‘Need we? You’re not cold?’
‘I want to.’ She turned to go.
‘But, please,’ he said at her elbow. ‘What have I done? The only dance we’ve had, and the evening half over—’
‘I’m feeling – ratty.’
Lessingham said no more, but followed her between the sleeping flower-borders to the house. In the doorway they encountered, among others, Glanford coming out. He reddened and looked awkward. Mary reddened too, but passed in, aloof, unperturbed. She and Lessingham came now, through the tea-room and the great galleried hall, to the drawing-room, where, since dinner, at the far end a kind of platform or stage had been put up, with footlights along the front of it, and in all the main floor of the room chairs and sofas arranged as for an audience. Shaded lamps on standards or on tables at the sides and corners of the room made a restful, uncertain, golden light.
‘You’ve heard the castanets before, I suppose?’ said Mary.
‘Yes. Only once properly: in Burgos.’
‘Castanets and cathedrals go rather well together, I should think.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that before; but they do. A curious mix up of opposites: the feeling of Time, clicking and clicking endlessly away; and the other – well, as if there were something that did persist.’
‘Like mountains,’ Mary said; ‘and the funny little noise of streams, day after day, month after month, running down their sides.’
Lessingham said, under his breath, ‘And sometimes, an avalanche.’
They were standing now before the fireplace, which was filled with masses of white madonna lilies. Over the mantelpiece, lighted from above by a hidden electric lamp, hung an oil painting, the head-and-shoulders portrait of a lady with smooth black hair, very pale of complexion, taken nearly full-face, with sloping shoulders under her gauzy dress and a delicate slender neck (
‘Reynolds,’ said Lessingham, after a minute’s looking at it in silence.
‘Yes.’
‘An ancestress?’
‘No. No relation. Look at the name.’
He leaned near to look, in the corner of the canvas: Anne Horton 1766.
‘Done when she was about nineteen,’ said Mary. There seemed to come, as she looked at that portrait, a subtle alteration in her whole demeanour, as when, some gay inward stirrings of the sympathies, friend looks on friend. ‘Do you like it?’
On Lessingham’s face, still studying the picture, a like alteration came. ‘I love it.’
‘She went in for fatty degeneration later on, and became Duchess of Cumberland. Gainsborough painted her as that, several times, later.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. He looked round at Mary. ‘Neither the fat,’ he said, ‘nor the degeneration. I think I know those later paintings, and now I don’t believe them.’
‘They’re not interesting,’ Mary said. ‘But in this one, she’s certainly not very eighteenth-century. Curiously outside all dates, I should say.’
‘Or inside.’
‘Yes: or inside all dates.’
Lessingham looked again at Mrs Anne Horton – the sideways inclination of the eyes: the completely serene, completely aware, impenetrable, weighing, look: lips as if new-closed, as in Verona, upon that private ça m’amuse. He looked quickly back again at Mary. And, plain for him to see, the something that inhabited near Mary’s mouth seemed to start awake or deliciously to recognize, in the picture, its own likeness.
It recognized also (one may guess) a present justification for the ça m’amuse. Perhaps the lady in the picture had divined Mary’s annoyance at Glanford’s insistent, unduly possessive, proposal, at her own rather summary rejection of it, and at Lessingham’s methods that seemed to tar him incongruously with the same brush (and her father, too, not without a touch of that tar): divined, moreover, the exasperation in Mary’s consciousness that she overwhelmingly belonged to Lessingham, that she was being swept on to a choice she did not want to make, and that Lessingham unpardonably (but scarcely unnaturally, not being in these secrets) did not seem to understand the situation.
Mary laughed. It was as if all the face of the night was cleared again.
The room was filling now. Madame de Rosas, in shawl and black mantilla, took her place on the platform, while below, on her right, the musicians began to tune up. Lessingham and Mary had easy chairs at the back, near the door. The lamps were switched out, all except those that lighted the pictures, and the footlights were switched on. ‘And my Cyprus picture over there?’ Lessingham said in Mary’s ear. ‘Do you know why I sent it you?’
Mary shook her head.
‘You know what it is?’
‘Yes: you told me in your letter. Sunrise from Olympus. It is marvellous. The sense of height. Windy sky. The sun leaping up behind you. The cold shadows on the mountains, and goldy light on them. Silver light of dawn. And that tremendous thrown shadow of Olympus himself and the kind of fringe of red fire along its edges: I’ve seen that in the Alps.’
‘Do you know what that is, there: where you get a tiny bit of sea, away on the left, far away over the ranges?’
‘What is it?’
‘Paphos. Where Aphrodite is supposed to have risen from the sea. I camped up there, above Troodos, for a fortnight: go up with my things about four o’clock every morning to catch the sunrise and paint it. I’ll tell you something,’ he said, very low: ‘I actually almost came to believe that story, the whole business, Homeric hymn, Botticelli’s picture in the Uffizi, everything: almost, in a queer way, when I was looking across there, alone, at daybreak. But—’ he said. The strings burst into the rhythm of an old seguidilla of Andalusia: the Spanish woman took the centre of the stage, swept her shawl about her shoulders and stood, statuesque, motionless, in the up-thrown brilliance of the footlights. Lessingham looked up at her for a moment, then back at Mary. Mary’s eyes had left picture for stage; but his, through the half-light, fed only upon Mary: the profile of her face, the gleam of the sapphired pendant that in so restful a sweet unrest breathed with her breathing. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it was you.’ The dusky sapphire stood still for an instant, then, like a ship from the trough of the sea, rose and, upon the surge, down again.
‘It would be a foolish myth if it could have been anyone else but you,’ he whispered. And the castanets began softly upon a flutter or rumour of sound, scarce heard.
An Andalusian dance, done by a hired woman to please the guests at an English country house in this year of Our Lord 1908. And yet, through some handfasting of music with landscape and portrait painted and their embarking so, under the breath of secular deep memories in the blood, upon that warmed sapphire rocked on so dear a sea, the rhythms of the dance seemed to take to themselves words:
Awful, gold-crowned, beautiful, Aphrodite—