CHAPTER XXII

Mrs. Deane-Pitt paid Kent the ten guineas a few days after the Saturday on which she had expected to receive the Editor's cheque, and she made no secret of being delighted with the two tales. They were based upon rather original ideas, and after she had had them typewritten, and read them, she talked to him about them with the frankest appreciation possible. Kent almost lost sight of his regret that they weren't to appear under his own name, as the lady expressed her approval, and declared enthusiastically that to call them "excellent" was to say too little. He found it very stimulating to hear his work praised by Mrs. Deane-Pitt, especially as it was work done for her. Although she had professed to be careless of the quality, it was not to be supposed that she would not rather sign good stuff than bad, and the warmth and gaiety of her comments took the sting from the association and lent it a charm.

When he began her novel, it was with the discomfiting consciousness that the breakneck speed imposed on him would prevent the labourer being worthy of his hire. He was too hurried to be able to frame a scenario, and neither he nor the lady who was to figure as the author had more than a hazy idea of what the book was going to be about. He had mentally sworn to keep his critical faculty in check and to produce a chapter of two thousand words every day--if he did not bind himself to the accomplishment of a fixed instalment daily, the book would not be finished in double the time at his disposal! And he rose at seven, and worked till about midnight, on the day on which Chapter I. was done. He had corrected in a fashion as he composed, and he did not read it through when he put down his pen--that would be too disheartening. He remembered the opening chapter of _The Eye of the Beholder_, and, contrasted with the remembrance, these pages that he had perpetrated appeared to him puerile and painful. He folded them up, and posted them to Mrs. Deane-Pitt with a note before he slept.

"Whether you will want the novel after you have seen this, I don't know," he wrote; "I am sending it to you to ascertain. It is a specimen of the rubbish the thing will be if I have to turn it out at such a rate. I will call, on the chance of your being in, to-morrow afternoon."

He found her at home, and she welcomed him with a humorous smile.

"You have read it?" asked Kent, with misgiving.

"Yes; I've read it," she said. "Violet! Pray don't look so frightened of me!"

"Why 'violet'? Well?"

"The type of modesty. Well, what's the matter with it? It'll do all right."

Kent drew a breath.

"I'm glad to hear you say so. I'm bound to confess I thought it very slovenly myself."

"Oh, nonsense!" she said. "Have you gone on with it?"

"No; I waited for your verdict. I thought you might call me names and cry off. I'll go on with it now, though, like steam."

"Do! I suppose you couldn't manage a five-thousand-word story for me this week, could you? It would be good business."

He stared ruefully.

"No, indeed! Not if I'm to write a chapter a day."

"Oh, the chapter a day, please! Get the novel done at the earliest moment possible; that's the chief thing. You will, won't you? I should be so grateful to you if you finished it in six weeks."

"I promise to finish it as quickly as I can," he said. "Even if I didn't care to serve you, I should do that, for my own sake. When I get two hundred pounds, I shall be at the end of my troubles."

"Happy man!" said Mrs. Deane-Pitt. "Would that two hundred pounds would see the end of mine! And as you do want to serve me, you'll do it even more quickly than you can?"

"Or try."

"That's very nice of you. I wonder how true it is. One of the answers one has to make, isn't it? Then when you're behind with the work, and your wife wants to be taken out somewhere, you'll nobly remember there's a miserable woman in Victoria Street depending on you and persuade Mrs. Kent to go with a sister, or a cousin, or an aunt? You'll say to yourself 'Excelsior!' and other improving mottoes, meaning 'Loyalty forbids'?"

"I'll say 'Loyalty forbids' when I want to go out by myself; my wife's in the country."

"Tant mieux! if it isn't shocking," she laughed. "I'm afraid a woman on the spot would prove too strong for me. Am I grossly selfish? Poor boy who has got no wife!"

She looked at him as she had looked across the supper-table in the avenue Wagram. He could not think of anything to say, of a nature that commended itself to him; and he exclaimed abruptly:

"Oh, you may rely on me, Mrs. Deane-Pitt; I'll never go anywhere; I'll be a hermit! By the way, you don't know I'm in Soho now. Perhaps I'd better give you the address?"

