The Lions Share | Page 8

vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother;
and she could trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze
were dangerously intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in
the presence of her fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss
Ingate she thought of the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal
liquor which by any accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she
could scarcely bear to look upon Miss Ingate.
At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently
solaced Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a
spinster's too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round
the chained yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous
short bounds, he followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the
slope of the garden; and the yard-dog, aware that none but the
omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole source of good and evil, had the right
to loose him, turned round once and laid himself flat and long on the
ground, sighing.
The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a
scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of
the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very
green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if
anybody was watching her.
Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall,"
was a seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint
woodwork; and like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy
marriage with the landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed
amid the dark bare trees, and they alone would have captivated a
Londoner possessing those precious attributes, fortunately ever
spreading among the enlightened middle-classes, a motor-car, a
cultured taste in architecture, and a desire to enter the squirearchy.
Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last depth of sordidness

and the commonplace. She could imagine positively nothing less
romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March mornings
with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and herself
wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition, an
effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly
unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers
and chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother
plaintively and weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in
a corner. The images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul,
desolated her.
Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red
barges beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay,
equinoctial spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean
covered with foam and the sea-wall felt the light lash of spray,
thunderstorms in autumn gathering over the yellow melancholy of
deathlike sunsets, wild birds crying across miles of uncovered mud at
early morning and duck-hunters crouching in punts behind a waving
screen of delicate grasses to wing them, and the mysterious shapes of
steamers and warships in the offing beyond the Sand.... The sail of the
receding yacht gleamed now against the Sand, and its flashing broke
her heart; for it was the flashing of freedom. She thought of the
yachtsman; he was very courteous and deferential; a mild creature; he
had behaved to her as to a woman.... Oh! To be the petted and
capricious wife of such a man, to nod commands, to enslave with a
smile, to want a thing and instantly to have it, to be consulted and to
decide, to spend with large gestures, to be charitable, to be adored by
those whom you had saved from disaster, to increase happiness
wherever you went ... and to be free!....
The little dog jumped up at her because he was tired of being ignored,
and she caught him and kissed him again and again passionately, and
he wriggled with ecstasy and licked her ears with all the love in him.
And in kissing him she kissed grave and affectionate husbands, she
kissed the lovely scenery of the Sound, and she kissed the magnificent
ideal of emancipation. But the dog had soon had enough of her arms;
he broke free, sprang, alighted, and rolled over, and arose sniffing, with

earth on his black muzzle....
He looked up at her inquiringly.... Strange, short-frocked blue figure
looking down at him! She had a bulging forehead; her brown eyes were
tunnelled underneath it. But what living eyes, what ardent eyes, that
blazed up and sank like a fire! What delicate and exact mirrors of the
secret traffic between her soul and the soul of the world! She had full
cheeks, and a