Dance of the Years (18 page)

Mrs. Timson's reply startled him. She professed herself horrified at this suggestion, which she affected to take literally, and assured him that she had such complete faith in the inviolable qualities of little Lizzie's sweetness that she never imposed any of the foolish restraints upon her to which she saw other mothers subject their unfortunate offspring. In her opinion, she said, any such move might give the child ideas which could be almost indelicate.

James listened to her and wondered why she was so vehement. He sincerely hoped she was lying. The topic was a trifle heavy for a first call and he steered the conversation into easier channels.

Some minutes later when he was leaving and the manservant was again conducting him across the marble chessboard, he saw something which reminded him of the conversation. Just before he reached the threshold a girl came hurrying in. She was about sixteen, he judged, but tall and well developed for her age. He guessed who she was, for she was startlingly like her father and had the same short nose and ingenuous blue eyes. She was hatless and breathless, and her hair, which was silken with much brushing, was slightly disarranged. Her muslin skirts were dimpled round the hems with the little sweethearts which grow on the jack-by-the-hedge, and her round, white collar was crumpled.

James observed all these things casually, but her expression held his attention. There is a certain look, which in very young people is apt to be nothing short of transfiguring; it is an expression of intoxication, of unconcealable, inexpressible, overpacked happiness. There was blood in Miss Lizzie's face, a shine in her eyes, and an unhidden smile on her mouth.

James, who was not given to poetic thought, fancied that if flowers had sprung up between the marble blocks underneath her feet it would hardly have been astonishing.

She ignored him and quite possibly did not see him, but ran on past him and up the stairs. The two men, James and the servant, had
seen her though, and James, looking sharply at the other, intercepted the same wary glance from him.

James rode off thinking of Mrs. Timson and wondering if she could be as much of a fool as she appeared, and too, idly, who it was Miss Lizzie had been meeting among the jack-by-the-hedge.

Miss Lizzie lay in her bed (which was small, and wore muslin flounces to hide its legs), and pulled the sheet up over her shoulders because she was not undressed. She was in great distress. Sin is a truly awful thing if one is honestly not used to it, and she was all but suffocated by fear of the uncontrollable urge which had sprung up in her to deceive Mama (who was now no longer Dear Mama but one of the Enemy) and go into the garden as she had promised Frank Castor. Her red and white room was as fussy and cluttered as a work-basket, but to-night its windows were wide open to a very different world.

The air was warm and scented, and the garden was alive with whispers and a sort of breathy sighing she never remembered hearing before. The moonlight was very palely gold and had the magic property of making lovely things like trees lovelier, and commonplace things like wheelbarrows and potting sheds invisible. It was an hour of enchantment.

At that moment she only meant to go out into the garden, really only that, only out in the garden. At the time Miss Lizzie was two people, two distinct girls; one of them, the more familiar Lizzie, was in a state of panic, terrified by the warning instincts which chattered inside her like voices just too far off to be heard. But the other Lizzie was astonishingly confident, entirely happy and possessed of alarming ingenuity in devising practical methods to attain her end. This new Lizzie was a frightening girl. She had a whole stream of logic to back her up, too, and had a way of suddenly producing fine arguments to which the yammering instincts of the good, everyday Lizzie could bring only vague, unsatisfactory replies. This had been shown very clearly in the battle they had just had over the Bible reading.

When Lizzie had come in from her walk this afternoon her usual bout of silent day-dreaming had not satisfied her, and she had felt the need of liberating words to free her of some of the shattering excitement which was torturing her so unmercifully. Having no one in the
world to whom she could talk she had tried to read, and it had been then that the new dominant Lizzie had decided on a certain passage, while the old Lizzie had protested feebly. To this objection the other Lizzie had taken up the Bible and let her finger run over the word “Holy” embossed in gold on the crimson morocco. So until the light failed, the two of them struggling in one little girl had sat and read the beautiful Eastern wedding idyll. Miss Lizzie read the verses just under her breath.

