Scene I.--PUPPENSPIELE

To have a wife, and to be father of children, bring many troubles into life.--_Menander_.

While rain was falling upon just and unjust, Herbert Juxon sat in his gas-lit office up a gloomy court, struggling to conquer the London which roared around him. A clock indicated half-past-three. The stockbroker was working excitedly, because he believed that the combination which might restore him much that he had lost was nearly made.

Without lifting his eyes from the file of letters and the pencilled notes before him, he held out his hand to take a message from his clerk; and at that moment the door opened noisily, and a man hurried in, hatless and unannounced. He was a lawyer, well-known in the city, and one of Juxon’s friends. The son of parchment bent over the desk, and making himself on this occasion a man of few words, whispered into the stockbroker’s ear. Juxon’s face went white for a moment, then he recovered, and jerked out a nervous laugh.

“It is impossible,” he muttered. “The business is a small one, but it has been established for so long. I have heard rumours. They did not come from a reliable source, and I could not trust them. I had no time to think of them. But my little nest-egg is there.”

“Get it out. You have just time--if it is not already too late,” whispered the counsellor; and then he left, as hurriedly as he had entered.

Juxon pounced upon his cheque-book, filled a form, then, glancing up at the clock, caught at his hat and raced from his office and the court. He dodged breathlessly along the crowded streets, until he came to a dark lane, which he entered at the double, and turned in at the door of a private bank where his money was deposited. He had always banked there, having no suspicion regarding its stability, and the manager was a personal friend of long standing, who, he firmly believed, would have given him a word of warning had any crisis been impending. He noticed, as he passed the threshold, a group of men discussing in low tones.

The cashier himself received Juxon’s cheque, but he did not say a word; nor did he once raise his eyes, after a nervous word of greeting and one hasty glance upon the stockbroker’s heated face. His own face twitched, in spite of himself, when he glanced at the figures on the slip of paper. He flung open a drawer and produced a handful of gold, which he swept towards the client, so fiercely that some of the coins rolled away along the floor; and then he rushed round to the door, locked and bolted it. There was a crash of broken glass, followed by an outcry and an uproar at the head of the lane. It was twelve minutes to four; and the little bank had failed.

Juxon received the blow with the patience which was part of his nature. He said nothing, but slipped clear of the crowd assembling rapidly before the bankrupt premises, and escaped into the comparative silence of his office. He believed in being quiet under affliction. He was not religious in the accepted sense of the word; but he was strong and upright, for his mind was unobscured by any perplexing creed; just as the faith of the savage, who kneels beneath the sun, amid the wonders of nature, may be at least as pure as that of the priest, standing before an altar, bound and tied by superstitions of man’s creation. Had Juxon been a scholar, he would probably have uttered the consoling words of Philemon the dramatist, “If thou couldst only know the evils which others suffer, thou wouldst gladly submit to thine own.”

Four hours later Juxon was hurrying from a suburban station, between parallel rows of lamp-posts, along numerous streets, past endless red villas exasperatingly alike. In a street, which differed from others only in name, he drew up before a house which was made dissimilar to its neighbours by the possession of a distinctive number. He knocked, waited impatiently, and knocked again; and then an elderly woman, attired in the uniform of a nurse, admitted him to the little house, and ushered him into a tiny room, where pretty four-year-old child was sitting up in her cot playing with a doll’s house.

“Daddy!” cried the child in an ecstasy, holding out two pink arms.

“Here he is again,” laughed the stockbroker. “Like a bad old battered shilling.”

The tiny lady, who was already wonderfully like Maude in appearance, received his caresses, returned them with interest, and straightway demanded with odd severity:

“Where’s Mummy?”

“Far away in the country, little Peggy,” said the father. “Only Daddy left. Are you glad to see him, sweetheart?”

“Vewy,” lisped the dainty miss. “Here’s a wose-bud for you.” She collected a white rose, somewhat the worse for ill-treatment, from the quilt, and lifted it laughing to his lips. “Put it in you coat. Here’s one for Mummy, a pwettier one, but Mummy won’t have it. You shall have it instead, Daddy. My Mummy is pwettier than my Daddy,” she announced generally to a family of small dolls. “But I love my Daddy most, ’cause he comes to see me, and my Mummy don’t. Oh, Daddy!”

Thereupon a pair of cherubic lips parted, and a chocolate disappeared between two rows of pretty teeth. “But you must have one too--the greatest one,” came from the little mouth in action.

“I was afraid you would be asleep, my Daisy,” said the father. “How you are growing, miss! You are getting quite a giantess. Do you know what a giantess is, darling?”

The fair curls were shaken violently.

“Well, a giantess is a great tall lady, who has to stoop whenever she comes into a house, lest she should knock the roof off. If you go on growing so fast, you will be like that some day, Miss Peggy, and you will look down, and pat me on the head, and say, ‘Poor old Daddy, what a long way down you are.’ Now, Daisy, shut your eyes, and open your mouth just as wide as ever you can.”

