Grey Roses Part 7

'Oh, you ought to have told her: you ought to have asked her,' she repeated.

'Well--now you know why I went away.'

'Yes.'

'When I heard of her--her--death'--he could not bring himself to say her suicide--'there was nothing else for me to do. It was so hideous, so unutterable. To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the old people, was quite impossible. I wanted to follow her, to do what she had done. The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as far from myself, as I could.'

'Sometimes,' Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, 'sometimes I wondered whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such connection with Mary's death--it followed it so immediately. I wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her. But I couldn't believe it--it was only because the two things happened one upon the other. Oh, why didn't you tell her? It is dreadful, dreadful!'

IV.

When he had left her, she sat still for a little while before the fire.

'Life is a chance to make mistakes--a chance to make mistakes. Life is a chance to make mistakes.'

It was a phrase she had met in a book she was reading the other day: then she had smiled at it; now it rang in her ears like the voice of a mocking demon.

'Yes, a chance to make mistakes,' she said, half aloud.

She rose and went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, turned over its contents, and took out a letter--an old letter, for the paper was yellow and the ink was faded. She came back to the fireside, and unfolded the letter and read it. It covered six pages of note-paper, in a small feminine hand. It was a letter Mary Isona had written to her, Margaret Kempton, the night before she died, more than thirty years ago. The writer recounted the many harsh circ.u.mstances of her life; but they would all have been bearable, she said, save for one great and terrible secret. She had fallen in love with a man who was scarcely conscious of her existence; she, a little obscure Italian music teacher, had fallen in love with Theodore Vellan. It was as if she had fallen in love with an inhabitant of another planet: the worlds they respectively belonged to were so far apart She loved him--she loved him--and she knew her love was hopeless, and she could not bear it. Oh, yes; she met him sometimes, here and there, at houses she went to to play, to give lessons. He was civil to her: he was more than civil--he was kind; he talked to her about literature and music.

'He is so gentle, so strong, so wise; but he has never thought of me as a woman--a woman who could love, who could be loved. Why should he?

If the moth falls in love with the star, the moth must suffer.... I am cowardly; I am weak; I am what you will; but I have more than I can bear. Life is too hard--too hard. To-morrow I shall be dead. You will be the only person to know why I died, and you will keep my secret.'

'Oh, the pity of it--the pity of it!' murmured Mrs. Kempton. 'I wonder whether I ought to have shown him Mary's letter.'

WHEN I AM KING

'_Qu'y faire, mon Dieu, qu'y faire?_'

I had wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think it time to inquire my way back to the hotel: then, turning a corner, I came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night, with the dim forms of many s.h.i.+ps, and stars hanging in a web of masts and cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Cafe de la Marine_, _Bra.s.serie des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops enough, designed for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they seemed to promise something in the nature of local colour; and I entered the _Bra.s.serie des Quatre Vents_.

It proved to be a _bra.s.serie-a-femmes_; you were waited upon by ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front part of the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred customers, talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid din--sailors, soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an occasional workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared s.p.a.ce, reserved for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it; and on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in an atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of gas, the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.

The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune.

Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He had once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a disreputable tavern, where they danced with prost.i.tutes. I don't know why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my handmaid to count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him, speculating about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious shame.

But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes, have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now, simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten, fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair's composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love, G.o.delinette:

'Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle, Lavender's green; When I am king, diddle-diddle, You shall be queen.'

It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his kingdom, G.o.delinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but, so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was pa.s.sing a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors' pothouse and hear it again.

Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you would meet the men who had 'arrived'--actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.' A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maitre_.

He was three or four years older than I--eight- or nine-and-twenty to my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.

He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-n.o.bbed with all sorts and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself, I admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my hero-wors.h.i.+p, and the lion's share of my friends.h.i.+p; perhaps I was vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over the table of a cafe, talking till the small hours--Elysian sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_ than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by G.o.delinette, go to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St.

Michel, flooded with suns.h.i.+ne, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and _etudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the _trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the mult.i.tude on the terrace of a cafe; and Edmund and G.o.delinette coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would drink our _aperitifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.

G.o.delinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading; she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night, four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his ma.n.u.script-littered study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during the months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect and comfort her for the future. This perhaps was no more than natural; but, what rather upset the calculations of his friends, she, towards whom he had established himself in the relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor, a pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only waiting till her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married; and meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have been due to his wife; and everybody called her by his name. She was a pretty little thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and feet, and big gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate, very fragile--she looked as if anything might carry her off. Her name, G.o.deleine, seeming much too grand and mediaeval for so small and actual a person, Pair had turned it into G.o.delinette.

