Christian discovered that he was not sorry to be alone. Cora’s company had been amusing and vivifying, no doubt, but it was even better now to have his own thoughts. He observed with relief that others in the stalls were smoking; tobacco as a rule had not very much meaning for him, but now he lit a large cigar from the dinner-case in his pocket, and stretching himself in his chair, proceeded to enjoy it. He kept his glance, in an indolent fashion, upon the stage, but his mind roamed far and wide.
Cora, in returning to explain that it would not be possible for her to stay till the time for Covent Garden, had ingenuously sat on for nearly another hour, cheering him with her lively prattle. She asked him many questions about himself, his diversions, his tastes, his relations with Lord Julius and Emanuel. He wondered now if these queries had been quite as artless as they seemed at the time. There rose up before him, in retrospect, certain occasional phases of her manner which suggested something furtive. She had watched the stage, and the doorway leading from it, with a kind of detached uneasiness on which he now languidly speculated. It occurred to him again to wonder if her husband was really in the building. Christian found himself thinking of this cousin of his almost with compassion. Poor devil! Was his fate not even more tragic than that of the others who were merely dead? He regretted now that he had not asked Cora point-blank as to his presence. His mood was so tolerant to-night that even the unforgivable insult to his father lost its sharp outlines, and became only a hasty phrase, the creature of imperative provocation.
In her final leave-taking, Cora had genially proffered her services if he desired to know any or all of the young ladies—and he had begged to be excused. Dicky Westland came down to the stalls later on, and shamefacedly linked a similar offer to his apologies for his prolonged neglect of his guest. But Christian protested that he was enjoying himself thoroughly. He was never less sleepy in his life; he did not want a drink; he would not dream of wishing to go until his friend was entirely ready. “You cannot realize,” he concluded, with his persuasive smile, “how strange and interesting this all is to me.”
But when Dicky had returned again to the stage, Christian paid less attention than ever to the diverting spectacle. His thoughts reverted obstinately to Captain Edward—? and to that portion of the family of which he was the congenital type. Was not that really the sort of man who should have the title? There seemed a cloud of negative reasons, but were these not sentimental abstractions? Should the duke not be a rough, hard sportsman, a man with a passion for horses and dogs and gunpowder saturating his veins? One who loved the country for its rude, toilsome out-of-door sports, and who liked best in town the primitive amusements of the natural man? He figured Edward in his mind’s eye most readily as puffing and cursing over a rat-hole with his terriers—or as watching with a shine of steel in his blue eyes the blood-stained progress of a prize-fight. And truly, were these not the things that a duke of Glastonbury of right belonged to?
He could not think of Lord Julius and of Emanuel as being Torrs at all. The older man had the physical inheritance of the family, it was true, but he was almost as much estranged from its ideals as that extraordinary son of his. They both were grotesquely out of the picture of English aristocratie life, whether in country or town. And he himself—how absolutely he also was out of the picture!
The immensity of the position which his grandfather’s death would devolve upon him had been present in his mind, it seemed sleeping as well as waking, for half a year. At the outset he had thrilled at the prospect; sometimes still he was able to reassure himself about it, and to profess to himself confidence that when the emergency came, he would be equal to it. But more often, in these latter days, the outlook depressed him. Of course nothing grievous would happen to him, in any event. He would be assured of an excellent living to the end of his days, with an exceptional amount of social deference from those about him, and relative freedom to do what he liked. He could marry and rear a family of lords and ladies; he could have his speeches in the House of Lords or elsewhere printed in the “Times”; if he looked about in America, he could secure a bride with perhaps millions to her dower. There was, in any case, the reasonable likelihood that he would be, to some extent, the heir of Lord Julius and Emanuel, in the latter part of his life. Thus he could go on, when he set himself to the task, piling-up reasons why he ought to view the future with buoyant serenity—to count himself among the happiest of men.
But then—was his not all self-deception? Did he not know in his heart that he was not happy?—that this gilded and ornate career awaiting him really repelled all his finer senses? To-night as he followed his thoughts behind the transparent screen of whisking dresses and jolting figures upon which his outer vision rested, the impulse to escape the whole thing rose strong within him. Already he had sworn that he would no longer weary himself with the meaningless and distasteful routine of social obligations in London. Why should he not plunge boldly forward beyond that, and say that he would make no further sacrifices of any sort to the conventions of mediocrity?
He lit another cigar and, rising, walked about a little by himself at the side of the stalls, his hands deep in his pockets, his brows knitted in formative introspection.
First of all, it was clear that Emanuel’s hopes about his taking up the System were doomed. It was not in him to assume such a part. He had not the capacity for such work; even if he had, he lacked both the tremendous driving energy and the enthusiasm.