“Don’t tell Nursie,” adjured the smallest of the transgressors.

“Of course not. It would never do to be caught by Nurse, or she might slap us both. What were you doing before I came, sweetheart?”

“Talking to my dollies,” said Peggy, munching busily and pointing to the doll’s house.

“You was answering me lots, but Mummy wouldn’t speak. Naughty Mummy!” She picked up a little pink doll, with flaxen hair and scarlet cheeks, and scolded it scrupulously. “And Mummy don’t stand up nice a bit.”

“Why can’t she stand up, Peggy?” asked the father.

“I stooded her up, and down she went--so! It is silly of her, isn’t it? P’raps she ain’t vewy stwong, poor Mummy! I’ll put her on the sofa. She looks pwetty on the sofa, doing nothing, cept laugh. This is you, Daddy. You’re so drefful busy you ain’t got time to talk much, and when you laugh it’s quick--so! And then you go on working.”

“That is quite true, Peggy. You see I have you and Mummy to work for, so I mustn’t be idle. And now I must run off again, and work, and work.”

There were protestations and tearful blue eyes, but the former were checked by the promise of a visit the very next evening, and the latter were kissed bright again. But before the stockbroker left his little daughter, he bent over her, and said in a whisper, “When I am gone, Daisy, say over and over again, until you go to sleep, ‘God help Mummy.’”

“God help dear Daddy and Mummy,” a small voice amended.

The honest man caught his treasure in his arms and kissed her many times.

“Good-night, sweet Daisy.”

“Come again vewy quick, Daddy.”

When in the street again there was an elasticity in Juxon’s step which had not been apparent earlier in the evening. There were heavy odds facing him. Many men would have shrunk from the difficult task of restoring the ruined fabric. A few cowards might even have sought the easiest way out; but quiet Mr. Juxon was prepared to go on playing the game. Although outwardly commonplace, and lacking in originality, he was not an ordinary man. His character could not be better revealed than by the statement that he did not entertain a single bitter thought towards his absent wife.

He did not intend that she should hear the truth, and he was resolved that she should not want even the least of those luxuries which she had hitherto enjoyed. He argued that she had a right to look to him for these things, and because he was true of heart he determined she should have them, if only he could avert that imminent and final disaster by hard work.

He reached his lonely office in the deserted city, leaving far behind the voices of paper-vendors screaming in malicious enjoyment the news of the bank failure. He turned up the gas, removed his coat, and wrapped a moistened handkerchief round his forehead. He smiled at the excessive plainness of his careworn face when it met his eyes in the glass. Was it possible that any woman could care for him, if he were poor? That smile was still upon his lips when he sat down to his desk. “There is still a chance,” he muttered. “The veriest loophole, but I may struggle through yet. I can fight, and I will fight, and I will go down, if that be my destiny, fighting all the time.”

It was close upon midnight when Juxon pushed aside his business books and papers, and began the composition of a letter to a client who was encumbered with wealth in very much the same proportion as Egypt was once troubled with flies. Upon this letter much depended, as without financial assistance he would have to declare himself a defaulter. All the securities which he had to offer were hidden in his safe. They were not so valuable as he could have wished, but he believed they might prove sufficient for his purpose. He wrote quickly, the pen held loosely in his tired fingers, winking his eyes often to dispel the black spots which rose persistently between his face and the sheet of paper.

The clocks chimed over the city of Mammon, which was empty, but not silent. Wind was howling along the deserted streets, and a heavy rain lashed the window. The noise of business was not there, but while men slept Nature awoke to traffic in storm and tempest. Instead of the rolling of carts came the rush of rain water, and the cries of the wind arose in the stead of the voices of men. Round the corners, where by day traffic crushed, nature in wet garments shouted and bustled; and in that one room, which made an eye of light in the solitude of buildings, Juxon went on writing.

How exhausted he was he did not know, until the knowledge came that he had lost control over his pen, which for some moments had scratched upon the paper without any apparent assistance from his hand. There was a coldness in his arm. He dropped the pen and rose, opening and closing his stiffened fingers. Then he brought the paper up to his tired eyes and read what he had written.

It was an ordinary business letter. There was nothing remarkable about it until he came to the last sentence; and there the writer must have lost control over his pen for a few moments. He was very tired. He had hardly known whether he was writing sense or nonsense. Certainly he had not the slightest idea that he had concluded his letter with the extraordinary sentence, “Go to the Strath.” These four words however were staring at him from the paper. There was no sense in them. He did not know what they meant. He had no memory of having written them. He only knew that they were there in his own crabbed handwriting.

“I must be careful,” Juxon whispered. “This sort of thing won’t do. This is what some people might call insanity. I have been working too much.”

He went into the corner of the office, dipped the hot handkerchief which had been around his forehead into cold water, wrung it out, and replaced it. Then he said:--

“My wife is living in the country, and in the neighbourhood stands a house about which strange things are said. That house is called the Strath.”