did. So all sorts of other things--art and high ideals, and, yes--even

religion, are given 'em to amuse themselves with until it's too late. Then, of course, they have to pretend they're satisfied. But give 'em their chance over again; you'd see. And for a girl with a face like yours it ought to be so easy. Oh, Nelly, what does your love matter if _his_ buys you health and beauty fifteen years longer, and angel children, and a house with lovely gracious rooms, and cool green lawns in summer, and the winter in the sun, and motor-cars and horses, while poorer women are scrambling and pushing and taking their turns for 'buses and trams in the rain, and a strong arm to help you whenever you need it, and honor and peace in your gray hairs. My own life hasn't been much, but think what it would have been for little ugly Anne Caslon if great-grandfather hadn't dipped his fingers in the Irish Exchequer. And yet--what am I saying?--if Nigel Barbour would have held up his finger, Nelly, I'd have gone with him and cooked his meals and washed his clothes in a garret----"

The nurse tapped Fenella on the shoulder.

"I think you'd best go now. She's been talking some time. I want to settle her for the night."

She shook a bottle as she spoke and poured out a cloudy mixture into a glass.

"Good-night, my pet! Do you remember when I taught you to read--'Ned had a gad--' and you wanted to know what a 'gad' was, and I forgot to find out. I'm afraid we shall never know now."

"I'll see you in the morning," murmured Fenella, as she kissed her. Miss Rigby was on the landing outside, dishevelled, round-eyed, and in a wrapper, asking news of her dear friend in a tragic whisper.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was because she cried herself to sleep that Nelly slept so late. The house was all topsy-turvy, and by the time they remembered to call her Lady Anne had been taken away. Her bedroom windows were wide open and Twyford was strewing tea-leaves on the carpet as Fenella passed the door. She had taken very little luggage--just a portmanteau full of linen and a dressing-case, and two days later she went a longer journey and took no luggage at all.

IX

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

Just as we are used to hearing from time to time that the lives of certain great ones of the earth are insured for many thousands of pounds in quarters which their demise will unsettle but certainly not move to grief, so there are lives dismissed at their close with scant obituary notice, the shadow of whose eclipse reaches far beyond the covenanted few who wear mourning for their sakes.

The house in Suffolk Square never really recovered the shock of poor Lady Anne's taking off. Her rooms, stripped of their household gods, repapered and repainted, stood empty for weeks before Mrs. Barbour could even be prevailed upon to notify their vacancy, and when she did move, the paying guests whom they attracted were not of a sort to efface the hard-riding lady's wholesome memory or to make her the less keenly regretted. London is changing daily, and in nothing so much as in the accommodation it offers the stranger within its gates. Cheap hotels, the diseased craving for a veneered luxury, rapid transit from outskirts to centre--all combine to render what was always a precarious living well-nigh a hopeless one. In vain do old-fashioned people, unable or unwilling to read the signs of the times, advertise the family atmosphere to a public anxious to escape from it--quiet and seclusion to a generation that droops unless it feels its spirits uplifted by the wind and whirl of life. Between the tragic end of the old dispensation and the final dispersion there was a squalid interlude which Fenella never could recall in after years without a sinking of the heart as at the memory of a ravaged sanctuary. A dreadful Anglo-Indian _ménage_, which washed the dirty linen of ten stations with doors and windows open; a grumbling _ayah_ whose gaudy rags clung to her, like wet cloths to a clay model, and whose depredations upon kitchen and larder on behalf of her screaming charges drove cook to revolt. A prim flaxen-tailed family who practised upon the piano all day by turns, and whose high-nosed parent did not think Miss Rigby "respectable." Was she, indeed, respectable? Mrs. Barbour had had her doubts from the first, and in spite of Lady Anne's breezy assurances, or perhaps on account of them, had long suspected a secret treaty of oblivion and protection between the two women. It had seemed, however, to include a tacit clause against direct communication, and with the new order the weaker woman appeared to see her way to break through this restriction upon her social aptitudes. She contracted a distressing habit of rapping at the doors of the first-floor rooms, to borrow, to return, to remonstrate, to apologize for remonstrating. Her friendship with little Mrs. Lovelace of Mian Meer, especially was, until its stormy close, over a disputed bargain at a "White Sale," of a suddenness and intensity calculated to revive a weakened faith in human affinities. Even the mother of the musical Miss Measons, after a glance at a skilfully disposed basket of calling-cards, called her "my dear" before she called her "that woman." In short, to express in one word a delayed and painful process, Jasmine Rigby deteriorated day by day, paid at long intervals, under pressure, and with cheques that were not her own, and finally, yielding no doubt to the instinct of flight from those whose good opinion we have forfeited, took a tearful and sentimental departure from the rooms which had been witness to fifteen futile years, and God alone knows what frenzied resolutions, what agonies of remorse and self-contempt as well. Financially, her loss was a serious matter, for she had rich and powerful connections, who might be trusted never to let her sink too deeply into debt nor beyond a certain standard of outward respectability: in other ways it would be idle to deny Mrs. Barbour felt it a relief. It afforded her an opportunity to reduce her establishment and to sell off some of the furniture. But the joy of turning our possessions into ready money and of ridding ourselves of old associates who have become encumbrances is a dearly bought one. It is likely that her health had been secretly unsatisfactory for years. It failed visibly from the day poor Druce, with the tears streaming down her honest wooden face, clasped her young mistress to her sparely covered chest in the hall and said "Good-bye." She had never been a good sleeper, but insomnia now became her nightly habit. Her cheeks grew flabby, her eyes dull; her comely face exchanged its pleasant pallor for a disquieting earthen tint.

Fenella would have been less than human if, amid all these anxieties, regrets, and annoyances, Lumsden's letters had come to her otherwise than as cheerful heralds from a happier world, bright assurances of a better time in store. He wrote oftener than many friends, though not as often as most lovers. He was generous enough or wise enough not to depart from the note he had struck during their conversation upon the day of winter sports at Freres Lulford. She was still his "investment," always "in training." And yet it was marvellous what a very wide field of inquiry, of advice and speculation, this position was held to justify. Her cheeks sometimes burned at Bryan's letters. Even when they were mere cheery chronicles of sport and pleasure, there was a little mocking undercurrent of sarcasm in them--sarcasm, as a rule, at the expense of society's hypocrisies--its standards of what might and what might not be permitted between two friends of opposite sexes, which she secretly resented--resented, that is to say, to the extent of never referring to it in her answers. Why should Bryan expect her to take the more cynical view, she wondered? Surely illusions were permissible to a girl of her age. What man who respected one, wished one well, would see her cheated of them? Clever letters are seldom written without ulterior motive. When heart speaks to heart it does so in language that admits of no double construction. It would save many a tangle were more sophisticated ones subjected to a merciless paraphrase.

For the rest, the time had probably passed when, in any sense of the word, she could be said to be "afraid" of Lumsden. He stood before her imagination now in all his pleasant power, holding open the gates of the fairyland to which he had the golden key, encouraging, inviting her to enter. Once through the gates, she had no doubt of her ability to justify and to repay. That money can discharge any obligation was just one of the obscuring simplicities of her youth. Another was that a stigma attached to the acceptance of money or money's visible worth. Beyond a cab-fare, she would have shrunk from such a thing as from actual dishonor; yet that money, to the extent of many hundreds of pounds, was being risked upon her untested power to please gave her only a very vague sense of indebtedness. It is true that to Bryan's personal interest she referred, with a completeness that was a little unfair to Mr. Dollfus's really kind heart, the ameliorations in her hard task--the warm dressing-room, the polite seriousness with which her views were entertained by the leader of the orchestra, the chair in the wings at rehearsals. She even fancied that she could detect a conspiracy to keep the seamy side of theatrical life from her. Mr. Lavigne, the stage-manager, never swore in her presence, though from her dressing-room she often heard language whose very volume implied profanity reverberate like stage thunder through the dark empty auditorium.

When general rehearsals began in March, among her new comrades upon the draughty, echoing boards, who stood blowsy or haggard in the perverse up-thrown light and exchanged the knowing, raffish jargon of their craft, there was abundant discussion as to her precise position, but no doubt at all. It is a pitiful thing to relate, but Bryan even got the credit of the clothes in which poor foolish Mrs. Barbour had sunk the profits of her enterprise. Fenella's dress had always possessed sophistication, and although by this time she was "economizing," enough of elegance remained from the old life to wreck her character in the new. But where she was now such things were a common-place. The misconception even was of use to her in one way. It removed her from the envy of those who were struggling upward on the strength of mere talents. Seen from the wings, her dancing made little impression upon a race not prone to enthusiasm, and notoriously bad judges of their own craft. She was to have the lime-light, the big letters on the bills, the "fat"--that was enough. She was _hors concours_, a thing apart. The latest recruit might dream, and did dream, of having the same chance some day. A strange thing, that it should be not so much "luck" which failure resents as the crown upon hard work.

By an unhappy coincidence, the first dress rehearsal was called upon the day when her spirits were at lowest ebb. The night before, her mother, unable to keep the secret locked up in her breast any longer, had exposed with tears and incoherent self-reproach, the whole disastrous domestic situation. It was all mismanagement, muddle, abused confidence, rights signed away for a tithe of their value, mortgages and life assurances effected in the interests of people whose one service seemed to have been to draw the strangling net a little tighter. Fenella closed the eyes of her mental vision firmly and wisely against the disastrous prospect. She let her mother have her cry out upon her shoulder.

"No, dear; of course I'm not angry with you, or only a tiny bit for letting me be a foolish over-dressed little pig all these years. We'll give up this great big house before it's swallowed all that's left and move into a smaller one. They must give us something for the lease. And I've got Lady Anne's money coming to me in two years. We can raise something on that now. I'll speak to Mr. Dollfus about it. And Mr. Lavigne told me the _Dime Duchess_ comes on early in May; then I shall begin to draw salary, and all our troubles will be over. And, mummy, you _must_ give those disgusting people upstairs notice. Never mind what they owe. Turn them out! I'll live in a garret with you, dear, but I won't have our home turned into a common lodging-house."

But, for all her brave words, her own spirits sank. Was she so sure of success, after all? To have so much depending upon it was only a reason the more for misgiving. Dancing seemed to be in the air. The flaming posters that met her eye on every side, of women in one stage or another of uncoveredness, filled her with nausea. Nothing depresses true genius so much as to feel that an inspiration with which they could deal worthily is given broadcast, under various mean forms of impulse or emulation, to those whose touch can only degrade. It is a failing so like unworthy envy that even to be forced to admit it to oneself is demoralizing.

When she reached the theatre a drama that was no part of the _Dime Duchess_ was in progress. Miss Enid Carthew stood down centre. Her dress was Doucet and her hat Virot. Her sable coat was open at the throat and a diamond _collier_ streamed blue fire on her agitated bosom. Her arm, thrust through a muff whose tails swept the dusty stage, was akimbo on her slender hip. She had a pretty, dissipated, sour face and a quantity of fair hair.

"Oh! I can't have it at all, Mr. Dollfus," she was saying, evidently not for the first time, biting her lips and tapping the stage with her foot. The manager, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, his back to the footlights, straddled his legs in a truculent manner.

"You can't haf it!" he repeated, derisively. "Well, can yer lump it? Ah! Think yer the only tin can in the alley, dontcher, eh? Think you're de manachment, ain't it? I tell you once for all: I bills who I like, unt I bills 'em as big's I like. Now then--ah! eh?"

"You can tell all this to my solicitor," said Miss Carthew, loftily.

The word seemed to goad Mr. Dollfus to frenzy. He took a stride forward and shook a brown, ringed finger within an inch or two of Miss Carthew's Grecian profile.

"Now, don't gif me no contract talk. Pleace--_pleace_ don't. 'Cos I drew up de contract, and I know what's in um. You can't holt me on de contract--see? You can go on rehearsing or you can t'row yer part down, and that's all--now?"

"I've a good mind to do it."

"Vell, make yer goot mind up quick, pleace, 'cos this happens ter be my busy day."

Before poor Fenella could retreat from the storm, the leading lady looked her up and down with an expression that was meant for contempt, but only succeeded in expressing dislike. The advantage of five years is not to be annihilated by a glance.

"Another of Lumsden's kindergarten," she observed, with a short, disagreeable laugh, and, having launched this Parthian shaft, exit left.

Mr. Dollfus turned upon the cause of the trouble rather irritably.

"Vot! aintcher dressed yet, neither. Good Got! ve oughter be t'rough the first act. Run upstairs at once! And while we're waiting let's haf the finale ofer again. I ain't satisfied yet, Mr. Lavigne. Come, _kapell-meister_!"

Somehow, and by an effort of her whole will, Fenella got through her two dances without actual disaster. For the first time in her life discouragement failed to react in bodily movement. Her limbs felt heavy--out of accord with the music, and, though this is a strange term for arms and legs, maliciously stupid. Once she stumbled and all but fell. Mr. Dollfus looked puzzled, and in the wings, where a brisk murmur of sympathy with the deposed favorite had been running, significant glances were exchanged.

She was leaving the stage-door, glad to be in the cool, wet street, when a big man who was holding cheerful converse with an exquisite youth--all waist and relaxed keenness--raised his hat and made a little familiar sign with his head for her to wait. Next moment Lumsden had cut his conversation short, resisting an obvious appeal for introduction, and was holding out his hand.

"Hello, Flash!"

At another time she would have been glad to see him, but, with that dreadful sentence ringing in her ears, his touch seemed an abasement. She plucked her hand away.

"I thought you were in Cannes."

"Came back Tuesday. Had lunch?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Get in, then, and let me drive you home."

There was a dark green motor-coupé standing by the curb. Fenella took a seat in it automatically. She noticed he had no difficulty in recalling her address.

"I've been sitting in front watching you."

"I wish I'd done better. I made a fool of myself to-day."

"Oh, you were all right. Been over-working?"

She shook her head.

"Dolly told me there was a breeze. Hope it didn't upset you."

No answer.

"Bless you! That sort of thing's an everyday affair with us. Oh, fie, Flash!"

"Sir Bryan"--and a big sob.

"Well, what is it? Having trouble with the boys?"

"I know you'll be furious."

"Never mind. Spit it out in mummy's hand."

"Don't make me laugh. I--I want to give it up."

"Pshaw!"

"Oh, but I do."

"What on earth for?"

She clenched her hands. "Because I feel such a _humbug_ coming on this way. Those other girls have worked and worked and been acting when I was at school. And now I step in front of them because--oh! you know what they think."

"I warned you of that before, you know."

"Yes; but I didn't realize then."

"And now, because a spiteful woman has said the obvious thing, you do. Oh, fie, Flash! This is weak-minded. I wish you knew her own history."

The girl turned to him, and even laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

"Sir Bryan, that's the mistake you make. You're always telling me--I mean in your letters--what a hypocrite this person or that is. But it doesn't make any difference to me. Of course, we understand one another, don't we?"

"I think we've made a start," Lumsden replied, in all seriousness.

"Yes, but those girls at the Dominion--some of them even younger than me. Think what I must seem to them. I can't go to them and say, 'Oh, believe me, it's not what you think.' And so the more they admire me, and the better I succeed, the greater scandal I shall be to them. And perhaps, some day----Oh! it seems such a responsibility, doesn't it?"

"Such a big one, that I advise you to put it out of your head."

"Oh, if I could!"

"Well, don't do anything in a hurry. And, oh, by the way, Flash, I believe I met an old friend of yours last night. World's a small place."

"A friend of mine? One of the people from Lulford?"

"Oh, no. Further back. At La Palèze. By George! that seems ancient history."

His kind, candid expression did not change, and yet not a detail of the girl's agitation was escaping him.

"Where did you meet him? Tell me, quick!"

"Don't look so scared. It was at a very nice house indeed, and he was looking uncommonly well."

"Did you speak to him?"

"No. He hadn't much to say. It was at the Rees house, and he's evidently _épris_."

"What's that?"

"Why, smitten with his pretty hostess--Mrs. Hepworth--the woman who calls herself Althea Rees, and writes rummy books. He stayed behind. I saw it arranged, like the fly, with my little eye. I finished the evening with Nick Templeton, who knows 'em well, and he says every one's expecting----Hello! here we are."

He held her hand again at parting, and this time she didn't snatch it away. Once inside the door, she returned a languid negative to the suggestion of lunch, and went upstairs to change her clothes and think over what she had just heard. First she cried a little, though nothing like as much as she had expected from the apparent weight at her heart; then, opening her trunk, she took out a leather box and emptied all his letters on to the hearth. So often, during that last lonely week by the sea, when she was hungering for news of him in vain, had she taken them down to the dunes to read, that there was almost a teaspoonful of fine sand at the bottom of the case. She had even been reading them over, she remembered, the day Bryan spoke to her first. She sat down on the hearth-rug, struck a match, and, crumbling each letter scientifically in her hand, burned piecemeal about half her little hoard from the wrecked past. Then she lost patience and locked the rest away. She was chilly; there had been no warmth in this sudden eager flame. She stretched herself and looked once more at her reflection in the long mirror. Her tears had thickened her features and throat. Something strangely, suddenly mature--some new adaptibility to life's sterner purposes--was looking back at her. She had wept--oh, how she had wept!--before, and yet only yesterday with her tears it had been the aspect of childhood that returned upon her. You would have said then: "There is a little girl who has broken her doll"; not until to-day: "There is a woman who has broken her heart." Was it so, indeed? Had it survived the first, the crueller blow, to break now at a piece of intelligence that was only to be looked for? Had there been hope, insane and unavowed? And why could she not hate him, as was her right? Why was it that only a brooding, yearning pity for him survived this final evidence of his faithlessness? Oh! it was because life was so hard on him--always would be so hard on him. Into whatever toils he had fallen, she could forgive him, because she knew he had not been seeking his own happiness when he fell. Just as she had never once conjectured concerning the old loves, so now she hazarded no guess as to the history of the new; but her woman's instinct, her appreciation of the nature by whose complexities her clear, sane common-sense had refused to be baffled, served her truly. It was still his compassion that sold him into new bondage--still his fatal fellowship with all that was weak, maimed or forsaken that, like a millstone round his neck, sunk him out of her sight. Hate him? Oh, what an uprush of smothered waters! What a tingling, as love like blood flowed back into her numbed heart, rebuked the suggestion! She reached out her arms to the mirror, and from its frozen depths, like an embodiment of all he had renounced in life--happiness, love, laughter, and ease of heart--the woman whom he had held shyly and awkwardly against his distracted heart, and whom to-morrow a thousand base eyes would covet, reached out her arms, too, in a mocking response.

