“I sometimes think that one’s
past life is written in a foreign language,”
said Mrs. Bowring, shutting the book she held, but
keeping the place with one smooth, thin forefinger,
while her still, blue eyes turned from her daughter’s
face towards the hazy hills that hemmed the sea thirty
miles to the southward. “When one wants
to read it, one finds ever so many words which one
cannot understand, and one has to look them out in
a sort of unfamiliar dictionary, and try to make sense
of the sentences as best one can. Only the big
things are clear.”
Clare glanced at her mother, smiling
innocently and half mechanically, without much definite
expression, and quite without curiosity. Youth
can be in sympathy with age, while not understanding
it, while not suspecting, perhaps, that there is anything
to understand beyond the streaked hair and the pale
glance and the little torture-lines which paint the
portrait of fifty years for the eyes of twenty.
Every woman knows the calendar of
her own face. The lines are years, one for such
and such a year, one for such and such another; the
streaks are months, perhaps, or weeks, or sometimes
hours, where the tear-storms have bleached the brown,
the black, or the gold. “This little wrinkle it
was so very little then!” she says. “It
came when I doubted for a day. There is a shadow
there, just at each temple, where the cloud passed,
when my sun went out. The bright hair grew lower
on my forehead. It is worn away, as though by
a crown, that was not of gold. There are hollows
there, near the ears, on each side, since that week
when love was done to death before my eyes and died intestate leaving
his substance to be divided amongst indifferent heirs.
They wrangle for what he has left, but he himself
is gone, beyond hearing or caring, and, thank God,
beyond suffering. But the marks are left.”
Youth looks on and sees alike the
ill-healed wounds of the martyrdom and the rough scars
of sin’s scourges, and does not understand.
Clare Bowring smiled, without definite expression,
just because her mother had spoken and seemed to ask
for sympathy; and then she looked away for a few moments.
She had a bit of work in her hands, a little bag which
she was making out of a piece of old Italian damask,
to hold a needle-case and thread and scissors.
She had stopped sewing, and instinctively waited before
beginning again, as though to acknowledge by a little
affectionate deference that her mother had said something
serious and had a right to expect attention.
But she did not answer, for she could not understand.
Her own young life was vividly clear
to her; so very vividly clear, that it sometimes made
her think of a tiresome chromolithograph. All
the facts and thoughts of it were so near that she
knew them by heart, as people come to know the patterns
of the wall-paper in the room they inhabit. She
had nothing to hide, nothing to regret, nothing which
she thought she should care very much to recall, though
she remembered everything. A girl is very young
when she can recollect distinctly every frock she
has had, the first long one, and the second, and the
third; and the first ball gown, and the second, and
no third, because that is still in the future, and
a particular pair of gloves which did not fit, and
a certain pair of shoes she wore so long because they
were so comfortable, and the precise origin of every
one of the few trinkets and bits of jewellery she
possesses. That was Clare Bowring’s case.
She could remember everything and everybody in her
life. But her father was not in her memories,
and there was a little motionless grey cloud in the
place where he should have been. He had been a
soldier, and had been killed in an obscure skirmish
with black men, in one of England’s obscure
but expensive little wars. Death is always very
much the same thing, and it seems unfair that the
guns of Balaclava should still roar “glory”
while the black man’s quick spear-thrust only
spells “dead,” without comment. But
glory in death is even more a matter of luck than
fame in life. At all events, Captain Bowring,
as brave a gentleman as ever faced fire, had perished
like so many other brave gentlemen of his kind, in
a quiet way, without any fuss, beyond killing half
a dozen or so of his assailants, and had left his
widow the glory of receiving a small pension in return
for his blood, and that was all. Some day, when
the dead are reckoned, and the manner of their death
noted, poor Bowring may count for more than some of
his friends who died at home from a constitutional
inability to enjoy all the good things fortune set
before them, complicated by a disposition incapable
of being satisfied with only a part of the feast.
