The next morning, after writing her letters and attending to her household duties, Clytie went into her studio with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating the artistic impulse that had been flagging for so long. Kent was right, she thought. Her life could be reconstructed. She would begin her laborious art life again, resume it seriously as a profession, put her pictures into the market once more. Amid the many confusing thoughts and emotions resulting from her conversation with Kent, one idea had sprung in connection with Jack. She could not adopt the boy. That was a wild feminine craving, somewhat selfish, springing out of a bitter hour when fairer hopes were crushed. It cost her a sigh to resign; but she trusted to Kent's judgment, and her mind was so far at rest. Yet if it could lie in her power to help Jack materially in after years, when a little capital would be worth all the world to him, she felt that she would have wrought some good for one human creature at least in her somewhat self-centred life. And then Kent's advice as to her art mingled and combined with these thoughts, and the outcome was the sudden idea that the proceeds of the sale of her pictures would, in course of time, form a very considerable fund. She clapped her hands with delight when this occurred to her. A mountain of weariness seemed removed. In the spontaneity of new workings she scribbled a hasty line to Kent and had it posted with the address scarcely dry.
“I am going to paintseriously, andsellmy pictures, and devote the proceeds to a fund for Jack. Shall I?”
She was in bright spirits this morning, having discovered an object in life. The future has generally much more to do with our present moods than the past. Yet, notwithstanding this broad truth, the immediate past had a certain influence on Clytie's humour. Whilst she was driving home the afternoon before, the gravity of the fact of her confession to Kent had somewhat weighed upon her. She had spent the lonely evening grappling with a truth that had been taking half-reluctant shape in her consciousness for the last two months, and now rose clear and sharply defined. She had even written to Kent the following portion of a letter which she straightway tore up into the finest of pieces. In fact her intention of sending it to him was from the first of the very remotest. “My dear Kent,” ran this singularly feminine effusion. “My words to-day were true. If you had told me you loved me eighteen months ago, I should have realised myself and what it was that I felt towards you. The knowledge of her own heart does not come to a woman with the easy grace that your sentimentalists make out. It is somewhat of a fierce process, Kent. There is no royal road to it. Well, I know my own heart now, and I have bought the knowledge with agonies of suffering. Oh, Kent, my true, loyal Kent! I am tired, tired of hiding facts from myself, of acting in a wilful dream, in defiance of the promptings of my reason. I am a woman, and I ought not to confess things to myself, let alone to you. So people say—and people are so wise, aren't they? I love you, Kent. There, I write it down in black and white. It looks odd, grotesque, horrible, and yet wonderfully comforting. I love you, Kent. Why should I deceive myself any longer? God knows whether it is for my happiness in the future or my misery; but now that the beauty of it is upon me it makes me wonderfully happy. Yes, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully happy.”
And then she threw down her pen and shredded the paper with frenzied zeal. But her heart was lighter. The world seemed a clearer, pleasanter place. Her cheeks burned like fire at the thought of Kent ever knowing of this feeling. She arranged in her mind the tenderest and most elusive of relations between Kent and herself. He, a declared lover, should give her all the comfort and kind counsel of a friend; she, his declared friend, would find delicate, subtle ways of colouring and softening his life with her love. A new paradise of exquisite emotion opened its evanescent portals. For the first time in her life came the romance of delicate sentiment, tinged with an innocent pink like the buds in spring. It is true these same buds, to continue the analogy, burst into gorgeous, riotous bloom under the summer sun; but while the tenderer air of spring keeps them closed they have a grace peculiarly their own.
Clytie moved about the studio singing, a sign with her of great content. The window was open and the morning sun streamed in, filling the large and somewhat heavily tapestried room with gay light. It glorified Clytie as she passed across the patch of sunlight, falling upon her hair in a thousand scintillations and revealing the deep sea-blue of her eyes. She wore a soft cream morning gown, a golden tasselled girdle round her waist, an edging of old lace round the somewhat open neck. The wide, drooping sleeves she had caught up a little for convenience in working, and her arms were bare to the elbow. The skirt clung around her as she walked quickly about the room, with her old elastic tread, making a soft frou-frou that pleased her, she did not know why. She was happy again, filled with a double sense of the meaning of life. At last she sat down before a small easel, on which was put the board with its fair sheet of Whatman paper ready for the first sketch. In her rapid, eager way she commenced to indicate the motive of the picture that had flashed like an inspiration upon her. In the middle distance on the left a pair of lovers, the woman looking with upturned face at the man, whose arm was round her waist. In the foreground, peeping at them from behind a clump of bushes, a girl of about seventeen, with a letter in her hand. The contrast between the two female faces was the motive—the fulfilment of knowledge on the one, the dawning revelation on the other. The title had come with the conception: “Maiden and Woman.” Clytie worked on steadily with herébauche, keen, sure of herself, tingling once again with the excitement of inspiration. She knew she could put that in their faces which would raise the picture above the narrative prettiness of Sant and his school. The accessories were to be severe to austerity. No elaborate detail in tree painting, no subtle effects of light and shade. The principle of abstraction to be as uncompromisingly carried out as in one of Seymour Haden's etchings. The whole artistic force of the picture was to be concentrated in the awakened and awakening souls.
