But Violet still looked rather troubled.
"You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one another even as children."
"Oh, but that will all be different now," said Alex, confused, and knowing that her manner was giving an impression of shiftiness from her very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.
As Pamela's claims and her own ceaseless fear of inadequacy made her increasingly unsure of Violet, Alex became less and less at ease with her.
The old familiar fear of being disbelieved gave uncertainty to every word she uttered and she could not afford to laugh at Pam's merciless amusement in pointing out the number of times that she contradicted herself. Violet always hushed Pamela, but she looked puzzled and rather distressed, and her manner towards Alex was more compassionate than ever.
Alex, with the impetuous unwisdom of the weak, one day forced an issue.
"Violet, do you trust me?"
"My dear child, whatdoyou mean? Why shouldn't I trust you? Are you thinking of stealing my pearls?"
But Alex could not smile.
"Do you believe everything that I say?"
Violet looked at her and asked very gently:
"What makes you ask, Alex? You're not unhappy about the nonsense that child Pamela sometimes talks, are you?"
"No, not exactly. It's—it's just everything...." Alex looked miserable, tongue-tied.
"Oh, Alex, do try and take things more lightly. You make yourself so unhappy, poor child, with all this self-torment. Can't you take things as they come, more?"
The counsel found unavailing echo in Alex' own mind. She knew that her mental outlook was wrenched out of all gear, and she knew also, in some dim, undefined way, that a worn-out physical frame was responsible for much of her self-inflicted torment of mind. Sometimes she wondered whether the impending solution to her whole destiny, still hanging over her, would find her on the far side of the abyss which separates the normal from the insane.
The days slipped by, and then, just before the general dispersal, Pamela suddenly announced her engagement to Lord Richard Gunvale, the youngest and by far the wealthiest of her many suitors.
"Oh, Pam, Pam!" cried Violet, laughing, "why couldn't you wait till after we'd left town?"
But every one was delighted, and congratulations and letters and presents and telegrams poured in.
Pamela declared that she would not be married until the winter, and refused to break her yachting engagement. She was more popular than ever now, and every one laughed at her delightful originality and gazed at the magnificence of the emerald and diamond ring on her left hand.
And Alex began to hope faintly that perhaps when Pamela was married, things might be different at Clevedon Square.
Then one night, just before she was to go to Hampstead, she overheard a conversation between Cedric and his wife.
She was on the stairs in the dark, and they were in the lighted hall below, and from the first instant that Cedric spoke, Alex lost all sense of what she was doing, and listened.
"...they're wearing you out, Pam and Alex between them. I won't have any more of it, I tell you."
"No, no, my dear old goose. Of course they're not." Violet's soft laughter came up to Alex' ears with a muffled sound, as though her head were resting against Cedric's shoulder. "Anyhow, it isn't Pam—I'mdelightedabout her, of course. Only Alex—I wish she was happier!"
"And why isn't she? You're a perfect angel to her," said Cedric resentfully.
"I'm sosorryfor her—only it's difficult sometimes—a feeling like shifting sands. One doesn't know what to beatwith her. If only she said what she wanted or didn't want, right out, but it's that awful anxiety to please—poor darling."
"She always was like that, from our nursery days. You never could get the rights of a matter out of her—plain black or white—she'd say one thing one day and another the next, always."
"That's what I find so difficult! It's impossible to do anything for a person like that—it's the one thing Ican'tunderstand."
"Pack her off to Hampstead tomorrow," Cedric observed gruffly. "Iwillnot have you bothered."
"Oh, Cedric! I'm not bothered—how can you? She'll be going next week, anyway, poor dear, and it may be easier for her to be herself with Barbara, who's her own sister, after all. But I don't know what about afterwards—when we get back."
"You'll have quite enough to think about with Pam's wedding, without Alex on your hands as well. Violet," said Cedric, with a note in his voice that Alex had never heard there, "when I think of the way you've behaved to all my wretched family—"
Alex did not hear Violet's answer, which was very softly spoken.
She had turned and gone away upstairs in the dark.
Was it, after all, only for Cedric's sake that Violet had kept her at Clevedon Square—had shown her such heavenly kindness and gentleness?
Alex asked herself the question all night long in utter misery of spirit. She had craved all her life for an exclusive, personal affection, and had been mocked with counterfeit again and again. She knew now that it was only in despair at such cheating of fate that she had flung herself rashly to the opposite end of the scale, and sought to embrace a life that purported detachment from all earthly ties.
"I will have all or none" had been the inward cry of her bruised spirit.
Fate had taken her at her word, this time, and she had not been strong enough to endure, and had fled, cowering, from the consequence of her own act.
Tortured, distraught, with self-confidence shattered to the earth, she had turned once again, with hands that trembled as they pleaded, to ask comfort of human love and companionship. Violet had not condemned her, had pitied her, and had shown her untiring sympathy and affection—for love of Cedric.
Alex rose haggard, in the morning. She wanted to be alone. The thought of going to Barbara in Hampstead had become unendurable to her.
It was with a curious sense of inevitability that she found a letter from Barbara asking her if she could put off her visit for the present. The admirable Ada had developed measles.
"Good Lord, can't they send her to a hospital?" exclaimed Cedric, with the irritability of a practical man who finds his well-ordered and practical plans thrown out of gear by some eminently unpractical intervention on the part of Providence.
"I'm sure Barbara never would," said Violet, laughing. "Poor dear, I hope she won't catch it herself. It'll mean having the house disinfected, too—what a nuisance for her. But, Alex, dear, you must come with us! I'll send a wire today—mother will be perfectly delighted."
"Couldn't I stay here?" asked Alex.
Cedric explained that the house would be partially shut up, with only two of the servants left.
"I shouldn't give any trouble—I'd so much rather," Alex urged, unusually persistent.
"My dear, it's out of the question. Not a soul in London—you forget it's August."
"But, Cedric," said Violet, "I don't see why she shouldn't do as she likes. It will be only till Barbara can have her, after all—I suppose Ada will be moved as soon as she's better, and the disinfecting can't take so very long. If she wants to stay here?"
"I do," said Alex, with sudden boldness.
"You don't think you'll be lonely?"
"No, no."
"After all," Violet considered, "it will be very good for Ellen and the tweeny to have somebody to wait upon. I never do like leaving them here on enormous board wages, to do nothing at all—though Cedricwillthink it's the proper thing to do, because his father did it."
She laughed, and Cedric said, with an air of concession:
"Well, just till Barbara can take you in, perhaps—if you think London won't be unbearable. But mind you, Alex, the minute you get tired of it, or feel the heat too much for you, you're to make other arrangements."
Alex wondered dully what other arrangements Cedric supposed that she could make. She had no money, and had never even roused herself to write the letter he had recommended, asking to have her half-yearly allowance sent to her own address and not to that of the Superior of the convent.
