That evening he was very excited, and he seemed to take no thought to disguise his excitement. The fact was, he could not have disguised it, even if he had tried. The fever of artistic creation was upon him--all the old desires and the old exhausting joys. His genius had been lying idle, like a lion in a thicket, and now it had sprung forth ravening. For months he had not handled a brush; for months his mind had deliberately avoided the question of painting, being content with the observation only of beauty. A week ago, if he had deliberately asked himself whether he would ever paint again, he might have answered, "Perhaps not." Such is man's ignorance of his own nature! And now the lion of his genius was standing over him, its paw on his breast, and making a great noise.
He saw that the last few months had been merely an interlude, that he would be forced to paint--or go mad; and that nothing else mattered. He saw also that he could only paint in one way--Priam Farll's way. If it was discovered that Priam Farll was not buried in Westminster Abbey; if there was a scandal, and legal unpleasantness--well, so much the worse! But he must paint.
Not for money, mind you! Incidentally, of course, he would earn money. But he had already quite forgotten that life has its financial aspect.
So in the sitting-room in Werter Road, he walked uneasily to and fro, squeezing between the table and the sideboard, and then skirting the fireplace where Alice sat with a darning apparatus upon her knees, and her spectacles on--she wore spectacles when she had to look fixedly at very dark objects. The room was ugly in a pleasant Putneyish way, with a couple of engravings after B.W. Leader, R.A., a too realistic wall-paper, hot brown furniture with ribbed legs, a carpet with the characteristics of a retired governess who has taken to drink, and a black cloud on the ceiling over the incandescent burners. Happily these surroundings did not annoy him. They did not annoy him because he never saw them. When his eyes were not resting on beautiful things, they were not in this world of reality at all. His sole idea about house-furnishing was an easy-chair.
"Harry," said his wife, "don't you think you'd better sit down?"
The calm voice of common sense stopped him in his circular tour. He glanced at Alice, and she, removing her spectacles, glanced at him. The seal on his watch-chain dangled free. He had to talk to some one, and his wife was there--not only the most convenient but the most proper person to talk to. A tremendous impulse seized him to tell her everything; she would understand; she always did understand; and she never allowed herself to be startled. The most singular occurrences, immediately they touched her, were somehow transformed into credible daily, customary events. Thus the disaster of the brewery! She had accepted it as though the ruins of breweries were a spectacle to be witnessed at every street-corner.
Yes, he should tell her. Three minutes ago he had no intention of telling her, or any one, anything. He decided in an instant. To tell her his secret would lead up naturally to the picture which he had just finished.
"I say, Alice," he said, "I want to talk to you."
"Well," she said, "I wish you'd talk to me sitting down. I don't know what's come over you this last day or two."
He sat down. He did not feel really intimate with her at that moment. And their marriage seemed to him, in a way, artificial, scarcely a fact. He did not know that it takes years to accomplish full intimacy between husband and wife.
"You know," he said, "Henry Leek isn't my real name."
"Oh, isn't it?" she said. "What does that matter?"
She was not in the least surprised to hear that Henry Leek was not his real name. She was a wise woman, and knew the strangeness of the world. And she had married him simply because he was himself, because he existed in a particular manner (whose charm for her she could not have described) from hour to hour.
"So long as you haven't committed a murder or anything," she added, with her tranquil smile.
"My real name is Priam Farll," he said gruffly. The gruffness was caused by timidity.
"I thought Priam Farll was your gentleman's name."
"To tell you the truth," he said nervously, "there was a mistake. That photograph that was sent to you was my photograph."
"Yes," she said. "I know it was. And what of it?"
"I mean," he blundered on, "it was my valet that died--not me. You see, the doctor, when he came, thought that Leek was me, and I didn't tell him differently, because I was afraid of all the bother. I just let it slide--and there were other reasons. You know how I am...."
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.
"Can't you understand? It's simple enough. I'm Priam Farll, and I had a valet named Henry Leek, and he died, and they thought it was me. Only it wasn't."
He saw her face change and then compose itself.
"Then it's this Henry Leek that is buried in Westminster Abbey, instead of you?" Her voice was very soft and soothing. And the astonishing woman resumed her spectacles and her long needle.
"Yes, of course."
Here he burst into the whole story, into the middle of it, continuing to the end, and then going back to the commencement. He left out nothing, and nobody, except Lady Sophia Entwistle.
"I see," she observed. "And you've never said a word?"
"Not a word."
"If I were you I should still keep perfectly silent about it," she almost whispered persuasively. "It'll be just as well. If I were you, I shouldn't worry myself. I can quite understand how it happened, and I'm glad you've told me. But don't worry. You've been exciting yourself these last two or three days. I thought it was about my money business, but I see it wasn't. At least that may have brought it on, like. Now the best thing you can do is to forget it."