She was absorbed in her work when, after a tap at the door, Jack came in. Clytie looked up with a smile.
“You here again, Jack! That is good of you. But I can't say a word to you—positively. I am so busy. Sit down somewhere until I have finished.”
The boy, used to these fits of absorption in his two artist patronesses, sat down for a little and let his eyes wander round the studio, looking at the pictures and nicknacks. Then he got up to make a closer examination of vases and photographs, and walked about on tiptoe, trying to still the noise of his iron-shod boots against the hard, polished floor. At last he discovered on the bookshelves an illustrated History of England, with which he retired to his favourite place on the hearthrug. And so they remained for half an hour without saying a word—Clytie bending over her study, Jack curled up with his picture-book. It was quite still. A stray bumble-bee looked in now and then at the window, buzzing querulously, as if he had lost his way in London, and then darted off again. From the servants' hall came the just perceptible voice of one of the maids singing a hymn-tune, and from far, far away came the tinkling treble of a piano-organ. And these few sounds, so faint yet so clear, accentuated the summer stillness.
When Clytie had put the last few touches on the portion of her work that demanded all her concentration, she gave a little sigh of relief.
“What do you think of that, Jack?” she said, leaning back with her head critically aslant. “Don't you think that is going to make a famous picture?”
Jack jumped up promptly, leaving his book open on the hearthrug, and came up to her side. He was not a connoisseur, in spite of his associations with art, so he said nothing, but grinned appreciatively, rubbing the calf of one leg with the instep of the other.
“Well,” asked Clytie, “why don't you admire?”
“You aint given them no faces,” said Jack.
“Ah! This is to be one face,” she said, pointing to a kind ofremarqueat the foot of the sheet. “Or something like it. Now just use your imagination, Jack. This face is to go there—the woman whose whole nature has been awakened, and is shining out of her eyes, and quivering on her lips, and is vibrating all through her frame—all of which is Greek and Chaldee to you, my good Jack; but I may as well explain. And now I have got to fix a face for this one. What kind of face do you think I am going to give her?”
“I dunno,” murmured Jack. And then after a slight pause: “And what's the man going to be like?”
“Ah!” said Clytie with a mock sigh. “What a little Philistine you are! The man can be any kind of creature on two legs. What does it matter about the man? He is a nuisance. I have a good mind to make him awfully ugly with a face like a rhinoceros. See, like this.”
She made a few rapid strokes with her charcoal in the oval left for the man's face, and the result was a picturesque monster with a long nose, Mephistophelian eyebrows, and a moustache curling up to his ears. Then they both burst out laughing.
“Let me draw some funny men for you,” she said in the light-hearted buoyancy of her mood. “Run and get me that sheet of paper over there.”
She pinned the sheet that Jack brought her on to the board and began to draw caricatures.
“You shall choose one for me to put in the picture, Jack.”
It was a long, long time since she had indulged this freakish side of her genius. It ran riot now in grotesque exuberance. Here a head with wide, leering mouth and pointed ears, like the devil that looks over Lincoln; there a snouted monster with cat's whiskers, an eyeglass, and a silk hat; a lean, cadaverous, equine face with a terrible squint; a masher, indicated by three or four little dots and lines. Jack looked on in rapture. She had never drawn pictures for him before. He broke out now and then into breathless exclamations.
“Lord, he's an ugly one! Give him a long nose—longer than that; and, my eye! that's a wart upon it. One of the teachers at school has a wart on his nose. That's just like him! And where's this one's 'ed?—he's all body and legs!”
And then he jumped and clapped his hands when the head was seen to emerge from between the knees after the fashion of the boneless wonders.