"Certainly," she said; "I may want to write to you. The Hermit of Soho! Well, when you've been good and done penance thoroughly, hermit, you may come and see me sometimes; I'll allow you that distraction. Come in whenever you like, and you can tell me how the thing is going. Any afternoon you please at this time. And don't come in trembling at me any more; I don't expect you to write me a masterpiece in six weeks, poor boy."

Kent kept his word to her doggedly, and, although he continued to rise early, he was seldom free to join Turquand until about nine o'clock in the evening. When the chapter was done, he would go downstairs, and light another pipe, and Turquand would put away his book or his paper without any indication of curiosity. With a woman such a state of things would have been impossible; but Turquand's manner was so unforced that by degrees Kent came to own that he was tired, or to make some other allusion to his labour quite freely. And not once did the other say to him, "Well, but what is it you're doing?" On the days that he called on Mrs. Deane-Pitt, it was later still before he could loll in the parlour; the temptation to go to her, however, was more than he could resist. He realised very soon that she had an attraction for him which was not in the least like friendship, and which he could never term "friendship" any more. In moments, as he sat writing in his shabby bedroom under the tiles, the thought of her would suddenly creep into him, and beat in his pulses till he was assailed by a furious longing to be in her presence; and though he often denied the longing, he frequently obeyed it. He would throw down his pen, and change his coat, and leave the house impetuously, seeing her, in fancy, all the way to the flat. During a fortnight or so, he sought some reason for the visit. Would she like the heroine to go on the stage when her husband lost his money? Did she think it would be a good idea to kill the husband, and introduce a new character to reinstate the girl in luxury? But presently such excuses were abandoned. For one thing, Mrs. Deane-Pitt was too much occupied with her serial to accord any serious consideration to his work; and for another, she welcomed him as a matter of course. It was agreeable to her to see this man who was in love with her, and whom she liked, looking at her with eyes that betrayed what he would not allow his tongue to acknowledge. "Oh, I'm glad," she would say, "I was hoping it was you. Sit down and make yourself comfortable--no, bring me that cushion first--and talk to me, and be amusing." Sometimes she received him radiantly, sometimes wearily. On one afternoon she declared she was in the best of spirits, and had just been wishing for someone to bear her company; on the next she sighed that she was worried to death, and that he had only arrived in time to save her from extinction. "Bills," she would yawn, when he questioned her, "bills! A dressmaker, a schoolmistress--I forget which. Some wretch threatens something, I know. Don't look so concerned; I shall survive. Cheer me up." Then the servant would enter with the tea-things, and afterwards, in the cool shadows of the drawing-room, through which the perfume of the heliotrope that grew in a huge bowl under the crimson lamp floated deliciously, there would be cigarettes, and a half-hour that he found exquisite in its air of intimate familiarity. Though no verbal admission was ever made, there were seconds in which Kent's voice, as plainly as his face, told her what he felt for her, and seconds in which the tones of the woman said, "I'm quite conscious of the effect I have on you; we both understand, of course." Occasionally he had a glimpse of her children, and once when he was there, Mrs. Deane-Pitt took the boy on her lap, among the folds of her elaborate tea-gown, and fondled him. "Do you think I make a nice mother, Mr. Kent?" she said, flashing a glance. "This monkey doesn't appreciate his privileges." She kissed the child three times, and in the gaze that she lifted over his curly head there was, for an instant, provocation that shook the man.

But such incidents as this were exceptional, and, as a rule, Kent could not have cited a single instance of coquetry when he took his leave and returned to the attic. Nor did the passion she had aroused in him militate against the success of his enterprise, taking "success" to mean its completion by the given date. Perhaps he was more industrious, even, in the perception that she was always warmest when he had done the most. "I finished the thirtieth chapter last night!" Then she would be delightful, and if she had appeared harassed at all, her languor would speedily give place to gaiety. The tremulous afternoons were never so quick with the sense of alliance, so entirely fascinating to him, as when he was able to surprise her by some such report. The desire to please the woman became fully as strong a stimulus to the ghost as his eagerness to receive the money that would permit him to begin a third novel for himself. The two short stories had been published now, in a periodical in which Kent would have been very proud to see his own name, and though he did not grudge them to her, he could not help feeling, as he read them, that they were better than he had known and that it would be eminently satisfactory to resume legitimate work.