"Oh, darling! why couldn't you trust me a little longer? Just because I couldn't _say_ things, didn't I feel them? I was what you wanted most. Just because I _was_ so different. Why weren't you a little patient with me, Paul?"

And now for her work. There was another rehearsal next week, but she couldn't wait. She would telephone Joe; have one called for Friday. They should see something then. She had a bit up her sleeve.

She was leaving her bedroom, humming over the first bars of her _Chaconne_, when she cannoned into the little maid who had replaced the irreproachable Druce. The sleeves of the girl's print dress were rolled up to her elbows, her cap awry.

"Frances, it's five o'clock. Why aren't you dressed?"

"Oh, miss! It's the missus."

"Your mistress? What's the matter with her?"

"Oh, miss, I dunno. She's a setting in the big armchair. It ain't sleep. Me nor cook can't rouse 'er, try 'ow we may. She's a moanin', too. I think it must be some kind of a stroke."

X

MONSIEUR DE VALBONNETTE

One of Paul's peculiarities, which I think I have indicated before, was a remissness in paying out the small coin of friendship. His visits were apparently governed by caprice, and as unaccountable as the fall of the red or black in roulette. Not to have seen him for the last month gave no warrant to expect him within the next. On the other hand, to have been honored with a visit last night was some reason for expecting a return on the morrow.

I had not seen him for two months when I ran across him in the foyer of the Elite Theatre. It was the first night of Durnham's _Miss Muffet_. (You will remember Brasier as "the Spider.") Things apparently were inextricably tangled up for all the smart sinners, and I was rather dreading the fourth act. I was surprised to see him there, though I knew he had got into journalism. In the twilight of our under-world one may know a man a long time before one knows what he is doing--perhaps only discover it then because he is found nibbling at the same loaf as oneself. I had never seen Ingram before in evening dress; he looked very gaunt and foreign and distinguished. One mentally added a red ribbon and the enamelled cross of the Légion d'Honneur.

"Hullo, Ingram! you a first-nighter?"

"I'm doing it for the _Parthenon_!"

"Oh! of course." Rumor had not lied, then. I had a horrible feeling that my comment sounded "knowing," and a suspicion that Ingram flushed at my tone. I made haste to change it.

"Lucky devil! You've got nearly a week to do Brasier's genius justice in. What d'you think of it all?"

"Pah! London bouquet. Sin and sachet powder."

"You won't say that in the _Parthenon_?"

"No." I noticed then how tired he looked. The bell began to ring.

"Look here, old man! You're quite impossible, but I want a chat. Where can you come on to afterward? Pimlico's so far away. What do you say to the _Concentric_?" (I belong perforce to an "all-night" club.)

Ingram demurred. "No, thanks. I don't much care for the frescoes at the _Concentric_. I've got rooms--a room, I should say--nearly as close. It's not a bad little crib. Come round there as soon as you've fired in your stuff." And I pencilled the address on my shirt-cuff.

Paul's room was at the top of a narrow, old-world house in Beak Street, almost looking into Golden Square. A creeper wandered over the front, and there were little painted iron balconies at each window. The first floor was taken up by a bowed, weather-stained shop front, and behind its narrow panes, on a rusty wire blind, appeared the following legend in gilt lettering:

"J. FOUDRINIER Table Liner and Leather Gilder."

The narrow staircase up which we climbed--for he let me in himself--was fragrant with the smell that is said to make radicals.

"What d'you think of it, Prentice?"

"Fine! Atmosphere here, my boy."

"It might be worse," said Paul, apparently misunderstanding my remark. "Imagine fried fish!"

I looked round me as he fought with a stubborn fire. The room was poor and low; its furnishings mere flotsam of the Middle Victorian era. The bureau and tallboy that I used to admire so much at Westminster were gone. My heart sank a little. Paul wasn't getting on.

"Come over here a minute, Prentice," he said, getting up and taking the lamp. "Look!"

Upon the old-fashioned shutter which folded back in the window recess I made out a long name, clumsily cut and half obliterated by paint.

"What do you make of it?"

"It's not very distinct. There's a C and a V."

"I'll read it for you. It's '_C. Gaillard de Valbonette_.' That thing at the top is meant for a coronet. Some French _émigré_ had this room a hundred years ago, and amused himself by cutting his name. All this quarter swarmed with them at one time--Golden Square, Broad Street, King Street. Can't you imagine him at work here for a whole Sunday morning, with a nice pea-soup fog out in the square, and speculating about his wife or sweetheart in the Conciergerie. He's great company at times, is M. de Valbonette."

"I think you live too much alone, Ingram," I said.

He put down the lamp. "I wonder do I?" he said, twisting his beard. "But it's Satan reproving sin."

"Let's club lonelinesses, then," I answered impulsively. "I know what I'll have to put up with by now. Remember the old warning, '_Vae Soli!_' If nothing else in the classics were true, that is."

"No," he said, roughly, "it's the wrong time. How can I afford a friend when I'm throwing out ballast all around. And besides"--he seemed to struggle with an invincible repugnance to speak--"Prentice, I'm living on money a woman--gives me."

"Oh!" Shocked as I was, I tried to keep my voice flat and toneless. Even as it escaped me, the exclamation was rather a request for further enlightenment.

"You won't repeat your invitation now?"

I got to my feet. "Yes, I will. You can come to-morrow--to-night, if you like. You're too good to lose, Ingram. I'm poor; but there's enough for two men like ourselves to struggle along on, even now. I can get you work of a sort almost at once; it'll be hack work, but you won't feel equal to anything better for awhile. Later on, when you're more yourself----"

Ingram shivered, and then, putting his hands on my shoulders, considered me a long while gravely and tenderly. I could have cursed to think of the charm of the man, wasted in loneliness and silence, and put to such base uses at last.

"My! but you're _white_, Prentice, you're _white_," he said. "Sit down"--in a lighter voice. "It's not as bad as it sounds. A man doesn't fall into a pit like that so suddenly. No; at first it was advances--advances; nothing more."

"On your book?" catching at a straw.

"Yes--on my book."

"From publishers?"

"I thought so at first. When I asked the question outright, it was too late. I was in debt already."

"But, my dear Ingram," I said, immensely relieved; "if Mrs. Hepworth--I suppose you mean Mrs. Hepworth----?"

"Yes."

"Well, if she liked to back her own opinion, I don't see where dishonor comes in at all. She's helped other people. And even if, when it's published, it turns out badly----"

"Prentice, it never will be published through her."

"Get it back then. We'll try somewhere else."

"I'm afraid I'd have some trouble even to get it back now."

The mystification was getting too much for me. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly.

"I'm sorry to seem mysterious," said Paul, "but I really am telling you all I know myself. I even hoped you'd be able to throw some light on it. Because you know as well as I do how it started. She was enthusiastic, wasn't she? Would see no fault. She advised me to cut a good deal, it's true; but it wasn't for reasons I could object to. Anyway I didn't object. I was too proud and happy. For once in my life I tasted full appreciation, full understanding. Oh! I know what that look of yours means--that I've been taking a woman's gush for gospel. But, I can tell you, a thing rings true or false to me the first time. Do you know, Prentice, once we were motoring to some place near Aylesbury, and she went ten miles out of our way to see the church where Ffoulkes--the English parson, you know--was a curate once. I'd just picked on the place haphazard, and then described it later. You know my mania for exactness in trifles. Nothing would satisfy her but to get out of the car, have the church opened, and scout around the vicarage. Now, is that genuine or isn't it? I tell you, sir, she made the people of my own book live for me--used to invent comments for them upon things we heard, so much in character that I wondered how I could have forgotten them myself."

"And then----?"

"And then"--wearily--"the subject dropped. When I spoke about it, which wasn't often, her answers were as evasive as a woman's can be who, I think, can't lie. I'm not an insistent person, and she seemed to guess it. Money got short: she guessed that too--offered me advances on the publication. Ever so delicately, mind."

"That was the very time for the _éclaircissement_."

"I know, I know. Don't be too grim. For me it's almost impossible to throw any sort of kindness back in people's faces. It's been responsible for half the unhappiness of my life. Then she got me this thing on the _Parthenon_. Lord, how I hate it! and the people it brings me into contact with, and how they must hate me! Sleek young barristers, on the make--you know the sort--dine out every night and say, 'Dear lady.'"

"Ingram! I say 'dear lady' sometimes."

"Yes, yes--but not the way they do. A precious johnny-cake of an art critic who wears thumb-rings and doesn't wash behind his ears...."

I hadn't been listening very attentively. A light was breaking in upon me.

"You meet a good many priests at Mrs. Hepworth's, don't you?"

Ingram raised his hands expressively. "My dear Prentice, at all hours--dinner, tea and lunch--bishops, deans, canons, monsignori. I don't know half their titles."

"I gather you don't find them sympathetic."

"Prentice, I just writhe."

"Aren't they civil?"

"Oh, intensely! It's their mental attitude that maddens me. So perpetually on guard, so impermeable to argument: bearing the condemnation of the massed intellect of Europe with a pitying smile, denying words their plain significance. What is it, Prentice? Is every one else really wrong? Does to be born at Guipuscoa instead of at Epworth make all the difference? Do these men know something that you and I don't? Sometimes in their company I almost feel I'm under mesmeric influence."

"Perhaps you are. I've always suspected you of being mediumistic. But, tell me, don't you suspect anything from all this?"

"Suspect--what?"

"That your book is really being held up because these men won't give it an _imprimatur_."

"Good Lord! I'm not one of their flock."

"No, but Althea is."

Paul flushed savagely, and muttered something I could not catch.

"Don't be too hard on her, Ingram. Probably her position's harder than either of us can conceive."

"Don't be afraid. There are about a hundred solid reasons why I couldn't be hard, even if I wanted to. Besides, I'm ceasing to care."

"Got the hump, in fact."

"Call it what you like. The book's become a scandal--a reproach. It's a relief not to see or hear of it. Once a certain point is reached a sense of humor comes to your rescue, and you cease to take a thing seriously. Something else is worrying me far more just now."

"What is it?"

"You'll only think me an old woman for my pains."

"Never," I answered stoutly. "Your virility is in your way."

"Do you believe in dreams?"

"Not as a rule. But at two o'clock in the morning, alone with you in a Soho attic whose associations you've just pointed out, I'm not so sure."

"I'm having the same one every night."

"Oh! What is it? A woman, or merely a tartan cat with acetylene eyes?"

"It's a woman."

"Go and see her then. Nothing will exorcise it like that."

"But it doesn't. Oh, Prentice! it's no use beating round the bush. You must know. I mean the woman we've just been talking about."

I confess I had been rather thinking of the Continental Express at Charing Cross.

"Go ahead old man," was all I said. "It will do you good to tell."

"It's in a church--always. A sort of foreign building with colored marble columns, gloomy side chapels, silver lamps, dark paintings of well-nourished virgin martyrs----"

"Wait a minute. Is it any place you've seen?"

"No. I'm sure of that.... She's always kneeling before one of the side altars. I'm not clear why I'm in the church at all. I'm not meeting her. Her back is turned, and she doesn't seem to know I'm there. And yet, mind you, I feel--I'm as certain as a man can be that there's something or other she wants to tell me--wants me to know. Something she's struggling with, and I'm not to go until it's told."

"At this point you wake?"

"I used to until last night. Do I sound childish, yet?"

"I'm immensely interested, Ingram. No one but a gross fool laughs at these things to-day."

"Well, last night I lost patience, and began to look around and to take bearings. I noticed there was a way in between the chapels, so you could pass from one to the other. I could get in front of her, see her face if I wanted to. Of course I wanted to. I tell you, I was tired out with all this nightly waiting. But something or other I couldn't see--'a Voice,' if you like--said, 'No, you can't!' 'Why not?' I argued. The answer was foolish."

"What was it?"

"'_It breaks the Law_'."

I moved restlessly. "But I hope you didn't mind the Law."

"No; I went in."

"Well----?"

He took a long breath. "Prentice, she's been dead for years and years."

"Pshaw!"

"Yes, dead, I tell you. There's nothing gruesome about it. Just--bleached--whiteness. But you can't mistake. You'd only have to lay your hand on her and she'd crumble away."

There was not a sound for a few moments, until becoming conscious my expression must look strange, I grabbed the poker and began to make brisk play with it. I also decided not to tell Paul I recognized the church perfectly from his description.

"What do you think of it?"

"Think? Oh, nothing. It's some sub-conscious crazy notion that has never been definitely formed in your own brain, so waits until you're asleep to sprout. The same thing's happened to me. Once I was visiting some people. They were so far disagreeable that one had to be very careful what one said before them. And every night I spent in their house I used to dream I was crossing the lawn, and underfoot, wherever I walked, were ducklings, and frogs, and new-born kittens, and everything that's most unpleasant to tread upon. You probably won't have the dream again.... What's the matter?"

"Look over there, Prentice! Do you see anything queer?"

I followed his eyes in the direction of the window upon whose shutter he had shown me the half-obliterated carving. To evidence my entire honesty in this matter, I will premise that, having shifted the lamp from the centre of the table in order to find me a pipe, Paul had plunged all that half of the room in shadow, and also that the curtain, which he had drawn roughly aside to show me the _émigré's_ work, still hung in awkward, bulgy folds. This much having been freely allowed, I don't mind going on and declaring that I saw, apparently as plainly as I have seen anything in my life, a man sitting upon the narrow window-seat. Every detail was distinct. He was as small as a woman, apparently old, and dressed entirely in black, with a white collar or cravat. One leg hung down to the floor, the other was drawn up to his chin, and his face rested upon it. He had white hair, gathered up or cut short round his ears, and a black cap. His expression was unforgettable. Serene, disdainful anger best expresses it.

I looked at him only a moment, for I don't believe in encouraging visions. In two strides I was across the room and shook the curtain loose.

"There goes some of your ghost," I said. I put the lamp back on the table. Its white reflection vanished from the blurred and darkened pane. "And there goes the rest!"

Paul didn't seem to listen. He was twisting his beard.

"See his face, Prentice? Now, I wonder what I said that irritated him?"

XI

"INEXTRICIBLE ERROR"

It was quarter to seven when Ingram arrived at the house in Portland Place. Althea, already dressed for dinner, sat writing at her desk in the big white room. It was the same desk, battered and inkstained, at which years ago--a staid little maid with a big pigtail, terminating in a sort of heavy tassel of auburn hair--she had prepared her home lessons. At one corner the leather lining had begun to curl up.

She scarcely looked round when he was announced, but thrust a bare white arm over the back of her chair.

"You find me achieving a last chapter," said she. "Sit down somewhere and, in the name of our common art, respect a fellow-laborer's agony."

"I suppose I'm unpardonably early."

"Doubly privileged mortal, then, to find yourself welcome."

"Do I abuse my privileges, Althea?"

"Never in the world. You are as unobtrusive, my dear friend, as a gray sky."

Paul, as he sat down by the fire, wondered why the phrase rang reminiscently. Who had compared his eyes once before to rain-clouds? Oh! he remembered. It was the little girl, in the summer-time, by the sea. He seldom thought of her now; when he did, it was without such a personal pang of loss as might have been expected. She had come--she had gone. The life before he had known her, the life after, like parted leaden waters in the wake of a ship, closed above her memory.

For form's sake, and in order that his presence might not fret his hostess, he picked up a book at random and opened it on his knee; but his eyes, after a few minutes' aimless reading, left the printed page and rested on her. She was writing quickly. The fountain-pen poised, pounced, ran forward, and was checked anew. A little pucker on her forehead straightened out as each sentence was completed. The shaded electric lamp before her left the brows in a green shadow, but flooded neck and arms with naked light. She was dressed in black; a long limp scarf the color of a dead rose-leaf lay across her shoulders, trailed upon the carpet, moved with the motion of the restless bare arm. Her beautiful chestnut hair was drawn up from her neck and dressed high on her head in soft rolls and plaits. Looking at her, and remembering the furnace through which she had passed, Ingram marvelled once again that the searing flame should have left so little evident trace upon her.

He had come prepared for explanation, reproaches, rupture even, but never in his life had he felt less ardor for battle, more doubt as to whether the cause were worthy the warfare. Hope deferred, neglect, dejection, had nearly done their work. He was beginning to doubt his own powers, inclining more each day to take the world's estimate of them as final. He had been writing a good deal lately, and to little purpose; it seemed unlikely that, years before, he had done better. No man endowed with the artist's temperament ever gained ease to himself by deliberately writing down to some imagined popular level. It is doubtful even whether the thing is to be done at all; probably every one that succeeds, even in the coarse acceptation of the term, succeeds by doing the best that is in him. The world may have no eye for genius, but it is quick to detect disrespect.

It was early in March: he had known her now nearly six months. To say that they had become better friends in that time would be inexact; it is juster to say that, from the high level of her first acclaim, he had never known her to descend. She had seemed to divine that he was already sick of beginnings that led nowhere, and lacked patience for the circumspect steps that friendship in the first degree requires. From the outset she showed him a full measure. She had a multitude of friends--much devotion, even, at her command. Here and there, amid the exotic sentimentality that for some reason or other was the dominant note in her circle, a graver, truer note vibrated; and yet, before he had known her a month, Paul must have been obtuse indeed not to have noticed a special appeal in her voice and a special significance in the hand-clasp that was kept for him. And if he was not precisely grateful, he was, at any rate, tremendously impressed. He had learnt her history, and no adventitious aid that riches, popularity, fine clothing or jewels--and none of these was wanting--could have lent her would so overwhelmingly have presented her to his imagination as this. That she should have emerged from such an ordeal at all was wonderful, but that she should have come through it beautiful still, gentle and plaintively wise, lent an almost spectral charm to her beauty, and the same significance to her lightest comment on men or things that one strives to read into a rapped-out message wrung from the dubious silence of the grave. The strange unreality which none who knew Althea well escaped noticing, though all did not call it by the same name, reached him, oppressed as he was by the burden of the material world, almost like a native air. In her house he breathed freely, forgot his chagrins, was enveloped in a formless sympathy that, by anticipating the unwelcome thought, spared him even the humiliation of uttering it.

Perhaps, without looking at him, she had guessed his thought now. At least there was a little conscious gaiety in her voice as she laid by her pen and packed the loose sheets square.

"_Voilà!_" said she. To speak French always carries the register a key higher. She switched off the light, and moved to the seat opposite him with a soft rustle of skirts. One finger-tip was marked with ink. She put it furtively to her lips and streaked it, schoolgirl fashion, down her black dress.