She did not believe him! She simply discredited the whole story; and, told in Werter Road, like that, the story did sound fantastic; it did come very near to passing belief. She had always noticed a certain queerness in her husband. His sudden gaieties about a tint in the sky or the gesture of a horse in the street, for example, were most uncanny. And he had peculiar absences of mind that she could never account for. She was sure that he must have been a very bad valet. However, she did not marry him for a valet, but for a husband; and she was satisfied with her bargain. What if he did suffer under a delusion? The exposure of that delusion merely crystallized into a definite shape her vague suspicions concerning his mentality. Besides, it was a harmless delusion. And it explained things. It explained, among other things, why he had gone to stay at the Grand Babylon Hotel. That must have been the inception of the delusion. She was glad to know the worst.
She adored him more than ever.
There was a silence.
"No," she repeated, in the most matter-of-fact tone, "I should say nothing, in your place. I should forget it."
"You would?" He drummed on the table.
"I should! And whatever you do, don't worry." Her accents were the coaxing accents of a nurse with a child--or with a lunatic.
He perceived now with the utmost clearness that she did not believe a word of what he had said, and that in her magnificent and calm sagacity she was only trying to humour him. He had expected to disturb her soul to its profoundest depths; he had expected that they would sit up half the night discussing the situation. And lo!--"I should forget it," indulgently! And a mild continuance of darning!
He had to think, and think hard.
"Henry," she called out the next morning, as he disappeared up the stairs. "Whatareyou doing up there?"
She had behaved exactly as if nothing had happened; and she was one of those women whose prudent policy it is to let their men alone even to the furthest limit of patience; but she had nerves, too, and they were being affected. For three days Henry had really been too mysterious!
He stopped, and put his head over the banisters, and in a queer, moved voice answered:
"Come and see."
Sooner or later she must see. Sooner or later the already distended situation must get more and more distended until it burst with a loud report. Let the moment be sooner, he swiftly decided.
So she went and saw.
Half-way up the attic stairs she began to sniff, and as he turned the knob of the attic door for her she said, "What a smell of paint! I fancied yesterday----"
If she had been clever enough she would have said, "What a smell of masterpieces!" But her cleverness lay in other fields.
"You surely haven't been aspinalling that bath-room chair?... Oh!"
This loud exclamation escaped from her as she entered the attic and saw the back of the picture which Priam had lodged on the said bath-room chair--filched by him from the bath-room on the previous day. She stepped to the vicinity of the window and obtained a good view of the picture. It was brilliantly shining in the light of morn. It looked glorious; it was a fit companion of many pictures from the same hand distributed among European galleries. It had that priceless quality, at once noble and radiant, which distinguished all Priam's work. It transformed the attic; and thousands of amateurs and students, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, would have gone into that attic with their hats off and a thrill in the spine, had they known what was there and had they been invited to enter and worship. Priam himself was pleased; he was delighted; he was enthusiastic. And he stood near the picture, glancing at it and then glancing at Alice, nervously, like a mother whose sister-in-law has come to look at the baby. As for Alice, she said nothing. She had first of all to take in the fact that her husband had been ungenerous enough to keep her quite in the dark as to the nature of his secret activities; then she had to take in the fact of the picture.
"Did you do that?" she said limply.
"Yes," said he, with all the casualness that he could assume. "How does it strike you?" And to himself: "This'll make her see I'm not a mere lunatic. This'll give her a shaking up."
"I'm sure it's beautiful," she said kindly, but without the slightest conviction. "What is it? Is that Putney Bridge?"
"Yes," he said.
"I thought it was. I thought it must be. Well, I never knew you could paint. It's beautiful--for an amateur." She said this firmly and yet endearingly, and met his eyes with her eyes. It was her tactful method of politely causing him to see that she had not accepted last night's yarn very seriously. His eyes fell, not hers.
"No, no, no!" he expostulated with quick vivacity, as she stepped towards the canvas. "Don't come any nearer. You're at just the right distance."
"Oh! If you don'twantme to see it close," she humoured him. "What a pity you haven't put an omnibus on the bridge!"
"There is one," said he. "That'sone." He pointed.
"Oh yes! Yes, I see. But, you know, I think it looks rather more like a Carter Paterson van than an omnibus. If you could paint some letters on it--'Union Jack' or 'Vanguard,' then people would be sure. But it's beautiful. I suppose you learnt to to paint from your--" She checked herself. "What's that red streak behind?"
"That's the railway bridge," he muttered.
"Oh, of course it is! How silly of me! Now if you were to put a train on that. The worst of trains in pictures is that they never seem to be going along. I've noticed that on the sides of furniture vans, haven't you? But if you put a signal, against it, then people would understand that the train had stopped. I'm not sure whether thereisa signal on the bridge, though."
He made no remark.
"And I see that's the Elk public-house there on the right. You've just managed to get it in. I can recognize that quite easily. Any one would."
He still made no remark.
"What are you going to do with it?" she asked gently.
"Going to sell it, my dear," he replied grimly. "It may surprise you to know that that canvas is worth at the very least £800. There would be a devil of a row and rumpus in Bond Street and elsewhere if they knew I was painting here instead of rotting in Westminster Abbey. I don't propose to sign it--I seldom did sign my pictures--and we shall see what we shall see.... I've got fifteen hundred for little things not so good as that. I'll let it go for what it'll fetch. We shall soon be wanting money."
