The Pennycomequicks (Volume 3 of 3)

'Oh no, not I. I have kept outside the bars. I have been too fond of my liberty to venture behind them.'

'What do you mean by bars?' asked Philip, with some gravity in his tone.

'Bars? There are bars of all sorts – social, religious, conventional – but there! I shock you; you have lived so long behind them, that you think the bars form the circumference of the world, and that existence is impossible, or improper outside of them.'

'Beyond some none are at liberty to step. They are essential.'

'I am not talking of the natural, but of the artificial restraints which cramp life. Have you any Bohemian blood in you?'

'Bohemian!'

'Wild blood. I have. I confess it. A drop, a little drop, of fiery African blood. You in England have your class distinctions, but they are nothing beside our American separations between white and black. With you a blot on the escutcheon by a mésalliance is nothing; with us it is ineradicable. There is a bar sinister cast over my shield and shutting me out from the esteem of and association with those whose blood is pure. Pure! It may be muddied with the mixture of villainous blood enough – of swindlers and renegades from justice, but that counts nothing. One little drop, an eighth part of a drop, damns me. I do not care. I thank that spot of taint. It has liberated me from conventional bonds, and I can live as I like, and see the sun eye to eye without intervening bars.'

Philip had winced when she spoke about the co-existence of pure blood with that of swindlers and renegades. He stopped and looked back.

They had been walking fast, though up-hill. When talkers are excited and interested in what they say they naturally quicken their pace. They had far outstripped Salome; as Philip looked back he could not see her, for the ground fell away steeply and concealed the several folds of the road.

'What?' asked Miss Durham mockingly, 'looking for one of your bars?'

Philip turned and walked on with her. They had reached the summit, and the ground before them was level. On this track of level mossy moor lay the lake of deep crystal water, in which floated masses of snow or ice, that had slidden from the mountain on the opposite side. Hardly a tree grew here, on this neck, exposed to furious currents of wind.

'May I take your arm?' asked Miss Durham. 'I am heated and tired with this long climb.'

Philip offered her the support she demanded.

'I suppose,' she said, 'that you have not associated much with any but those who are cage-birds?'

He shook his head and coloured slightly.

'Do you know what I am?' she asked abruptly, and turned and looked at him, loosing her hand from his arm.

'I have heard that you are a lady with a large independent fortune.'

'It is not true. I earn my living. I am a singer.'

She saw the surprise in his face, which he struggled to conceal.

'It is so; and I am here in this clear air that my voice may regain its tone. I sing – on the stage.'

She put her hand through his arm again.

'Yes, chained, imprisoned eagle, I am a free singing-bird. What do you say to that?'

What could he say? He was astonished, excited, bewildered. He felt the intoxication which falls on an evangelical preacher when he mounts the platform to preach in a music-hall. He was frightened and pleased; his decorum shaken to its foundation, and cracking on all sides.

'What do you say to that?' she asked, and looked full in his eyes, and her splendid orbs shot light and fire into his heart and sent the flames leaping through his veins. He heaved a long breath.

'Yes,' she said, 'you suffocate behind bars.'

Then she burst into a merry peal of laughter, and Philip involuntarily laughed also, but not heartily.

CHAPTER XLVI.

ARTEMISIA

'There is the restaurant,' said Miss Durham, 'and being painted within and without, impossible for us to enter. What say you to walking on to the head of the lake? I want to look over the col, and see the mountains of the Rhine valley above Dissentis.'

Philip hesitated, and again looked back.

'I see,' said Miss Durham; 'you are afraid of stepping out of your cage.'

'Not at all,' answered Philip, flushing. 'I am prepared to go to the end of this trough in the mountains with you, but I greatly doubt seeing much from the further end.'

'Well – if we see nothing, we can talk. Have you looked about you much since we began the ascent?'

'The time has flown,' said Philip, looking at his watch. 'It seems to me but a few minutes since.'

The long dreary valley or basin in which lay the lake was apparently closed at the end by a hill surmounted by a cross or flagstaff. The road ran along the north side of the lake, without a tree to shade it. The party behind, when they came to the restaurant, could not fail to see them if they continued along the road, and might follow, or await them there.

