Lalage’s come; aye

Come is she now, O!

—Hardy, “Timing Her”

 

 

He dismissed the cab at the bridge. It was the very last day of May, warm, affluent, the fronts of houses embowered in trees, the sky half blue, half fleeced with white clouds. The shadow of one fell for a minute across Chelsea, though the warehouses across the river still stood in sunlight.

Montague had known nothing. The information had come through the post; a sheet of paper containing nothing beyond the name and address. Standing by the solicitor’s desk, Charles recalled the previous address he had received from Sarah; but this was in a stiff copperplate. Only in the brevity could he see her.

Montague had, at Charles’s cabled command, acted with great care. No approach was to be made to her, no alarm— no opportunity for further flight—given. A clerk played de-tective, with the same description given to the real detectives in his pocket. He reported that a young lady conforming to the particulars was indeed apparently residing at the address; that the person in question went under the name of Mrs. Roughwood. The ingenuous transposition of syllables re-moved any lingering doubt as to the accuracy of the informa-tion; and removed, after the first momentary shock, the implications of the married tide. Such stratagems were quite common with single women in London; and proved the opposite of what was implied. Sarah had not married.

“I see it was posted in London. You have no idea ...”

“It was sent here, so plainly it comes from someone who knows of our advertisements. It was addressed personally to you, so the someone knows whom we were acting for, yet appears uninterested in the reward we offered. That seems to suggest the young lady herself.”

“But why should she delay so long to reveal herself? And besides, this is not her hand.” Montague silently confessed himself at a loss. “Your clerk obtained no further informa-tion?”

“He followed instructions, Charles. I forbade him to make inquiries. By chance he was within hearing in the street when a neighbor wished her good morning. That is how we have the name.”

“And the house?”

“A respectable family residence. They are his very words.”

“She is presumably governess there.”

“That seems very likely.”

Charles had turned then to the window, which was just as well; for the way Montague had looked at his back suggested a certain lack of frankness. He had forbidden the clerk to ask questions; but he had not forbidden himself to question the clerk.

“You intend to see her?”

“My dear Harry, I have not crossed the Atlantic ...” Charles smiled in apology for his exasperated tone. “I know what you would ask. I can’t answer. Forgive me, this matter is too personal. And the truth is, I don’t know what I feel. I think I shall not know till I see her again. All I do know is that . . . she continues to haunt me. That I must speak to her, I must. .. you understand.”

“You must question the Sphinx.”

“If you care to put it so.”

“As long as you bear in mind what happened to those who failed to solve the enigma.”

Charles made a rueful grimace. “If silence or death is the alternative—then you had better prepare the funeral ora-tion.”

“I somehow suspect that that will not be needed.”

They had smiled.

But he was not smiling now, as he approached the Sphinx’s house. He knew nothing of the area; he had a notion that it was a kind of inferior substitute for Greenwich—a place where retired naval officers finished their days. The Victorian Thames was a far fouler river than today’s, every one of its tides hideously awash with sewage. On one occasion the stench was so insupportable that it drove the House of Lords out of their chamber; the cholera was blamed on it; and a riverside house was far from having the social cachet it has in our own deodorized century. For all that, Charles could see that the houses were quite handsome; perverse though their inhabitants must be in their choice of environment, they were plainly not driven there by poverty.

At last, and with an inner trembling, a sense of pallor, a sense too of indignity—his new American self had been swept away before the massive, ingrained past and he was embarrassedly conscious of being a gentleman about to call on a superior form of servant—he came to the fatal gate. It was of wrought iron, and opened onto a path that led briefly to a tall house of brick—though most of that was hidden to the roof by a luxuriant blanket of wisteria, just now beginning to open its first pale-blue pendants of bloom.

He raised the brass knocker and tapped it twice; waited some twenty seconds, and knocked again. This time the door was opened. A maid stood before him. He glimpsed a wide hall behind her—many paintings, so many the place seemed more an art gallery.

“I wish to speak to a Mrs.... Roughwood. I believe she resides here.”

The maid was a slim young creature, wide-eyed, and without the customary lace cap. In fact, had she not worn an apron, he would not have known how to address her.

“Your name, if you please?”