The tears rose to Alice's eyes. She saw that he was more infinitely more mad than she imagined--with his £800 and his £1,500 for daubs of pictures that conveyed no meaning whatever to the eye! Why, you could purchase real, professional pictures, of lakes, and mountains, exquisitely finished, at the frame-makers in High Street for three pounds apiece! And here he was rambling in hundreds and thousands! She saw that that extraordinary notion about being able to paint was a natural consequence of the pathetic delusion to which he had given utterance yesterday. And she wondered what would follow next. Who could have guessed that the seeds of lunacy were in such a man? Yes, harmless lunacy, but lunacy nevertheless! She distinctly remembered the little shock with which she had learned that he was staying at the Grand Babylon on his own account, as a wealthy visitor. She thought it bizarre, but she certainly had not taken it for a sign of lunacy. And yet it had been a sign of madness. And the worst of harmless lunacy was that it might develop at any moment into harmful lunacy.
There was one thing to do, and only one: keep him quiet, shield him from all troubles and alarms. It was disturbance of spirit which induced these mental derangements. His master's death had upset him. And now he had been upset by her disgraceful brewery company.
She made a step towards him, and then hesitated. She had to form a plan of campaign all in a moment! She had to keep her wits and to use them! How could she give him confidence about his absurd picture? She noticed that naïve look that sometimes came into his eyes, a boyish expression that gave the He to his greying beard and his generous proportions.
He laughed, until, as she came closer, he saw the tears on her eyelids. Then he ceased laughing. She fingered the edge of his coat, cajolingly.
"It's a beautiful picture!" she repeated again and again. "And if you like I will see if I can sell it for you. But, Henry----"
"Well?"
"Please, please don't bother about money. We shall haveheaps. There's no occasion for you to bother, and I won'thaveyou bothering."
"What are you crying for?" he asked in a murmur.
"It's only--only because I think it's so nice of you trying to earn money like that," she lied. "I'm not really crying."
And she ran away, downstairs, really crying. It was excessively comic, but he had better not follow her, lest he might cry too....
A lull followed this crisis in the affairs of No. 29 Werter Road. Priam went on painting, and there was now no need for secrecy about it. But his painting was not made a subject of conversation. Both of them hesitated to touch it, she from tact, and he because her views on the art seemed to him to be lacking in subtlety. In every marriage there is a topic--there are usually several--which the husband will never broach to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her. Priam scarcely guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy. He thought she merely thought him queer, as artistsarequeer to non-artists. And he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer. As for Alice's incredulous attitude towards the revelation of his identity, he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a madman. On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.
Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road during three whole days. And then a singular event happened, and progress was resumed. Priam had been out since early morning on the riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High Street. He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his tobacconist's shop was on the north side, near the corner. An unfamiliar peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not in want of tobacco. It was the look of the window that drew him. He stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street. There was no necessity to go further. His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle of the window. He stared at it fixedly. He believed his eyes, for his eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able to believe them. The canvas was indubitably there present in the window. It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic advertisements of ships, soups, and tobacco. He was almost sure that he had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial announcement of Taddy's Snuff. The tobacconist had probably removed the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge. In any event the frame was about half-an-inch too long for the canvas, but the gap was scarcely observable. On the frame was a large notice, 'For sale.' And around it were the cigars of two hemispheres, from Syak Whiffs at a penny each to precious Murias; and cigarettes of every allurement; and the multitudinous fragments of all advertised tobaccos; and meerschaums and briars, and patent pipes and diagrams of their secret machinery; and cigarette-and cigar-holders laid on plush; and pocket receptacles in aluminium and other precious metals.
Shining there, the picture had a most incongruous appearance. He blushed as he stood on the refuge. It seemed to him that the mere incongruity of the spectacle must inevitably attract crowds, gradually blocking the street, and that when some individual not absolutely a fool in art, had perceived the quality of the picture--well, then the trouble of public curiosity and of journalistic inquisitiveness would begin. He wondered that he could ever have dreamed of concealing his identity on a canvas. The thing simply shouted 'Priam Farll,' every inch of it. In any exhibition of pictures in London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Munich, New York or Boston, it would have been the cynosure, the target of ecstatic admirations. It was just such another work as his celebrated 'Pont d'Austerlitz,' which hung in the Luxembourg. And neither a frame of 'chemical gold,' nor the extremely variegated coloration of the other merchandise on sale could kill it.
However, there were no signs of a crowd. People passed to and fro, just as though there had not been a masterpiece within ten thousand miles of them. Once a servant girl, a loaf of bread in her red arms, stopped to glance at the window, but in an instant she was gone, running.
Priam's first instinctive movement had been to plunge into the shop, and demand from his tobacconist an explanation of the phenomenon. But of course he checked himself. Of course he knew that the presence of his picture in the window could only be due to the enterprise of Alice.
He went slowly home.
The sound of his latchkey in the keyhole brought her into the hall ere he had opened the door.