When she had filled up the last space on the sheet she tossed the charcoal into the tray, and rose from her seat.
“There, Jack! There's nothing like going absolutely mad on occasions. Now if you'd like to keep these pictures and show them to the boys at school, you can.”
She rolled up the stiff piece of drawing paper, slipped an elastic band round it in her hasty way, and gave it to Jack, who could only look his delighted thanks.
“Now I must go and wash my hands and get decent for lunch. Go downstairs and tell Mrs. Pawkins to give you something to eat. Stay—you had better leave that roll up here; come in for it before you go.”
She took it from him, and laid it on a little table near the door. She did not desire that the inquisitive eyes in the servants' hall should witness the mistress's frivolity. Jack understood her more or less, but Mrs. Pawkins and Mary and John would have questioned her sanity.
Jack lingered for a moment on the threshold, and then drew shyly from his handkerchief pocket a dingy, whitey-brown packet.
“I came to show you this,” he said, putting it into her hand. “I prigged it from mother's drawer this morning. You'll give it me back, won't you?”
“I have a good mind not to,” said Clytie severely. “If your mother knew, she would be very angry, and you would catch it. Still, as you have been a good boy, I'll look at it and give it you back. Run away, now.”
Jack did as he was bid, and Clytie, after a few turns about the room, putting things more or less straight, unfolded the dirty wrapper of Jack's packet, with an amused curiosity as to the features of Jack's father.
But in another second all her curiosity, amusement, idle interest, were fled, and her whole emotive force concentrated into a short, irrepressible gasp of astonishment. It was a photograph of Thornton, her husband. There was no mistaking it. She had the fellow to it in her album. One day long ago she had seen it among his odds and ends, and had begged for it, loving it for all that it was so many years old, taken when he was still in the army. He looked so stalwart, soldierly, magnificent in his uniform. It was perhaps the likeness of him that she had cherished most—only too familiar. For a moment she could hardly understand—the shock was so sudden and unexpected. Then with the quick reaction she realised what it meant. Thornton was Jack's father, Mrs. Burmester was his mother. With a shudder of disgust she threw the photograph on the table.
The riddle of Jack's parentage was solved in a way she had not looked for; the mystery that had lain hidden in strange, unknown depths of passion was now clear to her in all its unlovely nakedness. Her soul sickened at the truth. She had not come to her husband with the helpless ignorance of a young girl. The knowledge of good and evil, to employ the somewhat meaningless euphemism, had come to her through her intelligence by means of books, through her contact with real life. She had grasped the fact of the existence of the Loulou Mendès type with whom love is a trade. That a man should have had a liaison with such a woman she could have understood. In fact she never at any one moment had fancied that Thornton had brought to her the pure ardour of a virgin soul. To have been revolted at the discovery of a mere antenuptial infidelity on the part of her husband would have been to her impossible. It was not noble, it is true; but it was intelligible. There was certainly for a lower nature a charm, witchery, fascination, in the fleshly beauty of the courtesan. She had heard of many men falling victims to it, and sinking very little into degradation. If Jack's mother had been such a woman, she would have felt little more than the shock of coincidence, a sense of strangeness in her relations with the boy. But Jack's mother was not of this type. She never had charm, witchery, or fascination. She had never even passable good looks. A poor, stolid, dull, animal drudge.
The truth had come upon Clytie; the truth that had touched her now and then with its bat wings, making her shiver; the horrible, soul-nauseating truth of the eternalbeastin man. She knew Thornton now as he was, and her indifference passed into loathing. In Thornton's feelings what difference had there been between this boy's mother and herself?
She walked swiftly up and down the studio, with clenched white hands, her shoulders rising now and then in an involuntary heave of disgust. The glory had gone out of the day. A foul shadow overspread it.
Suddenly Thornton himself appeared with eager face, a telegram in his hand. He had just come in from riding in the Park, and according to the modern fashion out of the season, was dressed in tweed suit and gaiters. He carried a silver-headed riding whip jauntily under his arm. He waved the telegram exultingly.
“They have asked me to put up for Witherby!” he said. “I'll have some lunch on the strength of it. I suppose there's some going.”
“I believe lunch is at the usual hour,” said Clytie, not looking at him.
He lingered a little, flicking his legs with his whip.
“You might as well congratulate me, if only for the sake of politeness,” he said in an injured tone.
“Oh, yes; I congratulate you,” she replied.
Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. She felt an almost irresistible impulse to burst forth into a torrent of speech, to say out finally all the bitterness and loathing that were in her heart. She restrained herself, but the effort gave a queer guttural resonance to her words. She turned and looked out of the window.
“What the devil's the matter?” he asked impatiently. “I came in, 'pon my soul, thinking you'd be pleased. It's a safe seat. I'm dead certain to knock the confounded Radical into a cocked hat. Just the moment when I've got what I've been sweating for the last eighteen months, confound it all, I did think you'd be civil for once in a way. But it's just like you; I might have expected it. Well, perhaps it's the truth to say you don't care a damn one way or the other.”
He walked to and fro for a little, fuming. Then his eyes falling on the photograph that lay on the table, he picked it up, as an angry man will do, looked at it absently for a moment, and pitched it sharply to the other side of the room. Clytie, startled by the slight click of the cardboard striking against the wall, turned half round and met his eyes fixed loweringly upon her. Each held the other spellbound for a few seconds. Then the door opened and Jack came into the studio, checking his motion forward as he saw Thornton.
“What the deuce is this?” cried the latter.
With a swift, instinctive glance Clytie compared the two faces. They were astonishingly alike. The same finely moulded features, dark lucent eyes, brown crisp hair, white evenly set teeth; the same lines of cruelty at the corners of the lips. Strange that, much as she had studied Jack's physiognomy, the likeness had never suggested itself. At Thornton's petulant question the boy looked at him half frightened, and then at Clytie, and was about to shrink back. But she called him in.
“Don't go away without your drawing, Jack. This,” she said coldly to Thornton, “is aprotégéof mine. He was once my model—for my picture 'Jack.' Here, Jack, take your drawing. Run home. Thank you for coming to see me.”
“And—and the photograph. You said you'd give it me back.”
Clytie went to the table where she had thrown it. Not seeing it, she remembered the sound that had startled her, and turning round, perceived the photograph lying face upwards on the floor. She gave a little start of dismay. The situation threatened to become dramatic, and she was unprepared. In her hurry to dismiss the boy she had forgotten the photograph. Now he had called attention to it, and she felt bound to restore it to him to save the poor little urchin's honour and most probably his back. And Thornton was leaning against the mantelpiece, with his hands in his pockets, frowningly surveying the scene. With outward calm, but with a beating heart, she picked up the photograph, wrapped it in the dirty covering, and put it into Jack's hand. Thornton, who had watched her movements with gathering surprise, strode forward with an oath.
“What the devil——”
But Clytie quickly interposed herself between him and the boy.
“Run away!” she said in a hasty whisper, and Jack, accustomed from his childhood to sudden dartings, disappeared like a flash. Clytie put her back against the door and looked at her husband with strange eyes. It had been done with the speed of a conjuring trick.
“What on earth is the meaning of all this?” asked Thornton; “and what are you giving away my photographs for? Upon my soul, I think you are taking leave of your senses. You'll have to drop this sort of thing. I'm damned if I am going to have my photographs given away to all the street urchins in London. Play the fool yourself if you like, but I'll trouble you to keep me and my things out of it. Have you been giving me away any more?”
“Oh, God! Thornton, you have given yourself away!” she cried, echoing his slang phrase half unconsciously in her bitterness. “I'll tell you, if you like. The photograph belongs to the boy's mother. He is your child.”
“What!” cried Thornton in a voice of thunder, showing his teeth savagely.
“Yes, your child,” she went on, striving to be calm. “His mother's name is Burmester. You gave her the picture yourself years ago. I had just made the discovery when you came in. Ah—h!” she cried, putting her hands suddenly before her face, “it is horrible, horrible!”
“Ha!” retorted Thornton fiercely. “You are in one of your damned high-horse moods. Well, I did give one of my father's kitchen-maids a photograph, and she did have a child, and I paid her for her trouble, and, damme! what that's got to do with you now is more than I can see. Besides, you never were such a fool as to imagine you were marrying an infernal saint.”
“Oh, stop! stop!” she cried. “Don't say anything more. You will brutalise me as well as yourself. I never thought you a saint—even when I cared for you. I know what you are, and, oh, God! this is the end of it. If you had betrayed a sweet, innocent girl, you would have been a villain, but not necessarily a brute—someone charming, pretty, attractive—I could have understood it; but a poor stupid drudge—a kitchen-maid—little better than an animal——”
Thornton rushed forward and caught her by her shoulder.
