Under Two Skies Read online

  He joined in the political conversation at his end of the table. He was no fool, and he argued with the professional politicians both closely and cleverly; it was amusing to hear him. So “shop” was being talked at both ends of the table; for Miss Cunningham and Adeane were rather sinners in this respect. But of the two kinds of “shop,” the literary is not only far the more interesting—it is infinitely the less debasing. This is not prejudice, but fact. When one or two authors are gathered together you can trust them to saturate the general talk in something under five minutes; and the politicians are only too glad (as they may well be) to get into the purer atmosphere. It is so, honestly; it was more so than usual on the present occasion; only—Mr. Cunningham should have kept out of it.

  Some disinterested person should have told himself off to confine this old gentleman to the House. He was all right there; he had enjoyed personal relations with leaders, of which he delighted to speak; but in literary talk he was impossible. He approached the sacred subject in a thoroughly profane spirit. He had no respect for the creative temperament. He was destitute of imagination, and, what was worse, of consideration for those who had it. His daughter’s work, about which she was peculiarly sensitive, he had always regarded as the family joke.

  “Reviews?” he said, catching at a word, and feeling that here, at least, he was qualified to speak. “How do you stand reviews, Adeane?”

  Adeane replied, like a nice little boy, that he tried to find a spark of goodness, in the most ill-conditioned notice, though, on the whole, he steeled himself against taking them unduly to heart, whatever they said.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Mr. Cunningham approvingly, “for it’s the very thing you don’t do, isn’t it, Maud? I assure you, Adeane, she was ill for a week after that review of her first book in the Times.’

  “How absurd you are, father,” said the clever girl—girlishly, not cleverly; and she blushed a little.

  “But it’s a fact,” said her father, turning confidently to the lady on his right.

  “The ghost of a fact, grossly exaggerated, and all wrong besides!” declared Miss Cunningham, disliking the subject, but disliking still more to appear to dislike it. “For it wasn’t the Times at all.”

  “She’s right,” said Mr. Cunningham to his right-hand neighbour, and to the whole party, for all were listening. “I recollect perfectly. My memory never plays the fool for long—kept too well oiled for that. It wasn’t the Times, I beg it’s pardon, it was that uncommon smart skit in the Spider.”

  The ladies shivered—all but Miss Cunningham, who smiled, though her heart frowned heavily.

  “I was very young then, and I hadn’t written a book before,” she said, almost apologetically to everybody. “But you all remember what a horrid, common paper the Spider was, and that thing about my story was even more odious than its standard.”

  As she closed her lips she looked at Adeane, perhaps for sympathy, and perhaps unconsciously. And she nearly jumped from her chair to support him, for he wore the look that comes over the face before one faints. There was no colour in his face, no flexibility, and the forehead—the fine, poetic forehead—shone in the candle-light like wet marble.

  She watched him with a shocked fascination; he was recovering himself. She heard her father speaking; his voice sounded as if the length of the table had been trebled.

  “I thought it pretty rich, you know,” he was saying to the lady on his right, “though nasty, distinctly nasty.”

  “It was detestable!” said Miss Cunningham severely. She had not taken her eyes from Adeane. She heard some one asking:

  “Did you say the Spider, sir?” The voice was Willock’s.

  “Yes; you mayn’t remember the paper; dead some time since. I was rather sorry,” remarked Mr. Cunningham; “there is plenty of room for that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I remember the paper perfectly; but it didn’t die, sir—it married beneath it—incorporated with something rather more so,” returned Willock cheerily; and quite suddenly he leant forward and twisted himself about until he had discovered a passage through the flowers and ferns and candles, at the end of which was Adeane’s white face. “By the way, Adeane,” he said airily, “didn’t you use to write for the Spider?’

  “To be sure, I wrote a bit for them in my struggling days,” Adeane replied, with forced frankness. “But”—to all—“you’ll write for anything, you know, in the beginning.”

  “And write anything, too!” said Digby, still leaning forward, with his head on one side, and his teeth showing; Adeane was colouring up; it did his old friend good to watch him.

  “Why, Maud!” cried Mr. Cunningham inevitably, “perhaps Mr. Adeane’s the culprit! If so, you can have your revenge at last. Was it you that guyed her book, Adeane?”

  The old savage was laughing heartily; it was the greatest of jokes to him.

  “No, Mr. Cunningham,” said Adeane, in a clear voice.

  Maud seemed not to have heard her father’s question. She had never taken her eyes from the face of Adeane. “Did you write it?” she asked.

  Her voice sounded quite unconcerned to all but Adeane. He knew her tones as none other knew them, and his heart beat badly. But he did not look at her; he looked steadily at Willock through the ferns and candles, and answered coldly:

  “No, I didn’t write it; and I don’t know who did.”

  Miss Cunningham gave him one glance, as he turned and bent his eyes on her, which meant nothing to anybody but Adeane. But Adeane knew her glances as he knew her tones. To him it meant death. She did not look at him again.

