Part 4

Sylvia drew a deep breath. “I believe all the delicious scents in the world are here!” she exclaimed.

“That’s why I like this room in the afternoon,” said Anne. “The sun draws all the sweetness out of the roses, and sends it up here. Take off your hat, my child. You’ve had a tiring walk, I’m afraid.”

“I’d walk twenty miles in the sun to find you at the end of them,” declared Sylvia, vehemently.

Anne laughed, as she got up and rang the bell for tea.

Her white wrapper of cambric and lace trailed after her as she moved. Sylvia touched it with reverent fingers.

“You look so sweet in these things,” she said.

“I ought to have changed my gown properly to receive you. But I was reading, and too lazy to move.”

Sylvia picked up the book which lay on the sofa.

“French, I see by the yellow cover.” She began to turn over the leaves, and suddenly laughed.

“How like you to have a rose-leaf for a book-marker! _I_ should put in a hairpin, or something equally ugly. I wish I could read French easily, then you would lend me all your books, wouldn’t you, Miss Page?”

“Not all of them,” returned Anne, smiling.

“Why not? I’m sure _you_ haven’t got stupid ideas about proper reading for young girls, and all that sort of thing,” declared Sylvia, petulantly.

“I’ve got ideas on the subject, stupid or otherwise. Tea, please Burks. We’ll have it up here. And bring the pink tea-service. It goes so nicely with this room,” she explained to Sylvia in parenthesis.

“Do tell me why you wouldn’t lend me all your novels?” the girl persisted.

“Because certain books, my dear, are of no use to us till life makes them intelligible. And life can only be learnt by living it.”

“I wish I’d lived it then,” protested Sylvia.

“Oh Sylvia, there’s time enough. Don’t wish that,” returned Miss Page, quickly. She bent forward and took the girl’s hand. “Don’t wish your youth away. It goes so fast in any case. And it should be the most beautiful part of one’s life.”

“_Should be!_” replied Sylvia, passionately. “But is it? What’s the good of my youth to me, here in this dull little hole? I’d give the world to be like you, Miss Page. You’re not--not quite young, perhaps----”

“My dear, I’m almost an old woman.”

Her smile was wistful, though it was touched with amusement.

“You’ll never be that!” returned Sylvia, vehemently. “And anyhow, you’re lovely, and every one adores you. And you lead your own life and make it beautiful. And I’m perfectly certain that you _have_ had everything I want. Except that you’re not married. I suppose I shall want to be married some time or other. But, then, as you didn’t marry it must have been because you didn’t want to. Hundreds of men must have been dying to marry you. I’m sure hundreds are dying now----”

“What an awful picture of carnage!” interrupted Anne, laughing, as Burks appeared with the tea.

“What a _lovely_ tea-service!” Sylvia exclaimed, taking up one of the Sèvres cups gently to examine it. “But then everything of yours is lovely. This room is as perfect as the drawing-room, and I think I like it almost better. I love the white matting on the floor, and these green-and-white chair-covers and curtains. And I love a room lined with books. What a lot!”

She began to walk round examining them. “But heaps of them are French ones, so you needn’t be afraid,” she added mischievously. “Oh, and Italian too! Do you read Italian, Miss Page? Really? I ought to be afraid of you. You’re so awfully clever. I believe you keep everything you love best up here, don’t you? The pictures now--I don’t understand pictures, but I like the colour of these. This room seems more _you_ than all the rest of the house. Though it’s all like you in a way.”

“I only receive my _special_ visitors up here.”

Anne’s smile flattered and touched the girl.

She slipped down on to the sofa beside her friend, and moved close to her with a caressing movement, as she took the tea-cup from her hand.