But when Emanuel learned this, then he would be angry, and he would cover over no more money to that account at the bank. Eh bien! It couldn’t be helped. Christian recalled that he had still at that blessed bank more than sixty thousand francs!—truly a prodigious sum, when one thought of it soberly. The question whether this sum ought not to be given back to Emanuel, under certain circumstances, seemed to have settled itself. When it had first occurred to him that afternoon, it had suggested a good many moral difficulties. But it was really simplicity itself, as he considered it now. There were all those lean and poverty-stricken years of his youth and childhood to be remembered—and, stretching back beyond that, those other years of his father’s exile before he was born—nearly forty in all. The intelligent thing was to regard the three thousand pounds as a sort of restitution fund, to be spread out over the whole of that long period. Viewed in this light, the annual fraction of it was a paltry matter. Besides, Emanuel had expressly declared that no conditions whatever were attached to the money. Christian saw that he could make his mind quite easy on that score.
So then, there were sixty thousand francs! With that he might live admirably, even luxuriously, on the Continent, until his grandfather’s death. That event would of course alter everything. There would then come automatically to him—no matter where he was or what he did—a certain fixed income, which he understood to be probably over rather than under seventy-five thousand francs a year. This—still on the Continent—would be almost incredible wealth! There was really no limit to the soul-satisfying possibilities it opened before him. He would have a yacht on the Mediterranean; he would have a little chateau in the marvelous green depths of the Styrian Mountains—of which a boyhood friend had told him with such tender reverence of memory. He would see Innsbruck and Moscow, and, if he liked, even Samarkand and China. Why, he could go round the world in his yacht, if he chose—to remote spice islands and tropical seas! He could be a duke when, and as much, as it pleased him to be one. Instead of being the slave to his position and title, he would make them minister to him. He would do original things—realize his own inner fancies and predilections. If the whim seized him to climb Mount Ararat, or to cross the Sahara with a caravan of his own servants—that he would do. But above all things—now and henceforth forever, he would be a free man! He laughed grimly as he thought how slight was the actual difference between the life of pauper bondage he had led up to last October, and the existence which polite England and London had imposed upon him ever since. The second set of chains were of precious metal—that was all. Well, hereafter there would be no fetters of any description!
“I’m quite ready to go now, old man, if you are,” Dicky Westland said at some belated stage of this reverie. He had approached without being seen by his friend, and he had to pull at Christian’s sleeve to attract his attention. “I fancy you’ve been walking in your sleep,” he laughed, in comment upon this.
Christian shook himself, and, blinking at Dicky, protested that he had never been more wide awake in his life. “I go only if you’re entirely ready,” he said. “Don’t dream of leaving on my account I have been extremely interested, I assure you.”
“Every fellow has his own notions of enjoyment,” reflected Westland, with drowsy philosophy, as they went up the stairs toward the stage. “I tried to explain your point of view to some of the girls up here, but I’m not sure they quite grasped it. They were dying to have me bring you up and make you dance, you know. By George, I had a job to keep Dolly Montressor from coming down and fetching you, off her own bat.”
“How should they know or care about me?” asked Christian. “I didn’t expect to be pointed out.”
“My dear man,” retorted Dicky, sleepily, “no one pointed you out. They all know you by sight as well as they do George Edwards. It isn’t too late, still, you know—if you really would like to be introduced.”
Christian shook his head with resolution, as they halted at the wings. “Truly, no!” he repeated. “But I should like a glass of wine and a sandwich, if we can get past the stage. I’m not an atom sleepy, but I’m hungry and thirsty.”
On their way through a narrow, shadowed defile of huge canvas-stretched frames of deal, they passed two young men, one much taller than the other, who had their heads bent together in some low-voiced, private conversation. Christian glanced at them casually, and was struck with the notion that they observed him in turn, and exchanged comment upon his approach. He looked at them with a keener scrutiny as he went by—and it seemed to him that there was something familiar in the face of the larger man—who indeed looked away upon the instant their eyes met.
“Did you see those men?” he asked Westland, in an undertone, a moment later. “Do you know them?”
“Those we just passed?” Dicky looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know the thin chap, but the other fellow is Gus Torr—why, of course—your cousin. Somehow, I never think of you as belonging to that lot—I mean, being related to them. Of course—that was his sister-in-law you were sitting with. Why did you ask if I knew him?”
“Nothing—I was not sure if it was he—I’ve seen him only once,” Christian replied, with an assumption of indifference. “I remember having noticed then how much he looked like his brother.”
“Yes—poor devils!” commented Dicky, as they entered the manager’s room. Apparently it was in his mind to say more, but the place was crowded, and the problem of getting through the throng to the food and drink monopolized his attention.
Some minutes later, while Christian stood in another corridor, waiting for his friend to bring their hats and coats from the mysteriously elusive spot where he had left them, he overheard the mention of his name. Two women’s voices, wholly unknown to him, came from behind an improvised partition of screens near at hand, with great distinctness.
One of them said: “He spells his name ‘Tower,’ you know. I understand the idea is to make people forget who his father was.”