"Would you like to know who you are dining with?" she asked, taking a slip of paper from the mantelpiece. "We're very worldly indeed to-night. 'Marchesina d'Empoli, the Countess of Hatherley, Lady Claire Templeton, Mrs. Sidney Musgrave.' Here! see for yourself."

As Paul glanced over the list, she put one slender foot on the curb of the fender and pulled her skirt a few inches above her ankle.

"'Sir Bryan Lumsden?' Who's he?"

"A stock-broking baronet, sir, of my acquaintance."

"That's a lurid description."

"He's very good to my 'Sparrow Parties.' Do you know him, that you pick him out?"

"I've seen him once," said Ingram slowly, pulling at his beard. "His manners where women are concerned did not impress me."

She tapped the rail with her foot. "You are very unmannerly. Mustn't I ask the world and the flesh sometimes?"

"What about the devil?"

She gave a tentative and rather frightened glance at his sardonic face.

"I think _he_ comes the earliest."

There was no mistaking her meaning. Paul put the slip back on the mantelpiece.

"Don't you think," said he, speaking with equal intention, "that it's as well even the devil should be allowed to state a case at times?"

"Perhaps--I don't know," Althea faltered in reply.

"Excuse me if I bore you. I don't ask often. Is there any news of my luckless story?"

"Some one is reading it."

"Some publisher?"

"Not exactly. I--I wanted an opinion from some one who--from some one----"

"Some one quite impartial, you mean?"

"Not quite that, either. From some one who is able to take a very special point of view."

Ingram laughed grimly. "Why don't you get some of your worldly friends to teach you how to lie?"

"_Sir!_"

He regarded her from head to foot and back again. Her cheeks flamed--not altogether with anger. It was not unpleasant to be looked at hard by him.

"Althea," he said at last, "suppose I told you I had come to-night to quarrel with you?"

She turned with a strange, scared appeal in her eyes.

"Oh! I should beg you not to. Don't ever quarrel with me, Paul--please."

The artless speech was so unlike anything he had ever heard from her--her voice, as she uttered it, so uncomfortably reminiscent of another, whose vain pleading had only just ceased to vibrate in his heart, that Paul had what may be best described as a moment of sentimental vertigo.

He laid his hand lightly upon hers. "Dear Mrs. Hepworth, do you dream I could be harsh with you?"

She did not move her hand from under his, nor appear conscious that one chapter of their intimacy was irretrievably ended by the impulsive moment.

"I only know I dread your anger. I suspect it can be awful."

"You shall never be sure, then. But reproof at least you must bear. Althea, you have put me under an obligation that no man finds tolerable."

Now she snatched her hand away. "Oh!" with a catch in her voice, "that is unworthy of you."

"And you are keeping me from what is at least a chance to discharge it."

"It is not I who keeps you from it."

The blood rushed to Ingram's head. "Some occult tribunal, then--some inquisition against whose unwarrantable interference my whole soul protests."

"Hush!" for he had raised his voice. "I think I hear a ring. People are beginning to arrive, and I must fly. Come down in about five minutes--it will look better--and wait after the rest are gone. I think you had best understand my position in this matter clearly. That much is due you."

XII

A CATASTROPHE

Checked in mid-course, and with all his righteous indignation bottled up, Paul, I expect, hardly found the "worldly" dinner a diverting affair. He had reached the stage of mental development--a mid-way one, be it noted--where types interest more than persons, and none of those he met to-night aroused in him anything save a burning desire for their speedy effacement. Lumsden did not appear to remember him, which was hardly wonderful, considering the complete change of dress and environment. Besides which the baronet was a man very much occupied and in request throughout dinner. He was just back from the _Côte d'Azur_, and was primed with the true inwardness of the approaching Manby-Millett sensation. Lucy Millett was passing through Paris alone, and thought it civil to leave a card on the only Mrs. Manby at the _Superbe_ because she had sent her a wedding present. Mrs. Manby's reputation hadn't reached her, it seems, which was hardly wonderful, seeing Lucy was a daughter of the great Quaker sago-refining family, and rather out of things. She had left her own card and her husband's, and by a mistake of the clerk only the smaller card was handed to the gay lady on her return. Result: that Lucy found a _petit bleu_ waiting when she got back from a round of the shops, which gave everything away. "Most impassioned," Lumsden understood, on good authority, and quite up to Manby form.

"And if you put that in one of your books, Mrs. Hepworth, people would say there was too much--what d'you call it?--coincidence, wouldn't they, now?"

It happened that Lady Robert Millett had been the first woman Ingram had interviewed for the _Parthenon_. He remembered the sandy haired girl-wife at Isleworth, with her high teeth, awkward kindness and innocent pride, who had given him tea and, "as a special favor," shown him her white squirrels and blue-wattled Japanese fowl. Well--her happiness was destroyed. He did not join in the laughter when some one achieved a stammering, knock-kneed epigram in French; something about _sagou_ and _sagesse_.

Captain Templeton had just won a seat for his party in a three-cornered contest. He detailed with considerable verve the intrigues necessary to induce a labor candidate to run and split the vote. The Liberal's wife had social ambitions. "I hope we shall meet in town, Captain Templeton," she had said after the poll. "We're Liberal; but _naturally_ most of our friends are on your side of the house."

At the top of the table, with his noble old ivory-white face, silver hair, and limitless shirt-front, their host sat, a fine flower of democracy, and enjoyed his daughter's social success. His ponderous civilities failed to absorb the little Italian marchesina on his right (Gioconda, they say, of the _Fool's Errand_). Her heart was at the noisy end of the table; continually, at some new outburst, she would clap her tiny ringed hands autocratically for silence. "_What_ is this? _What_ is this? I have not heard well." Things had to be repeated, explained, for her benefit.

Paul was nearest the door, and rose to open it as the women passed out. His hostess, who had barely addressed a word to him during dinner, bent forward as she passed and reminded him of his promise. Lumsden was the only man who seemed to notice the incident; and Ingram thought he caught the tail end of a look of intelligence as he returned to the table. But it was gone instantly, and presently the men drew to the side next the fire and began to talk tariffs. Tongue-tied amidst the women's chatter, their host easily dominated the conversation now. He spoke of Republican prospects at the Mid-West conventions, their intimate association with business prosperity, discussed the new influences at Washington with good-natured banter, predicted worse times before a "banner-year," hinted what was worth watching meantime. The men listened to him intently--even Lumsden--carelessly, sipping their coffee or rolling their liqueurs round and round in tiny gilt glasses. Every word was golden now. Art, literature, philosophy, all the visions that visit an idle mood, blew off like mists when the sun mounts the sky. Paul, watching him in silence, felt an involuntary respect, a pride despite himself, in their common nationality.

"You're force," he was saying to himself, "blind Titanic force--that's what you are. And our business is with you and not with this trash that cumbers the ground and obscures the issue; these parasites, who imagine the things their own hearts covet were the incentive to men like yourself, who corrupt you because they fear you, and with grave, attentive faces are trying to make you believe now that there's great personal merit in what you've been doing. You've sucked up riches from a disorganized society that your energy took unawares, because you couldn't help it, and you spend it on yourselves because you don't know any better way. Well, we must show you one. The force that creates, the wisdom that could distribute--these two are groping for each other through a maze of laws, human and divine, that the world has outgrown. They must mingle, must come together, must interpenetrate, and if priests and judges hinder, then priests and judges must go. They were made for man, not man for them."

"... so if you've bought warrants at sixty-three merely on the report of divisions inside the amalgamation, you haven't done badly, Lumsden. And now, Lord Hatherley, what do you say? Shall we join the ladies upstairs?"

* * * * *

An hour later Ingram was alone with his host and hostess. His presence, _ami de maison_ as he had become, did not restrain Mr. Rees from a palpable yawn.

"You look tired, father," said Althea, putting her arm over his broad shoulder. "What are you going to do? Mr. Ingram and I have something to talk over."

"I think I shall read Lew Wallace for half an hour, honey, and then go to bed. Have my hot milk sent to the study."

"Let us go upstairs to my own room," said Althea, when he was gone. "I can always talk better there."

Ingram followed her, and, as she preceded him gracefully, something forlorn and lonely in her face and figure struck him, over-receptive of such impressions as he was. He thought she drooped. Once she stumbled slightly.

She often wrote till morning, and the fire was still burning brightly in her room. She took the strip of paper on which the names of her guests had been written and, reading it over again, crumpled it in her hand with a little gesture of disgust and weariness, and threw it into the glowing coals.

"_Ugh!_" she said.

"Why do you have them, then?" asked Paul, more reasonably than politely.

"Oh!" impatiently, "you don't understand." She hesitated a moment. "Don't you ever find such people strangely interesting yourself?"

"The least so of any class I've met," Paul replied, without hesitation.

"I mean--sit down, please--because they are so _free_."

"----of scruples?"

"Yes, of scruples, if you will. Don't you see as long as one has work to do, or an ideal to follow, or conscience to consider, or a heart even, one's life must, in a sense be incomplete, fettered, bound. One must leave off in unexpected places--never go quite to the logical end, never run the whole gamut."

"That's just as well, isn't it--for other people's sakes?"

"Perhaps. You don't read Newman, I suppose?"

"Never."

"He speaks, in one of his poems, of 'A secret joy that Hell is near.' Now, he was a great saint, Mr. Ingram; no Augustine, but one of the predestined of God's love, who never in the whole course of their lives commit a vile act, say a vile word, nor probably entertain an ill thought. And yet, you see, he felt it."

She had taken out her handkerchief, and was twisting it nervously into a rope.

"'_A secret joy that Hell is near!_' That's what I feel at times. That's what I've been feeling all to-night, as I listened to those people. It's wicked, I know. It's even a refinement of wickedness."

"I think it's nerves."

"Oh, no, you don't. I won't submit to that kind of talk from you--but I'm not keeping you from bed to discuss my temperament. About your story: I'm so sorry I can't help you to publish it."

"Owing, I gather, to its religious views?"

"Why deny it? Yes."

"As exemplified in the Rev. Mr. Ffoulkes, the Salvation Merchant?"

"Oh! don't laugh. It's terribly serious. You have--I don't know where you learnt it--such a terrifying plausibility in your case against Providence. Nothing strikes at faith like a perverted mysticism."

"Name one instance!"--a little bitterly. "I'm beginning to forget what I did say."

"Well, you say that the most obvious result of punishment is to destroy the sense of guilt."

"So it is."

"Yes--perhaps. But----"

"In short, one may bear witness for your God, but not against Him?"

"I know I must sound illogical to you. It is so hard to explain."

"Don't try, please."

She was silent awhile, staring into the fire. "Mr. Ingram, you've heard, perhaps, that my life has not been a happy one.

"A word here and there. _Que sais-je?_"

"Exactly. What do you know? What can any one know of it? Imagination even couldn't do justice to the whole truth. I came out of it not desolate, alone; not only sick of body and soul, but even degraded. Yes, I mean it. A degraded wretch--that's how I saw myself. The poor street-walker seemed a clean and honorable thing beside me."

"And so you became a Catholic. Is this the usual way into the fold?"

"It is, for many. Yes," she went on, with a strange glow in her eyes, "for those who have endured great wickedness as for those who have committed it, God be thanked, there is one respirable medium left on earth. Call it what you will--a hospital of sick souls, a home for moral convalescents."

"I call it nothing. I take your word for it. Does this account for the decrepitude of so much of your doctrine?"

"Ah! don't be clever, Paul. Cleverness is a little thing. At least I should be loyal to that in which I have found peace, self-respect, a new life."

"You misjudge me, Althea. I grudge you none of your comfort. God is true if He's true for you, and He's true, for you, if the thought of Him gives you peace."

There really seemed nothing more to say, and he got to his feet.

"Send along my manuscript," he said, "whenever it's convenient, and dismiss the matter from your mind. It makes no difference."

"Why are you in such a hurry to go?" she asked fretfully, and put her hand to her head. She seemed to sway.

"Are you ill?" Ingram asked, coming across and standing beside her.

"My head went queer suddenly," she said. "It does that lately. It's fatigue, I think. Listen to me, Paul Ingram. I want to strike a bargain with you."

"Well."

"I want to buy 'Sad Company' myself."

"In order to destroy it?"

No answer.

"And at what do you assess the damage, moral and material, to your creed that its suppression will avoid. Come, now! just for curiosity's sake."

"Five hundred pounds--a thousand if----"

He interrupted her brusquely. "You must have taken leave of your senses. Do you think I'm to be bought? Burn the thing yourself, if you like--burn it in the name of whatever god it offends--but don't impute dishonor ever again to a man, even to a man that doesn't believe in Him."

She caught at his sleeve. "Oh, but you must have some money for it," she said, incoherently. "You must--you must! Don't rob me of a pleasure. You've travelled the world over, but you don't know what poverty in London means. Why, only to-night, as I looked down the table and saw your face so--so proud and fine, and thought how little stood between you and--there! I won't even name it. But don't be stubborn--for my sake. Because you must have money; you must have money, dear."

At the last word he took her in his arms.

"Let me go!" she whispered, pushing him away with all the poor force of her bare arms. "I didn't mean this. Oh! believe me. Upon my honor I didn't--nothing like this, Paul."

Ingram only drew her closer. "Stop struggling," he said, with authority. "That's better. Now then--kiss me properly."

XIII

NEW WINE--OLD BOTTLE

When the Reverend Antony Vernon, on the very morrow of a controversy whose issue was hailed variously in various quarters--here as a triumph and as a scandal there--forsook his fellow's rooms in Wadham, his parish of St. Hedwige, and the Hernandes Ethical Lectureship, to take the old, old beaten track toward the City of the Seven Hills and intellectual disenfranchisement, beyond a languid wonder as to what might await him in the less indulgent fold his migration aroused little interest. Excommunication or a cardinal's hat? Either, it was felt, might be the crown of his new career. He took no disciples with him in his incontinent flight, and he left no spiritual orphans to bewail his loss. No vindication of the strange step was ever published by him, and it cannot be pretended that his reserve balked any very keen curiosity. After all, had not the question been worn threadbare--to rags--years ago? To the fervor of the 'forties a generation had succeeded too weary of dogmatic strife to account for its own actions, far less demand an account from others; satisfied, in short, since it saved time and trouble, to accept the plea of impulse in full extenuation. During the traditional nine days, it is true, his motives were guessed at idly in the Common Room. Intellectual despair, said one; another, a recoil from the abyss to which a will to believe with the minimum of revelation always leads; a third might hint at reasons more personal and intimate still. None knew; and, when a few weeks had passed, none cared. The Reverend Antony Vernon was absolved and forgotten.

After his ordination in Rome, Archbishop Manning, who had been an old Oxford friend of his father, gave him a curacy in the northeast of London, in a district which had not then acquired its present sinister reputation, but was beginning to earn it. The mission itself was an old one, founded in the days of captivity and bishops _in partibus_; so much the fabric witnessed, a square box-like structure of hard yellow brick, with a stucco portico, and on each side four round-headed, narrow-paned windows of pinky-white glass, obscured by a wooden galley, and, on the side that faced the street, still bearing traces of some sort of wash which had once discreetly veiled the mysteries within. And yet, in its unpretending ugliness, the humble fane did not lack a certain charm denied to the great Gothic barn that has replaced it. It had been built upon the site of what had been a city merchant's suburban estate in the days of hoop and powder. Upon the side furthest from the street, two or three of the old garden trees had been spared, which of a sunny afternoon, according as the season lay, stained the clear panes a tremulous green and gold, or fretted them with an uneasy tracery of tangled branches. One guessed that, within the memory of man, before the city had spilled its desolating overflow around and beyond, gardens had bloomed--orchards borne fruit beneath these weather-stained walls, the odors of the hayfield stolen in at times and mingled its incense with that of the altar. For with cities it is as with the generations of men--new buildings upon which the old have gazed carry on, when they themselves have grown gray, the tradition of all that has been demolished and displaced around them.

"I am sending you into great temptation, Vernon," Manning had said to him at parting. (He had opened his heart to his superior, and there were no secrets between the two men). "The mission is the most difficult in the whole archdiocese. Since the trams were built the East End is pouring its cramped population into it in thousands. The old respectable families are leaving, in absolute panic, as soon as they can sell or surrender their leases. There will be no better centre in three or four years' time for a great missionary effort; but until Swinton dies or retires nothing much can be done. You will have need of all your faith and of all your tact. Abroad you will encounter an animalism such as you cannot have conceived possible; at home, a creed almost without love, and to which only the darker side of the revelation seems to have been vouchsafed. Get to know your people quietly; watch your armor, and--pray! And, above all," he continued, laying a hand that was already ethereal upon the young don's shoulder, "above all, Vernon, never despair of the poor. Don't be appalled by anything you see or hear. The degradation is great, but it is my experience it seldom reaches down as far as the soul. A word will work conversion here--a week's illness make a saint. It is far, far easier to wash the filth off of them than it is to heal the ulcer of the rich, or purify the intellect of men like you and me. It is God's crowning mercy to his elect. 'Blessed are the poor!'"

Vernon quickly discovered that the difficulties had not been over-rated. Father Swinton, the missionary rector, was a scion of an old Northumbrian family. His eccentricity, probably congenital and the result of long continued intermarriage, had been heightened by a solitary life until it reached a pitch that was almost monomania. Beneath the outward uniformity which Catholic discipline imposes he concealed a fanatical Jansenist heart. He was perhaps the last of a generation of priests who took a perverse pride in the insular and secluded character which three centuries of persecution had impressed upon the Roman communion in England. He boasted of never having made a convert, and resented the new expansiveness as a personal grievance. He never returned to his "chapel"--you would have earned his resentment by calling it a church--from a visit to more pretentious missions without experiencing a stealthy joy in his own square, painted pews, his railed gallery and bare altar, flanked only by two small plaster statues which a great lady, stubborn as himself, had imposed upon him as the price of peace. Two of his many aversions he made no attempt to conceal: he hated Irish curates, and he hated the beautiful modern devotion of the Sacred Heart.

"God bless my soul, Vernon!" he cried, one evening, shortly after the arrival of the new curate, waddling into the dining-room after benediction. "Do you know what's just happened me? No? Well, sir, a woman came into my sanctuary just now--my very sanctuary, sir!--as I was covering the altar, and asked me to bless a piece of red flannel for her--a common piece of red household flannel, sir, cut into the shape of a heart. Called it her '_Badge_!' I said: 'Take your blasphemous piece of red flannel home, ma'am! It's too small for a chest-protector, so make a penwiper of it. God bless my soul! haven't you seven sacraments?'"