But at the time of this tale they counted for more
than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind
them what they could not consume, while he, poor man,
had left very little besides the aforesaid interest
in the investment of his blood, in the form of a pension
to his widow, and the small grey cloud in the memory
of his girl-child, in the place where he should have
been. For he had been killed when she had been
a baby.
The mother and daughter were lonely,
if not alone in the world; for when one has no money
to speak of, and no relations at all, the world is
a lonely place, regarded from the ordinary point of
view which is, of course, the true one.
They had no home in England, and they generally lived
abroad, more or less, in one or another of the places
of society’s departed spirits, such as Florence.
They had not, however, entered into Limbo without
hope, since they were able to return to the social
earth when they pleased, and to be alive again, and
the people they met abroad sometimes asked them to
stop with them at home, recognising the fact that
they were still socially living and casting shadows.
They were sure of half a hundred friendly faces in
London and of half a dozen hospitable houses in the
country; and that is not little for people who have
nothing wherewith to buy smiles and pay for invitations.
Clare had more than once met women of her mother’s
age and older, who had looked at her rather thoughtfully
and longer than had seemed quite natural, saying very
quietly that her father had been “a great friend
of theirs.” But those were not the women
whom her mother liked best, and Clare sometimes wondered
whether the little grey cloud in her memory, which
represented her father, might not be there to hide
away something more human than an ideal. Her
mother spoke of him, sometimes gravely, sometimes
with a far-away smile, but never tenderly. The
smile did not mean much, Clare thought. People
often spoke of dead people with a sort of faint look
of uncertain beatitude the same which many
think appropriate to the singing of hymns. The
absence of anything like tenderness meant more.
The gravity was only natural and decent.
“Your father was a brave man,”
Mrs. Bowring sometimes said. “Your father
was very handsome,” she would say. “He
was very quick-tempered,” she perhaps added.
But that was all. Clare had a
friend whose husband had died young and suddenly,
and her friend’s heart was broken. She did
not speak as Mrs. Bowring did. When the latter
said that her past life seemed to be written in a
foreign language, Clare did not understand, but she
knew that the something of which the translation was
lost, as it were, belonged to her father. She
always felt an instinctive desire to defend him, and
to make her mother feel more sympathy for his memory.
Yet, at the same time, she loved her mother in such
a way as made her feel that if there had been any
trouble, her father must have been in the wrong.
Then she was quite sure that she did not understand,
and she held her tongue, and smiled vaguely, and waited
a moment before she went on with her work.
Besides, she was not at all inclined
to argue anything at present. She had been ill,
and her mother was worn out with taking care of her,
and they had come to Amalfi to get quite well
and strong again in the air of the southern spring.
They had settled themselves for a couple of months
in the queer hotel, which was once a monastery, perched
high up under the still higher overhanging rocks,
far above the beach and the busy little town; and
now, in the May afternoon, they sat side by side under
the trellis of vines on the terraced walk, their faces
turned southward, in the shade of the steep mountain
behind them; the sea was blue at their feet, and quite
still, but farther out the westerly breeze that swept
past the Conca combed it to crisp roughness; then it
was less blue to southward, and gradually it grew
less real, till it lost colour and melted into a sky-haze
that almost hid the southern mountains and the lizard-like
head of the far Licosa.
A bit of coarse faded carpet lay upon
the ground under the two ladies’ feet, and the
shady air had a soft green tinge in it from the young
vine-leaves overhead. At first sight one would
have said that both were delicate, if not ill.
Both were fair, though in different degrees, and both
were pale and quiet, and looked a little weary.
The young girl sat in the deep straw
chair, hatless, with bare white hands that held her
work. Her thick flaxen hair, straightly parted
and smoothed away from its low growth on the forehead,
half hid small fresh ears, unpierced. Long lashes,
too white for beauty, cast very faint light shadows
as she looked down; but when she raised the lids, the
dark-blue eyes were bright, with wide pupils and a
straight look, quick to fasten, slow to let go, never
yet quite softened, and yet never mannishly hard.
