Part 21

“It was not, then, a divine magnanimity that taught you to forget my stains?”

“No.”

“It was not that you drew your sword for a marvellous gospel--for a gospel that dazzled the poor outcast in the dock with its magnificence?”

“No, no.”

“Then why did your voice seem to wail like a flute? Why did you pluck the back of your hands until the blood flowed from them? Why did you conclude in a whisper so gentle that it could only be heard by the spirit?”

“I was in a frenzy of avarice. I was fighting for myself.”

“No, no! Your words were inspired from heaven.”

“No, no! It was no more than the baleful power of the earth. I was fighting for a roof over my head, regular meals, a reputation, material needs.”

A thrill passed through the eyes of the woman. They seemed suddenly to be blinded by a thousand black thoughts she had half-forgotten. She sprang to her feet, possessed by an excitement that he who had made his pitiful confession was afraid to plumb. She placed her hands on his shoulders and peered into his face; and he did not shrink from contact with her, for by some occult power, which was her own genie, her own special and peculiar gift, he was disarmed.

“You have the voice, the bearing, of a god,” she said, quivering with terror, “but your speech belongs to the underworld whence I have come. Persist in it and we return to it together, walking hand in hand.”

The advocate strove feebly to escape from the demonic faculty which already had been exerted upon him. She resisted him mournfully.

“You cannot put me off, my deliverer. Henceforward your ways are my ways. I go with you to the bright fields of your native kingdom, or I return to the horrors of my own. I beseech you to take me by the hand and lead me along the golden paths to those mountain fastnesses in which you were born, in which the sun shines forever. You know how I have been dreaming that some saint and hero would lead me to them; you must make my dreams come true again, my deliverer, as you did but yesterday.”

“Oh, why did you come to me?” cried Northcote weakly, as he strove in vain to free himself of the yoke that was already on his neck.

He seemed hardly to understand that he had to deal with a desperate gambler who was staking all upon a final cast.

“Do not let me perish,” cried the woman. “Do not say this is an illusion upon which I have built my miraculous faith. Do not tell me that the gods walk the earth no more!”

The tragic distension of her countenance filled the young man with horror, yet also with a sense of its weird poetry.

“You must not hurl me back into the abyss out of which I have crawled with bare life,” she cried, seizing his hands with an astounding passion. “You are the god who has breathed upon the poor outcast who knows no heaven apart from your nobility; you cannot, you must not, reject her.”

Again the wretched creature sank down upon her knees before him.

XXXV

DELILAH

As Northcote gazed upon her, despair beat him down like a flail. It was not for him, man of genius as he was, to heal this outcast with his touch. Only a perfect chastity could do that; and this was the jewel with which he had parted two days before to save her from the gallows. If he touched her now, it would be as the inhabitant of her own level. She cried for the living god, yet now he was become a counterfeit of arid clay. She had asked for bread, and he had only a stone to yield.

“You must go,” he said, and the words seemed to thicken as they fell from his throat. “You must fly from me. I have nothing to offer you.”

The woman shuddered and clasped him by the ankles, but otherwise made no sign that she had heard.

“My power is gone,” he said. “I am no longer the strong and valiant one, but the poor outcast even as are you. Two days ago I flung my birthright away.”

“Will you send me back to the charnel-house?” said the woman with a low moan.

Northcote drew up his body rigidly, erectly.

“I have no choice,” were the words that were forced from between his lips.

Vein by vein the creature before him was invaded by death. She crouched lower and lower upon the ground until she was no more than a shapeless and ignominious mass on the bare boards in front of the fire. Every line of her body was merged and outspread into something amorphous, without form. Her helplessness was too complete to arouse pity. Such a flaccidity was greater than that of an infant, whose frame is too puny even to allow it to crawl.

Northcote had no disgust. He had too sharp a sense of horror that the power should be denied to him to succor such an invertebrate thing. Presently, by an effort which seemed to shatter her flesh, the creature was able to move. She rose from her knees, issuing from the state of coma with all the heavy and desperate pangs of one who attempts to throw off the fumes of a deadly venom. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, and folded her arms in front of her.