Far from being shocked, the archbishop laughed at the story until the tears ran out of his watery blue eyes.

"Dear old Swinton!" was all his comment; "last of the Gallicans!" Vernon was early struck by the gaiety and love of fun among his fellow-workers in the vineyard.

As for the curates: he discovered he was the successor to a long line whose misplaced fervor and attempts to familiarize the channels of grace had brought them into collision with the heady old man.

"_Four--times--a--year_, Mr. Vernon," his rector would assert, bringing the palm of his hand down on the table at each word. "Four times a year, sir, and no more, if I had my way. And the three months in between all too short to prepare for the reception of this tremendous"--at the word something that was almost ecstasy descended upon the foolish old face--"_tremendous_ Sacrament! Besides"--fretfully--"none of 'em knew how to eat like gentlemen."

Perhaps on account of his superior table manners, perhaps for other reasons, Vernon's enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the proselyte--was condoned. Often during his strenuous later life he looked back upon those three years of curacy as perhaps the happiest he had known. If he might not sow the seed broadcast, at least he could sow and tend it in his own heart. He loved to read his breviary of an afternoon, pacing up and down between two green matted grass lawns, under the creeper-covered wall of the meek little house of God. The sun, filtering through the tender leaves of the plane trees, made a dappled puzzle-pattern on the broad flagged walk at his feet, or, if the season was late, he crisped their shed vesture beneath his low buckled shoes. Often, as his lips moved in the prayer that he had now got by heart, his eyes, wandering from the familiar page, would map out by the line, and square the foundation of his settlement--his bustling citadel of the friends of God--so soon to arise in the great wilderness, blotting out this selfish little oasis of peace and stillness forever. This very walk the vault of a chancel should cover--vast, imposing, lined with glowing chapels that pictured in fresco and mosaic the hard-won battles of the Church militant--draped with embroidered banners of guild and confraternity. Here, at the ivied presbytery gable, where a mob of sparrows, heedless of impending change, were repairing their frail tenements of straw, the gymnasium should stand, with a dining-hall above, where from henceforth his daily meals should be taken in the company of the starving and the outcast; of the workless man, hovering with amazement upon the brink of crime; of the felon, still sore from the stringent hand of earthly justice; guests gathered at his Master's bidding from highway and byway, and set down with the broad robe of charity over their bowed shoulders. And once a week at night, when chairs and benches had been cleared away, the piano should tinkle and the fiddle tune, and lads and lasses, in whose perverse minds guilt and gaiety had become convertible terms, should learn the religion of joy, and dance the devil out of their souls.

These were his dreams during three years. And yet, in his imagination, susceptible as a woman's to any influence of beauty and grace, and, like a woman's, sworn foe of all that is ugly and irrevocable in life, the quiet close was full of voices that reproached him for their outcasting. He used to pray against his weakness at night, when confessions were over and the church closed. Horse-cars jingled past the doors. The windows shook with raucous oaths; with cries of buyers and sellers in the market outside, from mouths furred with blasphemy and filthy talk; the naphtha flares threw strange, troubled shadows over the doomed pews and galleries.

Father Swinton fell ill in the middle of the third year, and after lingering a few months, died rather suddenly. At his death it was discovered that his private charities had been unbounded, and had eaten up all his inheritance. He left nothing of his own behind, save a family genealogy, in which the connection between the Swintons of Dimpleshall and the Swintons of Blacklash is clearly traced--a connection which, it would appear, Mackenzie, in his "View of the County of Northumberland," has been at pains to dispute, and a bound manuscript, much thumbed, of meditations on the Passion. The projected work had hardly waited on his death; indeed, Vernon was called to his superior's agony from a consultation with his architect. No man's dream is ever realized; but within two years a good deal of his was an accomplished fact. Vernon was a wealthy man, and, when his own money was spent, a consummate beggar. The dining-room, the schools, the gymnasium, the dispensary, and the old folks' hostel took shape one by one, amid discouragement, covert sarcasm, and abundant prophecy of failure. The trees fell, the chapel was gutted and torn down as completely as ever by Gordon rioters; the presbytery, with its panelled chambers, went the same way; the sparrows took to a dusty wing and, as covenanted servants, let us hope found sanctuary elsewhere. Last of all, the chancel, gaunt and bare as yet, a mere shell and outline of all it should be, but imposing if only by virtue of its bulk, with traceried windows, flying buttresses, clerestory and triforium, towered over the wet slate roofs that smoked sullenly all day, like a slaked furnace, beneath its feet. At the centre of the cross, where the long chancel met the truncated apse and aisles, an octagonal lead lantern, lit by eight round lunettes, took the place of tower and spire. It was at this lantern that men stood to stare; toward it that the whips of passing van and 'bus drivers inevitably were pointed for many a long day. For there, set up too high for any to escape His appeal--a symbol of hope to the hopeless, a fable to the scoffer, a source of irritation to the Pharisee, lit up at night by two coronals of electric light that encircled the pierced feet and haloed the drooping head--the Man of Sorrows watched the sorrowing city, and plucked His vesture aside to show the wounded and flaming breast--the Sacred Heart, beneath.

At fifty-eight Canon Vernon would have been a strange portent in the Common Room at Wadham. He had gained sanctity, but there is no denying he had lost polish. One cannot sit to table habitually with the outcast and not become either a little self-righteous or a little disreputable; and nothing could ever have made Antony Vernon self-righteous. He had a brown, seamed face, on which the lines of humor and pain crossed and intercrossed; the loose, mobile mouth of the great actor he might have been; piercing black eyes, an untidy thatch of dark hair whitening only at the temples, and thin, sensitive nostrils rimmed with snuff. Snuff also liberally besprinkled the breast of his shabby cassock. There had been, three hundred years back, an ancestor who wrote himself M. de Vernon, and, in reverting to the ancestral faith, Vernon seemed to have reverted a little to the ancestral type. He had no apparent austerities, was fond of a certain brand of white wine which grocers do not stock, and when his young men saw him in his private room, gave them, together with absolution, an Egyptian cigarette that was no part of their penance. His life is now matter for biography. In the district which is bounded roughly by Kingsland Road on the west and Hackney Road on the south, and which may be said to have London Fields--a rather tuberculous "lung"--for its centre and playground, it was even then matter for legend. Upon some of the legends his own comments were flippant, and we should probably err in attaching greater importance to them than he did himself. In speaking of his spiritual influence we are on safer ground. Very few--perhaps none quite--had ever withstood this. It was the old, old test. Power "went out" from him. Very unjustly, the worship of which he was the object did not extend to the hard-working curates with whom he surrounded himself. His delivery in the pulpit was bad, his writing all but illegible, and, as he never had time to prepare his sermons for the press, a good deal has perished that deserved to survive. We preserve a few fragments, however, as characteristic of his peculiar train of thought.

"_Of love_:

"There is no way to love God but through His creatures. It is through admiration of the work that we must be brought to the artist. But often the one condition upon which our love can stay sinless is that it shall stay silent."

"_Of suffering_:

"There is a genius in suffering as in all else. The confessor may labor with Christ, the martyr be crucified with Him; it is the artist alone who can understand or share the agony of Olivet."

"_Of sacrifice_:

"The history of Cain and Abel is full of significance to us. It is not of the things that renew themselves year by year that God would have us make our offering. To be acceptable to Him the sacrifice must be irreparable."

Despite his gaiety, his personal pessimism was unbounded. He was taken to task for it once by a burly and breezy Jesuit.

"After all, Vernon, God is Lord of life as well as of death."

"True," replied Vernon, as though speaking to himself. "But with a perceptible bias toward death."

* * * * *

He maintained that while it was our duty to resist all temptations, there were some so overwhelming that our responsibility was ended when we asked God to keep them out of our way.

* * * * *

He used to say that the crowning humiliation of the saints was to know their lives would be written by the devout.

* * * * *

Once upon his return from examining a school taught by religious, he was observed to be preoccupied, and was asked the reason.

"I was thinking," he said, "that few indeed are to be trusted with the credulity of childhood."

* * * * *

Of a noted atheist who was very charitable, he remarked: "G---- gives alms for the hatred of God."

* * * * *

After leaving Oxford his remarks seldom strayed beyond the sphere of his new duties. When they did, they were apt to be rarely illuminating. He said of France, for instance: "Four words give us her genius and her history--'Often conquered, never ashamed.'"

* * * * *

He used to declare that, in striking a balance between a man's happiness and unhappiness, time was not to be taken into account at all, because men live all their lives every day of their lives.

* * * * *

Religion, he observed, had an advantage that had not escaped the worldly mind. There is no other ideal which a man can live for and live on at the same time.

XIV

SOME THEORIES--AND A WAY OUT

He was sitting in his study late one windy March Saturday when Mrs. Hepworth was announced. He had been in his confessional all the evening. A half-finished letter lay on his blotting-pad, but he had turned away from it and was warming his stockinged feet at the fire. She was heavily veiled, but he divined a crisis at a glance.

"Are you very busy?" she asked, in a smothered voice.

"Very idle," he answered gaily. "The appearances of industry are deceitful. I was really--don't tell--toasting my toes. Are you in any trouble?" he asked in a graver tone, taking her hand in both his.

She nodded, but did not speak. He drew an arm-chair to the fire, and poked a great lump of coal into a blaze.

"There, there!" said he. "Sit down and have the cry out. I have a letter to finish and another to write. By the time they are both done you will be calmer."

He went on with his writing; re-read, sealed, and stamped the two letters, rang the bell, and, when it was answered by one of the mission lads, carried them to the door himself. When he turned to her again the worst was over. She was drying her eyes. He leaned forward and patted her hand.

"What a big baby we are!"

She returned him a spasmodic smile. She was conscious of a tear-stained face--possibly a red nose. But then, he was a priest. That made a difference.

"And now, what is the trouble? Has invention given out? No? Come, come then, everything else is bearable, isn't it? If I were an imaginative writer, that fear would never leave me, and would end by paralyzing my pen. I should have stage-fright every time I sat down opposite a sheet of paper. It has always been less of a marvel to me that a novel should be finished well than that it should be finished at all."

Althea hardly listened. She was wondering how she should express the things of this world in terms that a man of the other should understand; a necessity--let the prurient believe it or not--that makes confession a dry business for all parties.

"Father Vernon, has it ever occurred to you that I am a woman as well as a writer?"

"My dear, a very charming one."

"At least an honest one. Three years ago, you will remember, I came to you on quite an impersonal matter. You divined an inward trouble--saw that I had missed the peace which passes understanding, and offered me--how delicately, I shall never forget--your aid to attain it. I refused it. You never would guess what the refusal cost me."

"My dear----"

"Yes, yes; let me go on. I must have seemed churlish. But if principles are to be anything beyond mere idle words, they must be held to; and one of mine is that for a woman to invite sympathy is only a degree less shameful than for her to beg for love. The way of the devout woman with her director is hateful to me. This unseemly self-revelation from week to week is treachery--treachery to her own heart and to those whom she takes into it. Am I very heretical?"

"Oh, my child! How it would lighten my task were there more who thought like you."

"Before I left, you bade me, if ever I was in great trouble, to come to you again. And now----"

"Now the time has come?"

"Yes." She rubbed her hands nervously one over the other. "I am in great straits."

"Is the way growing dark or only hard?"

"Oh, _hard--hard_!" she moaned, rocking a little backward and forward.

She looked up in his face and saw her trouble was guessed. When the will to help and the powerlessness meet upon a face that regards us tenderly we read our fate written there in letters of fire.

"Yes," she went on, as though he had spoken. "I am a Catholic: I am a divorced woman whose husband lives, and I am in love--in love with all my heart, and soul, and strength."

"The man? Is he free?" Vernon asked, perhaps for something to say.

"Yes. I thank God, whose captive I am, that he at least is free."

"He understands your peculiar position?"

"He understands nothing."

"My dear child, you should let him know. In justice to him."

His words irritated Althea vaguely, as a little professional mannerism might irritate us in the surgeon fighting for our lives.

"Oh, have patience! I am going to tell you everything. It is the man whose book I sent you to read. Mr. Prentice, a friend of mine, a journalist, brought him to me last summer. He was quite unknown in London and was finding a difficulty in even getting it considered. He is not quite a stranger to us; at least, we know who he is. My father is a friend of some of the rich branch of his family in Connecticut. My publishers made difficulties, of course, but the thing was in a fair way of being settled--"

"But surely, my child, his opinions shocked you?"

"Not at all, Father!" Noticing his surprise: "You must take my word for that. It is so hard when one is leading two lives--the artist's and the other. There seems no contact between them--no common ground. I have had no temptation myself to such things, and so the question had never arisen for me personally. No, I was conscious of nothing but the joy, the privilege of helping a fellow-worker toward his reward."

"When did you first find it a matter of conscience?"

"Once when I went to confession to Father Mephan at the Priory. I mentioned it almost casually. To my surprise, he took the matter most seriously--said I was incurring a tremendous responsibility, and that if one soul was led by it to love God less, the sin would be at my door. I had to get the manuscript back from the publishers. Oh! it was weary work."

"Mephan pronounced against the book, of course."

"Yes. I told him that to my knowledge the writer was a good man--in his way almost saintly. I knew him well enough by then to say that. But he said it didn't matter--that Antichrist had his own prophets and confessors, and even martyrs. Is that so?"

"I fear it is."

"He said something else stranger still. He said the virtue that was outside the Church was a greater danger than the wickedness. Do you believe that?"

"No, I don't. I think virtue, of any sort, is quite secure from popularity. But go on. You have told me nothing of the man himself."

"He continued to visit us. He was lonely and embittered at first, but it wore off. He is very handsome. I was proud to be able to show such a fellow-countryman after some that have been at our house. The men liked him, and I know the women envied him to me. Oh! a woman can see. I got him to tell me some of his life. It's wonderful! He seems to have deliberately sought out pain and labor as though some inward need of his soul impelled him to it. He does not know God, but he has never lost the spiritual vision. His heart is as clean as a child's and as simple. He has his faults. He hates the rich; but there is not a trace of envy in his hatred. He is not even like Mill--led to the love of the many by the hatred of the few. It is simply the holy hunger and thirst after justice."

"My dear, you are painting a very good man. Did you never try to influence him toward the truth?"

"Father Vernon, do you believe in my sincerity or not?"

"I do, indeed."

"Then, believe me when I tell you it's not possible. Perhaps in years and years to come; but his heart will have to be broken first. No, his virtue is the virtue of Marcus Aurelius--of Julian. He has all the sadness of the old, stoical, pagan world. Will you think me exaggerated if I tell you how he affects me?"

"I think not."

"Well, I feel as though some great angel, neither of light nor darkness, neither fallen nor confirmed, to whom the test for or against God has never been offered, has folded his wings and dropped gently at my feet. I have but one fear--that he will spread them as quietly and take flight."

Two red spots glowed on her cheeks as she spoke. Vernon, considering her, suddenly realized how ill she was looking. There was even on her face an expression that, as a priest, it was part of his office to watch for.

"When did this thing happen--the thing that makes you so unhappy?"

"Last Thursday. He had dined with us. I had been feeling ill all day. Since the summer I have been frightened two or three times--it is my head I think--but I have put off getting any advice. He could not have asked for an explanation at a worse time; but I had no right to withhold it. I tried to explain, even offered him money, and then----"

"Yes, and then?"

"Oh, Father Vernon, he grew so big! He seemed to tower. Everything else was small. Yes--let me tell the truth--religion, priests, even God--we all seemed to be a little band of intriguers trying to pull him down. He told me to burn his book, turned on his heel. I knew he wouldn't come back, and so--and so--I'm only a woman: I babbled something or other that was in my heart, and he took me--in his--arms."

She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and looked into the fire. The action was deliberate. One never would have guessed what a storm was rending her breast.

"He kissed me only once," she went on. "He was very gentle. Then we sat down, and I found out that, all the time while I had been condescending, advising, putting him at his ease, I was nothing to him but just a little, lonely, spoilt girl."

"Have you seen him since?"

"No."

"Nor written?"

"No."

"He has called, of course?"

"Yes. I have not been at home to him."

"Then--the thing is over."

"Read this!" She drew a letter from the bosom of her dress and handed it to him. She watched him narrowly as he read it, but his expression of grave concern did not alter.

"Are you alone in town?" he asked, when he had read it through.

"My father and most of the servants are at Hindhead. I should have gone with them on Saturday, but I waited because----Oh! I just waited----"

"Do you want this back?" said Vernon, still holding the letter between his fingers.

"Burn it, please. No, wait a minute! Tear me off the signature first. I want that."

She pressed the little shred of paper against her lips.

"Oh! I love him _so_, I love him _so_," she moaned.

Vernon crumpled the sheets of paper one by one and threw them all into the fire together. The flames caught them at once. The writing glowed red, then white. The draught from the chimney rustled the ashes to and fro in the grate.

"Well," she asked, almost roughly, "what am I to do?"

"There is but one thing--your duty. I cannot soften it."

"_Duty!_" she repeated, in a terrible voice. For a moment Vernon thought a nerve-crisis was at hand; but she fought it down. The wit that was almost the woman's second nature came uppermost.

"It's a pretty trap, isn't it? There ought to have been a notice-board on my narrow way, Father Vernon: 'Beware man-traps and canons.' God's ways are a little _impish_ at times, don't you think so? Can I see him?"

"I think not, dear child. It will only make it harder for you both."

"Pah! You say that, but you really don't trust me. You're only a man, after all. Can I write the letter here? It won't be very long."

Without a word he wheeled his writing-chair round for her, and pulled out unheaded note-paper and plain envelopes. She wrote a letter of six or eight pages quietly, without hesitating, except just at the end, when Vernon noticed her lips were pursed and her eyes swimming in tears. The second letter was a much shorter affair, and she enclosed in it the slip of paper which she had saved from the burnt letter. It lay on the top, and he noticed the address was that of a bank.

"I will leave these with you to post," she said; "then you will feel quite safe. I shall go down to Hindhead to-morrow and stay a good while, I think. I like watching the spring come. Good-bye; and remember it is by what you _didn't_ say to-night that I measure your sympathy. I don't think I could have stood platitudes."

"My child, I preach to those who are bearing their cross, not to those whom God has nailed to it. Before them I dare only kneel and pray."

