Part 2

His cool deferring of her invitation afforded him just that touch of masterful self-assertiveness Everard had always lacked in his dealings with this young woman. She now firmly made up her mind to marry him, that is, if he continued to carry things off so well. He would be better than a companion, and--there seemed to be nobody else!

At a quarter to eight on Saturday evening she was all ready, dressed in black and looking very handsome, on one side of the brightly burning fire, for there was a slight touch of frost in the air. Her senses were alert, she found herself actually listening for the sound of his hansom driving up to the door. Quite loverlike, she thought, with a little laugh, to herself! She remembered the last sentence in Everard’s old-maidish letter, which she passed over on first reading. He had informed her that this was his birthday. She welcomed this as a touch of sentiment--the sentiment she had not in the old days been solicitous to cultivate in him, but had carelessly let die. She wished she could remember exactly how old he was to-day? If she had been able to allude to it it would have pleased him.…

No use, she could not recapture the knowledge. She supposed he might be somewhere about forty? And he was late! How dared he be late, for her? Was there a fog perhaps?

She went to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and looked out. Rather misty--but not enough to prevent Everard from keeping time, if he had started early enough to dress! How rude if he hadn’t? She remained drumming on the pane with her long, slender fingers, looking down into the empty roadway.

She had not heard the door of the drawing-room open, but suddenly, before she had time to turn away from the window, Everard stood beside her with his handkerchief held up to his face, a familiar gesture of his for which she had often reproved him.

“How are you?” she asked him, rather frigidly. “What a draught you seem to have brought in with you!”

“May I shut the door?” Everard said, suiting his action to the words.

“Come to the fire, won’t you? You are cold.”

She spoke more cordially, but, in spite of her definite intention to propose herself to Everard that evening, the curious sense of physical alienation which she knew now had held them apart all these years, returned to her with tenfold vigour. Her instinct had been right. Physical leanings counted for something, and there was no real affinity between them. Alice shivered a little, for she was a sensible, business-like woman, and she firmly meant to over-ride the absurd and awkward shrinking, and marry him. Her mind once made up, she never went back.

He was holding his thin, blue-veined hands to the blaze. His eyes seemed to avoid hers.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “I hope you have got a good appetite? I have ordered such a nice little dinner for you.”

“How kind of you! But really, I eat very little except fish. My doctor has cut me down remorselessly.”

“And do you attend to him? You never used.”

“I have to attend to his orders. I am in rather a bad way, Alice. The base of one lung is quite solid… and the other is gone.”

“Nonsense! I believe you’re as right as I am, barring this little bit of a cold, that you’ll soon get rid of. You haven’t coughed once since you were in the room, do you know? I fancy that living alone as you do, you go and get ideas about yourself, and then rush out and call in a doctor who frightens you.”

“May be,” he said slowly. “Loneliness certainly doesn’t improve one’s perspective. And I haven’t been inside any one else’s house for a month.”

“There now, what did I say? And what do you do, when you are at home? Sit over the fire and grizzle, and think of your sins--and mine, eh?”

“Not yours--much!” said he, with a chilling effect of partial forgiveness which benumbed Alice, whose fighting spirit was up in arms to bring him to her feet again.

The maid announced dinner, and Alice took his recalcitrant arm, which gave her the sense of being glued to his side. On the way downstairs she thought, “Poor dear, he will want civilizing all over again!”

“You’ll drink champagne?” she suggested, when they were both seated.

“No, water, please.” He added, speaking to the maid, “Thanks, no soup!”

He allowed a helping of fish to be placed on his plate, but he did not eat a mouthful, that Alice could see.

The dreary dinner progressed. Alice Damer ate for two, and every now and then looked furtively at the man she had made.

It was her fault; she saw it now. This man had been her slave; she had been his inhuman master. She had laid him on the rack, she had starved his heart, for bread she had given him a stone. This was what their famous understanding had amounted to; the ruin of a man, a pale, thin, hectic mask, sitting opposite her, pretending to eat--the play of his thin wrists that manipulated his knife and fork drove her frantic--his sullen eyes refusing to meet hers, as in tones that only faintly represented the rich, soft, legal, measured voice she used to know, he responded gently but dully to all her conventional openings, and allowed the subjects she started so painstakingly to drop one by one. What would the servants think? Little pearly drops of dismay and effort broke out on her own white forehead; the effort she was making was too much for even her social fortitude. Yes, she knew she had behaved badly to him, but he might let her down more easily! Vexing of him! For what she had to do, must be done, in spite of difficulties.