  Neither was silenced. They talked after that with the greatest energy. But not together—practically not together. And Miss Cunningham made the move rather abruptly—almost clumsily, for so good a hostess. What was worse, she deserted her ladies in the drawing-room; luckily they were ladies whom she knew very well.

  She was a woman who had seen something of the world, and known something of men, and of their love. That made it so much the worse. At twenty she had hardened her heart against men for ever. Hence at least one excellent novel. At twenty-five, Adeane—with his boyish winning ways, his taking tone, and all that seemed to lie so much lightlier on him than it really did—had softened her. And now—and now she went to that little room on the ground floor which was her workshop here at Bladen. The window was wide open, and the rising moon shone full upon her writing-table. She put her hands upon the brass-bound desk which contained the work now in hand—which had held, also, the heart of Maud Cunningham from twenty to twenty-five. Adeane had taken this out of it. Adeane had greatly injured the work now in hand. Adeane, the low lampooner, the still lower liar, whose facile talk had charmed her, here in this very room, but a few hours earlier!

  Maud Cunningham knelt at the table on which it stood, flung her arms around that brass-bound desk, and let her hot cheek lie on the cold smooth lid.

  IV.

  An hour had passed. The young May moon shone down into the meadows. From the wooded rise beyond them nightingales were singing. The night wind was as the breath of a child asleep. It was a night of nights to inspire the lyric muse. Yet the poet hung over the old stone balustrade of the terrace, unmoved, untouched.

  There was no poetry in Adeane to-night. The moon, the nightingales, and the sweet breath of May were less than nothing to the miserable young man. A weeping, wailing, passionate night might have spoken to his spirit; but in this peaceful sweetness his spirit was deaf and blind, and no better than dead. His soul was heavy with what had happened and with what might never happen now.

  As to the lie he had told, he was less ashamed of it than he should have been. He was filled to over-flowing with shame and self-contempt, but not exclusively on account of his barefaced falsehood at the dinner-table; he felt it far more degrading to stand suddenly convicted of frequent contributions to the Spider. Even had his pen been guiltless of that unlucky parody, he would have found it difficult to look Maud Cunningham in the eyes again. B
ut he had written it, she knew that he had written it; and she had learnt this, not from himself, but from his friend. The friend had given him a rude lesson in human nature—a salutary experience for Adeane and his sort; but this bit of education had cost him his happiness. She would never forgive him. She would have forgiven him fast enough had she heard the story as he would have told it to her one day, when he was sure of her. He was bitterly sure of her now; so sure that it would be idle and humiliating even to ask her forgiveness.

  The moon became blurred and big: his sight was dimmed.

  Adeane dreaded humiliation more than most things. He fancied the proud contempt in her voice; he had already seen it in her eyes; the memory of that look would hurt him enough without a memory of words to double the pain. That look was for the lie; he had not been able to deceive the one soul that understood his soul. The lie alone would never be forgiven him; no power on earth could make Maud Cunningham see its justification; because it was a lie—and she a woman. She was a slave to unreasoning principles, like the rest of them. And she was not only a woman, but a woman who wrote; even a lie would become a venial offence in a woman’s eyes when compared with a travesty on what the woman had written. Miss Cunningham had always struck him as too sensitive about her work. Adeane felt that he could have helped her out of this weakness; she would have helped him out of worse failings.

  He was deeply distressed, and he did not stand his distress very well. The nightingales sang, and earthlier music floated through the open windows; but he heard neither. It was long before he stirred. At last he turned, and leant with his back against the stone balustrade, fixing his eyes upon the building. He did not try to fix his thoughts upon it too; but the low soft pile, with the even windows unevenly lighted, made a more distinct appeal to his aesthetic intelligence than the moonlit meadows with the woods beyond. The moon was behind him now; he realised his pleasure that it was not behind the Abbey, hardening its outlines and blackening all within them. It threw out every buttress, and let the embrasures sink inward, instead of painting parallelograms of light on a sable screen. Even in his trouble Adeane could not help appreciating the difference; and he watched the windows with a kind of personal pride in the moonshine, which so chastened and subdued the gaslit panes. But, as he watched, the sudden illumination of one window on the basement killed his artistic sense and quickened his heart. This window belonged to Maud Cunningham’s den, which she had herself graciously shown him, within an hour of his arrival.

  He found himself moving firmly towards her window without knowing in the least what he was going to do or to say. He saw the lamp on her desk; he saw her white face behind the lamp; he had the presence of mind to delight in the swift reflection that with the lamp set on this side of her she could not possibly see him. As he came nearer he saw that she was examining a heap of manuscript, turning over the leaves impatiently—merely glancing at them, nothing more. He divined at once that the manuscript was her new novel—which was not going very well. She had told him she was out of love with it; but it was himself she was out of love with now; she had flown to her poor discarded work for consolation and refuge.

  “Miss Cunningham!” cried Adeane; and the girl started up from her chair, but sat down again as he came within the outer rays of the lamp. She was extremely pale; but the look she levelled at him across her table was uncompromisingly stern.

  He stood a foot from the low sill.

  “May I speak to you now, Miss Cunningham?”

  “I would rather you chose some other time,” answered the girl coldly. “You will find the others in the billiard-room,” she added.

