On an evening when the sky was clear and only its fringes embroidered1 with the purple arabesques2 of the sunset, Joan Brett was walking on the upper lawn of the terraced garden at Ivywood, where the peacocks trail themselves about. She was not unlike one of the peacocks herself in beauty, and some might have said, in inutility; she had the proud head and the sweeping5 train; nor was she, in these days, devoid6 of the occasional disposition7 to scream. For, indeed, for some time past she had felt her existence closing round her with an incomprehensible quietude; and that is harder for the patience than an incomprehensible noise. Whenever she looked at the old yew8 hedges of the garden they seemed to be higher than when she saw them last; as if those living walls could still grow to shut her in. Whenever from the turret9 windows she had a sight of the sea, it seemed to be farther away. Indeed, the whole closing of the end of the turret wing with the new wall of eastern woodwork seemed to symbolise all her shapeless sensations. In her childhood the wing had ended with a broken-down door and a disused staircase. They led to an uncultivated copse and an abandoned railway tunnel, to which neither she nor anyone else ever wanted to go. Still, she knew what they led to. Now it seemed that this scrap10 of land had been sold and added to the adjoining estate; and about the adjoining estate nobody seemed to know anything in particular. The sense of things closing in increased upon her. All sorts of silly little details magnified the sensation. She could discover nothing about this new landlord next door, so to speak, since he was, it seemed, an elderly man who preferred to live in the greatest privacy. Miss Browning, Lord Ivywood’s secretary, could give her no further information than that he was a gentleman from the Mediterranean11 coast; which singular form of words seemed to have been put into her mouth. As a Mediterranean gentleman might mean anything from an American gentleman living in Venice to a black African on the edge of the Atlas12, the description did not illuminate13; and probably was not intended to do so. She occasionally saw his liveried servants going about; and their liveries were not like English liveries. She was also, in her somewhat morbid14 state, annoyed by the fact that the uniforms of the old Pebblewick militia15 had been changed, under the influence of the Turkish prestige in the recent war. They wore fezzes like the French Zouaves, which were certainly much more practical than the heavy helmets they used to wear. It was a small matter, but it annoyed Lady Joan, who was, like so many clever women, at once subtle and conservative. It made her feel as if the whole world was being altered outside, and she was not allowed to know about it.
But she had deeper spiritual troubles also, while, under the pathetic entreaties17 of old Lady Ivywood and her own sick mother, she stayed on week after week at Ivywood House. If the matter be stated cynically18 (as she herself was quite capable of stating it) she was engaged in the established feminine occupation of trying to like a man. But the cynicism would have been false; as cynicism nearly always is; for during the most crucial days of that period, she had really liked the man.
She had liked him when he was brought in with Pump’s bullet in his leg; and was still the strongest and calmest man in the room. She had liked him when the hurt took a dangerous turn, and when he bore pain to admiration20. She had liked him when he showed no malice21 against the angry Dorian; she had liked him with something like enthusiasm on the night he rose rigid22 on his rude crutch23, and, crushing all remonstrance24, made his rash and swift rush to London. But, despite the queer closing-in-sensations of which we have spoken, she never liked him better than that evening when he lifted himself laboriously25 on his crutch up the terraces of the old garden and came to speak to her as she stood among the peacocks. He even tried to pat a peacock in a hazy26 way, as if it were a dog. He told her that these beautiful birds were, of course, imported from the East—by the semi-eastern empire of Macedonia. But, all the same, Joan had a dim suspicion that he had never noticed before that there were any peacocks at Ivywood. His greatest fault was a pride in the faultlessness of his mental and moral strength; but, if he had only known, something faintly comic in the unconscious side of him did him more good with the woman than all the rest.
“They were said to be the birds of Juno,” he said, “but I have little doubt that Juno, like so much else of the Homeric mythology27, has also an Asiatic origin.”
“I always thought,” said Joan, “that Juno was rather too stately for the seraglio.”
“You ought to know,” replied Ivywood, with a courteous28 gesture, “for I never saw anyone who looked so like Juno as you do. But, indeed, there is a great deal of misunderstanding about the Arabian or Indian view of women. It is, somehow, too simple and solid for our paradoxical Christendom to comprehend. Even the vulgar joke against the Turks, that they like their brides fat, has in it a sort of distorted shadow of what I mean. They do not look so much at the individual, as at Womanhood and the power of Nature.”
“I sometimes think,” said Joan, “that these fascinating theories are a little strained. Your friend Misysra told me the other day that women had the highest freedom in Turkey; as they were allowed to wear trousers.”