The last course had been removed, two punctilious, slightly shocked maids had disappeared, and the couple were left alone over the walnuts and the wine.

She spoke to him quite crossly, in a voice she could hardly command. “Aren’t you interested in _anything_, Everard?”

“Yes, dear, in some things--for instance in your calling me by my Christian name--for the first time,” he replied quietly.

Alice felt uncomfortable. Such a direct thrust from this petrifaction suggested that he had seen through her, who hardly realized herself, and what she was doing.

“Oughtn’t I?--I forgot.”

“Oh, don’t apologize, it doesn’t matter.… I wanted you to badly, once, do you remember? Strange, when it does come--one is more or less past caring----”

“Coffee?” she asked. “I make it myself now, as you see!”

“Yes, please.”

She made it. She handed it. She even let her fingers graze his as she passed him the cup. It was literally the first time she had ever practised her own special art of flirtation in Everard’s connection.

Then there fell a silence between them. The patent coffee machine ceased to bubble. Its duties were sped.… Alice, sipping a restorative draught of the tonic liquid, broke the silence bravely. She felt that she owed it to him to take the initiative.

“I am feeling very lonely--now,” she said softly.

“Poor child, you must be,” he answered gravely.

“And I think I--I understand a little better how you must have felt all these years.”

He lifted his fishy eyes for the first time to hers. “Yes, but I am used to it, now.”

“But, Everard, it hasn’t done you any good?”

“No, I daresay not.”

“Everard, do you think--now--do you believe we--you and I, I mean, would have got on together?”

“How do you mean? In what relation?”

“I mean--in the usual relation--if I had wanted what you wanted?”

“Well, you know, I thought so, then.”

“Not now?”

“No, not now. Did I not tell you that I had grown philosophical? Whatever is, is good.”

“Oh, dear! Then you tell me that you think it is good, your living alone, with not a soul to talk to, or exchange an idea with, no one to look after you when you are ill, as you are now, but just to sit mooning over a dying fire----”

The ghost of a shrug was vouchsafed her. “Oh, I keep my fire up, and I mix my own grog and drink it, and warm my own slippers. It isn’t so bad.”

“Everard!” She rose to her feet and he imitated her, supposing that a move to the drawing-room was contemplated. “No, I am not going up yet, not till we have had this out. You do make it very difficult for me. It is as if you had lost the key--you will not understand _à demi-mot_!”

“Why should it be _à demi-mot_?” he repeated after her, catching, however, none of her fire. He sat down again and motioned her to do the same. Then he spoke, dully, but very clearly.

“Let us talk quietly, and not get excited over it. A man in my condition has no time for vagueness. I do understand, quite well, and I will show you that I do. You are willing to marry me now?”

“Yes,” she cried breathlessly. “Yes, poor Everard! And you--you don’t want me to any more?”

“I want nothing! Don’t think of me. Let us consider only you. Now tell me, would this marriage be of any use to you?”

“Use to me to be married to you, Everard?” She started.

“Sorry, but I can only put it from the point of view of utility. My personal desires are dead.”

“Ah, I killed them.”

“Yes, my dear, you killed them. I can’t pretend to any extravagant feelings of joy at what I suppose we must call your capitulation. You know, they give better terms to beleaguered fortresses the sooner they surrender? You, Alice, in your pride and impregnability left it too long. The wine got musty in the bottle, the cord got frayed and rotten. I am no good to you or anybody. My life is done. I thought all this out as I lay there--wrote some of it down even. I never thought I should get a chance of telling it all to you in person. I could not rest. In my delirium----”

“Delirium! Oh, Everard, what nonsense!”

He put her exclamations aside. “Well, I have told it you now, and I shall rest in peace.”

“If it’s any consolation to you, you have had a good scold--a good go at me!” Alice cried angrily, adding with bitterness, “And plus the satisfaction of refusing me!”

