JOHN ALWYN
A LITTLE red brick house near Godalming, with a porch to its front door, and a wooden balcony that looked like a Swiss one to the upper windows. Striped sun-blinds and a creeper, a tiled roof and a lightning-conductor. Close to the house, flower-beds, trim and bright with marigolds and sweet peas; round it, yet standing a little way off, dark fir trees. Against the wooden fence that shut in the garden, and almost leaning over the front gate, two larch trees. On the outer side of the fence, clumps of heather and bushes of gorse and broom. Behind the house, a moor that wandered on to meet the Surrey hills blue in the distance. In front, a white road that came from the station and went past the house. Along the road on the right folk could be seen coming from half a mile away. They disappeared into the dip on the left in precisely six minutes; none had ever done so in less than four.
In the drawing-room of the little house a woman waited: she had waited half her lifetime for the meeting that was to take place this afternoon. She was neither young nor pretty; her hair was grizzled, and her face marked by lines of care and sorrow. Yet Time had been tender and left her an indefinable grace, a charm that half compelled love; and it had given her a dignity that gently kept any expression of that love unspoken.
She walked up and down, and lingered and listened with the happy anxiety of a woman who knows that there is only a little time to wait and then a footstep is certain to fall upon her ear. She raised her eyes and looked round the room and was satisfied. It was cool and shady, for the sun-blind over the wide open window kept out the glare and stifling heat; the chintz covers were fresh; the flowers in the Italian pots sweet smelling; there were books and pictures and basket chairs and down cushions; everywhere within and without was the effect of drowsy stillness that is summer’s own.
‘ My little home, my dear little home,’ she said to herself; ‘ to think that he will see it at last.’ A smile came to her lips, though tears were in her voice. She clasped her hands and leant her foolish head down on the back of her chair and hid her face. ‘ Oh, John, John!’ she whispered tenderly; ‘ to think that we shall meet again after all these years. To think that I should see your face and hear your voice—you dear voice—once more. Perhaps you will find fault with me just as you used,’ and she laughed softly for joy, ‘ but I don’t care—I don’t care on little atom what you do to me so that it is you who do it—’ She started up in dismay, for there entered without any warning a woman, middle-aged also, and in a widow’s bonnet. She had the air of having come a journey.
‘ Oh, Mary!’ Miss Roberts exclaimed, half drawing back: ‘ I did not expect you. Why didn’t you write? Some one is coming: I am, this afternoon.’ The visitor laughed, and showed a dimple in her happy face. Sorrows had evidently been only incidents to her, borne bravely and recovered from pleasantly.
‘ You are very inhospitable,’ she said. ‘ I have come literally for ten minutes, between the two afternoon trains. I walked from the station and entered by the stable gate. I wouldn’t risk a telegram, because I wanted your answer.’
‘ What is it?’ Miss Roberts asked, still dismayed and listening the while for the sound of wheels stopping by the porch.
‘ The Milfords have lost their father and can’t go to Switzerland. They were to start to-morrow, had taken circular tickets for a month. They want to give them to us; they come into heaps of money and can afford it; I agreed to accept them provided you would go. We have not been together since we were girls, that time when John Alwyn went with us all to Cornwall—’
‘ Oh, Mary, I can’t. John Alwyn is coming this afternoon.’ The tears were in her eyes; she put her arms round her friend’s neck, and trembled with excitement. ‘ He wrote to me,’ she went on. ‘ He has taken a little place, called Heatherway, five or six miles off. He asked if he might come. After all these years, Mary, we are going to meet once more.’
‘ Mrs. Norton looked at her bewildered.
‘ But—but he cannot be anything to you now, Georgie. All that was over long ago.’
‘ He is the whole world,’ Miss Roberts answered, almost in a whisper. ‘ I have lived my life waiting for him. Oh, Mary,’ and she gave a long sigh, ‘ it is something even to say his name aloud.’
‘ I never understood why you cared for him so much, nor why you parted.’ Mrs. Norton was wonder-struck.
‘ He is just my life,’ Miss Roberts went on, almost as if she had not heard, and with a smile that was like a flicker of sunshine when the hoar frost first begins, ‘ and he will be till—till they draw down the blinds for me. That is one reason why I live alone. I have felt that some day he would come back, and would not like any one to see his coming. It was my fault that we parted,’ she went on, after a moment’s silence. ‘ I had a thousand faults; I wasn’t good enough, or pretty enough, or clever enough for him.’ She poured out her words—after the silence of long years.
