Part 17

Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.

His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his ears that irritated him.

He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.

His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose the winds upon his summer.

His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery steel.

Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he should earn the title? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears, and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a man worth the name do to his enemy?

And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.

He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall, peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.

And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully until suspicion grew into conviction.

His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not see.

He knew it was on guard.

There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost in the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A sluggish terror began to steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.

His enemy--then Sydney.

He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon him.

And still the cold increased, and the personality of Fane's invisible companion seemed to develop in power. There was a sort of silent violence in the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were taking place. Waves of darkness were stirred into motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn by the retreating tides of the sea out and away, was drawn from the wall where he had been crouching.

He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his right hand, his heart barely beating, his lips white--nearer, nearer to his enemy.

He counted each step, until he was enfolded in the inmost circle of that deadly frost emanating from the blackness before him.

Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm and sprang forward and upward, dashing the dagger down as one plunging it through a human heart.

The cry died suddenly into silence.

There was the sound of a heavy fall.

It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.

The footman took a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants huddled in the passage.

The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at length the man thrust the door open and peered in.

The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure, huddled face downwards upon the floor.

His neck was broken.

The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.

Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.

A BOUDOIR BOY

I

"It is so impossible to be young," Claude Melville said very wearily, and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought, went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.

His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning, although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.

"It is so impossible to be young," Claude repeated, without emphasis. "I was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy--the correct age for entering into one's dotage, I believe--I cannot expect to have a second childhood. I have never had a first."

He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.

His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked among his divans and his roses.

After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:--

"Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?"

"Immensely."

"I know somebody who could give you one."

"Really, Jimmy! What strange people you always know; curates, and women who have never written improper novels, and all sorts of beings who seem merely mythical to the rest of us!"

"This is not a curate."

"Then it must be a woman who has never written an improper novel."

"It is."

"And you mean to tell me seriously that there is such a person? To see her would be to take what _Punch_ calls a pre-historic peep. She must be ingeniously old."

"She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt."

"How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so I can never be an uncle. It is one of my lasting regrets, although I daresay that profession is terribly overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four? It seems a risky thing for a woman to be?"

"She takes the risk without thinking at all about it."

"She must be very daring."

"No; she's only completely natural."

"Natural. What is that?"

Jimmy laughed again. He was fond of Claude, but he and Claude met so often chiefly because they were extremes. Jimmy was a handsome athlete, who had been called to the bar, and persistently played cricket or football whenever the courts were sitting. He was cursed with a large private income, which he spent royally, and blessed with a good heart. Once he had appeared for the defence in a divorce case, which--lasting longer than he had anticipated, owing to the obvious guilt of all parties concerned in it, and the consequent difficulty of getting an innocent jury to agree about a verdict--had cost him a cricket match. Since then he had looked upon the law in the legendary way, as an ass, and spent most of his time in exercising his muscles. In the intervals of leisure which he allowed himself from sports and pastimes, he saw a good deal of Claude, who amused him, and whom he never bored. He called him a boudoir boy, but had a real liking for him, nevertheless, and sometimes longed to wake him up, and separate him from the absurd _chiffons_ with which he occupied his time. Now he laughed at him openly, and Claude did not mind in the least. They were really friends, however preposterous such a friendship might seem.

"What is that? Well--my aunt. When you see her you will understand thoroughly."

"Does she live in Park Lane or in Clapham?"

"She lives in the country, in Northamptonshire, is very well off, and has a place of her own."

"And a husband?"

"No. She is a prosperous spinster, dines the local cricket team once a year, keeps the church going, knows all the poor people, and all the rich in the neighbourhood, and has only one fad."

"What is that?"

"She always wears her hair powdered. Come down and stay with her, and she will teach you to be young."

"Well--but I am afraid she will work me very hard."

"Not she. You would like a new experience."

Claude yawned, and blinked his long dark eyes in a carefully Eastern manner.

"I am afraid there is no such thing left for me," he said with an elaborate dreariness. "Still, if your aunt will invite me, I will come. Of course you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon."

"Of course."

"Ah!" Claude said, as a footman came softly into the room, "here is our absinthe. Now, Jimmy, please do forget your horrible football, and I will teach you to be decadent."

"As my aunt will teach you to be young--you old boy."

