The Enchanted April
permanently agreeable to be with than the others, in that they remained
grateful.
Yes; she might really consider Kate. The poor soul had never married,
but then everybody could not expect to marry, and she was quite
comfortably off—not too comfortably, but just comfortably enough to pay
her own expenses if she came and yet be grateful. Yes; Kate was the
solution. If she came, at one stroke, Mrs. Fisher saw, would the
Wilkinses be regularised and Mrs. Wilkins be prevented from having more
than her share of the rooms. Also, Mrs. Fisher would save herself from
isolation; spiritual isolation. She desired physical isolation between
meals, but she disliked that isolation which is of the spirit. Such
isolation would, she feared, certainly be hers with these three
alien-minded young women. Even Mrs. Arbuthnot was, owing to her
friendship with Mrs. Wilkins, necessarily alien-minded. In Kate she
would have a support. Kate, without intruding on her sitting-room, for
Kate was tractable, would be there at meals to support her.
Mrs. Fisher said nothing at the moment; but presently in the
drawing-room, when they were gathered round the wood fire—she had
discovered there was no fireplace in her own sitting-room, and
therefore she would after all be forced, so long as the evenings
remained cool, to spend them in the other room—presently, while
Francesca was handing coffee round and Lady Caroline was poisoning the
air with smoke, Mrs. Wilkins, looking relieved and pleased, said:
“Well, if nobody really wants that room, and wouldn’t use it anyhow, I
shall be very glad if Mellersh may have it.”
“Of course he must have it,” said Lady Caroline.
Then Mrs. Fisher spoke.
“I have a friend,” she said in her deep voice; and sudden silence fell
upon the others.
“Kate Lumley,” said Mrs. Fisher.
Nobody spoke.
“Perhaps,” continued Mrs. Fisher, addressing Lady Caroline, “you know
her?”
No, Lady Caroline did not know Kate Lumley; and Mrs. Fisher, without
asking the others if they did, for she was sure they knew no one,
proceeded. “I wish to invite her to join me,” said Mrs. Fisher.
Complete silence.
Then Scrap said, turning to Mrs. Wilkins, “That settles Mellersh,
then.”
“It settles the question of Mr. Wilkins,” said Mrs. Fisher, “although I
am unable to understand that there should ever have been a question, in
the only way that is right.”
“I’m afraid you’re in for it, then,” said Lady Caroline, again to Mrs.
Wilkins. “Unless,” she added, “he can’t come.”
But Mrs. Wilkins, her brow perturbed—for suppose after all she were not
yet quite stable in heaven?—could only say, a little uneasily, “I _see_
him here.”
Chapter 13
The uneventful days—only outwardly uneventful—slipped by in floods of
sunshine, and the servants, watching the four ladies, came to the
conclusion there was very little life in them.
To the servants San Salvatore seemed asleep. No one came to tea, nor
did the ladies go anywhere to tea. Other tenants in other springs had
been far more active. There had been stir and enterprise; the boat had
been used; excursions had been made; Beppo’s fly was ordered; people
from Mezzago came over and spent the day; the house rang with voices;
even sometimes champagne had been drunk. Life was varied, life was
interesting. But this? What was this? The servants were not even
scolded. They were left completely to themselves. They yawned.
Perplexing, too, was the entire absence of gentlemen. How could
gentlemen keep away from so much beauty? For, added up, and even after
the subtraction of the old one, the three younger ladies produced a
formidable total of that which gentlemen usually sought.
Also the evident desire of each lady to spend long hours separated from
the other ladies puzzled the servants. The result was a deathly
stillness in the house, except at meal-times. It might have been as
empty as it had been all the winter, for any sounds of life there were.
The old lady sat in her room, alone; the dark-eyed lady wandered off
alone, loitering, so Domenico told them, who sometimes came across her
in the course of his duties, incomprehensibly among the rocks; the very
beautiful fair lady lay in her low chair in the top garden, alone; the
less, but still beautiful fair lady went up the hills and stayed up
them for hours, alone; and every day the sun blazed slowly round the
house, and disappeared at evening into the sea, and nothing at all had
happened.
The servants yawned.
Yet the four visitors, while their bodies sat—that was Mrs. Fisher’s—or
lay—that was Lady Caroline’s—or loitered—that was Mrs. Arbuthnot’s—or
went in solitude up into the hills—that was Mrs. Wilkins’s—were
anything but torpid really. Their minds were unusually busy. Even at
night their minds were busy, and the dreams they had were clear, thin,
quick things, entirely different from the heavy dreams of home. There
was that in the atmosphere of San Salvatore which produced
active-mindedness in all except the natives. They, as before, whatever
the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did, remained
immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to. All
their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent
spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to
them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico’s dog
asleep in the sun.
The visitors could not be blind to it—it was too arresting after London
in a particularly wet and gloomy March. Suddenly to be transported to
that place where the air was so still that it held its breath, where
the light was so golden that the most ordinary things were
transfigured—to be transported into that delicate warmth, that
caressing fragrance, and to have the old grey castle as the setting,
and, in the distance, the serene clear hills of Perugini’s backgrounds,
was an astonishing contrast. Even Lady Caroline, used all her life to
beauty, who had been everywhere and seen everything, felt the surprise
of it. It was, that year, a particularly wonderful spring, and of all
the months at San Salvatore April, if the weather was fine, was best.