"Oh, I felt it! I felt it! Something seemed to come out of you and break my will suddenly. Besides"--she hesitated--"besides, there's always something a woman keeps back, they say. I think, perhaps, he is saved from great unhappiness by what you have made me do to-night. I can't say more, even to you."

"My dear, love is never sent idly, never in vain. It is from our ignorant misuse, our blind misapprehension of its meaning, that the pity and the waste come about. Many a precious purpose is brought to nothing by the world's superstition of the happy ending. In love, as in life, those who seek selfishly forever seek vainly; even as they grasp it, the radiant vision turns a corpse within their arms. It is they who humbly and submissively--no matter how hard the law, how intolerable the accident--follow the inscrutable finger beckoning them from pleasant ways, to stumble upon the road that is narrow and steep and dark, who have their heart's desire given them in the end.... Yes! Who is it?"

There was a knock at the door.

"Please, farver, it's Mrs. Murnane come about Jimmy's charackter for the 'am-and-beef shop."

"Say I'm coming.... Would you like to spend a few minutes with me in the church before you go? We have the Forty Hours' devotion this week. I can let you out by the side door into the street. I suppose you have your car?"

She passed before him down the staircase and along a white-washed corridor, whose bluntly pointed windows and doorways were wreathed by texts in Gothic lettering. Mrs. Murnane, a woman with a commanding eye and great digestive capacity, was sitting on a long bench in the hall; the ham-and-beef aspirant, a knock-kneed lad who seemed to grow more uncertain and wavering of outline as he receded from his enormous boots to his cropped white head, sat by her side with an air of being in custody. Behind the bench successive sessions of unwashed heads had besmeared the wall with a grimy average of height.

The church was dark, and silent too; not with the mere absence of sound, but with a positive and penetrative stillness that seemed to radiate from one white disk, rimmed and rayed with gold, and enthroned, amid a phalanx of tapers and sweet waxen flowers, in one of the side chapels. A lad in a scarlet cassock and laced cotta was extinguishing a guttering candle, almost beyond his reach. As he rose on tiptoe the long pole trembled in his hands like a fishing-rod. Within the rails two men, their heads sunk beneath their shoulders, and without the rails two nuns, in broad white _cornichons_ and turned-back sleeves of serge, watched the host motionlessly. On a votive-wheel near by many tapers, some white, some red, were blazing and dripping. The smell of incense was everywhere.

She knelt upon a rush-seated _prie-dieu_ in the same posture of absorbed devotion as the others, but her thoughts strayed, like a child's brought to church by an elder sister. She tried to count the tapers--how many red? how many white?--wondered what the nuns' faces were like behind the flapped white caps. The scene took shape in her head in little biting phrases, just as another kind of artist would have seen it in tone and composition. She was rather restless, wanted to be gone, and even said to herself that this last move of Father Vernon's was in doubtful taste. After going through so much----!

But the silence, the stillness, the enervating loaded atmosphere gained her little by little. She had an access of devotion: tapers, flowers, prostrate fellow-worshippers were all part of some intimate rite of which there were two protagonists--that white sphere toward which, from time to time, she stole an awed glance, and she--a white host herself, with tired, folded pinions, submissive, only waiting for fire from heaven to complete the sacrifice....

... Oh, God--the pain! the pain in her head! She wanted to scream, to faint, but her horror, the refined woman's horror of any "scene," kept her dumb and almost still. She prayed, wildly and incoherently--pressed her gloved fingers into her temples; her forehead was damp with perspiration....

It was going now. Yes. In wave after wave, each less poignant than the one before, the pain left her. She lifted her head, wet her lips--wiped her forehead with the handkerchief still damp from her tears. Her eyes were tired and dim; the altar swam mistily. She looked across to Father Vernon, and he, noting her restlessness at last, rose and, with a low genuflection on both knees, beckoned her, and passed before her from the church.

In the open air she revived, and even began to doubt the reality of what she had just undergone. There is a dream-like quality about intense pain that makes it hard to estimate it truly afterward. The car was waiting, in a dark slum that had once been a walled country lane smelling of mould and verdure. Even now the warm restlessness of spring could be felt in its fetid air. The chauffeur sat sideways upon his seat, reading some strange by-product of literature in a green cover. A dozen or so of ragged children, shock-headed and sore of face, clustered round the headlights like so many poor scorched flies. She shared the coppers in her purse between them.

"Write me from Hindhead," Vernon said, at the door of the car; "and come to see me again when you get back. Be sure, my dear, God has some great mercy for you after this. And if I were you, I should see some one about the headaches. Nerves? Oh, yes! but it never does harm to have good advice. Good-bye, good-bye! God bless you, my dear. Now then, babies, why aren't the lot of you in bed?"

* * * * *

The car rolled, smoothly and swiftly, southward and westward. Through brawling, chaffering Saturday night markets; through the old "Square Mile," deserted now, its mysterious lanes coiling away to left and right in tortuous perspective; across the Circus, in whose midst the bronze archer poises himself, choosing his prey and aiming his unseen arrow day and night at the spinning wheel of pleasure; round the sweep of the Quadrant--and home. Two and two, two and two; the men leaning over the women, the women leaning toward the men. Nature, after all, was slightly vulgar. To be placed--by circumstances--out of reach of its allurement had compensations--lent dignity to the point of view. It was almost enough to make one turn to virtue to have to share vice with so many....

There she went again! Phrases, phrases! Well, it was just as well, since, after all, there wasn't much else left for her now. How tired she was of it all! And what was the great mercy that Father Vernon had predicted so confidently?... Home, at last.

* * * * *

"Three hours, probably more," the doctor said. It was Pemmer-Lloyd, the great cancer specialist from Weymouth Street, just round the corner. He was in golfing tweeds, and felt justly aggrieved that, with so many general practitioners in the neighborhood, he should have been called away from breakfast, for this. The nine forty-five to Amersham was out of the question now.

One window-blind had been drawn up, crookedly and hurriedly, and through the rhomboidal opening a sinister light fell upon the disorder of the room. Two frightened maids and a housekeeper stood at the foot of the bed, watching the doctor, with inane hope upon their faces. One of the maids was crying, but looking about her curiously at the same time.

"Done? No! of course nothing can be done. Am I not telling you she has been dead over three hours. Had any doctor been attending her lately?"

"Not to our knowledge, sir."

"There may have to be an inquest, then. In that case you must see that nothing is touched. Have the family been advised?"

"No, doctor. I thought first----"

"Wire and 'phone them immediately! _immediately!_ and the police as well. Here is my card for the inspector. I shall have to stay at home all day now. In a case like this, you should always call a general practitioner."

* * * * *

They say she must have been reading a great part of the night. Two books were on the table near her bed--"Madame Bovary," and "The Imitation of Christ." Flaubert and à Kempis! Poor Althea! It was almost your life's epitome.

XV

A LAST WISH

Many will remember the profound impression that Althea's death created. It extended far beyond the circles that her novels had reached. There was something about that last mysterious journey through London--the sudden, unheralded end, at some conjectural hour, when the great heart of the city was beating its faintest, that struck the popular imagination, always ready to be harrowed, and secretly grateful, I believe, for evidence that fate works with an even grimness under all the inequalities of rank or fortune. I attended the funeral, combining for the last time my professional duties with the privileges of an old but lately neglected friend, and saw her committed to the awakening earth. She was buried with all the pomp and circumstance that the church of her adoption gives its children as a last assurance of its own unshaken power, but through all the chants and absolutions the chill human ache of an irreparable loss persisted, as, through the perfume of incense and flowers, the raw smell of the polished elm coffin pierced to the sense. The church was crowded with her friends; wreaths and crosses, lyres with snapped strings, broken columns of rare exotic flowers, all symbols of untimely end, were banked round the catafalque, but the coffin itself was stark and bare, covered thinly by a pall of purple silk wrought at its hem with passion flowers. The girls in some refuge or another, poor soiled doves whose unwearied friend she had been, had sat up, it was said, night and day in order to complete it.

About the time that references to Mrs. Hepworth's career were ceasing to appear even in the minor papers, rumors of a theatrical hoax began to circulate through London. The new dancer, whom the zealous friendship of a certain well-known sporting baronet had forced upon an unwilling management, would not, after all, appear in the new play that was to replace the _Motor Girl_ at the Dominion some time in May. "_Would not appear!_" Imagine what an eye trained to cheat the censor of his spoil could make of that; with what significance a tongue, thrust into a leathery cheek not quite innocent of biscuit and cheese, at the Bedford Street Bodega, could invest those three little words.

"_Will not appear_, my boy. Catch on? Why won't she? That's the joke, my boy. Because she's got to stop at home and _nurse her mother_."

Imagine it! just once, and then let us pass on into sweeter air. Even if it must be the air of a sick-room. For many weeks Fenella hardly breathed any other. During that first breathless rally which hardly gave thought to the final issue, and during which a spoonful of broth swallowed, an hour's quiet rest or a fall in temperature were triumphs repaying the sleepless night, dull eye, and hollow cheek a hundredfold, career, character, seemed very empty, shadowy words. Even if one of the vile journals in pink and blue and yellow covers addressed in a handwriting needlessly disguised, which, be sure of it, the postman did not fail to deliver at Number Eleven, had reached her, had not--as all were, in fact, been torn from its wrapper by honest Frances' grimy hand to light parlor or kitchen fire--I doubt very much whether the marked paragraph would have had power to inflict one pang upon her self-respect, or bring one drop of blood to her cheek.

How much she loved her mother, how far the wholesome, homely _fact_ of her had been the basis of all happiness in life, Nelly had not guessed until now, when the thought must be faced of its speedy change to a mere memory. A reproachful memory, alas! She looked back on her girlhood--her school-days, and saw herself heedless and heartless. How niggardly of love she had been, how chary in response! She even accused herself of a little snobbishness in her mother's regard--unjustly, since it was from the innate expansiveness of the older woman and not from the accident of station or manner that her own finer nature had shrunk. But, in circumstances like these, to be conscious of a finer nature does not administer much comfort.

Mrs. Barbour rallied a little from the first stroke, but never rose from her bed, and never spoke intelligibly again. Sometimes, by bending close to her lips and straining every sense, Fenella fancied she could construe the formless gabble into words, but into the words even her affection could read no meaning. During the day, indeed, her presence seemed to agitate the invalid to such an extent that the nurse had to be roused and the desperate effort to speak cut short by some opiate or injection. Once, driven almost mad at sight of her mother's mental suffering, Fenella took a sheet of stiff white cardboard, propped the sick woman upon a pillow, and put a pencil into the palsied hand. Slowly, with infinite pains on the one hand and infinite patience on the other, five dreadful letters took shape upon the writing-pad; five letters such as a dying man might scrawl with a finger dipped into his heart's blood:

"D--A--N--C--E."

A light broke upon the girl. "You want me to go on rehearsing? Is that it, mother?"

Oh! what joy in the poor fading eyes at being at last understood. The trembling head nodded again and again, and fell back on the pillow exhausted.

"I will then, dear!" Fenella whispered in her mother's ear. "I'll go and put my things on at once."

She came back, dressed as for the street, and kissed her mother good-bye. Ten minutes afterward, in response to a stealthy knock at the door, the little Scotch nurse whispered that the patient was fast asleep.

From now until the day on which the slowly curdling brain ceased to receive any impression at all the little loving conspiracy of lies went on. Every morning, at the usual hour of her departure for the theatre, Fenella, in hat and long coat, kissed her mother's cheek and forehead, and asked her how the night had passed--that night whose every hour she often had watched. At seven o'clock, dressed again, she came back, having first laid her cheek to the marble mantelpiece in the drawing-room, that it might be convincingly cold. (The best women have these depths in deception, this recognition of the importance of trifles.) She would sit down upon the bed and regale her duped parent with a long and elaborate history of the day's doings--what Mr. Dollfus had said, what Mr. Lavigne had said--how tiresome the chorus were, how jealous the leading lady--how set, above all, were all signs and portents toward ultimate triumph. Her achievement in this new field stirred even little Frances, now become a person of vast importance and responsibility, to involuntary admiration.

"Miss! You can't 'alf tell 'em!" that little helpmeet would say, harkening her.

Whenever a protracted illness has ended in death it is a commonplace of comfort with well-meaning but shallow folk to say, "You must all feel it a _merciful release_." Apart from its sincerity, the phrase is founded upon a misconception of human feeling. No dead are missed so much as the dead who have been long a-dying. The presence of a perilous illness brings many an evil into a house; it at least casts one out. _Ennui_ never reigns in the house that has the straw in front of its railings. A great drama is going on, and there never is a moment when one may not steal upstairs on tiptoe to measure its progress. Hence, apart altogether from sorrow, a strange emptiness in life when all is over, a bitter superadded regret for the close, shadowed room, haunted by broken murmurs, that was once the core of a whole polity of existence.

In her sad absorption Fenella forgot Sir Bryan all but completely. He wrote to her often. His letters, headed in black or blue, or embossed whitely in thick square letters--"The Turf Club"; "369 Mount Street, Tel. 9087 Mayfair"; "Coffers Castle. Parcels: Balafond Stn. N. B. R."--lay strewn about her dressing-table or stuck carelessly behind looking-glasses, for all the world, represented now by Nurse Ursula or Frances, to read if they would. (We will not suspect Nurse Ursula of such a thing for a moment, and on any that have been placed in my hands there is no such grimy finger-print as I am sure Frances would have left.) She answered rarely, and then only in little set missives, mere bulletins of her mother's health. She begged his pardon for leaving so many of his letters _unansered_. She was quite well, thank him, had had a quiet night, and felt quite _enegetic_. The doctor had been and said mother's _strenth_ was well maintained. She thanked him for the lovely grapes from Stanmore. She hoped that "Mud-Major" would win in the big race at Liverpool, and she remained sincerely his--Fenella Powys Barbour. She had decided on the full signature in letters to Lumsden. It sounded stately, and enforced respect. She would have been vastly surprised seeing the sort of respect with which the misspelt little notes were treated.

It is only part of the general injustice of life that while the man who was doing his clumsy best to lighten her sorrow hardly stayed in her mind a moment after she had cast his letters aside or scribbled an answer to them, the false lover, who had kissed her in her own home, loved and ridden away, haunted every hushed empty corner of it. Her very unhappiness brought him back to her, as a new illness weakens the smart of an old wound. She had an impulse once, which the lonely and deserted will understand, to set her thoughts on paper in the form of a letter to him.

"MY DARLING LOST LOVE" (she began),

"What years and years it [_sic_] seems to have past since I saw your dear face----"

Then she stopped, and tore the sheet into little pieces. Anything approaching literary composition suddenly became hateful. The thought had occurred to her: How well the other woman could do this! The other woman--in her grave nearly a month.

One morning, while she lingered outside her mother's door, after perpetrating the customary deception, Frances, the begrimed, brought her Lumsden's card in a corner of her apron. He was in the small drawing-room, straight and fair and good to look upon, standing amid a dusty huddle of chairs that had not been restored to their places since the doctors consulted there a week ago.

"I came to see if you were killing yourself," he said, when they had shaken hands and he had asked after her mother.

"Oh! I'm as strong as a horse."

"That remark rather loses its force with me, because I know something about them. When did you take your feed--'horse'?"

"Sir Bryan! I eat with nurse."

"Oh! I know the sort of meals. You're dressed. Have you been out?"

"N--no."

"Just going then?"

Fenella blushed, but did not reveal the pious fraud.

"I've got the big car outside," said Lumsden. "Care to come for a run till tea?"

The suggestion had its attractions.

"I must run upstairs first. You don't mind waiting a minute?"

Nurse not only gave permission, but a little straight hygienic talk she had been saving up, too professional to be repeated here. Fenella took her seat almost with a feeling of duty done. Bryan ordered the chauffeur into the back and took the wheel himself.

"Tuck this round you. Now, where shall we go that's within reach? Richmond?"

"Oh no!" hastily--"not Richmond. Let's go to Hampstead."

"No; I don't care for Hampstead," with a sudden shadow of distaste. Two pasts met in their glance--her woman's fault of loving too well--and his.

After a while the mere physical act of breathing fully and deeply again, the rush of the spring air, pleasantly cold, past her pallid cheeks, did their work, and unsealed the springs of joy in her own young breast--a facile joy, born of health and perfect balance, for which she had often blamed herself since the summer, ignorant of how between it, as between every function of her body, and the ascetic ideal which a heart, untimely chastened, sought to impose, there was war declared, in which she was a mere battle-ground for contending forces. It had rained hard in the forenoon. Now, level with their eyes, a belated sun flooded the suburbs with temperate gold, spilled its overflow on wet slate roofs, set bright jewels in the upper windows of gray stucco houses, and wove a filagree pattern, beaded with tender green buds in railed gardens and bristling walled shrubberies. Nothing was beneath its glorifying magic. Between the flashing tram-rails the very bed of the wide road seemed flooded with alluvial dust. A wonderful sky country, all mountain and islet-strewn tarn--such a landscape as may lie at the gate of dream-cities in the Alps--closed the prospect into which they were rushing. The wheels hummed, the six cylinders purred happily. She began to sing to herself, stretching her neck and pouting her lips, a foolish little song she had caught from one of the Dominion girls:

"I like your old French bonnet With the ribbons on it, And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways. If you'll come to Parry Then we two will marry And our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."

"Feeling happier, Flash?"

She had forgotten him. Now, as she turned, self-reproachful, at the sound of his voice, the unreasonable little fit of happiness took wing. Yet she could not but admire him. How cleverly and coolly he drove! What chances he took! They were passing every one. Once, at some congestion in the traffic, a policeman touched his helmet and let him through. He seemed to feel this was a man not used to wait his turn. Paul had once said to her that most men failed in life because its detail was too much for them to tackle; at least, this was what she made out of a rather more ornate speech. Bryan didn't seem to find any difficulty. She remembered Jack Barbour's comprehensive phrase, "Bryan's first-class in anything he takes up." Was it because she was ambitious, aspiring, herself that she resisted this power, instead of succumbing to it, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have done, and being content to shine with a reflected glory? She had had her own little dream of success--the packed theatre, the thunders of applause, her name flashing and winking in letters of fire--part of the madness of a great city by night--paragraphs, interviews. All very mean and personal, no doubt, yet with an element in them that somehow dignified the ambition. For to be the favorite of the public was what she wanted--nothing else would do--the great good-hearted public, that rings its hard-earned shilling or half-crown upon the ledge of the ticket-office, shopman and clerk with honest wife and sweetheart at his side, equally ready to laugh or cheer or cry, who dip a mutual finger into a box of chocolates and believe that even a dancer can be an honest girl.