“By the Lord God! if you don't hold your tongue, I'll strike you!”
She saw that she had aroused the devil in him. She had meant to be calm, to tell him plainly the facts of the case and to say that it would be better that they should live apart. But an irrepressible shudder had come over her, and then the brutal cynicism of his confession had caused her the loss of her self-control. As she saw the blazing eyes and white glittering teeth in front of her and felt the grip on her shoulder, she regretted that she had been, in a way, to blame; but she was no coward, and the threat awakened the fierce old Puritan courage in her nature. She did not flinch, but looked him directly in the face.
“Your striking me would only add to your other brutalities.”
“Damn you!” he cried in blind fury; and swinging her round, he struck her with the riding whip with all his huge strength, cutting the back of the thin morning gown, that flew open at the gap, showing her bare shoulders. Then he hurled her from him and rushed out of the room.
With an almost superhuman effort of will Clytie sprang to her feet, stood for a moment dazed, stunned, on fire with agony, then staggered forward and threw herself upon the bearskin rug, with the illustrated History of England, open as Jack had left it, beneath her face.
Suddenly Clytie rose to her feet and left the studio. As she moved a strange weight seemed to lie upon her limbs. It was a physical effort to drag herself up the stairs to her bedroom. Her heart seemed to be burned through, a fiery sword to have been thrust through her temples. It was the supreme moment of the horror and abasement of her married life. One intense thought possessed her; to fly from the house, to escape from the area of Thornton's influence, to bury herself somewhere far away. Mechanically she changed her things, choosing one of the simple morning dresses she had retained since the days before her marriage, and bathed her feverish face and hands. The cold water refreshed her, restored adjustment to her quivering nerves, and she was able to think, form a coherent plan.
She would go forthwith to her old rooms in the King's Road, which she knew to be vacant. There she would live again as Clytie Davenant, and shut out of her memory the nightmare of the past months. The plan conceived, she hurried to put it into execution. She would have liked to open the street door there and then, to cross its threshold for the last time. But the practical side of life asserts itself in the midst of the intensest emotions. She would have to pack her boxes, select what things she would take with her. The aid, too, of the servants would be necessary. After a swift look at the glass she composed her features, summoned her maid, gave her orders in a calm, equable voice, as if she were going on an ordinary visit in the country.
While the servants packed the articles she designated, she went down to the studio in order to collect a few of the portable objects that were dear to her: Rupert Kent's etching, the Jacquemart that Kent had given her, a book or two, a favourite box of oil-tubes. All the rest she would leave behind, together with everything that Thornton had ever given her. The maid, an excellently trained servant, packed quickly, but to Clytie she seemed unutterably slow. It was an effort of control to refrain from urging the girl on, from snatching the articles from her hands and stowing them away anyhow, haphazard. Every moment that she lingered seemed an eternity of degradation. In after days she wondered that she had never reflected how far Thornton's possible presence in the house might have affected the ease of her escape. As it happened, he had flung out of doors as soon as he had left her stricken upon the floor; but she, in the fixity of her idea, never concerned herself as to his whereabouts.
At last, when the boxes were packed and locked, the maid, dangling the keys in her hand, asked Clytie when she should order the brougham.
“I shall go in a four-wheeled cab with the luggage,” said Clytie.
“Go and order one round at once.”
The maid retired wonderingly, and Clytie was left alone. She put on her bonnet and sat down on the edge of the bed to draw on her gloves. Then for the first time her eye fell consciously upon her wedding-ring, and thereupon came over her the sense of all that her present action implied: the final renunciation of the marriage-tie, the assertion of her own individuality, the beginning of another life. And yet, in spite of her repudiation, the tie remained, indissoluble except by death, and this little circlet of gold was the symbol. With a twinge of pain she wrenched it off, for it was tightly fitting, and went and threw it in a jewel box containing the jewellery that Thornton had given her. At any rate, she could spare herself the hourly misery of this visible bond. It was a poor kind of relief to leave it there with the other tokens of her wifehood.
Then, as she waited, her crushed pride rose a few degrees. Whatever subsequent steps Thornton might take, her departure should at least not have the indignity of flight. A scribbled line would save her self-respect. When the servants came into the room to take down the boxes to the cab she had written the note.
“I am leaving your house. I go back to my old rooms in the King's Road, where I shall resume the life I led before I knew you.”
