XVI
AZRAEL
They stopped at a little place in a fold of the Chiltern Hills, a mere roadside inn which the neighborhood of a fashionable golf-course had galvanized into new and rather graceful life. The stone front was covered in ivy, two wings of red brick terminated in sunny bay windows, there was a bowling-green at the back, and an academician had repainted the sign. A few men in tweeds and flannels whom Lumsden appeared to know were strolling about the place, but abstained tactfully from more than a passing greeting. While tea was getting ready the baronet lit a cigar, and the girl gathered a bunch of primroses in the garden and pinned them at her waist. Now that she had taken off the heavy coat he had insisted on her wearing, he noticed for the first time the shabbiness of her black house-frock. A white thread, dropped from some needlework, clung to one sleeve.
Lumsden was a man for whom some kind of a love affair had always been a necessity. Even before he left Eton he had had friends among women of the world. His bluff, slangy manners covered a good deal of intensity of a rather un-English sort. Men of Scotch race have a subtlety denied to the obtuser Southron. They are both more steadfast and more perfidious. His early manhood had been shaken by one great passion, which had ended unhappily and which it is no part of our business to disinter. A long series of inconclusive sentimental experiments had followed it; inconclusive, because he had the grace or the vanity to think that, had it been constancy he was seeking, he might often enough have found it. The devotion, indeed, which one might strike up against in unexpected quarters was, in his opinion, a serious drawback to the game. He was a generous lover. The idol of the moment was always bravely apparelled, always had plenty of tinsel on it, and if a sense of its inadequacy oppressed him, he got rid of the feeling by putting on a little more. All he had asked latterly was that it should simper prettily and do him credit. He was deceived, of course, from time to time, but never before his own waning attention had given betrayal at once its justification and its clue. Thus it fell out that, although his favored pastime had cost him a great deal of money, it had never cost him what such a man would consider his self-respect. It will save time to admit that his intentions toward his young cousin (she was not really his cousin, we know, but he liked to speak of her, even think of her so) had not been honorable. That she was kin and of the same caste as himself had no weight with a man accustomed to divide women into two classes—those he would not marry under any circumstances and those whom he would only marry if there were no help for it. Fenella, to do him justice (and, in a way, to do her justice too), had belonged to the second class from the beginning, but her emergence from it now into a category all by itself was not due to any recognition on his part of her integrity—why should he recognize what he had not tempted?—but simply and solely to the fact that the illness of that poor lady, her mother, had upset all his early calculations. He had his own code of conduct, and one of them was that you can not call at a girl's home, inquire after the maternal health, send the invalid fruit and game, and then—well, without an entire change in perspective as regards her. Of late, indeed, she had lain in his imagination to a quite distressing extent. The impulse that had made him give up a day's hunting and come spurring to her side over ten miles of muddy ground had not failed to repeat itself again and again. His thoughts turned toward her incessantly. At every man's tale of fraud and wrong her image stirred uneasily in his imagination, and the ideal, rather deferred than quite disowned, to which his whole life had done violence, joined with his passion in pleading for a reparation that was at once so easy and so pleasant. Women are generally avenged competently by some woman. The eclipse of the individual in the species never lasts. She emerges, armed with all the old illusions, and often at the very moment when a man is weakest to do battle with her.
Smoking silently, he looked at her now, busied with the pretty feminine duties of milk-jug and sugar-tongs, marked the perceptible changes of face and figure since their first encounter. His experience projected, as it were, her maturity, even her gray hairs upon her—owned that she would always be charming, always a sweet woman.
"Dreaming, Flash?"
She had only been respecting his own silent mood, but did not deny her abstraction.
"I was thinking of the Dominion. When's the first night?"
"In about three weeks. It'll beHamletwithout the prince for some of us, eh, coz?"
She did not answer.
"You must only look upon it as put off for awhile," he said reassuringly. "You'll get another chance."
She shook her head. "I don't feel I shall. Don't you ever feel there's just one time for the one thing?"
"Even if I didn't, Shakespeare has. But you're over-young, Flash, to be thinking of fortune at the ebb."
He looked down at her hand. There were no rings on it. He had a suspicion that was confirmed when she snatched it off the table and put it in her lap.