XVI

AZRAEL

They stopped at a little place in a fold of the Chiltern Hills, a mere roadside inn which the neighborhood of a fashionable golf-course had galvanized into new and rather graceful life. The stone front was covered in ivy, two wings of red brick terminated in sunny bay windows, there was a bowling-green at the back, and an academician had repainted the sign. A few men in tweeds and flannels whom Lumsden appeared to know were strolling about the place, but abstained tactfully from more than a passing greeting. While tea was getting ready the baronet lit a cigar, and the girl gathered a bunch of primroses in the garden and pinned them at her waist. Now that she had taken off the heavy coat he had insisted on her wearing, he noticed for the first time the shabbiness of her black house-frock. A white thread, dropped from some needlework, clung to one sleeve.

Lumsden was a man for whom some kind of a love affair had always been a necessity. Even before he left Eton he had had friends among women of the world. His bluff, slangy manners covered a good deal of intensity of a rather un-English sort. Men of Scotch race have a subtlety denied to the obtuser Southron. They are both more steadfast and more perfidious. His early manhood had been shaken by one great passion, which had ended unhappily and which it is no part of our business to disinter. A long series of inconclusive sentimental experiments had followed it; inconclusive, because he had the grace or the vanity to think that, had it been constancy he was seeking, he might often enough have found it. The devotion, indeed, which one might strike up against in unexpected quarters was, in his opinion, a serious drawback to the game. He was a generous lover. The idol of the moment was always bravely apparelled, always had plenty of tinsel on it, and if a sense of its inadequacy oppressed him, he got rid of the feeling by putting on a little more. All he had asked latterly was that it should simper prettily and do him credit. He was deceived, of course, from time to time, but never before his own waning attention had given betrayal at once its justification and its clue. Thus it fell out that, although his favored pastime had cost him a great deal of money, it had never cost him what such a man would consider his self-respect. It will save time to admit that his intentions toward his young cousin (she was not really his cousin, we know, but he liked to speak of her, even think of her so) had not been honorable. That she was kin and of the same caste as himself had no weight with a man accustomed to divide women into two classes--those he would not marry under any circumstances and those whom he would only marry if there were no help for it. Fenella, to do him justice (and, in a way, to do her justice too), had belonged to the second class from the beginning, but her emergence from it now into a category all by itself was not due to any recognition on his part of her integrity--why should he recognize what he had not tempted?--but simply and solely to the fact that the illness of that poor lady, her mother, had upset all his early calculations. He had his own code of conduct, and one of them was that you can not call at a girl's home, inquire after the maternal health, send the invalid fruit and game, and then--well, without an entire change in perspective as regards her. Of late, indeed, she had lain in his imagination to a quite distressing extent. The impulse that had made him give up a day's hunting and come spurring to her side over ten miles of muddy ground had not failed to repeat itself again and again. His thoughts turned toward her incessantly. At every man's tale of fraud and wrong her image stirred uneasily in his imagination, and the ideal, rather deferred than quite disowned, to which his whole life had done violence, joined with his passion in pleading for a reparation that was at once so easy and so pleasant. Women are generally avenged competently by some woman. The eclipse of the individual in the species never lasts. She emerges, armed with all the old illusions, and often at the very moment when a man is weakest to do battle with her.

Smoking silently, he looked at her now, busied with the pretty feminine duties of milk-jug and sugar-tongs, marked the perceptible changes of face and figure since their first encounter. His experience projected, as it were, her maturity, even her gray hairs upon her--owned that she would always be charming, always a sweet woman.

"Dreaming, Flash?"

She had only been respecting his own silent mood, but did not deny her abstraction.

"I was thinking of the Dominion. When's the first night?"

"In about three weeks. It'll be _Hamlet_ without the prince for some of us, eh, coz?"

She did not answer.

"You must only look upon it as put off for awhile," he said reassuringly. "You'll get another chance."

She shook her head. "I don't feel I shall. Don't you ever feel there's just one time for the one thing?"

"Even if I didn't, Shakespeare has. But you're over-young, Flash, to be thinking of fortune at the ebb."

He looked down at her hand. There were no rings on it. He had a suspicion that was confirmed when she snatched it off the table and put it in her lap.

"Don't think me impertinent, but will it make much difference, I mean financial difference, to you if your mother dies?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid so. But I have a little money coming to me when I'm twenty-one. Not a lot."

"How old are you now?"

"Nearly nineteen."

"Two years! What are you going to do meanwhile?"

She shrugged her shoulders, or maybe shivered. Life _was_ gray with the dream out of it.

"Work, I suppose--at something. I can always teach dancing again."

"Flash, I'm ungodly rich. Won't you let me----"

"_Bryan!_"

It was the first time she had ever called him familiarly by his name, but her face was so shocked and white, her voice so like a real cry of pain, that he did not notice it. He flushed, and churned the gravel with his heel.

"What have I said? Do you know, young woman, I don't find the expression on your face very flattering."

"Bryan! If I thought you meant what you've just said, you--I--we----"

"Well, what?"

"Never, _never_ could meet again."

Lumsden swallowed his humiliation, but it didn't go down very far.

"I beg your pardon. Will that do? There was some excuse for me, you know. You let me help you once before."

"Not with money."

He wasn't in a mood to be very delicate. "Wasn't it?" he said with a short laugh. "Never mind, then."

"Why do you laugh that funny way?" said Fenella, with unexpected spirit. "You must tell me now. Did you have to pay Dollfus to take me?"

"Dear _ingénue_! Do you mean to say you've never suspected it? You don't think Dollfus is in business for hygienic reasons, do you?"

"Much money?" she persisted.

"Oh, ask Joe," said Lumsden, rather wearily. "He's on the telephone."

Fenella beat her palms against the side of the chair. "I've been a fool," she went on, in a fierce soliloquy, "a little, credulous donkey. No wonder that girl thought me a fraud! And yet--I believed you all believed in me. Do you think I'd ever have let you--unless I felt sure? Oh! you must know it."

"My dear child, be content. You carry conviction. I acquit you from this moment of everything unmaidenly, generosity included."

"Generosity!"

"Yes. It sometimes requires as much to take as to give. But you're like all women."

"Why?"

"When they're not insulted at being offered money they're insulted it isn't more."

"How dare you call me 'women'?"

"Does it hurt your dignity?"

"Never mind what it hurts. You've no right to speak that way, to class me with--with others. Oh, yes, you have, though. I'd forgotten."

"Flash, let me tell you one thing: No matter how young or charming or virtuous you may be, to keep harping on what you know hurts a man's feelings is to be a shrew."

"Your 'feelings'!" The vexation went out of her face. She leaned her chin on her hand and gave him a look so piercing, so direct and unexpected, that it went through all his worldly armor.

"Well?" he asked, grimly, through his teeth. She never guessed the restraint he was putting on himself. "Haven't I a right to any?"

She looked away without answering.

He got up abruptly. "Let's go home," he said. "We've had enough heart-to-heart talk for one afternoon."

They rode back into the London lights in a silence which the gentleman in the peaked cap who drove them probably misconstrued as perfect accord. "They don't talk much, not w'en they're 'olding 'ands," he said that night in his favored house of call. But he only held her hand once, to say good-bye at the door.

"Have I been a prig?" asked Fenella, contritely.

He seemed to be turning the matter over, but was really thinking how prettily penitence became her.

"Have I offended you?"

"I'll tell you whether you have some other time."

* * * * *

Apparently not beyond forgiveness, for he came again two days later and took her for an hour's drive--and then the next day. Good or bad, the habit formed itself. Two or three times she allowed herself to be persuaded further, and let him take her to dinner. At such an hour the big restaurants would not be very full; but it seemed Bryan could not go anywhere without meeting a man he knew, and who, while speaking, divided his attention pretty evenly between the baronet, half-turned in his chair, holding the lapel of his friend's coat, and the pretty stranger to whom he was not introduced. He was very kind and cousinly; had theories as to what people should eat (he never asked her to drink) when low-spirited and anxious, kept clear of the personal note, and always saw she got back in time. Thus, little by little, the hint she had received of a dangerous hardness in his nature was effaced. In time of trouble the heart receives more impressions than the head, and it is wonderful into what bulk tearful eyes can magnify a little kindness. Fenella was to blame herself subsequently for her conduct during the last days of her mother's life; but I think, perhaps too indulgently, that it was only the instinct to grasp at enjoyment while enjoyment was possible. The very pang of self-reproach with which she took up her nightly task might have convinced her of this. Old habits are not effaced in an instant. From babyhood she had known no surer way to make her mother happy than by seizing all opportunities for pleasure that came her way. Outsiders who suspect love because it falls from some arbitrary standard they choose to set up have no idea how often apparent heartlessness is justified by some such little secret covenant between the loving and the loved. And then, though the period of suspense was short, it passed so heavily. The days seemed counted out with pitiful slowness by a power that knew how few they were. Time, like distance, deceives when one is seeking the way. She was so fearfully alone! Her vision sometimes ached at the obscurity of her own destiny. In that still room uncertainties seemed to multiply, thicken and coil, like smoke in a tunnel. She envied every one in turn--Nurse Ursula, with her brisk professional manner and endless prospect of clearly defined duty--cases to come running into perspective like beds in a long ward; slatternly, pretty little Frances, with her brisk love-passages in the area; the woman upon the bed, nearer with every breath to a change that raises no problems but solves them all. She often whispered in her mother's ear, "Mother, mother; take me with you. Don't go without Nelly."

Foolish extravagances of an undisciplined heart. Even for death, Nelly, we have to wait until the time for enjoying it is past.

* * * * *

Early one morning, following a night in which her mother had seemed much easier, and in the very first hour of her untimely sleep, the nurse shook her by the shoulder. In the one look that the two women exchanged her news was told. Fenella huddled on her clothes and followed to the sick-room. Her mother was breathing strangely. Every inspiration was like the hiccough that follows a fit of weeping in a child. Her brows were knitted--she seemed puzzled and absorbed. Occasionally she tried to lift a hand stiffly and clumsily toward her head. By noon all was over. The doctor called twice, and, for the first time in many days, failed to write a new prescription. The lawyer was telephoned for. About three o'clock in the afternoon two decent pew-opening bodies were admitted without question, stole upstairs, and, having performed their office, stole as quietly away. The charwoman stayed for tea, and uncovered a rich vein of reminiscence suitable for the occasion. The blinds were drawn down, the windows opened. Outside, in the square, was heard the champing of bits, the rattle of the harness, that poor Mrs. Barbour had loved to listen to of an afternoon in spring or autumn.

Toward evening, when they were all done with the dead woman, Fenella went softly upstairs. Nurse Ursula, upon whose breast, for want of a nearer, the orphaned girl's first passion of grief had spent itself, but whose attentions harassed her now, would have accompanied her, but she would have no one. She approached the door full of awe as well as sorrow. Within it seemed some dark angel, with brimming chalice, had been waiting till she was calm enough to drink. There was something sacramental in this first visit to her dead; her passion composed itself for the encounter. Through the lowered blinds the afternoon sun filled the room with a warm amber light. The windows were opened slightly at the bottom, and the fresh spring wind puffed and sucked at the light casement curtains. She laid her head down upon the pillow and put her lips to the chill, sunken temples, upon which she felt the hair still damp from the sweat of the death-struggle. As there are depths in the sea which the hardiest diver cannot support save with constraint of breathing, so there are depths of sorrowful reverie wherein the soul abdicates for a time its faculties of memory and comparison. Fenella did not cry nor remember nor rebel. The briny flood rose quietly--encompassed her utterly--covered her insensibly at the temperature of her own forsaken heart. Sorrow so deep has many of sleep's attributes. She had been vaguely conscious for some time of a knocking at the door before she raised her head. It was turned quite dark; the charwoman, with a candle lighting up her frightened face, stood in the open door.

"Mrs. Chirk! How dare you disturb me."

"Oh, miss, I'm sorry; but I knocked and knocked. Nurse is upstairs and Frances is out, and there's two gentlemen below says they must see you. I 'aven't told them nothink, miss, not knowin' as you'd 'ave me."

Some more of the dreary business of death, she concluded. She went to her own room, bathed her eyes, dressed her hair hurriedly, and came downstairs. She started as she opened the dining-room door. Her visitors were Lumsden and the Dominion manager.

XVII

A DREAM COMES TRUE

The two men were in evening dress, standing a good way apart. Both seemed ill at ease, and each showed it in a different fashion. Bryan was pulling at his fair moustache, and Mr. Dollfus, his watch in his hand, full of suppressed excitement, had evidently just checked himself in a nervous pacing of the carpet. Before she could give her indignation words, Bryan came quickly across the room, and kept her silent with a gesture.

"Miss Barbour, just a word before you say anything, and before Dollfus tells you our errand. I've brought him here to-night because I don't want either you or him to reproach me afterward that I came between you and even a hundred-to-one chance; but I want you to know before he begins that the whole thing's against my judgment, and against my inclination, too. Now then, Joe, fire away, and remember time's valuable."

The Jew only seemed to have been waiting to burst forth.

"Mith Barbour," he exclaimed, with a nervous movement of his hands, and lisping worse than ever, "I wantcher to thave me."

"To save you?"

"Yeth. Oh, don't look at me that way. I'm thpeakin' sense. Dontcher know what's happenin' to-night?"

She shook her head.

"What!" he almost screamed; "you meanter thay you've forgotten. It's the first night of the _Dime Duchess_. They're playin' the second act now, and, by Gott, the piece is damned already!"

He wiped his dripping forehead with a big scented handkerchief, and began to pace the floor again, flinging out his arms exuberantly.

"It's a conthpiracy from beginning to end," he cried, shrilly--"a conthpiracy! I tell yer, Lumpsden, I bin in front, and I know a lot of the faces. Fifty or sixty of Costello's people if there's vun. I'll haf the law on him. But cher can't turn out sixty people, eh! They've stopped Ormiston's encore twice; Mith Carthew's so frightened she can't sing a note. Three months' work and thousants of pounds gone to h--ll in a night, by Gott!"

"Stop swearing and raving, Joe, and tell the girl what you want."

Dollfus sobered himself with a great effort and wiped his mouth.

"Scuthe my langwitch, please, Miss Barbour," he said in a lower tone. "I'm excited; I ain't meself. I wantcher ter come and dance."

Fenella stared at him. "To _dance_! to-night?"

Bryan, who had kept his back to them, turned his head now.

"That's right, Flash," he said over his shoulder, "my advice to you is 'don't you do it.' Joe's crazy, but he ain't exaggerating much. They're pretty wild over something in front."

Dollfus shook his head despairingly from side to side.

"There you go Lumpsden, there you go agen. You're all wrong. I've bin tellin' him that all the vay in the cab. He don't know the public like I do. They're jutht in the mood now when somethin' new and somethin' good'll carry 'em off their feet. Mith Barbour, I haf ter go back anyhow. It'th for you ter decide. Will you come or wontcher?"

"Bryan," she said. "Doesn't he know?" pointing to the ceiling with her head.

"Bout cher mother!" said Dollfus, who was watching her narrowly. "Courthe I know the poor lady'th ill. But I'll take yer down and I'll bring yer back. Think? Three quarters of an hour! You'll never be mithed."

"Mr. Dollfus, mamma died this morning."

The Dominion manager took up his hat without a word and walked on tiptoe to the door. Bryan followed and, if looks could have killed, Mr. Dollfus's troubles would have been over then and there. In the hall the little man turned.

"Mith Barbour, pleathe, _pleathe_ belief me. Not for a thousant pounds, not for ten thousant, I vouldn't er had this happen. I couldn't know, could I--ah? I gotter heart--eh? You von't t'ink the vorse of me?"

"Oh, come on!" said the baronet, taking hold of his sleeve. "Haven't you done enough mischief already?"

"_Stop!_" cried Fenella, so loudly that both men obeyed. She stood rigid for a moment, pressing her hands over her eyes. Across her brain in letters like fire the last message from the beloved dead was throbbing and glowing. "_Dance! Dance!_"

"I'll come, Joe!" she cried. "Just two minutes to put on my cloak, that's all. Don't stop me, Bryan! I know what I'm doing. Let me pass! Oh, I've had enough of its being made smooth and easy for me. I'm one of the crowd to-night, and I'm going to help 'em pull the fat out of the fire. I can do it, too. I never was afraid, and I've got a bit up my sleeve you haven't seen."

She was gone and back in a moment, cloaked and with a little box under her arm.

"My make-up box," she said, tapping it. "I just thought of it in time. Have you got the car outside? How long'll it take? Mrs. Chirk!" she called down the kitchen stairs. "Tell nurse I've been called away on business and not to sit up."

"You're a herrowen, a herrowen," said Joe, dabbing at his eyes this time, as they took their seats in the cab.

"Oh, no, I'm not, Joe. No more than any of the other girls. Do you think I'm the only woman that's got to grin to-night when she'd rather cry? I never was stage-struck, like other girls. I always knew it was 'work! work!' once you were over the floats. Don't look so glum, Bryan. That's 'cos he only knows half our business, isn't it, Joe? He's only a dabbler. It's bread and butter and a bed to lie on, and perhaps medicine for somebody's mother, isn't it, Joe? Some of those girls told me they'd been eighteen months out and three months rehearsing! Think of it! Oh, why doesn't he get through the traffic?"

The front of the Dominion flashed past, festooned with boards announcing that stalls and dress circle and amphitheatre were full. The vestibule round the box office was crowded with men in dress clothes.

"They're just t'rough the second act," said Dollfus. "Now you know what you've gotter do." And he repeated his instructions. At the stage door he took her hand and pulled her after him, past the wicket and down the whitewashed corridor, full of girls in spangled finery, who gazed at her in amazement and drew aside to let them pass. Near the wings the manager was pounced on by various subalterns, but he waved them aside furiously.

"Go 'way! ask some vun else! Do somethin'! Getter hustle on! What is it, Mr. Lavigne? Oh! the band parts for the cymbal dance. Take 'em rount to Steiner. I ain't the orchestra! Run up to your old dressin'-room," he said, and let go of her hand; "I'll send up your own dresser. Mr. Lavigne--have the old cue put back. You know. What's it--'muffins'?"