Then only did it occur to her to inquire of the footman whether Mr. Hammerdyke was in. The man, who was accustomed to the separation between the lives of his master and mistress, replied, without manifesting any surprise at the question, that Mr. Hammerdyke had gone out just before lunch.
“Put this note in his room for him,” said Clytie. “I shall be away some time.”
In a few moments she had started. With a little convulsive moan, wrung involuntarily from her lips by her agony of body and soul, she leaned her head against the rusty cushions of the ramshackle vehicle and closed her eyes. The day was still glorious, London bathed in sunlight, the streets filled with life and motion. For all the world but her the promise of the morning was kept. As the cab slackened its pace on crossing the Fulham Road she opened her eyes for a moment, and looked vacantly, as if in a dream, out of the window. Then she relapsed into her darkness.
“And I was so happy this morning,” she murmured to herself. “I could have lived the better life—with Kent's help!”
Kent! She started, as a wave of blood rushed to her cheeks. She was going to Kent now, to live under the same roof with him once more, to see him daily, to take him more intimately than ever into her life. Until now she had not realised this coherently. Vague thoughts of him had passed through her mind, but she had been too dazed, too sickened, too much possessed by the overpowering longing for freedom, escape from the house of bondage, to connect him definitely with her immediate future. And in the unconscious sequence of ideas a little self-reproach came into her mind, bringing with it a sense of soothing. Why had she not thought of Kent at first, of the true, loyal friend and lover, on whom she could rely for strength and comfort? How could she have been so much wrapped up in herself and her wrongs as never to have given him a place in her plans? And then the tide of feeling ebbed back again, leaving her heart quite cold and sad. How could she meet him? How could she tell him? The eternal woman in her shrank from the confession. If he had been to her but a friend, it had been easy. But she loved him. Had not her heart sung within her that very morning, only a few hours before, at the grace and tenderness of her at last awakened love? And she fought, womanlike, against she scarce knew what, striving to disentwine herself like Laocoon from the coils that love and circumstance had wound, in subtle intricacy of convolution, about her heart. But for all her shrinking she longed for Kent. If only he could understand it all without her telling! If only he could come that evening and sit by her side and hold her hand in strong, mute sympathy! Well, she would conquer her woman's diffidence, and tell him bravely. She felt she owed him a little reparation. The inherent delight in putting itself in the wrong is perhaps one of the most elusive traits of a woman's nature.
The cab stopped before the familiar side door. Mrs. Gurkins, standing beneath the awning of the shop between the stalls of cabbage and fruit, gave a gasp of bewilderment as she saw Clytie alight from the luggage-laden vehicle. She ran round through the connecting passage and opened the front door.
“You are not coming to stay here, miss?” she asked.
It was only in moments of calm reflection that she could bring herself to address Clytie more decorously as “ma'am.”
“Yes, I am,” replied Clytie in her decisive way. “Can I have my old rooms?”
“Of course, miss—but——”
“Well, have my boxes taken up and get things straight for me, Mrs. Gurkins. You know what an erratic creature I am, don't you? I think I am going to stay a very long time. I'll go and see Miss Marchpane while you do all that is necessary. You'll forgive me for putting you to all this trouble?”
“La, miss—ma'am, I'm that glad to have you back! But Miss Marchpane left early to-day—about an hour ago. You can go up to the sitting-room. I was cleaning it out only yesterday.”
Clytie went upstairs to the familiar room, and took off her bonnet and gloves. In a few moments the boxes were brought up. When she had unpacked these and arranged their contents, and eaten as much as she could of the meal that Mrs. Gurkins prepared for her, the glorious afternoon had melted into night. She sat by the open window and looked out upon the hurrying street below. It was a Saturday evening. The whole population of the district was astir buying their Sunday provisions or their Sunday headaches. Bands of the youth of both sexes clattered noisily past, singing hoarsely or darting from pavement to roadway in loud, dissonant gaiety. Along the kerb stretched the line of costers' barrows with flaming naphtha torches, and the faces of the sellers and buyers stood out clear in the glare. A babel of sounds arose: the confused murmur of private conversations pitched in the discordant key of the unrefined, the raucous cries of the costers offering their wares, the shrill “Buy! buy!” of the butcher a few yards away and the rapid click of his steel, the doleful nasal dirge of a tramp woman holding a vague bundle looking like a baby in her arms, the continuous scraping of feet, the roar of the 'buses and carts in the roadway.