"Oh, Henry," she said--she was quite excited--"I must tell you. I was passing Mr. Aylmer's this morning just as he was dressing his window, and the thought struck me that he might put your picture in. So I ran in and asked him. He said he would if he could have it at once. So I came and got it. He found a frame, and wrote out a ticket, and asked after you. No one could have been kinder. You must go and have a look at it. I shouldn't be at all surprised if it gets sold like that."
Priam answered nothing for a moment. He could not.
"What did Aylmer say about it?" he asked.
"Oh!" said his wife quickly, "you can't expect Mr. Aylmer to understand these things. It's not in his line. But he was glad to oblige us. I saw he arranged it nicely."
"Well," said Priam discreetly, "that's all right. Suppose we have lunch?"
Curious--her relations with Mr. Aylmer! It was she who had recommended him to go to Mr. Aylmer's when, on the first morning of his residence in Putney, he had demanded, "Any decent tobacconists in this happy region?" He suspected that, had it not been for Aylmer's beridden and incurable wife, Alice's name might have been Aylmer. He suspected Aylmer of a hopeless passion for Alice. He was glad that Alice had not been thrown away on Aylmer. He could not imagine himself now without Alice. In spite of her ideas on the graphic arts, Alice was his air, his atmosphere, his oxygen; and also his umbrella to shield him from the hail of untoward circumstances. Curious--the process of love! It was the power of love that had put that picture in the tobacconist's window.
Whatever power had put it there, no power seemed strong enough to get it out again. It lay exposed in the window for weeks and never drew a crowd, nor caused a sensation of any kind! Not a word in the newspapers! London, the acknowledged art-centre of the world, calmly went its ways. The sole immediate result was that Priam changed his tobacconist, and the direction of his promenades.
At last another singular event happened.
Alice beamingly put five sovereigns into Priam's hand one evening.
"It's been sold for five guineas," she said, joyous. "Mr. Aylmer didn't want to keep anything for himself, but I insisted on his having the odd shillings. I think it's splendid, simply splendid! Of course I alwaysdidthink it was a beautiful picture," she added.
The fact was that this astounding sale for so large a sum as five pounds, of a picture done in the attic by her Henry, had enlarged her ideas of Henry's skill. She could no longer regard his painting as the caprice of a gentle lunatic. There was somethinginit. And now she wanted to persuade herself that she had known from the first there was something in it.
The picture had been bought by the eccentric and notorious landlord of the Elk Hotel, down by the river, on a Sunday afternoon when he was--not drunk, but more optimistic than the state of English society warrants. He liked the picture because his public-house was so unmistakably plain in it. He ordered a massive gold frame for it, and hung it in his saloon-bar. His career as a patron of the arts was unfortunately cut short by an order signed by his doctors for his incarceration in a lunatic asylum. All Putney had been saying for years that he would end in the asylum, and all Putney was right.
One afternoon, in December, Priam and Alice were in the sitting-room together, and Alice was about to prepare tea. The drawn-thread cloth was laid diagonally on the table (because Alice had seen cloths so laid on model tea-tables in model rooms at Waring's), the strawberry jam occupied the northern point of the compass, and the marmalade was antarctic, while brittle cakes and spongy cakes represented the occident and the orient respectively. Bread-and-butter stood, rightly, for the centre of the universe. Silver ornamented the spread, and Alice's two tea-pots (for she would never allow even Chinese tea to remain on the leaves for more than five minutes) and Alice's water-jug with the patent balanced lid, occupied a tray off the cloth. At some distance, but still on the table, a kettle moaned over a spirit-lamp. Alice was cutting bread for toast. The fire was of the right redness for toast, and a toasting-fork lay handy. As winter advanced, Alice's teas had a tendency to become cosier and cosier, and also more luxurious, more of a ritualistic ceremony. And to avoid the trouble and danger of going through a cold passage to the kitchen, she arranged matters so that the entire operation could be performed with comfort and decency in the sitting-room itself.
Priam was rolling cigarettes, many of them, and placing them, as he rolled them, in order on the mantelpiece. A happy, mild couple! And a couple, one would judge from the richness of the tea, with no immediate need of money. Over two years, however, had passed since the catastrophe to Cohoon's, and Cohoon's had in no way recovered therefrom. Yet money had been regularly found for the household. The manner of its finding was soon to assume importance in the careers of Priam and Alice. But, ere that moment, an astonishing and vivid experience happened to them. One might have supposed that, in the life of Priam Farll at least, enough of the astonishing and the vivid had already happened. Nevertheless, what had already happened was as customary and unexciting as addressing envelopes, compared to the next event.
The next event began at the instant when Alice was sticking the long fork into a round of bread. There was a knock at the front door, a knock formidable and reverberating, the knock of fate, perhaps, but fate disguised as a coalheaver.
Alice answered it. She always answered knocks; Priam never. She shielded him from every rough or unexpected contact, just as his valet used to do. The gas in the hall was not lighted, and so she stopped to light it, darkness having fallen. Then she opened the door, and saw, in the gloom, a short, thin woman standing on the step, a woman of advanced middle-age, dressed with a kind of shabby neatness. It seemed impossible that so frail and unimportant a creature could have made such a noise on the door.