“Good job, too!” replied the other voice.
Christian turned abruptly, and strode off in the direction whither Dicky had disappeared. “After forty years!” he murmured hotly to himself. “After forty years!” and clenched his fists till the nails hurt his palms.
The two young men walked homeward, arm in arm, through silent streets over which the dawn was spreading its tentative first lights. It was colder than they had thought, and the morning air was at once misty and fresh. In Leicester Square the scent of lilacs came to them; beside the pale, undefined bulk of the squat statue they caught the lavender splash of color which was sister to the perfume.
“By Jove, it’s spring!” said Dicky. He pointed out the flowers, and then, still drawing Christian’s arm to turn his attention to the square, recalled to him as they moved that this was the oldtime haunt of foreigners in London. “Dickens’s villain in ‘Little Dorrit,’ you know—the fellow whose mustache went up and his nose went down—I never can remember his name—he lived here. In those days, all that sort of chappies lived here—the adventurers and jailbirds who had made their own countries too hot to hold them.”
Westland’s insistence upon this theme had no purpose other than to divert Christian’s attention while they passed the Empire. He was tired, and profoundly disinclined to any renewal of the discussion about the promenade. He encountered with vague surprise, therefore, the frowning glance which Christian, half halting, bent upon him. The young man’s displeasure was marked, but Dicky for the life of him could not imagine why. He tightened his hold on the other’s arm and quickened their pace.
But Christian, after a few yards, suddenly withdrew his arm altogether. “I do not like to walk so fast,” he said, with a sharp note in his voice.
Dicky regarded him with puzzled apprehension. “What’s up, old man?” he asked, almost pleadingly. “Has anything gone wrong?”
Christian, still with knitted brows, parted his lips to speak. Then he seemed to reconsider his intention, and let his face soften as he paused. “No—nothing at all,” he replied, after a moment. He smiled a little to reassure the other. “It was nothing at all,” he repeated. “Only I am nervous and excited to-night—this morning, I should say—and my head is full of projects. It is twelve hours since you came to me—and the whole world has changed meanwhile. I see everything different. I am not altered to your eyes—but none the less, I am not at all, in any respect, the man you took to dine with you. You have not observed anything—but it is a revolution that has occurred under your very nose, Mr. Dicky Westland.”
“I’m too sleepy to observe anything,” the other declared. “I couldn’t tell a revolution from a—from a hot-potato can.”
The comparison had forced itself upon Westland’s jaded mind through the medium of his weary eyes. There before them, by the curb at the corner, stood the dingy wheeled-oven of the streets, the sullen red glow of its lower door making a strange patch of fiery light upon the ragged trousers of the man in charge. He was a dirty and undersized creature, and he looked up at the two young gentlemen in evening dress with a speculative, yet hardly hopeful, eye.
Christian stopped short. “Ah, this is very good,” he said, with a brightening face. “I have never eaten a potato from a can.”
Dicky sighed, but resigned himself with only a languid protest: “You have to eat so much else besides the potato,” he commented dolefully.
The man opened an upper door, and then drew from under the machine a twisted wad of old newspaper, which, being unwound, revealed a gray heap of salt. “How many, cap’n?” he demanded, briefly.
Christian had been glancing across the Circus meanwhile—to where, in the misty vagueness of dawn, Piccadilly opened between its tall, shapely corners, and beyond, the curved yellowish sweep of Regent Street began. The dim light revealed some lurking figures to his eyes.
“Can you call over those women?” he asked the potato-man.
A tall, fresh-faced young policeman came upon the group round the Criterion corner. Although the pounding of his thick boots on the pavement had been audible long before his appearance, he regarded them with the slightly dramatic air of one who has deftly surprised a group of conspirators. The potato-man looked from Christian to the officer and made no reply.
Christian drew some silver from his pocket, shaking off the restraining hand Westland tried to lay on his arm. “Is there any objection, constable,” he inquired, “to my buying potatoes for those friends of ours over there? It is a cold morning.”
The policeman’s glance ranged from the white ties of the young gentlemen to the coins in Christian’s palm. His official expression relaxed. “I dare say it’ll do no ’arm, sir,” he replied with courtesy. He even lent himself to the enterprise by stooping down and beating a certain number of strokes with his baton on the pavement.
“How many times did he strike?” Dicky made whispered inquiry. “That’s a new dodge to me.”
New or old, it was efficient. Forlorn shapes began to emerge from the shadows of the big streets opposite, and move forward across the empty open space. Others stole noiselessly in from the byways of Leicester Square. There were perhaps a dozen in all when the potato-man made his census—poorly dressed, fagged, bold-faced, furtive-eyed women. They spoke in monotonous, subdued tones among themselves. There were to be heard German, French, Belgian French, cockney English, and Lancashire English. Two of them pulled at the sleeve of the potato-man to make him hurry.