“
My beloved is mine and I am his:

He feedeth his flock among the lilies

Until the day be cool and the shadows flee away
,

Turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or young hart

Upon the mountains of Bether
.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth
,

I sought, but I found him not
.”

Beautiful, kind words to one in great pain. There was one recurring phrase which rather frightened her, it came so often and was like a spell or a chant in a fairy tale:

“
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the hinds of the field that you stir not up nor awaken love until it please
.”

Miss Lizzie did not want it to say what she thought it might, and so she put it out of her mind and went on with the interchange of the main love song.

As she had sat by her window catching the last dregs of the light on the tiny print, she looked like a picture from a Christmas Supplement, her hair was so smooth, her snood was in place, and the folds of her blue dress hung softly to the floor as she bent over the Book, yet no roe or hart on the mountains of Bether ever lifted his head with more eagerness than she did to look out of the window at the green leaves as she heard for the first time the dreadful calling music of the insistent earth.

The normal Miss Lizzie Timson, who until three weeks ago had lived and suffered and been happy in a child's way for over sixteen years, was a very good, if very ingenuous and affectionate little girl. She was not quite ordinary, however. She had her father's gentle interest in the next human being, and had added to it a trick of her own, by which she was able to identify herself with almost anyone who might be near her. This was more than sympathy; it was a power to link up with, to suffer as, to enjoy for, to love in fact, practically anybody. It is a comparatively rare attribute, and since what it actually amounts to in sober fact is the gift for pooling human
emotional force, it is the secret of man and highly dangerous if the rest of the human mechanism surrounding it is not ready for it.

Lizzie's ignorance of the ordinary reproductive machinery of the animal world was very nearly complete. Early and continuous assurances that certain matters were “not quite nice subjects for a young lady,” had convinced her that there was virtue in not knowing a great many things, and with some effort she had succeeded in making herself blind to much.

Meanwhile everyone who met her loved her in the end, if only because she loved him. She never demanded anything from them, and was neither jealous or possessive; moreover, her affection was diffused, and thus never ugly or importunate. Always with her it was a giving and not a taking. Now she was grown and as artificially ignorant as if she had been reared in a padded bandbox; a very vulnerable, very dangerous young person.

To-night as she pressed her head into the pillow and pulled the coverlet closer round her shoulders, she was trembling with the agony of the passion which was burning in her. She was a strong, healthy young thing for all her slenderness. Moreover, she was very feminine, very normal, and for six weeks now she had met Frank Castor nearly every day.

Their acquaintance had progressed from deliciously exciting beginnings, through the miseries of doubt, and the delights of certainty to the crisis of a declaration. Since then there had been worry in it. New problems had arisen; new responsibilities; new urgencies. For ten days now he had been pleading with her to meet him in the garden at night where they could talk and kiss alone quietly without the constant fear of being overlooked. It seemed to them they wanted so little from the world, only that they should be left alone just for an hour, just for a breathing space.

To-day Lizzie had consented, and now she was two-fifths afraid while the rest of her was a bundle of breathless anxiety for Mama to come in and get her good-night kiss over and done with.

At last far down the corridor Mama's door opened. The candle Mrs. Timson carried shed a thin stick of light under the door at first, and then as she came softly in, her dressing gown of gophered linen whispering over the shining boards, it made a wide, sharp shaft like the blade of a scimitar.

Mama was hardly thinking of Lizzie, and certainly not of her as a human being, and she said the things she always said in these days.

“My darling not yet asleep? Surely the windows are too wide? Mama would not like Elizabeth to take cold!”