“If you could have touched me once with the hem of your garment you would have healed me. As it is, I walk back with my wounds into the world.”

A singular change had occurred in the voice of the suppliant. It was far other than that which had clothed the language of entreaty which had previously fallen from her lips. In the ear of Northcote the change wrought relief. Yet even as he imbibed this clear, this definite, this pungent tone with the eagerness of one who presses cold water to his throat at a time when the pangs of his thirst have become insupportable, a rapid and bewildering transformation took place in her who confronted him. She who a minute ago had presented the appearance of a nebula, suddenly broke out all over into light like a star. Out of the sprawling shapelessness there was seen to issue something as strong, graceful, and agile as a leopard. The hue of her skin became luminous as though a fire had been kindled beneath it; and her eyes, which so lately had been dull and without nascency, shot forth a lustre that added light to the room.

There was nothing baleful or malevolent in an apparition so profoundly wonderful. In standing aside to witness the evolutions of any force, in the act of obeying the laws by which it is governed, however inimical its operations may be to our personal safety, the feeling of repulsion bears no part. The spring of the tiger, the long white teeth of the wolf, the pinions of the eagle, the motions of the serpent, are in themselves beautiful, for in them are manifested the free and unconquerable expression of that force which nature has taken for its highest gospel. The wide and curving nostrils of the prostitute were the mansion of a subtle but brutally dominating power.

For the moment, however, Northcote was only aware that a splendid, supple, and entrancing thing had stolen unperceived, like a beast of prey, into the room. The strong, fine, and beautiful line that had been traced along the convergence of the thin but full lips addressed him like an unexpected but supreme artifice of a great painter, who has learned to use his pigments with effrontery.

As a revelation of power she was more than his equal; she challenged him with eyes whose insolent domination exceeded his own. Furtively, yet boldly, she had discarded her stealthiness; she had already the strength that disdains a mesh. She looked upon him now with the same hidden but imperious scornfulness with which he had looked upon the judge, the jury, and the bar under the excitement his speech on her behalf had generated. Strong, subtle, and secure as he had been in the exercise of his specific and audacious talent, this siren was equally so in hers. He had delivered a great prostitute from the gallows in order that she might lead him to it.

“I came here with no thought of destroying you,” she said.

With perfect composure she proceeded to divest herself of her hat and coat, and carried them confidently behind the curtain, as though already she were perfect mistress of his house. When she returned she seated herself in the chair against the fire.

Northcote had not protest to raise. He could not meet the challenge in the eyes of Medusa. In their baleful lustre he had read the abrupt limit to his own imperious will, he beheld as through a mirage the prefiguration of his own doom. Even as he had conquered others by the fearlessness of his own quality, he had himself been conquered by the fearlessness of hers. He was no common advocate, but this was no common harlot. Prayer and devotion alone could have saved him from toils such as these; but of prayer and devotion he no longer commanded the use. There was a fissure in his armor; and through that aperture, small as it was, the deadly, unnamable thing that had crawled into his room had been able to plant its look.

“I am trying to think,” said his visitor, as she reclined in the chair with her elbows outspread and her hands clasped behind her hair, which was profuse and ordered with rare precision, “I am trying to think what it is about you that has caused me to love you. I do not think it can be your voice altogether, for although when it chooses it can sound so low and delicious, it can also sound harsh and rude. No, my noble warrior, I think there is a deeper cause. Is it not that our natures are alike? Are they not so similar? We are not of the common herd. We can think, we can feel, we have a little knowledge, and do we not possess enormous powers of resentment? Life has not been very gentle with you and me, but we will not complain about it much. Can we not quietly choose our own weapons and go our own way to work in order that we may avenge ourselves? It is for your strength and spirit that I love you. Give me a kiss.”

Northcote obeyed.

She caressed his hands with an extreme tenderness.

