IT must have been her mother, then,' said Jill.
They had walked for some time in silence. They had passed the cemetery and were on the descent of the grande route among the lower ledges of the chestnut forest, and her mind had all the while been full of Marthe Ludérac.
'Whose mother?' asked Graham.
'The landlady's mother. Her name is the same. Didn't you hear?'
'The same as whose? No; I didn't.'
'As the grave's. Of course. That is it. The roses were the same and she's only been gone a few days.'
'My dear, what are you talking about?' Graham inquired, roused from his reverie and with a mild exasperation.
'I can't help feeling it all very queer. Didn't you notice—you seemed to notice everything, Dick;—I never saw you stare so;—on the mantelpiece in that dismal room?—They were the same roses, arranged in just the same way, as those on Marthe Ludérac's grave. I saw them at once and thought she must have been a friend of Madame de Lamouderie's and that Madame de Lamouderie must be rather a dear to keep flowers on her grave like that. And just now, when I realized that her landlady was young and asked her name,' she said: Marthe Ludérac. You must own it's queer.'
Dick listened, but rather vaguely. 'I can see nothing queer about it. Why shouldn't the daughter put roses on her mother's grave—and on the mantelpiece as well? It's the natural thing to do if you have a dead mother—and roses;—and a mantelpiece. What of it, Jill?'
'I don't know. I only feel it a little creepy. The grave all alone like that; and the dismal house, and the one-eyed, one-legged animals, and that poor old woman with her princely châteaux and porridge-bowl.'
At this Graham began to laugh and looked at his wife as he had not looked at her since they had entered the Manoir. It was as if her preoccupation exorcised his own. He linked his arm in hers. 'Go on, Jill. Tell me some more. I like to see your imagination having a run; it runs so seldom—sane creature that you are.—Now I've not been seeing people at all. I've been seeing that tranced room—the colour of sea-water; those stairs with the high, uncanny window over them; that garden that remembers—and waits;—in its sleep; for it went to sleep fifty years ago.'
'Oh, Dick;—you are a treasure!—to see it all like that—and make me see it, too. Yes, of course; I was feeling it down at the bottom of my mind; only it was all, with me, a background for the people; for Marthe Ludérac and the old lady. You're quite right. It's a coup de foudre. She's dreadfully in love with you, and I was afraid she was going to cry as she clung to your hand like that just now when we left her. She's afraid she won't see you again, of course; but she shall; she shall,' said Jill, fumbling for her cigarettes, since Dick had her by the arm, and getting out her matches.
'You wouldn't mind coming back? I don't know, really, about the old lady; it needs a Goya and a Manet rolled in one to do her with the parrot beside her; but I could go on painting this country for the rest of my life.'
'Well, I shouldn't like to spend the rest of my life here, I confess,' said Jill. 'But I do want you to come back and keep your promise. I want to see Marthe Ludérac, too. And she'll be here in the spring. She's young and sad and kind; rather a wonderful person, I feel. And Madame de Lamouderie feels a little glum about her. I wonder why. Perhaps because of the noblesse blood that she doesn't think a Jacquard has aright to. Perhaps it was because of the noblesse blood that the mother didn't care to be mixed up with the gravel and the tin tubs and moved into the grass—and almost into the chestnut forest.'
'Perhaps it was. Pretty good, Jill. But the old lady interested me more than the young one, and she doesn't interest me much except for her looks.'
'Oh, you must be kind to her! You mustn't flirt with her and lead her on and then not really care.'
'She knows I'm ragging her.'
'She's afraid you are, but hopes you're not. There's something one does like in her, Dick, in spite of the boasting and flattery; something endearing. The way she smiled at Coco and looked at the hare.'
'I don't dislike her. I feel as if I understood her; better than you could ever do, Jill—for I am somewhat devilish too, while you belong to the angelic category—better than she does herself. If she were twenty I'd probably fall in love with her. She's that kind of woman. She's never existed apart from her sex.'
'Do any of us?' Jill mused, ruefully. 'Perhaps you wouldn't care about me if I were eighty.'
'Yes, I should, Jill. Yes, I should,' Graham bent his dark head to smile into her eyes. 'That you're a woman lends you charm; but it's incidental. If you were a man you would be my greatest friend. That's the test.'
'Your greatest friend? When I don't understand the things you live for?—when there's only one side of your life that I touch at all?'
