Lord Frederic Hamilton - "The Days Before Yesterday"

Francis Leggett & Co. - "Tea Leaves"

Thornton W. Burgess - "The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack"

Unknown - "History of Friedrich II of Prussia V Vol 15"

The Woman With The Fan

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Woman With The Fan




"I'll go to bed, signora!" he said.

Then he looked at her again and there were doubt and wonder in his eyes.

She turned away, with a sickness at her heart. She knew exactly what he
had thought, was thinking. The suspicion had crossed his mind that she
knew why the hidden boat was there, that she wished no one else to
suspect why it was there. And then had followed the thought, "Ma--per
questa signora--non e possibile."

At certain crises of feeling, a tiny incident will often determine some
vital act. So it was now. The fleeting glance in a carelessly expressive
boy's eyes at this moment gave to Lady Holme's mind the last touch it
needed to acquire the impetus which would carry it over the edge of the
precipice into the abyss. The look in Paolo's eyes said to her, "Life has
done with you. Throw it away." And she knew that though she had thought
she had already decided to throw it away that night, she had really not
decided. Secretly she had been hesitating. Now there was no more
hesitation in her. She drank her coffee and had the cup taken away, and
ordered the lights in the drawing-room to be put out.

"When I come in I shall go straight up to bed," she said. "Leave me a
candle in the hall."

The lights went out behind the windows. Blank darkness replaced the
yellow gleam that had shone upon them. The two houses on either side of
the piazza were wrapped in silence. Presently there was a soft noise of
feet crossing the pavement. It was Paolo going to lock the door leading
to the boathouse. Lady Holme moved round sharply in her chair to watch
him. He bent down. With a swift turn of his brown wrists he secured the
door and pulled the key out of the lock. She opened her lips to call out
something to him, but when she saw him look at the key doubtfully, then
towards her, she said nothing. And he put it back into the keyhole. When
he did that she sighed. Perhaps a doubt had again come into his young
mind. But, if so, it had come too late. He slipped away smiling, half
ironically, to himself.

Lady Holme sat still. She had wrapped a white cloth cloak round her. She
put up her hand to the disfigured side of her face, and touched it,
trying to see its disfigurement as the blind see, by feeling. She kept
her hand there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or
three minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in the
piazza, very near to the balustrade.

Now she was thinking fiercely.

She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
cause him to suffer a little, to think, "I held it often, and now it is
sodden and cold." At least he must think something like that, and his
body must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken its
old companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet she
did not say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the
accident she had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the
face of truth among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly
or not. And since the accident--there are things that kill even a woman's
love abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.

Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.

Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
sleeping, heart:


"Tutto al mondo e vano:
Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."


It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her utter
desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the world. But
she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly taken from
her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place. Possibly before
the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of giving up the world
for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it seemed to her as if a
woman isolated from everything with love possessed the world and all that
is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she had heard about this
very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance connected with it. Two
lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long time. She imagined them
now, sitting together at night in this piazza, hearing the waterfall
together, looking at the calm lake together, watching the stars together.
The sound of the water was terrible to her. To them how beautiful it must
have been, how beautiful the light of the stars, and the lonely gardens
stretching along the lake, and the dim paths between the cypresses, and
the great silence that floated over the lake to listen to the waterfall.
And all these things were terrible to her--all. Not one was beautiful.
Each one seemed to threaten her, to say to her, "Leave us, we are not for
such as you." Well, she would obey these voices. She would go. She
wrapped the cloak more closely round her, went to the balustrade and
leaned over it looking at the water.

It seemed to her as if her life had been very trivial. She thought now
that she had never really enjoyed anything. She looked upon her life as
if it were down there in the water just beneath her, and she saw it as a
broken thing, a thing in many fragments. And the fragments, however
carefully and deftly arranged, could surely never have been fitted
together and become a complete whole. Everything in her life had been
awry as her face was now awry, and she had not realised it. Her love for
Fritz, and his--what he had called his, at least--for her, had seemed to
her once to be a round and beautiful thing, a circle of passion without a
flaw. How distorted, misshapen, absurd it had really been. Nothing in her
life had been carried through to a definite end. Even her petty struggle
with Miss Schley had been left unfinished. Those who had loved her had
been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And all
through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped the
sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains shifting
between her arms at the touch of every wind.