Clytie had often before sat on Saturday evenings at her window, lost in the wonder of speculation upon the individualities of the units that composed this hurrying, bawling, laughing, cursing crowd. And now she felt the old fascination creep over her. The noise and movement acted as a counter-stimulus to the fierce whirl of emotions through which she had passed during the day. She lost for the time the sense of loneliness, soul-sickness, and bodily prostration in this external world of tumult. What did it all mean, this hurry and strain? Looked at as a whole, it seemed to indicate that life was intense, earnest, throbbing with infinite variety of passions, an end in itself, to be carried on, because it was life, to all eternity. It seemed real, practical, objective, obeying inscrutable, immutable laws. The planets circle round the sun; our solar system circles round another focal sphere. It is great, it is glorious, serving some great and glorious end; yet what that end is no man knoweth. And so with the collective life that surged beneath Clytie's window, yielding blindly to the unchanging laws that direct the cosmos. If this movement was meaningless and vain, then did the stars wander futilely in their courses. Sin and shame and misery, love and laughter and happiness, what did they matter in the progress of collective life? They are internal forces affecting its resistless march as little as the incessant motion of men affects the rotation of the earth.
But the individuals, when detached from the conglomerate mass of humanity—what was this life to them? How far was it a gracious thing to yonder bawling cheap-jack, with his red, sodden face? And the factory girl, with her feathered hat and deep fringe overshadowing pinched, soulless features, looking hungrily at his Brummagem wares; the fat, unintelligent workman's wife gossiping loudly of sickness, death, and funerals; the besotted navvy stumbling along in the grip of a soberer friend—how far were they intellectually, spiritually, cognisant of life? Again as of old these questions presented themselves to Clytie. During these latter months she had been too closely confronted with the problems of her own personality to interest herself in that of others. But now a newly awakened self-knowledge had given her a key to mysteries to the elucidation of which she had once devoted all her artistic powers. She had arrived at the truth of the relativity of individual life. There was no such thing as absolute fulness of existence. Everyone—coster, factory girl, statesman, poet—was striving, each in his way, after a completer life, but the ideal of completeness was limited by each individual's capacity for action, sensation, and thought. Hence yonder factory girl's life might be relatively as full as her own, the hunger for the unknown that would complete it as loudly clamourous. Clytie was glad for the moment, almost happy. New artistic stirrings seemed to be at work within her soul. Heretofore she had sought a solution for the problems of life through her art. Might not this newer knowledge and more extensive sympathy enable her to present finely perceived truths, thus making her art less self-centred, more universal?
This train of thought was working through her mind as she sat by the window, resting her cheek on her arm.
Gradually, however, the thoughts confused themselves into a medley of dim associations, which in their turn became lost in drowsiness. Worn out by the physical strain of the day, she fell asleep in the midst of the uproar that arose from the hurrying street.
Suddenly she became conscious of a presence beside her in the room, and, starting up, beheld Kent looking down upon her.
“You'll get cold or a stiff neck or something sleeping by the open window like that,” he said in his kindly way. “And yet I did not like to wake you.”
“I do feel a little cramped,” said Clytie, rising. “But the night is hot. Bring another chair and sit down. I shall not go to sleep again.”
Kent did as she bade him, and they sat on either side of the window, Clytie with face half averted looking into the street, Kent leaning forward, gazing at her with troubled eyes. For some moments neither spoke. At last Kent broke the silence.
“Clytie!”
“Yes?”
“Was I wrong to come in? Do you want to be alone? Tell me frankly and I will go.”
“No; stay,” replied Clytie slowly, without turning her head. “I wanted you to come. I don't know why. How did you find out I was here?”
“Mrs. Gurkins caught me in the passage. She said you were staying some time. I knocked at your door, but you did not answer, so I looked in, saw you asleep there. I could not resist the temptation of coming nearer so as to see your face. You look so done up, you must go to bed early and have a good night's rest.”
“Ah, Kent! How like you!” said Clytie, looking quickly round at him. Womanlike, she was pleased that he had not expressed wonderment at her presence in the house, and beset her with abrupt questions, but tried instead with delicate sympathy to put her at her ease.
“Can you guess why I am here, Kent?” she asked in a low voice.
“I dare not try,” he replied.
“I have finally parted from my husband.”
“Good God! Clytie, what do you mean?” he cried, with a leap at his heart, followed by a feeling of great pity for the woman he loved, an aching sense of the irony of things. “It has been a misunderstanding. It will all be cleared up in time,” he continued unsteadily.
Clytie shook her head.