Christian, regarding his motley guests, found himself neither touched nor entertained. They seemed as stupid as they were squalid. With a gesture of decision he gave the money to the policeman.
“Pay for it all,” he directed, “and if more come, give them a look-in, too—and keep what is left for yourself.”
“Now then, Frenchy!” broke in the constable, sharply. “Mind what you’re at! Pass Germany the salt!” With an abrupt change to civility, he turned to Christian. “Right you are, sir!” he said.
Dicky laughed drowsily. “It’s like the Concert of Europe,” he declared. “Shall we go on?”
They moved down the broad pavement, again arm in arm, breathing in slowly the new, keen air, and observing in a silence which was full of tacit comment the beautiful termination of the street before them: the dark figures of the Crimean monument standing in grim relief against the morning light, the stately palace beyond, with its formal portals of club buildings, its embowered statues, its huge column towering ponderously above the pale green of spring in the park—all gray and cool and, as it were, thoughtfully solemn in the hush of daybreak.
“Ah, yes—this wonderful London!” sighed Christian, as they halted at the Continental corner. He spread his hand to embrace the prospect before them. “How right you were! I have not learned to know it at all. But I begin now! If you will walk through the square with me—there is something I wish to say.”
This something did not get itself said till they halted within this somber, slate-colored square. Christian paused before a big, pretentious house of gloomy, and even forbidding aspect—a front of sooty stucco, with cornices of ashen-hued stone, and many windows masked with sullen brown shades.
“This was our town house a hundred years ago,” he said meditatively. “My father was born here. My grandfather sold it when the entail was broken. Until this afternoon, it was my fixed resolve to buy it back again. I said always to myself: ‘If I am to have a house in London, it must be this old one of ours in St. James’s.’ But that is all changed now. At least, it is no longer a resolve.”
Dicky gazed at him with sleepy eyes. “How do you mean?” he asked, perfunctorily.
“Wake up now, and I will tell you!” Christian, with a lingering glance, as of renunciation, at the mansion, began to walk again. “This is it. You said you were eager to be some colonial official’s secretary—to have three hundred pounds—and the yellow fever. To obtain this, you expend all your energies, you and your relations. Well, then—why will you not be my secretary instead? You shall have more than three hundred pounds—and no yellow fever.”
Westland had roused himself, and looked inquiringly now into the other’s face. “What do you need of a secretary?” he objected, half jestingly. “If you want to talk about it after you’ve come into the thing—I don’t say that I shouldn’t be glad-to consider it. But the deuce of it is——”
“No—I wish it to begin now, this morning, this hour—this minute!” Christian spoke peremptorily.
Dicky, pondering, shook his head. “No, you mustn’t insist on settling anything now,” he decided. “It isn’t regular, you know. If you—really—want to propose something immediate—why, I’ll call and talk with you to-morrow—or, that is to say, this afternoon. But I couldn’t possibly let you commit yourself to anything of that sort now.”
Christian frowned at his friend. “You speak of what you will let me do!” he said.
“In your opinion—I see it!—you think I have not sober command of myself, am not responsible—is that it?”
“Nonsense! I’ve said nothing of the sort,” protested the other. “Of course, you’re perfectly all right—but we’re both tired and sleepy, and you’re not so accustomed to go home by daylight as I am—and it wouldn’t be at all the thing for me to close a bargain with you now. Can’t you see what I mean? I wouldn’t play threepenny écarté with you at this hour in the morning—and I’m damned if I’m going to let you in for three hundred a year for the rest of my life. Shall I come round, say, at luncheon time?”
“I shall not be in,” said Christian, curtly. He looked at his companion, and then past him at the trees in the square, in vexed rumination. “What I have it in my mind to do”—he continued, vaguely, after a pause—“it is not a thing for delay. It is in my blood to do it at once. It was my impulse to make you my comrade in it—but of course, since you have your reservations and doubts, there need be nothing more said about it.”
The shrug of the shoulders which emphasized these last words nettled Westland, and at the same time helped him to repress his annoyance. It lent to the whole episode just that savor of foreign eccentricity which appealed to the amiable tolerance of the islander.
“My dear man,” he urged, gently, “I haven’t the slightest notion what it is that you’re so keen about—but whatever it is, do go home and sleep on it, and make up your mind calmly after breakfast. It’s no good deciding important questions, and striking out new lines, and all that sort of thing, at this hour in the morning. Nobody ever does it, you know. It simply can’t be done.”
“Good-night!” said Christian, proffering his hand. “You are right; it is high time for those who are sleepy to go to bed I won’t drag you round to Duke Street.”
Dicky looked at him doubtfully. “You do wrong to be angry, you know,” he said.