‘ What nonsense, Georgie. Why, you were the cleverest of us all; you could do anything you liked. Every one said, when you wrote that article on Normandy, how clever it was, and the illustrations too—you might have made a career as an artist; and you were so pretty—though I think you are beautiful now with your tall thin figure and grey hair.’
‘ I wonder if I really was pretty’; Miss Roberts looked longingly towards the glass, as, remembering the part of hostess, she rang for tea. ‘ If I had been,’ she added as the servant left the room, ‘ he would have come before. Mary’—there was almost a sob in her voice, the dry sob of hungry love—‘ it is two-and-twenty years since I last set eyes on him, yet my whole life has been lived mentally in his sight. I have striven so hard—everything I have done well has been put before him with a little petition in my heart that said: “Won’t this win you back and prove to you that I was worth better love than you gave me?” but the plea has seemed to go out into space, like Noah’s drove, and to come back unheard and unnoticed. He used to find fault with me so much in the old days,’ she went on with a sad little smile, ‘ he was so fastidious—so critical; an yet the first condition of my happiness, its first necessity, was—and is—that he should think well of me. He expected so much of people; he had ideals—’
‘ Nonsense! What did he ever do in the world himself? I have heard nothing of him for years; but we all know that he failed in science and lived a lazy life in town on the money his father left him.’
‘ A contemplative life is often more useful than an active one,’ Miss Roberts pleaded.
‘ Don’t say things against him,’ and she put out her hand entreatingly. ‘ I do not know why, but I think, somehow, he cares for me still; and, though it could only mean friendship and a now-and-then meeting, it would be compensation for all the years of waiting.’
‘ Cares for you!’ Mrs. Norton exclaimed scornfully; ‘ if he does he would have come to you before this, or he hasn’t the courage of a mouse’s tail. Well, my dear, the train won’t wait for me: I must go. Of course you can decide nothing till you have seen him; telegraph before seven this evening “Yes” or “No,” about Switzerland.’ She looked down at Miss Roberts’s white hands, and up at her face. ‘ Not good enough for you! Georgie, we women are sad fools, and our reward is accordingly.’ But Miss Roberts only looked up with a smile that had in it the happiness of one who is waiting to see Heaven, and feels that it is very near.
Then suddenly there was heard the sound of a light carriage. The friends looked at each other silently. The wheels stopped before the house.
‘ Go, Mary,’ Miss Roberts whispered; ‘ I want to see him alone.’ Mrs. Norton kissed her and without a word left the room, and slipped out of the side door by which she had entered the house before the servant had crossed the little hall to admit the new arrival.
Miss Roberts stood still, her heart beating, her hands trembling. Low down the sun-blind that kept out the glare projected, and in at the open space came the scent of heliotrope from a bed beneath the window. A butterfly darted upwards from it towards the window-sill, then quickly back to the sunshine. The scent of heliotrope and a white butterfly for ever afterwards seemed to have a message to her.
There were slow and cautious footsteps; then the door opened. She noticed the servant’s hand on the door latch, and the little inflection with which the visitor was announced.
‘ Mr. Alwyn, ma’am.’
‘ Yes,’ she said—her whole heart said it, and she drew a long breath, for the years of silence and parting had come to an end. Then there entered a man of middle height, thickset and red-faced, clean-shaven and double-chinned, a fringe of grey hair round his bald and shining head, a curious expression in his grey eyes and about his mouth, as though he came prepared to tell her that he had left all foolishness and illusion behind and learnt to accept the substantial and rather low-down satisfactions within reach of the majority. She almost started. Was this what John Alwyn had become? The man she remembered was slim and delicate, with a slightly supercilious air, and refinement in every line of his face. This man looked commonplace and easy-going, and was evidently one of those who thoroughly enjoy the somewhat primitive pleasures—not to be confounded with the simplicities—that appeal least to the intellectual side of human nature. She stood still for a moment covered with a strange shame and despair because of all her past fine feelings. She nearly laughed, it was so absurd; she nearly cried, it was so tragic.
‘ Oh!’ she said, with a little gasp. ‘ It is you—it is John Alwyn!’
‘ Yes, that’s it,’ he said with a smile, more ready than it had been in the old days. ‘ How do you do?’ They shook hands, and he looked at her with good-natured amusement. ‘ You were surprised to get my letter, weren’t you? I don’t believe you knew me for a moment; I have altered a good deal, you see—there’s more of me than there was, for one thing.’ And he laughed as though he thought it a pleasant joke.
