IN FIVE YEARS

WINTER had set in again when Lucinda and I came together to Cragsfoot. The picture of her on her first evening there stands out vivid in my memory.

Sir Paget had received her with affectionate, but perhaps somewhat ceremonious, courtesy; there was a touch of ratifying a treaty of peace in his manner. She was minded to come closer in intimacy; for in these recent days—before and just after our wedding—a happy confidence seemed to possess her. Self-defense and the hardness it has to carry with it were necessary to her no longer; she reached out more freely for love and friendship, and broke the bounds of that thoughtful isolation which had so often served to keep the woman herself apart from all about her. She was not on guard now; that was the meaning of the change which had come over her; not on guard and not fighting.

After dinner she drew a low stool up beside the old man’s big armchair before the fire, and sat down beside him, laying one arm across his knees; I sat smoking on the other side of the hearth. Sir Paget laid his hand on hers for a moment, as though to welcome her bodily presence thus in touch with him.

“You’ll be wondering how it happened,” she began, “and Julius won’t have been able to tell you. Probably it never occurred to him to try, though I suppose he’s told you all the actual happenings—the outward things, I mean, you know. It was at Ste. Maxime that we—began to be ‘we’ to one another. I knew it in him then—perhaps sooner than he did—but I don’t know; he’s still rather secretive about himself, though intolerably inquisitive about other people. But I did know it in him; and I searched, and found it in myself—not love then, but a feeling of partnership, of alliance. I was very lonely then. Well, I can stand that. I was standing it; and I could have gone on—perhaps! I wonder if I could! No, not after I found out about Arsenio’s taking that money! That would have broken me—if it hadn’t been for Ste. Maxime.”

She paused for a moment; when she spoke again, she addressed me—on the other side of the fireplace.

“You went away for a long while; but you remembered and you wrote. I’m not a letter-writer, and that was really the reason I didn’t answer. I have to be with people—to feel them—if I’m to talk with them to any purpose—to ask then questions and get answers, even though they don’t say anything.” (I saw her fingers bend in a light pressure on old Sir Paget’s knee.) “I should have sounded stupid in my letters. Or said too much! Because the only thing was to say nothing about it, wasn’t it? You knew that as well as I did, didn’t you? If once we had talked—in letters or when you came back——! I did nearly talk when you suddenly appeared there on the Piazza at Venice. It was pretty nearly as good as a declaration, wasn’t it, Julius?”

She gave a low merry laugh; but then her eyes wandered from my face to the blaze of the fire, and took on their self-questioning look.

“I think it’s rare to be able to see the humor of things all by yourself—I mean, of course, of close things, things very near to you, things that hurt, although they’re really funny. You want a sympathizer—somebody to laugh with. Oh, well, it goes deeper than that! You want to feel that there’s another world outside the miserable little one you’re living in—outside it, different from it—a place where you yourself can be different from the sort of creature which the life you’re leading forces you to be—at least, unless you’re a saint, I suppose; and I never was that! You want a City of Refuge for your heart, don’t you, Sir Paget? For your heart, and your feelings; yes, and your humor; for everything that you are or that you’ve got, and want to go on being or having. Because the worst thing that anybody or any state of things can do to you, or threaten you with, is the destruction of yourself—whether it’s done by assault or by starvation! In the world I lived in—the actual one as it had come to be for Arsenio and me—I was done for! There was hardly anything left of me!” She suddenly turned her face up to Sir Paget, with a murmur of laughter. “It was like the Cheshire cat! Nothing left but a grin and claws! A grin for his antics, claws to protect myself. That’s what I had come to in my own world—the little world of Arsenio and me! Claws and a grin—wasn’t I, Julius?”

“I would not hear your enemy say so, but——”

“You know it’s true; I knew at the time that you felt it, but I couldn’t alter myself. Well, I told you something about it at Venice—trying to change, not succeeding! Even his love for me had become one more offense in him—and that was bad. The only thing that carried me through was the other world you gave me—outside my own; where you were, where he wasn’t—though we looked at him from it, and had to!—where I could take refuge!”

She went on slowly, reflectively, as though she were compelled reluctantly to render an account to herself. “I have escaped; I have gained my City of Refuge. But I bear the marks of my imprisonment—even as my hands here bear the marks of my work—of my sewing and washing and ironing. I’m marked and scarred!”

Sir Paget laid his hand on hers again. “We keep a salve for those wounds at Cragsfoot,” he said gently. “We’ve stored it up abundantly for you, Lucinda.”

She turned to him, now clasping his arms with her hands. “You! Yet I put you to shame; I betrayed you; I was false—Oh, and cruel to Waldo!” For the first time in all my knowledge of her I saw tears running down her cheeks. Sir Paget took her hands into his and kissed her upturned face.

“Waldo’s as happy as a king—or, at least, a Prince Consort,” he said, smiling, though I think that his voice shook a little. “And, since it’s an evening of penitence and confession, I’ll make my confession too. I’ve always been a bit of a traitor, or a rebel, myself. You know it well enough, Julius!” He smiled. “Sitting here, under the sway of Briarmount, I’m afraid that I have, before now, drunk a silent toast to the Queen over the Water. Because I remembered you in old days, my dear.”