But, in its own way, perhaps, there is no look so hard
as the look of maiden innocence can be. There
can even be something terrible in its unconscious
stare. There is the spirit of God’s own
fearful directness in it. Half quibbling with
words perhaps, but surely with half truth, one might
say that youth “is,” while all else “has
been”; and that youth alone possesses the present,
too innocent to know it all, yet too selfish even
to doubt of what is its own too sure of
itself to doubt anything, to fear anything, or even
truly to pray for anything. There is no equality
and no community in virtue; it is only original sin
that makes us all equal and human. Old Lucifer,
fallen, crushed, and damned, knows the worth of forgiveness not
young Michael, flintily hard and monumentally upright
in his steel coat, a terror to the devil himself.
And youth can have something of that archangelic rigidity.
Youth is not yet quite human.
But there was much in Clare Bowring’s
face which told that she was to be quite human some
day. The lower features were not more than strong
enough the curved lips would be fuller before
long, the small nostrils, the gentle chin, were a
little sharper than was natural, now, from illness,
but round in outline and not over prominent; and the
slender throat was very delicate and feminine.
Only in the dark-blue eyes there was still that unabashed,
quick glance and long-abiding straightness, and innocent
hardness, and the unconscious selfishness of the uncontaminated.
Standing on her feet, she would have
seemed rather tall than short, though really but of
average height. Seated, she looked tall, and her
glance was a little downward to most people’s
eyes. Just now she was too thin, and seemed taller
than she was. But the fresh light was already
in the young white skin, and there was a soft colour
in the lobes of the little ears, as the white leaves
of daisies sometimes blush all round their tips.
The nervous white hands held the little
bag lightly, and twined it and sewed it deftly, for
Clare was clever with her fingers. Possibly they
looked even a little whiter than they were, by contrast
with the dark stuff of her dress, and illness had
made them shrink at the lower part, robbing them of
their natural strength, though not of their grace.
There is a sort of refinement, not of taste, nor of
talent, but of feeling and thought, and it shows itself
in the hands of those who have it, more than in any
feature of the face, in a sort of very true proportion
between the hand and its fingers, between each finger
and its joints, each joint and each nail; a something
which says that such a hand could not do anything
ignoble, could not take meanly, nor strike cowardly,
nor press falsely; a quality of skin neither rough
and coarse, nor over smooth like satin, but cool and
pleasant to the touch as fine silk that is closely
woven. The fingers of such hands are very straight
and very elastic, but not supple like young snakes,
as some fingers are, and the cushion of the hand is
not over full nor heavy, nor yet shrunken and undeveloped
as in the wasted hands of old Asiatic races.
In outward appearance there was that
sort of inherited likeness between mother and daughter
which is apt to strike strangers more than persons
of the same family. Mrs. Bowring had been beautiful
in her youth far more beautiful than Clare but
her face had been weaker, in spite of the regularity
of the features and their faultless proportion.
Life had given them an acquired strength, but not
of the lovely kind, and the complexion was faded,
and the hair had darkened, and the eyes had paled.
Some faces are beautified by suffering. Mrs.
Bowring’s face was not of that class. It
was as though a thin, hard mask had been formed and
closely moulded upon it, as the action of the sea
overlays some sorts of soft rock with a surface thin
as paper but as hard as granite. In spite of the
hardness, the features were not really strong.
There was refinement in them, however, of the same
kind which the daughter had, and as much, though less
pleasing. A fern a spray of maiden’s-hair loses
much of its beauty but none of its refinement when
petrified in limestone or made fossil in coal.
