Mr. Eustace Vernon is not by any error to be imagined as a villain1 of the deepest dye, coldly planning to bring misery2 to a simple village maiden3 for his own selfish pleasure. Not at all. As he himself would have put it, he meant no harm to the girl. He was a master of two arts, and to these he had devoted4 himself wholly. One was the art of painting. But one cannot paint for all the hours there are. In the intervals5 of painting Vernon always sought to exercise his other art. One is limited, of course, by the possibilities, but he liked to have always at least one love affair on hand. And just now there were none—none at least possessing the one charm that irresistibly6 drew him—newness. The one or two affairs that dragged on merely meant letter writing, and he hated writing letters almost as much as he hated reading them.
The country had been unfortunately barren of interest until his eyes fell on that sketching7 figure in the pink dress. For he respected one of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking9 a vulgar love-affair. He was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn10 in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare with him in which one finds anything to say to a little milliner. He wanted the means, not the end, and was at one with the unknown sage11 who said: "The love of pleasure spoils the pleasure of love."
There is a gift, less rare than is supposed, of wiping the slate12 clean of memories, and beginning all over again: a certain virginity of soul that makes each new kiss the first kiss, each new love the only love. This gift was Vernon's, and he had cultivated it so earnestly, so delicately, that except in certain moods when he lost his temper, and with it his control of his impulses, he was able to bring even to a conservatory13 flirtation14 something of the fresh emotion of a schoolboy in love.
Betty's awkwardnesses, which he took for advances, had chilled him a little, though less than they would have done had not one of the evil-tempered moods been on him.
He had dreaded15 lest the affair should advance too quickly. His own taste was for the first steps in an affair of the heart, the delicate doubts, the planned misunderstandings. He did not question his own ability to conduct the affair capably from start to finish, but he hated to skip the dainty preliminaries. He had feared that with Betty he should have to skip them, for he knew that it is only in their first love affairs that women have the patience to watch the flower unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He bit his lip and struck with his cane16 at the buttercup heads. He had made a wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet." his "young and innocent and beautiful like—like." If the girl had been a shade less innocent the whole business would have been muffed—muffed hopelessly.
To-morrow he would be there early. A ship of promise should be—not launched—that was weeks away. The first timbers should be felled to build a ship to carry him, and her too, of course, a little way towards the enchanted17 islands.
He knew the sea well, and it would be pleasant to steer18 on it one to whom it was all new—all, all.
"Dear little girl," he said, "I don't suppose she has ever even thought of love."
He was not in love with her, but he meant to be. He carefully thought of her all that day, of her hair, her eyes, her hands; her hands were really beautiful—small, dimpled and well-shaped—not the hands he loved best, those were long and very slender,—but still beautiful. And before he went to bed he wrote a little poem, to encourage himself:
Yes. I have loved before; I know
This longing19 that invades my days,
This shape that haunts life's busy ways
I know since long and long ago.
This starry20 mystery of delight
That floats across my eager eyes,
This pain that makes earth Paradise,
These magic songs of day and night,
I know them for the things they are:
A passing pain, a longing fleet,
A shape that soon I shall not meet,
A fading dream of veil and star.
Yet, even as my lips proclaim
The wisdom that the years have lent,
Your absence is joy's banishment21
And life's one music is your name.
I love you to the heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How can one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no—I never loved before!
When he read it through he entitled it, "The Veil of Maya," so that it might pretend to have no personal application.
After that more than ever rankled22 the memory of that first morning.
"How could I?" he asked himself. "I must indeed have been in a gross mood. One seems sometimes to act outside oneself altogether. Temporary possession by some brutal23 ancestor perhaps. Well, it's not too late."
Next morning he worked at his picture, in the rabbit-warren, but his head found itself turning towards the way by which on that first day she had gone. She must know that on a day like this he would not be wasting the light,—that he would be working. She would be wanting to see him again. Would she come out? He wished she would. But he hoped she wouldn't. It would have meant another readjustment of ideas. He need not have been anxious. She did not come.