“How strong, square, massive, and beautifully ugly they are!” she exclaimed. “I am sure you could fell a bullock if you doubled your fist. I love you even for these. I would rather be strangled by strong hands than I would be fondled by weak ones. If you cared to drive your fist into the world, you could knock a hole in it and let out a few of its wrongs. How tall and young and splendid you look. And strength means bravery.”

Her words, the careless complacency which accompanied them, the ease of her posture with her head thrown far back in the chair and her eyes directed steadfastly to Northcote’s face, filled him with a cruel sensation of pleasure. Knowledge translated into the grace of physical perfection had an all-conquering attraction for his nature. Every blemish upon her, and as she lay back in the shadow of the lamp they appeared surprisingly few, were additions to her value. They were so many receipted acknowledgments of the heavy sums she had paid for what she possessed. There was a short but deep scar over one eye. There was a suggestion of coarseness in her jaw; her bust looked a little too full.

“What shall I call you?” said the young advocate with shining eyes. “Shall I call you Diomeda?”

“Do, my beloved Achilles!”

“How do you come to have heard about him? Is it that Greek is compulsory in the University of the Gutter?”

“Achilles was perfectly familiar to me before I attended it. My dear father used to tell us stories from Homer when he was drunk.”

“Well, Diomeda, I have come to believe that your father must have been a very remarkable man.”

“The world will arrive at a similar belief two hundred years hence. But how can you have acquired such an important piece of information concerning him when you have never seen one of his works?”

“Do not forget that for the past hour I have been gazing upon his _chef-d’œuvre_, the masterpiece among his masterpieces.”

“On the contrary, my beloved, you are judging him by his one great failure. In conception, in design, I have no peer in this time of ours, but the inspiration of the artist failed suddenly and lamentably before he could touch me with the magic that would have rendered me immortal. I am a splendid thing, my beloved, but I shall perish. Therefore the artist has failed.”

“This is a masculine intellect of yours,” said Northcote, who was captivated by the celerity with which she had interpreted an idea that in his own mind had still the nebulosity of recent birth. “Is it usual to your sex to have such powers?”

“You will confess that you would not say so? Are they not eternally dunces and fools in the austere eyes of the male?”

“Perhaps I make that confession if you insist upon the measure of my ignorance.”

“Say rather, my hero, the measure of your inexperience. You see you have only studied those of my sex who are affiliated to the Great Trades’ Union. They take eternal vows of foolishness and duncishness before they are admitted to membership of that sanctified order. But with us black-legs it is different. We are allowed to know everything. You may not know that in our University of the Gutter we have the most learned staff of professors in the world. There is a chair for everything.”

“Except for honesty. If there was a chair for that, would there not at once be an end to your intellectual subtlety?”

“You do not know the great university to which I have the honor to belong if you think intellectual dishonesty is tolerated among us. The moment we become intellectually dishonest we have done forever with Alma Mater. She sends us down immediately, and there is nothing for us then but the river or the Great Trades’ Union.”

“That is what the world would call being ‘sent up.’ Yet if the simplest terms were not subject to totally different meanings in the varying strata of our society, we should not have so many of these pretty paradoxes to subsist upon. But I feel, Diomeda, that I am entitled to ask you one question. Was it in my capacity as a mentally dishonest person that you came to me to-night to ask me to arrange for you to be ‘sent down’ from your university?”

“Answer that question to your own liking, beloved one. It was your appeal on my behalf that brought me here to-night. Would you have me ask whether you were mentally honest when you made it?”

Her laugh had an edge that cut him like a keen blade. But she was quick to read the sharp thrill of pain that made his eyes grow dark.

“Do not repine, my beloved Achilles,” she said with a softness that had the power to caress, “I found you after all to be as honest as I am myself.”

“At least,” said the young man, sensible that even her lightest caresses possessed the ferocity of those of the snake and the tiger, “you are the first of your sex with whom I have conversed who appears to understand the uses of paradox.”

“There is no other means by which the honest mind can carry on its thinking.”