May scorched and withered; March was restless, and could be hard and
cold in its brightness; but April came along softly like a blessing,
and if it were a fine April it was so beautiful that it was impossible
not to feel different, not to feel stirred and touched.
Mrs. Wilkins, we have seen, responded to it instantly. She, so to
speak, at once flung off all her garments and dived straight into
glory, unhesitatingly, with a cry of rapture.
Mrs. Arbuthnot was stirred and touched, but differently. She had odd
sensations—presently to be described.
Mrs. Fisher, being old, was of a closer, more impermeable texture, and
offered more resistance; but she too had odd sensations, also in their
place to be described.
Lady Caroline, already amply acquainted with beautiful houses and
climates, to whom they could not come quite with the same surprise, yet
was very nearly as quick to react as Mrs. Wilkins. The place had an
almost instantaneous influence on her as well, and of one part of this
influence she was aware: it had made her, beginning on the very first
evening, want to think, and acted on her curiously like a conscience.
What this conscience seemed to press upon her notice with an insistence
that startled her—Lady Caroline hesitated to accept the word, but it
would keep on coming into her head—was that she was tawdry.
Tawdry. She. Fancy.
She must think that out.
The morning after the first dinner together, she woke up in a condition
of regret that she should have been so talkative to Mrs. Wilkins the
night before. What had made her be, she wondered. Now, of course, Mrs.
Wilkins would want to grab, she would want to be inseparable; and the
thought of a grabbing and an inseparableness that should last four
weeks made Scrap’s spirit swoon within her. No doubt the encouraged
Mrs. Wilkins would be lurking in the top garden waiting to waylay her
when she went out, and would hail her with morning cheerfulness. How
much she hated being hailed with morning cheerfulness—or indeed, hailed
at all. She oughtn’t to have encouraged Mrs. Wilkins the night before.
Fatal to encourage. It was bad enough not to encourage, for just
sitting there and saying nothing seemed usually to involve her, but
actively to encourage was suicidal. What on earth had made her? Now she
would have to waste all the precious time, the precious, lovely time
for thinking in, for getting square with herself, in shaking Mrs.
Wilkins off.
With great caution and on the tips of her toes, balancing herself
carefully lest the pebbles should scrunch, she stole out when she was
dressed to her corner; but the garden was empty. No shaking off was
necessary. Neither Mrs. Wilkins nor anybody else was to be seen. She
had it entirely to herself. Except for Domenico, who presently came and
hovered, watering his plants, again especially all the plants that were
nearest her, no one came out at all; and when, after a long while of
following up thoughts which seemed to escape her just as she had got
them, and dropping off exhausted to sleep in the intervals of this
chase, she felt hungry and looked at her watch and saw that it was past
three, she realised that nobody had even bothered to call her in to
lunch. So that, Scrap could not but remark, if any one was shaken off
it was she herself.
Well, but how delightful, and how very new. Now she would really be
able to think, uninterruptedly. Delicious to be forgotten.
Still, she was hungry; and Mrs. Wilkins, after that excessive
friendliness the night before, might at least have told her lunch was
ready. And she had really been excessively friendly—so nice about
Mellersh’s sleeping arrangements, wanting him to have the spare-room
and all. She wasn’t usually interested in arrangements, in fact she
wasn’t ever interested in them; so that Scrap considered she might be
said almost to have gone out of her way to be agreeable to Mrs.
Wilkins. And, in return, Mrs. Wilkins didn’t even bother whether or not
she had any lunch.
Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn’t mind missing a meal.
Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one’s
time; and Mrs. Fisher was, she was afraid, one of those persons who at
meals linger. Twice now had she dined with Mrs. Fisher, and each time
she had been difficult at the end to dislodge, lingering on slowly
cracking innumerable nuts and slowly drinking a glass of wine that
seemed as if it would never be finished. Probably it would be a good
thing to make a habit of missing lunch, and as it was quite easy to
have tea brought out to her, and as she breakfasted in her room, only
once a day would she have to sit at the dining-room table and endure
the nuts.
Scrap burrowed her head comfortably in the cushions, and with her feet
crossed on the low parapet gave herself up to more thought. She said to
herself, as she had said at intervals throughout the morning: Now I’m
going to think. But, never having thought out anything in her life, it
was difficult. Extraordinary how one’s attention wouldn’t stay fixed;
extraordinary how one’s mind slipped sideways. Settling herself down to
a review of her past as a preliminary to the consideration of her
future, and hunting in it to begin with for any justification of that
distressing word tawdry, the next thing she knew was that she wasn’t
thinking about this at all, but had somehow switched on to Mr. Wilkins.
Well, Mr. Wilkins was quite easy to think about, though not pleasant.
She viewed his approach with misgivings. For not only was it a profound
and unexpected bore to have a man added to the party, and a man, too,
of the kind she was sure Mr. Wilkins must be, but she was afraid—and