After the fortieth chapter was scrawled, conclusion was in sight, and though he could not quite sustain his earlier pace, he never turned out less than one thousand words a day. Had anybody told him, a couple of months before, that he could do even this, he would have ridiculed the statement, but the consciousness that acceptance was certain had been very fortifying. He scarcely allowed himself leisure to eat after passing the fortieth chapter. The stuff was undeniably poor, though it was not so jejune as it seemed to Kent. The worst part was the construction, for, ignorant what the next development was to be, he was often forced to write sheets of intermediate and motiveless dialogue until an idea presented itself; but for the style, hasty as it was, there was still something to be said. Instinctively Kent gave to a commonplace redundancy a literary twist, and the writing had almost invariably a veneer, though the matter written might be of no account.

During the final week he did not go to Victoria Street at all. He could not suppress the artist in him wholly, and for the climax he meant to do his utmost. It was a sop to his conscience--he could remember the last chapter and forget the rest. He had sent or taken the manuscript to Mrs. Deane-Pitt piece by piece, and he took her the last of it on the evening that he wrote "The End." A telegram had told her to expect him. He had written the book in seven weeks; but he felt as exhausted as if he had built a house in the time, brick by brick, with his own hands. She read the pages that he had brought, while he watched her from an arm-chair; and, with the candour which was so striking a feature in such an association, she cried that the scene was admirable--that she could not have done it half so well. Kent's weariness faded from him as they talked, and momentarily he regretted that he had not been able to write a book for her equal to _The Eye of the Beholder_.

With regard to her negotiations, however, she was not so outspoken--it was only by chance that Kent had seen the two short stories; she had not even told him for what paper they were intended. There was some delay in paying the two hundred pounds, and her explanations were vague and various. The partner with whom she always dealt was on the Continent; she would not sign an agreement before American copyright was arranged; she generally ran her stories as serials before they were issued in book-form and it was not decided what she was going to do--half a dozen reasons for postponement were forthcoming. She gave him his share at last, though, and very cordially, and he felt some embarrassment in taking her cheque when the moment arrived, its being his earliest experience of business with a woman. If he had had others, he would have appreciated her action in paying him in full, and only a little late, more keenly than he did, though he was far from ungrateful to her as it was.

He put the cheque in his pocket as carelessly as he could manage, and said:

"Well, you've done me a tremendous service, Mrs. Deane-Pitt, and, by Jove! I thank you for it--heartily."

"Oh, rubbish!" she replied; "the work's been as useful to me as to you; you've nothing to thank me for."

"It makes more difference to me," said Kent; "it means--you hardly know what it means! I needn't look out for a berth now; I can sit down to another novel. I owe you that."

"If you like to think so----" She smiled, but her tone was constrained. "I should be glad if somebody owed me something; I'm more used to its being the other way round."

"I feel a Croesus. We ought to celebrate this accession to wealth; it demands a festivity! If I get seats for a theatre, will you go to dinner with me somewhere to-morrow night? What shall we go to see? Have you been to Daly's yet?"

"I'm engaged to-morrow night, and the next."

"To-night, then?"

"This evening I am dining out; there's the card on my desk."

"What a fashionable person you are!" exclaimed Kent, rather enviously. "Would Friday evening suit you?"

"Yes, I'm free on Friday; but a theatre is awfully stifling this weather, isn't it?"

"Well, we needn't go to a theatre," he said; "we might dine at Richmond. Will you drive down to Richmond, and have dinner at the Star and Garter on Friday?"

Mrs. Deane-Pitt promised that she would, but the animation with which she had given him the cheque had deserted her; and after a minute, she said:

"I suppose your starting another novel for yourself needn't stand in the way of our business together? There are several things I can offer you, if you care to do them."