But on the day before Cedric and Violet, with Violet's maid, and Rosemary, and her nurse, and her pram, all took their departure, Cedric called Alex into the study.
She went to him feeling oddly as though she was the little girl again, who had, on rare occasions, been sent for by Sir Francis, and had found him standing just so, his back to the fireplace, spectacles in hand, speaking in just the same measured, rather regretful tones of kindliness.
"Alex, I've made out two cheques one to cover the servants' board wages, which I thought you would be good enough to give them at the end of the month, and one for your own living expenses. You'd better cash that at once, in case you want any ready money. Have you anywhere to keep it under lock and key?"
Cedric, no more than Sir Francis, trusted to a woman's discretion in matters of money.
"Yes, there's the drawer of the writing-table in my bedroom."
"That will be all right, then. The servants are perfectly trustworthy, no doubt, but loose cash should never be left about in any case—if you want more, write to me. And, Alex, I've seen old Pumphrey—father's man of business. He will see that you get your fifty pounds. Here is the first instalment."
Cedric gravely handed her a third cheque.
"Have you a banking account?"
"I don't think so."
"Then I'll arrange to open one for you at my bank today. You'd better deposit this at once, hadn't you—unless you want anything?"
"No," faltered Alex, not altogether understanding.
"You will have no expenses while you're here, of course," said Cedric, rather embarrassed. Alex looked bewildered. It had never occurred to her to suggest paying for her own keep while she remained alone at Clevedon Square. She gave back to her brother the cheque for twenty-five pounds, and received his assurance that it would be banked in her name that afternoon.
"They will send you a cheque-book, and you can draw out any small sum you may need later on."
"I don't think I shall need any," said Alex, looking at the other two cheques he had given her, made payable to herself, and thinking what a lot of money they represented.
"You will have a thorough rest and change with Barbara," Cedric said, still looking at her rather uneasily. "Then, when we meet again in October, it will be time enough—"
He did not say what for, and Alex remembered the conversation that she had overheard on the stair. With a feeling of cunning, she was conscious of her own determination to take the initiative out of his hands, without his knowledge.
They did not want her, and they would want her less than ever, with all the approaching business connected with Pamela's wedding in December. Barbara did not want her, self-absorbed, and unwearingly considering how to cut down more and yet more expenses.
Alex had made up her mind to go and live alone. She would prove to them that she could do it, though they thought fifty pounds a year was so little money. She thought vaguely that perhaps she could earn something.
But she gave no hint of her plans to any one, knowing that Violet would be remonstrant and Cedric derisive.
Obsessed by this new idea, she said good-bye to them with a sort of furtive eagerness, and found herself alone in the house in Clevedon Square.
At first the quiet and the solitude were pleasant to her. She crept round the big, empty house like a spirit, feeling as though it presented a more familiar aspect with its shrouded furniture and carefully shaded windows, and the absence of most of Violet's expensive silver and china ornaments. The library, which was always kept open for her, was one of the least changed rooms in the house, and she spent hours crouched upon the sofa there, only rousing herself to go to the solitary meals which were punctiliously laid out for her in the big dining-room.
Presently she began to wonder if the elderly upper-housemaid, Ellen, left in charge, resented her being there. She supposed that the presence of some one who never went out, for whom meals had to be provided, who must be called in the morning and supplied with hot water four times a day, would interfere with the liberty of Ellen and the unseen tweeny who, no doubt, cooked for them. They would be glad when she went away. Never mind, she would go very soon. Alex felt that she was only waiting for something to happen which should give her the necessary impetus to carry out her vague design of finding a new, independent foothold for herself.
A drowsy week of very hot weather slipped by, and then one morning Alex received three letters.
Cedric's, short but affectionate, told her that Violet had reached Scotland tired out, and had been ordered by the doctor to undergo something as nearly approaching a rest-cure as possible. She was to stay in bed all the morning, sit in the garden when it was fine, and do nothing. She was to write no letters, but she sent Alex her love and looked forward to hearing from her. Cedric added briefly that Alex was not to be at all anxious. Violet only needed quiet and country air, and no worries. She was looking better already.
Alex put the letter down reflectively. Evidently Cedric did not want his wife disturbed by depressing correspondence, and she did not mean to write to Violet of her new resolution. She even thought that perhaps she would continue to let Violet believe her at Clevedon Square or with Barbara.
Her second letter was from Barbara. It was quite a long letter, and said that Barbara had decided to leave Ada at a convalescent home and take her own much-needed summer holiday abroad. Would Alex join her in a week's time?
"What do you think of some little, cheap seaside hole in Brittany, which we could do for very little? I wish I could have you as my guest, dear, but you'll understand that all the disinfecting of the house has cost money, besides forcing me to go away, which I hadn't meant to do. However, I'm sure I need the change, and I dare say it won't do you any harm either. We ought to do the whole thing for about fifteen pounds each, I think, which, I suppose, will be all right for you? Do ring me up tonight, and let's exchange views. I shan't be free of a suspicion as to these wretched measles till next week, but I don't think really there's much danger, as I've had them already and am not in the least nervous. Ring up between seven and eight tonight. I suppose Violet, as usual, has kept on the telephone, even though they're away themselves?"
Alex knew that she did not want to go abroad with Barbara. She nervously picked up her third letter, which bore a foreign post-mark. When she had read the sheet of thin paper which was all the envelope contained, she sat for a long while staring at it.
The nuns in Rome, with whom she had spent the few weeks previous to her return to England, had sent in their account for her board and lodging, for the few clothes she had purchased, and for the advance made her for her travelling expenses. The sum total, in francs, looked enormous.
At last Alex, trembling, managed to arrive at the approximate amount in English money.
Twenty pounds.
It seemed to her exorbitant, and she realized, with fresh dismay, that she had never taken such a debt into consideration at all. How could she tell Cedric?
She thought how angry he would be at her strange omission in never mentioning it to him before, and how impossible it would be to explain to him that she had, as usual, left all practical issues out of account. Suddenly Alex remembered with enormous relief that twenty-five pounds lay to her credit at the bank. She had received her new cheque-book only two days ago. She would go to the bank today and make them show her how she could send the money to Italy.
Then Cedric and Violet need never know. They need never blame her.
Full of relief, Alex took the cheque-book that morning to the bank. She did not like having to display her ignorance, but she showed the bill to the clerk, who was civil and helpful, and showed her how very simple a matter it was to draw a cheque for twenty pounds odd. When it was done, and safely posted, Alex trembled with thankfulness. It seemed to her that it would have been a terrible thing for Cedric to know of the expenses she had so ignorantly incurred, and of her incredible simplicity in never having realized them before, and she was glad that he need never know how almost the whole of her half-year's allowance of money had vanished so soon after she had received it.
She telephoned to Barbara that night, and said that she could not go abroad with her.