As they sat there, side by side, mother
and daughter, where they had sat every day for a week
or more, they had very little to say. They had
exhausted the recapitulation of Clare’s illness,
during the first days of her convalescence. It
was not the first time that they had been in Amalfi,
and they had enumerated its beauties to each other,
and renewed their acquaintance with it from a distance,
looking down from the terrace upon the low-lying town,
and the beach and the painted boats, and the little
crowd that swarmed out now and then like ants, very
busy and very much in a hurry, running hither and
thither, disappearing presently as by magic, and leaving
the shore to the sun and the sea. The two had
spoken of a little excursion to Ravello, and they meant
to go thither as soon as they should be strong enough;
but that was not yet. And meanwhile they lived
through the quiet days, morning, meal times, evening,
bed time, and round again, through the little hotel’s
programme of possibility; eating what was offered
them, but feasting royally on air and sunshine and
spring sweetness; moistening their lips in strange
southern wines, but drinking deep draughts of the rich
southern air-life; watching the people of all sorts
and of many conditions, who came and stayed a day
and went away again, but social only in each other’s
lives, and even that by sympathy rather than in speech.
A corner of life’s show was before them, and
they kept their places on the vine-sheltered terrace
and looked on. But it seemed as though nothing
could ever possibly happen there to affect the direction
of their own quietly moving existence.
Seeing that her daughter did not say
anything in answer to the remark about the past being
written in a foreign language, Mrs. Bowring looked
at the distant sky-haze thoughtfully for a few moments,
then opened her book again where her thin forefinger
had kept the place, and began to read. There
was no disappointment in her face at not being understood,
for she had spoken almost to herself and had expected
no reply. No change of expression softened or
accentuated the quiet hardness which overspread her
naturally gentle face. But the thought was evidently
still present in her mind, for her attention did not
fix itself upon her book, and presently she looked
at her daughter, as the latter bent her head over
the little bag she was making.
The young girl felt her mother’s
eyes upon her, looked up herself, and smiled faintly,
almost mechanically, as before. It was a sort
of habit they both had a way of acknowledging
one another’s presence in the world. But
this time it seemed to Clare that there was a question
in the look, and after she had smiled she spoke.
“No,” she said, “I
don’t understand how anybody can forget the past.
It seems to me that I shall always remember why I
did things, said things, and thought things.
I should, if I lived a hundred years, I’m quite
sure.”
“Perhaps you have a better memory
than I,” answered Mrs. Bowring. “But
I don’t think it is exactly a question of memory
either. I can remember what I said, and did,
and thought, well twenty years ago.
But it seems to me very strange that I should have
thought, and spoken, and acted, just as I did.
After all isn’t it natural? They tell us
that our bodies are quite changed in less time than
that.”
“Yes but the soul
does not change,” said Clare with conviction.
“The soul ”
Mrs. Bowring repeated the word, but
said nothing more, and her still, blue eyes wandered
from her daughter’s face and again fixed themselves
on an imaginary point of the far southern distance.
“At least,” said Clare, “I was always
taught so.”
She smiled again, rather coldly, as
though admitting that such teaching might not be infallible
after all.
“It is best to believe it,”
said her mother quietly, but in a colourless voice.
“Besides,” she added, with a change of
tone, “I do believe it, you know. One is
always the same, in the main things. It is the
point of view that changes. The best picture
in the world does not look the same in every light,
does it?”
“No, I suppose not. You
may like it in one light and not in another, and in
one place and not in another.”
“Or at one time of life, and
not at another,” added Mrs. Bowring, thoughtfully.
“I can’t imagine that.”
Clare paused a moment. “Of course you are
thinking of people,” she continued presently,
with a little more animation. “One always
means people, when one talks in that way. And
that is what I cannot quite understand. It seems
to me that if I liked people once I should always
like them.”
Her mother looked at her.
“Yes perhaps you would,” she
said, and she relapsed into silence.
Clare’s colour did not change.
No particular person was in her thoughts, and she
had, as it were, given her own general and inexperienced
opinion of her own character, quite honestly and without
affectation.
“I don’t know which are
the happier,” said Mrs. Bowring at last, “the
people who change, or the people who can’t.”
“You mean faithful or unfaithful
people, I suppose,” observed the young girl
with grave innocence.
A very slight flush rose in Mrs. Bowring’s
thin cheeks, and the quiet eyes grew suddenly hard,
but Clare was busy with her work again and did not
see.
“Those are big words,”
said the older woman in a low voice.
“Well yes of
course!” answered Clare. “So they
ought to be! It is always the main question,
isn’t it? Whether you can trust a person
or not, I mean.”