"Oh, thanks," said Kent; "but I'm afraid I'd better stick to the novel. I want to do all I can with it, you see."

"L'un n'empêche pas l'autre--a short story now and then won't interfere with it, surely? I can place a ten-thousand-word story at once if you like to write it for me."

The refusal was difficult, and he hesitated how to express himself. He had never contemplated the association as a permanent one, and now that an alternative was open to him, its indignity looked doubly repellant. He was surprised that Mrs. Deane-Pitt expected it to continue. Couldn't she understand that he felt it a humiliation--that he had adopted the course merely as a desperate measure in a desperate case? He had taken her comprehension for granted.

"I'd rather not, if you don't mind," he said awkwardly. "It would take me off my own work more than you can imagine. My motive for doing this was to make it possible for me to devote myself heart and soul to a novel; and that is what I want to do."

She looked downcast.

"When do you mean to begin it? You could knock off ten thousand words first, couldn't you? And I believe an occasional short story would come as a relief to you, too! I wouldn't persuade you against your will--pray don't think that--but, as a matter of fact, there is no reason why you shouldn't make a few pounds a week all the time you're writing your book, you know? if you like. I don't want another novel yet, but I can take almost any number of short stories; or, if you preferred it, you might write me a short thing that could be published in paper covers at a shilling. Will you think it over? I don't want to hurry your decision." She hummed a snatch of tune, and picked up a new song that was lying on the piano. "Have you seen this?" she said carelessly. "It's pretty."

Kent took it from her, and played with the leaves in a pause. He was conscious that he must decline now, and definitely, and the insistence of her request made the duty harder every second. Mrs. Deane-Pitt sauntered about the room; she felt blank and annoyed with herself. Was this her reward for liking the man enough to give him two hundred pounds in a lump, instead of paying him by instalments, which would have been infinitely more convenient to her?

"If you won't think me boorish," he said at last abruptly, "I'd rather keep to my intention. I'm not a boy--I need all the time at my disposal to succeed in."

She gave a forced laugh.

"How much younger do you want to be? If the money doesn't attract you, it won't be in your way, I suppose; and--you can do it to oblige me! Come, I'm quite frank! I own that you're very useful to me. You don't mean that you're going to strike and leave me in the lurch?"

The face upturned to him was more earnest than her words. Her brown eyes widened, and fastened on him, and for an instant his resolution broke down. But it was his work, and his ambition, his fidelity to his art, that she was asking him to waive--he would not!

"Nobody so sorry as the 'striker,'" he said, in a tone to match her own. "Let me be your banker when I'm going into a dozen editions, Mrs. Deane-Pitt, and I'll serve you all you want. The service you ask me to-day is just the one I can't do."

"Bien," she murmured; "I suppose you know your own business best."

But she was plainly disappointed, and, though she speedily spoke of another subject, her voice lacked spontaneity. Kent's courage knew no approving glow, and if, during the minutes he remained, she had begged him to assist her by returning the cheque, he would most certainly have done it. He thought that she must hate him--though in truth he had never appealed to her so strongly--and it was the only occasion on which he had ever taken leave of her without regret.

To Cynthia he wrote immediately, telling her he had been paid two hundred pounds, and enclosing twenty-five, that she might have a surplus to draw upon without applying to him. He also remitted to Paris the amount necessary to redeem her ring, and his watch and chain, and the rest. He had now an opportunity of going down to see her, and he told her that she might expect him on Monday or Tuesday in the following week. The picture he had once seen of surprising her in the garden had long since ceased to present itself to him, and he was not impatient to find himself in his wife's company in the circumstances. He questioned if Mrs. Deane-Pitt would be disposed to go with him to Richmond after what had passed. To refuse a woman's petition to augment her income, but to invite her to dinner at Richmond, was rather suggestive of the bread and the stone. Yet, now that propinquity was not her ally, he was fervently glad that he had had strength to refuse. It was a partnership that every month would have made more difficult to sever, and she had, apparently, looked for it to extend over years. As to Richmond, he hoped the engagement would be fulfilled; it would pain him intensely otherwise. He owed her too much to be reconciled to their separating with coldness, and he determined to send a note, reminding her of her promise.