Jack Ormiston was just finishing his third song as she came down dressed, made up in vivid white and carmine, and with the little silver cymbals on her hands. He tumbled off, breathless, perspiring through his grease paint, and stood for a moment, his knees trembling, trying to catch some encouragement amid the babel of cheers, counter--cheers, whistles, cat-calls, and cries of "Order!" that followed him through. And she had to face _that_ presently--unknown, untested, her name not even on the programme.

"Do you think you can do it, Flash?" Bryan asks, nervously, chewing his moustache. In defiance of the "well-known Dominion rule" he has followed her behind.

"Wait and see!" she says, without looking at him, and next moment has taken her cue and is on the stage.

In front the vast concavity of the auditorium sweeps away from her feet, outward and upward. It is dark, confused and populous, full of faces, like pebbles, she fancies, dragged seaward by a retreating wave--flecked white with shirt fronts and fluttering programmes--a hungry monster, ready to engulf her at a tremor or hint of fear. Its hot breath mingles with the cold down-draught of the stage like the flush and chill of an ague. Beyond the blurred footlights her eyes, misty with emotion, watch the leader of the orchestra lifting the first languid bars of the score. His head is turned toward her. In a moment he will give her her signal. Yet, though not a single stroke of his baton but is counted by her, as she waits, poised and tense, for the note upon which, with a clash of cymbals and a tremor of her whole body, the dance must begin, her thoughts, strangely detached and visionary, stray far away from the present moment with its personal crisis of success or failure, to brood, with a perverse preference, over the two great sorrows of her life--the lover who forsook her at the cross-roads of his own ambition because she had not wealth or wit to hold him--the mother, deserted now in her turn, whose waxen fingers, stitch by stitch, had sewn the very dress she is wearing, and who lies at home unwatched or watched only by strangers on the first night of her pitiful state. Life! life! this is life. Something beautiful yet horrible, too. Something that in its demand for service--for distraction--takes as little heed of the woman's breaking heart as it took of the man's thwarted ambition.

"_B-r-r-r!_" The note is reached. As she clashes her cymbals together all visions take flight. The music rises like a flood, pours over the footlights, enters into her and possesses her utterly. She has sold herself to it, and, true to the bargain, her bangled feet beat--beat out the rhythm upon the boards as they once, upon the sand, had beaten out a tune that one man and the eternal sea sang together. Not a movement of her body above the waist but is poised upon them, governed by their shifts and changes, and nothing is stranger than, having watched them awhile at their work, quick and calculated as the shuttle of a machine into which a brain of steel has been built, to look upward to where arms and breast and head thrown back are all partners in some dream of an unattained desire, that hovers just out of reach of the inviting arms, swoops wilfully for a moment to touch the pursed lips, and, just as it is clasped convulsively to the heaving breast, escapes, to leave her gazing after it with set, expressionless face and limbs, suddenly grown rigid again.

* * * * *

"_B-r-r-r!_" The cymbals bray their harsh discord anew. The music begins, more faintly at first; slowly, slowly it woos the coy vision back to her arms. Her face softens. Out of despair intenser desire is born. Nearer and nearer still. But a new note of warning has crept into the score. A muffled drum-tap, hardly heard at first, grows louder--falls faster. And her face changes with it. To bewilderment, horror succeeds rapidly. Either this is not the dream that fled her arms before, or else some new significance in what she sees terrifies her, now when it is too late. Straight and level as a blow it reaches her. She covers her eyes, tries to strike it down, holds it from her with outstretched hands, folds her arms across her breast to deny it entrance. The music tears through crescendo to climax, and all the time she is dancing as well as acting--dancing with all her strength and skill. She cannot feel the tension of the audience, does not know what a tribute is in its breathless attention. She only knows that her dance is nearing its end and that they are silent. Why does no one cheer or clap their hands? Is it possible that, amid those hundreds, not one knows how well the thing is being done? Furore or failure: this had been prophesied of her, and she had given no thought to the alternative. It is to be failure then. All her work is to go for nothing--her dishonor, the violence done her own feelings to-night--for nothing. With success she might even have forgiven herself. A great terror seizes her of the pitiless many-headed monster whom she has wooed in vain and whose churlish silence has power to change all she had thought inspiration into the dross of a crazy, heady folly. It is beginning to murmur--to move restlessly. As she holds her arms out to it in a sort of last abject appeal, the murmuring grows louder. It is the wave, the wave again, of her first fancy, that has hung suspended while she danced, and that now, gathering volume, rears its head to finally overwhelm her with shame and confusion. She was mad to have ventured! Nothing living can face it! She stifles a scream, dances out the last furious finale of the orchestra, and falls prostrate, her arms stretched out before her, the silver cymbals held upward.

Everything turns dark and thunderous. She feels the chorus sweep past her with a glitter of gold legs and a stiff rustle of skirts; fancies that the orchestra is playing again, but that something louder and stormier is drowning it; gets shakily to her feet, takes one frightened glance at the tumult before her, and, with a half curtsey, totters through the wings. Mr. Dollfus rushes to meet her; he is shaking her hands again and again, some one else is holding her round the waist and whispering in her ear.

"Pull yourself together, Flash! It's all right. You must go on--once, anyhow. Damn it, Joe, give the girl a few moments. Can't you see it's got over her?"

"Did I--do--all right?" says Fenella, between gasps.

"All right?" Dollfus repeats, excitedly. "Cantcher hear 'em? Listen to the noise! Wotcher think they mean? Come--surely to gootness, you're ready now?"

She is calmer, and draws herself out of the baronet's arms.

"Go on, kid," he says, as he lets her go. "Go on, and taste popularity. Take a good long drink of it, Flash."

As she came through the wings the dropping fire of applause exploded into a roar again. It was nearly three minutes--I mean three real minutes--before she was done kissing her hands to us all, and the play was allowed to proceed to its triumphant finale. I happen to know, because I was in front, and a good deal of what you have been reading is my own impression, on record in the columns of the _Panoply_, of the night Fenella Barbour came into her kingdom.

XVIII

ICE TO THE MOON

And yet an hour later, when the theatre was empty, the cheering and the speeches done, and the linotypes were pecking various people's impressions of a wonderful night into place, she was crying as though her heart would break. She was sitting in Lumsden's study in a big chintz-covered arm-chair. She had taken off her hat but not her cloak, and her hair fell in some disorder over tear-stained cheeks. The baronet sat on the edge of a table opposite her, his long shapely black legs stretched out before him. He had changed his coat for a silk dressing-jacket and was smoking a cigarette. In spite of his air of being at home, something in his face, harassed and unquiet, checked the inference that he was also at his ease. His thin hair was ruffled and his eyes were a little bloodshot. Quite frequently he reached across to a tray on which a syphon, a cut-glass bottle, and a long thin tumbler kept cheerful company.

"Don't you think you've cried about enough, Flash?" he suggested, presently.

She pressed a handkerchief, already wet through, against her eyes, but made no attempt to check the flow. There was something disquieting in this steady drain upon her emotions. It seemed to tell of a mortal wound to affection or self-respect.

"I t-told you I should. You should have let me go home."

"My dear child, it's natural you should cry after what you've been through. But there's a point where every one ought to stop. You'll make yourself ill."

"I shall never forgive myself--_never, never_!"

This was a point of view that the baronet had evidently tried to combat already, and unsuccessfully. He sighed, and took another drink.

"I'm bad--wicked--heartless and disgraced." She jumped up and began to button her coat.

"I must go--at once!" she cried. "Where did you put my hat?"

"_Flash!_"

She was so near him that without rising he could put out his hand and catch her arm. She looked at his face and sat down, weakly and as if fascinated. He held her so for a few moments, and then turned his eyes away.

"Don't be a little muff!" he said.

His words seemed to relieve a tension. She giggled hysterically.

"You're up here to-night," he went on deliberately, "because I made you come up, and because I wasn't going to have you go home, after eating nothing all day, to a house where every one's in bed, and cry yourself to sleep or lie awake starving and self-reproachful. You won't be so hard on yourself after eating and drinking something. Hello!"

There was a stir and tinkle of glass and china from the inner room. Bryan threw the door open.

"Bring it in here, Becket," he said.

Two servants entered, carrying a tray. Quickly as a conjuror the elder of the two cleared the low table, spread a fringed linen cloth and laid out supper. There was soup in brown silver-covered bowls, and something in a tureen with a white tongue of flame licking the bottom, and an epergne of fruit topped with a big pine and a phalanx of thin glasses. The footman put a pail on the ground full of cracked ice, out of which three long bottle-necks were sticking. He began to cut the cork of one of them loose.

"Anybody call while I was out, Becket?"

"Madame called about nine, Sir Bryan."

"Again?" he said, in a surprised voice.

"Yes, Sir Bryan."

"Did she leave any message?"

"She said you would probably hear from her to-night, Sir Bryan."

Lumsden looked at the clock and shrugged his shoulders.

"You needn't wait up, Becket," he said. "I'll telephone to the garage."

The outer door closed softly upon the two men. Neither of them had looked at her once.

"Now then," said Lumsden, expanding hospitably. "Sit where you are and I'll wait on you." He put a napkin over her knees, tilted the scalding bouillon into her soup-plate, and filled two glasses with the spumy wine. He emptied one himself and refilled it immediately.

"Aren't _you_ going to eat anything?" asked Fenella.

"Oh! I've had dinner. Besides, I'm a bit off my oats, Flash. Been worried lately." He gazed at the fire awhile, chewing one end of his moustache, but didn't enlarge upon the reason of his disquiet.

"Is that all you can eat?" he asked presently, seeing she put aside her plate. "You must have some Hide-and-Seek, then. You should have taken some first. It'll give you an appetite; and it'll give you a color besides. That's another of my worries. You're too pale, child. Have you always been so?"

"I suppose so."

"Oh! it's all right, then. Of course it's a divine color; but one doesn't want an artistic effect at the expense of health. Well, Flash, here's a toast: 'The New Life,' Miss Fenella Powys Barbour." He bowed profoundly and emptied his glass.

Fenella just sipped her own wine. A suspicion that had crossed her mind even in her own house, and again when Lumsden held her in the wings, but which, in her excitement, she had forgotten, returned upon her. Every time he filled and drained his glass fear clutched at her heart.

"What a rummy little face you made then, Flash. You won't do that when you're ten years older. No, no! Thank God for the juice of the grape. It's killed more men than bullets, but it's better to be full of it than full of bullets. 'Ah! eh!' as Joe would say. Don't jump!--'tother cork's just going."

"Bryan, don't drink any more. It--it isn't fair to me."

"Oh, oh! So that's the secret? That's why we're such a tongue-tied little lady: that's why we've lost our appetite? My dear kiddie, you surely don't think a bottle more or less makes any difference to an old war-horse like myself. But I love you for hating it. It's a low taste for a girl. I get fits of loathing myself; sometimes even the smell suggests dyed hair. There, then!" He thrust the open bottle back into the melting ice. "Now, turn to vinegar!... But I'll tell you a secret, Flash. Half the work of the world is done by men who aren't quite sober after nine o'clock. Just cosy, y' know. And the best paid half, too. I could give you names that would surprise you. It's a rummy world."

He meditated awhile on the strangeness of the world against which he had so little cause of complaint, shook his head, and, probably from force of habit, mixed himself a whiskey and soda.

"What was I saying when we were interrupted? Oh, yes; I remember. I'll tell you while I'm cutting up one of these little brown birds. Why--just this, Flash. You're unhappy because you're confusing reasons with motives. One can have all sorts of reasons, good and bad mixed, but it's the motive that counts. Take yourself to-night. Why did you come and dance? Well, Joe in tears is an affecting sight: that's one. Then you don't like to see work and worry wasted: that's another. And I think you're a helpful little baby. That makes three good 'uns. Suppose in with all these there was a bit of vanity mixed, a little half-formed wish to show 'em a trick or two and a very pretty shape...."

He stopped suddenly and threw down the knife and fork he had been plying. "I say, Flash, don't you think you and I ought to know where we stand?"

"Where we stand?" Her mouth went suddenly dry.

"Yes"--nervously but stubbornly--"where you and I stand. It's the proper time for it. There's a new life beginning for you to-night, Flash. I don't want to exaggerate it; I've seen too many of these things end in smoke, and the time's gone by for any Lola Montes. The world wants things just as bad, but it wants to pay less for 'em. But you're good for three or four years, and that looks a long way ahead to me. Flash, what do you think of me? I mean, personally. Bryan Lumsden--the human animal?"

"How can I tell? I don't know you well enough."

"That's the sort of answer that tries to gain time and only loses it. I'm playing _bona fide_, Flash: don't you play Punchinello. You're woman enough to know the most important thing about me."

"Important for you, perhaps."

"Yes, my clever girl, and for you, too. You can't play the lone hand forever. All life's a conspiracy against it. When fate throws two people like you and me together, it doesn't let them go under an explanation, at least. Let's have ours."

She covered her eyes. "Not to-night, Bryan; not to-night. Think what I've been through."

"Yes, to-night, coz. Don't look scared. You ain't going to hear anything you shouldn't. I'll begin at the beginning.... Nine or ten months ago, you know, I was at La Palèze. I'd been asked to put money in, and I went for a look. God knows why I stayed on. We didn't have much to do in the evenings except talk scandal, and I admit there was a good deal talked about a French artist and his pretty model, who were staying together in the town. You've heard, perhaps, how common that arrangement is all along the coast. But this time they said the model was English, and even before I saw you I felt sorry for you. It's a kind of national pride, I suppose. We ain't angels ourselves, but we don't like to think of our own women that way, abroad. My bedroom window looked right out along the beach, and when I was dressing for dinner I used often to see you coming back along the sands. Do you remember it?"

Fenella was leaning forward now, intense interest on her face, her lips parted, and her eyes half closed.

"I know--I know," she broke in. "We used to go to Sables and have tea in a little windy, boardy place that he said reminded him of America. It was about half-past seven or seven when we used to come back, wasn't it? And the hotel windows seemed to be all on fire, and the village all low and gray and sad, and, however quick we walked, the streak from the sun over the water kept up and dazzled us. And I used to stop and grub for shells and funny things, and when I looked up he'd be miles ahead, and I had to run--run--oh! I'm sorry for interrupting." She looked at Lumsden and all the glow died out. "Go on, Bryan."

His mouth twitched and his face grew dark.

"Well, I spoke to you at last. I hope you remember that as vividly. It didn't seem a great sin against propriety under the circumstances. You'd gone before I found out who you were. If I had known, it might have made a difference. Because I knew your father, Flash. I used to spend my holidays at Lulford, often. Coffers was always let to some rich cockney or other, and we used to live on the rent in Pimlico. He taught me how to throw a fly. Then he dropped out. I heard he married some one--who didn't--you know----"

"He married a farmer's daughter for love," said Fenella, proudly, but inexactly.

"It doesn't matter. When I got back from New York just before Christmas, Joe came to see me, full of news. He told me you had gone to him asking for an engagement and that you were to spend Christmas at Lulford. He wanted money. I wouldn't promise till I'd seen you. You know what happened then, don't you, Flash?"

"I know some of it."

"I'll tell you the rest. When I came into the library, I won't say I lost my heart. I'm not a man to be bowled over by the first piece of plaintive prettiness with a white neck and a turned-down collar that comes his way. I've seen pretty nearly every pose, and that's the one I mistrust most. Besides, I already had La Palèze against you."

"It wasn't such a secret as you think. Other people had it against me too."

"Yes. But with the unimportant difference that I got the credit of the walks to Sables in the sunset and all the rest of the idyll."

"Which you never took the trouble to deny."

"Frankly, I never did, coz."

"Why not, please?"

"Ah! there you touch a kink in my nature that I can't explain."

"You saw that we were left alone. You must have noticed the women cut me. Do you know that my own cousin spied on me at night and accused me of wearing clothes and jewelry you'd bought for me?"

"Flash--don't scold! I didn't know all this; and if I had, it wouldn't have upset me. It seemed more my business than any one else's what had happened to you before."

"_You! you!_ Why is my reputation your affair?"

Instead of answering, he knelt down on the bearskin hearth-rug, and leaned forward until their eyes were on a level.

"Look at me, Flash--straight! That's a good girl. Now, tell me this. I've met Ingram once. If I were to know everything as, say, for argument's sake, God knows it, is there any reason I shouldn't like to meet him again?"

"_You'll--never--know._"

Of all the answers she could have made him, it was probably the one for which he was least prepared. He jumped to his feet and stood, baffled, pulling at his moustache and looking down on the floor. Then he threw up his head.

"So be it," he said. "I'll take that risk with the others. Flash, will you have me?"

She curled her lip.

"Oh! quite respectably. A man with his shirt outside his coat shall say those few words first that mean so much."

"No, Bryan. I won't."

"Don't be a little donkey, Flash. You don't realize what you're throwing away. You don't know what a man like me is prepared to do, once he's hard hit. Don't believe all the tales you hear. My heart's been burgled, but it's never been raided before. You _are_ the first, in a way. I'll be gentle--I'll be respectful--I'll be as like the men in the novels girls read as I can. I know my faults. Haven't I been holding myself in all the time? It's not as if I wanted you to give up anything. You can live your own life, till you've tired of it. I ain't"--he laughed shortly--"jealous of the public. And as for the man you won't tell me about, you see I'm putting him out of the question. He's gone, anyhow. And oh, Flash! I'll make your life a fairy tale come true. Think of the dresses you'll have. I'll never be tired of seeing you in new ones. And the travelling! We'll go all over the earth. If you've got those new ideas, I'll settle money on you in a lump. Then you won't feel bad asking me for it. I'll leave everything to your own generosity. Could I say fairer? Could I offer more? Oh, why don't you say something? How can you sit there and listen to me, talking like some rotten old drysalting coronation knight?"

He knelt down on the hearth-rug again, unlocked her fingers, and took them into his own--gently and with a sort of frightened respect for the repulsion in her averted face. His own was flushed and ignobly eager. His agitated breath, tainted with liquor and tobacco, seemed to penetrate her fine dry hair to the scalp. Within, I suppose, was ferment and chaos--blind, confident passion waiting impatiently on a tenderness, felt indeed, but which seemed to perish on his lips in one bald unconvincing speech after another, whose unworthiness he felt as he uttered them. Somewhere inside the animal tegument that his life had thickened and indurated he was groping for his starved, mislaid soul.

"Flash, why don't you speak? Haven't I eaten enough dirt yet? What pleasure can there be in watching a human being grovel? Why don't you say 'Yes'?"

"No--no--_no_!" she cried, passionately, stamping her foot. "Bryan, don't touch me! I won't have you touch me! I've got a temper. Oh, can't you see I'm not the sort of woman that gives herself twice."