‘ It’s so long since we met,’ and then the amenities came to her aid and she asked him to sit down, and signed to a low easy-chair; but he ignored it and took a higher one, while she almost fell on to the couch between the window and the little tea-table, and stared half-foolishly at him.
‘ Yes, a long-time—it must be twenty years,’ he said. She, who had counted every month and week of them as merely waiting time for this day—this day!—knew that they were twenty-two. ‘ Why, you have grown grey, and you are so thin. Have you been ill?’
‘ I am always thin,’ she answered with a little smile, ‘ and grey—of course I am grey. I am growing old.’
‘ Well, so am I,’ he said with cheery resignation, ‘ but it can’t be helped, you know. You see we are both getting on. Time has not only made my hair grey, but taken off most of it, which is worse; however, it has put more on to me in other ways,’—he was referring to his increased size, she gathered,— ‘ so perhaps I ought not to complain, eh?’
‘ No—will you have tea.’ She poured it out and handed him a cup and some cake, and took some herself, and tried to realise that after all these years she was quite naturally sitting face to face with John Alwyn. He looked round the room with an air of curiosity that was being pleasantly gratified, and asked for some more milk, and seemed glad of the rest and shade of her dainty room.
‘ And now tell your news,’ he said; ‘ I haven’t come across any of your people for a good many years, and I was too lazy to look them up. Are they all right?’
‘ Oh yes, thank you; they are all right,’ she answered. ‘ But I want to hear about you, John—you don’t expect to be called Mr. Alwyn?’ she spoke with the little courteous manner that was peculiar to her.
‘ Mr. Alwyn! I should think not, we are old friends—we were sweethearts once, you know, Georgie.’
‘ Yes,’ she said shyly.
‘ Pretty girl you were, too; nice figure and plenty to say; clever girl, too—rather too clever for my taste if the truth must be told. I thought it a mistake when you took to—well, to overdoing it, you know. I don’t care about women who write articles in magazines and draw pictures for publication: I don’t mind a few drawings to hang on the walls—that’s different.’
‘ Yes—quite different.’
‘ And how is it you have never married? You must be rather lonely living here alone; I wonder you don’t get a niece or two to cheer you up. I suppose you have some by this time?’
‘ Oh yes, there are nieces of course; but how did you know I lived alone?’ Mr. Alwyn put down his cup and took some cake before he answered. There was an old-fashionedness about him that she had not noticed in other men of his age, and his manner had deteriorated—its fastidiousness had gone with his reserve and his sternness.
‘ Heard it from the parson; and he gave me your address. I knew you were about here; Jack Lawrence’s wife told me so some years ago, but I had forgotten the name of your place. I’ve taken a little one six miles off—Heatherway it is called.’
‘ I thought it must be you, when I heard that it was let to some one called Alwyn.’
‘ I daresay you thought, too, that I should come and see you?’ he said, dropping the crumbs of his cake on to the peacock-blue carpet. ‘ I waited till we were to rights and then drove over; I wanted a talk with you.’
‘ Yes,’ and she waited, for she knew then that there was more to come.
‘ The fact is, I’m married,’ he said firmly, evidently relieved in having got it out. ‘ But I haven’t told any one about it yet; that’s one reason why I have bought Heatherway: I wanted to come among people who didn’t know her. She—she—well, it’s no use beating about the bush—she kept house for me for a good many years; she was a widow, husband drowned at sea, and she had to do something for herself, so she came and looked after my place in town, and we got to like each other. My tastes have altered a good deal of late years, and I grew tired of all the nonsense people call society. She knew how to make me comfortable, and that’s everything to a man at my time of life. We got married on the quiet four or five years ago, and she kept out of the way when any one came who had known her as the housekeeper. But that wasn’t the right sort of way to treat a wife.’
‘ No,’ said Miss Roberts faintly, and gathered up her cashmere skirt, for the train had spread itself out as if to give effect to her graceful figure. A bumble-bee cam towards the window, hesitated, and dropped down towards the heliotrope; she wondered if it had passed the butterfly: she remembered a clump of heather just tinged with violet a little beyond the gateway. ‘ No,’ she repeated, ‘ it is much kinder to give her a new home and acknowledge her properly.’