“But not at all!” he said, turning surprised, lack-lustre eyes on her. “If you think a marriage with me would do you any earthly good, you shall have it. I ought to have made that clear----”

“I wanted to do good to _you_!” she wailed.

“Too late for that. I won’t pretend, even to salve your conscience, Alice, that I care anything at all about it. Besides, your conscience has no need of salving. You were perfectly right not to marry me, in your heyday and mine, if you could not love me; you are very kind and perfectly in order to suggest it now, as a way of making me useful to you, as you have done in the past. I am at your service now, as ever. I am reserved to your use, as good as married to you already, though not you to me, and quite ready to go to church with you to-morrow, if you decide that we shall do so. I am your property.… Only, my dear, it is a pity you tied me up in brown paper and left me on the shelf so long. Fatal delay! Unused, I deteriorated! You have had me warehoused so many years that now, when you choose to untie me and take me down, you find that you have to make allowance for depreciation of stock. I think I wrote that to you--or said it!… How it did amuse Mrs. Clarkson!”

“Who’s Mrs. Clarkson?” she asked through her tears.

He did not answer, but rose, and took her in his arms. Pale flickers of posthumous triumph lighted up his kind, lined face. Weakly victorious, he enfolded her, and she shrunk and shivered out of his embrace.

“What is it, dear?”

“Nothing, oh, nothing! Only, I don’t believe I _can_ marry you, Everard, after all!”

He did not ask her why, and she could hardly have told him that the momentary contact had affirmed the sense of physical aversion she had always thought she felt for him. Now she was sure. Oh, what was she to do?…

She stood timorously away from him, as it were freed from the clasp of a corpse. How could she tell him that? And then she reflected consolingly that according to his own words marriage meant so little to him now, that she need perhaps never kiss him when they were married.

Her colour returned a little as she formulated this evasion.… Many a conscientious woman has forced herself before now to marry a wreck, to pay conscience money.

There was a good fire burning, she motioned him to one of two leather-covered chairs drawn up on opposite sides of the fireplace. “It’s warm here. We won’t go upstairs. I am really getting rather frightened about you, Everard. I was incredulous at first, but I do believe now, that you _have_ been ill.”

“Yes, I have been very ill.”

“But why come out? Why didn’t you send an excuse--ask me to come to you?”

“Would you have come? Well, as a matter of fact, a telegram was sent you. Mrs. Clarkson _said_ she had sent it.”

“Mrs. Clarkson--your landlady--your bedmaker? Oh, dear, how unkind you must have thought me!”

“No, I don’t know that I thought anything about it. I said she might send it, and then it passed out of my mind entirely. Everything did go clean out all at once, somehow… it’s a most unusual sensation--very like death, I should think.”

“Everard, I believe you ought to be in bed now, you ought not to be here--pleasant as it is. Go home, and I’ll come and nurse you to-morrow. I can safely do that. I am--engaged to you!” She spoke with mouth awry, putting the greatest constraint upon herself.

He smiled. “Awfully kind of you, dear, but I’ve got a nurse already. Mrs. Clarkson is a nurse.”

“Everard! you’re dreaming! Do you mean a white-capped creature, with starched cuffs? How could you be here if that were so?”

“I don’t know, but I _am_ here, you see. Mrs. Clarkson certainly did send you a wire to say I couldn’t come. She asked you to come to me, I believe, though I forbade her. As I told you”--he sighed--“I forgot it all.…”

“But then why have you come, and why haven’t I got the wire?”

“Wrongly addressed, I fancy. I was too ill to speak much. She looked the address up in my book and I have only your old one there.”

“It shows how I’ve neglected you.”

“But it’s as well you didn’t come. The nurse is excellent. These hired people do best because they have no feelings, whether it’s merely putting on a poultice, or finally laying you out----”

“Oh, don’t, Everard!”

He rose. He looked preoccupied.

“It’s after midnight. Do you realize how late we have been talking, right into the night? The daylight will surprise us in a minute!… Oh, dear me! I must be off.” He rose, and stood, wavering like a wind-blown taper. “Good-night, dear Alice, I shan’t forget you have kissed me--once in your life. Oh, no, twice; once on the river--that day, the twelfth of July. I loved you--I wish you had loved me too!”