“These cakes were baked expressly for you, so you must do them justice. Really cook makes them very prettily, doesn’t she? They’re rather like the cakes in _Goblin Market_. Do you remember how the sisters

‘_Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat?_’”

She passed them to Sylvia in their silver basket, over the rim of which fell a d’oyley of fine lace and linen.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know anything!” she exclaimed. “I shall never know anything if I stay here. Oh Miss Page, _do_ help me to get away! You can do anything with father. Please persuade him that I ought to go. You know how it is at home. I’m not really wanted. We’re quite comfortably off, and there are enough servants to do the work without _making_ work for me, to try to keep me quiet when I’m aching to go and make my own life!”

She pushed her cup away from her with an impatient movement.

Anne waited a moment. “It’s still the music, I suppose?”

“Yes. I _have_ got a voice. I know I could do something with it. And you see they don’t understand. Mother says I can take lessons from Miss Rowe at Dorminster. _Miss Rowe!_” She laughed derisively. “And father says if I sing well enough to please them at home, and to lead in the choir, what more do I want? They expect me to trot round with mother on her district calls, when I’m really only in the way. Mother _likes_ doing it. She wouldn’t give up her work to me even if I wished it. And I’m supposed to do needlework for the children, when poor Mrs. Jones down the village would be glad of it, and ought to have it. And they think I’m awful and ungrateful not to be quite happy with tennis parties and flower shows for my amusement! Oh Miss Page, don’t you think to be a daughter at home, with no money, at the mercy of your parents, unable to get away, is just like being a slave?”

She poured out the words passionately. Her hands were shaking, her eyes full of tears.

Anne looked at her, and a wave of comprehension and pity passed over her heart.

The girl’s incoherent words were echoes; they touched painful memories of years for her, long past.

She recognized the despairing cry of youth, articulate in these modern times, no longer stifled as in the days of her own girlhood.

Youth, fettered, struggling with passionate clamour to be free.

She recognized the revolt of a temperament unsuited to its environment, bound by a tyranny no less stifling because it was unconscious and even loving.

She rose, and began to walk about the room, conscious of the modern spirit, accepting it as inevitable, and in spite of all the misery it involved, right in its essence, a necessary step towards the just claim for individual liberty.

Sylvia watched her hungrily, like a prisoner who has staked his existence on the goodwill and clemency of a ruler.

“I will do what I can, Sylvia,” she said at last. “I will speak to your father. I think you ought to go.”

The girl’s face grew radiant. “Oh, you’re an _angel_!” she cried. “What should I do without you? Speak to him soon, Miss Page!” she implored. “I can’t bear it any longer. I really can’t. I get on so badly with father now, and with mother too. I can’t help it. I know I’ve got an awful temper, but they irritate me so, and----”

Anne sat down beside her on the sofa. “I will speak to your father,” she repeated. “But, my dear, I know it’s a hard, perhaps almost an impossible thing to ask you, but try to see your parents’ point of view as well as your own. They _have_ one, you know,” she added, smiling. “One that belongs to their age and the traditions of their education. To them, though you don’t believe it, their standpoint is as important as yours to you.”

“But you think mine is right?” demanded Sylvia, breathlessly.

Miss Page laughed. “For you, yes. But I’m sorry for your people.”

“I believe you’re sorry for every one,” said Sylvia, after a pause.

“There’s a tendency to get sorrier for most people as one gets older, I admit. You must bear with me, Sylvia.”

The girl flushed. “Now you’re laughing at me,” she said.

“No. Only remembering how I felt at your age, and being very sorry for you too.”

“Ought I to see every one’s point of view as you do?”

“You couldn’t. It’s not to be expected of you. And after all, it’s right that you shouldn’t. It’s the young who make history, and history is made by seeing one thing at a time to the exclusion of every other consideration. It’s only in the autumn of life that one has time to be sorry. But still my dear, you can be kind even without comprehension. Remember the immortal remark that our parents are fellow-creatures after all.”

She looked at the girl whimsically, and Sylvia laughed.

“How angry father would be to hear you say that!” she cried. “But you wouldn’t say it to him, of course,” she added.

“You know it’s only nonsense; and there’s such a thing as tact, my dear.”

