# The White Pagoda

Extracted from Century magazine, vol. 84, 1912, pp. 771-787.
THE WHITE PAGODA
BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
Author of "Tante," "Franklin Kane," "A Fountain Sealed," "The Rescue," etc.
THE drama of the drawing-rooms had begun years ago, but Owen Stacpole did not come into it until the day on which bis cousin Guendolen, after examining the box of bric-à-brac, remarked, refolding the last pieces of china in their dusty newspapers, that they were all rubbish, and silly rubbish, too, of just the sort that Aunt Pickthorne had always unerringly accumulated. The box had arrived that morning, a legacy from this deceased relative; it had been brought up to the drawing-room and placed upon a sheet near the fire, so that Mrs. Conyers might examine its contents in comfort, and Owen, while he wrote at the black lacquer bureau in the window, had been aware of Guendolen's gibes and exclamations behind him. Now, when she asserted that she would send the whole futile collection down to Mr. Glazebrook and see if he would give her enough for it to buy a pair of gloves with, Owen rose and limped to join her and to look down at the wooden box into which she was thrusting, with some vindictiveness, the dingy parcels.
"Have you looked at them all?" he inquired. "I forget—was your Aunt Pickthorne a Mrs. or a Miss? And how long has it been since she died?"
"About six months, poor old thing! And these treasures have evidently never been dusted since. She was a Mrs. Her husband was old Admiral Pickthorne,—don't you remember?—and they lived. after he retired, at Cheltenham. Two more guileless Philistines I've never known. It used to make me feel quite ill to go and stay with them when I was a girl. I've hardly been at all since then, and that's probably why she selected all the most hideous objects in her drawing-room to leave me. How well I remember that drawing-room! Crocheted antimacassars; and a round, mahogany center-table on which a lamp used to stand in the evening; and the wall-paper of frosted robin's-egg-blue, with stuffed birds in cases, and terra-cotta plaques, framed in ruby plush, hanging upon it—a perfectly horrible room. Half a dozen of the plaques are in there; the birds she spared me. She had one or two lovely old family things, too, that I'd allowed myself to hope for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no; there's nothing worth looking at."
Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands together, and rose from her knees. She was, at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman, tall, of ample form, and attired with fashionable ease and fluency. Fashion had been a late development with Guendolen. In her gaunt and wistful girlhood she had worn her hair in drooping Rossettian and her throat had been differently bare. Now she was as accurate as she was easy. Her hair was even a little too sophisticatedly distended, and her long ear-rings, though they became the tender violet of her eyes, emphasized, as her former Preraphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a certain genial commonplaceness in the contours of her cheek and chin. But almost fat and decisively unpoetical as she had become, it was undeniable that this last phase of dress and, in especial, these widow's weeds, with sinuous lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became her better than any in which Owen remembered to have seen her.
Guendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy holiday—when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. Her teas had been brought in on trays of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like opening between the front and back drawing-rooms had been hung with translucent curtains of beaded reeds, through which one had to plunge as though through a sheet of dropping water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and rattle and the perfume of burning Eastern pastils that greeted one when, emerging, one found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the divans and the brasses and the palms. In those days Guendolen had been draped rather than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of her languid arms and wrists seemed more adapted to a dulcimer than to a tea-pot. But she dispensed excellent tea, and though her eyes were appropriately yearning, her talk was quite as reassuringly commonplace as Owen had always found it.
It was only in the course of years that the reed curtains and the carved Indian screens and the divans ebbed away; but the change was complete at last, and he found Guendolen, with undulated hair puffed over a frame, and a small waist,—large waists not having then come in,—receiving her visitors in the most clear, calm, austere of rooms, with polished floor, Sheraton furniture, and Japanese color-prints, framed in white, hanging on pensive spaces of willow-leaf-green wall. Guendolen talked of Strauss's music and of the New English Art Club, was indignant at the prohibition of "Monna Vanna," and, to some no longer apt remark of an aspiring caller, answered that to speak so was surely to Ruskinize. He realized on this occasion that Guendolen had become the arbiter of taste in Chislebridge. He followed her into several drawing-rooms and observed that she had set the fashion in furniture and wall-paper; that some were pushing their way toward Japanese prints, and some were even beginning to babble faintly of Manet. Five years had passed since then, and now on this his first visit to Chislebridge since old Mr. Conyers's death another change had taken place. Guendolen's hips were compressed, her waist was large once more, though of a carefully calculated largeness, and only in a fine bit of the old furniture here and there did a trace of the former green drawing-room remain. This was certainly the most interesting room that Guendolen had yet achieved. There had been little character, if much charm, in the green drawing-room; one knew so many like it. With a slight self-discipline, its harmonies were really easy to attain. But it was not easy to attain a mingled richness and austerity; to be recondite, yet lovely; to set such cabinets of rosy old lacquer near such Chinese screens or hang subtle strips of Chinese painting on just the right shade of dim, white wall. It took money, it took time, it took knowledge to find such delicate cane-seated settees framed in black lacquer, and to pick up such engraved glass, such white Chinese porcelain and white Italian earthenware. Melting together in their dim splendor and shining softness, they had so enchantingly arrested Owen the night before that, pausing on the threshold, he had said with a whole-heartedness she had never yet heard from him, "Well, Guen, yours is the loveliest room I've ever seen.
It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions. It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere. They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower. And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated an all sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Guendolen, from where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his eyes, "I am so glad you like it, dear Owen."
Guendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never felt fonder of Guendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers, who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure and his breakfasts historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and duchesses, who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old town, and Owen had found himself, as Guendolen's crippled writing cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of Guendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished. Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for Guendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion—the same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognized a difference. He wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Guendolen a dwelling tenderness; a brooding touch, indeed, of reminiscent wistfulness. Was it to show an unbecoming complacency if he allowed his mind to dwell upon the possibilities that this development in Guendolen presented to his imagination? He was delicate and poor and, despite a large visiting-list, he was lonely. He was fond of Guendolen and of her two nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, as she had always amused him; for though her drawing-room had become interesting, though she had developed a sense of humor, or at least the intention of humorousness, though she often attempted playfulness and even irony, she was still at heart as disproportionately earnest as she had been in youth. But Guendolen would make no romantic demands upon him, and she would not expect him to take even red lacquer as seriously as she did, or to follow with the same breathlessness the erratic movements of modern estheticism. She was accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness, and would resent it no more in the husband than in the friend. Altogether, as he sat there writing at Guendolen's lovely bureau, he knew that a sense of homely magic grew upon him.
Next morning, wandering about the pleasant streets of the old town, he found himself before the window of Mr. Glazebrook's curiosity-shop—a shop well known to more than Chislebridge. He paused to look at the objects disposed with a dignified reticence against a dark background, and his eye was attracted by a very delightful red lacquer box that at once made him think of Guendolen's drawing-room. Just the thing for her, he thought. But as he entered the shop, Mr. Glazebrook leaned from within and took it from its place in the window. He was showing it to another customer. Owen now quite vehemently longed to possess the box, which, he saw, as Mr. Glazebrook displayed it, was cunningly fitted with little inner segments, beautifully patterned in gold. Feigning an indifferent survey of the shop, he lingered near, hoping that his rival would relinquish her opportunity.
"Five pounds! Oh, dear, that is too much for me, I'm afraid," he heard her say, and, at the voice, he turned and looked at her. The voice was unusual—a rapid, rather husky voice that made him think of muffled bells or snow-bound water, gay in rhythm, yet marred in tone, almost as though the speaker had cried a great deal. She was an unusual figure, too, though he could not have said why, except that her dress seemed to recall bygone fashions quaintly, though without a hint of dowdiness or affectation. She wore a skirt and jacket of soft gray, with pleated lawn at neck and wrists, and her small gray hat was wreathed with violets. She held the lacquer box; and her face, rosy, crisp, decisive, and showing, like her voice, a marred gaiety, expressed her reluctant relinquishment and her strong desire. Owen had seen a child look at a forbidden fruit with just such an expression, and he suddenly wished that he could give the box to her rather than to Guendolen, to whom five pounds was a matter of small moment.
"I think I mustn't," she repeated, after a further hesitation, and setting the box down with cherishing care. "Not to-day. And I have so much red lacquer. It's like dram-drinking."
Mr. Glazebrook smiled affably. He was evidently on old-established terms with his customer. "Perhaps you'd like to look round a bit, Mrs. Waterlow," he suggested. "There are some nice pieces of old glass in the inner room, quite cheap, some of them—a set of old champagne glasses." Mrs. Waterlow, saying that she wanted some old champagne glasses, moved away.
"Do you think the lady has given up that box?" Owen asked. "I don't want to buy it if there's a chance of her changing her mind."
Mr. Glazebrook said that there was no such chance, the lady being one who knew her own mind; so the box was bought, and Owen ordered it to be sent to Guendolen. He said then that he would like to have a look round, too. He really wanted to have another look at the lady with the rosy face and the small gray hat trimmed with violets. He peered into cabinets ranged thickly with old glass and china, examined the Worcester tea-set disposed upon a table, and the case of Chinese tear-bottles and Japanese netzukes, and presently made his way into the smaller, dimmer room at the back.
"Oh, Mr. Glazebrook," said the lady in gray. She had heard his step, but had not turned. She was kneeling before an open packing-case and holding an object that she had drawn from it. Owen suddenly recognized the case. It was the one that Guendolen yesterday had sent down to Mr. Glazebrook. He called this person, raising his hat, and the lady looked round at him, too preoccupied to express her recognition of her mistake by more than a vague murmur of thanks. "Mr. Glazebrook," she said, holding up a whitish object, "may I have this? Is it expensive?"
"Well, really, I only glanced over the box. A customer sent it down to me to dispose of, and I didn't think there was anything in it worth much. Let me see, Mrs. Waterlow; it's a pagoda, I take it, a Chinese pagoda. We've had them from time to time, in ivory and smaller than this."
"This is in porcelain," said the lady, "and beautifully molded."
"I see, I see," said Mr. Glazebrook, taking the fragile top segment of the disjointed pagoda in his hand and rather at a loss; "and it's slightly damaged."
The lady in gray evidently was not a shrewd bargainer. "Only a little," she said. "One or two bits have been chipped out of the roofs, and it's lost one or two of these little crystal rings; but I think it's in quite good condition, and I have it all here." She was placing one segment upon the other. "They are all made to fit, you see, with the little openings in each story."
She had built it up beside her as she knelt on the floor, and it stood like a fragile, fantastic ghost, with the upward tilt of its tiled roofs, its embossed patterns, and the crystal rings trembling from each angle of the roofs like raindrops. "What a darling!" said Mrs. Waterlow. "How much do you ask for it, Mr. Glazebrook?"
Mr. Glazebrook, adjusting his knowledge of the limitations of Mrs. Waterlow's purse to his present appreciation of the pagoda and of her desire for it, said genially, after a moment, that from an old customer like herself he would ask only forty-five shillings.
"Well, I think it's a great bargain, Mr. Glazebrook," said Mrs. Waterlow. "And I'll have it."
"Shall I send it round?" Mr. Glazebrook asked.