"Is this Mr. Henry Leek's?" asked the visitor, in a dissatisfied, rather weary tone.
"Yes," said Alice. Which was not quite true. 'This' was assuredly hers, rather than her husband's.
"Oh!" said the woman, glancing behind her; and entered nervously, without invitation.
At the same moment three male figures sprang, or rushed, out of the strip of front garden, and followed the woman into the hall, lunging up against Alice, and breathing loudly. One of the trio was a strong, heavy-faced heavy-handed, louring man of some thirty years (it seemed probable that he was the knocker), and the others were curates, with the proper physical attributes of curates; that is to say, they were of ascetic habit and clean-shaven and had ingenuous eyes.
The hall now appeared like the antechamber of a May-meeting, and as Alice had never seen it so peopled before, she vented a natural exclamation of surprise.
"Yes," said one of the curates, fiercely. "You may say 'Lord,' but we were determined to get in, and in we have got. John, shut the door. Mother, don't put yourself about."
John, being the heavy-faced and heavy-handed man, shut the door.
"Where is Mr. Henry Leek?" demanded the other curate.
Now Priam, whose curiosity had been excusably excited by the unusual sounds in the hall, was peeping through a chink of the sitting-room door, and the elderly woman caught the glint of his eyes. She pushed open the door, and, after a few seconds' inspection of him, said:
"There you are, Henry! After thirty years! To think of it!"
Priam was utterly at a loss.
"I'm his wife, ma'am," the visitor continued sadly to Alice. "I'm sorry to have to tell you. I'm his wife. I'm the rightful Mrs. Henry Leek, and these are my sons, come with me to see that I get justice."
Alice recovered very quickly from the shock of amazement. She was a woman not easily to be startled by the vagaries of human nature. She had often heard of bigamy, and that her husband should prove to be a bigamist did not throw her into a swoon. She at once, in her own mind, began to make excuses for him. She said to herself, as she inspected the real Mrs. Henry Leek, that the real Mrs. Henry Leek had certainly the temperament which manufactures bigamists. She understood how a person may slide into bigamy. And after thirty years!... She never thought of bigamy as a crime, nor did it occur to her to run out and drown herself for shame because she was not properly married to Priam!
No, it has to be said in favour of Alice that she invariably took things as they were.
"I think you'd better all come in and sit down quietly," she said.
"Eh! It's very kind of you," said the mother of the curates, limply.
The last thing that the curates wanted to do was to sit down quietly. But they had to sit down. Alice made them sit side by side on the sofa. The heavy, elder brother, who had not spoken a word, sat on a chair between the sideboard and the door. Their mother sat on a chair near the table. Priam fell into his easy-chair between the fireplace and the sideboard. As for Alice, she remained standing; she showed no nervousness except in her handling of the toasting-fork.
It was a great situation. But unfortunately ordinary people are so unaccustomed to the great situation, that, when it chances to come, they feel themselves incapable of living up to it. A person gazing in at the window, and unacquainted with the facts, might have guessed that the affair was simply a tea party at which the guests had arrived a little too soon and where no one was startlingly proficient in the art of small-talk.
Still, the curates were apparently bent on doing their best.
"Now, mother!" one of them urged her.
The mother, as if a spring had been touched in her, began: "He married me just thirty years ago, ma'am; and four months after my eldest was born--that's John there"--(pointing to the corner near the door)--"he just walked out of the house and left me. I'm sorry to have to say it. Yes, sorry I am! But there it is. And never a word had I ever given him! And eight months after that my twins were born. That's Harry and Matthew"--(pointing to the sofa)--"Harry I called after his father because I thought he was like him, and just to show I bore no ill-feeling, and hoping he'd come back! And there I was with these little children! And not a word of explanation did I ever have. I heard of Harry five years later--when Johnnie was nearly five--but he was on the Continent and I couldn't go traipsing about with three babies. Besides, if Ihadgone!... Sorry I am to say it, ma'am; but many's the time he's beaten me, yes, with his hands and his fists! He's knocked me about above a bit. And I never gave him a word back. He was my husband, for better for worse, and I forgave him and I still do. Forgive and forget, that's what I say. We only heard of him through Matthew being second curate at St. Paul's, and in charge of the mission hall. It was your milkman that happened to tell Matthew that he had a customer same name as himself. And you know how one thing leads to another. So we're here!"
"I never saw this lady in my life," said Priam excitedly, "and I'm absolutely certain I never married her. I never married any one; except, of course, you, Alice!"
"Then how do you explain this, sir?" exclaimed Matthew, the younger twin, jumping up and taking a blue paper from his pocket. "Be so good as to pass this to father," he said, handing the paper to Alice.
Alice inspected the document. It was a certificate of the marriage of Henry Leek, valet, and Sarah Featherstone, spinster, at a registry office in Paddington. Priam also inspected it. This was one of Leek's escapades! No revelations as to the past of Henry Leek would have surprised him. There was nothing to be done except to give a truthful denial of identity and to persist in that denial. Useless to say soothingly to the lady visitor that she was the widow of a gentleman who had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey!
