry with her when she returned.

'You know how these people think of such things,' he said.

'What they think and what I do are very different,' retorted Clara, her eyes s.h.i.+ning, her cheeks glowing from the night air. 'It makes him happy, and, if you are happy with me, he doesn't see why he shouldn't be. _Pourquoi pas moi aussi_? Men are all alike.'

'It is not the same.... What a child you are! Some day you will love and then you will see very differently.... The old fool thinks you are----'

'No. He said I was Ariel. So I am. So I am.... I wonder I never thought of it before. I shall never be a woman as women have been----'

'There have been good women.'

'Tra la la! The good women have done far more harm in the world than all the bad women put together. Lady B is a good woman.'

'A painted tigress. _She_ won't forgive you in a hurry. She thinks--that, too.'

'People can't think beyond what they are. You can't expect me to be what other people think.'

'I want you to be yourself.'

'So I am.... You shall take me away in a day or two. I want to see the Bracebridges just for fun, _and_ the Cabinet Ministers, and then I want to drown their memories one by one in the lakes as we pa.s.s them.

We are going to see them all, aren't we?'

'I want to get away. I can't bear being with you in this atmosphere of money.'

'Now, now. You promised me you would never behave like a lover.'

'I thought I was behaving like an angry brother.'

She was pleased with him for that. She knew that part of his trouble was due to his being an only son.

The Bracebridges were disappointing: a very dull man, a hard and raffish woman, but apparently to Lady Butcher they were the wonder of all wonders. She and Lady Bracebridge were to each other 'dear Ethel'

and 'dearest Madge.' Together they made a single dominant and very formidable personality, which must be obeyed. They flung themselves upon the house-party, sifted the affairs of every member of it, and in three days had arranged for two engagements and one divorce. They commanded Verschoyle--by suggestion--to marry a Mrs Slesinger, who was plain but almost as rich as himself, and in his distress he very nearly succ.u.mbed; but Clara swooped in to save him, and found that her position was made almost impossible by whispered t.i.ttle-tattle, cold looks, and downright rudeness. She was distinctly left out of picnic and boating parties, and almost in contempt she was partnered with Sir Henry who, after Lady Bracebridge's arrival, was no longer master in his own house.... When the Cabinet Ministers arrived the situation became impossible for they produced chaos. The household was dislocated, and in the confusion Clara packed, had her trunks carried to the garage, and slipped away with Verschoyle.

Said he,--

'These d.a.m.ned politicians can't get off the platform. Did you see how that old fool sawed the air when he talked of Ireland, and did you hear how the other bleated when he mouthed of Poor Law Reform? They're on show--always on show.... So are these infernal lakes. I can't stand scenery that has stared at me for hours in a railway carriage.'

'It doesn't matter,' said Clara. 'You may be unjust to Lady Butcher, but you mustn't be unjust to Rydal.'

'It is so still and out of date.... I can't think of it without thinking of Wordsworth, and I don't want to think of Wordsworth....

Being with you makes me want to get on into the future, and there's something holding us all back.'

All the same, their holiday swept up to a triumphant conclusion, and they forgot the Butchers and their London elegance in going from inn to inn in the lovely valleys, taking the car up and down breakneck hills and making on foot the ascent of Great Gable and Scafell, upon whose summit in the keen air and the gusty wind Clara let fly and danced about, wildly gay, crying out with joy to be so high above the earth, where human beings spied upon each other with jealous eyes lest one should have more happiness than another.

'They can't spoil this,' she said.

'Who?'

'Oh, all the people down there. They can spoil Charles, and you and me and silly old Sir Henry, but they can't spoil this.'

'In Switzerland,' said Verschoyle, 'there are mountains higher than this, and they make railways up them, and at the top of the railways English governesses buy Alpenstocks, and have the name of the mountain burned into the wood.'

'If I were a mountain,' said Clara, 'and they did that to me I should turn into a volcano and burn them all up, all the engineers and all the English governesses.... I'm sure Lady Bracebridge was a governess.'

'Right in once,' said Verschoyle, staring at her with round boyish eyes, as though he half expected her at once to turn into a volcano.

With Clara anything might happen, and her words came from so deep a recess of her nature as almost to have the force of a prophecy.

XI