"Yes, please; or, no, it isn't heavy,"—she lifted it with both hands, rising with it and looking like a Saint Barbara holding her tower,—"I can manage it to just round the corner. Wrap it up for me, and I'll carry it off myself."
When Owen saw his cousin again at lunch, the red lacquer box had not yet arrived, and, with a touch of friendly mockery, he said:
"Well, you have been unlucky, my dear Guen. There was the most charming piece of old Chinese porcelain in that scorned Cheltenham box, and I saw Mr. Glazebrook sell it this morning to a lady who wasn't to be put off by dust and newspapers and plush-framed plaques. She carried it off in triumph, saying that it was a great bargain. And so it was; but she might have had it for half the money if she hadn't informed Mr. Glazebrook of its probable value."
Guendolen fixed her mild, violet eyes upon him. "A piece of old Chinese porcelain? Do you mean that silly white pagoda?"
"You did see it, then?"
"See it? Haven't I seen it all my life? It stood on a purple worsted mat on a little bamboo table between the Nottingham lace curtains in one of Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room windows, and looked like some piece of childish gimcrackery bought at a bazaar, where, I'll wager, she did buy it."
"Well, Mrs. Waterlow evidently didn't think it gimcrackery, or, if she did, she didn't mind. It looked to me, I confess, an exquisite thing. But her admiration may have lent it its enchantment."
Guendolen's eyes now fixed themselves more searchingly than before.
"Mrs. Waterlow? Did Mrs. Waterlow buy it? How did you know it was Mrs. Waterlow? I thought you'd never met her."
"I haven't; but I heard Mr. Glazebrook call her by her name. She'd wanted to buy a red lacquer box that I spotted in the window and had gone in to get for you, my dear Guen. It was too expensive for her,—so that it is yours,—and she went rummaging into the back shop and found your box with the things just as you and Mr. Glazebrook had left them, and in no time she'd disinterred the pagoda."
Guendolen apparently was so arrested by his story that she forgot for the moment to thank him for the lacquer box.
"Do you know her?" he asked.
"Know her? Know Cicely Waterlow? Why, I've known her since she first came to live here, years ago. She's a very dear friend of mine," Guendolen said, adding: "How much did she pay for it? That wretched man gave me only fifteen shillings for the lot."
"He made her pay forty-five shillings for the pagoda. I suspect myself that it's worth ten times as much. Does she care for things, too—lacquer and engraved glass?"
Guendolen still showed preoccupation and, he fancied, a touch of vexation.
"Care for them? Yes; who with any taste doesn't care for them? Cicely has very good taste, too, in her little way. She doesn't know anything, but she picks up ideas and puts them together very cleverly. I can't help thinking that she'd never have given the pagoda a thought if my white porcelain hadn't educated her. I really can't believe that it's good, Owen."
Owen waived the point.
"Who is Mr. Waterlow?" he asked.
"He died eight or nine years ago. He was in the army, a very delightful man, so people say who knew him. And Cicely lost her little girl, to whom she was passionately devoted, three years ago; she has never really recovered from that. She used to be so pretty, poor Cicely! She's lost it all now. She cried her very eyes out. She has a little money and lives with her mother-in-law, old Mrs. Waterlow, who is very fond of her. They don't entertain except in the quietest way, or go out much, and I do what I can to give Cicely a good time. I often have her here to tea when I have interesting people staying."
"Oh, that's good. Do count me as interesting enough and ask her while I'm here."
"Interesting enough, my dear Owen! I don't suppose that Cicely often has a chance of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of course I'll ask her," said Guendolen. Then, remembering his gift: "It was nice of you to get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red lacquer, and I'm quite sure, whatever you and Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a hundred of your white pagodas."
Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, the last of Owen's stay. The drawing-room was crowded, and Owen, in a corner, was enjoying a talk with a dismal-looking old philosopher—who had plaintive white hairs on his nose and trousers that bagged irremediably at the knees—when she was announced.
"Yes indeed, I know her well," said Professor Selden, as Owen questioned him. "I play chess with her once a week. Her little girl was a great pet of mine. You never saw the little girl?"
"Never, and I've not yet met Mrs. Waterlow. She is most charming-looking."
"The little girl was so much like her," said Professor Selden, sadly. "Yes, she is a charming woman. Don't let me keep you from meeting her. I am going to sit down here while our young friend Dawkins plays. You know Dawkins? Between ourselves, Mrs. Conyers thinks too highly of him."
Mrs. Waterlow's eyes turned upon him as he limped up to her and Guendolen, and, smiling, she said, "Why, I saw you yesterday in Mr. Glazebrook's shop."
"Yes," said Owen, "and there is the red lacquer box."
"And you, Cicely, bought my pagoda," said Guendolen.
"Your pagoda?" Mrs. Waterlow questioned, her merry, weary eyes, that seemed to open with a little difficulty, resting on her hostess inquiringly. "Was the pagoda yours?"
"Yes; mine," said Guendolen. "It came in a box of rubbish,—you saw the kind of rubbish,—a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled it off to Glazebrook. Owen says it is really good. Is it?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Mrs. Waterlow.
"1'm sure it Is," said Owen, "and I liked the accuracy with which you fell in love with it at first sight."
"I did fall in love with it, good or bad," said Mrs. Waterlow. "Don't tell me that you want it back again, Guendolen. But if it was a mistake, of course"—
He recognized in her the note of guilelessness and, with some decision, for he actually perceived a deepening in Guendolen's eyes, interposed with, "But Guendolen thinks it gimcrackery, and wouldn't have it at any price. Isn't it so, Guendolen?"
Poor Guendolen was looking a little glum, but she was the most unresentful of creatures.