Her reply allayed his misgivings. It was confirmed by her demeanour when they met. Indeed, her display of even more good fellowship than usual made him feel rather guilty.

She seemed to divine his reflections, and to assure him that such self-reproach was needless. She had never been brighter or more informal with him than in the hansom as they drove down. Her air implied that their previous interview had been a trivial folly which, as sensible people, they must banish from their minds, and she talked of everything and nothing with the gaiety of a schoolgirl on an unforeseen excursion, and the piquancy of a woman who had observed and lived.

Her vivacity was infectious, and Kent's constraint gradually melted in a rush of the warmest gratitude for her forbearance. He was so entirely at her mercy here, and he thought that few women similarly placed would have refrained from planting at least one little sting among their verbal honey. His admiration began to comprise details. He remarked the hat she wore, and the delicacy of a little ear against her hair's duskiness. He noted with pleasure the quick, petulant twitch of a corner of her mouth as her veil got in the way, and the appreciative gaze of young men in the cabs that rolled towards them--a gaze which invariably terminated in a swift scrutiny of the charming woman's companion.

When the hotel was reached, he had never been livelier; and, often as he had read an opposite opinion, he found it very delightful to see the woman he was in love with eat, and drink her champagne. It was intimate, it lessened the _noli me tangere_ mien of feminine fashion and brought her closer. The attire of an attractive woman who has never belonged to him has always a mystery for a man, though he may have had three wives and kept a dressmaker's shop. But liveliness was succeeded by a vaguer emotion, as they lounged on the terrace over their coffee and liqueurs. Under the moon the river shone divine, limitless in its glint and shadow. Her features took tenderness from the tremulous light, and sometimes a silence fell which, as he yielded himself to the subtile endearment of the moment, soft as the breath of love on his face, Kent felt to be the supplement of speech. A woman who could have uttered epigrams in the mood that possessed him now would have disgusted him, and insensibly their tones sank. She spoke gently, seriously. Presently some allusion that she made begot a confidence about her earlier life--her marriage. It disturbed him to hear that she had been fond of Deane-Pitt when she married him, yet he was grieved when she owned how quickly her illusions had died. Her belief that she might have been "a better woman" if she had married a different man was pathetic in its revelation of unsuspected heart-aches, and sympathy made him execrate the feebleness of words. Her voice acquired an earnestness that he had never heard in it before, and while he was stirred with the sincerest pity for her, a throb of rapture was in his veins that she could be talking so to him. The minutes were ineffable, in which she seemed to discard the social mask and surrender more and more of her identity to his view. Spiritually she appeared to be lying in his arms; and when she checked herself, and rallied with a laugh which was over-taken by a sigh, he felt that he could have listened to her for ever.

"How solemn we've become!" she exclaimed; "and we came out to be 'festive' to-night."

"I shall always remember the 'you' of to-night," he said.

They were silent again. She passed her hand across her eyes impatiently, as if to wave away the pictures of the past. By transitions their tones regained their former cheerfulness. She mentioned the hour, and drew her wrap about her. It was time to return.

"It has been delicious," she murmured, looking up at the stars. "Only you let me bore you."

"By talking of yourself?"

"So stupid of me!"

"You know," said Kent--"you know!"

"I _wanted_ to tell you; you won't think so badly of me, perhaps."

"I?"

"I'm sure you have. Now, sometimes?"

"If I confessed my thoughts, you'd never say so any more."

"Really?" Her eyes flashed mockery. "You mustn't tell me, then--I might be vain."

The cab bowled over the white roads rapidly. The flutter of her scarf on his shoulder stole through his blood, and the clip-clop sound of the horse's hoofs seemed to him to waken echoes in his inside.

"Do you know, it was very indiscreet of me to come down here with you?" she laughed.

"Supposing somebody had met us!"

"And then?"

"What would be thought?"

"_What_ could be thought?" he asked unsteadily.