  “Then I cannot speak at all! I shall be gone before any of you are down to-morrow morning; I am going by the first train.”

  “Have you ordered something to take you to the station?” asked Maud Cunningham; and she was subsequently ashamed of this sarcasm.

  “I intend to walk,” returned Adeane shortly. “I told you a lie,” he added plainly, after a pause.

  She waited for more. She had lowered her eyes; she was putting her manuscript together again. Her indifference irritated Adeane.

  “I would tell it you again!” cried the young man, with sudden vigour.

  This time he had the satisfaction of diverting Miss Cunningham’s attention from her novel to himself; her indignant stare transfixed him, and her hands grasped the arms of her chair.

  “I am afraid I should do it again,” he said more quietly, though by no means tamely. “That settles it, of course. I ought to thank you for not getting up and going out of the room after that! As you are lenient enough to remain listening, you must judge between this fellow and me. I mean Willock. He is a friend of yours; I don’t want to blacken him in your eyes so as to whiten myself; but you must know that some time ago he was a friend of mine. He knew I had written that abominable thing; he was in my room the night I began it, and I remember how he laughed at me. Would you have had him make a scene before you all—as he was trying hard to do—as he would have done had I told you the truth? Wasn’t it better to lie as I did, and score off him for the moment, and explain to you afterwards? I meant to explain to you at once; but this is my first chance as well as my last. Well, I am sorrier about the whole thing than you would be likely to believe, even if I could ever tell you how sorry I am. As to the stuff I wrote—shall I tell you why Willock laughed at me the night I began it? It was because your book had made me cry when I read it, though I had read it only to make fun of it, at my editor’s orders!”

  Miss Cunningham favoured him with a markedly incredulous smile; at the same time she could not repress a slight access of colour to her cheeks.

  “You do not believe me!” he cried bitterly.

  “Do you deserve to be believed?” Maud Cunningham inquired, in a voice, however, that had certainly been more severe some minutes before.

  “Yes, in this; you can ask Willock!”

  “Thank you, I will ask him nothing.”

  “Then it is no good my telling you. At least I liked the book; only at that time—I was forced to write much that I detested,” said Adeane, with visible shame, “or I could hardly have written for the Spider.”

  “I see; for the money.”

  “For one’s bread—to be bombastic.”

  There was no need to make a point of this. Maud Cunningham was essentially sympathetic and imaginative. As she gazed at him, certainly he was standing in the moonlight not far from where she sat; but she beheld him at the same moment, and almost as plainly, ill-dressed, ill-fed, and in a garret. Her imagination overdid the garret a little, but at any rate the picture touched her. Before she could help herself she felt the sting of that travesty less, and her sympathy with Adeane greater than she had ever felt either before. She was not likely to say so, however; she wished very much that he would go; her hands went back to her manuscript.

  “Is that the novel?” Adeane felt emboldened to inquire.

  “Yes,” sighed the girl; for this novel had stuck.

  “You have taken it up again? I am so glad!”

  Miss Cunningham glanced at him sharply. “Why?” she asked. “Do you hope to make fun of this one too?”

  “I hope to read it some day.”

  The manuscript was put away; the desk was shut with some vehemence.

  “That you will never do; no one will; I am done with it.”

  She spoke with the bitterness of the artist who has failed so badly as to have acute conviction of the failure; and the cause of it all stood before her, for Adeane had long ago spoilt her for her work, and sown a nobler interest only to pluck it up and leave her desolate in the end. The tears were in her eyes as she rose from her chair. Adeane saw them.

  “If you were to let me see it as it is,” he said, with much diffidence, “I might convince you that it is better than you think, or I might even suggest some way of making it so. I don’t write stories; but two heads are better than one.”

  She gazed down upon him with appealing eyes. Thi
s was exactly what she had begun of late to realise. But she did not want him to point this out to her now; she wished him to leave her. And, as always, he understood her desire; but for once he could not accede to it. Though a poet, he was a man, and this was the woman he loved; and but a few minutes ago he had dreamt of losing her for ever, of facing life without her.

  “Maud, you forgive me!”

  Her eyes told him that she did; she was raising her hand to the window sash, to shut it down; but it was caught in his, with a tender roughness not a little refreshing in one whose softer side was so soft as Adeane’s.

  “Then if you forgive that, you can forgive this! Darling, I love you, and I want to marry you. I want to make you happy; I believe I can. I know we were made for one another!”

  “But to think you should know I wrote for the Spider!”

  Miss Cunningham was shutting down the window at last. She paused with her hands upon the sash, and looked long and keenly at her lover.

  “You are a poet,” she said slowly, “but you are all the man as well. You have told a downright lie, and told it to me, and you are not ashamed of it. You have wounded me deeply, since it turns out that it was you who wrote the cruellest thing that ever was written about me and mine; but no, you are not greatly ashamed of that either. But we have got to know that our popular poet was on the Spider in its time; and that, and that only, has stung you. You are thoroughly ashamed of that. Do you know, I begin to think you are as bad as other men, and very, very vain after all!”