"I know nothing about it," said Priam doggedly.
"I suppose you'll not deny, sir, that your name is Henry Leek," said Henry, jumping up to stand by Matthew.
"I deny everything," said Priam doggedly. How could he explain? If he had not been able to convince Alice that he was not Henry Leek, could he hope to convince these visitors?
"I suppose, madam," Henry continued, addressing Alice in impressive tones as if she were a crowded congregation, "that at any rate you and my father are--er--living here together under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Leek?"
Alice merely lifted her eyebrows.
"It's all a mistake," said Priam impatiently. Then he had a brilliant inspiration. "As if there was only one Henry Leek in the world!"
"Do you really recognize my husband?" Alice asked.
"Your husband, madam!" Matthew protested, shocked.
"I wouldn't say that I recognized him as hewas," said the real Mrs. Henry Leek. "No more than he recognizes me. After thirty years!....Last time I saw him he was only twenty-two or twenty-three. But he's the same sort of man, and he has the same eyes. And look at Henry's eyes. Besides, I heard twenty-five years ago that he'd gone into service with a Mr. Priam Farll, a painter or something, him that was buried in Westminster Abbey. And everybody in Putney knows that this gentleman----"
"Gentleman!" murmured Matthew, discontented.
"Was valet to Mr. Priam Farll. We've heard that everywhere."
"I suppose you'll not deny," said Henry the younger, "that Priam Farll wouldn't be likely to havetwovalets named Henry Leek?"
Crushed by this Socratic reasoning, Priam kept silence, nursing his knees and staring into the fire.
Alice went to the sideboard where she kept her best china, and took out three extra cups and saucers.
"I think we'd all better have some tea," she said tranquilly. And then she got the tea-caddy and put seven teaspoonfuls of tea into one of the tea-pots.
"It's very kind of you, I'm sure," whimpered the authentic Mrs. Henry Leek.
"Now, mother, don't give way!" the curates admonished her.
"Don't you remember, Henry," she went on whimpering to Priam, "how you said you wouldn't be married in a church, not for anybody? And how I gave way to you, like I always did? And don't you remember how you wouldn't let poor little Johnnie be baptized? Well, I do hope your opinions have altered. Eh, but it's strange, it's strange, how two of your sons, and just them two that you'd never set eyes on until this day, should have made up their minds to go into the church! And thanks to Johnnie there, they've been able to. If I was to tell you all the struggles we've had, you wouldn't believe me. They were clerks, and they might have been clerks to this day, if it hadn't been for Johnnie. But Johnnie could always earn money. It's that engineering! And now Matthew's second curate at St. Paul's and getting fifty pounds a year, and Henry'll have a curacy next month at Bermondsey--it's been promised, and all thanks to Johnnie!" She wept.
Johnnie, in the corner, who had so far done nought but knock at the door, maintained stiffly his policy of non-interference.
Priam Farll, angry, resentful, and quite untouched by the recital, shrugged his shoulders. He was animated by the sole desire to fly from the widow and progeny of his late valet. But he could not fly. The Herculean John was too close to the door. So he shrugged his shoulders a second time.
"Yes, sir," said Matthew, "you may shrug your shoulders, but you can't shrug us out of existence. Here we are, and you can't get over us. You are our father, and I presume that a kind of respect is due to you. Yet how can you hope for our respect? Have you earned it? Did you earn it when you ill-treated our poor mother? Did you earn it when you left her, with the most inhuman cruelty, to fend for herself in the world? Did you earn it when you abandoned your children born and unborn? You are a bigamist, sir; a deceiver of women! Heaven knows--"
"Would you mind just toasting this bread?" Alice interrupted his impassioned discourse by putting the loaded toasting-fork into his hands, "while I make the tea?"
It was a novel way of stopping a mustang in full career, but it succeeded.
While somewhat perfunctorily holding the fork to the fire, Matthew glared about him, to signify his righteous horror, and other sentiments.
"Please don't burn it," said Alice gently. "Suppose you were to sit down on this foot-stool." And then she poured boiling water on the tea, put the lid on the pot, and looked at the clock to note the exact second at which the process of infusion had begun.
"Of course," burst out Henry, the twin of Matthew, "I need not say, madam, that you have all our sympathies. You are in a----"
"Do you mean me?" Alice asked.
In an undertone Priam could be heard obstinately repeating, "Never set eyes upon her before! Never set eyes on the woman before!"
