The crumpled violet clouds around the edge of the silver evening looked to Lady Joan more and more like vivid violet embroideries hemming some silver curtain in the closed corridor at Ivywood. The peacocks looked more lustrous 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 Philip Ivywood, very softly, in the twilight, “I am not ashamed of my laurels, I see no meaning in what these Christians call humility. 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 Philip, 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 betrothal. 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 diplomacy 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 standing above some of the last grand reaches of the Rhine. And things came over me but for which I might be crying stinking 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 marsh 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 Philip 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 epics 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 afterward 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 Philip 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 convalescence of Ivywood, about which she could say nothing except that it annoyed her somehow. There was something in it glorious–but also languorous. By an impulse by no means uncommon among intelligent, fashionable people, she felt a desire to talk to a sensible woman of the middle or lower classes; and almost threw herself on the bosom of Miss Browning for sympathy.
But Miss Browning, with her curling, reddish hair and white, very clever face, struck the same indescribable note. Lord Ivywood was assumed as a first principle; as if he were Father Time, or the Clerk of the Weather. He was called “He.” The fifth time he was called “He,” Joan could not understand why she seemed to smell the plants in the hot conservatory.
“You see,” said Miss Browning, “we mustn’t interfere with his career; that is the important thing. And, really, I think the quieter we keep about everything the better. I am sure he is maturing very big plans. You heard what the Prophet said the other night?”
“The last thing the Prophet said to me,” said the darker lady, in a dogged manner, “was that when we English see the English youth, we cry out ‘He is crescent!’ But when we see the English aged man, we cry out ‘He is cross!’”
A lady with so clever a face could not but laugh faintly; but she continued on a determined theme, “The Prophet said, you know, that all real love had in it an element of fate. And I am sure that is his view, too. People cluster round a centre as little stars do round a star; because a star is a magnet. You are never wrong when destiny blows behind you like a great big wind; and I think many things have been judged unfairly that way. It’s all very well to talk about the infant marriages in India.”
“Miss Browning,” said Joan, “are you interested in the infant marriages in India?”
“Well–” said Miss Browning.
“Is your sister interested in them? I’ll run and ask her,” cried Joan, plunging across the room to where Mrs. Mackintosh was sitting at a table scribbling secretarial notes.
“Well,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, turning up a rich-haired, resolute head, more handsome than her sister’s, “I believe the Indian way is the best. When people are left to themselves in early youth, any of them might marry anything. We might have married a nigger or a fish-wife or–a criminal.”
“Now, Mrs. Mackintosh,” said Joan, with black-browed severity, “you well know you would never have married a fish-wife. Where is Enid?” she ended suddenly.
“Lady Enid,” said Miss Browning, “is looking out music in the music room, I think.”
Joan walked swiftly through several long salons, and found her fair-haired and pallid relative actually at the piano.
“Enid,” cried Joan, “you know I’ve always been fond of you. For God’s sake tell me what is the matter with this house? I admire Philip as everybody does. But what is the matter with the house? Why do all these rooms and gardens seem to be shutting me in and in and in? Why does everything look more and more the same? Why does everybody say the same thing? Oh, I don’t often talk metaphysics; but there is a purpose in this. That’s the only way of putting it; there is a purpose. And I don’t know what it is.”
Lady Enid Wimpole played a preliminary bar or two on the piano. Then she said,
“Nor do I, Joan. I don’t indeed. I know exactly what you mean. But it’s just because there is a purpose that I have faith in him and trust him.” She began softly to play a ballad tune of the Rhineland; and perhaps the music suggested her next remark. “Suppose you were looking at some of the last reaches of the Rhine, where it flows–”
“Enid!” cried Joan, “if you say ‘into the North Sea,’ I shall scream. Scream, do you hear, louder than all the peacocks together.”