Part 22 (1/2)
He was roused from his troubled thoughts by seeing Miss Asphodel Vincent coming along the walk towards him. Her step had lost its wonted spring, her carriage its usual buoyancy. In a minute or two she would reach him.
Would she deign to speak? He felt no compunction towards her. He had made her his heroine in the tale. By not a word had he cast a shadow over her character or her abilities. Indeed, he had pictured her as the highest ideal of an English girl. She might be flattered, she could not be offended. And yet there was no flattery in his pencil--he had sketched her in as she was.
As she approached she noticed the young author. She did not hasten her step. She displayed a strange listlessness in her movements, and lack of vivacity in her eye.
When she stood over against him, Joseph Leveridge rose and removed his hat. ”An early promenade, Miss Vincent,” he said.
”Oh!” she said, ”I am glad to meet you here where we cannot be overheard. I have something about which I must speak to you, to complain of a great injury done to me.”
”You do me a high honour,” exclaimed Joseph. ”If I can do anything to alleviate your distress and to redress the wrong, command me.”
”You can do nothing. It is impossible to undo what has already been done. You put me into your book.”
”Miss Vincent,” protested Leveridge with vehemence, ”if I have, what then? I have not in the least overcharged the colours, by a line caricatured you.” It was in vain for him further to pretend not to be the author and to have merely read the book.
”That may be, or it may not. But you have taken strange liberties with me in transferring me to your pages.”
”And you really recognised yourself?”
”It is myself, my very self, who is there.”
”And yet you are here, before my humble self.”
”That is only my outer sh.e.l.l. All my individuality, all that goes to make up the Ego--I myself--has been taken from me and put into your book.”
”Surely that cannot be.”
”But it is so. I feel precisely as I suppose felt my doll when I was a child, when it became unst.i.tched and all the bran ran out; it hung limp like a rag. But it is not bran you have deprived me of, it is my personality.”
”In my novel is your portraiture indeed--but you yourself are here,”
said Leveridge.
”It is my very self, my n.o.blest and best part, my moral and intellectual self, which has been carried off and put into your book.”
”This is quite impossible, Miss Vincent.”
”A moment's thought,” said she, ”will convince you that it is as I say.
If I pick an Alpine flower and transfer it to my blotting-book, it remains in the herbarium. It is no longer on the Alp where it bloomed.”
”But----” urged Joseph.
”No,” she interrupted, ”you cannot undeceive me. No one can be in two places at the same time. If I am in your book, I cannot be here--except so far as goes my animal nature and frame. You have subjected me, Mr.
Leveridge, to the greatest humiliation. I am by you reduced to the level of a score of girls that I know, with no pursuits, no fixed principles, no opinions of their own, no ideas. They are swayed by every fas.h.i.+on, they are moulded by their surroundings; they are dest.i.tute of what some would call moral fibre, and I would term character. I had all this, but you have deprived me of it, by putting it into your book. I shall henceforth be the sport of every breath, be influenced by every folly, be without self-confidence and decision, the prey to any adventurer.”
”For Heaven's sake, do not say that.”
”I cannot say anything other. If I had a sovereign in my purse, and a pickpocket stole it, I should no longer have the purse and sovereign, only the pocket; and I am a mere pocket now without the coin of my personality that you have filched from me. Mr. Leveridge, it was a cruel wrong you did me, _when you used me up_.”
Then, sighing, Miss Asphodel went languidly on her way. Joseph was as one stunned. He buried his face in his hands. The person of all others with whom he desired to stand well, that person looked upon him as her most deadly enemy, at all events as the one who had most cruelly aggrieved her.