"I do, madam," said Henry, not to be cowed nor deflected from his course. "I speak for all of us. You have our sympathies. You could not know the character of the man you married, or rather with whom you went through the ceremony of marriage. However, we have heard, by inquiry, that you made his acquaintance through the medium of a matrimonial agency; and indirectly, when one does that sort of thing, one takes one's chance. Your position is an extremely delicate one; but it is not too much to say that you brought it on yourself. In my work, I have encountered many sad instances of the result of lax moral principles; but I little thought to encounter the saddest of all in my own family. The discovery is just as great a blow to us as it is to you. We have suffered; my mother has suffered. And now, I fear, it is your turn to suffer. You are not this man's wife. Nothing can make you his wife. You are living in the same house with him--under circumstances--er--without a chaperon. I hesitate to characterize your situation in plain words. It would scarcely become me, or mine, to do so. But really no lady could possibly find herself in a situation more false than--I am afraid there is only one word, open immorality, and--er--to put yourself right with society there is one thing, and only one, left for you to--er--do. I--I speak for the family, and I--"
"Sugar?" Alice questioned the mother of curates.
"Yes, please."
"One lump, or two?"
"Two, please."
"Speaking for the family--" Henry resumed.
"Will you kindly pass this cup to your mother?" Alice suggested.
Henry was obliged to take the cup. Excited by the fever of eloquence, he unfortunately upset it before it had reached his mother's hands.
"Oh, Henry!" murmured the lady, mournfully aghast. "You always were so clumsy! And a clean cloth, too!"
"Don't mention it, please," said Alice, and then toherHenry: "My dear, just run into the kitchen, and bring me something to wipe this up. Hanging behind the door--you'll see."
Priam sprang forward with astonishing celerity. And the occasion brooking no delay, the guardian of the portal could not but let him pass. In another moment the front door banged. Priam did not return. And Alice staunched the flow of tea with a clean, stiff serviette taken from the sideboard drawer.
The family of the late Henry Leek, each with a cup in hand, experienced a certain difficulty in maintaining the interview at the pitch set by Matthew and Henry. Mrs. Leek, their mother, frankly gave way to soft tears, while eating bread-and-butter, jam and zebra-like toast. John took everything that Alice offered to him in gloomy and awkward silence.
"Does he mean to come back?" Matthew demanded at length. He had risen from the foot-stool.
"Who?" asked Alice.
Matthew paused, and then said, savagely and deliberately: "Father."
Alice smiled. "I'm afraid not. I'm afraid he's gone out. You see, he's a rather peculiar man. It's not the slightest use me trying to drive him. He can only be led. He has his good points--I can speak candidly as he isn't here, and Iwill--he has his good points. When Mrs. Leek, as I suppose she calls herself, spoke about his cruelty to her--well, I understood that. Far be it from me to say a word against him; he's often very good to me, but--another cup, Mr. John?"
John advanced to the table without a word, holding his cup.
"You don't mean to say, ma'am," said Mrs. Leek "that he--?"
Alice nodded grievously.
Mrs. Leek burst into tears. "When Johnnie was barely five weeks old," she said, "he would twist my arm. And he kept me without money. And once he locked me up in the cellar. And one morning when I was ironing he snatched the hot iron out of my hand and--"
"Don't! Don't!" Alice soothed her. "I know. I know all you can tell me. I know because I've been through--"
"You don't mean to say he threatenedyouwith the flat-iron?"
"If threatening was only all!" said Alice, like a martyr.
"Then he's not changed, in all these years!" wept the mother of curates.
"If he has, it's for the worse," said Alice. "How was I to tell?" she faced the curates. "How could I know? And yet nobody, nobody, could be nicer than he is at times!"
"That's true, that's true," responded the authentic Mrs. Henry Leek. "He was always so changeable. So queer."
"Queer!" Alice took up the word. "That's it Queer! I don't think he'squiteright in his head, not quite right. He has the very strangest fancies. I never take any notice of them, but they're there. I seldom get up in the morning without thinking, 'Well, perhaps to-day he'll have to be taken off.'"
"Taken off?"
"Yes, to Hanwell, or wherever it is. And you must remember," she said gazing firmly at the curates, "you've got his blood in your veins. Don't forget that. I suppose you want to make him go back to you, Mrs. Leek, as he certainly ought."
"Ye-es," murmured Mrs. Leek feebly.
"Well, if you can persuade him to go," said Alice, "if you can make him see his duty, you're welcome. But I'm sorry for you. I think I ought to tell you that this is my house, and my furniture. He's got nothing at all. I expect he never could save. Many's the blow he's laid on me in anger, but all the same I pity him. I pity him. And I wouldn't like to leave him in the lurch. Perhaps these three strong young men'll be able to do something with him. But I'm not sure. He's very strong. And he has a way of leaping out so sudden like."
Mrs. Leek shook her head as memories of the past rose up in her mind.
"The fact is," said Matthew sternly, "he ought to be prosecuted for bigamy. That's what ought to be done."
"Most decidedly," Henry concurred.
"You're quite right! You're quite right!" said Alice. "That's only justice. Of course he'd deny that he was the same Henry Leek. He'd deny it like anything. But in the end I dare say you'd be able to prove it. The worst of these law cases is they're so expensive. It means private detectives and all sorts of things, I believe. Of course there'd be the scandal. But don't mind me! I'm innocent. Everybody knows me in Putney, and has done this twenty years. I don't know how it would suit you, Mr. Henry and Mr. Matthew, as clergymen, to have your own father in prison. That's as may be. But justice is justice, and there's too many men going about deceiving simple, trusting women. I've often heard such tales. Now I know they're all true. It's a mercy my own poor mother hasn't lived to see where I am to-day. As for my father, old as he was, if he'd been alive, there'd have been horsewhipping that I do know."