“I did--I do,” she averred, her lips chattering.

“Too late!” said he, taking a woollen comforter out of his pocket.

“Everard, I don’t think you are fit to go home alone. Let me send some one with you. Or stay here, the servants are not gone to bed, and there’s a spare room, slept in only last night. Aunt Polly----”

“And your reputation?”

“I’ll risk that,” she said. “I’ve behaved too badly to you not to make you some amends.”

“But it’s all nonsense. I am all right. Strength has been given me----”

“How funnily you talk! Well, since you _will_ be foolhardy and go back to your nurse--is she pretty? You know I don’t believe in her. You are thinking of your landlady, who’s been mothering you a little, as she should.” She put out her hand and rang the bell. “A hansom, please, for Mr. Jenkyns.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I meant to walk.”

“Well, you aren’t going to be allowed to walk! You must take no risk. Have a good night’s rest, and be well enough to marry me to-morrow--by special licence.” She looked up in his face with terror-stricken audacity. How could she do it!

“Would you really?” He was out in the hall by now, and the maid was whistling for a cab. “Well, we’ll see!”

“I’ll come to you at eleven in Paper Buildings. I know the way. I’ve been there once.”

“Dear Alice, how unmaidenly you are grown all of a sudden! I like it, though. It is some compensation----”

“But will you really marry me if I come?”

“If I can,” he answered gravely.

The hansom had come rattling up. She gave a twist to the comforter. “Keep it well over your mouth.…”

“I will kiss your hand first.”

She controlled herself. His touch was pain to her. She wailed, as the hall door closed--

“Oh, I don’t love him! He is dead. I have killed him! I’ll marry him, that is my vow!”

* * * * * * *

The strayed telegram was brought her next morning on the tray with her tea. It had been as Everard had surmised, wrongly addressed to the old house. It ran--

“Mr. Jenkyns unable to go to you to-night. Ill. Come if prefer.”

“She must have been in a rare fright when she wrote that, whoever she is!” thought Alice, who could not bring herself to believe in the presence of a nurse in 82 Paper Buildings.

Her exaltation of last night had left her. Everard was such a wreck, poor dear! Every bit of charm, and he never had much, had departed and left him sear, dry, stupid and unsympathetic. But she meant to marry him, and repair her sins, and be able to live without a companion. Even an invalid husband was better than a hired solacium. She would go and see him this morning, but of course they could not really be married at once, out of hand, like that. In a week or so, after a few preparations had been made and when he had been nursed up and made to look a little less ghastly. She could not allow a ghost to lead her to the altar. Then they would go off somewhere warm for the honeymoon, to the Riviera or Egypt, and Everard would revive under the combined influences of sun and agreeable society, and love--that is, if he was still capable of feeling the kindly glow of a delayed, but at last gratified passion.

Perhaps he was not quite so dead after all; perhaps in time she would find herself able to submit to his kisses without a politely suppressed shudder? Though she could easily account for that symptom of hers. Starved physically and mentally, as he seemed to be, what wonder that all the magnetism had gone from him? Alice, none other, would nurse him back to life, make a charming, attentive, affectionate husband of him, one whose kisses she would get not to mind so much.

She drove down to the Temple and dismissed her carriage at the gate on the Embankment, and walked up, quite unnecessarily, for Everard’s rooms in Paper Buildings had a road in front where a carriage might stand. But she did not mind walking. It was a lovely morning. The famous fountain in the court was playing merrily, and suggested springing hopes of all sorts--and possibilities of revival. She walked along to Everard’s rooms with a light step, laughing a little to herself at the thought that she was going to earn for him the reputation of being “a dog.” She did not suppose many young ladies sought out the dry student lawyer in his rooms! His landlady, or laundress, whichever it was, would be shocked, and a good thing too. His character was altogether too immaculate, and a picturesque smudge or so would improve it in the eyes of men. Alice had all the sweet, headlong depravity of mind of the excessively innocent. Using her tortoise-shell pince-nez, she read the name of Everard Jenkyns printed on the wall on the right-hand side of the open door of number eighty-two, and plunging into the dimness, began to ascend. She met a man on the first landing who looked like a doctor. He seemed in a hurry to get to his hansom, which she had observed standing there. He merely peered in her face and passed on before she could ask him if he was the doctor, and if so, how Mr. Jenkyns was?