“But that is your error—I am not in the least angry—I beg you to believe it,” cried Christian. His eyes beamed genially in proof of his assertion, and he put heartiness into his voice. “For a minute I was disappointed—shall I say vexed?—but not any more. How should I quarrel with you for not beholding things through my eyes? To me, something is a giant; you perceive that it is a windmill. Eh bien! We do not convince each other—but surely we do not quarrel.”
“Oh, I am game enough to play Sancho to your Don,” expostulated Dicky, with a readiness which Christian had not looked for, “but I draw the line at starting out on an empty stomach, and when we’re too sleepy to stand. Well, what shall it be?” He took the hand offered him, and strove to signify by his cordial grasp that no trace of a misunderstanding remained. “Shall I look you up, say, at two o’clock?”
“I do not think I shall be there. Goodnight!” responded Christian, and the two parted.
Christian climbed the stairs at Duke Street, and let himself into his apartments, with painstaking precautions against being overheard. There was an excess of zeal about Falkner which might easily impel him to present himself for service at even this most unseasonable hour.
The young man had still only formless notions of what he was going to do, but it was at least plain to him that Falkner was to have no part in the proceedings. He drew off his varnished boots as a further measure of security, and then, with more hesitation, removed his cloak and coat, and raised the inside blinds at the two windows. This sitting-room of his had rather pleased him formerly. He could recall having taken quite an affectionate interest in buying and arranging the rugs and pictures and bookcases with which he had supplemented the somewhat gaunt furnishing of his predecessor. But now, in this misty and reluctant light of the London morning, nothing seemed good to him as he looked about.
The pretty things of his own selection said no more to him than did the chattels he had taken over from a stranger. There was no spirit of home in them.
He moved noiselessly to the adjoining bedroom, and drew the curtains there as well, and glanced round. Here, too, he had the sense of beholding the casual appointments of a hotel chamber. Nothing made an appeal of intimacy to him. He reflected that in a day or two he should not be able to remember how his room looked—even if his memory attempted the fatuous task. Duke Street had been engraved on his cards for six months, but it had not made the faintest mark on his heart.
With an air of decision, he suddenly began to drag forth his clothes from the wardrobe and drawers, and spread them on the bed. In the tiny dressing-room beyond were piled his traveling bags, and these he brought out into the light. Upon consideration, however, the original impulse to take a good many things weakened and dwindled. To begin with, their secret removal was in no way practicable. Moreover, now that he thought of it, he did not want them. They would be simply encumbrances. He would take with him only the smallest handbag, with a change of linen and a few brushes.
Finally, the conviction that even this must be a nuisance became clear to him, and he desisted from the random packing he had begun. Still moving about as silently as possible, he changed his ceremonial tie for one of every-day wear, and put on a suit of sober-colored tweeds, and his easiest brown boots. The transfer of his watch, some loose gold and the roll of notes from one set of pockets to another, completed his preparations in the bedchamber. He tiptoed out to the larger room, and there, upon reflection, wrote a few lines for Falkner’s direction, saying merely that he was called away, and that matters were to go on as usual until he returned or sent further orders. He separated a banknote from the roll to place inside this note, but on second thoughts wrote a check instead, and sealing and directing the envelope, laid it in a conspicuous place on the table.
He noticed then, for the first time, that there were some letters from the evening post for him, neatly arranged on this table. He opened the nearest, and glanced at its contents: it was a note from his second cousin, Lady Milly Poynes, the fair-haired, fair-faced, fair-brained, fair-everything sister of Lord Lingfield, reminding him that she was depending upon his escort for the Private View of the Academy, and that the time for getting tickets was running very short. He laughed aloud at the conceit of the Royal Academy rising in his path as an obstacle at such a moment—and without more ado thrust this with the unopened letters into his pocket. Then, when he had made sure once more that he had his check-book, nothing remained to be done. He went softly forth, without so much as a thought of taking a farewell glance behind him, found a soft dark hat in the hallway and then closed the outer door with great care upon the whole Duke Street episode of his life.
“You are not to see me here again in a hurry,” he confided aloud to the banisters and steps, when he had descended to the first floor. Then he laughed to himself, and tripped gaily down the remaining flight.
There was no hesitation now in his mood. He walked briskly back through the square, and then down Waterloo Place, till he came to the Guards’ Memorial. He moved round this to the front, and looked up at one of the three bronze Guardsmen with the confident air of familiarity. He knew this immutable, somber face under every shifting aspect of light and shadow; he had stared at the mantling greatcoat and the huge bearskin of this hero of his a hundred times. The very first day of his arrival in London he had made the acquaintance of this statue, and had started, dazed and fascinated, at the strange resemblance it suggested. Thus his boy-father must have looked, with the beard and the heavy dress of the Russian winter. The metal figure came to mean to him more than all London beside. In the sad, strong, silent countenance which gazed down upon him he read forever the tragedy that gripped his heartstrings. Forever Honor, standing aloft, held the laurel wreath poised high above the warrior’s head—immovable in the air, never to descend to touch its mark. Christian had seen this wreath always through moist eyes.