“If that is the case, you conduct the thinker to his doom with atrocious certainty. You conduct him to the gutter.”

“That is true, O Achilles,” said the woman with a quiet laugh.

“In other words,” pursued Northcote, “he demonstrates in his own person the impossibility of a reconciliation in any terms whatever between the ideal world of the spirit and the material world of the flesh.”

“Why trouble to put it into so many words, dear lad? Briefly, I am the child of the poor drunken man of genius, my father; and I suspect that you had a poor drunken man of genius for your father also.”

“I would have you to know that my father was ordained a clergyman of the Church of England.”

“How old was he when he died?”

“About thirty.”

“Did it never occur to you that the poor fellow killed himself in the struggle to become an honest man?”

“These eyes of yours are dreadfully piercing. I remember my mother saying of him that the clock of his intellect was always set a little too fast.”

“She never informed you by any chance, dear lad, that if he had not taken an overdose of opium he would have died a lunatic?”

“Or that he killed himself with drinking brandy after the manner of your own illustrious parent. By the way, you have yet to give me a description of your mother. Can you recall her?”

“She died, worn out, I believe, by slavery when I was about four years old. She reminded me of a cow; her eyes were so placid and her movements were so slow. But she had been affiliated to the Trades’ Union from her earliest days. I believe she was a life member with her policy or whatever they call it--I have no first-hand knowledge--fully paid up. She was buried in consecrated ground in Kensal Green cemetery with wreaths on her coffin in consequence. Non-members of the Union are mostly buried in a prison or in the Thames. And now about your mother, the clergyman’s widow? She, I presume, would be a vice-president of the Union, or on its committee, or one of its trustees, or she might even aspire to be one of its honorary secretaries? Her social rank would render it necessary.”

“Yes, dear old woman,” said Northcote softly. “She is on the committee right enough. As you say, her social rank has rendered it necessary.”

XXXVI

THE HONORABLE SECRETARY

On the following morning Northcote was late for breakfast. When the old charwoman shook his curtains at a quarter to eight, a sleepy voice murmured: “I may be a bit late. I will cook the bacon myself and make the tea. Lay a knife and fork for two and don’t stay.”

It was between ten and eleven o’clock by the time he had completed his toilet. And it befell that at that hour the kettle was singing on the fire, and he himself was kneeling before it, toasting pieces of bacon upon a fork, when there came a knock on the door of his room.

“Come in,” he called cheerfully.

He expected to see an attorney’s clerk with further business for his attention.

Instead, two persons entered whose appearance caused him to drop the fork and the bacon among the ashes.

A moment ensued in which he had to fight with all his resolution to regain his self-possession. The first to enter the room was his mother, and immediately behind her was the young girl whom he was under a pledge to marry.

Mrs. Northcote was a tall, strong woman, past fifty, with assured movements and a resolute-looking face. It was large and rather square. Her cheeks were red with country life; her hair had streaks of white in it; her eyes were bluish gray. Her clothes, severe in outline, fitted close to her broad and powerful frame. They helped to sustain a somewhat rural appearance, which was not altogether unprepossessing and had a sort of education in it. Her speech was decisive, while the voice was somewhat harsh, and left an impression that it would be easy for it to domineer.

The young girl who accompanied her was not moulded in these Amazonian lines. She was straight and slender, only a little above the medium height, neat of hand, delicate of foot. Her complexion could only have been produced by generations of country air. It was perfectly clear, and of an exquisite tawny pinkish whiteness. Her eyes were large, soft, and long-lashed, and although as clear and bright as a pair of crystals, as meaningless as those of a dumb animal. Her simple straw hat and thick gray coat and skirt were in themselves innocent of coquetry, but their inhabitant was in her kind a sweetly beautiful thing--half-child and half-woman--therefore these articles, rough and primitive as they were, had significance in every crease and fold.

The moment Northcote had managed to strangle the first pangs of his stupefaction, he rose from his knees and ran forward to greet them. He kissed his mother on both cheeks, and seized both of the young girl’s hands in his own.