He worked steadily24, masterfully. He always worked best at the beginning of a love affair. All of him seemed somehow more alive, more awake, more alert and competent. His mood was growing quickly to what he meant it to be. He was what actors call a quick study. Soon he would be able to play perfectly25, without so much as a thought to the "book," the part of Paul to this child's Virginia.
Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the step-father whom she so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink? Relations who might interfere26 and pray and meddle27 and spoil things?
However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be concealed28. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan29 she sometimes pretended to herself to be. She had aunts—an accident that may happen to the best of us.
A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth left Harrow and went to Ealing where he was received in a family in the capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who knew exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had taught her to know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly30 of youth—not her own youth—taught her how to get it. There were several pups. She selected the most eligible31, secretly married him, and to the day of her death spoke32 and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He was a dreamy youth, who wrote verses and called the Crammer's daughter his Egeria. She was too clever not to be kind to him, and he adored her and believed in her to the end, which came before his twenty-first birthday. He broke his neck out hunting, and died before Betty was born.
His people, exasperated33 at the news of the marriage, threatened to try to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been needed to get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four. Egeria was frightened. She compromised for an annuity34 of two hundred pounds, to be continued to her child.
The passion of this woman's life was power. One cannot be very powerful with just two hundred a year, and a doubtful position as the widow of a boy whose relations are prepared to dispute one's marriage. Mrs. Desmond spent three years in thought, and in caring severely35 for the wants of her child. Then she bought four handsome dresses, and some impressive bonnets36, went to a Hydropathic Establishment, and looked about her. Of the eligible men there Mr. Cecil Underwood seemed, on enquiry, to be the most eligible. So she married him. He resisted but little, for his parish needed a clergywoman sadly. The two hundred pounds was a welcome addition to an income depleted37 by the purchase of rare editions, and at the moment crippled by his recent acquisition of the Omiliac of Vincentius in its original oak boards and leather strings38; and, above all, he saw in the three-year-old Betty the child he might have had if things had gone otherwise with him and another when they both were young.
Mrs. Desmond had felt certain she could rule a parish. Mrs. Cecil Underwood did rule it—as she had known she could. She ruled her husband too. And Betty. When she caught cold from working all day among damp evergreens39 for the Christmas decorations, and, developing pneumonia40, died, she died resentfully, thanking God that she had always done her duty, and quite unable to imagine how the world would go on without her. She felt almost sure that in cutting short her career of usefulness her Creator was guilty of an error of judgment41 which He would sooner or later find reason to regret.
Her husband mourned her. He had the habit of her, of her strong capable ways, the clockwork precision of her household and parish arrangements. But as time went on he saw that perhaps he was more comfortable without her: as a reformed drunkard sees that it is better not to rely on brandy for one's courage. He saw it, but of course he never owned it to himself.
Betty was heart-broken, quite sincerely heart-broken. She forgot all the mother's hard tyrannies, her cramping42 rules, her narrow bitter creed43, and remembered only the calm competence44, amounting to genius, with which her mother had ruled the village world, her unflagging energy and patience, and her rare moments of tenderness. She remembered too all her own lapses45 from filial duty, and those memories were not comfortable.
Yet Betty too, when the self-tormenting remorseful46 stage had worn itself out, found life fuller, freer without her mother. Her step-father she hated—had always hated. But he could be avoided. She went to a boarding-school at Torquay, and some of her holidays were spent with her aunts, the sisters of the boy-father who had not lived to see Betty.
She adored the aunts. They lived in a world of which her village world did not so much as dream; they spoke of things which folks at home neither knew of nor cared for; and they spoke a language that was not spoken at Long Barton. Of course, everyone who was anyone at Long Barton spoke in careful and correct English, but no one ever troubled to turn a phrase. And irony47 would have been considered very bad form indeed. Aunt Nina wore lovely clothes and powdered her still pretty face; Aunt Julia smoked cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long Barton did not use. Betty was proud of them both.