"Indeed, it is," she said, "and I did think it gimcrackery; but, to tell the truth, I never really saw it at all. I can't believe you'd have seen it, Cicely, standing on its worsted mat in my Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room. But I wouldn't dream, of course, of taking it back; and, if it's really good, I'm more glad than I can say that my loss should be your gain. Now, won't you and Owen sit down here and listen to my wonderful Perceval Dawkins? Oh, he is going to astonish the world some day."
Mrs. Waterlow and Owen, in the intervals of the ensuing music, talked together. Seen more closely, he found that her face, though not beautiful, was even more singularly delightful than he had thought it. She had eyes merry, yet tired, like those of a sleepy child; and sweet, small, firm lips; and a glance and smile at once very frank and very remote. There was about her none of that aroma of sorrow that some women distil from the tragedies of their lives, and wear, even if unconsciously, like an allurement. He felt that, in Mrs. Waterlow, sorrow had been an isolating, a bewildering, a devastating experience, making her at once more ready to take refuge in the trivialities of life and more unable to admit an intimacy into the essentials. Yet the spring of vitality and mirth was so strong in her that, in all she said, he felt a quality restorative, aromatic, fragrant, as if he were walking in spring woods and smelled everywhere the rising sap and the breath of violets. She was remote, blighted, yet buoyant. When she rose to go, he realized, with sudden dismay, that to-day was his last in Chislebridge and that he should not see her again for who knew how long.
"Is the pagoda placed?" he asked her. "Does it fulfil your expectations?"
"Yes, indeed," she said. "I spent two hours yesterday in washing and mending it. It is immaculate now, as lovely as a pearl."
"I wish I could see it," said Owen.
"Why, pray, then, come and see it. Can you come to tea with me and my mother-in-law to-morrow?"
"I'm going away to-morrow," said Owen, dismally. And then he bethought him. "Can't I walk back with you now? Is it too late? Only five-thirty."
"Not in the least too late! Mama will still be having tea, and she loves people to drop in. But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Waterlow glanced round the crowded room.
"I'll not be missed," he assured her, with some conscious speciousness.
Guendolen, indeed, had time only for a little stare of surprise when he told her that he was going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Waterlow. She was receiving new guests, richly furred and motor-veiled ladies who had come in from the country and were expatiating over the beauties of the red lacquer cabinets, Guendolen's latest acquisitions.
"That will be delightful," she said; "and now Owen will see that sweet drawing-room of yours, dearest. You have made it so pretty!"
Owen observed that Mrs. Waterlow, while maintaining all the suavities of intercourse, did not address Guendolen as dearest.
It was not far to Mrs. Waterlow's, and he said, in reply to her question, that he liked walking, if she didn't mind going slow on his account. He found himself telling her about his lameness. A bad fall while skating in boyhood had handicapped him for life. The lamps had just been lighted and the evening of early spring was blurred with mist. Catkins hung against a faintly rosy sky, and, in the gardens that they passed, the crocuses stood thickly. Owen had a sense of adventure poignant in its reminiscent magic. Not for years had he so felt the savor of youth. He realized, with a deep happiness, that Mrs. Waterlow liked him; sometimes she laughed at things he said, and once or twice, when her eyes turned on him, he fancied in them the same expression of happy discovery with which she had looked at the pagoda. Well, he reflected, if she thought him delightful, too, she had had to get through a great many dusty newspapers to find him.
Mrs. Waterlow lived, away from the gardened houses of Chislebridge, in a small but rather stately house with a Georgian façade which stood on one of the narrower, older streets. They went up two or three stone steps from the pavement and knocked at a very bright and massive knocker, and the door was opened by a middle-aged Quakerish maid. The drawing-room was on the ground floor, and Mrs. Waterlow led him in.
Owen's astonishment, when he entered, prompted him to stand still and to gaze about him; but luckily he could not yield to the impulse, for he had to cross to the fire, near which, behind her tea-table, old Mrs. Waterlow sat, and had to be presented to her and to the middle-aged, academic-looking lady who was having tea with her. He was glad of the respite, for he had received a shock.
Old Mrs. Waterlow had dark, authoritative eyes and white hair much dressed under black lace, and the finest of hands, decorated with old seals and old diamonds. She must, he felt, be a companion at once inspiriting and disquieting, for she had the demeanor of a naughty, haughty child, and as she held Owen in talk for some moments, he perceived that her conversation was of a sort to cause alarm and amusement in her listeners. Poor old Professor Selden, who was mentioned, offered her an opportunity for the frankest witticisms, and when her daughter-in-law protested, "Yes, dear, I know you are fond of him," the old lady replied, "and so am I; but he does, all the same, look like a damp potato that has begun to sprout."
"Now look at my pagoda, Mr. Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she had been standing with her foot on the fender.
"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-à-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the pagoda because it means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home in triumph and always doing without hats; and I sit here without an atom of taste and get the credit for hers. Frankly, Sybilla my dear," she addressed the academic lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cozy with apple-blossoms painted on it. I had such a cozy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely wouldn't let me use it."
Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. Waterlow—he had seen it in the first astonished glance—had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, been imitating Guendolen, and his whole conception of her was undergoing a reconstruction. He followed her to the table on which the white pagoda stood, glancing about him and taking in deep drafts of disillusion. Red lacquer and Japanese prints, white porcelain and dimly shining jars of old Venetian glass—it was a replica, even to its white walls, of Guendolen's drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it were, humbly smiling, with folded hands and no attempt at emulation. And in the midst, beautifully in place on its little black, lacquer table, was the pagoda, offering him not a hint of help, but seeming, rather, to smile at him with a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was aware, as from the pagoda he brought his eyes back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would not have given the naïve derivativeness a thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full of savor and independence—? One thing only helped him: beside the effortless atmosphere of the room—and that was the fact—he clung to it; that the glasses set everywhere among the red and black and white were filled not (thank goodness!) with pink roses, but with poppy anemones, white and purple and rose. And the first thing he found to say of the pagoda to Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in here," and then, turning to the nearest bowl of delicate color, he added, "And how beautifully these flowers go with your room!"