A sudden passionate fury of longing woke in her to have one week, one
day, one hour of life, one hour of life now that her eyes were open, one
moment only--even one moment. She felt that she had had nothing, that
every other human being must have known the /dolcezza/, the ineffable,
the mysterious ecstasy, the one and only thing worth the having, that she
alone had been excluded, when she was beautiful, from the participation
in joy that was her right, and that now, in her ugliness, she was
irrevocably cast out from it.

It was unjust. Suddenly she faced a God without justice in His heart,
all-powerful and not just. She faced such a God and she knew Hell.

Swiftly she turned from the balustrade, went to the door by the
waterfall, unlocked it and descended the stone staircase. It was very
dark. She had to feel her way. When she reached the last step she could
just see the boat lying against it in the black water. She put out her
hand and felt for the ring through which the rope was slipped. The rope
was wet. It took her some minutes to undo it. Then she got into the boat.
Her eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now, and she could see the
arched opening which gave access to the lake. She found the oars, pushed
them into the rowlocks, and pulled gently to the opening. The boat struck
against the wall and grated along it. She stood up and thrust one hand
against the stone, leaning over to the side. The boat went away swiftly,
and she nearly fell into the water, but managed to save herself by a
rapid movement. She sank down, feeling horribly afraid. Yet, a moment
after, she asked herself why she had not let herself go. It was too dark
there under the house. Out in the open air it would be different, it
would be easier. She wanted the stars above her. She did not know why she
wanted them, why she wanted anything now.

The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water.

It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are
full of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among
the lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green
sides looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely
remote and inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly
the lights of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still
ringing languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a
silence full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline.

Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon
her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away
but attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon
herself. She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if
eyes, but as if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the
stars and the mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat.
This concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft,
impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster.

But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had
already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could only
see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars again,
but again--after two or three strokes--she had the sensation that she was
being followed. She recalled Paolo's action when they were returning to
Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat's side and put her ear
close to the water.

When she did so she heard the plash of oars--rhythmical, steady, and
surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic seized
her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat, Paolo's
assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not gone. He
had said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he began to
sing, had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction came to
her that this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was it? She
knew nobody on the lake, except Robin. And he--no, it could not be Robin.

The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear increased.
With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was now blent a
crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified, and, seizing
her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the lake.

"Viola!"

Out of the darkness it came.

"Viola!"

She stopped and began to tremble. Who--what--could be calling her by
name, here, in the night? She heard the sound of oars plainly now. Then
she saw a thing like a black shadow. It was the prow of an advancing
boat. She sat quite still, with her hands on the oars. The boat came on
till she could see the figure of one man in it, standing up, and rowing,
as the Italian boatmen do when they are alone, with his face set towards
the prow. A few strong strokes and it was beside her, and she was looking
into Rupert Carey's eyes.



CHAPTER XXI

SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on
the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the
disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the
accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She
saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with
the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells
above the nets.

"You heard me call?" he said at last, almost roughly.

She nodded.

"How did you--?" she began, and stopped.

"I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I
was under the shadow of the woods."

"Why?"

All this time she was gazing into Carey's eyes, and had not seen in them
that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not
realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The
expression in his eyes made her forget it.

"I wanted something of you."

"What?"

He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to
each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her
question.

"I know I've no business to speak to you," he said. "No business to come
after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong
brute, and it seems I can't change."

"But what do you want with me?"

Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift
gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last
man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own
condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred
features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment,
as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let
him look upon her. She was looking upon him.

"What do you want?" she repeated.

"I want a saviour," he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking
without tenderness.

"A saviour!"

For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation
that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.

"Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?" she
said.

And she began to laugh.

"But don't you see me?" she exclaimed. "Don't you see what I am now?"

Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the
dreadful change in her appearance.

"Don't you think I want a saviour too?" she exclaimed.

"I don't think about you," he said with a sort of deliberate brutality.
"I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women."

"Or go away from them," she said.

She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.

"Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?" she asked.

"Yes. I saw him leave you."

"You saw--but how long have you been watching?"

"A long time."

"Where do you come from?"

He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.

"Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I'm staying
with him over there."

"With Sir Donald?"

"Yes. He's ill. He wants somebody."

"Sir Donald's afraid of me now," she said, watching him closely. "I told
him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?"

"I think he will. Poor old chap! he's had hard knocks. They've made him
afraid of life."

"Why didn't you keep your memory of me?" she said, with sudden nervous
anger. "You too? If you hadn't come to-night it would never have been
destroyed."

Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of fierce
bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he had loved
her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he come? He
might have remembered her as she was.

"I hate you for coming," she said, almost under her breath.

"I don't care. I had to come."

"Why? Why?"

"I told you. I want a saviour. I'm down in the pit. I can't get out. You
can see that for yourself."

"Yes," she answered, "I can see that."

"Give me a hand, Viola, and--you'll make me do something I've never done,
never been able to do."

"What?" she half whispered.

"Believe there's a God--who cares."

She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It was
not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm hand
laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a travelling
flood.

"What are you saying?" she said in a low voice. "You are mad to come here
to-night, to say this to me to-night."

"No. It's just to-night it had to be said."

Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well,
the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to
practise subterfuge.

"You don't know," she said, and her voice was quiet now. "You don't know
why it was mad of you to come to-night. I'll tell you. I've come out here
and I'm not going back again."

He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.

"I'm going to stay out here," she said.

And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers
touched the water.

"No," he said. "You can't do that."

"Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water."

"Give me a hand first, Viola."

Again the warmth went through her.

"Nobody else can."

"And you've looked at me!" she said.

There was a profound amazement in her voice.

"It's only when I look at you," he said, "that I know there are stars
somewhere beyond the pit's mouth."

"When you look at me--now?"

"Yes."

"But you are blind then?" she said.

"Or are the others blind?" he asked.

Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand
to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a
moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.

"What do you see?" she asked. "But--but it's so dark here."

"Not too dark to see a helping hand--if there is one," he answered.

And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from
the oar it was holding.

"And there is one," he added.

She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her face.
How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it was so. No
woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it loves--she
knows.

"What are you going to do, Viola?"

"I don't know."

There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.

"I can't do anything," she murmured. "You would know that to-morrow, in
sunlight."

"To-morrow I'll come in sunlight."

"No, no. I shall not be there."

"I shall come."

"Oh!--good-night," she said.

She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell
whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy--what it was. But it
mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like
an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves and
beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of
passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a
throne and a woman in the dust--radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one
beaten.

"Good-night, good-night," she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.

Her hand struggled in his hand.

"Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people."

She scarcely heard him speaking.

"D'you understand?"

"No, no. Not to-night. I can't understand anything to-night."

"Then to-morrow."

"Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow."

He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a
master rather than of a lover.

"You won't dare to murder me," he said.

"Murder--what do you mean?"

He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost
as the attention of a madwoman wanders.

"If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above
the pit's mouth."

"I can't help it--I can't help anything. It's not my fault, it's not my
fault."

"It will be your fault. It will be your crime."

"Your hand is driving me mad," she gasped.

She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to
row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which
she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night,
was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator bending
down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond human life
there was life compared with which human life was as death. And now she
told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human passion coming
suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that this cry for
salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as destroyed had
deafened reason within her.

His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in
sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the
archway into the darkness. Somehow--how, she did not know--she guided it
to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out
on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its
spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were
wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was
looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist
that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit, gazing
up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he could not
see them.

"Go away," she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to
go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might
say, do, be anything in that moment.

"I can't bear it."

She did not know what she meant she could not bear.

He made a strange answer. He said:

"If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me--the last
song I heard you sing--I'll go. But to-morrow I'll come and touch my
helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day."

"Sing--?" she said vacantly. "To-night!"

"Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you."

He spoke almost sternly.

She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She took
it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness. There
was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the lake.
She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred the
shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound of oars
as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She drew
back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands on the
keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While he was
there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not--She struck
a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action, had a
strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear consciousness
after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did he want? The
concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips the poetry,
her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found the meaning, more
than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things unutterable, the
things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of the women who are
the saviours of men.

When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.

"When you sing I can see those stars," he said. "Do you understand?"

She bent down.

"I don't know--I don't think I understand anything," she whispered.
"But--I'll try--I'll try to live."

Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and
sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.

And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only
by the faint voices of the fishermen's bells, and said to herself again
and again, like a wondering child:

"There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!"



EPILOGUE

IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a
man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in
Society, were the actors.

In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was
found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
great number of persons to be "a very strange one;" but it was not this
which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
club to club.

It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag
bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was
rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no longer
a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have
understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the
accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost a
legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her, after
the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it was
argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to do was
to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from the fray in
which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had indeed
retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and pinched
regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken
commandments.

One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady
Holme's conduct, and finally remarked:

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