“That is one question.
The other is, whether the person deserves to be trusted.”
“Oh it’s the same thing!”
“Not exactly.”
“You know what I mean, mother.
Besides, I don’t believe that any one who can’t
trust is really to be trusted. Do you?”
“My dear Clare!” exclaimed
Mrs. Bowring. “You can’t put life
into a nutshell, like that!”
“No. I suppose not, though
if a thing is true at all it must be always true.”
“Saving exceptions.”
“Are there any exceptions to
truth?” asked Clare incredulously. “Truth
isn’t grammar nor the British Constitution.”
“No. But then, we don’t
know everything. What we call truth is what we
know. It is only what we know. All that we
don’t know, but which is, is true, too especially,
all that we don’t know about people with whom
we have to live.”
“Oh if people have
secrets!” The young girl laughed idly. “But
you and I, for instance, mother we have
no secrets from each other, have we? Well?
Why should any two people who love each other have
secrets? And if they have none, why, then, they
know all that there is to be known about one another,
and each trusts the other, and has a right to be trusted,
because everything is known and everything
is the whole truth. It seems to me that is simple
enough, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Bowring laughed in her turn.
It was rather a hard little laugh, but Clare was used
to the sound of it, and joined in it, feeling that
she had vanquished her mother in argument, and settled
one of the most important questions of life for ever.
“What a pretty steamer!” exclaimed Mrs.
Bowring suddenly.
“It’s a yacht,”
said Clare after a moment. “The flag is
English, too. I can see it distinctly.”
She laid down her work, and her mother
closed her book upon her forefinger again, and they
watched the graceful white vessel as she glided slowly
in from the Conca, which she had rounded while they
had been talking.
“It’s very big, for a
yacht,” observed Mrs. Bowring. “They
are coming here.”
“They have probably come round
from Naples to spend a day,” said Clare.
“We are sure to have them up here. What
a nuisance!”
“Yes. Everybody comes up
here who comes to Amalfi at all. I hope they
won’t stay long.”
“There is no fear of that,”
answered Clare. “I heard those people saying
the other day that this is not a place where a vessel
can lie any length of time. You know how the
sea sometimes breaks on the beach.”
Mrs. Bowring and her daughter desired
of all things to be quiet. The visitors who came,
stayed a few days at the hotel, and went away again,
were as a rule tourists or semi-invalids in search
of a climate, and anything but noisy. But people
coming in a smart English yacht would probably be
society people, and as such Mrs. Bowring wished that
they would keep away. They would behave as though
the place belonged to them, so long as they remained;
they would get all the attention of the proprietor
and of the servants for the time being; and they would
make everybody feel shabby and poor.
The Bowrings were poor, indeed, but
they were not shabby. It was perhaps because
they were well aware that nobody could mistake them
for average tourists that they resented the coming
of a party which belonged to what is called society.
Mrs. Bowring had a strong aversion to making new acquaintances,
and even disliked being thrown into the proximity of
people who might know friends of hers, who might have
heard of her, and who might talk about her and her
daughter. Clare said that her mother’s
shyness in this respect was almost morbid; but she
had unconsciously caught a little of it herself, and,
like her mother, she was often quite uselessly on
her guard against strangers, of the kind whom she might
possibly be called upon to know, though she was perfectly
affable and at her ease with those whom she looked
upon as undoubtedly her social inferiors.
They were not mistaken in their prediction
that the party from the yacht would come up to the
Cappuccini. Half an hour after the yacht had
dropped anchor the terrace was invaded. They came
up in twos and threes, nearly a dozen of them, men
and women, smart-looking people with healthy, sun-burnt
faces, voices loud from the sea as voices become on
a long voyage or else very low indeed.
By contrast with the frequenters of Amalfi they
all seemed to wear overpoweringly good clothes and
perfectly new hats and caps, and their russet shoes
were resplendent. They moved as though everything
belonged to them, from the wild crests of the hills
above to the calm blue water below, and the hotel servants
did their best to foster the agreeable illusion.