"Oh, very well, my dear, if you think it wiser not. Of course, if you don'tmindLondon at this time of year, it's a tremendous economy to stay where you are.... Are the servants looking after you properly?"
"Oh, yes."
"Well, do just as you like, of course. I think I shall get hold of some friend to join forces with me, if you're sure you won't come...."
"Quite sure, Barbara," said Alex tremulously. She felt less afraid of her sister at the other end of the telephone.
She went and saw Barbara off the following week, and Barbara said carelessly:
"Good-bye, Alex. You look a shade better, I think. On the whole you're wiser to stay where you are—I'm sure you need quiet, and when once the rush begins for Pam's wedding, you'll never get a minute's peace. Are you staying on when they get back?"
"I'm not sure," faltered Alex.
"You may be wise. Well, come down to my part of the world if you want economy—and to feel as though you were out of London. Good-bye, dear."
Alex was surprised, and rather consoled, to hear Barbara alluding so lightly to the possibility of her seeking fresh quarters for herself. Perhaps, after all, they all thought it would be the best thing for her to do. Perhaps there was no need to feel guilty and as though her intentions must be concealed.
But Alex, dreading blame or disapproval, or even assurances that the scheme was unpractical and foolish, continued to conceal it.
She wrote and told Violet that she had decided that it would be too expensive to go abroad with Barbara. Might she stay on in Clevedon Square for a little while?
But she had secretly made up her mind to go and look for rooms or a boarding-house in Hampstead, as Barbara had suggested. As usual, it was only by chance that Alex realized the practical difficulties blocking her way.
She had now only five pounds.
On the following Saturday afternoon she found her way out by omnibus to Hampstead. She alighted before the terminus was reached, from a nervous dread of being taken on too far, although the streets in which she found herself were not prepossessing.
For the first time Alex reflected that she had no definite idea as to where she wanted to go in her search for lodgings. She walked timidly along the road, which appeared to be interminably long and full of second-hand furniture shops. Bamboo tables, and armchairs with defective castors, were put out on the pavement in many instances, and there was often a small crowd in front of the window gazing at the cheaply-framed coloured supplements hung up within. The pavements and the road, even the tram-lines, swarmed with untidy, clamouring children.
Alex supposed that she must be in the region vaguely known to her as the slums.
Surely she could not live here?
Then the recollection of her solitary five pounds came to her with a pang of alarm.
Of course, she must live wherever she could do so most cheaply. She had no idea of what it would cost.
It was very hot, and the pavement began to burn her feet. She did not dare to leave the main road, fearing that she should never find her way to the 'bus route again, if once she left it, but she peeped down one or two side-streets. They seemed quieter than Malden Road, but the unpretentious little grey houses did not look as though lodgers were expected in any of them. Alex wondered desperately how she was to find out.
Presently she saw a policeman on the further side of the street.
She went up to him and asked:
"Can you tell me of anywhere near here where they let rooms—somewhere cheap?"
The man looked down at her white, exhausted face, and at the well-cut coat and skirt chosen by Barbara, which yet hung loosely and badly on her stooping, shrunken figure.
"Somebody's poor relation," was his unspoken comment.
"Is it for yourself, Miss? You'd hardly care to be in this neighbourhood, would you?"
"I want to be somewhere near Hampstead—and somewhere very, very cheap," Alex faltered, thinking of her five pounds, which lay at that moment in the purse she was clasping.
"Well, you'll find as cheap here as anywhere, if you don't mind the noise."
"Oh, no," said Alex—who had never slept within the sound of traffic—surprised.
"Then if I was you, Miss, I'd try No. 252 Malden Road—just beyond theGipsy Queen, that is, or else two doors further up. I saw cards up in both windows with 'apartments' inside the last week."
"Thank you," said Alex.
She wished that Malden Road had looked more like Downshire Hill, which had trees and little tiny gardens in front of the houses, which almost all resembled country cottages. But no doubt houses in Downshire Hill did not let rooms, or if so they must be too expensive. Besides, Alex felt almost sure that Barbara would not want her as a very near neighbour.
She was very tired when she reached No. 252, and almost felt that she would take the rooms, whatever they were like, to save herself further search. After all, she could change later on, if she did not like them.
Like all weak people, Alex felt the urgent necessity of acting as quickly as possible on her own impulses.
She looked distastefully at the dingy house, with its paint cracking into hard flakes, and raised the knocker slowly. A jagged end of protruding wire at the side of the door proclaimed that the bell was broken.
Her timid knock was answered by a slatternly-looking young woman wearing an apron, whom Alex took to be the servant.
"Can I see the—the landlady?"
"Is it about a room? I'm Mrs. 'Oxton." She spoke in the harshest possible Cockney, but quite pleasantly.
"Oh," said Alex, still uncertain. "Yes, I want rooms, please."
The woman looked her swiftly up and down. "Only one bed-sittin'-room vacant, Miss, and that's at the top of the 'ouse. Would you care to see that?"
"Yes, please."
Mrs. Hoxton slammed the door and preceded Alex up a narrow staircase, carpeted with oil-cloth. On the third floor she threw open the door of a room considerably smaller than the bath-room at Clevedon Square, containing a low iron bed, and an iron tripod bearing an enamel basin, a chipped pitcher and a very small towel-rail. A looking-glass framed in mottled yellow plush was hung crookedly on the wall, and beneath it stood a wooden kitchen chair. There was a little table with two drawers in it behind the door.
Alex looked round her with bewilderment. A convent cell was no smaller than this, and presented a greater aspect of space from its bareness.
"Is there a sitting-room?" she inquired.
"Not separate to this—no, Miss. Bed-sitting-room, this is called. Small, but then I suppose you'd be out all day."
For a moment Alex wondered why.
"But meals?" she asked feebly.
"Would it be more than just the breakfast and supper, and three meals on Sunday?"
Alex did not know what to answer, and Mrs. Hoxton surveyed her.
"Where are you working, Miss? Anywhere near?"
"I'm not working anywhere—yet."
Mrs. Hoxton's manner changed a little.
"If you want two rooms, Miss, and full board, I could accommodate you downstairs. The price is according, of course—a week in advance, and pay by the week."
Alex followed the woman downstairs again. She was sure that this was not the kind of place where she wanted to live.
Mrs. Hoxton showed her into a larger bedroom on the first floor, just opening the door and giving Alex a glimpse of extreme untidiness and an unmade bed.
"My gentleman got up late today—he don't go to 'is job Saturdays, so I 'aven't put the room to rights yet. But it's a nice room, Miss, and will be vacant on Monday. It goes with the downstairs sitting-room in the front, as a rule, but that's 'ad to be turned into a bedroom just lately. I've been so crowded."
"Will that be empty on Monday, too?" asked Alex, for the sake of answering something.
"Tonight, Miss. I let a coloured gentleman 'ave it—a student, you know; a thing I've never done before, either. Other people don't like it, and it gives a name, like, for not being particular who one takes. So he's going, and I shan't be sorry. I don't 'old with making talk, and it isn't as though the room wouldn't let easy. It's a beautiful room, Miss."