"Don't think me impertinent, but will it make much difference, I mean financial difference, to you if your mother dies?"
"I don't know. I'm afraid so. But I have a little money coming to me when I'm twenty-one. Not a lot."
"How old are you now?"
"Nearly nineteen."
"Two years! What are you going to do meanwhile?"
She shrugged her shoulders, or maybe shivered. Lifewasgray with the dream out of it.
"Work, I suppose—at something. I can always teach dancing again."
"Flash, I'm ungodly rich. Won't you let me——"
"Bryan!"
It was the first time she had ever called him familiarly by his name, but her face was so shocked and white, her voice so like a real cry of pain, that he did not notice it. He flushed, and churned the gravel with his heel.
"What have I said? Do you know, young woman, I don't find the expression on your face very flattering."
"Bryan! If I thought you meant what you've just said, you—I—we——"
"Well, what?"
"Never,nevercould meet again."
Lumsden swallowed his humiliation, but it didn't go down very far.
"I beg your pardon. Will that do? There was some excuse for me, you know. You let me help you once before."
"Not with money."
He wasn't in a mood to be very delicate. "Wasn't it?" he said with a short laugh. "Never mind, then."
"Why do you laugh that funny way?" said Fenella, with unexpected spirit. "You must tell me now. Did you have to pay Dollfus to take me?"
"Dearingénue! Do you mean to say you've never suspected it? You don't think Dollfus is in business for hygienic reasons, do you?"
"Much money?" she persisted.
"Oh, ask Joe," said Lumsden, rather wearily. "He's on the telephone."
Fenella beat her palms against the side of the chair. "I've been a fool," she went on, in a fierce soliloquy, "a little, credulous donkey. No wonder that girl thought me a fraud! And yet—I believed you all believed in me. Do you think I'd ever have let you—unless I felt sure? Oh! you must know it."
"My dear child, be content. You carry conviction. I acquit you from this moment of everything unmaidenly, generosity included."
"Generosity!"
"Yes. It sometimes requires as much to take as to give. But you're like all women."
"Why?"
"When they're not insulted at being offered money they're insulted it isn't more."
"How dare you call me 'women'?"
"Does it hurt your dignity?"
"Never mind what it hurts. You've no right to speak that way, to class me with—with others. Oh, yes, you have, though. I'd forgotten."
"Flash, let me tell you one thing: No matter how young or charming or virtuous you may be, to keep harping on what you know hurts a man's feelings is to be a shrew."
"Your 'feelings'!" The vexation went out of her face. She leaned her chin on her hand and gave him a look so piercing, so direct and unexpected, that it went through all his worldly armor.
"Well?" he asked, grimly, through his teeth. She never guessed the restraint he was putting on himself. "Haven't I a right to any?"
She looked away without answering.
He got up abruptly. "Let's go home," he said. "We've had enough heart-to-heart talk for one afternoon."
They rode back into the London lights in a silence which the gentleman in the peaked cap who drove them probably misconstrued as perfect accord. "They don't talk much, not w'en they're 'olding 'ands," he said that night in his favored house of call. But he only held her hand once, to say good-bye at the door.
"Have I been a prig?" asked Fenella, contritely.
He seemed to be turning the matter over, but was really thinking how prettily penitence became her.
"Have I offended you?"
"I'll tell you whether you have some other time."
