XI
"INEXTRICIBLE ERROR"
It was quarter to seven when Ingram arrived at the house in Portland Place. Althea, already dressed for dinner, sat writing at her desk in the big white room. It was the same desk, battered and inkstained, at which years ago—a staid little maid with a big pigtail, terminating in a sort of heavy tassel of auburn hair—she had prepared her home lessons. At one corner the leather lining had begun to curl up.
She scarcely looked round when he was announced, but thrust a bare white arm over the back of her chair.
"You find me achieving a last chapter," said she. "Sit down somewhere and, in the name of our common art, respect a fellow-laborer's agony."
"I suppose I'm unpardonably early."
"Doubly privileged mortal, then, to find yourself welcome."
"Do I abuse my privileges, Althea?"
"Never in the world. You are as unobtrusive, my dear friend, as a gray sky."
Paul, as he sat down by the fire, wondered why the phrase rang reminiscently. Who had compared his eyes once before to rain-clouds? Oh! he remembered. It was the little girl, in the summer-time, by the sea. He seldom thought of her now; when he did, it was without such a personal pang of loss as might have been expected. She had come—she had gone. The life before he had known her, the life after, like parted leaden waters in the wake of a ship, closed above her memory.
For form's sake, and in order that his presence might not fret his hostess, he picked up a book at random and opened it on his knee; but his eyes, after a few minutes' aimless reading, left the printed page and rested on her. She was writing quickly. The fountain-pen poised, pounced, ran forward, and was checked anew. A little pucker on her forehead straightened out as each sentence was completed. The shaded electric lamp before her left the brows in a green shadow, but flooded neck and arms with naked light. She was dressed in black; a long limp scarf the color of a dead rose-leaf lay across her shoulders, trailed upon the carpet, moved with the motion of the restless bare arm. Her beautiful chestnut hair was drawn up from her neck and dressed high on her head in soft rolls and plaits. Looking at her, and remembering the furnace through which she had passed, Ingram marvelled once again that the searing flame should have left so little evident trace upon her.
He had come prepared for explanation, reproaches, rupture even, but never in his life had he felt less ardor for battle, more doubt as to whether the cause were worthy the warfare. Hope deferred, neglect, dejection, had nearly done their work. He was beginning to doubt his own powers, inclining more each day to take the world's estimate of them as final. He had been writing a good deal lately, and to little purpose; it seemed unlikely that, years before, he had done better. No man endowed with the artist's temperament ever gained ease to himself by deliberately writing down to some imagined popular level. It is doubtful even whether the thing is to be done at all; probably every one that succeeds, even in the coarse acceptation of the term, succeeds by doing the best that is in him. The world may have no eye for genius, but it is quick to detect disrespect.
It was early in March: he had known her now nearly six months. To say that they had become better friends in that time would be inexact; it is juster to say that, from the high level of her first acclaim, he had never known her to descend. She had seemed to divine that he was already sick of beginnings that led nowhere, and lacked patience for the circumspect steps that friendship in the first degree requires. From the outset she showed him a full measure. She had a multitude of friends—much devotion, even, at her command. Here and there, amid the exotic sentimentality that for some reason or other was the dominant note in her circle, a graver, truer note vibrated; and yet, before he had known her a month, Paul must have been obtuse indeed not to have noticed a special appeal in her voice and a special significance in the hand-clasp that was kept for him. And if he was not precisely grateful, he was, at any rate, tremendously impressed. He had learnt her history, and no adventitious aid that riches, popularity, fine clothing or jewels—and none of these was wanting—could have lent her would so overwhelmingly have presented her to his imagination as this. That she should have emerged from such an ordeal at all was wonderful, but that she should have come through it beautiful still, gentle and plaintively wise, lent an almost spectral charm to her beauty, and the same significance to her lightest comment on men or things that one strives to read into a rapped-out message wrung from the dubious silence of the grave. The strange unreality which none who knew Althea well escaped noticing, though all did not call it by the same name, reached him, oppressed as he was by the burden of the material world, almost like a native air. In her house he breathed freely, forgot his chagrins, was enveloped in a formless sympathy that, by anticipating the unwelcome thought, spared him even the humiliation of uttering it.
Perhaps, without looking at him, she had guessed his thought now. At least there was a little conscious gaiety in her voice as she laid by her pen and packed the loose sheets square.
"Voilà!" said she. To speak French always carries the register a key higher. She switched off the light, and moved to the seat opposite him with a soft rustle of skirts. One finger-tip was marked with ink. She put it furtively to her lips and streaked it, schoolgirl fashion, down her black dress.
"Would you like to know who you are dining with?" she asked, taking a slip of paper from the mantelpiece. "We're very worldly indeed to-night. 'Marchesina d'Empoli, the Countess of Hatherley, Lady Claire Templeton, Mrs. Sidney Musgrave.' Here! see for yourself."
As Paul glanced over the list, she put one slender foot on the curb of the fender and pulled her skirt a few inches above her ankle.
"'Sir Bryan Lumsden?' Who's he?"
"A stock-broking baronet, sir, of my acquaintance."
"That's a lurid description."
"He's very good to my 'Sparrow Parties.' Do you know him, that you pick him out?"
"I've seen him once," said Ingram slowly, pulling at his beard. "His manners where women are concerned did not impress me."
She tapped the rail with her foot. "You are very unmannerly. Mustn't I ask the world and the flesh sometimes?"
"What about the devil?"
She gave a tentative and rather frightened glance at his sardonic face.
"I thinkhecomes the earliest."
There was no mistaking her meaning. Paul put the slip back on the mantelpiece.
"Don't you think," said he, speaking with equal intention, "that it's as well even the devil should be allowed to state a case at times?"
"Perhaps—I don't know," Althea faltered in reply.
"Excuse me if I bore you. I don't ask often. Is there any news of my luckless story?"
"Some one is reading it."
"Some publisher?"
"Not exactly. I—I wanted an opinion from some one who—from some one——"
"Some one quite impartial, you mean?"
"Not quite that, either. From some one who is able to take a very special point of view."
Ingram laughed grimly. "Why don't you get some of your worldly friends to teach you how to lie?"
"Sir!"
He regarded her from head to foot and back again. Her cheeks flamed—not altogether with anger. It was not unpleasant to be looked at hard by him.
"Althea," he said at last, "suppose I told you I had come to-night to quarrel with you?"
She turned with a strange, scared appeal in her eyes.
"Oh! I should beg you not to. Don't ever quarrel with me, Paul—please."
The artless speech was so unlike anything he had ever heard from her—her voice, as she uttered it, so uncomfortably reminiscent of another, whose vain pleading had only just ceased to vibrate in his heart, that Paul had what may be best described as a moment of sentimental vertigo.
He laid his hand lightly upon hers. "Dear Mrs. Hepworth, do you dream I could be harsh with you?"
She did not move her hand from under his, nor appear conscious that one chapter of their intimacy was irretrievably ended by the impulsive moment.
"I only know I dread your anger. I suspect it can be awful."
"You shall never be sure, then. But reproof at least you must bear. Althea, you have put me under an obligation that no man finds tolerable."
Now she snatched her hand away. "Oh!" with a catch in her voice, "that is unworthy of you."
"And you are keeping me from what is at least a chance to discharge it."
"It is not I who keeps you from it."
The blood rushed to Ingram's head. "Some occult tribunal, then—some inquisition against whose unwarrantable interference my whole soul protests."
"Hush!" for he had raised his voice. "I think I hear a ring. People are beginning to arrive, and I must fly. Come down in about five minutes—it will look better—and wait after the rest are gone. I think you had best understand my position in this matter clearly. That much is due you."