‘ That is just what I thought,’ he answered with much approval. ‘ So I came to the conclusion that I would take a little place down here, and set up properly with her. She’s a fine-looking woman, knows how to dress herself, and ought to go down very well in the country. I have brought her portrait to show you.’ He dug into the breast-pocket of his dark tweed coat and pulled out a cabinet-size photograph. While Miss Roberts looked at it, he felt for his pocket-handkerchief and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. ‘ Tea is not very cooling on a day like this,’ he said apologetically; but she was looking at the photograph of her old love’s wife, and did not hear him. It represented a well-developed woman of two of three and forty, with a quantity of hair, and a fringe, thick and dark, that fell low on her forehead. She wore a black satin dress, trimmed with something that had come out in white stripes; there were rings in her ears, and at her throat a brooch too large for the present fashion. She looked like a solid, slow-of-movement, good-tempered woman, with business-like eyes and an air of easy enjoyment.
‘ She’s rather handsome,’ he said.
‘ That is why you fell in love with her?’ She looked up and tried to satisfy him with her manner.
‘ Fell in love?’ he repeated. ‘ Well, not quite so far as that, perhaps. I don’t believe in it, you know—never did, or in old days I should have fallen in love with you, Georgie, for you were a very pretty girl, that’s certain. But all the same I am fond of her. She’s a nice, sensible woman, has plenty to say, and she’s an excellent manager.’
‘ That is such a good thing in the country,’ Miss Roberts said, trying to make her manner sympathetic.
‘ Of course it is,’ he answered cordially. ‘ Well now, Georgie, I want you to do what you can with the neighbourhood for us. She has rather a fancy to know people, so I said to her: “Unless I’m much mistaken, there’s an old sweetheart of mine a few miles off, daughter of Sir William Roberts, and I feel sure she’ll do what she can for the sake of old times.” So when will you come and see us?’
‘ I’ll come soon—’
‘ I knew you would,’ he said triumphantly.
‘ But,’ she went on, ‘ I fear it can’t be till I come back from Switzerland. I start to-morrow,’ she added hurriedly.
‘ That’s a pity,’—he looked, dismayed,—‘ for we have just got straight, and the garden looks nice, and she thought it would be a good idea to give a garden party while the summer held out.’
‘ Yes, but you must wait till you have been called upon and returned visits before you can invite people,’ she said gently. She was beginning to be sorry for him. His life and his satisfaction in it were so amazing to her, not because his world did not include her, but because she remembered the old fastidiousness that had once prevented everything from seeming good enough. He appeared to have stamped with his heavy good-natured feet on all the conditions that had once been necessary to his existence.
‘ Yes, of course. I had forgotten that; you see I have been out of things so long. Perhaps you could give people a hint to come? How long will you be away?’
‘ A month.’
‘ You will let us know when you are back?’ and he held on his hand. ‘ You’ll do what you can for her, I know, for the sake of old times.’
‘ Yes, I will do what I can.’
‘ That’s all right then,’ he said, with an air of satisfaction. ‘ I told her you would. There’s some good in being a clever woman after all, Georgie, though when I saw that article of yours—about Normandy, wasn’t?—I thought to myself, “It is rather a pity; she’d much better leave this sort of thing to the young women Girton.” I am told that young women write for newspaper nowadays—perhaps that’s why the papers are so bad.’ He said it with an air of being witty and aware of it.
‘ Yes,’ she repeated vacantly, ‘ perhaps that’s why they are so bad—are they bad? I don’t know.’
‘ Neither do I; as a matter of fact I don’t see much of them: they are not as solid as they used to be—so they don’t suit me. Well, I am glad to have seen you again, Georgie,’ and he got up. ‘ I must be going. She’ll be anxious to hear the news, and we dine at seven—she’s particular, keeps me in order,’ he laughed, ‘ and doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’ He looked round the room again. ‘ Nice little place, daresay you are very comfortable. Well, good-bye.’
‘ Good-bye,’ she said, taking a long look at him, as if she were trying to see, far back behind the years, the face she remembered. ‘ Good-bye, but I will come and see you off,’ and she followed him to the front door.
A chaise stood by the porch, a boy was holding the pony’s head. Miss Roberts reproached herself for not having sent it round to the stable after its journey, but there was no time for apologies. Mr. Alwyn settled himself into his seat with difficulty. ‘ The boy drives,’ he said, ‘ I never understand these country ponies myself; this little beggar shied twice as we came along. I say, isn’t it warm? Well, good-bye, glad to have seen you, and you’ll comes as soon as you are back, eh?’
‘ Yes, when I a back; good-bye.’ She waved her hand and stood watching till the pony disappeared in the dip, then slowly she turned away, entered the house, and shut the door.
‘ He looks so happy,’ she said. ‘ I am very glad,— and that I have seen him.’ She hid her face in one of the down cushions, and thought for a moment of the bumble-bee and the white butterfly; she raised her head and saw the crumbs John Alwyn had left on the carpet.