“I know,” sighed Sylvia. “I haven’t got any.”

“That’s another of the things that comes with age.”

“All the nice things come with age, I believe.”

“Well, age should have _some_ compensations,” returned Anne, gaily.

“You have _all_ of them,” Sylvia declared. “All the pretty things that generally belong to girls, and all the interesting things that ought to belong to women. It isn’t fair. You know how to talk to every one. I should _love_ to hear what you say to father. It would be too amusing! Mrs. Dakin came in this morning, and said you were wonderful with the Frenchman who dined here last night. And the way you talk to Dr. Dakin is quite different from the way you talk to father. And of course, you’re quite different with me again. You always remind me of that verse in the Bible about being all things to all men!”

“You’re really a terrible young woman!” was Miss Page’s reply. “Go and sing me something. It’s the only way to stop you from proving me a monster of duplicity.”

“No, no,” urged Sylvia, eagerly. “You only speak to people as they can understand. But the wonderful thing is, that you know by instinct exactly what they _will_ understand, and exactly how to say it.”

“Go and sing,” repeated Anne.

Sylvia went laughing to the piano. “I feel awfully happy. I must think of something that suits.”

She considered a moment, and then broke into a gay little love-song, with a charming refrain.

Anne listened, and as she listened, her determination grew. Sylvia was right. She must go. Her voice was worth cultivating, even at the price of parental displeasure.

“Thank you dear,” she said as the clear, ringing notes ceased. “I feel as though a nightingale with brains had been kind enough to fly into my room.”

“What else would you like?” Sylvia turned her head as she sat at the piano, playing rippling notes with her left hand. The cloud had left her face, and her parted red lips were very sweet.

Anne hesitated a moment. “You read music easily, don’t you? I wonder whether you could sing me a little French song?”

She got up, and opening a cupboard in the wall, began to turn over some papers.

“Here it is,” she said at last.

Sylvia left her place, and knelt beside her friends chair, taking the music from her hand.

There were some words upon the cover, but they were in French, and in a difficult handwriting.

Anne opened the page rather quickly. “You see it’s quite short and quite simple,” she observed.

“Let me read the words first, and you must correct my pronunciation.”

She began to say the lines a little falteringly, but her quick ear soon found their lilt, and she read them well.

“How pretty! They’re quite easy words. I can understand them,” she said, going to the piano again. “Who wrote them?”

Anne did not answer, and Sylvia, engrossed in trying the accompaniment, forgot her question.

“I see how it goes!” she exclaimed, playing the first bars. Involuntarily, as she began the first bar, Miss Page put out a quick hand as though to stop her, but the girl sang on unconsciously, and the hand dropped at her side.

“It’s lovely!” Sylvia cried, playing the last notes softly over again.

“Thank you, dear,” said Anne, gently. She had crossed the room, and was trying on her garden hat.

With one hand she gathered up the folds of her long gown.

“The sun is off the roses now, and I’m going to give you some to take home to your mother. Come out and help me pick them.”

V

Dr. Dakin’s house stood in the village street. It was a plain Georgian dwelling of a type common to every English country town; a type which admirably combines comfort with a certain homely dignity.

It was covered with ivy, carefully trimmed where the rows of square-paned windows broke the front, and its long, narrow door was surmounted by the conventional classic design of skulls and garlands.

As Miss Page crossed the road towards the post-office one morning late in September, Mrs. Dakin tapped at the window of the breakfast-room, and then ran to the door.

Anne smiled as she crossed the threshold. “Why, Madge, what is it? You look radiant, my dear!”

“I am. I mean I feel radiant. Come in. Do come in. I want to tell you.”

Her voice shook with suppressed excitement, as Anne followed her across the stone-flagged hall to a room on the right.

“I’m going to Paris for a long visit!” she exclaimed, drawing up a chair for her friend close to the window. “What do you think of that?”

“I didn’t know you had friends in Paris.”