They all wanted chairs, and tables, and things to
drink, and fruit. One very fair little lady with
hard, restless eyes, and clad in white serge, insisted
upon having grapes, and no one could convince her
that grapes were not ripe in May.
“It’s quite absurd!”
she objected. “Of course they’re ripe!
We had the most beautiful grapes at breakfast at Leo
Cairngorm’s the other day, so of course they
must have them here. Brook! Do tell the man
not to be absurd!”
“Man!” said the member
of the party she had last addressed. “Do
not be absurd!”
“Si, Signore,” replied
the black-whiskered Amalfitan servant with alacrity.
“You see!” cried the little
lady triumphantly. “I told you so!
You must insist with these people. You can always
get what you want. Brook, where’s my fan?”
She settled upon a straw chair like
a white butterfly. The others walked on towards
the end of the terrace, but the young man whom she
called Brook stood beside her, slowly lighting a cigarette,
not five paces from Mrs. Bowring and Clare.
“I’m sure I don’t
know where your fan is,” he said, with a short
laugh, as he threw the end of the match over the wall.
“Well then, look for it!”
she answered, rather sharply. “I’m
awfully hot, and I want it.”
He glanced at her before he spoke again.
“I don’t know where it
is,” he said quietly, but there was a shade of
annoyance in his face.
“I gave it to you just as we
were getting into the boat,” answered the lady
in white. “Do you mean to say that you left
it on board?”
“I think you must be mistaken,”
said the young man. “You must have given
it to somebody else.”
“It isn’t likely that
I should mistake you for any one else especially
to-day.”
“Well I haven’t
got it. I’ll get you one in the hotel, if
you’ll have patience for a moment.”
He turned and strode along the terrace
towards the house. Clare Bowring had been watching
the two, and she looked after the man as he moved
rapidly away. He walked well, for he was a singularly
well-made young fellow, who looked as though he were
master of every inch of himself. She had liked
his brown face and bright blue eyes, too, and somehow
she resented the way in which the little lady ordered
him about. She looked round and saw that her
mother was watching him too. Then, as he disappeared,
they both looked at the lady. She too had followed
him with her eyes, and as she turned her face sideways
to the Bowrings Clare thought that she was biting
her lip, as though something annoyed her or hurt her.
She kept her eyes on the door. Presently the young
man reappeared, bearing a palm-leaf fan in his hand
and blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke into the air.
Instantly the lady smiled, and the smile brightened
as he came near.
“Thank you dear,” she said
as he gave her the fan.
The last word was spoken in a lower
tone, and could certainly not have been heard by the
other members of the party, but it reached Clare’s
ears, where she sat.
“Not at all,” answered the young man quietly.
But as he spoke he glanced quickly
about him, and his eyes met Clare’s. She
fancied that she saw a look of startled annoyance in
them, and he coloured a little under his tan.
He had a very manly face, square and strong.
He bent down a little and said something in a low voice.
The lady in white half turned her head, impatiently,
but did not look quite round. Clare saw, however,
that her expression had changed again, and that the
smile was gone.
“If I don’t care, why
should you?” were the next words Clare heard,
spoken impatiently and petulantly.
The man who answered to the name of
Brook said nothing, but sat down on the parapet of
the terrace, looking out over his shoulder to seaward.
A few seconds later he threw away his half-smoked
cigarette.
“I like this place,” said
the lady in white, quite audibly. “I think
I shall send on board for my things and stay here.”
The young man started as though he
had been struck, and faced her in silence. He
could not help seeing Clare Bowring beyond her.
“I’m going indoors, mother,”
said the young girl, rising rather abruptly.
“I’m sure it must be time for tea.
Won’t you come too?”
The young man did not answer his companion’s
remark, but turned his face away again and looked
seaward, listening to the retreating footsteps of
the two ladies.
On the threshold of the hotel Clare
felt a strong desire to look back again and see whether
he had moved, but she was ashamed of it and went in,
holding her head high and looking straight before her.