THE DAY’S JOURNEY

“Cecily,” He Said Suddenly, “What are You Going to Do?”

[PAGE 260]

THE DAY’S JOURNEY

BY NETTA SYRETT AUTHOR OF “ROSANNE,” “THE TREE OF LIFE,” ETC.

CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1906

Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1906 Published September 15, 1906 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

THE DAY’S JOURNEY

THE DAY’S JOURNEY

CHAPTER I

ROSE SUMMERS paused a moment before she lifted the latch of a little gate set between two walls of yew. It was June. The sky had the blue of larkspur, the air was sweet with the scent of flowers. The gate in the yew hedge opened upon a small flagged court leading to a porch wreathed with roses. Above the porch clematis and ivy continued the wall of living green almost to the gables of what had once been an Elizabethan farm-house, and was now the picturesque home of Robert Kingslake and of Cecily his wife.

To the left, above a walled garden, great chestnut trees reared their heads, and flung shadows across the lane in which Mrs. Summers was standing. The stillness, broken only by the sleepy clucking of fowls, was of that peculiar peacefulness which broods over an English country-side. On the white dust[2] in the road the shadows lay asleep. The trees themselves drowsed against the blue sky; the very roses above the house-porch laid their pink faces together, and, cradled in leaves, dreamt in the sunshine.

Only a moment passed before Mrs. Summers lifted the latch, yet in that moment she saw in imagination one hill station after another; she hurried through adventures and experiences which had filled five years, and came back to the realization that, in the meantime, her cousin Cecily had just lived here at the Priory, listening to the clucking of the fowls, looking at the chestnut trees against the sky, perhaps tending the roses round the porch. She walked up the flagged path and rang the bell. The door was opened in a few moments by a neat maid, who said that Mrs. Kingslake was out. “But she won’t be long, ma’am, if you’ll come in,” she added.

The porch led almost directly into one of those square, panelled halls which make the most charming of sitting-rooms. At the farther end a long, low casement window framed a vista of the garden—green, luxuriant, brilliant with flowers. On the window-ledge there was a china bowl of sweet peas.

[3]Mrs. Summers looked about her with interest. There was not much furniture, but each piece, though simple, was beautiful in form at least, and in some cases obviously rather costly. It was furniture chosen with discretion. “Better off than they used to be,” was her mental comment.

She glanced at the fresh chintz curtains, at the two or three little pieces of silver, exquisitely cared for, on mantelpiece and tables; at the flowers everywhere. “She’s as dainty as ever,” was her next reflection.

A photograph on the top of a writing-table caught her wandering attention. She took it up, and examined it with interest.

It was that of a man of a possible five-and-thirty, clean-shaven, handsome, with something eager, enthusiastic, almost childlike about the eyes, and the mouth of a sensualist.

Mrs. Summers replaced the photograph; it was of Cecily’s husband, but she was more interested in Cecily, and of her she could find no picture.

She walked presently to the door which led into the garden. Looking out upon its cool greenness and beauty, her thoughts were full of its owner. A very close friendship, rather than the tie of blood, bound her to the[4] woman for whose coming she waited. Much of her girlhood had been spent with Cecily, and up to the time of her own marriage, six years ago, she had stayed weeks at a time at the Merivales’ house in Chelsea. It had been an interesting house to visit. Cecily’s father, a widower and a well-known doctor, was the type of man who attracted the better minds, the more striking personalities, and Cecily was undoubtedly the woman to keep them.

Apparently gazing into the quiet Surrey garden, in reality Mrs. Summers was looking into the drawing-room at Carmarthen Terrace, seeing it as it had appeared on many an evening in the past. The room was full of firelight and candlelight, a quiet, restful room, a little old-fashioned with its traces of mid-Victorianism, brought by Cecily’s clever touch into harmony with a more modern standard of taste. Mrs. Summers remembered the pattern of the long chintz curtains, remembered the subdued tone of the walls, the china in the big cabinet, the water-colors which were the pride of her uncle’s heart. She saw him talking earnestly at one end of the room, his fine gray head conspicuous among the group of men who surrounded him—men well known in the world of science, of letters, and of art.[5] Even more distinctly she saw Cecily, the young hostess and mistress of the house, in the midst of the younger men and women of their circle. She heard the laughter. There was always laughter near Cecily, whose airy insouciance was amusing enough successfully to disguise real ability.