We all said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.' He had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker. We said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and indeed I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had style and they had 'go.' One would have imagined they must please at once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand why they weren't popular. They would be printed; they would be praised at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn't _sell_, and they wouldn't get themselves sung at concerts. If they had been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but they weren't. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no whit more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We couldn't understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question of chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to possess the friends.h.i.+p of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to hear them prophesy, 'He will do great things'--all that is something, even if your wares don't 'take on' in the market-place.

'It's a good job, though, that I haven't got to live by them,' Pair said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own.

But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hamps.h.i.+re, made him rather a liberal allowance,--something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair's relation with G.o.delinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when, one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his intention of marrying her, _dans les delais legaux_, the squire protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_ who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.' But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when the marriage was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.

'Never mind, my dear,' said Pair. 'We will go to London and seek our fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and

"When I am king, diddle-diddle, You shall be queen!"'

So they went to London to seek their fortune, and--that was the last I ever saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters from Pair, written within a month of their hegira--gossipy, light-hearted letters, describing the people they were meeting, reporting G.o.delinette's quaint observations upon England and English things, explaining his hopes, his intentions, all very confidently--and then I had no more. I wrote again, and still again, till, getting no answer, of course I ceased to write. I was hurt and puzzled; but in the spring we should meet in London, and could have it out. When the spring came, however, my plans were altered: I had to go to America. I went by way of Havre, expecting to stay six weeks, and was gone six years.

On my return to England I said to people, 'You have a brilliant young composer named Pair. Can you put me in the way of procuring his address?' The fortune he had come to seek he would surely have found; he would be a known man. But people looked blank, and declared they had never heard of him. I applied to music-publishers--with the same result. I wrote to his uncle in Hamps.h.i.+re; the squire did not reply.

When I reached Paris I inquired of our friends there; they were as ignorant as I. 'He must be dead,' I concluded. 'If he had lived, it is impossible we should not have heard of him.' And I wondered what had become of G.o.delinette.

Then another eight or ten years pa.s.sed, and now, in a waterside public at Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair's setting of 'Lavender's blue,' and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet far-away memories of my friend. It was as if fifteen years were erased from my life. The face of G.o.delinette was palpable before me--pale, with its sad little smile, its bright appealing eyes. Edmund might have been smoking across the table--I could hear his voice, I could have put out my hand and touched him. And all round me were the streets, the lights, the smells, the busy youthful _va-et-vient_ of the Latin Quarter; and in my heart the yearning, half joy and all despair and anguish, with which we think of the old days when we were young, of how real and dear they were, of how irrecoverable they are.

And then the music stopped, the Bra.s.serie des Quatre Vents became a glaring reality, and the painted female sipping _eau-de-vie_ at my elbow remarked plaintively, 'Tu n'es pas rigolo, toi. Veux-tu faire une valse?'

'I must speak to your musician,' I said. 'Excuse me.'

He had played a bit of Pair's music. It was one chance in a thousand, but I wanted to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the composer. So I penetrated to the bottom of the shop, and approached his platform. He was bending over some sheets of music--making his next selection, doubtless.

'I beg your pardon--,' I began.

He turned towards me. You will not be surprised--I was looking into Pair's own face.

You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was for me.

Oh, yes, I recognised him instantly; there could be no mistake. And he recognised me, for he flushed, and winced, and started back.

I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless, speechless and motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-and-by I think I said--something had to be said to break the situation--I think I said, 'It's you, Edmund?' I remember he fumbled with a sheet of music, and kept his eyes bent on it, and muttered something inarticulate. Then there was another speechless, helpless suspension. He continued to fumble his music without looking up. At last I remember saying, through a sort of sickness and giddiness, 'Let us get out of here--where we can talk.'

'I can't leave yet. I've got another dance,' he answered.

'Well, I'll wait,' said I.

I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of order out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and considering him as he played his dance--Edmund Pair playing a dance for prost.i.tutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection of it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circ.u.mstances have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for the time when we should be alone--anxiously, yet with a sort of terror. I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so.

If to conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him to this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when he was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded the explanation that I longed to hear.