She thrust him away and jumped up, pushing the arm-chair back on its smooth casters. He rose, too, and picked a hair or two carefully from his broad-clothed knees.

"I see," he said, gloomily and comprehensively. "It's a lesson not to judge by faces. Yours has given me the sell of my life--but it's what I've always maintained. The first man--the first man, however great a hound he may be. You never catch him up."

"Think what you like of me," she cried indignantly, "but don't dare suppose evil of him. You can't even imagine him. He's as far above me and you, Bryan, as the stars are above the ground. You've met him, you say. How could you look in his eyes and not be ashamed of all your horrid, wicked knowledge? Oh!" she went on in a softer voice, "I don't despise you, Bryan--truth and honor, I don't. I like you as a friend. I've heard things about you; but I feel that if I was a man and had your chances I mightn't be much better. That's honest, isn't it? You and I are much about the same. We're fond of the world and pleasure and all the good things money buys. What you offer dazzles me in a way--'specially the clothes. Perhaps if I hadn't known him first--but oh, Bryan, I _can't_--I can't come down after that! You don't know how hard I fought for him. I found him at his work and I tempted him away. I made myself pretty for him. I made all the advances. I'm full of tricks, really. There's things even I couldn't tell. But they don't mean the same to him, Bryan, as they would to us clay people. I don't know what they do mean. I thought I might have in time. Because he was always kind. He saw through me, I think, but my feelings never got hurt. I think I was just a little bird that had come to drink out of his hand, and he wouldn't frighten it away."

"It's a pity Mrs. Hepworth isn't alive," sneered Lumsden. "You and she might compare notes."

"Is she dead?" said Fenella, in a still lower voice. "Poor thing; that's it, then. She was ill and suffering and told him. He couldn't resist those sorts of things--Paul couldn't."

"He must have been an amusing companion."

"Not amusing, Bryan, but, oh! something so much deeper. Don't think I loved a muff. My darling is as strong and brave as he's good. I felt so _safe_ with him. You don't know the terror a girl can feel of a man she isn't sure of. It's like a nightmare where you can't run away. I'd have gone tramping with Paul. I'd have slept under a hedge if he'd had me in his arms. Now, don't you see how impossible it is? I'm tired, Bryan, I _must_ go home. Will you 'phone for a cab?"

The dogged silence in which he listened to her, sitting on the edge of the table, his hands thrust into his pockets and his head hanging down, should have warned her. Now, when he lifted it and showed his face, she measured the full extent of her folly in trusting herself to him. He walked deliberately across the room and locked the outer door. With an open laugh at her terrified face, he slipped the key into his pocket and stood before her, his hands clutching the lapels of his smoking jacket.

"Now then," he said, and took a deep breath. "You've had your advantage and you've used it as a woman always does--mercilessly and foolishly. It's my turn now."

She faced him bravely. "I know what you mean," she said without flinching, and without raising her voice. "Don't go mad, Bryan! If you destroy me, you destroy yourself."

"I'll take the risk," he answered. "I see you looking at the windows. You're quite right. They ain't locked. You can throw one open now and squeal. I shan't stop you. There's a bobby on point just round the square. Tell _him_ your story. But, before you do, just look at the clock, and think how you'll come out of the show-up yourself. Time passes quickly in the kind of chat we've been having. I think, under the circumstances, there's discredit enough for us both. You won't? That's sensible. Now listen to me."

He stopped for a moment as though his mouth were dry, filled a glass from the syphon and gulped it down. She watched his face with a sort of disgusted fascination--the bloodshot, frowning eyes, the dilated nostrils, and the twitching mouth.

"You say you've the same flesh and blood as myself, Flash. Perhaps you can imagine, then, how it feels when you've chucked your heart at the feet of the only woman in the world, and she's danced on it and kicked it back to you. Pretty bad, I assure you. There's nothing like a little real life to chase away the dreams you've been filling your head with."

She would have fainted if he had kept his eyes upon her; but he turned aside to drink again, and when he looked up it was into the muzzle of a little steel revolver. He didn't flinch or start--only kept quite still and whistled softly under his breath.

"I'll shoot!" she said. "I swear I'll shoot, Bryan, if you don't unlock the door and let me out. It's his present. He told me I'd want it. It was under my pillow all the time at Lulford. I've had it in my coat pocket every time I went out with you. Will you let me go?"

"No," he said. "Less than ever now."

Her hand wavered--steadied--tightened convulsively. Next moment he had gripped her wrist. With a little cry of pain she let the revolver go. It fell on the thick carpet almost as noiselessly as on grass. He picked it up and examined it before he put it in his hip-pocket.

"By gad!" he exclaimed half under his breath. "She really pulled the trigger. Why didn't he tell you to push the safety catch up first?"

She had fallen back in the arm-chair, quite beaten and crying.

"Have mercy on me, Bryan!"

"Oh, yes! I'll have mercy. I'm going into the library to collect my own thoughts. I'll leave you here for a quarter of an hour. You can do a lot of thinking in that time. All I've offered you stands. If you make up your mind quicker than you expected, just knock at the door or call me."

He opened the door of the inner room, looked at her for a few moments, checked a sudden movement either of ruth or passion, and closed it behind him. She heard him drag a chair along the floor and sit down.

Left alone, she looked quickly round her for a means of escape. The windows were not bolted. She opened one, trembling at the slight noise it made, and looked out. The street was twenty feet below her. Empty asphalt stretched left and right, scalloped by the street lamps into white semi-circles of incandescent light, whose dim edges touched one another. There was a triangular open space across the road to her left. Some hotel or club opened upon it. As she watched, one of the glass leaves of the door swung open, and two men in evening dress came out. They parted at the bottom of the steps with some light talk that ended in a coarse unrestrained laugh. One took a cab, the other went swinging along and still shaking with laughter, in the opposite direction. Call for help!--tell her story!--to a world like this!

She closed the window and looked round her with that despairing glance that leaves no corner unscanned. Suddenly her eyes were arrested in their search. At the farthest end of the room, just beyond the light of a shaded reading lamp, they caught the familiar ebony and silver of a telephone apparatus. The nurse was not to leave them till to-morrow, and she was sleeping in Miss Rigby's old room. They had decided to give up their telephone, but there was a month or so of the old lease still to run. She tiptoed across the room, lifted the receiver from its bracket and put it to her ear. Silence for a long, long while. Then the metallic sound of feet approaching along a zinc-covered floor.

"Number please?"

She tried to keep her voice low and steady.

"3087 Paddington."

"I can't hear you."

She ventured to speak a little louder, glancing over her shoulder as she did so, and the man repeated the number. After what seemed an eternity she heard a piping, sleepy little voice with a Scotch accent. Thank God! It was nurse.

"Who are you?"

She had not answered when the receiver buzzed in her ear, nearly deafening her. Another voice, louder, more urgent, broke in.

"Are you Mayfair? Is this Sir Bryan Lumsden's?"

"Oh! please go away," pleaded poor Fenella, "you're interrupting a call."

"I _won't_ go away. We're Hampstead. Is this Lumsden's? It's urgent. It's life or death. Tell him----"

She listened for a moment, then dropped the receiver with a scream. Bryan burst into the room, haggard, his tie hanging loose.

"What's the matter? Are you hurt?"

"Oh, Bryan! There's some one on the telephone for you. They say your son----I don't understand. It's something awful."

Lumsden caught the oscillating receiver and clapped it to his ear. This is what she heard:

"_What!_ Both? _My God!_ The boy's alive? Have you got----? What does he say? Yes! At once! _At--once!_"

He turned so quickly that Fenella, who was standing by his shoulder, was nearly thrown over. She had to catch his arm to keep her balance.

"Is it bad news?"

"Yes, yes! Oh the devil!--the devil!"

"You'll want the car, won't you?"

"Yes. Do you know how to call it? Put the peg in the hole marked 'Garage!' Say: '_At once_--dressed or not.' I can drive."

He tried the outer door, cursed at finding it locked, then remembering, took the key from his pocket and flung it open. He shouted. It seemed scarcely a minute before the passage was full of servants, half dressed, the women with their hair loose, and the men fastening their braces--hardly two before the car was at the door, filling the quiet street with the throb of its great pulse.

"Call a cab and get home quick," he said, as he twisted a white muffler round his throat. "You'll find the number of a cab-rank in that red book. Have you got money for your fare?"

"Can't I go with you, Bryan? Can't I help?"

Even in his distress he had time for a moment of surprised admiration.

"Oh, Flash!" he groaned, "there's no one like you. Come on, then, and be in at the finish!"

XIX

THE WAGES

The chauffeur was fastening his leather gaiters as they came out.

"Frognal!" was all Bryan said. "And drive like h--ll!"

The lad touched his cap. As they took their seats, the car seemed to bounce and then leap forward. The streets and squares were empty, except for an occasional limping shadow on the pavement that stopped short at their approach and turned to watch them past. From time to time the chauffeur's shoulder dipped to one side, and the piercing wail of a "Gabriel" horn went before them like an admonition of judgment at hand. She knew then that they were nearing a corner, and that she must hold her companion's arm, for the suddenly diverted impetus seemed to heel the car over on two wheels and she could not keep her seat on the inflated cushions except by clinging to him. But he never spoke to her, or seemed to notice the clutch upon his sleeve. The muscles of his forearm were always moving spasmodically, as if the anguish of waiting found relief in some restless, regular motion of the hands. She knew he had a trick of twisting his signet-ring round and round. The carriage lamp was behind his head, and she only saw his face in silhouette. In the dark lanes around Hampstead the car seemed to be plunging giddily into a tunnel of light made by its own lamps.

It stopped, almost as suddenly as it had started, outside a thick hedge of evergreens. Over an unpainted oak gate an electric light was burning inside a tiny drop-lantern of frosted glass. Beneath it three or four men were standing together; one of whom wore a flat braided cap with a peak. Lumsden jumped out almost before the car had pulled up, and, with a hasty word to the man in blue, disappeared. He had not asked her to come in with him, and she was shy of renewing her offer of service. She sat still in the corner where he had left her, and began to look about her and take her bearings. The hedge was so high and the house so far back that she could only see two of its gable windows. A light, turned very low, showed in one of these. Across the road, on the other side from the house, was a pebbled path with a fringe of coarse grass at its further edge. In front of her a few lamps marked out a curved perspective of road. Beneath it and beyond, the heath lay in confused patches of various intensities of blackness. The sky was paling over in the direction of Highgate, and a bird in a tree overhead, roused probably by the glare of the lamps, was beginning to pipe drowsily and tentatively.

A "_honk! honk!_" like the croak of some old marsh-haunting reptilian bird, began to sound behind her from the direction in which they had come. It grew louder. A motor-cab slowed up behind them, and two men, one of whom carried a large bag, passed quickly into the house. The two chauffeurs, avoiding the whispering group at the gate, walked up and down together on the edge of the heath, smoking the cigarette of freemasonry and stamping their feet, for the morning was turning cold. A French maid-servant brought out a big cat-skin rug. "For mademoiselle," she said. Her beady eyes scanned the girl curiously as she tucked it round her.

It was broad daylight when Fenella woke, and the heath was a dull sodden green under the window. Lumsden was shaking her by her shoulder. She woke suddenly and completely, as we do from a sleep of which we are half ashamed.

"Why didn't you call me before?"

"You were better asleep. You couldn't have done anything."

"Is--is the boy better?"

He shook his head, and put his hand to his throat as though his collar irked him.

"Not--dead? Oh, Bryan!"

"_S--s-h!_ Just going. Come in now. I want you to see him first."

The house was quite new, full of quaint projecting windows planned to trap the sun, with a tiled roof that dipped and rose in unexpected places. A house of nooks and corners--built for light and air, and the new religion of open window and running water over porcelain baths, in which one feels death to be almost as incongruous as dust. Half the hall door was of glass, in bubbly panes like the bottom of a bottle. He held it open for her, and, bidding her follow, crossed the tiled hall parlor to a white-railed and velvet-carpeted staircase. A red-eyed maid-servant, carrying an enamelled pail and with a mass of soiled linen over one arm, stood aside to let them pass. At the head of the staircase was a square landing, lit by an octagonal turret skylight. A great many doors opened off it. Bryan turned the handle of one.

"In here!" he said.

The room was large and gaily papered. In the centre was a brass-railed cot. Its brass-railed sides had been lifted off and stood, behind it, against the wall. All around the little bed, upon tables and even chairs, were strange utensils, meaningless to the girl, some in glass, others in shining white metal with tubes that coiled and trailed, and linen, linen, everywhere that sheet or towel could be hung. The room was as full of strange scents as of strange shapes, but that of rubber overpowered all the rest, and was to be, for all time, the smell that could most vividly recall the scene to the girl's memory. The blinds were up, but no one had remembered to switch off the lights. Into one corner of the room a pile of toys had been hastily swept; prominent among them a great elephant brandished four lumpy wheeled legs in the air.

Upon the bed a little lad of five or six was lying, covered with clothes to his waist. Even now, with his poor little face lead-color, and all the spun silk of his hair damped down on his forehead, he was beautiful: with the hue of health on his cheek the face must have been that of an angel. His fringed eyelids were closed, and had dark shadows under them; his pinched nose was pitifully like Lumsden's. He seemed to be very tired, and very glad that all these clever people had given up exercising their skill upon him. For no one was doing anything now. One man, in shirt sleeves, held his limp wrist in a great hairy paw, and kept his eyes upon his watch; the other stood at his colleague's shoulder with his hands behind his back, intent upon the shrunken little face.

Lumsden cleared a chair, and, pulling it forward, bade the girl, with a gesture, sit down.

"Any change, Webber?" he asked.

"It may be a few minutes yet. _Hush!_"

He got up and put his ear to the boy's mouth. A faint snore was audible. He looked up at his partner.

"'Cheyne-Strokes' breathing beginning, Girling."

"Is he suffering?" Bryan asked. He seemed to have lost interest in the technicalities of the question. "That's all I want to know."

"No, no," said the younger man. "Please believe us, Sir Bryan. He won't have suffered from first to last."

"Why's it such a long business?"

"Oh! seven hours is nothing unusual. The power of resistance in children his age is generally much greater. Twelve to fourteen is quite common. I still believe, Webber, there was subcutaneous administration as well."

"Perhaps. I could find no puncture, but his reaction to the ether certainly looked like it."

As Webber spoke he dropped the wrist, pocketed his watch, and made a sign to Lumsden.

"Can I take him up?" said the baronet.

"Yes. It doesn't matter now."

Bryan lifted the inert little body out of bed, held it to his breast, and put his face down on the wet curls.

"_Squirrel! Squirrel!_" he whispered once or twice, and held him closer.

"I can't hear anything now," he said at the end of a few minutes.

"Let me look at his eyes," said Webber.

Bryan gave a great wild laugh. "His eyes! Good God, man! what do you think you'll see there? Eyes? He never had any. He was born blind."

He laid the body tenderly down on the bed, put one hand across his face for a moment, and touched the weeping girl on the shoulder.

"Come down, Flash. I must send you home now. Don't cry so, girl! It's not fair. This is _my_ funeral."

On the way to the head of the staircase they passed another door. He laid his hand upon the brass knob.

"I promised I'd show you real life. There's more inside here. Do you want to see it?"

"No! no!" The girl shrank away, and pulled her skirts from the panel.

"All right, then. Don't be afraid. I haven't been in myself yet. I'm not going to. The fiend! oh! the fiend, Flash! A little child like that--a little boy born blind! He never saw the sun. Look out of this window over the heath and think of it. For all he ever saw he might have lived and died at the bottom of a well. I used to describe things for him though. He was stupid with some people, but he knew my voice. Gad, how he knew it! You'd see the poor little devil's eyes straining, straining, and he'd struggle and kick and push things out of the way till he found me. Oh! the incarnate fiend!"

"Bryan! She's dead, remember."

"Dead! What do I care? If she wasn't I'd have killed her myself. And she knew it. She was the one I cared for least. A cold, vicious, bargaining jade. I tried to get the boy away, but she was too d--d clever. So many hundreds a year more, that's all he meant to her. Do you remember my asking you once if you were fond of kids? I was thinking of him when I asked you that. Some day, perhaps--I thought----'Cos some good women are the devil over things like that, Flash; and if I'd had a dozen born right they shouldn't have come in front of him--This is nice talk to a girl!"

"I don't mind, Bryan. I don't seem to mind a bit now. I think I've missed my proper delicacy, somehow."

He stared at her. "You haven't missed your health, at any rate. You must be a robust little animal for all your color. This time yesterday, Flash, think of it! If it was put in a book, who'd believe it? I wonder if everything that ever can happen a man and a girl has happened us, or if there's more coming to-morrow."

They had been talking in the dining-room. He went over to the sideboard for a drink and stopped suddenly. A half-crown was lying on the top of the buffet. He brought it over to the light, lying flat in the palm of his hand.

"This is a rummy coincidence, Flash," he said, without taking his eyes off it. "D'you know, years and years ago in Vienna, where I was a thing that danced and trailed the conquering sabre past the _Töchterschulen_ in the _Hohenmark_ on court days, I spun a coin this very size to decide a rather important matter for me. 'Tails I go on; heads I go out.' I wasn't bluffing. I was pretty hard hit, or thought I was. But I was young, too, and I'll never forget my feelings when I looked down and saw the double eagle--I'd shut my eyes while it spun, and I remember feeling behind in my hip pocket----Hello! Where did this come from?"

He was holding Ingram's strange present in his hand.

"Of course. Another property. 'Act ii., scene 2: The lair of the wicked baronet.' Do you want it back? No, I won't, though," snatching it back as she reached for it. "Guns are for people who know how to let them off."

He made a movement as though to put it back, then checked himself, and balancing it in his hand looked from it to the coin and back again. The half-crown lay now, head upward, upon the table.

Suddenly Fenella caught his arm. "Bryan! not that--not that!"

He seemed to rouse himself. "Not that?"--angrily. "Why not? What d'you mean? How can you know what I was thinking of?"

His hand had closed upon the weapon. She loosened his fingers one by one to find her own hand held fast.

"Bryan, perhaps I've been too hard on you to-night. Suppose--suppose----Don't look at me that way or I'll stop. I don't promise anything. I must have time. It won't be easy for either of us."

He bent his head and put his lips to the hand that had been held out to slay him and to save him in one night.

"As you will, Flash. God bless you whatever you do with me."

"And now, dear, let me go," she said gently. "Remember, I have my own dead to watch."