She went on ascending till she found the right door, knocked, and stood there, breathless.…

A foolish fear assailed her as she waited. She found herself dreading the first sight of Everard as he would appear on opening the door to her; she remembered with annoyance the poor, lank, gawky face, which always made her think, as she used to tell her mother, of a boy’s compendious clasp-knife, with all the blades open! He would smile, of course, and look pleased to see her; it was a strong step for haughty Alice Damer, whom he had sighed for so long, to visit a man in his rooms at half-past eleven and ask him to marry her!

He was a long time coming!… She rang again, more firmly.…

The door was opened, by a nurse. Everard had not been raving, then! He was probably in bed?… She formally muttered his name.

The nurse seemed to have been expecting her. Murmuring, “You would like to see him, Ma’am?” she led the way into the sitting-room, out of which the bedroom obviously opened. The door was ajar. The nurse did not stop.…

“But not in there!” Alice stammered.

A strong note of disapprobation pierced in the woman’s voice as she turned round sharply--

“Why not? He’s dead. You’re not going to faint?”

“Oh, no,” said the poor girl, striving to adjust herself to these new and unexpected circumstances. Like a proud, plucky automaton she entered the bedroom, and looked on the form that was faintly outlined under the sheet, so thin Everard had grown. She had good nerves, and could always bear shocks well. But an immense, searching pity, a world of value for the dead man, combined with self-depreciation, filled her, and she wept silently. Her noble calmness and self-restraint won the admiration of the nurse, who had been condemning the heartless creature wholesale for having left her sweetheart to die alone as she had done.

“What was it, Nurse?” she asked.

“Double pneumonia. Collapse. I telegraphed to you, Miss--you are Miss Damer, I believe? He objected, but when once he became unable to speak, I took it upon myself. I thought you would want to be here.”

“Of course. But I have only just got it.”

The nurse accepted the _amende_. She could not realize that Alice was struggling to form a comment on the apparent inconsistency of a man sick unto death being able to dine with her, hoping at the same time that dates would be proved not to fit and all be normally explained. She stammered something vague as the nurse laid down the covering sheet, and disclosed the still face, looking, however, no more emaciated than Alice had seen it in life and no longer ago than last night.

Alice was painfully aware of the tacit suggestion on the woman’s part that she should bend down and kiss that waxen mask, and recoiled, though the nurse had said no word.

“Oh, I can’t kiss anybody dead.… It’s awful of me, Nurse, but I can’t!”

“Some can’t!” said the nurse resignedly. And this girl was the poor gentleman’s fiancée, so she had understood?…

She was a little pacified when Alice unfastened the bunch of lilies of the valley that she was wearing, and laid them on the dead man’s breast. Then she turned away and dried her eyes. She was a beautiful creature, the nurse thought, and was conscious that the faulty young lady was slowly acquiring her sympathies.

“When did he die? When was it?”

“We don’t know exactly, Miss. In these cases---- But he last spoke about seven.”

“What made you think of sending to me?”

“Because, Miss, for days before, when he was wandering worst, he talked about you. We gathered, the doctor and I, that he was more or less engaged to you, Miss, but that you was rather too fond of putting him off. Said it had been going on for years, and that he was fairly worn out. So he was, poor man; he hadn’t an ounce of flesh on his bones to spare----”

“Yes, but----” the girl exclaimed impatiently, “I want to get at the facts. He died, you say, this morning at seven o’clock?”

“Spoke last at seven o’clock last night, Miss, I said. Died some time in the night, or, may be, directly after he did speak. At least, part of him may have died, as ignorant people seem to think. He was hardly breathing at a little before eight, but the last spark may have held on longer.”

“I suppose you know, Nurse, that he dined with me last night, at a quarter-past eight,” said the girl stonily, looking away from the nurse’s apathetic face, which changed at once, sympathetically;--

“Miss, you’re upset! You took it so calm at first. Have some brandy. You have had a shock. One understands----”