II

"Mr Haddon has left, sir," said the footman, standing by Claude's bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. "Here is a note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing."

And he handed it on a salver.

Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The Northamptonshire sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his chaperon had already "left," possibly to be a "half-back," or something equally ridiculous, at a local football match in a neighbouring village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped to the very manifest spring.

"DEAR BOY,--Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all right. Study hard.--Yours ever,

JIM."

Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--

"Jimmy writes a very dull letter."

At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep, instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.

"Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a boiled egg and a bit of toast?" he asked himself as he entered the breakfast-room.

Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed high, and void of cap.

"You are very punctual," she said with a smile. "I was going to send up to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy has run away and left us together, I find."

"Yes, Jimmy has run away," Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the plot.

"I hope you will not be bored," Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. "But, indeed, I think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country."

Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.

"You don't agree with me?" she asked.

"I cannot disagree, at least," he said; "because, to tell the truth, I am always in towns."

"Probably you are happy there then," she rejoined, with a briskness that was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.

But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this utterly erroneous belief.

"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."

Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly acute, scrutiny.

"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not suffered enough."

"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."

"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done. I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so. There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a quarter of the different departments."

"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"

"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It is a most delightful time."

Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and more surprised.

"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.

"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."

"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try everything, of course. That is one's duty."

"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of facts."

"Such as what books?"

"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"

"They ignore nothing."

"Not even duty?"

"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."

Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon. She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to the egg.

"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive me--sometimes the young devil of the day."

"I am decadent, Miss Haddon," Claude said with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.

The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy interest.

"How exciting," she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with a completely natural air. "You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy isn't one, is he?"

"Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for lunch."

"Do tell me--how does one do it?"

She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown in one of her own orchards.

Claude raised his dark eyebrows.

"I beg your pardon?"

"How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all, about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and draw, and smoke, and think, and--and eat--"

She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.

"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me, teach me to be a decadent."

"But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and stopped just in time. "I mean--er--"

He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.

"Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.

"Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully.

He was remarking to himself:--

"Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!"

She was murmuring in her mind: "I have always heard they have no sense of humour!"

III

"Mr Melville, Mr Melville," cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on the following day, "the absinthe has arrived!"

Claude came out languidly into the hall.

"Has it?" he said dreamily.

"Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books--I mean the yellow books, and" (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) "yes, here are two novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes. Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea, or what?"

Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion was lulled to rest.

"We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe about an hour or so before dinner."

"Very well. Tea, James, and muffins."

The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming, "What's to be done now?"

The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct it.

"Please try to be a little--a--"

"Yes?"

"A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it should never be crude. All extremes are crude."

"What--even extremes of wickedness?"

He hesitated.

"Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me. Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street--really."

Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.

"Perhaps you are right," she said. "I daresay happiness is unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?"

Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides, Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.

"I do it because I feel so Turkish," he explained. "Otherwise, it would be an assumption, and not naive. People make a great mistake in fancying the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry would have been much more read in England than it has been. Yes, please, I will have another muffin."

"But I think I feel Turkish too," Miss Haddon said calmly. "Yes, I am sure I do. I ought not to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be flying in the face of your beautiful theories." And she squatted down on the floor at his elbow.

Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute irritation, during which he felt strangely natural. Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery manner until he began to be rather ill, but her face never lost its expression of grave sadness, a strange, inexplicable melancholy that was not in the least Bank Holiday. The contrast between her expression and her voice worried Claude, as an intelligent pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that something was wrong. Either face or voice required alteration. And then questions are like death--extremely irksome. Besides, he found it difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define precisely the position of the decadent, his intentions and his aims. It was no use to tell Miss Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or the other. Always with the same definitely sad face, the same definitely cheerful voice, she declined to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion, and his Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously disturbed.

The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess, and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.

"It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt," she said after a while.

Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.

"When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead rabbit at the end of it," she explained.

"My dear lady," he protested plaintively. "Really, you do not grasp the inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will not care what happens, or what--"

"But must I drink it all before I feel detached?" she asked. "It's really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think so."

"I drink it for its after-effect."

"Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?"

"I don't know," the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a good act seemed to him quite intolerable.

He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing gong sounded in the hall.

Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.

"I rather admire you for drinking this stuff," she said. "I am sure you do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most invigorating to the mind."