The coloured gentleman's room was tidier than the one upstairs, but a haze of stale tobacco fumes hung round it and obscured Alex' view of a short leather sofa with horsehair breaking from it in patches, a small round table in the middle of the room, and a tightly-closed window looking on to the traffic of Malden Road.
"About terms, Miss," Mrs. Hoxton began suggestively in the passage.
"Oh, I couldn't afford much," Alex began, thinking that it was more difficult than she had supposed to walk out again saying that she did not, after all, want the rooms.
"I'd let you 'ave those two rooms, and full board, for two-ten a week!" cried the landlady.
"Oh, I don't think—"
Mrs. Hoxton shrugged her shoulders, looked at the ceiling and said resignedly:
"Then I suppose we must call it two guineas, though I ought to ask double. But you can come in right away on Monday, Miss, and I think you'll find it all comfortable."
"But—" said Alex faintly.
She felt very tired, and the thought of a further search for lodgings wearied her and almost frightened her. Besides, the policeman had told her that this was a cheap neighbourhood. Perhaps anywhere else they would charge much more. Finally she temporized feebly with the reflection that it need only be for a week—once the step of leaving Clevedon Square had been definitely taken, she could feel herself free to find a more congenial habitation at her leisure, and when she might feel less desperately tired. She sighed, as she followed the line of least resistance.
"Well, I'll come on Monday, then."
"Yes, Miss," the landlady answered promptly. "May I have your name, Miss?—and the first week in advance my rule, as I think I mentioned."
"My name is Miss Clare."
Alex took two sovereigns and two shillings, fumbling, out of her purse and handed them to the woman. It did not occur to her to ask for any form of receipt.
"Will you be wanting anything on Monday, Miss?"
Alex looked uncomprehending, and the woman eyed her with scarcely veiled contempt and added, "Supper, or anything?"
"Oh—yes. I'd better come in time for dinner—for supper, I mean."
"Yes, Miss. Seven o'clock will do you, I suppose?"
Alex thought it sounded very early, but she did not feel that she cared at all, and said that seven would do quite well.
She wondered if there were any questions which she ought to ask, but could think of none, and she was rather afraid of the strident-voiced, hard-faced woman.
But Mrs. Hoxton seemed to be quite satisfied, and pulled open the door as though it was obvious that the interview had come to an end.
"Good afternoon," said Alex.
"Afternoon," answered the landlady, as she slammed the door again, almost before Alex was on the pavement of Malden Road. She went away with a strangely sinking heart. To what had she committed herself?
All the arguments which Alex had been brooding over seemed to crumble away from her now that she had taken definite action.
She repeated to herself again that Violet and Cedric did not want her, that Barbara did not want her, that there was no place for her anywhere, and that it was best for her to make her own arrangements and spare them all the necessity of viewing her in the light of a problem.
But what would Cedric say to Malden Road? Inwardly Alex resolved that he must never come there. If she said "Hampstead" he would think that she was somewhere close to Barbara's pretty little house.
But Barbara?
Alex sank, utterly jaded, into the vacant space in a crowded omnibus. It was full outside, and the atmosphere of heat and humanity inside made her feel giddy. Arguments, self-justification and sick apprehensions, surged in chaotic bewilderment through her mind.
Alex, full of unreasoning panic, made her move to Malden Road.
She was afraid of the servants in Clevedon Square, all of them new since she had left England, and only told Ellen, with ill-concealed confusion, that she was leaving London for the present. She was unaccountably relieved when Ellen only said, impassively, "Very good, Miss," and packed her slender belongings without comment or question.
Suddenly she remembered the cheque which Cedric had given her for the servants. She looked at it doubtfully. Her own money was already almost exhausted, thanks to that unexpected claim from the convent in Rome, and Alex supposed that the sum still in her purse, amounting to rather less than three pounds, would only last her for about a fortnight in Malden Road. She decided, with no sense of doubt, that she had better keep Cedric's cheque. It was only a little sum to him, and he would send money for the servants. He had said that he was ready to advance money to his sister. Characteristically, Alex dismissed the matter from her mind as unimportant. She had never learnt any accepted code in dealings with money, and her own instinct led her to believe it an unessential question. She judged only from her own feelings, which would have remained quite unstirred by any emotions but those the most matter-of-fact at any claim, direct or indirect, justifiable or not, upon her purse.
She had never learnt the rudiments of pride, or of straight-dealing in questions of finance. But in Malden Road Alex was, after all, to learn many things.
There were material considerations equally unknown to Clevedon Square and to the austere but systematic doling-out of convent necessities, which were brought home to her with a startled sense of dismay from her first evening at 252. She had never thought of bringing soap with her, or boxes of matches, yet these commodities did not appear as a matter of course, as they had always done elsewhere. There was gas in both the rooms, but there were no candles. There was no hot water.
"You can boil your own kettle on the gas-ring on the landing," Mrs. Hoxton said indifferently, and left her new lodger to the realization that the purchase of a kettle had never occurred to her at all.
Buying the kettle, and a supply of candles and matches and soap, left her with only just enough money in hand for her second week's rent, and when she wanted notepaper and ink and stamps to write to Barbara, Alex decided that she must appropriate Cedric's cheque for the servants' wages to her own uses. She felt hardly any qualms.
This wasn't like that bill from Rome, which she would have been afraid to let him see. He would have talked about the dishonesty of convents, and asked why she had not told him sooner of their charges against her, and have looked at her with that almost incredulous expression of amazed disgust had she admitted her entire oblivion of the whole consideration.
But this cheque for the servants.
It would enable her to pay her own expenses until she could get the work which she still vaguely anticipated, and the sum meant nothing to Cedric. She would write and tell him that she had cashed the money, sure that he would not mind, in fulfilment of his many requests to her to look upon him as her banker.
But she did not write, though she cashed the cheque. The days slipped by in a sort of monotonous discomfort, but it was very hot, and she learnt to find her way to Hampstead Heath, where she could sit for hours, not reading, for she had no books, but brooding in a sort of despairing resignation over the past and the nightmare-seeming present. The conviction remained with her ineradicably that the whole thing was a dream—that she would wake up again to the London of the middle 'nineties and find herself a young girl again, healthy and eager, and troubling Lady Isabel, and, more remotely, Sir Francis, with her modern exigencies and demands to live her own life, the war-cry of those clamorous 'eighties and 'nineties, of which the young new century had so easily reaped the harvest. She could not bring herself to believe that her own life had been lived, and that only this was left.
Alex sometimes felt that she was not alive at all—that she was only a shade moving amongst the living, unable to get into real communication with any of them.
She did not think of the future. There was no future for her. There was only an irrevocable past and a sordid, yet dream-like present, that clung round her spirit as a damp mist might have clung round her person, intangible and yet penetrating and all-pervading, hampering and stifling her.