'It's the only side where I need to touch humanity. All I need is someone to rest with and play with and be myself with. You're the perfect comrade; as well as the perfect wife, Jill.'
It was sweet to Jill to hear this, and to know how true it was. She had reflected more than once of late that, if happy married life consisted in each one going his own way, the trouble with her and Dick was that, while he had so very much of a way, she herself had, nowadays, none at all. Her only way was the English country way that Dick, as he had truly said, had taken her from; gardening; games; and hunting. She thought of hunting now, as she and Dick went down through the chestnut forest and came out upon the river level in the waning evening light. Hounds—darling hounds—and dear horses, and familiar faces that represented not so much individuals as types who did the same things as oneself; and had done so for generations. All the woodland lore; all the crafty knowledge of gate and wall and ditch; all the unvoiced awareness of beauty everywhere, in earth and sky. It was the only real life, of course, from her point of view, in its cool, cheerful comradeship, its risks and endurances; its ecstasies of flight over wide spaces. The artist's life always seemed to her like a queer make-believe in comparison; like a child's game without basis or consistency. Not that Dick was like the others;—those weedy, tiresome young men talking, talking—heavens! how they talked!—of planes and stresses in the London studios. Dick cared for them all as little, really, as she did. He was not gregarious. Under the paints and canvases he was the same sort of person that she was; silent, indifferent; out-of-doors. But it was funny to spend your life butting your head against a wall, as it were; for to try to capture, to express nature, came to no more than that; did it?—Jill sometimes tried to think it out. Was not nature something transcendent which one entered and partook of? Was not art like trying to dip up the sea in a tea-cup? A branch of bramble, whitened by hoar frost and glanced at as one waited in the woods on a morning of cub-hunting, seemed to have more in it than all their pictures put together. Once or twice, it was true, in looking at a great picture, Jill had felt herself brushed for a moment by a sense of mystery; by the sense that here indeed something had happened, something been shown to her that, face to face with nature, by herself, she would never have seen. Dick's pictures, strange, queer, even ugly as she found them, had given her that feeling once or twice; especially this last picture he had just finished of the great river and the plains and cliffs seen from the mountain-pass. But the picture could never give all that went with the visual experience. It did not give the feeling of the wind upon one's cheek, or the scent of bracken in the air, or the sound of birds and insects, of brooks and branches stirring; it was less; not more; so why try? why butt one's head? So Jill came back to it again. And it was amusing to know that where they all felt Dick great and waited expectantly for him to tell them something of his secret, to her his meaning and his worth consisted in being like the branch of bramble.
It was not till after dinner when, for their last evening, they had gone outside to the balcony, that Jill's thoughts again turned to the Manoir and its occupants.
'Isn't it odious to think of that poor old woman all alone up there, Dick?' she said, looking over the mysterious spaces of the river to the darkling cliff.
Dick's eyes rested on her. He was not thinking of the old lady. He would never think of her unless she were before him for him to look at. 'It's nice of you to be so sorry for her,' was what he said.
'If she weren't so horribly alive, one wouldn't mind so much.—Aren't you sorry for her?'
'I don't suppose I am. I feel it's a law of nature that an old woman like that should perish rather miserably.'
'But it makes me sorry to think that a vulture should perish miserably.'
'A vulture, perhaps; but not an old woman who's like one. She's never created beauty, or sought truth, or known love; so how can she expect to have anything?'
'You are rather horrible, you know, Dick. Your heart is so hard. Why should you think she's meant nothing more than that? Anyone so alive must have.'
'I don't know that. A vulture is very much alive. Her vitality may all have gone to greed and passion and vanity.'
'She's wanted to be loved, of course; who doesn't? And she's wanted to be happy. She's been dreadfully unhappy; one can see it; and disappointed; and ravaged generally. And now she's like a motor-car shut up in a garage with its engine going and its headlights on, and it makes me uncomfortable to think of her—however wrong she's been.'
Dick was still looking at her. He had said to Madame de Lamouderie that afternoon that she was not æsthetically interesting and Jill had not minded in the least, for she knew how much Dick liked looking at her. She was something quite apart from art, for him; just as he was for her. She was his branch of bramble. And now, after a moment, he put his hand behind her head and bent it back and kissed her neck and cheek. 'I like you very much,' he said.
And Jill, leaning against his shoulder, yielded to his caresses, smiled, thinking that it was a happy thing, after five years of marriage, that one's husband should still be one's lover. That was what made it all worth while.