Chapter 12

"Yes, Sir Owen; indeed I do." And the two stood looking at each other, thinking of the changes that time had made in themselves. Sir Owen's figure was thinner, if anything, than before; his face seemed shrunken, but there were only a few grey hairs, and the maid thought him still a very distinguished-looking man--old, of course; but still, nobody would think of him as an old man. Mérat's shoulders seemed to be higher than they were when he last saw her; she had developed a bust, and her black dress showed off her hips. Her hair seemed a little thinner, so she was still typically French; France looked out of her eyes. "Isn't it strange? The day we first met we little thought that we would come to know each other so well; and you have known her always, travelled all over Europe with her. How I have loved that woman, Mérat! And here you are together, come from Park Lane to this poor little flat in Bayswater. It is wonderful, Mérat, after all these years, to be sitting here, talking together about her whom we both love, you have been very good to her, and have looked after her well; I shall never forget it to you."

"I have done my best, Sir Owen; and you know mademoiselle is one of those whom one cannot help liking."

"But living in this flat with her, Mérat, you must feel lonely. Do you never wish for your own country?"

"But I am with mademoiselle, Sir Owen; and if I were to leave her, no one else could look after her--at least, not as I can. You see, we know each other so well, and everything belonging to her interests me. Perhaps you would like to see her, Sir Owen?"

"I'd like to see her, but what good would it do me or her? I'll see her in the evening, when I can speak to her. To see her lying there unconscious, Mérat--no, it would only put thoughts of death into my mind; and she will have to die, though she didn't die last night, just as we all shall have to die--you and I, in a few years we shall be dead."

"Your thoughts are very gloomy, Sir Owen."

"You don't expect me to have gay thoughts to-day, do you, Mérat? So here is where you live, you and she; and that is her writing-table?"

"Yes; she sits there in the evening, quite contented, writing letters."

"To whom?" Owen asked. "To no one but priests and nuns?"

"Yes, she is very interested in her poor people, and she has to write a great many letters on their behalf."

"I know--to get them work." And they walked round the room. "Well, Mérat, this isn't what we are accustomed to--this isn't like Park Lane."

"Mademoiselle only cares for plain things now; if she had the money she would spend it all upon her poor people. It was a long time before I could persuade her to buy the sofa you have been sitting on just now; she has not had it above two months."

"And all these clothes, Mérat--what are they?"

"Oh, I have forgotten to take them away." And Mérat told him that these were clothes that Evelyn was making for her poor people--for little boys who were going upon a school-treat, mostly poor Irish; and Owen picked up a cap from the floor, and a little crooked smile came into his face when he heard it was intended for Paddy Sullivan.

"All the same, it is better she should think about poor people than about religion."

"Far better, Sir Owen, far better. Sometimes I'm afraid she will bring back things upon her. She comes back tired and sleeps; but when she spends her time in churches thinking of her sins, or what she imagines to be sins, Sir Owen, I hear her walking about her room at night, and in the morning she tells me she hasn't slept at all."

"What you tell me is very serious, Mérat. All the same, all the same-- jackets and coats for Paddy Sullivan's children. Well, it is very touching. There never was anybody quite so good, do you think there was, Mérat?"

"That is the reason why we all love her; and you do, too, Sir Owen, though you pretend to hate goodness and to despise--"

"No, Mérat, no. Tell mademoiselle, if she wakes, that I am coming back to see her this evening late--the later the better, I suppose, for she is not likely to fall asleep again once she awakes."

Mérat mentioned between nine and ten o'clock, and, to distract his thoughts, Owen went to the theatre that evening, and was glad to leave it at ten, before the play was over.

"Is she awake?"