The modicum of physical strength which she had regained in Clevedon Square was ebbing imperceptibly from her. It was difficult to sleep very well in Malden Road, where the trams and the omnibuses passed in incessant, jerking succession, and the children screamed in the road late at nights and incredibly early in the mornings. The food was neither good nor well prepared, but Alex ate little in the heat, and reflected that it was an economy not to be hungry.
The need for economy was being gradually borne in upon her, as her small stock of money diminished and there came nothing to replace it. Presently she exerted herself to find a registry office, where she gave her name and address, and was contemptuously and suspiciously eyed by an old lady with dyed red hair who sat at a writing-table, and asked her a fee of half-a-crown for entering her name in a ledger.
"No diplomas and no certificate won't take you far in teaching now-a-days," she said unpleasantly. "Languages?"
"French quite well and a little Italian. Enough to give conversation lessons," Alex faltered.
"No demand for 'em whatever. I'll let you know, but don't expect anything to turn up, especially at this time of year, with every one out of town."
But by a miraculous stroke of fortune something did turn up. The woman from the registry office sent Alex a laconic postcard, giving her the address of "a lady singer in Camden Town" who was willing to pay two shillings an hour in return for sufficient instruction in Italian to enable her to sing Italian songs.
Elated, Alex looked out the conversation manual of her convent days, and at three o'clock set out to find the address in Camden Town.
She discovered it with difficulty, and arrived late. The appointed hour had been half-past three.
Shown into a small sitting-room, crowded with furniture and plastered with signed photographs, she sank, breathless and heated, into a chair, and waited.
The lady singer, when she came, was irate at the delay. Her manner frightened Alex, who acquiesced in bewildered humiliation to a stipulation that only half-fees must be charged for the curtailed hour. She gave her lesson badly, imparting information with a hesitation that even to her own ears sounded as though she were uncertain of her facts. However, her pupil ungraciously drew out a shilling from a small chain-purse and gave it to Alex when she left, and she bade her come again in three days' time.
The lessons went on for three weeks. They tired Alex strangely, but she felt glad that she could earn money, however little; and although the shillings went almost at once in small necessities which she had somehow never foreseen, it was not until the middle of September that she began once more to reach the end of her resources.
Just as she had decided that it would be necessary for her to write to Cedric, she received a letter from him, forwarded from her bank.
Alex turned white as she read it.
"MY DEAR ALEX,"I am altogether at a loss to understand why Ellen (the upper-housemaid at home) writes to Violet on Friday last, Sept. 12, that you have left Clevedon Square, and that she and the other servant have not yet received the money for their board and wages. This last I take to be an oversight on your part, but you will doubtless put it right at once, since you will remember that I handed you a cheque for that purpose just before leaving London. As to your own movements, I need hardly say, my dear Alex, that I do not claim to have any sort of authority over them of whatever kind, but both Violet and I cannot help feeling that it would have been more friendly, to say the least of it, had you given us some hint as to your intentions. Knowing that Barbara is already abroad, and Pamela with her friends yachting, I can only hope that you have received some unforeseen invitation which appealed to you more than the prospect of solitude in Clevedon Square. It would have been desirable had you left your address with the servants, but I presume the matter escaped your memory, as they appear to be completely in the dark as to your movements."Violet is looking quite herself again, and sends many affectionate messages. She will doubtless write to you on receipt of a few lines giving her your address. I am compelled to send this letter through the care of Messrs. Williams, which you will agree with me is an unnecessarily elaborate method of communication.
"MY DEAR ALEX,
"I am altogether at a loss to understand why Ellen (the upper-housemaid at home) writes to Violet on Friday last, Sept. 12, that you have left Clevedon Square, and that she and the other servant have not yet received the money for their board and wages. This last I take to be an oversight on your part, but you will doubtless put it right at once, since you will remember that I handed you a cheque for that purpose just before leaving London. As to your own movements, I need hardly say, my dear Alex, that I do not claim to have any sort of authority over them of whatever kind, but both Violet and I cannot help feeling that it would have been more friendly, to say the least of it, had you given us some hint as to your intentions. Knowing that Barbara is already abroad, and Pamela with her friends yachting, I can only hope that you have received some unforeseen invitation which appealed to you more than the prospect of solitude in Clevedon Square. It would have been desirable had you left your address with the servants, but I presume the matter escaped your memory, as they appear to be completely in the dark as to your movements.
"Violet is looking quite herself again, and sends many affectionate messages. She will doubtless write to you on receipt of a few lines giving her your address. I am compelled to send this letter through the care of Messrs. Williams, which you will agree with me is an unnecessarily elaborate method of communication.
"Your affectionate brother,"CEDRIC CLARE."
Alex was carried back through the years to the sense of remorse and bewilderment with which she had listened to the measured, irrefutable condemnations, expressed with the same unerring precision, of Sir Francis Clare. She realized herself again, sick with crying and cold with terror, standing shaking before his relentless justice, knowing herself to be again, for ever and hopelessly, in the wrong. She would never be anything else.
She knew it now.
Her sense of honour, of truth and justice, was perverted—in direct disaccord with that of the world. What would her brother say to her misuse of the money that he had entrusted to her? Alex knew now, with sudden, terrifying certainty how he would view the transaction which had seemed to her so simple an expedient. She knew that even were she able to make the almost incredible plea of a sudden temptation, a desperate need of money, that had led her voluntarily to commit an act of dishonesty, it would stand her in better stead than a mere statement of the terrible truth—that no voice within her had told her of dishonour, that she had—outrageous paradox!—committed an act of dishonesty in good faith.
To Cedric, the lack in her would seem so utterly perverted, so incomprehensible, that there would appear to be no possibility of that forgiveness which, as a Christian, he could consciously have extended to any wilful breaking of the law. But there would be no question of forgiveness for this. It was not the money, Alex knew that. It was her own extraordinary moral deficiency that put her outside the pale.
Perhaps, thought Alex drearily, this was how criminals always felt. They did the things for which they were punished because of some flaw in their mental outlook—they didn't see that the things mattered, until it was too late. They had to be saved from themselves by punishment or removal, or sometimes by death; and for the protection of the rest of the community, too, it was necessary to penalize those who could not or would not conform to the standard. Alex saw it all.
But dimly, involuntarily almost, an echo from her childhood's days came back to her, vaguely formulated into words:
"Always take the part of the people in the wrong—they need it most."
The only conviction to which she could lay claim was somehow embodied in that sentiment.
She wrote to Cedric, the sense of having put herself irrevocably in the wrong by her own act making her explanation into an utterly bald, lifeless statement of fact. She felt entirely unable to enter into any analysis of her folly, and besides, it would have been of no use. Facts were facts. She had taken Cedric's money, which he had given her for one purpose, and used it for another. There had not even been any violent struggle with temptation to palliate the act.