After some rather pointless and disjointed remarks from the curates, a sound came from the corner near the door. It was John's cough.
"Better clear out of this!" John ejaculated. Such was his first and last oral contribution to the scene.
Priam Farll was wandering about the uncharted groves of Wimbledon Common, and uttering soliloquies in language that lacked delicacy. He had rushed forth, in his haste, without an overcoat, and the weather was blusterously inclement. But he did not feel the cold; he only felt the keen wind of circumstance.
Soon after the purchase of his picture by the lunatic landlord of a fully licensed house, he had discovered that the frame-maker in High Street knew a man who would not be indisposed to buy such pictures as he could paint, and transactions between him and the frame-maker had developed into a regular trade. The usual price paid for canvases was ten pounds, in cash. By this means he had earned about two hundred a year. No questions were put on either side. The paintings were delivered at intervals, and the money received; and Priam knew no more. For many weeks he had lived in daily expectation of an uproar, a scandal in the art-world, visits of police, and other inconveniences, for it was difficult to believe that the pictures would never come beneath the eye of a first-class expert. But nothing had occurred, and he had gradually subsided into a sense of security. He was happy; happy in the untrammelled exercise of his gift, happy in having all the money that his needs and Alice's demanded; happier than he had been in the errant days of his glory and his wealth. Alice had been amazed at his power of earning; and also, she had seemed little by little to lose her suspicions as to his perfect sanity and truthfulness. In a word, the dog of fate had slept; and he had taken particular care to let it lie. He was in that species of sheltered groove which is absolutely essential to the bliss of a shy and nervous artist, however great he may be.
And now this disastrous irruption, this resurrection of the early sins of the real Leek! He was hurt; he was startled; he was furious. But he was not surprised. The wonder was that the early sins of Henry Leek had not troubled him long ago. What could he do? He could do nothing. That was the tragedy: he could do nothing. He could but rely upon Alice. Alice was amazing. The more he thought of it, the more masterly her handling of these preposterous curates seemed to him. And was he to be robbed of this incomparable woman by ridiculous proceedings connected with a charge of bigamy? He knew that bigamy meant prison, in England. The injustice was monstrous. He saw those curates, and their mute brother, and the aggrieved mother of the three dogging him either to prison or to his deathbed! And how could he explain to Alice? Impossible to explain to Alice!... Still, it was conceivable that Alice would not desire explanation. Alice somehow never did desire an explanation. She always said, "I can quite understand," and set about preparing a meal. She was the comfortablest cushion of a creature that the evolution of the universe had ever produced.
Then the gusty breeze dropped and it began to rain. He ignored the rain. But December rain has a strange, horrid quality of chilly persistence. It is capable of conquering the most obstinate and serious mental preoccupation, and it conquered Priam's. It forced him to admit that his tortured soul had a fleshly garment and that the fleshly garment was soaked to the marrow. And his soul gradually yielded before the attack of the rain, and he went home.
He put his latchkey into the door with minute precautions against noise, and crept into his house like a thief, and very gently shut the door. Then, in the hall, he intently listened. Not a sound! That is to say, not a sound except the drippings of his hat on the linoleum. The sitting-room door was ajar. He timidly pushed it, and entered. Alice was darning stockings.
"Henry!" she exclaimed. "Why, you're wet through!" She rose.
"Have they cleared off?" he demanded.
"And you've been out without an overcoat! Henry, how could you? Well, I must get you into bed at once--instantly, or I shall have you down with pneumonia or something to-morrow!"
"Have they cleared off?" he repeated.
"Yes, of course," she said.
"When are they coming back?" he asked.
"I don't think they'll come back," she replied. "I think they've had enough. I think I've made them see that it's best to leave well alone. Did you ever see such toast as that curate made?"
"Alice, I assure you," he said, later--he was in a boiling bath--"I assure you it's all a mistake, I've never seen the woman before."
"Of course you haven't," she said calmingly. "Of course you haven't. Besides, even if you had, it serves her right. Every one could see she's a nagging woman. And they seemed quite prosperous. They're hysterical--that's what's the matter with them, all of them--except the eldest, the one that never spoke. I rather liked him."
"But Ihaven't!" he reiterated, splashing his positive statement into the water.
"My dear, I know you haven't."
But he guessed that she was humouring him. He guessed that she was determined to keep him at all costs. And he had a disconcerting glimpse of the depths of utter unscrupulousness that sometimes disclose themselves in the mind of a good and loving woman.
"Only I hope there won't be any more of them!" she added dryly.
Ah! That was the point! He conceived the possibility of the rascal Leek having committed scores and scores of sins, all of which might come up against him. His affrighted vision saw whole regions populated by disconsolate widows of Henry Leek and their offspring, ecclesiastical and otherwise. He knew what Leek had been. Westminster Abbey was a strange goal for Leek to have achieved.