"She has been awake some time. I think you will be able to have a little talk with her." And Owen stole into the room with so little noise that Evelyn did not hear him, and all the room was seen and understood before she turned: the crucifix above the bedstead, the pious prints, engravings which they had bought in Italy--Botticelli and Filippo Lippi. She lay in a narrow iron bed, and all the form that he knew so well covered in a plain nightgown such as he had never seen before, but in keeping, he thought, with the rest of the room, and in conformity--such was his impression, there was no time for thinking--with her present opinions. The smallness of the chest of drawers surprised him. Where did she keep her clothes? It might be doubted if she possessed more than two or three gowns. Where were they hanging? The few chairs and the dressing-table, on which he caught sight of some ivory brushes he had given her, seemed the only furniture in the room.

"Evelyn!"

"Oh, it is you, Owen. So you have come to see me. You are always kind."

"My dear Evelyn, there never can be any question of kindness between you and me. You will always be Evelyn, and I am only thinking now of how glad I am to have found you again."

"Found me again!" And her thoughts seemed to float away, her mind not being strong enough yet to think connectedly. "How did you hear about me?" Before he could answer she said, "I suppose Ulick--" And then, with an effort to remember, she added, "Yes, Mérat told me he had come here," and the effort seemed to fatigue her.

"Perhaps it would be better if you didn't talk."

"Oh, no," she said, taking his hand, detaining it for a moment and then losing it; "tell me."

And he told her, speaking very gently so that his voice might not tire her, that Ulick had called at Berkeley Square.

"He told me you weren't going away with him."

A slight shudder passed through Evelyn's face, and she asked, "Where is Ulick?"

"He has gone away. If he had stayed he would have lost his post as secretary to the opera company."

Evelyn did not appear to hear the explanation, and it was some time before she said:

"He has gone away. I don't think we shall see much of him again, either you or I, Owen."

Owen did not resist asking if she regretted this, and she answered that she did not regret it at all. "And now you understand, Owen, what kind of woman I am; how hopeless everything is." In spite of herself, a little trace of her old wit returning to her, she added, "You see what an unfortunate man you are in your choice of a mistress."

Owen could not answer; and a moment after he remembered that it is only those who feel as deeply as Evelyn who can speak as lightly, otherwise they would not be able to resist the strain; and the strain was a very terrible one, he could see that, for she turned over in bed, and a little later he perceived that she had been crying. Turning suddenly, she exclaimed:

"Owen, Owen, I am very frightened!"

"Frightened of what, dear one?"

"I don't know, Owen, I can't tell you; but I am very frightened, for he seems not to be very far away and may come again."

"And who is 'he'?"

"It is impossible to tell you--a darkness, a shadow that seems always by me, and who was very near me last night. A little more chloral and I should not be here talking to you!"

"It is terrible, Evelyn, terrible! And how should I have lived?"

"You lived before me and you will live after me. Suicide is a mortal sin, so Monsignor would tell me. We are forbidden to kill ourselves even to escape sin, and that seems strange; for how shall I ever believe that God would not have forgiven me, that he would not have preferred me to kill myself than to have--?" And her voice died away, Owen wondered whether for lack of strength or unwillingness to express herself in words.

"My dear Evelyn! my dear Evelyn!"

"You don't understand, Owen; I am so different from what I was once. I know it, I feel it, the difference, and it can't be helped."

"But it can be helped, Evelyn. You've been living by yourself, spending whole days and nights alone, and you've been suffering from want of sleep--something had to happen; but now that it has happened you will get quite well, and if you had only done what I asked you before--if we had been married--I"

"Don't let us talk about it, Owen; you don't understand how different I am, how impossible--I--don't want to be unkind, you have been very good to me always; and, understanding you as I seem to understand you now, I am sorry you should have made such a bad choice, and that I was not more satisfactory."

"But you are perfectly satisfactory, Evelyn. If I am satisfied, who should have the right to grumble? The pain of losing you is better than the pleasure of winning anybody else.... So you think, Evelyn, you will never return to the stage?"

She did not answer, and, with dilated eyes, she looked through the room till Owen turned, wondering if he should see anything; and he was about to ask her if she saw the shadow again which she had spoken of a while ago, but refrained from speaking, seeing that the time was not one for questions.