It was Aunt Nina who taught Betty how to spend her allowance, how to buy pretty things, and, better still, tried to teach her how to wear them. Aunt Julia it was who brought her the Indian necklaces, and promised to take her to Italy some day if she was good. Aunt Nina lived in Grosvenor Square and Aunt Julia's address was most often, vaguely48, the Continent of Europe. Sometimes a letter addressed to some odd place in Asia or America would find her.
But when Betty had left school her visits to Aunt Nina ceased. Mr. Underwood feared that she was now of an age to be influenced by trifles, and that London society would make her frivolous49. Besides he had missed her horribly, all through her school-days, though he had yielded to the insistence50 of the aunts. But he had wanted Betty badly. Only of course it never occurred to him to tell her so.
So Betty had lived on at the Rectory carrying on, with more or less of success, such of her Mother's Parish workings as had managed to outlive their author, and writing to the aunts to tell them how bored she was and how she hated to be called "Lizzie."
She could not be expected to know that her stepfather had known as "Lizzie" the girl who, if Fate had been kind, would have been his wife or the mother of his child. Betty's letters breathed contempt of Parish matters, weariness of the dulness of the country, and exasperation51 at the hardness of a lot where "nothing ever happened."
Well, something had happened now.
The tremendous nature of the secret she was keeping against the world almost took Betty's breath away. It was to the adventure, far more than to the man, that her heart's beat quickened. Something had happened.
Long Barton was no longer the dullest place in the world. It was the centre of the universe. See her diary, an entry following a gap where a page had been torn out:
"Mr. V. is very kind. He is teaching me to sketch8. He says I shall do very well when I have forgotten what I learned at school. It is so nice of him to be so straightforward52. I hate flattery. He has begun my portrait. It is beautiful, but he says it is exactly like me. Of course it is his painting that makes it beautiful, and not anything to do with me. That is not flattery. I do not think he could say anything unless he really thought it. He is that sort of man, I think. I am so glad he is so good. If he were a different sort of person perhaps it would not be quite nice for me to go and meet him without any one knowing. But there is nothing of that sort. He was quite different the first day. But I think then he was off his guard and could not help himself. I don't know quite what I meant by that. But, anyway, I am sure he is as good as gold, and that is such a comfort. I revere53 him. I believe he is really noble and unselfish, and so few men are, alas54!"
The noble and unselfish Vernon meanwhile was quite happy. His picture was going splendidly, and every morning he woke to the knowledge that his image filled all the thoughts of a good little girl with gray dark charming eyes and a face that reminded one of a pretty kitten. Her drawing was not half bad either. He was spared the mortifying55 labour of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. In one of his arts as in the other he decided56 that she had talent. And it was pleasant that to him should have fallen the task of teacher in both departments. Those who hunt the fox will tell you that Reynard enjoys, equally with the hounds and their masters, the pleasures of the chase. Vernon was quite of this opinion in regard to his favourite sport. He really felt that he gave as much pleasure as he took. And his own forgettings were so easy that the easy forgetting of others seemed a foregone conclusion. His forgetting always came first, that was all. But now, the Spring, her charm and his own firm parti pris working together, it seemed to him that he could never forget Betty, could never wish to forget her.
Her pretty conscious dignity charmed him. He stood still to look at it. He took no step forward. His role was that of the deeply respectful "brother artist." If his hand touched hers as he corrected her drawing, that was accident. If, as he leaned over her, criticising her work, the wind sent the end of her hair against his ear, that could hardly be avoided in a breezy English spring. It was not his fault that the little thrill it gave him was intensified57 a hundred-fold when, glancing at her, he perceived that her own ears had grown scarlet58.
Betty went through her days in a dream. There were all the duties she hated—the Mothers' meetings, the Parish visits when she tried to adjust the quarrels and calm the jealousies59 of the stout60 aggressive Mothers, the carrying round the Parish Magazine. There were no long hours, now. In every spare moment she worked at her drawing to please him. It was the least she could do, after all his kindness.
Her step-father surprised her once hard at work with charcoal61 and board and plumb-line, a house-maid posing for her with a broom. He congratulated himself that his little sermon on the advantages of occupation as a cure for discontent had borne fruit so speedy and so sound.