This morning, for a wonder, no tearful impulse came to him as he looked upward. The impassive face was as gravely fine as ever, but its customary effect of pathos was lacking. There even seemed in its sightless eyes a latent perception of Christian’s altered mood. He lifted his hat soberly and saluted the statue.
Toward the Strand now he made his way, walking blithely, and humming to himself. He could not forbear to smile at a policeman he passed in front of St. Martin’s. Two elderly and much bewrapped cabmen stood stamping their feet beside a shelter, and they pointed toward their ridiculous old horses and battered growlers as he came along, with an air that moved him to glee. He gave them a shilling to divide, and went on, conscious of a novel delight in himself and in the world at large.
The big clock showed it to be half-past five. There was no blue in the sky, but the mist of daybreak was abating, and the air was milder. Not a living creature was visible along the naked length of the Strand. At the end, the beautiful spire of St. Mary’s rose from the dim grays about its base, exquisite in tints and contour as an Alpine summit in the moment before sunrise.
A turning to the left opened to Christian, unexpectedly, a scene full of motion and color. He had not thought himself so near Covent Garden, but clearly this must be it. He walked up toward the busy scene of high-laden vans, big cart-horses and swarming porters, wondering why no sign of all this activity was manifest in the sleeping Strand below, barely a stone’s throw distant. He saw the glowing banks of flowers within, as he approached, and made toward them, sighing already with pleasure at the promise they held out to him.
He might have read in the papers that it was a backward and a grudging April, this year, in the matter of flowers. But to Christian, no memory of the exuberant South suggested any rivalry with this wonderful show of northern blossoms. Tulips and daffodils, amaryllis and azaleas, rhododendrons, carnations, roses—he seemed to have imagined to himself nothing like this before. He spent over an hour among them, in the end making numerous purchases. At each stall he gave an address—always the same—and exacted the pledge of delivery at eight o’clock.
At last he could in reason buy nothing more, and he went out to look about him. He found the place where the market-men take drinks at all hours, and food and coffee when nature’s sternest demands can be positively no longer disregarded—but it did not invite his appetite. Some further time he spent in gazing wondering at the vast walls of vegetables and fruit being tirelessly built up and pulled down again, pondering meanwhile the question whether he should breakfast before eight o’clock, or at some indefinitely later hour. He partially solved the problem at length by buying a small box of Algerian peaches, and eating them where he stood. Then some exceptionally fine bananas tempted him further, and he finished with a delicate little melon from Sicily.
How it carried him back to the days of his youth—this early morning fragrance of the fresh fruit! It was as if he were at Cannes again—only buoyant now, and happy, and oh, so free! And in his pocket he could feel whenever he liked the soft, munificent crackle of over four thousand francs! The sapphire Mediterranean had surely never been so lovely to his gaze as was now the dingy Strand below.
The laggard hour came round at last. He descended to Arundel Street, and discovered the house he wanted, and found just within the entrance two or three of the flower-laden porters awaiting his arrival, For the rest, the building seemed profoundly unoccupied. He led the way up to the third floor, and had the plants set down beside the locked door which bore the sign “Miss Bailey.” Other similarly burdened porters made their appearance in turn, till the narrow hallway looked like a floral annex to the Garden itself.
He waited alone with his treasures for what seemed to him a very long time, then descended and stood at the street door till he was tired, then climbed the stairs again. The extraordinary quiet of the big building, filled with business offices as it was, puzzled him. He had no experience of early-morning London to warn him that English habits differed from those of the continent. It occurred to him that perhaps it was a holiday—conceivably one of those extraordinary interludes called Bank Holidays—and he essayed a perplexing computation in the calendar in the effort to settle this point.
Finally there began the sounds of steps, and the opening and closing of doors, below him. A tow-headed boy in buttons came up to his landing, stared in vacuous amazement at him and the flowers and passed on to the next floor. Noises of occupancy rose from the well of the staircase to bear him countenance, and suddenly a lift glided up past him in this well. He had not noticed the ropes or the iron caging before. He heard the slamming of the lift doors above, and the dark carriage followed on its smooth descent. Christian reproached himself for not having rung the bell and questioned the lift-man. He considered the feasibility of doing it now, but was deterred by the fear that the man would resent it. Then the lift came up again—and was stopping at his floor. There was a sharp note of girlish laughter on the instant of the halt, answered by a male guffaw.
A slight, erect, active young woman emerged from the lift, her face alive with mirth of some unknown character. Behind her, in the obscurity, Christian saw for an instant the vanishing countenance of the liftman, grinning widely. This hilarity, somehow, struck in him an unsympathetic chord.
The young woman, still laughing, spread an uncomprehending glance over Christian and his flowers. She moved past him, key in hand, toward the door which he had been guarding, with a puzzled eye upon him meanwhile. With the key in the lock she turned and decided to speak.