“I’m quite clever enough to pass for a fluffy fool—when necessary.” This, a long-ago remark of her cousin’s, suddenly recurred to Mrs. Summers, à propos of nothing, and she wondered whether Cecily ever wrote anything now. Then her thoughts went back to Cecily as a hostess. She had been looked upon by some of her friends as a brilliant woman, a woman whose social gifts, whose power of pleasing—as well as leading—should carry her far in the yet wider world which would open for her when she made the excellent marriage that every one predicted.

And, after all, Cecily had married Robert Kingslake, a writer with nothing but his pen between him and starvation.

Rose remembered the first day he came to the house, a rather sombre, rather picturesque figure, with his dark eyes and graceful, lithe body. Things moved very quickly after that first evening, so quickly that in retrospect[6] there seemed to Mrs. Summers to have been scarcely a moment of ordinary acquaintanceship. There was a slight interval devoted to impetuous, ardent love-making, and then the wedding, for which she, herself a year-old bride, had not been able to stay.

Her husband’s regiment had been ordered to India a week before Cecily Merivale became Cecily Kingslake, and she had sailed with him. A breath of warm air swept towards the open door, and fanned the short curtains at the window; it brought with it the scent of carnations, and to Mrs. Summers a sudden vision of Cecily as she had last seen her.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her room at Carmarthen Terrace. The room was flooded with sunshine. The basin on the washstand was, Mrs. Summers remembered, full of carnations, and as she entered the room she had exclaimed at their beauty.

“They’ve just come. I’m going to arrange them,” Cecily had said. She held a letter which had also evidently just come, and as she raised her head the look on her face had startled her cousin. She remembered fearing for her. Could any human being with impunity be as ecstatically happy as that? It was like tempting Providence.

[7]Something of this, half in jest, half seriously, she had tried to say, and Cecily had laughed, the low, trembling laugh of a delight too deep to find other expression. She had given herself over to her love as the woman a little difficult, more than a little fastidious, always gives herself—with a surrender complete and unquestioning.

The sunny bedroom, the dainty new frocks over the backs of the chairs, the litter of boxes and paper about the room, the brilliant flowers, and Cecily in her white petticoat, her white shoulders bare;—beautiful, proud, and smiling,—Mrs. Summers saw her as though five days rather than five years had passed since they had met.

She moved, and glanced back over her shoulder. The memory was so vivid that it stirred her to impatience. Why didn’t Cecily come? A door closed sharply.

“Where? Where is she?” It was the same clear, eager voice, and Mrs. Summers smiled, suddenly reassured.

The next moment Cecily’s arms were round her, and there was a rush of incoherent questions. Then Rose gently pushed her back, and they looked at one another.

Involuntarily an exclamation rose to the[8] elder woman’s lips, mercifully checked, as she recognized, by Cecily’s eager words.

“You are just the same!” she cried. “You’ve scarcely changed at all.” And then came the inevitable pause. Rose listened to a thrush singing, and to the distant sound of a mowing-machine. She seemed to have been listening quite a long time before Cecily broke in so sharply that her voice was almost like a cry.

“Ah no! don’t look at me! I’m old and ugly. I’ve changed, haven’t I, Rose?” The question ended in a nervous laugh.

CHAPTER II

“I ’M dying to go into the garden,” said Mrs. Summers. She slipped her arm within Cecily’s, and while she talked volubly, felt its trembling gradually lessen. “Tongue cannot tell what I’ve endured since I landed on Tuesday,” she exclaimed. “The children’s ayah has been ill, relations have incessantly banged at the front door, Mother has had one of her attacks—excitement, you know,—and I’ve been tearing my hair. I daren’t write to tell you when to expect me because I didn’t know from hour to hour when I could get away. At last to-day there was a lull; so, forbidding anything to happen in my absence, I just rushed off to you.”

“And the babies?” asked Cecily.

“Splendid. They got horribly spoilt on board, and now Mother’s putting the finishing touches.”

“And Jack?”

[10]“Very fit when I left him, a month ago. But I’m not going to talk babies, nor even husbands. I want to know about you.”

Cecily shrugged her shoulders. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “You saw me a month before I came into this house; I’ve been here ever since. This is rather a nice seat.”