"Dear child, she only wanted a word in season," he thought. And he said:
"I am glad to see that you have put away vain dreams, Lizzie. And your labours will not be thrown away, either. If you go on taking pains I daresay you will be able to paint some nice blotting-books and screens for the School Bazaar62."
"I daresay," said Betty, adding between her teeth, "If you only knew!"
"But we mustn't keep Letitia from her work," he added, vaguely conscientious63. Letitia flounced off, and Betty, his back turned, tore up the drawing.
And, as a beautiful background to the gross realism of Mothers' meetings and Parish tiresomenesses, was always the atmosphere of the golden mornings, the dew and the stillness, the gleam of his white coat among the pine-trees. For he was always first at the tryst64 now.
Betty was drunk; and she was too young to distinguish between vintages. When she had been sober she had feared intoxication65. Now she was drunk, she thanked Heaven that she was sober.
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1
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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2
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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3
maiden
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| n.少女，处女；adj.未婚的，纯洁的，无经验的 | |
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4
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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5
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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6
irresistibly
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| adv.无法抵抗地，不能自持地；极为诱惑人地 | |
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7
sketching
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| n.草图 | |
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8
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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9
undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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10
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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11
sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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12
slate
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| n.板岩，石板，石片，石板色，候选人名单；adj.暗蓝灰色的，含板岩的；vt.用石板覆盖，痛打，提名，预订 | |
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13
conservatory
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| n.温室，音乐学院；adj.保存性的，有保存力的 | |
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14
flirtation
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| n.调情，调戏，挑逗 | |
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15
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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16
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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17
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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18
steer
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| vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶 | |
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19
longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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20
starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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21
banishment
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| n.放逐，驱逐 | |
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22
rankled
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| v.（使）痛苦不已，（使）怨恨不已( rankle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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23
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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24
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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25
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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26
interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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27
meddle
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| v.干预，干涉，插手 | |
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28
concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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29
orphan
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| n.孤儿；adj.无父母的 | |
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30
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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31
eligible
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| adj.有条件被选中的；(尤指婚姻等)合适(意)的 | |
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32
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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33
exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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34
annuity
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| n.年金；养老金 | |
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35
severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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36
bonnets
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| n.童帽( bonnet的名词复数 )；（烟囱等的）覆盖物；（苏格兰男子的）无边呢帽；（女子戴的）任何一种帽子 | |
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37
depleted
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| adj. 枯竭的, 废弃的 动词deplete的过去式和过去分词 | |
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38
strings
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| n.弦 | |
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39
evergreens
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| n.常青树，常绿植物，万年青( evergreen的名词复数 ) | |
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40
pneumonia
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| n.肺炎 | |
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41
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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42
cramping
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| 图像压缩 | |
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43
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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44
competence
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| n.能力，胜任，称职 | |
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45
lapses
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| n.失误，过失( lapse的名词复数 )；小毛病；行为失检；偏离正道v.退步( lapse的第三人称单数 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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46
remorseful
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| adj.悔恨的 | |
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47
irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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48
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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49
frivolous
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| adj.轻薄的；轻率的 | |
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50
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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51
exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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52
straightforward
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| adj.正直的，坦率的；易懂的，简单的 | |
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53
revere
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| vt.尊崇，崇敬，敬畏 | |
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54
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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55
mortifying
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| adj.抑制的，苦修的v.使受辱( mortify的现在分词 )；伤害（人的感情）；克制；抑制（肉体、情感等） | |
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56
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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57
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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58
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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59
jealousies
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| n.妒忌( jealousy的名词复数 )；妒羡 | |
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61
charcoal
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| n.炭，木炭，生物炭 | |
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62
bazaar
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| n.集市，商店集中区 | |
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63
conscientious
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| adj.审慎正直的，认真的，本着良心的 | |
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64
tryst
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| n.约会；v.与…幽会 | |
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65
intoxication
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| n.wild excitement;drunkenness；poisoning | |
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