“Oh yes. Didn’t I ever tell you about Helen Didier? She was one of my school-fellows at the convent near Tours, where I went for a year. She married a Frenchman.”

“And she lives in Paris?”

“Yes. I haven’t seen her for ages--scarcely once since we both married. But I took it into my head to write to her a week or two ago, and just fancy! You’ll be awfully interested. She knows Monsieur Fontenelle quite well. Her husband is a friend of his.”

Anne looked up rather quickly. “Really?”

“Yes. Isn’t it strange? I happened to mention him when I wrote to her, and she knew all about him. She would, naturally, as he’s such a great man; but it’s awfully exciting that he should be a friend, isn’t it?”

“What does Harry say?” asked Anne.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He says it will do me good to have a change.”

“He will miss you horribly, my dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s so busy, you know. And when he’s at home, he’s always buried in his books. Besides, he knows I must have a change. My nerves get worse and worse, and I’m always having neuralgia. I sleep badly, too.”

“You mustn’t look so brilliant, then,” returned Anne, laughing. “You’ll be considered a fraud.”

“It’s nothing but joy,” Madge declared. “You know I’ve never been to Paris. And just think of getting out of this hole for two or three months, perhaps. I could scream with excitement at the bare idea!”

“When do you go?”

“Next month. I shall be awfully interested to meet Monsieur Fontenelle again,” she added. “He’s so clever, isn’t he? I’m rather afraid of him. I envy you for getting on with him so well.”

Anne smiled.

“Why has he never been to see you before?”

“He’s not often in England now, though he travels a great deal, and is very cosmopolitan.”

“How on earth has he learnt to speak English so perfectly?”

“He has English relations--Lady Farringchurch is one of them. And as a young man he studied over here with a friend. But in any case he’s a wonderful linguist naturally.”

“What interesting people you must have met!” exclaimed Madge, looking rather curiously at her visitor. “I suppose you met him during all those years you were travelling? I often wonder how you stand this miserable little dead-and-alive place. You must have had such an exciting life.”

Anne did not reply for a moment.

“My dear,” she said at last quietly, “when you come to my age, your garden, your books, and your friends make a very pleasant haven before you set sail.”

“And your memories, I suppose?” Madge glanced again swiftly at her friend.

“And your memories--yes,” Anne repeated.

“I shall have none,” declared Madge, restlessly. “None that count.”

Miss Page was silent. “Oh! I know you think me an ungrateful wretch!” she broke out, leaning back in her chair and tapping her foot impatiently. “Harry’s very good and all that. But I’m so _bored_. I’m bored from morning till night. When I get up every morning I think--‘Here’s another dull day, what on earth shall I do with it?’ And sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while to get up and go on.”

Anne watched her as she stared moodily into the narrow trim garden, discontent and listlessness plainly expressed by her eyes and drooping mouth.

She was a woman loved faithfully and with infinite tenderness. If she had allowed them expression, Anne’s reflection would have been translated by a smile and a sigh, both of them utterly unintelligible to the little woman at her side. Both of them were therefore repressed.

“Well!” she said aloud. “I hope you’ll have a very gay time. I’m very glad for you, my dear. Go and be happy. Where does your friend live?”

“Over by the Parc Monceau, wherever that is. _Do_ tell me what it’s like?” she begged, all animation again.

Anne stayed a few minutes longer, talking about Paris, and then rose to go.

Mrs. Dakin kissed her affectionately. “I wish you were going with me. I shall miss you horribly!” she declared.

She followed Anne to the door, and stood a moment, waving and smiling as her friend crossed the street.

All the bored discontent had vanished from her face, and her husband, who at the moment drove up in his car, thought she had never looked prettier.

The reflection was accompanied by a curious dull pain at his heart, a pain to which he was well accustomed.

“I’ll drive you home,” he called to Miss Page, stopping his car at the opposite pavement.

“So Madge is going to Paris?” she said, as they swept off.