"Evelyn," he said, "I will come to see you to-morrow. You are tired to-night."

XV

"She will fall asleep again, and to-morrow will be quite well. But what a near escape!" And he lingered with Mérat, feeling it were better she should know everything, yet loth to tell her that he had known all the while that Ulick was trying to persuade Evelyn to go away with him. But Mérat must know that Ulick had been staying at Berkeley Square.

"I suppose Monsignor comes here to see her?"

"He has been here, Sir Owen."

Owen would have liked to question her, but it did not seem honourable to do so, and after a little talk about the danger of yielding to religious impulses, he noticed that Mérat was drifting from him, evidently thinking such discussions useless.

On the landing he told her that Ulick had gone away with the opera company, and that it was not likely that he and mademoiselle would see each other again.

"But when Mr. Dean comes back to London?" Mérat answered.

"Well, hardly even then; after a crisis like this she will not be anxious to see him. You know, Mérat, he was staying with me at Berkeley Square; and I knew of his visits here, only it seemed to me the only way to save her from religion was by getting her to go back to the stage."

Owen took breath; he had told his story, or as much as was necessary, omitting the fact that he was an accomplice in the love-making which had led to attempted suicide.

"You don't think I was right?"

"Well, Sir Owen, you see, I don't think mademoiselle will ever go back to the stage."

"You think that, Mérat? Well, then, the only thing to save her from religion is marriage. I don't mind telling you, nor is there any need to tell you--you must know--that I have always wanted her to be my wife, only she would not marry me, and for some reason impossible to get at."

"Mademoiselle is like nobody else; _elle avait toujours son idée_."

"_Parfaitement, comme disent les paysannes de chez vous, d'une bête qui ne ressemble pas au troupeau et qui allait toujours._"

"_Oui, mademoiselle a eu toujours son idée_. So Sir Owen thinks it was fear of going back to the stage that persuaded mademoiselle to--"

"Something like that, Mérat. She liked Mr. Dean."

"But you are first in her thoughts, Sir Owen."

"That isn't astonishing. We have known each other so long. Now, after what has happened, perhaps she will think differently about marriage, do you understand, Mérat. She may think differently to-morrow, for instance, and it would be better for all of us--for you, for myself, for her. Don't you agree?"

"Well, Sir Owen, there is nothing I should like more than to see mademoiselle married, only--"

"Only you don't think she'll marry me?"

"_Comme monsieur a dit, elle a eu toujours son idée._"

"But after the great shock surely she will see that marriage is the only way." Owen continued to talk of marriage a little while longer, and all the way home his thoughts ran on his chance of persuading Evelyn to marry him. It did not seem possible that she could refuse after the shock. The chances were all with him: he would catch her in a moment when her faith in religion would be weakened, for she must see that it had not saved her from attempted suicide; all the chances were in his favour, and he hardly doubted at all he would be able to persuade her to marry him. Once she agreed she would carry it out; nothing she hated as much as any alteration of plan.

His mind wandered back into the past years, and he recalled little facts significant of her character. However loud the storm she would cross the Channel, though there was no reason for it--merely, as she said, because it had been arranged to cross that day. He could remember the dress she wore on that occasion, and the expression of her face. Other instances equally trivial floated into his mind, every one strangely vivid, delighting him because they were characteristic of her. If he could only get her to say she would marry him. It would be unnecessary to explain why he had sent Ulick to her. Or he might explain. It didn't matter. Ulick would pass out of their lives, and all this miserable business would be forgotten.

The quickest way of being married was in a registry office, but would Evelyn look upon a civil marriage as sufficient? Once the civil marriage was an accomplished fact, she could be married afterwards in Church, even in a Catholic church; he would go there if it pleased her to go. Besides, Evelyn really looked upon marriage more as a civil than as a religious obligation. His thoughts continued to chatter, keeping him up late, till long after midnight, and awaking him early. And the sun seemed to him to have dawned on his wedding day. But even if they were to be married in a registry office a best man would be required. So his thoughts went to Harding, whom he knew to be in London. But Harding would be busy with his writing until the afternoon, and Owen strode about Bond Street, visiting the shops of various picture dealers, welcoming any acquaintance whom he happened to meet, walking to the end of the street with him, and spending the last hour--from three to four--in the National Gallery, whither he had gone to see some new acquisitions. But the new pictures did not interest him. "My thoughts are elsewhere."

