Lady Rye’s misguided parents had selected the name Cynthia for her. This was a pity, since there was nothing whatever in her appearance or disposition that could remind her friends of the moon, and while she was still of an early age they had taken the matter into their own hands, disregarded her baptismal name, and always called her Peggy, which suited her quite admirably. In her own opinion she was hideous, but this fact, for so she honestly and frankly considered it to be, did not in the least weigh on her mind, nor did she let that very acute instrument of perception dwell on it, for it was a mere waste of time to devote any thought to that which was so palpably inferior. She knew that her mouth was too big, and that her nose was too small, and that her hair, which might, if anybody wanted to be really candid, be called sandy, did not suit with her rather dark complexion. She knew, too, that her eyes were green, and since this was so, she considered, this time rather hastily, that they must therefore be ugly, which they certainly were not, for they had to a wonderful degree that sensitiveness and power of reflecting the mood of the moment, which green eyes above all others seem to possess. And since the moods which were reflected there were always shrewd, always kindly, and always humorous, it followed that the eyes were very pleasant to look upon. They indicated an extraordinary power of friendliness.
Her friends, it therefore followed, were many, and though their unanimous verdict was that “she looked charming,” she, with the rather severe commonsense which distinguished her, took this epithet as confirmation of her own opinion. For nobody (except one’s enemies) said one looked charming if it was ever so faintly possible to say that one was pretty or beautiful, and to her mind “you look charming” was rather a clumsy mode of indicating one’s plainness, accompanied by a welcome. But she was as far from quarrelling with her fate as she was from quarrelling with her friends; in this over-populated world, where there are so many people and so few prizes, she was more than content with what had been given her. She was well married, she had two adorable children, a “dear angel” of a husband—a position in its way quite unique, and entirely of her own making; also she had formed the excellent habit of enjoying herself quite enormously, without damage to others—an attitude toward life which is more to be desired than gold. It was, in fact, a large part of her gospel; with her whole nature, pleasant and mirthful and greatly alive, she passionately wanted people to be happy. It seemed to her the ideal attitude toward life, and she practised it herself.
The advent of her sister, Mrs. Allbutt, and herself on the London horizon had, twenty years ago, been quite a big event. Edith had been then a girl of twenty-two; she herself was three years younger. Much of the coal of Staffordshire was in their joint hands, and marriageable London was at their feet. Then, as usual, the unusual happened. Cynthia (or Peggy), the green-eyed, the sandy-haired, married at once, and married well; and though that was not in the least remarkable, the odd thing was that Edith, the elder, the beautiful, did not marry for two years later. And when she did marry she married that impossible little Dennis Allbutt. The only explanation was that she fell in love with him. She, at any rate—that proud, shy, silent girl of twenty years ago—had no other to give, for this was true and simple and sufficient, and as to the “why” that she had fallen in love with this bad subject she did not concern herself to enquire. It was so; something in her responded to something in him—to his quickness maybe, for she, beautiful mind and body alike, was rather slow of movement, and it was in vain that Peggy, wise from the heights of her two years’ knowledge of the domestic hearth, besought her to withdraw her hand before it was irrevocably given. Then, when pleading was of no use, when reasoning was vain, she had told her sister what people said of him—how he tipped and fuddled himself, so that he went to bed every night not sober, even if not drunk; that it was in the blood, that his father had died a drunkard’s death. And at that Edith had risen up in quiet, rather dreadful anger.
“It will be wiser of you not to go on, Peggy,” she had said. “Dennis has told me all about it. What you say about his father is true; what you say about him is false. It was true, however, at one time. He has completely got over it.”
“But—” began Peggy.
“I think you had better beg my pardon,” said Edith.
So, poor soul, she had her way, and the twelve years that followed had been for her a descent, steady and unremitting, into the depths of hell. Three years ago now the end had come, and these three years of her widowhood had been passed by her in a long heroic struggle to build up life again out of the wreck and ruin that he had made of her best years, when he chained her by his side, so to speak, in a cellar while outside June was in flower for her. It had been hard work, and often it was the mere fear of going mad if she allowed herself to pause to let her mind dwell on that frightful background of the years, that had kept her struggling and battling to make something of what remained to her. She had studied, she had worked, with the whole force of her quiet indomitable will she had held to that which she knew, even in the darkest hours, to be a fact—namely, that nobody could ruin your life for you, unless you acquiesced in the ruin; as long as she could say to herself “I do not allow it to be ruined,” it was not. And to-day she might fairly say that that attitude had become a habit to her; dark hours still came—hours of gloom and impotent revolt against the searing and burning years she had been through—but these were no longer habitual.
London, which never remembers anything clearly for long, never wholly forgets, and this spring when Edith Allbutt had appeared again, staying at Rye House with her sister, it faintly recollected these facts and commented on them. It really was almost worth while to live twelve years with a dreadful little man like that if at the end you came out at the age of over forty looking like Juno. She was so pleasant too, so agreeable, she had such distinction of a kind that was rather rare nowadays, when everybody played bridge with one hand while they played croquet with the other, and talked all the time with their mouths full of a vegetarian diet. She was the sort of person—magnetic, is it not?—of whom one is always conscious. In a way utterly opposite to Peggy’s, she gave the impression of immense vitality. What had she been doing with herself during these three years in the country, where nobody had seen her, to make her like that? Above all, what was she going to do with herself now?
It seemed then that, dissimilar as the two sisters were, the family likeness between them did exist somewhere very essentially, for if there was one thing for which Peggy was distinguished it was vitality of a kind that made everybody else seem rather like molluscs. And though very differently manifested, this vitality seemed to be equally characteristic of her sister, who had not retired to a bath-chair or a cemetery, but had come out again unimpaired and serenely splendid from what would have driven most women out of their minds.
The little house where this tiny party of four, not counting the two wild Indians, was assembled was Peggy’s own particular pied-à-terre, though, as she justly observed, there was on the whole less land about it than water. It stood separated only by its own lawn from the loveliest reach of all Thames-side, just below Odney Weir and opposite the woods of Cliveden, which rose in a hundred spires and finials of varied green up the steep hillside. The tow-path crossed the river to the other bank just below it, so that the lawn went down to the water’s edge, and no riband of dusty thoroughfare tarnished or smirched the liquidness of the place. On one side a hedge, no mere gauze of twigs and leaves as transparent as a wire fence, but a real compact growth of hawthorn eight feet high and a yard in solid, comfortable breadth, separated it from the meadow; while on the other a mill-stream, flowing strong and steady, and combing the soft green waterweeds as it passed over them in ropes of woven crystal, made an inviolable peninsula, on which stood paddock and house and garden. The house itself held not more than half a dozen guests, and it was just for this privacy and smallness that Peggy so loved it, and the very rarity of the occasions on which she could manage to escape from the businesses which her incredible energy involved her in made her feel like a child on a holiday. It had a veranda all along the front side of it, and a dozen climbing roses which had swarmed up to the very chimneys of the house made the walls and much of the roof invisible under the red and cream of their blossoming. On the lawn a thicket of lilac and syringa fenced off the paddock and kitchen garden, a couple of big elms offered their grave shade against the noonday heat, and lower down close to the mill-stream and facing the river stood a big plane with moulting bark, elbowed branches, and clean-cut, geometric