"Scandal, perhaps. I'm very angry with you; you've made me do wrong. Why did you make me do wrong when I had such faith in you?"

"You've given me the happiest evening of my life," said Kent; "is that the wrong?"

"Do you think happiness must always be right? It's a convenient creed. Happiness at any price--and let the woman pay it, eh? That's a man's philosophy. You're quite right, though; but, then, you're at the happiest time of life. No, nobody is ever that! The happiest time of life's the past. Believe me, or believe me not, the past is always beautiful; to-morrow I shall regret to-day."

"So shall I," said Kent. "But very much indeed I appreciate it now.... What are you cynical for? You only put it on. It's not 'you' really."

"'Wise judges are we of each other.' How do you know?"

"You said that to me once before--in Paris."

"Said what? Oh, the quotation! When?"

"At your place, after the Variétés."

"What a memory! Yes, you're certainly resolved to try to make me vain. But I'm adamant. Did you know that? I'm made of stone. Do you treasure up what every woman says to you? The answer is a wounded gaze; it's dark to see expressions, but I'll take it for granted."

"I remember what _you_ said to me half an hour ago, and I know your bitterness is a sham. You were meant to be----"

"Oh, 'meant'!" she cried recklessly; "a woman's what she's made. I'm afraid _I've_ been made untidy. Do you mind driving in a hansom with such a figure?"

She plucked at her veil in the strip of looking-glass, and bent her face to him for criticism. The brilliance of the eyes that she widened glowed into him as she leant so, and his arms trembled to enfold her. His mouth was dry as he muttered a response.

The sweetness of June was in the air that caressed them as they sped through the moonlight. With every sentence she let fall, with every glance she shot at him, she dizzied him more, and he sat strained with the struggle to retain his self-command. Through his febrile emotions, the horror of proving false to Cynthia loomed like an angel betokening the revulsion of his remorse. He could imagine the afterwards--he knew how he would feel--and there were instants in which he prayed for the drive to finish and permit escape. But there were instants also in which he ceased to fight, and steeped in the present, yearned only to forget his wife, though tardy remembrance should be a double scourge.

Her fingers were busy at a knot of violets in her dress; and she held the flowers up to him, looking round, smiling.

"Shall I give you a buttonhole?" she inquired gaily. "It would be an appropriate conclusion--my ideals, my withered hopes, and my dead violets! Oh, I shiver to think of what I said to you! Did I gush towards the last? I've a fearful, a ghastly misgiving that I gushed. If you acknowledge that I did, I'll never forgive you; but you shouldn't have encouraged me. Stoop for the souvenir! It cost a penny--symbolic of the sentiment.... Though lost to sight, to memory dear! It will be a very dear memory, won't it? Use me one day! I shall come in as material--the hard woman of the world, who bares her soul on impulse, and the Star and Garter terrace, to the man she likes and stands revealed as--as what? I wonder what you'd make of me. Child, I shall never get this buttonhole in if you don't turn! I've admitted I'm a spectacle, but you might suffer for a second."

Her hair swept his cheek as she wrestled with refractory stalks, and the dark eyes grew and; fastened on him again.

The hansom sped on. The quietude was left behind, and the lights of the West End twinkled around them. There was the rattle of traffic. Kent was laughing at something she had said, and he heard himself with surprise--or was it; himself? The cab rolled to a standstill, and they got out. The lift bore them to her landing. The servant opened the door.

"Good-night," he said; "I won't come in."

"Oh, come in; it's not ten o'clock. You'll have a brandy-and-soda before you go?"

She entered without waiting for his reply, and he followed her reluctantly. Only the lamp had been lighted, and the room was full of crimson shadow. He stood watching her unpin her hat before the mirror, and pull at her gloves.

"I don't think I'll stop," he said again, "really! I've something to do."

"If I can't persuade you----" she answered listlessly.

Her gaiety had deserted her, and there was weariness in her attitude as she drooped by the mantelshelf; her air, her movements, had a languor now. She put out her bare hand slowly, and Kent's clung to it.

He stood holding her hand in a pause....

"I can't leave you," said Kent.