Alex felt a sort of dazed stupefaction at herself.
She was bad, she told herself, bad all through, and this was how bad people felt. Sick with disappointment, and utterly unavailing remorse, knowing all the time that there was no strength in them ever to resist any temptation, however base.
She wondered if there was a hell, as the convent teaching had so definitely told her. If so, Alex shudderingly contemplated her doom. But she prayed desperately that there might be nothing after death but utter oblivion. It was then that the thought of death first came to her, not with the wild, impotent longing of her days of struggle, but with an insidious suggestion of rest and escape.
She played with the idea, but for the most part her faculties were absorbed in the increasing strain of waiting for Cedric's reply to her confession.
It came in the shape of a telegram.
"Shall be in London Wednesday 24th. Will you lunch Clevedon Square 1.30. Reply paid."
Alex felt an unreasonable relief, both at the postponement of an immediate crisis, and at the reflection that, at all events, Cedric did not mean to come to Malden Road. She did not want him to see those strange, sordid surroundings to which she had fled from the shelter of her old home.
Alex telegraphed an affirmative reply to her brother, and waited in growing apathy for the interview, which she could now only dread in theory. Her sense of feeling seemed numbed at last.
Something of the old terror, however, revived when she confronted Cedric again in the library. He greeted her with a sort of kindly seriousness, under which she wonderingly detected a certain nervousness. During lunch they spoke of Violet, of the shooting that Cedric had been enjoying in Scotland. The slight shade of pomposity which recalled Sir Francis was always discernible in all Cedric's kindly courtesy as host. After lunch he rather ceremoniously ushered his sister into the library again.
"Sit down, my dear you look tired. You don't smoke, I know. D'you mind if I—?"
He drew at his pipe once or twice, then carefully rammed the tobacco more tightly into the bowl with a nicotine-stained finger. Still gazing at the wedged black mass, he said in a voice of careful unconcern:
"About this move of yours, Alex. Violet and I couldn't altogether understand—That's really what brought me down, and the question of that cheque I gave you for the servants. I couldn't quite make out your letter—"
He paused, as though to give her an opportunity for speech, still looking away from her. But Alex remained silent, in a sort of paralysis.
"Suppose we take one question at a time," suggested Cedric pleasantly. "The cheque affair is, of course, a very small one, and quite easily cleared up. One only has to be scrupulous in money matters because theyaremoney matters—you know father's way of thinking, and I must say I entirely share it."
There was no need to tell Alex so.
"Have you got the cheque with you, Alex?"
"No," said Alex at last. "Didn't you understand my letter, then?"
Cedric's spectacles began to tap slowly against the back of his left hand, held in the loose grasp of his right.
"You—er—cashed that cheque?"
"Yes."
Alex felt as though she were being put to the torture of the Inquisition, but was utterly unable to do more than reply in monosyllables to Cedric's level, judicial questions.
"May I ask to what purpose you applied the money?"
"Cedric, it's not fair!" broke from Alex. "I've written and told you what I did—I needed money, and I—I thought you wouldn't mind. I used it for myself—and I meant to write and tell you—"
"You thought I wouldn't mind!" repeated Cedric in tones of stupefaction.
"You said you would advance me money—I knew you could write another cheque for the servants' wages. I—I didn't think of your minding."
"Mind!" said Cedric again, with reiteration worthy of his nursery days. "My dear girl, you don't suppose it's the money I mind, do you?"
"No, no—I ought to have asked you first—but I didn't think—it seemed a natural thing to do—"
"Good Lord, Alex!" cried Cedric, more moved than she had ever seen him. "Do you understand what you're saying? A natural thing to do toembezzle money?"
Tears of terror and of utter bewilderment seized on Alex' enfeebled powers, and deprived her of utterance.
Cedric began to pace the library, speaking rapidly and without looking at her.
"If you'd only written and told me what you'd done at once—though Heaven knows that would have been bad enough but to do a thing like that and then let it rest! Didn't you know that itmustbe found out sooner or later?"
He cast a fleeting glance at Alex, who sat with the tears pouring down her quivering face, but she said nothing. It was of no use to explain to Cedric that she had never thought of not being found out. She had meant no concealment. She had thought her action so simple a one that it had hardly needed explanation or justification. It had merely been not worth while to write.
Cedric's voice went on, gradually gaining in power as the agitation that had shaken him subsided under his own fluency.
"You know that it's a prosecutable offence, Alex? Of course, there's no question of such a thing, but to trade on that certainty—"
Alex made an inarticulate sound.
"Violet says of course you didn't know what you were doing. That wretched place—that convent—has played havoc with you altogether. When I think of those people—!" Cedric's face darkened. "But hang it, Alex, you were brought up like the rest of us. And on a question of honour—think of father!"
Alex had stopped crying. She was about to make her last stand, with the last strength that in her lay.
"Cedric—listen to me. You must! You don't understand. I didn't look at it from your point of view—I didn't see it like that. There's something wrong with me—there must be—but it didn't seem to me to matter. I know you won't believe me—but I thought the money was quite a little, unimportant thing, and that you'd understand, and say I'd done right to take it for granted that I might have it."
"But it'snotthe money!" groaned Cedric. "Though what on earth you wanted it for, when you had no expenses and your allowance just paid in—But that's not the point. Can't you see, Alex? It's not this wretched cheque in itself; it's the principle of the thing."
Alex gazed at him quite hopelessly. The flickering spark of spirit died out and left her soul in darkness.
Cedric faced her.
"I couldn't believe that your letter really meant what it seemed to mean," he said slowly; "but if it does—as on your own showing it does—then I understand your leaving us, needless to say. Where are you living—what is this place, Malden Road?"
Characteristically, he drew out her letter, and referred to the address carefully.
"Where is Malden Road?"
"In Hampstead—near Barbara."
"Are you in rooms?"
"Yes."
"How did you find them? Who recommended them?"
She made no answer, and Cedric gazed at her with an expression of half-angry, half-compassionate perplexity.
"You are entitled to keep your own counsel, of course, and to make your own arrangements, but I must say, Alex, that the thought of you disturbs me very much. Your whole position is unusual—and your attitude makes it almost impossible to—" He broke off. "Violet begged me—quite unnecessarily, but you know what she is—not to let you feel as though there were any estrangement—to say that whatever arrangement you preferred should be made. Of course, Pamela's marriage will add to your resources—you understand that? She is marrying an extremely wealthy man, and I shall have not the slightest hesitation in allowing her to make over her share of father's money to you as soon as it can be arranged. She wishes it herself."
He paused, as though for some expression of gratitude from Alex, but she made none. Pam had everything, and now she was to have the credit and pleasure of a generosity which would cost her nothing as well. Alex maintained a bitter silence.
"The obvious course is for you to join Barbara, paying your half of expenses, as you will now be enabled to do."