“What might all this be—the Temple Flower Show or the Crystal Palace?” she asked, with banter in her tone.
“These are for Miss Bailey,” said Christian, quite humbly.
“Must be some mistake,” said the girl decisively. “Did she order them herself? Were you there at the time? Did you see her? Where do they come from?”
Christian advanced a little into the light. “She has not ordered them,” he said, in his calmest voice. “I have not seen her for a long time. But I have brought them for her, and I think you may take it from me that they are hers.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she replied, lightly but with grace. “I didn’t understand. Things are forever being brought here that belong somewhere else. Men are so stupid in finding their way about! Well—I suppose we must get them inside. That is your idea, isn’t it?”
She spoke very rapidly, and with a kind of metallic snap in her tones. Christian answered her questions by a suave assenting gesture. “Miss Bailey is not likely to turn up much before half-past nine,” she went on, as if he had made the inquiry. “She lives so far out, and just now we’re not very busy. There’s nothing doing in new plays at this time of the year, and the lady novelists are all getting their own typewriters. If you’ll lend a hand, we’ll carry the things in.” Between them they bore in the various pots, and the big bouquets loosely wrapped in blue paper. The girl led the way through a large working-room to a smaller apartment, fitted as an office but containing also a sofa and a tall gas cooking-stove—and here on desk and center-table, chairs and windowsill, they placed the flowers. Christian watched her as she deftly removed their paper wrappings. She had a comely, small face of aspect at once alert and masterful. The skin was peculiarly fair, with a tinge of rose in the cheeks so delicately modulated that he found it in rivalry with the “Mrs. Pauls” she was unpacking. Her light hair was drawn plainly down over the temples in a fashion which he felt was distinguished, but said to himself he did not like. Her shrewd eyes took calm cognizance of him from time to time.
“They are very beautiful indeed,” she remarked with judicial approval, upon the completion of her task. Then, as upon an afterthought, she moved rapidly about, peering under the branches of the growing plants, and separating the cut flowers lightly with her hands. “There is no card anywhere, is there? I suppose you will want to leave a message? Here are pen and ink—if you wish to write anything.”
“Thank you,” Christian began, smilingly but with obvious hesitation. He looked at his watch. “If you don’t mind—if you’re quite sure I shan’t be in the way—I think I should like to wait till Miss Bailey comes.”
“Oh, you won’t be in the way,” the girl replied. She regarded him meditatively, with narrowed eyes. “I shouldn’t dust this room in any event—since the flowers are here; but you mustn’t come out into the big room—unless you want to get choked with blacks. Would you like a morning paper? I can send a boy out for one.”
“Thank you—you are very good—no,” Christian answered. “There are some books here—I shall amuse myself.”
The girl turned to leave him, and then on second thought moved over to the window and lifted the sash. “There’ll be no objection to your smoking if you like,” she informed him. Then she went out, closing the door behind her.
Christian walked to the window in turn, and looked down over the flowers to the narrow street below. It was full of young men in silk hats, toiling up the granite ascent like black ants. He reflected that they must be clerks and shopmen, going to their daily work from the Temple station or the Embankment. The suggestion of monotonous bondage which their swarming progress toward the wage-earning center gave forth, interested him. He yawned pleasurably at the thought of his own superb emancipation from duties and tasks of all descriptions.
He strolled over to the bookcase above the desk, and glanced at the volumes revealed through its glass doors. They seemed very serious books, indeed. “Economics of Socialism,” “Capitalist Production,” “The Ethics of Socialism,” “Towards Democracy”—so the titles ran that first met his eye. There were other groups—mainly of history and the essayists—but everything was substantial. His glance sought in vain any lightsome gleam of poetry or fiction. The legend on a thin red book, “Civilization: Its Cause and Cure,” whimsically caught his attention. He put his hand to the key in the bookcase door to get out the volume; then, hesitating, yawned, and looked over the shelves once more. There was nothing else—and really he desired to read nothing.
He would half recline in comfort upon the sofa instead, until his friend came. As a pleasing adjunct to this plan, he drew the table up close, and found room upon it, by crowding them together, for most of the flowers that had been bestowed elsewhere. He seated himself at his ease, with his head resting against the wall, and surveyed the plants and blossoms in affectionate admiration. It was delicious to think how naïve her surprise would be—how great her pleasure! Truly, since his discovery of his birthright, remarkable and varied as had been his experiences, he had done nothing else which afforded him a tithe of the satisfaction he felt now glowing in all his veins. Here, at last, by some curious and devious chance, he had stumbled upon the thing that was genuinely worth doing.
He could hear the cheerful girl in the next room, whistling gently to herself as she moved the furniture about. There came presently the sound of other female voices, and then a sustained, vibrant rattle, quaintly accentuated like the ticking of a telegraph key, which he grew accustomed to, and even found pleasant to the ear.