He noted the absence of the “sir”; perhaps she was not a maid; her accent was far superior to a maid’s. He handed her his card.

“Pray tell her I have come a long way to see her.”

She unashamedly read the card. She was not a maid. She seemed to hesitate. But then there was a sound at the dark far end of the hall. A man some six or seven years older than Charles stood in a doorway. The girl turned gratefully to him.

“This gentleman wishes to see Sarah.”

“Yes?”

He held a pen in his hand. Charles removed his hat and spoke from the threshold.

“If you would be so good ... a private matter ... I knew her well before she came to London.”

There was something slightly distasteful in the man’s intent though very brief appraisal of Charles; a faintly Jewish air about him, a certain careless ostentation in the clothes; a touch of the young Disraeli. The man glanced at the girl.

“She is ... ?”

“I think they talk. That is all.”

“They” were apparently her charges: the children.

“Then take him up, my dear. Sir.”

With a little bow he disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. The girl indicated that Charles should follow her. He was left to close the door for himself. As she began to mount the stairs he had time to glance at the crowded paint-ings and drawings. He was sufficiently knowledgeable about modern art to recognize the school to which most of them belonged; and indeed, the celebrated, the notorious artist whose monogram was to be seen on several of them. The furore he had caused some twenty years before had now died down; what had then been seen as fit only for burning now commanded a price. The gentleman with the pen was a collector of art; of somewhat suspect art; but he was no less evidently a man of some wealth.

Charles followed the girl’s slender back up a flight of stairs; still more paintings, and still with a predominance of the suspect school. But he was by now too anxious to give them any attention. As they embarked on a second flight of stairs he ventured a question.

“Mrs. Roughwood is employed here as governess?”

The girl stopped in midstair and looked back: an amused surprise. Then her eyes fell.

“She is no longer a governess.”

Her eyes came up to his for a moment. Then she moved on her way.

They came to a second landing. His sibylline guide turned at a door.

“Kindly wait here.”

She entered the room, leaving the door ajar. From outside Charles had a glimpse of an open window, a lace curtain blowing back lightly in the summer air, a shimmer, through intervening leaves, of the river beyond. There was a low murmur of voices. He shifted his position, to see better into the room. Now he saw two men, two gentlemen. They were standing before a painting on an easel, which was set oblique-ly to the window, to benefit from its light. The taller of the two bent to examine some detail, thereby revealing the other who stood behind him. By chance he looked straight through the door and into Charles’s eyes. He made the faintest inclination, then glanced at someone on the hidden other side of the room.

Charles stood stunned.

For this was a face he knew; a face he had even once listened to for an hour or more, with Ernestina beside him. It was impossible, yet ... and the man downstairs! Those paint-ings and drawings! He turned hastily away and looked, a man woken into, not out of, a nightmare, through a tall window at the rear end of the landing to a green back-garden below. He saw nothing; but only the folly of his own assump-tion that fallen women must continue falling—for had he not come to arrest the law of gravity? He was as shaken as a man who suddenly finds the world around him standing on its head.

A sound.

He flashed a look round. She stood there against the door she had just closed, her hand on its brass knob, in the abrupt loss of sunlight, difficult to see clearly.

And her dress! It was so different that he thought for a moment she was someone else. He had always seen her in his mind in the former clothes, a haunted face rising from a widowed darkness. But this was someone in the full uniform of the New Woman, flagrantly rejecting all formal contem-porary notions of female fashion. Her skirt was of a rich dark blue and held at the waist by a crimson belt with a gilt star clasp; which also enclosed the pink-and white striped silk blouse, long-sleeved, flowing, with a delicate small collar of white lace, to which a small cameo acted as tie. The hair was bound loosely back by a red ribbon.

This electric and bohemian apparition evoked two immedi-ate responses in Charles; one was that instead of looking two years older, she looked two years younger; and the other, that in some incom-prehensible way he had not returned to England but done a round voyage back to America. For just so did many of the smart young women over there dress during the day. They saw the sense of such clothes—their simplicity and attractiveness after the wretched bustles, stays and crinolines. In the United States Charles had found the style, with its sly and paradoxically coquettish hints at eman-cipation in other ways, very charming; now, and under so many other new suspicions, his cheeks took a color not far removed from the dianthus pink of the stripes on her shirt.