He wondered, as their eyes met over the anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow guessed his discomfiture.
When he saw Guendolen that evening she asked him at once whether he liked old Mrs. Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked young Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room, and he reflected that this was really very magnanimous of her.
"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be dull with her."
"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said Guendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbors scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."
He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Guendolen asked him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time of all others when Guendolen and her ministrations would have been the most acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influence, feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The thought of Guendolen and of her possible place in his life must be adjourned—adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he able to meet it more impartially.
He saw Guendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he found, in the imaginary Guendolen than in the real one. The sight of her brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they seemed to have spoiled each other. Guendolen had all the ethical advantages and, even if it came to that, all the esthetic ones; yet, ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged Guendolen's virtues and Guendolen's achievements. He even felt that he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Guendolen, when he must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her, tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that Guendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could not be combined. Guendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote to her in November, and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours' wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.
He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow. This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led for a second time into the drawing-room.
He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically, incredibly different, except—his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of wonder—the white pagoda; for there, in the center of the room, upon a round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the white pagoda stood, and under it an old mat,—a mat of faded, old blue beads,—his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,—of white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular intervals, raying out from the center, books were placed upon the table; small, sober books bound in calf.
So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them, the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize Its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were having together?
For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of black satin—sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lusters ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble, ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Between the clock and the lusters, on each side, was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools, with bead-worked tops, stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly colored drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labor could make them.
No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful dream; for, with it all, above it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it, laughing at and with it. For it all laughed—surely, yes; and the elfish chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing, like a Chinese Pierrot, at the center of the revels.
Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay, precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.
"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of astonishment had spoken from his face.
He stared round him again, smiling.
"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says, 'If I be I.'"
"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as they are now, and the people, I sometimes think, were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady, moving to her tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, Mr. Stacpole! It is very nice to see you again."
"But, tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked; drawing his chair to the table. "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone forever?"
Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery,
"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it. Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.
"Yes; I'm only passing through. Guendolen's been gone for nearly a month."
"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness. "And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of. my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"
"It's genius," said Owen. "What made her think of it?" And then, with a pang, he wondered whether Guendolen had thought of it first. Was it imaginable that Guendolen would have turned away from beauty and plunged herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?
"Well, things are in the air, you know"; said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out the tea, "that's what Cicely always says, at all events; reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."
"Things in the air?" Had Guendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.
"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us. How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to buttoned black satin and old flower-pieces? It's as an exception that it has its charm and its meaning. But if it became a commonplace?"
"Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "Will it? It has very much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains. And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said; downright ugliness; she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."
Owen's head was whirling. It was as though suddenly the little crystal rings of the pagoda had given out a sportive, significant tinkle. This, then, was what it meant? It was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap. For whom? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Waterlow's lips, could mean only Guendolen. He did not know quite what he hoped or feared, but he knew that he must conceal from old Mrs. Waterlow his recognition of her meaning.
"I felt from the first moment that I saw her in the curiosity-shop that Mrs. Waterlow was the sort of person who would always find the white pagodas," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I hadn't realized that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to realize it, too, and to follow her lead."
"It's not that they realize it, really," said the old lady, salting her scone; "it's something deeper than realization. It's instinct—the instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their credit. And then, since she is poor, and they—some of them—rich, their copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and Cicely, to some people (I've no doubt of it), seems the ape. It has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.
Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather angry with Guendolen.
"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it. Has it gone on for long?"
"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,—you remember the dreadful epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so. It's wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct thing. Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was amused when I first saw Japanese prints on some one else's green walls, and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red lacquer and the glass and that beautiful old set of cane-seated furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had white walls or a scrap of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied, the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have them because some one else likes them. They dress themselves in other people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.
Poor, stupid Guendolen! After all, one could not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something approaching pitying tolerance. Guendolen could be stupid in such good faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Guendolen was so sincerely unaware of having no ideas of her own. He wondered, as he said good-by to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt convinced that she had at last reached a haven, whether she guessed that she had made him happy rather than unhappy.
She had made him so happy, with his recovered ideal, that, as he drove away, it was with a definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remembered Guendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. Waterlow. Was it not possible, after all, that she had been indulging in sheer malice at Guendolen's expense? Wasn't it possible that Guendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had the same inspirations independently? But no two people could stumble at once on such a drawing-room as that he had just left. Horrid thought—what if Guendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just such a singular reversion to ugliness? After his delicious relief, he could not bear the doubt.
He drove to Guendolen's. Yes, the old housekeeper, who knew him, said he could of course go up and look at the red lacquer. The red lacquer! He could almost have embraced her for the joy her words gave him. Guendolen would not have retained red lacquer with a black satin suite. And on the threshold of Guendolen's drawing-room he received full reassurance. The lovely room was intact. The blacks and whites and reds and golds were all there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambiguous discipline upon them. And in the midst of them all it was not Guendolen, but Cicely Waterlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon him, merry, tired, and tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Guendolen in the mid-Victorian back-water, why should she have copied her in this? She had been first in both, and in her back-water she was now safe.
Many months passed before he saw Guendolen's drawing-room again. He was felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Guendolen and the boys hadn't joined him, a she hadn't nursed and amused and encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have died and made an end of it. Guendolen was more than kind. She was at once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a comfortable, impersonal cushion that she adjusted for his weary head, she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Guendolen's character disappeared. The long, pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most delicious beef teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness! Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms he found that Guendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained, was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry him, and to take care of him forever. Poor, good, kind Guendolen! It was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the thought of the bad bargain she would make.
