PAGE 4
Victor
by
Mr. Frank glanced up at the engraving and turned his face away. It was the face of a man taken at unawares, embarrassed, almost afraid. The Vicar, who had been watching him, intending some pleasant remark about the picture, saw at once that something was wrong, and with great tact kept the talk upon some petty act of charity in which he sought to enlist his visitor’s help. Mr. Frank listened, gave his promise hurriedly and made his escape. He never entered the Vicarage again.
III.
Eighteen years had passed since Miss Bracy’s interview with Bassett; and now, late on a summer afternoon, she and Mr. Frank were pacing the little waterside garden while they awaited their first visitor.
Mr. Frank betrayed the greater emotion, or at any rate the greater nervousness. Since breakfast he had been unable to sit still or to apply himself to any piece of work for ten minutes together, until Miss Bracy suggested the lawn-mower and brought purgatory upon herself. With that lawn-mower all the afternoon he had been “rattling her brain to fiddle-strings”–as she put it–and working himself into a heat which obliged a change of clothes before tea. The tea stood ready now on a table which Deborah had carried out into the garden–dainty linen and silverware, and flowered china dishes heaped with cakes of which only Scotswomen know the secrets. The sun, dropping behind Battery Point, slanted its rays down through the pine-trunks and over the fiery massed plumes of rhododendrons. Scents of jasmine and of shorn grass mingled with the clean breath of the sea borne to the garden wall on a high tide tranquil and clear–so clear that the eye following for a hundred yards the lines of the cove could see the feet of the cliffs where they rested, three fathoms down, on lily-white sand. Miss Bracy adored these clean depths. She had missed much that life could have given; but at least she had found a life comely and to her mind. She had sacrificed much; but at times she forgot how much in contemplating the modest elegance of the altar.
She wore, this evening, a gown of purplish silk, with a light cashmere scarf about her shoulders. Nothing could make her a tall woman; but her grey hair, dressed high a l’imperatrice, gave her dignity at least, and an air of old-fashioned distinction. And she was one of those few and fortunate ladies who never need to worry about the appearance of their cavaliers. Mr. Frank–six feet of him, without reckoning a slight stoop–always satisfied the eye; his grey flannel suit fitted loosely but fitted well; his wide-brimmed straw hat was as faultless as his linen; his necktie had a negligent neatness; you felt sure alike and at once of his bootmaker and his shirtmaker; and his fresh complexion, his prematurely white hair, his strong well-kept hands, completed the impression of cleanliness for its own sake, of a careful physical cult as far as possible removed from foppery.
This may have been in Miss Bracy’s mind when she began: “I daresay he will be fairly presentable, to look at. That unfortunate woman had at least an art of dressing–a quiet taste too, quite extraordinary in one of her station. I often wondered where she picked it up.”
Mr. Frank winced. Until the news of his wife’s death came, a fortnight ago, her name had not been spoken between them for years. That he and his cousin regarded her very differently he knew; but while silence was kept it had been possible to ignore the difference. Now it surprised him that speech should hurt so; and, at the same moment, that his cousin should not divine how sorely it hurt. After all he was the saddest evidence of poor Bassett’s “lady-like” tastes.
“I suppose you know nothing of the school she sent him to?” Miss Bracy went on–“King William’s, or whatever it is.”