But against this shock—what was she now, what had she become!—there rushed a surge of relief. Those eyes, that mouth, that always implicit air of defiance ... it was all still there. She was the remarkable creature of his happier mem-ories—but blossomed, realized, winged from the black pupa.

For ten long moments nothing was spoken. Then she clutched her hands nervously in front of the gilt clasp and looked down.

“How came you here, Mr. Smithson?”

She had not sent the address. She was not grateful. He did not remember that her inquiry was identical to one he had once asked her when she came on him unexpectedly; but he sensed that now their positions were strangely reversed. He was now the suppliant, she the reluctant listener.

“My solicitor was told you live here. I do not know by whom.”

“Your solicitor?”

“Did you not know I broke my engagement to Miss Freeman?”

Now she was the one who was shocked. Her eyes probed his a long moment, then looked down. She had not known. He drew a step closer and spoke in a low voice.

“I have searched every corner of this city. Every month I have advertised in the hope of ...”

Now they both stared at the ground between them; at the handsome Turkey carpet that ran the length of the landing. He tried to normalize his voice.

“I see you are ...” he lacked words; but he meant, altogether changed.

She said, “Life has been kind to me.”

“That gentleman in there—is he not... ?”

She nodded in answer to the name in his still incredulous eyes.

“And this house belongs to ...”

She took a small breath then, so accusing had become his tone. There lurked in his mind idly heard gossip. Not of the man he had seen in the room; but of the one he had seen downstairs. Without warning Sarah moved to the stairs that went yet higher in the house. Charles stood rooted. She gave him a hesitant glance down.

“Please come.”

He followed her up the stairs, to find she had entered a room that faced north, over the large gardens below. It was an artist’s studio. On a table near the door lay a litter of drawings; on an easel a barely begun oil, the mere ground-lines, a hint of a young woman looking sadly down, foliage sketched faint behind her head; other turned canvases by the wall; by another wall, a row of hooks, from which hung a multi-colored array of female dresses, scarves, shawls; a large pottery jar; tables of impedimenta—tubes, brushes, color-pots. A bas relief, small sculptures, an urn with bulrushes. There seemed hardly a square foot without its object.

Sarah stood at a window, her back to him.

“I am his amanuensis. His assistant.”

“You serve as his model?”

“I see.”

“Sometimes.”

But he saw nothing; or rather, he saw in the corner of his eye one of the sketches on the table by the door. It was of a female nude, nude that is from the waist up, and holding an amphora at her hip. The face did not seem to be Sarah’s; but the angle was such that he could not be sure.

“You have lived here since you left Exeter?”

“I have lived here this last year.”

If only he could ask her how; how had they met? On what terms did they live? He hesitated, then laid his hat, stick and gloves on a seat by the door. Her hair was now to be seen in all its richness, reaching almost down to her waist. She seemed smaller than he remembered; more slight. A pigeon fluttered to alight on the sill in front of her; took fright, and slipped away. Downstairs a door opened and closed. There was a faint sound of men’s voices as they made their way below. The room divided them. All divided them. The silence became unbearable.

He had come to raise her from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full armor, ready to slay the dragon—and now the damsel had broken all the rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands. He was the man who appears at a formal soiree under the impression it was to be a fancy dress ball.

“He knows you are not married?”

“I pass as a widow.”

His next question was clumsy; but he had lost all tact.

“I believe his wife is dead?”

“She is dead. But not in his heart.”

“He has not remarried?”

“He shares this house with his brother.” Then she added the name of another person who lived there, as if to imply that Charles’s scarcely concealed fears were, under this evi-dence of population, groundless. But the name she added was the one most calculated to make any respectable Victorian of the late 1860s stiffen with disapproval. The horror evoked by his poetry had been publicly expressed by John Morley, one of those worthies born to be spokesmen (i.e., empty facades) for their age. Charles remembered the quintessen-tial phrase of his condemnation: “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” And the master of the house himself! Had he not heard that he took opium? A vision of some orgiastic menage a quatre—a cinq if one counted the girl who had shown him up—rose in his mind. But there was nothing orgiastic about Sarah’s appearance; to advance the poet as a reference even argued a certain innocence; and what should the famous lecturer and critic glimpsed through the door, a man of somewhat exaggerated ideas, certainly, but widely respected and admired, be doing in such a den of iniquity?