He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and lawns and trees, and seemed to look upon him with eyes of unresentful patience.
He limped in and Guendolen met him in the hall.
"My dear, dear Owen, how are you? Yes, I had your wire this morning. Good; I see that the journey has done you no harm. But you are tired, aren't you? Will you go to your own room or have tea with me at once? It's just been brought in."
He said that he would have tea with her. She did not actually help him up the stairs, but as, with skill impaired, he swung himself from step to step, the touch of her tactful and ready hand was upon his arm, a caress rather than a sustainment. Passing the hand through his arm, she led him into the drawing-room.
Owen looked about him. He stood for a long moment in the door and looked. He then allowed himself a cautious, side-long glance at Guendolen. Her eyes, unaware in their bland complacency, had followed his and rested upon her room.
"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that you hadn't seen my new drawing-room," she said. "We've had great changes."
Even in his horror, for it was hardly less, he was touched to realize that Guendolen was thinking far less of her drawing-room than of him. She might have forgotten that it had changed had he not so helplessly displayed his amazement.
"Yes, indeed?" he said. He limped to the fire and sank heavily into the deep, black satin easy-chair drawn before it. He leaned his elbow on his knee and rested his head on his hand, and as he did so he observed that before the fire stood a mahogany footstool with a bead-worked top.
"You are tired, dear Owen. Do you feel ill?" Guendolen hovered above his chair.
"I do feel a little giddy," he confessed. "I'm not all right yet, I see."
He raised his head. It was to face the mantelpiece, with its oval, gilt mirror and crystal lusters and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there were not doves and a nest upon it. This was a finer clock than the one with the doves, and the lusters were larger, and the flowers that stood between were mauve orchids. Guendolen always went astray over her flowers.
"Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a little mahogany table with bowed and decorated legs. "Of course you 're bound to feel tired, dear Owen, after your journey. Tea will be the very thing for you."
He turned now a furtive eye along the wall. Flower-pieces, dim, flat, old flower-pieces and and steel engravings and tall pieces of mahogany furniture with marble vases upon them—no mistakes had been made here, for if the vases were not urns, they were of marble and in their places.
"How do you like it in this phase?" Guendolen asked him, tactfully turning from the question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I own, though of course Chislebridge thinks I've lost my wits. To tell you the truth, Owen, I was tired of beauty. One may come to that. One may feel," said Guendolen, pouring out the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This room is my discipline, and after it I know that I shall find self-indulgence almost vulgar."
No; his mind was working to and fro between the present and the past with the rapidity and accuracy of a shuttle threading an intricate pattern—no, he had never mentioned to Guendolen that late autumnal visit of his to Chislebridge eighteen months ago. Had that been because to mention it and the transformation he had been the first to witness in Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room would have been, in a sense, to give Guendolen a warning? And had he not, in his deepening affection for her, conceived her to be above the need of such warnings? Yes; for though he had been glad to recover his ideal of young Mrs. Waterlow, though he had been more than willing that Guendolen should occupy the slightly ridiculous and humiliating position that he had imagined to be Mrs. Waterlow's, he had never for a moment imagined that Guendolen's disingenuous docility would go as far as this. So many people might love red lacquer and old glass with a clear conscience once they had been brought to see them; but who, with a clear conscience, could love black satin furniture and marble urns?
"It is a very singular room," he found at last, in comment upon her information. "How—and when—did you come to think of it?" He heard the hollow sound of his own voice; but Guendolen remained unaware. The fact of her stupidity cast a merciful veil of pitifulness over her.
"I hardly know," she said, handing him his tea and happy in her theme. "These things are in the air at a given time—reactions, repulsions, wearinesses—I think. It grew bit by bit; I've brought it to this state only since my return from the Riviera. The idea came to me, oh, long ago—long before your illness. Alec Chambers is perfectly entranced with it, and vows it is the most beautiful—yes, beautiful—room in existence. It is witty as well as beautiful, he says, and he is going to paint it for the New English Art Club. Rooms have a curious influence upon me, you know, Owen. I really do feel," said Guendolen, busying herself hospitably with his little plate and hot buttered toast, "that I've grown cleverer since living in this one."
Owen, while she talked and while he drank his tea, had been more frankly looking about him. Flagrant as was the plagiarism, Guendolen, as before, had protected herself by a more illustrious achievement. It was a stately, not a staid room; it carried the idea higher, and thereby missed it. It was not an amusing room, nor witty, to any one who had seen the original. It was impressive, oppressive, almost forbidding. Guendolen, for one thing, had had more space to fill. The naïvete of mere flower-pieces would not furnish her walls, and she had lapsed into sheer ugliness with the large and admirably accurate steel-engravings. Caution, too, had been mistakenly exercised here and there; the black satin furniture had no antimacassars and the center-table no ornament except a vase of orchids, and calf-bound books.
Owen felt no indignation; he would always remain too fond of Guendolen, too tolerant of her folly, to feel indignant with her; it was with a mild but final irony that he brought his eyes back at last to his unconscious and hapless cousin. And he wondered how far Guendolen had gone, how far she could be made to go. "There's only one thing that it lacks," he said. "Shall I tell you?"
"Oh, do," she urged, beaming over her tea. "You know how much I value your taste."
"Oh, I haven't much taste," said Owen, "I've never gone in for having taste. And doesn't your room prove that taste is a mistake if indulged too far? It's more a sense of literary fitness I allude to. Yours is meant to be a soulless room, isn't it? That's your intention?"