“Yes. I hope it will do her good,” he returned shortly. “She complains of neuralgia. Perhaps a change will set that right. I hear the little Carfax girl is going to London to study this autumn?” he added after a moment. “She’s off her head with delight about it. That’s _your_ doing, of course.”

“Well, I suggested it to her father,” Anne admitted.

He laughed. “We all know your suggestions. When a witch ‘suggests,’ mere man is instantly hypnotized. Poor old Carfax can do nothing now, but put his hand in his pocket and produce the necessary fees.”

Anne smiled. “Come in and look at my hollyhocks,” she said, as they turned into the drive. “They’re really worth seeing.”

The doctor followed her through the house and across the lawn into one of the walled gardens. “How gorgeous!” he exclaimed, as she opened the gate.

The enclosure was a blaze of colour. Wine-red, white faintly flushed with pink, yellow soft as a sunset sky, the flowers stood close together in stately rows.

Behind them, on either side of the dividing grass path, masses of phlox, white and rose and crimson, continued the wave of colour till it was arrested by the enclosing walls.

“Look at the butterflies,” said the doctor, instinctively lowering his voice as though he feared to disturb them.

They hovered in numbers above the silken cups of the hollyhocks. On the sulphur-coloured petals of one of them, a Purple Emperor, motionless, extended his splendid wings. Here and there, dazzling in fairy armour of peacock-blue and sheen of silver, darted a dragon-fly.

“The colour of the thing is intoxicating,” murmured Dr. Dakin.

“It reminded me this morning of an elaborately arranged ‘sensation’ scheme, planned by that madman in _À Rebours_. Only of course, he would have despised such a homely natural flower as the hollyhock.”

The doctor smiled. “What a curious anomaly you are here, my dear lady!” he declared suddenly. “And yet that’s not true either, because you also suit the place to perfection. Huysmans, and a country practice, and Carfax--and you! It’s an amazing world. I hope some intelligent Being doesn’t miss the exquisite humour of many human juxtapositions,” he added rather drily.

“I’m glad Sylvia’s going to study,” was Miss Page’s somewhat irrelevant reply. “She has a beautiful voice.”

“Quite remarkable,” he agreed. “She’ll be a difficult young woman though, if that face of hers means anything. I don’t know that you haven’t thrown her to the lions.”

“My dear doctor, isn’t it better to meet the lions, and take one’s chance, than to be preyed upon by restlessness and discontent till the whole of one’s character is worm-eaten?” asked Anne, quietly.

The doctor stooped to examine the Purple Emperor which still lay motionless, basking in the sunshine.

When he raised his head Anne saw the trouble in his eyes.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. Then abruptly, after a moment, “I wish I could give Madge the life that would suit her!” he exclaimed, jerking out the words awkwardly.

Miss Page waited a moment. “What do you think _would_ suit her?” she asked gently.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “She wants to live in London, you know. She wants a gayer life. But I should be no use in town. I shouldn’t make a living even. I haven’t the manner. It’s as much as I can do to hold my own here.”

“Every one who knows you, ends by being thankful to find a splendid friend as well as an excellent doctor,” returned Anne.

The bitterness in his face softened. “If all the world were like you,” he began with a little laugh, and paused. “I’m glad they’re not, though. There must only be one Miss Page. But that’s it,” he went on, “I must know people well--better than one could ever know them in the rush of a London practice, where the polished manner I don’t possess is absolutely necessary.”

There was a silence, while they walked the length of the grass path together.

“I ought never to have married Madge,” he broke out at last, in a low voice. “She’s too pretty, and too gay by nature, for a slow coach like me. This village life is too dull for her. She wants her dances, her theatres”--he made a vague gesture--“all that sort of thing. I can’t make her happy.”

There was a note of sad discouragement in his voice which went to his listener’s heart.

“I think you could,” she said.

He turned his head sharply. “How?” The involuntary hope died. He shook his head. “She’s bored with me.”

“Partly I think, because she imagines you are bored with her.”