Lizzie begged for them to be left open, and as usual Mrs. Timson was acquiescent. She sat on the end of the bed, her square face lit
by the candle-light, and began to question gently. Where had Lizzie gone for her walk? To the mill? That was a pretty walk. As she came back through the water meadows had she met anybody? Only young Mr. Castor? Oh, with his tutor? Oh,
not
with his tutor? Had they spoken? Just for a moment no doubt? What a good-looking boy he was, wasn't he? So reserved and shy, and yet so distinguished! Mama had heard his poor Papa was unwell. Perhaps when he grew better he would call upon Lizzie's dear Papa, and they could all be friends. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Perhaps when Lizzie went out to-morrow she had better wear her grey merino with the wine braid. It was very becoming, and more formal than her muslin. Mama liked her little girl to be a credit to her, although Lizzie must never be vain. Vanity was not becoming in a woman. Gentlemen like her dear Papa did not like vain girls. A very charming gentleman called on Mama to-day—a Mr. James Galantry. It was an odd name, wasn't it? Mama fancied she had heard of the Galantrys somewhere, they were some connection of Lord Driffield's. Mr. Galantry was a very good-looking person, extraordinarily dark, though. Had Lizzie seen him? He was riding a very nice horse.

Lizzie, who was well nigh fainting with guilt and its weariness, said she had seen him, and wasn't he very old?

This made Mama laugh. She said Mr. Galantry was a comparatively young man, younger than Mama, but not so young, of course, as Frank Castor. Frank Castor was really remarkably fair, wasn't he? Well, little Lizzie must go to sleep now, and have a nice walk to-morrow!

It was criminal of course, cruel to the point of insanity, but to do Mrs. Timson justice, she had no idea of it. She herself had been brought up very strictly but not in complete ignorance, and it simply had not occurred to her that the added grace in the marriage market which she had so carefully bestowed upon her daughter might easily have altered the entire make-up of the product. Had her own mother indulged in little day dreams before her, she would even at sixteen have followed the elder woman's plan of campaign. The notion that Lizzie did not do so merely struck her as pleasant.

Very happy in her own wisdom, she kissed Lizzie and trailed away to her own room. As soon as the last flicker of the candle-light slid away from under the door, Lizzie sprang out of bed and began to straighten her hair in a misery of haste. The Enemy had kept her too long. Perhaps Frank had thought she was not coming, and had gone home in despair. This very practical worry swept away any nattering of conscience, and she was free of it until she was safely in the garden.

It was warm out of doors, and the turf deadened her footsteps. The
avenue of small hollies and cedars, which would one day make two stuffy walls, was now broad and spacious. The hollyhocks and standard roses nodded between, and the shivering of the poplars made a noise like the sea a long way off.

Lizzie walked unsteadily across the grass, and at last reached the new plaster temple which his architect had persuaded Mr. Timson was a necessity in any well-appointed garden. Once there she clung to one of its smooth pillars and struggled to get her breath, which would not come properly because of the thunderous beating of her heart.

She had no mind left; nothing to think with at all. She was a quivering, disorganized, purely emotional machine. Tremendous forces, unlike anything it had ever before encountered, battled amid it. At one moment her body was racked with physical pain and the next was alive with pleasure, and all the while the “child in charge,” the owner of this paralysing phenomena, sat wide-eyed and silent among it.

The boy came out of the little temple clumsily and almost fell in her arms. They were both aware of their awkwardness, and both brushed it aside as negligible. His first kiss missed her mouth altogether, and hurt the thin bone of her chin, but the next was more successful, and they clung together like drowning things, wretched, in desperate need and terribly afraid.

Frank Castor was just seventeen. He was like his father, but had most of his mother's discontent in his face, which was otherwise at this age beautiful and fair-skinned as a woman's. He was quite as much in love as Lizzie and because of his sex very much more reckless. In stealing out at such an hour he was running a greater risk even than she was. He had been driven to more desperate shifts, and now that she was actually with him, his physical unease was greater.

When they could speak, they walked up and down the little upper lawn which was hidden by the trees, and kept very close to each other, since parting was an agony.

Their conversation was terrifying. They gabbled wearily through matters which in the normal way would have been interesting to both. There were details of Lizzie's descent over the porch roof to be mentioned, and the important fact that Frank's tutor, who actually slept in the room leading out of his own, was still drunk.