"Exactly," said Guendolen, with eager apprehension; "that is just it—a soulless room. One is sick of souls, just as one is sick of beauty."
"Exactly," Owen echoed her. "But, since you have here a travesty of beauty, what you need to complete your idea is a travesty of soul. You need a center that draws it all into focus. You need something that, alas! you might have had, and have lost forever. The white pagoda, Guendolen, that Mrs. Waterlow found. Your room needs that, and only that, to make it perfect."
He spoke in his flat, weak invalid's voice, but he was wondering, almost with ardor, if Guendolen, this touchstone applied, would suspect or remember and, from penitence or caution, redeem herself by a confession. For a moment, only a moment, she looked at him very earnestly; and he was aware that he hoped that she was going to redeem herself; hoped it almost ardently, not for his own sake, those sober hopes were dead forever,—but for the sake of the past and what it had really held of fondness and sympathy and essential respect.
Guendolen looked at him earnestly; it was as though a dim suspicion crossed her; and then, poor thing! she put it aside. Yes, he was very sorry for her as he listened to her.
"Owen, that is clever of you," she said, "but very, very clever. That is precisely what I've been saying to myself ever since the idea came to me. I can't forgive myself for that piece of stupidity; my only one, I will say, in regard to such recognitions and perceptions. I may be a stupid woman about a great many things, but I'm not stupid about rooms. The horror of Aunt Pickthorne's room dulled my eyes so that in all truth I can say that I never saw that pagoda. And from the moment I've had my idea I've moaned—but literally moaned—ever having lost it. Of course it is what the room needs, and all that it needs; the travesty of a soul standing on that mahogany table."
"Yes, the center-table is the place for it;" said Owen,
"It is clever of you to feel it just as I do, Owen dear," she went on. "The pagoda was meant for this room and for this room only; for, you know, I didn't think Cicely Waterlow at all happily inspired in placing it as she had."
"As she had?" He rapped the question out with irrepressible quickness.
"Yes, among all that rather trashy lacquer and glass in that rather gimcrackery little drawing-room of hers. The pagoda looked there, what it had always looked in Aunt Pickthome's room, a gimcrack itself."
"Looked?" he repeated. "How does it look now? How has she placed it now?"
For the first time in all their intercourse he saw that Guendolen was suddenly confused. He had hardly trapped her. She had set the trap herself, and inadvertently had walked into it. A faint color rose to her cheek. She dropped for a moment her eyes upon the fire. Then, covering her self-consciousness with a show of smiling vivacity, she knelt to poke the logs, saying:
"I don't know, I really don't know, Owen. Cicely is always changing her room, you know. She is very quick at feeling what's in the air—as quick as I am really, and I haven't seen her for ages. She has gone to live in London; oh, yes, didn't you know? Yes, she came into a little money over a year ago, and she and old Mrs. Waterlow have taken a house in Chelsea, and are coming back to Chislebridge only for two or three months in every year. They are very fond of Chislebridge. So I haven't an idea of what her drawing-room is like now."
"Perhaps it's like yours," Owen suggested. "The one I saw was rather like yours, I remember."
But Guendolen opened kind and repudiating eyes.
"Do you think so, Owen? Like mine? Oh, only in one or two superficial little things. She hadn't a Chinese screen or a lacquer cabinet or a piece of Chinese painting to bless herself with, poor little Cicely! No, indeed, Owen; I don't think it would be at all fair to say that Cicely copied me. These things are in the air."
Before he left Chislebridge he asked Guendolen for Mrs. Waterlow's London address, and observed that she did not flinch in giving it to him. He inferred from this that Mrs. Waterlow's black satin suite had not left Chislebridge and that Guendolen knew that she had nothing to fear from a London visit. Would she indeed fear anything from any visit? Her placid self-deception was so profound that it would be difficult to draw a line fairly between skilful fraud and instinctive self-protection. Guendolen, without doubt, conceived herself completely protected. She would never suspect him of suspecting her.
He felt, when he got back to London, a certain reluctance in going to see Mrs. Waterlow. It was not only that he shrank from reading in old Mrs. Waterlow's malicious eyes the recognition of his discovery; in regard to young Mrs. Waterlow there was another shrinking that was almost one of shyness. She had been wronged, grossly wronged, by some one to whom he must show the semblance of loyalty; and the consciousness of her wrongs affected him deeply. A fortnight passed before he made his way one afternoon to Chelsea, a fortnight in which the main consciousness that filled his sense of renewal was that of his merciful escape. Mrs. Waterlow's house was in St. Leonard's Terrace, one of the narrow, old houses that face the expanse of the Royal Hospital gardens. The spring sun, as he limped along, was shining upon their façades, dull, old brick and dim, white paint, like slabs of ancient wedding-cake with frosted edging.
After all the expense of his illness, he was very poor in these days, and had come with difficulty in a bus. As he opened the gate and went into the flagged garden, where white tulips grew, he glanced up and saw young Mrs. Waterlow standing looking out at the drawing-room window. Her eyes met his in surprise, they had not seen each other for so long a time; then, as lifting his hat he smiled at her, he thought he saw in them a sudden pity and gravity. He did of course look so much more battered than when she had last seen him. The nice, middle-aged maid let him in, he was glad of that; and as he followed her up the narrow staircase, with its white, paneled walls, he wondered which drawing-room it was to be, and felt his heart sink strangely at the thought that perhaps, after all, Mrs. Waterlow had transplanted her discipline to London.