“No; thank God, this is the end. See my hand: that which was there I drew off to-day for the first time. It shall never be there again.”
“Clytie, my dear friend Clytie!” said Kent, very much moved. “What can I say to you? My heart aches for all that you must have suffered. You told me yesterday your life was not what I thought it to be, for I fancied you happy, with all around you to make the world bright and glorious. I do not know what to think now. Is there no hope for your happiness?”
“Oh, no, Kent, not that way. Let me tell you at once what I can. Don't judge me severely. I did what lay in my nature to do. I bore things that nearly drove me mad, although perhaps many other women would not have looked on them as burdens. But my marriage was a mistake—for both of us. And then—oh, how can I tell you? Something happened to-day, the climax, rendering further life there impossible. Oh, I can't speak or even think of it!”
Her voice ended in a moan and a shivering catch of her breath, and she covered her face with her hands. Kent leaped to his feet quivering with a sudden intuition.
“Clytie, you have been wronged far more than by mere misunderstanding. Did he dare——”
“Yes—yes. Don't think of it. It's all over.”
“But I must think of it. It is like a red-hot iron in my heart. I can't bear it. All last night I lay awake thinking of your unhappiness, tortured by regrets, hating the man who made your life a weariness to you. I never thought of this. The coward! The brute! Oh, my God!”
And as he strode up and down the room, with set lips and clenched hands, Clytie looked at him half-wonderingly. She had never seen her calm, strong Kent so moved by passion. She went up to him, with natural impulse, and put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his face.
“You need never speak or think of this again, Kent. It is all over, buried. For nearly a year we have lived almost as separated as we shall do henceforward. I have come to be Clytie Davenant once again, to lead the old life of work and happiness with you and Winifred. I can blot out the past eighteen months like an evil dream in which I have suffered much and learned much. We can work together as we used to do, Kent, and you will find me, I hope, a better, gentler woman, dear. Now forget all about it, as I shall do. Remember what you said yesterday—that no life was so wrecked as to be incapable of reconstruction. You cannot tell what comfort you gave me. And I cannot tell you what happiness I passed through this morning—before—ah, well——Oh, Kent, my true, loyal Kent! I am a very weak woman, and I want your goodness and help and tenderness. You can do nothing to help or avenge what has passed. You can do all for me in the future if you will.”
“What I can do is small enough, God knows!” replied Kent.
“Do you know what you can do for me?”
“Tell me.”
“Let me forget myself and my selfish wants in trying to bring some help and gladness into your life. I wronged you deeply once—I wronged myself; let me make reparation.”
Kent turned aside and passed his hand across his forehead.
“You must not think of me,” he said in a low voice. “I am rough and strong, with no particular burdens to bear. Some day or the other, when you are happy, I will come to you with my little griefs for the sake of having them charmed away by your sympathy; but until then let me think of you—help you if I can. If I can't, Heaven knows it will not be for want of longing to do so.”
“Kent,” said Clytie very softly, unconsciously moving nearer to him, “I am happy now. Can't you see that I am?”
Kent's heart beat like a sledge hammer; a wave of passionate love swept through his veins, thrilling him to the finger tips. He was conscious that if he turned his face the hair on her forehead would brush his cheek. Never before had a woman spoken to him in that strange tone. The world stood still for a moment. Then in a blinding daze of light, in which all things in heaven and earth were drowned, he turned, caught her to him, and kissed her.
Slowly Clytie freed herself, held out a restraining hand, and, with steps strangely faltering, moved across the room to the couch, where she sat down and hid her face in the cushions. Kent paused for a moment, steadying his senses still reeling from the shock of the first kiss of love he had ever given to woman. Then he went and stood by her side.
“Forgive me, Clytie. It was base of me. But it was something beyond my will that acted. You forget that I love you. I have wronged you, my queen, my life! If you can ever trust me again, I will devote myself to making you forget that I have dared to love you. I ask your pardon, Clytie.”
He stayed for a moment looking at her bowed figure. Then, as she gave no sign that she was moved by his appeal, he left her, and with a strange mingling of death and gladness in his heart walked lingeringly to the door. But just as his hand was on the knob Clytie rose impulsively from the couch, and with hair ruffled and her cheeks glowing came up to him, and it was she who opened the door.
“You are pardoned, dear, for I love you.”
A moment later she was alone. And she resumed her position by the open window, and looked out upon the busy scene. But she heeded it not. Her sight was directed to the mysteries of an invisible world.