And turning from the new Titian, it seemed to him that he might drive to Victoria Street; Harding's work must be over for the day.

"My dear Harding, you don't mind my interrupting you?" And he envied his friend's interest in his manuscripts when the writer put them away.

"You are not disturbing me; my secretary didn't come to-day, and everything is habit. I can no longer write except by dictation."

"If I had known that I would have called in the morning."

"Again some drama in which Evelyn Innes is concerned," Harding said to himself.

"Harding, I have come to ask your advice; you'll give me the very best. But you will have to hear the whole story."

"Well, I am a story-teller, and like to hear stories."

Owen told him how he had met Ulick Dean at Innes', and had invited him to stop at Berkeley Square, and how gradually the idea that he could make use of Ulick in order to tempt Evelyn back to the stage had come into his mind. Anything to save her from religion, from Monsignor.

Owen caught Harding looking at him from under his shaggy eyebrows, and anger had begun to colour his cheeks when Harding said:

"Don't you remember, Asher, coming here a couple of years ago, and--"

"Yes, I know. You predicted that Ulick Dean and I would become friends, and you are right; we did."

"And you preferred that Evelyn should be his mistress rather than that she shall go over to Monsignor?"

"I am not ashamed to confess I did; anything seemed better--but there is no use arguing the point. What I have come to tell you is that rather than go away with him she tried to kill herself." And he told Harding the story.

"What an extraordinary story! But nothing is extraordinary in human nature. What we consider the normal never happens. Nature's course is always zigzag, and no one can predict a human action."

"Well, then, my good friend, when you have done philosophising--I don't mean to be rude, but you see my nerves have been at strain for the last four-and-twenty hours; you will excuse me. My notion now is that everything has happened for the best." And he confided to Harding his hopes of being able to persuade Evelyn to marry him. "Only by marriage can she be saved, and I think I can persuade her." And he babbled about her appearance last night after her long sleep, comparing her with the portrait in his room. The painter had omitted nothing of her character; all that had happened he read into the picture--the restless spiritual eyes, and the large voluptuous mouth, and the small high temples which Leonardo would like to draw. The painting of this picture was as illusive as Evelyn herself, the treatment of the reddish hair and the grey background.

And Harding listened, saying, "So this is the end."

"You think she will marry me?"

"Everything in nature is unexpected, that is all I can tell you. Art is logic, Nature incoherency."

"Well, let us hope that Nature will be a little more coherent to-morrow than she was last night, and that Evelyn will do the right thing. Women generally marry when it is pressed upon them sufficiently, don't you think so, Harding?"

"I hope it will be so, since you desire it."

"And you will be my best man, won't you?"

"I shall be only too pleased. Now, if you wait for me while I change my boots we'll go out together." And the two men crossed the Green Park talking of the great moral laxity of the time they lived in; whereas in the eighteenth century men were even accused of boasting of their successes, now the conditions were reversed, men never admitting themselves to be anything else but virtuous; women, on the contrary, publishing their _liaisons_, and taking little pleasure in them until they were known to everybody.

"_Liaisons_ have become as official as marriages. Who doesn't know--" And Harding mentioned a number of celebrated 'affairs' which had been going on for ten, some twenty years. "The real love affair of her ladyship now is probably some little tenor or drawing-master, and Cecil's a little milliner; but her ladyship and Cecil are forced to keep up appearances, for if they didn't who would talk about them any more?"