The mention of Briarmount brought the smiles back to Lucinda’s face. She rose from her stool and stood on the hearthrug between us, looking from one to the other. She gave a defiant toss of her fair head. “Guilty, my lords! I can’t abide her. And I’m glad—yes, I am—that she’s not here at Cragsfoot!”

“Moreover, she has retreated even from Briarmount before you,” chuckled Sir Paget.

“When I advanced in strength, she always retreated,” said Lucinda with another toss. “The fact is—I had the least bit more effrontery. I could bluff her, whatever was in my heart. She couldn’t bluff me.”

“Reconciliation, I suppose, impossible?” hazarded the diplomatist en ratraite, not able to resist the temptation of plying his trade, of getting round the grand implacability; what a feather in his cap it would be!

“Looking down the vista of years,” said Lucinda, now gayly triumphant in her mastery over the pair of us, “a thing I used to do, Julius, oftener than I need now—I see two old ladies, basking somewhere in the sun—perchance at Villa San Carlo—which I have not, up to now, visited, though I know the surrounding district. From under their wigs, in old squeaky voices——”

“I thank God for my mortality,” murmured old Sir Paget as he looked at her.

“They’re telling one another that they must both of them have been very wonderful, clever, attractive, beautiful! Or else they’d never have made so much trouble, and never squabbled so much. And I shouldn’t wonder if they said—both of them—that nothing in the whole business was their fault at all; it was only the men who were so silly. But then they made the men silly. What men wouldn’t they make silly, when they were young and beautiful so long ago?”

“How much of this is Lady Dundrannan—and how much more is you?”

“Mostly me, Julius. Because I have, as I told you, the least bit more effrontery. But her ladyship agrees, and the two old gossips sip their tea and mumble their toast, with all the harmony and happiness of superannuated sinners. I’m sure I needn’t explain that feeling to men—they knew all about it!”

“This picture, distant though it is, saps my conception of Lady Dundrannan,” I protested. “Perhaps of you too; do you mind if I call you a good hater?”

A smile hung about her lips; but her voice passed from the gay to the gentle, and the old inward-looking gaze took possession of her eyes. “No, I don’t mind, I like my hatreds; even for me there never failed to be something amusing in them. I wonder if I do myself too much credit in saying—something unreal? Did I play parts—like poor Arsenio? But still they seemed very real, and they kept my courage up. I suppose it’s funny to think that one behaves well—honorably—sometimes, just to spite somebody else. I’m afraid it is so, though—isn’t it, Sir Paget?”

“The Pharisee in the Temple comes somewhere near your notion.”

She came and sat herself down on the arm of my chair, and threw her arm round my neck. “Yes, hatreds serve their turn. But they ought to die; being of the earth earthy, they ought to, oughtn’t they? And they do. Do any of us here hate poor Arsenio now?” Suddenly she kissed me. “You never did, because you’re so ridiculously understanding—and I thank you for that now, because it helped me to try not to, to try to remember that he loved me, and that he couldn’t help being what he was. But where’s all my anger gone? Why, you and I often talk of him, and enjoy his tricks, don’t we? They can’t hurt us now; they’re just amusing, and we’re grateful to the poor man, and don’t feel hard to him any more, do we?” She fell silent for a moment, and then, with a broader smile, and with one hand uplifted in the air, she said, “And so, Sir Paget, very, very dear Sir Paget, I back myself to make friends with Nina in—well, say five years!”

The prudently calculated audacity of this undertaking made us laugh. “And with Waldo—how soon?” asked Sir Paget.

“Oh, to-morrow! But if I do that, I must take ten years, instead of five, for Nina!”

“You’d better arrange the time-table in your own way, my dear,” Sir Paget admitted discreetly. “Now I’ll go off to bed and leave you to have a talk together.”

He rose from his chair and advanced towards her, to give her his good-night greeting. Quicker than he was, she met him almost before he had taken a step. Catching his hands in hers, she fell on her knees before him. “Have you a blessing left for the sinner that repenteth—for your prodigal daughter?”

She was not in tears now, nor near them. She was just wonderfully and exultantly coaxing.

The old man disengaged his hands, clasped her face with them, turned it up to him, and gallantly kissed it. “Your sunshine warms my old bones,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back at Cragsfoot, Lucinda.” He turned away quickly and left us.

I went to her and raised her from her knees.

“That’s all right!” she said, with a tremulous but satisfied little laugh. “And I love him even more than I’ve tried to make him love me—and that’s saying a good deal to you, who’ve seen me practice my wiles! Are the tricks stale to you, Julius?”

“Yes. Try some new ones!”

“Ah, you’re cunning! The old ones are, I believe—I do believe—good enough for you.”

“The new ones had better be for Nina!”

“In five years, Julius, as sure as I live—and love you!”

“How do you propose to begin?” I asked skeptically. I knew my Nina! I knew Lucinda. It seemed, at the best, a very even bet whether she could bring it off.

Lucinda laughed in merry confidence and mockery. “Why, by giving her to understand that you make me thoroughly unhappy, of course. How else would you do it?”

THE END