"Barbara doesn't want me."
"It is the natural arrangement," repeated Cedric inflexibly. "And I must add, Alex, that you seem to me to be terribly unfitted to manage your own life in any way. If what you have told me is the case, I can only infer that your moral sense is completely perverted. I couldn't have believed it of one of us—of one of my father's children."
Alex knew that the bed-rock of Cedric's character was reached. She had come to the point where, for Cedric, right and wrong began and ended—honour.
They would never get any nearer to one another now. The fundamental principle which governed life for Cedric was deficient in Alex.
She got up slowly and began to pull on her shabby gloves.
"Will you forgive me, Cedric?" she half sobbed.
"It isn't a question of forgiveness. Of course I will. But if you'd only asked me for that wretched money, Alex! What you did was to embezzle—it neither more nor less. Oh, good Lord!"
He looked at her with fresh despair and then rang the bell.
"You're going to have a taxi," he told her authoritatively. "You're not fit to go any other way. Alex, my dear, I'd give my right hand for this not to have happened—for Heaven's sake come to me if you want anything. How much shall I give you now?"
He unlocked the writing-table drawer agitatedly. Alex thought to herself hysterically, "He thinks I maystealmoney, perhaps, from somebody else, if I want it, andperhaps I should." And with a sense of degradation that made her feel physically sick, she put into her purse the gold and the pile of silver that he pushed into her hand.
Cedric straightened himself, and taking off his glasses, wiped them carefully.
"Write to me, Alex, and let me know What you want to do. Barbara will be back soon—youmustgo to her—at any rate for a time—till after Pamela's wedding. You know that's fixed for December now? And, my dear, for Heaven's sake let's forget this ghastly business. No one on this earth but you and I and Violet need ever know of it."
"No," said Alex.
She looked at him with despair invading her whole being.
"Good-bye, Cedric. You've been very, very kind to me."
"The taxi is at the door, sir."
"Thank you."
Cedric took his sister into the hall, and she gave a curious, fleeting glance round her at the familiar surroundings, and at the broad staircase where the Clare children had run up and down and played and quarrelled together, in that other existence.
"Good-bye, dear. Write your plans, and come and see us as soon as we get back. It won't be more than a week or two now."
Cedric put her into the waiting taxi, and stood on the steps looking after her as the cab turned out of Clevedon Square. And Alex, crouched into a corner of the swiftly-moving taxi, knew herself capable of any treachery, any moral infamy to which she might be tempted, since Cedric had been right when he said that her sense of honour, of fundamental rectitude, was completely perverted.
The weather broke suddenly, and it became cold and rainy. For two or three days Alex sat in her sitting-room at Malden Road and heard the trams and the omnibuses clash past, and the children screaming to one another in the street. She could hardly have said when she had first realized that it was impossible for her to go on living. But the determination, now that it was there, full-grown, had brought with it a sense of utter finality.
For two or three days she felt stunned, and yet driven by a desperate feeling that it was necessary for her to think, to make a plan. But she could not think.
Then one evening Mrs. Hoxton, the landlady, said to her curiously:
"Wouldn't you like a fire, tonight?" She seldom said "Miss" in speaking to Alex. "It's so chilly, all of a sudden, and you look ill, really, now, you do."
Alex felt rather surprised. Perhaps she was ill, which would account for the impossibility of consecutive thought. A fire would be very nice. She shivered involuntarily, looking at her little empty grate crammed with cut paper. She remembered that there was no need to consider expense any more.
"Yes, I'd like a fire, please," she said gently. And that evening she sat close to the pleasant blaze, flickering on the wall, and dimly recalling to her the nursery at Clevedon Square in the old days, and the power of thought came back to her.
It was as though the warmth and companionship of the flames had suddenly unsealed something frozen up within her, and she became more herself than she had been for many months. With the horrible, pressing dread of an unbearable present and an unimaginable future lifted from her heart, Alex felt a pervading lucidity of thought, to which she had for years been a stranger, take possession of her. She knew suddenly that she was, for a little while, to regain faculties that had been atrophied within her since the far, free days of her girlhood. She began to reflect.
Why had life, to which she had looked forward so eagerly, with such confident anticipation of some wonderful happiness, which should be in proportion to the immense capacity for realizing it which she knew to exist within her, have proved to be only a succession of defeats, of receding hopes and of unfulfilled desires?
Alex did not question that the fault lay with herself. From her baby days, under the unvarnished plain speaking of old Nurse, she had known herself to be the black sheep of every flock. And she had not sinned splendidly, dramatically, either. Her sins had been those of petty meanness, of shirking and evading, of small self-indulgences and childish tyranny at the expense of others, of vulgar lies and half-truths.
Those sins which find little or no place in the decalogue, and which stand lowest in the scale by which the opinion of others is meted out to us.
Those are the things which are not forgiven. That was it, Alex told herself, with a feeling of having suddenly struck the keynote. Forgiveness.
Forgiveness was the key to everything. Alex, in the sudden surety of vision that had come to her, did not doubt that her own interpretation of the word was the right one. Forgiveness meant understanding—not condemnation and subsequent pardon. It did not mean the bewildered, scandalized, and yet regretful oblivion to which Cedric would consign her memory and that of her many failings, it did not mean Barbara's detached, indifferent kindness, carefully measured in terms of material resources, nor Pamela's and Archie's good-natured patronage, half-stifled in mirth, of which the very object was the gulf that separated them from their sister. It did not even mean Violet's soft pity and unresentful acceptance of facts that amazed her. Looking further back, Alex knew that it did not mean either the serious, perplexed pardon that Sir Francis had tendered to his troublesome daughter, or Lady Isabel's half-complaining, half-affectionate remonstrances.
It did not in any way occur to her to blame them for a lack of which she had all her life been subconsciously aware in all their forbearance. She told herself, with a fresh sense of enlightenment, that they had not understood because it was in none of them to have yielded to those temptations which had beset and mastered her so easily. Measuring her frailty by their own strength, they had only seen her utter failure in resistance, and been shamed and grieved by it. Alex knew that in herself was another standard of forgiveness; she could never condemn, for the simple reason that she herself had failed, in every sense of the word. Unresentfully, she was able to sum it all up, as it were, when she told herself, "People who would have resisted temptation themselves, can't understand those who fall—so they can't really forgive. But the bad ones, who know that they have given way all along the line, know that any temptation would have been too strong for them—it's only chance whether it comes their way or not—so they can understand."
She felt oddly contented, as at having reached a solution.
Later on, her thoughts turned to the past again, and to the childish days when she had been the leading spirit in the Clevedon Square nursery. But the memory of that past, incredible, security and assurance, made her begin to cry, and she wiped away blinding tears and told herself that she must not give way to them. She did not at first quite know why she must reserve the tiny modicum of strength still left her, but presently she realized that the end which had become inevitable could not be reached without decisive action of her own.