But, no; like a soft gush of sunlight, like bells and clear, running water, the first room greeted him in a medley of untraceable associations. It was the first room, with the delicate cane-seated chairs and settees, the red lacquer and the glass, all looking lovelier than ever against the paneled white, all brighter, sweeter, happier than in the rather dim room on the ground floor in Chislebridge. And touches of green, like tiny flakes of vivid flame, went through it in the leaves of the white azaleas that filled the jars and vases. He saw it all, and he saw, as Mrs. Waterlow came toward him, that the white pagoda stood on its former little black lacquer table in one of the windows.
Mrs. Waterlow shook his hand and her eyes examined him.
"You have been ill. I was so sorry to hear," she said.
"Yes, I've been wretchedly ill; for years now, it seems," he replied.
They sat down before the fire. Old Mrs. Waterlow, she told him, was away on a visit to Chislebridge, from which she was to return. that evening at six o'clock. It was only four. He had two hours before him, and he felt that in them he was to be very happy. They talked and talked. He saw that she liked him and expected him to stay on and talk. All the magic and elation and sense of discovery and adventure was with him as on their first encounter. She knew him, he found, so much better than he could have guessed. She had read everything he had written. She appreciated so finely; she even, with a further advance to acknowledged friendship, criticized, with the precision and delicacy expressed in all that she did. And the fact that she liked him so much, that she was already so much his friend, gave him his right to let her see how much he liked her. The two hours were not only happy; they were the happiest he had ever known.
The clock had hardly struck six when old Mrs. Waterlow's cab drove up.
"Don't go; Mother will so like to see you," said Mrs. Waterlow. "She so enjoyed that little visit you paid her over a year ago, you know."
This was the first reference that had been made to the visit. He wondered if she guessed what it had done for their friendship.
Old Mrs. Waterlow came in, wearing just such a delightful, flowing black satin cloak and deep black satin bonnet as he would have expected her to wear. And seeing him there with her daughter-in-law, she paused, as if arrested, on the threshold. Then her eyes passing from the tea-table and its intimacy of grouping with the two chairs they had risen from, and resting brightly on her daughter's face, where she must read the reflection of his happiness, Owen saw that she cast off a scruple, came to a decision, and renewed the impulse that had brought her up the stairs, he now realized, at an uncharacteristic speed.
"My dear Cicely," she exclaimed, after she had greeted him, "you've lost your wager!"
Cicely Waterlow gazed at her for a moment, and then she flushed deeply.
"Have I, Mother?" she said, busying herself with the kettle. "Well, that pleases you, and doesn't displease me. You'll want some tea, won't you?"
"Yes, indeed, I want some tea. But you'll not put me off with tea, my dear. I want to talk about my wager, too; and Mr. Stacpole will want to hear about it, for it was his wager as well. You did say that you felt convinced that I was safe in my haven, didn't you, Mr. Stacpole? Well, I've lost it, and I'm not at all pleased to have lost it. I'm triumphant, if you will, but savage, too. You'll forgive me, I know, Mr. Stacpole, if I'm savage with your cousin when I tell you that she has been inspired with a black satin suite and mahogany furniture and bead-work since seeing Cicely's new drawing-room in Chislebridge."
"Mother!" Cicely protested. "Two people can perfectly well have the same idea at the same time! There's no reason in the world why Guendolen shouldn't feel just my fancy for funny, old, ugly things."
"She didn't show any fancy for them when she saw them a year ago, did she, dear?" said the intractable old lady, seating herself at the tea-table. "She was very guarded, very mute, though very observant. Yes; people may have the same idea, but they'll hardly have the same black satin furniture and the same beaded footstools, will they?"
Seeing the deep embarrassment in which his friend was plunged, Owen now interposed.
"Don't try to defend Guendolen on my account," he said. "She really can't be defended. I know it, for I've seen her drawing-room."
"You have seen it? And what do you think of it?" asked old Mrs. Waterlow.
"I thought, as I told her," said Owen, "that it lacked but one thing, and that was the travesty of a soul. It lacked the white pagoda."
"You told her that? It was what she told me. She told me that she could not forgive herself for having parted with the pagoda, for it was the travesty of a soul that her room still needed. 'You mean,' I said, 'the pagoda placed as Cicely placed it on the center-table in her new room?' She gazed at me and laid her hand on my arm and asked: 'But, dear Mrs. Waterlow, how had Cicely placed the pagoda? I really don't remember. I really don't remember at all what Cicely's new room was like, except that it was mid-Victorian, and had old water-colors on the walls. Surely you don't think that I've copied Cicely?'
"'My dear Mrs. Conyers,' I said to her, 'I don't think, but know, that you've done nothing else since you came to Chislebridge. But in this case you are farther from success than usual, for Cicely's drawing-room is gay, and yours is grand sérieux,'"
Mrs. Waterlow's bomb seemed to fill the air with a silvery explosion, and as its echoes died, in the ensuing stillness, the eyes of Cicely and Owen met beneath the triumphant gaze of the merciless old lady. It was from his eyes that hers caught the infection. To remain grave now was to be grand sérieux, and helpless gaiety was in the air. Owen broke into peals of laughter.
"Oh—but—" Cicely Waterlow protested, laughing, too, but still flushed and almost tearful, "it isn't fair. It's as if we had taken her in. She doesn't know she does it, really she doesn't; and she is so dear and good and kind!"
"She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, who remained unsmiling, but with a placidity full of satisfaction; "and she'll hardly be able to forget."
"I'm quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really believes that she cares for the new drawing-room. People can persuade themselves so easily of new tastes. And why shouldn't they have them? I believe that Guendolen does like it."
"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says she never cared for any room so much as that. She intends to live and die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, buttoned into her black satin forever!"
Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr. Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone forever, is no longer in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Guendolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard's Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen, on the day they arrived, that any wrong of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the old one. This they brought back to Guendolen, and with unfaltering courage she has placed it upon her mahogany center-table.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1935, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 88 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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