“I could not believe my own eyes,” were the first words he spoke to his mother. “You should have given me warning that you were coming up to London, my dearest. It is the merest chance you have caught me at home.”

“It was not until last evening that we decided to come,” said Mrs. Northcote. “Margaret had happened to see the advertisement of an excursion, only eight shillings here and back.”

“Why not telegraph, my dear?” Northcote expostulated gently. “I would then have met you at St. Pancras.”

“It would have cost sixpence,” said his mother. “Besides it was too late last night.”

“Always the woman of action,” said her son, with a hollow laugh. “Always an arbitrary and drastic old woman in the execution of her ideas.”

Northcote kissed his mother again with the pride and affection which for the moment overlay this wound.

“I wonder,” said she, with an air of one who has come upon something profound, “why men have such a dislike to being taken by surprise. Your father was the same, Henry. He could not bear to be taken by surprise in anything. And I think you are wonderfully like your father in some things.”

“What is your opinion of this room of mine?” said her son abruptly.

“I don’t think I like it,” she said decisively, after making a catalogue of everything with an immensely critical glance. “It has a dismal look. And a hole in the roof, I declare! You must have it mended at once; it might help you to catch a cold. And you are right up at the top just under the tiles; I should think you must get frozen in winter. And it must be extremely draughty with those cracks in the door. And, my dear boy, I must say it looks very bare and untidy with not even a piece of carpet to the floor. I have meant for years to come and see you; and when I received that money you so kindly sent me, I thought now or never is the time. How I wish I could have come before, to have made you a little more comfortable!”

“How I wish you could, old woman!” said Northcote gently, taking both her hands.

“I think this room is rather sweet myself,” said the girl, who also had been examining it very critically. “Somehow every room looks sweet with a nice fire and a lot of books.”

“That unnecessarily large grate takes all the heat up the chimney,” said Mrs. Northcote, “and moreover is very wasteful of the coal. And what have you got behind the curtain, Henry?”

“That is where I sleep.”

“Well, that is sensible, my boy; a saving of money.”

“What a large room this must be altogether!” said the girl, with a sudden growth of her curiosity.

“I can see neither of you will rest until you have penetrated into the heart of all my mysteries,” said Northcote, laughing loudly, as he interposed himself between the entrance to his chamber and his mother, who, full of inquiry, was plucking at the curtain.

“Why, Henry,” cried the girl, with a thrill of consternation in her voice, “you have not had your breakfast!”

“Why should I? This is not Chittingdon, you know. Eleven o’clock is the fashionable hour in town. It wants ten minutes yet.”

“Bad habits,” said Mrs. Northcote solemnly. “My dearest, eleven o’clock is wrong.”

“When one is in Rome you must do like the Romans, you know.”

“I have never agreed with that proverb,” said Mrs. Northcote. “I consider it weak. When in Rome one should make the Romans do as one does.”

“Imagine me knocking at the gates of Buckingham Palace at a quarter to seven.”

“I am quite sure, my dear boy, the royal family is addicted to good habits. I am quite sure you would not find the king having his breakfast at eleven o’clock.”

“Oh, this dear dogmatic old woman of mine,” said Northcote, tapping her cheek in tender remonstrance. “A fixed rule and a definite opinion for everything under the sun.”

“You must have fixed rules and definite opinions if you are to succeed, my dear boy. Those who have their doubts always end by failing miserably.”

“So they do, old woman, so they do!” cried Northcote fervently, in spite of being stabbed by consternation. Yet he never conversed with his mother on the most trivial topics without feeling that her simplicity rendered her invulnerable.

“I see your table is laid for two, Henry,” said the girl. “Are you expecting a friend?”

“If he comes, he comes,” said Northcote, with a clever assumption of carelessness, “and if he don’t he stops away. Do you understand, Miss Inquisitive? I generally have an extra knife and fork, you know, in case a friend should happen to drop in.”