Philip walked on, but no longer gave Artemisia Durham his arm. He saw far away in the rear Mrs. Sidebottom signalling with her parasol; but whether to him, or to the Labarte girls who were dispersed in the morass at the end of the lake, picking butterwort, soldanella, and primula, he could not tell.

His eyes were on the ground. He was thinking of his companion, what a strange life hers must be, incomprehensible to him. He felt how, if he were thrown into it, he would not know how to strike out and hold his chin above water. At the same time his heart beat fast with a wild vain desire for a freer life than that of commerce.

The restraints to which he had been subjected had compressed and shaped him, as the Chinese lady's shoe compresses and shapes her foot – but the pressure had been painful; it had marked him, but the marks were ever sensitive. The ancient robe of the Carmelite fathers was of white wool barred with black, and they pretended that they derived this habit from the mantle of Elijah, which he had dropped as he was being carried up to heaven, and the mantle had touched as it fell the spokes of the chariot of fire in which he ascended, and was scorched in stripes. Philip, and many another successful man of business who has been exalted to a position of comfort and warmth, has the inner garment of his soul scarred by the wheels of the chariot in which he has mounted. Philip felt his own awkwardness, his want of ease in other society than that narrow circle in which he had turned, his inability to move with that freedom and confidence which characterizes those born and reared in generous society. Even with this girl – this Bohemian – he was as one walking and talking with chains to his feet and a gag to his tongue. She was right; he was born to be at ease everywhere, to be able everywhere to walk upright, and to look around him; he had been put in a cramping position, tied hand and foot, and his head set in such a vice as photographers employ to give what they consider support and steadiness, and he was distorted, stiffened, contracted. Had his life been happy? He had never accounted it so – it had been formal at the solicitor's desk, and it was formal in the factory. Was man made and launched into life to be a piece of clockwork? He had thought, acted, lived an automaton life, and taken his pleasure in measuring glasses, never in full and free draughts.

'Have you had a happy existence?' he asked thoughtfully.'

'Oh yes, the birds are happy; all nature is happy so long as it is free. It is in the cage that the bird mopes, and in the pot that the plant sickens.'

Had Philip looked in her face he would have seen a strange expression of triumph pass over it. She had carried her first point and gained his interest.

'Here,' she said, 'is a large rock above the water; let us sit on it, and I will tell you about myself. You had no confidence in me, and would not give me your story. I will return good for evil, and show you my past. I agree with you, there will be no view of the mountains above Dissentis from the col. It is not worth our while going on. Besides, I am tired.'

She took a seat on a broad boulder that had fallen from the mountains, and hung fast, wedged on one side, disengaged on the other, over the crystal water that, stirred by the light wind, lapped its supports. Looking into the clear flood beneath, they could see the char darting about, enjoying the sun that penetrated the water and made it to them an element of diffused light.

Artemisia pointed to them, and said:

'Who would not rather be one of these than a goldfish in a glass bottle?'

Philip at once recalled the pond at Mergatroyd, with the hot water spurted into it from the engine, in which the goldfish teemed, and the globes in every cottage-window supplied with the unfortunate captives from this pond, swimming round and round all day, all night, every year, seeing nothing novel, without an interest, a zest in life. Such had his career been; he, a fish – not a gold one, nor even a silver one till recently, but quite a common brown fish – in a common glass receiver full of stale water, renewed periodically, but always flat.

He looked at the darting char with interest.

'We are in the land of freedom,' said Miss Durham. 'Then don't stand on the rock like a semaphore. Sit down beside me, and let your feet dangle over the water. Oh! as Polixenes says, "to be boy eternal!"'

'"With such a day to-morrow as to-day,"' added Philip, completing the quotation, as he seated himself on the rock.

How wonderfully brilliant the sun was at that height! So utterly unlike the rusty ball that gave light at Mergatroyd, and there gave it charily. How intense the blue of the sky! – dark as the deep-belled gentian, not the washed-out cobalt of an English heaven. And the air was fresh; it made the heart dance, and the pulses throb faster, with a trip and a fandango such as the blood never attains in our gray and sober land.