Leonora by Arnold Bennett (best fiction novels TXT) 📕

with a touch of cynicism, what new scheme had got possession of him, and how her assistance was necessary to it.

'Would you like to go and live in the country, Nora?' He looked at her audaciously for a moment and then his eyes shifted.

'For the summer, you mean?'

'Yes,' he said, 'for the summer and the winter too. Somewhere out Sneyd way.'

'And leave here?'

'Exactly.'

'But what about the house, Jack?'

'Sell it, if you like,' said John lightly.

'Oh, no! I shouldn't like that at all,' she replied, nervously but amiably. She wished to believe that his suggestion about selling the house was merely an idle notion thrown out on the spur of the moment, but she could not.

'You wouldn't?'

She shook her head. 'What has made you think of going to live in the country?' she asked him, using a tone of gentle, mild curiosity. 'How should you get to the works in the morning?'

'There's a very good train service from Sneyd to Knype,' he said. 'But look here, Nora, why wouldn't you care to sell the house?'

It was perfectly clear to her that, having mortgaged her house, he had now made up his mind to sell it. He must therefore still be in financial difficulties, and she had unwittingly misled Uncle Meshach.

'I don't know,' she answered coldly. 'I can't explain to you why. But I shouldn't.' And she privately resolved that nothing should induce her to assent to this monstrous proposal. Her heart hardened to steel. She felt prepared to suffer any unpleasantness, any indignity, rather than give way.

'It isn't as if Hillport wasn't changing,' he went on, politely argumentative. 'It is changing. In another ten years all the decent estates will have been broken up, and we shall be left alone in the middle of streets of villas rented at nineteen guineas to escape the house duty. You know the sort of thing.... And I've had a very fair offer for the place.'

'Whom from?'

'Well, Dain. I know he's wanted the house a long time. Of course, he's a hard nut to crack, is Dain. But he went up to two thousand, and yesterday I got him to make it guineas. That's a good price, Nora.'

'Is it?' she exclaimed absently.

'I should just imagine it was!' said John.

So it was expected of her that she should surrender her home, her domain, her kingdom, the beautiful and mellow creation of her intelligence; and that she should surrender it to David Dain, and to the impossible Mrs. Dain, and to their impossible niece. She remembered one of Milly's wicked tales about Mrs. Dain and the niece. Milly had met Mrs. Dain in the street, and in response to an inquiry about the health of the hypochondriacal niece, Mrs. Dain, gorgeously attired, had replied: 'Her had but just rallied up off th' squab as I come out.' These were the people who wanted to evict her from her house. And they would cover its walls with new papers, and its floors with new carpets, in their own appalling taste; and they would crowd the rooms with furniture as fat, clumsy, and disgusting as themselves. And Mrs. Dain would hold sewing meetings in the drawing-room, and would stand chattering with tradesmen at the front door, and would drive out to Sneyd to pay a call on Leonora and tell her how _pleased_ they all were with the place!

'Do you absolutely need the money, John?' She came to the point with a frank, blunt directness which angered him.

'I don't absolutely need anything,' he retorted, controlling himself. 'But Dain made the offer----'

'Because if you do,' she proceeded, 'I dare say Uncle Meshach----'

'Look here, my girl,' he interrupted in turn, 'I've had exactly as much of Uncle Meshach as I can stand. I know all about Uncle Meshach, what I wanted to know was whether you cared to sell the house.' And then he added, after hesitating, and with a false graciousness, 'To oblige me.'

There was a marked pause.

'I really shouldn't like to sell the house, John,' she answered quietly. 'It was aunt's, and----'

'Enough said! enough said!' he cried. 'That finishes it. I suppose you don't mind my having asked you!'

He walked out of the room in a rage.

Tears came into her eyes, the tears of a wounded and proud heart. Was it conceivable that he expected her to be willing to sell her house?... He must indeed be in serious straits. She would consult Uncle Meshach.

The front door banged. And then Rose entered the room.

Leonora drove back the tears.

'Your father has been suggesting that we sell this house, and go and live at Sneyd,' she said to the girl in a trembling voice. 'Aren't you surprised?' She seldom talked about John to her daughters, but at that moment a desire for sympathy overwhelmed her.

'I should never be surprised at anything where father was concerned,' said Rose coldly, with a slight hint of aloofness and of mental superiority. 'Not at anything.'

Leonora got up, and, leaving the room, went into the garden through the side door opposite the stable. She could hear Millicent practising the Jewel Song from Gounod's _Faust_. As she passed down the sombre garden the sound of the piano and of Milly's voice in the brilliant ecstatic phrases of the song grew fainter. She shook violently, like a child who is recovering from a fit of sobs, and without thinking she fastened her coat. 'What a shame it is that he should want to sell my house! What a shame!' she murmured, full of an aggrieved resentment. At the same time she was surprised to find herself so suddenly and so deeply disturbed.