They sat down on a bench under a beech tree, and for all her volubility Rose felt herself nonplussed. She glanced at Cecily, her momentary hesitation as to what to say next indicated by a little furrow between the eyes.

Rose Summers was scarcely a pretty, but certainly a striking woman, who, in spite of trying circumstances in the shape of an Eastern climate, looked younger than her thirty-one years. Her figure, of the athletic type, was good; she was exceedingly well dressed, and she wore her clothes with distinction. Her slightly freckled face had a healthy tint, and her eyes—gray, clear, and steady—were beautiful as well as kindly. Their expression was contradicted, to some extent, by the sarcasm indicated in a rather large and certainly humorous mouth. The eyes she turned upon her friend now were troubled, almost[11] incredulous. Her mental picture of the Cecily of five years back had been so vivid that, even with the witness before her, she could not realize the change those years had brought.

Cecily was still graceful; nothing could rob her of the beautiful movements which characterized every change of attitude; and as she threw herself back against the cushions in the corner of the bench, for the first time Mrs. Summers recognized the Cecily of the past.

But her beauty was wellnigh gone. It was a beauty that had always largely depended on happiness, and now, with her blue eyes faded, the delicate color gone from her cheeks, her hair still soft but lustreless, she was almost a plain woman. Rose glanced furtively from her face to her dress. It was of simple dark blue linen, quite neat, quite serviceable. She thought of the dainty muslins, the ribbons, the flowers of earlier summers—and the ludicrousness of even imagining Cecily in a gown that could be characterized as serviceable!

“When you begin to neglect your frocks, Cis, I shall know the end is near.” In the old days Mrs. Summers had often told her this. She recalled it now, and made haste to break the silence.

[12]“Where is Robert?” she asked. “Do I call him Robert? I forget.”

“Of course you do. He’s in town—reading at the British Museum.”

Rose raised her eyebrows with a laugh. “Since when has our Robert become so studious?”

“He’s writing a historical novel, and has to study up the period. Robert is getting quite famous, you know, Rose,” she added, after a moment’s pause.

“Yes—but you, Cis? Why are you not famous?”

“I? Oh, I’m married—instead,” she replied, with a little laugh.

“Tell me all about Robert,” demanded Mrs. Summers. “If you only knew how horribly out of things I feel! I know nothing of what’s been going on in the book world.”

“I should think not—with two babies to look after.”

“And the constant moving from one station to another. One loses touch so quickly, and you know, Cis,” with a touch of reproach, “you haven’t written. Why didn’t you write? For the last year or two I’ve scarcely heard anything of you.”

[13]For a moment her cousin was silent, and when she spoke her voice trembled.

“I know. But after baby died, I hadn’t the heart. And then——” She broke off abruptly.

Mrs. Summers’ voice was very gentle.

“Yes, dear, of course—I understand,” she said. “But tell me everything now. Robert’s getting famous? That means that you’re getting rich, you lucky little wretch!”

“Yes,” returned Cecily. “Yes, I suppose we shall be rich,” she added, slowly.

“Bless the child! Aren’t you glad? Isn’t he glad?”

“Oh, yes, he’s very glad. We can get away now.” She spoke in a quiet, unemotional tone, and Rose glanced at her sharply.

“Get away? But doesn’t he love this place?”

“No, he’s sick of it,” she said, still in the same indifferent voice. “We’re going to sell it, and move to London in the autumn.”

“But Robert was so wild to take it!”

“That was five years ago.”

“It’s perfectly lovely, of course,” returned her friend, glancing round her. “But you never wanted to come, I remember. You wanted so much to live in town. The[14] discussion of town versus country was at its height when I left. So country won?”

“Yes, country won,” Cecily repeated.

“Well, it’s beautiful,” Rose repeated. “I never saw such flowers. What a gardener you must have!”

Cecily laughed. “I am the gardener. I do it nearly all myself.”

Rose’s astonishment kept her silent. Cecily, who knew nothing of country things! Cecily, who, in spite of her love for nature, belonged first to the town—to its life, its thoughts, its opportunities! To this meeting with the friend of her girlhood she had been looking forward for months, and she had met a stranger. She had foolishly expected to take up the thread of intimacy where she had dropped it, and in the interval a whole new pattern had been woven,—a pattern in faded colors, whose design she did not understand.