I am overemphasizing the worse, that is the time-serving, Morley-ish half of Charles’s mind; his better self, that self that once before had enabled him to see immediately through the malice of Lyme to her real nature, fought hard to dismiss his suspicions.

He began to explain himself in a quiet voice; with another voice in his mind that cursed his formality, that barrier in him that could not tell of the countless lonely days, lonely nights, her spirit beside him, over him, before him ... tears, and he did not know how to say tears. He told her of what had happened that night in Exeter. Of his decision; of Sam’s gross betrayal.

He had hoped she might turn. But she remained staring, her face hidden from him, down into the greenery below. Somewhere there, children played. He fell silent, then moved close behind her.

“What I say means nothing to you?”

“It means very much to me. So much I...”

He said gently, “I beg you to continue.”

“I am at a loss for words.”

And she moved away, as if she could not look at him when close. Only when she was beside the easel did she venture to do so.

She murmured, “I do not know what to say.”

Yet she said it without emotion, without any of the dawn-ing gratitude he so desperately sought; with no more, in cruel truth, than a baffled simplicity.

“You told me you loved me. You gave me the greatest proof a woman can that ... that what possessed us was no ordinary degree of mutual sympathy and attraction.”

“I do not deny that.”

There was a flash of hurt resentment in his eyes. She looked down before them. Silence flowed back into the room, and now Charles turned to the window.

“But you have found newer and more pressing affec-tions.”

“I did not think ever to see you again.”

“That does not answer my question.”

“I have forbidden myself to regret the impossible.”

“That still does not—“

“Mr. Smithson, I am not his mistress. If you knew him, if you knew the tragedy of his private life ... you could not for a moment be so ...” But she fell silent. He had gone too far; and now he stood with rapped knuckles and red cheeks. Silence again; and then she said evenly, “I have found new affections. But they are not of the kind you suggest.”

“Then I don’t know how I am to interpret your very evident embarrassment at seeing you again.” She said nothing.

“Though I can readily imagine you now have ... friends who are far more interesting and amusing than I could ever pretend to be.” But he added quickly, “You force me to express myself in a way that I abhor.” Still she said nothing. He turned on her with a bitter small smile. “I see how it is. It is I who have become the misanthropist.”

That honesty did better for him. She gave him a quick look, one not without concern. She hesitated, then came to a decision.

“I did not mean to make you so. I meant to do what was best. I had abused your trust, your generosity, I, yes, I had thrown myself at you, forced myself upon you, knowing very well that you had other obligations. A madness was in me at that time. I did not see it clearly till that day in Exeter. The worst you thought of me then was nothing but the truth.” She paused, he waited. “I have since seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good. I remonstrat-ed once. I was told that if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an artist. I believe that is right. I believe I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it, a—“

“I was not to blame for that,”

“No, you were not to blame.” She paused, then went on in a gentler tone. “Mr. Smithson, I remarked a phrase of Mr. Ruskin’s recently. He wrote of an inconsistency of concep-tion. He meant that the natural had been adulterated by the artificial, the pure by the impure. I think that is what hap-pened two years ago.” She said in a lower voice, “And I know but too well which part I contributed.”

He had a reawoken sense of that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her. He saw, too, what had always been dissonant between them: the formality of his language— seen at its worst in the love letter she had never received— and the directness of hers. Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a foolish constraint—but she had just said it, an artificiality of conception—and on the other a substance and purity of thought and judgment; the difference between a simple colophon, say, and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys, all scrollwork, elaboration, rococo horror of void. That was the true inconsistency between them, though her kindness—or her anxiety to be rid of him—tried to conceal it.

“May I pursue the metaphor? Cannot what you call the natural and pure part of the conception be redeemed—be taken up again?”

“I fear not.”

But she would not look at him as she said that.

“I was four thousand miles from here when the news that you had been found came to me. That was a month ago. I have not passed an hour since then without thinking of this conversation. You ... you cannot answer me with observa-tions, however apposite, on art.”

“They were intended to apply to life as well.”

“Th............