* * * * *


At the foot of the long garden was a low fence separating it from the meadow, and in the fence a wicket from which ran a faint track to the main field-path. She leaned against the fence, a few yards away from the wicket, at a spot where a clump of bushes screened the house. No one could possibly have seen her from the house, even had the bushes not been there; but she wished to isolate herself completely, and to find tranquillity in the isolation. The calm spring night, chill but not too cold, cloudy but not too dark, favoured her intention. She gazed about her at the obscure nocturnal forms of things, at the silent trees, and the mysterious clouds gently rounded in their vast shape, and the sharp slant of the meadow. Far below could be seen the red signal of the railway, and, mapped in points of light on the opposite slope, the streets of Bursley. To the right the eternal conflagration of the Cauldon Bar furnaces illumined the sky with wavering amber. And on the keen air came to her from the distance noises, soft but impressive, of immense industrial activities.

She thought she could decipher a figure moving from the field-path across the gloom of the meadow, and as she strained her eyes the figure became an indubitable fact. Presently she knew that it was Arthur. 'At last!' her heart passionately exclaimed, and she was swept and drenched with happiness as a ship by the ocean. She forgot everything in the tremendous shock of joy. She felt as though she could have waited no more, and that now she might expire in a bliss intense and fatal, in a sigh of supreme content. She could not stir nor speak, and he was striding towards the wicket unconscious of her nearness! She coughed, a delicate feminine cough, and then he turned aside from the direction of the wicket and approached the fence, peering.

'Is that you?' he asked.

'Yes.'

Across the fence they clasped hands. And in spite of her great wish not to do so she clutched his hand tightly in her long fingers, and held it for a moment. And as she felt the returning pressure of his large, powerful, protective grasp, she covered--but in imagination only--she covered his face, which she could shadowily see, with brave and abandoned kisses; and she whispered to him, but unheard: 'Admit that I am made for love.' She feared, in those beautiful and shameless instants, neither John, nor Ethel and Milly, nor even Rose. She knew suddenly why men and women leave all--honour, duty, and affection--and follow love. Then her arm dropped, and there was silence.

'What are you doing here?' She was unable to speak in an ordinary tone, but she spoke. Her voice exquisitely trembled, and its vibrations said everything that the words did not say.

'Why,' he answered, and his voice too bore strange messages, 'I called at Church Street and Mr. Myatt said you had only been gone a few minutes, and so I came right away. I guessed I should overtake you. I don't know what he would think.' Arthur laughed nervously.

She smiled at him, satisfied. And how well she knew that her smiling face, caught by him dimly in the obscurity of the night, troubled him like an enchanting and enigmatic vision!

After they had looked at each other, speechless, for a while, the strong influence of convention forced them again into unnecessary, irrelevant talk.

'What's this about you selling this place?' he inquired in a low, mild tone.

'Have you heard?'

'Yes,' he said, 'I did hear something.'

'Ah!' she murmured, wrinkling her forehead in a pretty make-believe of woe--the question of the sale had ceased to be acute: 'I just came out here to think about it.'

'But you aren't really going to----'

'No, of course not.'

She had no desire to discuss the tedious affair, because she was infallibly certain of his entire sympathy. Explanations on her side, and assurances on his, were equally superfluous.

'But won't you come into the house?' She invited him as a sort of afterthought.

'Why?' he demanded bluntly.

She hesitated before replying: 'It will look so queer, us staying here like this.' As soon as she had uttered the words she suspected that she had said something decisive and irretrievable.

He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked several times to and fro a few paces. Then he stopped in front of her.

'I guess we are bound to look queer, you and I, some day. So it may as well be now,' he said.

It was in this exchange of sentences that their mutual passion became at length articulate. A single discreet word spoken quickly, and she might even yet perhaps have withdrawn from the situation. But she did not speak; she could not speak; and soon she knew that her own silence had bound her. She yielded herself with poignant and magnificent joy to the profound drama which had been magically created by this apparently commonplace dialogue. The climax had been achieved, and she was conscious of being lifted into a sublime exultation, and of being cut off from all else in the world save him. She looked at him intently with a sadness that was the cloak of celestial rapture. 'How courageous you are!' her soft eyes said. 'I should never have dared. What a _man_!' It seemed to her that her heart would break under the strain of that ecstasy. She had not imagined the possibility of such bliss.

'Listen!' he