“Ah, he’s kind-hearted… and good.”
“Yes. ‘Mr. Trewe,’ I say to him sometimes, ‘you are rather out of spirits.’ ‘Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,’ he’ll say. ‘Why not take a little change?’ I ask. Then in a day or two he’ll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and he comes back all the better for it.[42]”
“Ah, indeed! His is sensitive, no doubt.”
“Yes. Still he’s odd in some things… But we get on very well.”
This was the beginning of a series of conversations about the poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: lines in pencil on the wallpaper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.
“O! let me look,” said Mrs. Marchmill, as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.
“These,” said Mrs. Hooper, “are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. I believe that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some line in his head, and puts it down there on the wall not to forget it by the morning. Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before. I think it was done only a few days ago.”
“O, yes!..”
Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished Mrs. Hooper to go away. She realised it was personal interest rather than literary and wanted to read the lines alone.
Ella’s husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing without his wife, who was a bad sailor,[43] than with her. Thus, while the manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air, the life of Ella was monotonous enough, she spent some hours each day in bathing and walking up and down the shore. But the poetic impulse grew strong, she was burnt by an inner flame and hardly noticed what was going on around her.
She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of verses, and spent a great deal of time in attempting to write something like that, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element in the magnetic attraction Mr. Trewe had for her was so much stronger than the intellectual one and she could not understand it. She lived among his things and his verses; but he was a man she had never seen.
In the natural way of passion, her husband’s love for her had not survived, except in the form of friendship, any more than her own for him. Being a woman of strong emotions, she required something to support her feelings. By chance she got this material, which was far better than chance usually offers.
One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, where they took a coat. Mrs. Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and put it in the closet again. Ella went later in the afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, took the coat, and put it on, with the hat belonging to it.
“It might inspire me to rival him, even though he is a genius!” she said.
Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to look at herself in the glass. His heart had beaten inside that coat, and his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never reach. The idea of her weakness beside him made her feel quite sick. Before she took the things off her the door opened, and her husband entered the room.
“What the devil – ”
She blushed, and took them off.
“I found them in the closet here,” she said, “and put them on as a joke. What else do I have to do? You are always away!”
“Always away? Well…”
That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself have some tender feelings for the poet, so ready was she to speak about him.
“You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,” she said; “and he has just sent a note to say that he is going to call tomorrow afternoon to look up some books of his that he wants. May he take them from your room?”
“O, yes!”
“You could very well meet Mr. Trewe then, if you’d like to!”
She went to bed dreaming about him.
Next morning her husband observed: “I’ve been thinking of what you said, Elclass="underline" that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much attention. Perhaps it’s true. Today I’ll take you with me on board the yacht.”
For the first time in her life Ella was not glad at such an offer. She stood thinking. The desire to see the poet she was now in love with did not let her accept the offer.
“I don’t want to go,” she said to herself. “I can’t bear to be away! And I won’t go.”
She told her husband that she had changed her mind and would rather stay at home.[44] He did not mind, and went away.
For the rest of the day the house was quiet, as the children had gone out to the shore. There was a knock at the door.
Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up. She rang the bell.
“There is some person waiting at the door,” she said.
“O, no, ma’am. He’s gone long ago. I answered it,” the servant replied, and Mrs. Hooper came in herself.
“So disappointing!” she said. “Mr. Trewe not coming after all!”
“But I heard him knock!”
“No; that was somebody looking for lodgings. I tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch to say I needn’t get any tea for him, as he would not require the books, and wouldn’t come to take them.”
Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his verse, so heartbroken she was. When the children came in, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.
“Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of – the gentleman who lived here?” She was shy in mentioning his name.
“Why, yes. It’s in the frame in your own bedroom, ma’am.”
“No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.”
“Yes, but he’s behind them. As he went away he said: “Cover me up from those strangers that are coming. I don’t want them to look at me, and I am sure they won’t want me to look at them.” So I put the Duke and Duchess in front of him. If you take ’em out you’ll see him under. Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it! He didn’t think the next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you.”
“Is he handsome?” she asked timidly.
“I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn’t. I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, such as you’d expect a poet to be.”
“How old is he?”
“Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I think.”
Ella was a few months over thirty herself; but she did not look so much. Though quite young, she was entering that stage of life in which emotional women begin to suspect that last love may be stronger than first love. She thought of Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.
Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had gone down the Channel[45] with his friends in the yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.
After her light dinner Ella walked about the shore with the children, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room. On learning[46] that her husband was to be absent that night she had not rushed upstairs and opened the picture-frame, but waited till she could be alone, and the occasion could be made more romantic by silence, candles, sea and stars outside.
The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was not yet ten o’clock. She now made her preparations, reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest verses. Next she took the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, and took out the portrait.