Cecily was obviously unhappy; obviously, also, she was keeping her at arm’s length, and with such success that she had not the courage to ask direct questions. With gratitude she hailed the appearance of a maid who came with tea, as a relief to her embarrassment—that terrible embarrassment one feels in the presence of a close friend to whose mind one has lost the key.

[15]While the cloth was being spread, and the maid was moving to and fro from the house, they exchanged information on family matters.

“Diana is almost grown up,” said Cecily, speaking of her sister, whom Mrs. Summers remembered as a child of twelve. “You know she’s been living with Uncle Henry and Aunt Mary since father died?” The softening of her voice, the hesitation with which she spoke his name, reminded Rose of one great grief, at least, through which in her absence her friend had passed. “You will like Diana,” Cecily added after a moment. “Of course you’re going to stay to-night, Rose?”

Mrs. Summers admitted that she was open to an invitation. “When is Robert coming back?” she inquired.

“This afternoon, I think. He was staying last night at his godmother’s—Lady Wilmot, you know.”

The mention of her husband’s name did not, as Rose hoped, lead to confidences. Cecily began at once to inquire the earliest date at which her friend could leave the children long enough for a “proper visit,” and Mrs. Summers was soon driven to make conversation.

“What a ridiculous little world it is!” she remarked, stirring her tea; “I haven’t yet[16] been home a week, and already I’ve run across people I’d lost sight of for years before I left England. Now, on Monday, for instance, I was going to the dressmaker’s when I met a girl I used to know, a girl called Philippa Burton.”

“Philippa Burton!” echoed Cecily, with interest. “Why, I went to school with her. A rather pretty dark girl?”

“Major Burton’s daughter? Yes? How strange!”

“Philippa Burton! How it brings all the schooldays back!” exclaimed Cecily, with a retrospective laugh. “I had no idea you knew her, Rose. When did you meet her?”

“That year I went to Leipzig to study music, you know. She was in the same pension, studying something or other also; I forget what. Affectation, I should think.”

“But she had brought that to a fine art even as a schoolgirl,” Cecily remarked. “Tell me about her. We left school the same term, I remember. Is she as pretty as ever?” She spoke with animation, obviously glad of a topic which drew conversation away from personal matters.

“Pretty?—yes, in a floppy fashion.”

Cecily laughed. “Oh, she still flops? She[17] used to be a most intense young woman. When she asked you to pass the salt at dinner, you felt inclined to burst into tears. She was High Church when I knew her, but that was early in her career.”

“Oh, yes, there’s been Rationalism since then, and Socialism, and Vegetarianism, and Theosophy, and what not. Just now it’s Sandals and the Simple Life, whatever that may mean. It seems to cover a multitude of complexities.”

“Does she still yearn?”

“Oh, horribly! She begins at breakfast-time, I’m sure. She’s doing miniatures and mystic drawings now.”

“And mouse-traps, and moonshine, and everything else that begins with an M? It sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Go on. I’m awfully interested to hear of her again. Even as a schoolgirl Philippa posed more than any other human being I’ve ever met.”

“She has a studio in Fulham somewhere,” Mrs. Summers continued. “I happened to be quite close to it when I met her, and she asked me to come in to tea. She had grape-nuts and plasmon. It’s astonishing what lurid views of life can be nourished upon this apparently mild diet,” she added, reflectively.

[18]“Are Philippa’s views lurid?” asked Cecily.

“Oh, my uninstructed married ignorance is to blame, of course!” declared Mrs. Summers, with a meek expression.

“What did she say?”

“A great many things—most of them quite unfit for publication. But the latest and simplest gospel, according to Burton, appears to be, ‘Down with the proprietary view of marriage.’”

Cecily leaned back against her cushions. “Ah!” she said.

“Yes,” continued Mrs. Summers, meditatively, “there should be room in life for frank, free comradeship—camaraderie was, I think, the word—between husbands and ladies who are living the Simple Life. Room for beautiful, breezy, ennobling friendships, untrammelled by vulgar jealousy on the part of the wife.”

“I see,” returned Cecily. “And is the wife to have beautiful, breezy friendships too?”

“Oh, yes! Liberty, Fraternity (presumably), and Equality, of course.”

Cecily was silent a moment. “And you don’t believe in that kind of thing?” she asked.

Mrs. Summers shrugged her shoulders.

[19]“My dear, I haven’t lived the Simple Life,” she returned, dryly.