"You should write that as a short story," Owen suggested. And the two friends began to argue as to the number of lovers which fell to the lot of fashionable women, from the age of twenty-three to fifty. Two or three ladies were mentioned whose _liaisons_ reached a couple of hundred, and there was another about whom they were not agreed, for some of her _liaisons_ had lasted so long that Owen did not believe she had had more than fifty lovers.

"It is impossible to imagine any time for a young man more propitious than the present, or any society more agreeable than London. Morals, as the newspapers would say, are in abeyance, conscience is looked upon as pedantic, especially in women, and unbecoming." As the two walked up St. James' Street together, Harding noticed that Owen, notwithstanding his chatter about morals, was thinking of Evelyn, and took very little interest in the display of the season--in the slim nobility of England, fresh from Oxford, all in frock coats for the first time, delighting in canes, and deerskin gloves, in collars and ties, the newest fashion, going down the street in pairs, turning into their clubs, lifting their hats to the women who drove past in victorias and electric broughams.

"Never were women more charming than they are now," Owen said, in order not to appear too much immersed in his own thoughts, and he picked a woman out, pretending to be interested in her. "That one leaning a little to the left, her white dog sitting beside her."

"Like a rose in Maytime."

"Rather an orchid in a crystal glass."

Harding accepted the correction.

"Do you know who she is, Harding?"

The question was a thoughtless one, for no one knows the whole of the peerage, not even Harding, and it was painful for him to admit that he did not know the lady, who happened to be an earl's daughter-- somebody he really should have known. Not having been born a peer himself, he had, as a friend once said, resolved to make amends for the mistake in his birth by never knowing anybody who hadn't a title. But this criticism was not a just one; Harding was not a snob. It has already been explained that love of order and tradition were part of his nature; the reader remembers, no doubt, Harding's idiosyncrasies, and how little interested he was in writers, and painters, avoiding always the society of such people. But his face brightened presently, for a very distinguished woman bowed to him, and he was glad to tell Owen he was going to stay with her in the autumn. The Duchess had just returned from Palestine, and it was beginning to be whispered she had gone there with a young man. The talk turned again on the morality of London, and exciting stories were told of a fracas which had occurred between two well-known men. So their desks had been broken open, and packets of love letters abstracted. New scandals were about to break to blossom, other scandals had been nipped in the bud.

Harding said nothing wittier had been said for many generations than the _mot_ credited to a young girl, who had described a ball given that season by the women of forty as "The Hags' Hop." Somebody else had called it "The Roaring Forties." Which was the better description of the two? "The Roaring Forties" seemed a little pretentious, and preference was given to the more natural epigram, "The Hags' Hop."

"We were all virtuous in the fifties, now licence has reached its prime, and we shall fall back soon into decadence."

Harding, who was something of an historian, was able to illustrate this prophecy by reference to antiquity. When the life of the senses and understanding reached its height, as it did in the last stages of the Roman Empire, a reaction came. St. Francis of Assisi was succeeded by Alexander VI.; Luther soon followed after. "And in twenty years hence we shall all become moral again. Good heavens! the first sign of it has appeared--Evelyn."

Piccadilly flowed past, the stream of the season, men typical of England in their age as in their youth, typical of their castles, their swards, and lofty woods, of their sports and traditions, hunting, shooting, racing, polo playing; the women, too, typical of English houses and English parks, but not so typical; only recognisable by a certain reflected light; an Englishman makes woman according to his own image and likeness, taking clay often from America. The narrow pavements of Bond Street were thronged, women getting out of their carriages, intent on their shopping, bowing to the men as they ran into the shops, making amends for the sombre black of the men's coats by a delirium of feathers, skirts, and pink ankles. And nodding to their friends, bowing to the ladies in the carriages, Harding and Owen edged their way through the crowd.

"The street at this hour is like a ballroom, isn't it?" Owen said. "I want to get some cigars." And they turned into a celebrated store, where half a dozen assistants were busily engaged in tying up parcels of five hundred or a thousand cigars, or displaying neatly-made paper boxes containing a hundred cigarettes.

"When will men give up smoking pipes, I should like to know?"