Apparently not beyond forgiveness, for he came again two days later and took her for an hour's drive—and then the next day. Good or bad, the habit formed itself. Two or three times she allowed herself to be persuaded further, and let him take her to dinner. At such an hour the big restaurants would not be very full; but it seemed Bryan could not go anywhere without meeting a man he knew, and who, while speaking, divided his attention pretty evenly between the baronet, half-turned in his chair, holding the lapel of his friend's coat, and the pretty stranger to whom he was not introduced. He was very kind and cousinly; had theories as to what people should eat (he never asked her to drink) when low-spirited and anxious, kept clear of the personal note, and always saw she got back in time. Thus, little by little, the hint she had received of a dangerous hardness in his nature was effaced. In time of trouble the heart receives more impressions than the head, and it is wonderful into what bulk tearful eyes can magnify a little kindness. Fenella was to blame herself subsequently for her conduct during the last days of her mother's life; but I think, perhaps too indulgently, that it was only the instinct to grasp at enjoyment while enjoyment was possible. The very pang of self-reproach with which she took up her nightly task might have convinced her of this. Old habits are not effaced in an instant. From babyhood she had known no surer way to make her mother happy than by seizing all opportunities for pleasure that came her way. Outsiders who suspect love because it falls from some arbitrary standard they choose to set up have no idea how often apparent heartlessness is justified by some such little secret covenant between the loving and the loved. And then, though the period of suspense was short, it passed so heavily. The days seemed counted out with pitiful slowness by a power that knew how few they were. Time, like distance, deceives when one is seeking the way. She was so fearfully alone! Her vision sometimes ached at the obscurity of her own destiny. In that still room uncertainties seemed to multiply, thicken and coil, like smoke in a tunnel. She envied every one in turn—Nurse Ursula, with her brisk professional manner and endless prospect of clearly defined duty—cases to come running into perspective like beds in a long ward; slatternly, pretty little Frances, with her brisk love-passages in the area; the woman upon the bed, nearer with every breath to a change that raises no problems but solves them all. She often whispered in her mother's ear, "Mother, mother; take me with you. Don't go without Nelly."
Foolish extravagances of an undisciplined heart. Even for death, Nelly, we have to wait until the time for enjoying it is past.
Early one morning, following a night in which her mother had seemed much easier, and in the very first hour of her untimely sleep, the nurse shook her by the shoulder. In the one look that the two women exchanged her news was told. Fenella huddled on her clothes and followed to the sick-room. Her mother was breathing strangely. Every inspiration was like the hiccough that follows a fit of weeping in a child. Her brows were knitted—she seemed puzzled and absorbed. Occasionally she tried to lift a hand stiffly and clumsily toward her head. By noon all was over. The doctor called twice, and, for the first time in many days, failed to write a new prescription. The lawyer was telephoned for. About three o'clock in the afternoon two decent pew-opening bodies were admitted without question, stole upstairs, and, having performed their office, stole as quietly away. The charwoman stayed for tea, and uncovered a rich vein of reminiscence suitable for the occasion. The blinds were drawn down, the windows opened. Outside, in the square, was heard the champing of bits, the rattle of the harness, that poor Mrs. Barbour had loved to listen to of an afternoon in spring or autumn.
Toward evening, when they were all done with the dead woman, Fenella went softly upstairs. Nurse Ursula, upon whose breast, for want of a nearer, the orphaned girl's first passion of grief had spent itself, but whose attentions harassed her now, would have accompanied her, but she would have no one. She approached the door full of awe as well as sorrow. Within it seemed some dark angel, with brimming chalice, had been waiting till she was calm enough to drink. There was something sacramental in this first visit to her dead; her passion composed itself for the encounter. Through the lowered blinds the afternoon sun filled the room with a warm amber light. The windows were opened slightly at the bottom, and the fresh spring wind puffed and sucked at the light casement curtains. She laid her head down upon the pillow and put her lips to the chill, sunken temples, upon which she felt the hair still damp from the sweat of the death-struggle. As there are depths in the sea which the hardiest diver cannot support save with constraint of breathing, so there are depths of sorrowful reverie wherein the soul abdicates for a time its faculties of memory and comparison. Fenella did not cry nor remember nor rebel. The briny flood rose quietly—encompassed her utterly—covered her insensibly at the temperature of her own forsaken heart. Sorrow so deep has many of sleep's attributes. She had been vaguely conscious for some time of a knocking at the door before she raised her head. It was turned quite dark; the charwoman, with a candle lighting up her frightened face, stood in the open door.
"Mrs. Chirk! How dare you disturb me."
"Oh, miss, I'm sorry; but I knocked and knocked. Nurse is upstairs and Frances is out, and there's two gentlemen below says they must see you. I 'aven't told them nothink, miss, not knowin' as you'd 'ave me."
Some more of the dreary business of death, she concluded. She went to her own room, bathed her eyes, dressed her hair hurriedly, and came downstairs. She started as she opened the dining-room door. Her visitors were Lumsden and the Dominion manager.