Alex' logic was elementary, and its directness left her no loophole for doubt.
She could endure the plane of existence on which she found herself no longer. If she fled in search of other conditions, it was with full certainty that these could not be less tolerable than those from which she was flying, and at the back of her mind was a strange, growing hope that perhaps that forgiveness of which her mind was full, might be found beyond the veil.
"After all," thought Alex, "it's even chances. If religion is all true, then Imustgo to hell, whether I kill myself or not, and if it isn't, then perhaps I shall just go out and know nothing more—ever—or perhaps it will be really a new beginning, and there will be somebody or something who will forgive me, and let me start over again."
She began to feel rather excited, as though she were about to try an experiment that might best be described as a gamble.
Mrs. Hoxton, coming in with the small supper-tray, looked at her sharply two or three times, and when she had gone away again, Alex, turning to the glass, saw that her eyes were shining and looking enormously large and wide-pupilled.
"I believe I am happy tonight," she thought wonderingly.
While she ate her supper she tried to make a plan, but the excitement within her was growing steadily, and she could only think out eager self-justification for her own decision.
"It won't hurt any one else—nobody will mind. In fact, when they've got over the first shock, it will be a relief to them all. They've been very kind—Violet and Cedric—Violet most of all—but they haven't understood. They'd have understood better if I'd been a bad woman—lived with wicked men, or things like that. I suppose I should have done that too, if it had come my way—but then I never had the temptation. I had only little, mean, horrible temptations—and I didn't resist any of them. The other sort of sin would have made me happier—it would have meant a sort of success in a way—but I have been a failure at everything—always."
Her heart hammering against her side, Alex resolved that in this, her last disgrace, she would not fail.
Making no preparations, no written farewells, she rose presently and went to her room, where she put on her thickest coat and tied a woollen scarf over her head.
Then she went out.
It had stopped raining, and the air was soft and moist. It was a starless night, and when Alex got to the Heath and away from the lighted streets, it was very dark. Underneath her sense of adventure she was conscious of terror—sheer physical terror—and also of the deeper dread that her resolution might fail her.
"I mustn't—I mustn't," she kept on muttering to herself.
Then, as though reassuring somebody else, "But it's only like going for a journey—to a quite new place where everything may be different and much, much better ... or else to sleep, and never any waking up to misery again.... Just one dreadful minute or two, perhaps, and then it will all be over ... only a question of a little physical courage ... not to struggle ... like taking gas ... much easier if one doesn't struggle...."
She was struck by a sudden thought and said aloud, triumphantly, as though she were defeating by her inspiration some one who was urging difficulties upon her:
"I won't give myself any chances. I'll put big stones in my pocket and tie my scarf over my mouth. That'll make it quicker, too."
When she came to the part of the Heath where the water lay, Alex began to stoop down and hunt for stones. She pounced on each one that seemed larger than its fellows with a sense of pride at her own success, and put them into the pockets of her coat. The moon appeared palely through clouds and then disappeared again, but not before she had taken her bearings.
She was on one of the many wide bridges that span the long pools dotted over the Heath—pools shelving at the sides with an effect of shallowness and deepening suddenly in the middle. Alex threw an indifferent glance at the dark water, and only felt annoyance that so few stones should be loose upon the pathway, and none of them very large ones. When her pockets were filled, she did not think the weight very noticeable.
Then came another evanescent gleam of moonlight, and Alex, still with that sharpening of all her perceptions, noticed that there was a man's figure at the far end of the bridge. He appeared to be stationary, leaning on the parapet and gazing down at the almost invisible pond.
She was conscious of vexation. His presence would surely interfere with her scheme.
For a moment she wondered, detachedly enough, whether she should go away and come back the following evening. But the next instant she recoiled from the thought, as though seeing in it the promptings of her own weakness.
"I am not frightened tonight—at least, hardly at all. If I wait I may never feel like this again. I shall make a failure of it all, and that would be worse than anything. I must do it tonight, while I'm not frightened."
She was not cold. Walking in her heavy coat had warmed her, and the evening was mild as well as damp. So she waited quietly in the shadow, hoping that the man would presently move away.
The thought crossed her mind, with a certain humour, that the situation held possibilities of romance.
"If it were in a book, he would save me at the last minute and fall in love with me and it would all end happily. Or he would see me now, and perhaps speak to me, and he would understand all I told him, and persuade me not to. Anyhow, it would all come right."
She smiled in the darkness.
"But that won't happen tome. There never was any one—and nobody would love me now, especially when they knew all about me." She remembered the haggard, distorted countenance that the looking-glass had shown her—the great, starting eyes with discoloured circles beneath them, and the blackened, prominent teeth, more salient than ever from the thinness of her face.
She could almost have laughed, without any conscious bitterness, at the idea of any romance in connection with her present self.
And yet the girl, Alex Clare, could have loved—had looked forward to love and to happiness as her rights, just as Pamela Clare did now.
But Pamela was different. Every one was—No!
It was Alex that was different—that had always been different.
She began to feel less warm, and shivered a little as she waited.
It occurred to her, not with any sense of fear, but with vexation, that her purpose would be far more difficult of achievement if she waited until she was physically chilled.
She looked up at the bridge again, and the figure was still there, at the furthest end. Alex measured the length of the bridge with her eyes.
It was doubtful if he would see her from the furthest end of it, but she reflected matter-of-factly:
"If I jump there will be the noise of a splash—and he might do something—he would try to save me, I suppose—or run for help. It wouldn't be safe. If he wouldonlygo."
She became irritated. With a sense of despair she determined to circumvent the motionless, watchful figure.
Moving very quietly and almost soundlessly over the soft muddy ground, Alex made her way from the path to the bank, and further and further down it till only a short declivity of shelving mud lay between her and the water.
She could feel the brambles catching in her thick coat as though pulling her back, but she went on, cautiously and steadily. Once or twice she pushed at the low, tangled bushes that impeded her progress, and paused aghast at the rustling that ensued. But from the bridge above her there came no sound.
Within a few steps of the dark water, her feet already sinking ankle-deep into the wet, spongy ground, she stopped.
She realized with wondering joy that, after all, she was not very much afraid. It was as though the self-confidence which had for so long deserted her had come back now to carry her through the last need.
She felt proud, because she knew that for this once she was not going to fail.
She talked to herself in a whisper:
"This one time—just a few minutes when it may be very bad—but remember that it can't last long, and then it'll all be over. And perhaps there'll never be anything more afterwards—like being always asleep, and no one need be vexed or disappointed any more. But perhaps—"
She paused on the thought, and her heart began to beat faster with a hopeful excitement such as she had not known for a very long while.
"Perhaps it will be much better than one imagines possible. Perhaps there'll be real forgiveness and understanding—and then my having done this won't matter. Anyway, I shall know very soon, if only I'm brave just for a few minutes."