Part 25 (1/2)

It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for litter for cattle. The time of year had fallen upon rust--brown-rust were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the ma.s.ses of seeded hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts of down, that blew against Blanche's dress as she pa.s.sed, and clung there.

Swish-swish ... came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue. She felt that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder.

There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray labourers, and with less s.p.a.ce about her she felt she would find her task easier. Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread to come. Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff that he had been wont to like to wander in.

They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up thus for better protection against the wind. The close-set hedges of elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of pa.s.sing from one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side.

In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them a.s.siduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance, and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers, violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always called them ”the hanging gardens of Babylon”--a phrase that had filled him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare earth crumbled underfoot; even gra.s.s or weeds seemed afraid to grow there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.

Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely. Ishmael had a moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown together and were penning him in. Then he faced her and spoke.

”Blanche!” he said; ”won't you tell me what is the matter?”

Blanche said nothing; tears of pity suddenly choked her, and the knowledge of the blow she was about to deal. Ishmael at last brought himself to voice his dread.

”You aren't disappointed in it all--or in me?” he asked in a low voice.

”You're not getting--bored, are you, Blanche? After all, the actress sees the seamiest side of town; you won't mind leaving it? I know I'm offering you a very different life from what you're used to, but”--with a shade of the decisiveness that had always attracted her to him--”it will be much better for you. No late hours, no more of the sandwiches-at-odd-times game. We shall be very happy, just us two, even if we don't know people. People!” he cried scornfully, a wave of pa.s.sion breaking over him as he caught her to him. ”What do we want with other people?”

Pressing her almost roughly against him, he bent her head back into the curve of his arm and kissed her fiercely. She lay pa.s.sive, deliberately taking all he gave and thrilling to it. Self-pity surged over her; she had been so happy--not only happy, but so much better! It was very hard, she felt, as she trembled with pleasure under his kisses. She shrank from giving pain, but she shrank still more from lowering herself in his eyes, and the situation needed all her skill. Disengaging herself from his arms, she faced him with what she felt to be a brave little smile.

”Ishmael! My poor boy; Ishmael!” she said.

He was suddenly very grave, but waited silently.

Still, he said nothing, and she took his hand in hers and spoke very gently.

”Ishmael, dear one! listen to me. You must see that it's impossible, that it would never do.”

He did see it, her very certainty showed him plainly enough; but still he fought against it, bringing forward every plea, and ending with what was to him the great argument: ”But if we love each other?”

”Of course love is very important, Ishmael,” said Blanche, choosing her words carefully; ”but don't you see how important other things are too?

It's the externals that matter most in this life, Ishmael; see how they matter to you, who have worked so hard to alter them.”

”You can be clever about it,” said Ishmael, a new look that was almost suspicion glinting in his eyes; ”I can't talk round a thing, but I know things. I know I love you and would spend my life trying to make you happy. You say you aren't happy in your own life.”

”But how could I be happy without my friends and my own kind of people, Ishmael?” asked Blanche reproachfully. She did not add that, being incapable of loyalty, she had no real friends, but suddenly she saw it as true, and staggered under the flood of self-pity that followed.

Losing Ishmael, she was indeed bereft, not only of him, but of her new self, and with the worst of all pangs--loneliness--striking through her, she laid her arms against the hedge and, hiding her face, burst into a storm of tears. Ishmael stood by her silently; like most men, he was inarticulate at the great moments, and Blanche sobbed on. She who for so many years had made herself believe what she wished, had gagged and blindfolded her own soul till truth showed its face to her in vain, was now stripped of all bandages and having facts pa.s.sed relentlessly before her. She had made Ishmael love her, as she had so many men, by seeming something she was not; she had fallen in love with Ishmael herself, and must keep up the pretence of being the woman he thought her, for for her real self such a man as Ishmael could have no comprehension. She told herself that if they could only have married she would in time have grown to be the woman he thought her, and she railed bitterly at Fate.

For her there only remained the old path, and the knowledge filled her with a leaden weariness. But for Ishmael--what remained for him? Never again would he be able to delight in the world of hopes he had set up with such care. What could she give him to help him face reality? The plighted word, steadfastness, friends.h.i.+p, none of these gifts were Blanche's to bestow, but she could at least send him away his own man again--at the sacrifice of her vanity. A struggle shook her mind, all the well-trained sophistries warring against a new clarity of vision.

There were two courses open to her--she might hoodwink Ishmael, bewilder him with words, show herself as grieving, exquisite, far above him, yet in spirit unchangeably his; or she might show him the truth, let him see her as the world-ridden, egotistical creature of flimsy emotions and tangible ambitions that she was. If she chose the first way, Ishmael would have an unshattered ideal to take away and set up in his lonely heart; but it placed forgetfulness out of the question for a man of his temperament. If she decided on the second course, he would have a time of bitter disillusionment, but could some day love again, perhaps all the sooner for the shock; Blanche knew that nothing sends a man so surely into a woman's arms as a rebuff from another woman. In her heart she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling something that could never be the same again: on the one side whatever there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit of a lifetime.

She raised her head, and her glance was arrested idly by a deserted spider's web woven from branch to branch of the elder hedge and wavering gently in the breeze. Some seed husks had been blown into the meshes and clung there lightly, cream-hued against the pearly threads. Blanche found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this innovation on flies. ”It is like my life,” she thought, ”blown husks for bread,” and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell and the web run together in a silvery blur. The moment of idle thought had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she tried to compromise.

”I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael,” she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain. ”You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not.

I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life--friends.h.i.+p, beauty, one's own kin--mean so much to me.”

He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited silently.