Ivywood smiled his rare and dry smile. “The Prophet has something of a simplicity30 often found with genius,” he answered. “I will not deny that some of the arguments he has employed have seemed to me crude and even fanciful. But he is right at the root. There is a kind of freedom that consists in never rebelling against Nature; and I think they understand it in the Orient better than we do in the West. You see, Joan, it is all very well to talk about love in our narrow, personal, romantic way; but there is something higher than the love of a lover or the love of love.”
“What is that?” asked Joan, looking down.
“The love of Fate,” said Lord Ivywood, with something like spiritual passion in his eyes. “Doesn’t Nietzsche say somewhere that the delight in destiny is the mark of the hero? We are mistaken if we think that the heroes and saints of Islam say ‘Kismet’ with bowed heads and in sorrow. They say ‘Kismet’ with a shout of joy. That which is fitting—that is what they really mean. In the Arabian tales, the most perfect prince is wedded31 to the most perfect princess—because it is fitting. The spiritual giants, the Genii, achieve it—that is, the purposes of Nature. In the selfish, sentimental32 European novels, the loveliest princess on earth might have run away with her middle-aged19 drawing-master. These things are not in the Path. The Turk rides out to wed16 the fairest queen of the earth; he conquers empires to do it; and he is not ashamed of his laurels34.”
The crumpled35 violet clouds around the edge of the silver evening looked to Lady Joan more and more like vivid violet embroideries36 hemming37 some silver curtain in the closed corridor at Ivywood. The peacocks looked more lustrous38 and beautiful than they ever had before; but for the first time she really felt they came out of the land of the Arabian Nights.
“Joan,” said Phillip Ivywood, very softly, in the twilight39, “I am not ashamed of my laurels. I see no meaning in what these Christians40 call humility41. I will be the greatest man in the world if I can; and I think I can. Therefore, something that is higher than love itself, Fate and what is fitting, make it right that I should wed the most beautiful woman in the world. And she stands among the peacocks and is more beautiful and more proud than they.”
Joan’s troubled eyes were on the violet horizon and her troubled lips could utter nothing but something like “don’t.”
“Joan,” said Phillip, again, “I have told you, you are the woman one of the great heroes could have desired. Let me now tell you something I could have told no one to whom I had not thus spoken of love and betrothal42. When I was twenty years old in a town in Germany, pursuing my education, I did what the West calls falling in love. She was a fisher-girl from the coast; for this town was near the sea. My story might have ended there. I could not have entered diplomacy43 with such a wife, but I should not have minded then. But a little while after, I wandered into the edges of Flanders, and found myself standing29 above some of the last grand reaches of the Rhine. And things came over me but for which I might be crying stinking44 fish to this day. I thought how many holy or lovely nooks that river had left behind, and gone on. It might anywhere in Switzerland have spent its weak youth in a spirit over a high crag, or anywhere in the Rhinelands lost itself in a marsh45 covered with flowers. But it went on to the perfect sea, which is the fulfilment of a river.”
Again, Joan could not speak; and again it was Phillip who went on.
“Here is yet another thing that could not be said, till the hand of the prince had been offered to the princess. It may be that in the East they carry too far this matter of infant marriages. But look round on the mad young marriages that go to pieces everywhere! And ask yourself whether you don’t wish they had been infant marriages! People talk in the newspapers of the heartlessness of royal marriages. But you and I do not believe the newspapers, I suppose. We know there is no King in England; nor has been since his head fell before Whitehall. You know that you and I and the families are the Kings of England; and our marriages are royal marriages. Let the suburbs call them heartless. Let us say they need the brave heart that is the only badge of aristocracy. Joan,” he said, very gently, “perhaps you have been near a crag in Switzerland, or a marsh covered with flowers. Perhaps you have known—a fisher-girl. But there is something greater and simpler than all that; something you find in the great epics46 of the East—the beautiful woman, and the great man, and Fate.”
“My lord,” said Joan, using the formal phrase by an unfathomable instinct, “will you allow me a little more time to think of this? And let there be no notion of disloyalty, if my decision is one way or the other?”
“Why, of course,” said Ivywood, bowing over his crutch; and he limped off, picking his way among the peacocks.
For days afterward47 Joan tried to build the foundations of her earthly destiny. She was still quite young, but she felt as if she had lived thousands of years, worrying over the same question. She told herself again and again, and truly, that many a better woman than she had taken a second-best which was not so first-class a second-best. But there was something complicated in the very atmosphere. She liked listening to Phillip Ivywood at his best, as anyone likes listening to a man who can really play the violin; but the great trouble always is that at certain awful moments you cannot be certain whether it is the violin or the man.
Moreover, there was a curious tone and spirit in the Ivywood household, especially after the wound and convalescence48 of Ivywood, about which she could say nothing except that it annoyed her somehow. There was something in it glorious—but also languorous49. By an impulse by no means uncommon50 among intelligent, fashionable people, she felt a desire to talk to a sensible woman of the middle or lower classes; and almost thre............