He put his feet up on the edge of the sofa—and nestled downward till his head was upon it as well. A delicate yet pervasive fragrance from the table close beside him aroused his languid curiosity. Was it the perfume of carnations or of roses?
He closed his eyes the better to decide.
In the outer room, Miss Connie Staples permitted herself numerous and varied speculations as to the identity and purposes of the young man with the flowers, the while she dusted the typewriters, distributed the copy for the morning’s start and set the place in order. She had her sleeves rolled up, and had wound a big handkerchief about her hair; beneath this turban her forehead scored itself in lines of perplexed wonderment as to this curious early caller—but when two other girls arrived, she suffered them to put aside their things and begin work without so much as hinting at what had happened. A third girl, coming a little later, brought in a stray blossom which she had picked up in the corridor outside. She mentioned the fact, and even laid stress upon it, but got no syllable of explanation.
This was all simple enough, but at half-past nine the arrival of still another of the sex put Miss Connie’s resources to an unexpected test.
A handsome, youngish woman, very well dressed indeed, appeared suddenly upon the threshold of the workroom, knocking upon the door and pushing it wide open at the same instant. She looked curiously about, and then point-blank into the face of the girl who came toward her. It was a glance of independent and impersonal criticism which the two exchanged, covering with instantaneous swiftness an infinitude of details as to dress, coiffure, complexion, figure, temperament and origin. Connie wondered if the new-comer was really quite a lady, long before she formulated an inquiring thought about her errand. Even as she finally looked this question of business, she decided that it was an actress with a play for the provinces, and asked herself if she did not seem to recognize the face. The visitor, for her part, saw that Connie’s teeth were too uneven to be false, and that her waist was overlong, and that her hair was not thick enough to be worn flat over the temples, much less to justify so confident a manner. In all, something less than a second of time had elapsed.
“I want to see Miss Bailey—Miss Frank Bailey,” explained the stranger, graciously.
Connie conveyed to her, with courteous brevity, the fact that Miss Bailey had not yet arrived. “Is it something that I can do?” she added.
The other shook her head, and showed an affable thread of white between her freshened lips. “No, I will wait for her,” she answered, and threw a keen glance about the place. “That’s her private room, isn’t it?” she asked, nodding at the closed door to the right. “I will wait in there,” she decided, in the same breath, and began moving toward it.
Connie alertly headed her off. “If you will kindly take a seat here—” she interposed, standing in front of her visitor.
“It’s too noisy out here,” remarked the other; “those horrid machines would give me a headache. Thatisher private room, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” Connie began, lowering her voice, “the room belongs to another office. Or rather, I should say, it is locked. Miss Bailey will be here—with the key—very shortly now.”
“Oh, it’s all right—I’m her sister,” explained the other, in no wise resenting the ineffectual fabrications. She pushed forward past the reluctant girl with a resolute step, and put her hand on the knob of the tabooed door. “Make your mind quite easy, my dear,” she remarked over her shoulder, sinking her voice in turn in deference to the situation; “you’ve done all that could be expected of you—and I’ll tell her so.”
Then, with a momentary gleam of good nature on her pretty face, which the short transparent veil she wore to her chin seemed to accentuate rather than mask, she opened the door, threw up her head with a swift, puzzled glance at what she saw, and then tiptoed gracefully into the room, closing the door with painstaking noiselessness behind her.
Miss Frances Bailey entered her office not many minutes later, her cheeks aglow with the morning air as the wheelwoman meets it. She nodded cheerfully to Connie, and beyond her to the girls at the machines, as her hand sought for a hat-pin at the back of her head.
“Any word from the Lyceum?” she asked. “And what does that Zambesi-travel manuscript make?”
Connie ignored industrial topics. “There are people waiting in there to see you,” she announced, in low, significant tones.
The mistress was impressed by the suggestion of mystery. “People? What people?” she asked, knitting her brows.
“One of them says she’s your sister. And the other is a young gentleman—he came first—and he brought—”
“My sister?” interrupted Miss Bailey. “Cora! Something dreadful must have happened—for she never got out so early as this before in her life. Is she in mourning? Did she seem upset?”
“Nota bit of it!” said Connie, reassuringly. She added, following the other toward the private office: “I tried my best to keep her out here.”
“Why should you?” asked Frances, with wide-open eyes.
“Oh, well—you’ll see,” replied the girl, evasively. “I told you there was some one else in there.”
Frances opened the door—and Connie noted that she too lifted her head and stared a little, and then cautiously closed the door behind her. She pondered this as she returned to her machine, and she curled her thin lip when she took up the copies of the first act of an amateur’s romantic play, to underscore the business directions with red ink, and sew on brown paper covers. Intuition told her that a much better drama was afoot, here under her very nose.
Inside her office, Miss Bailey surrendered herself to frank astonishment at what she beheld.
Bestowed in obvious discomfort upon her sofa, behind an extraordinary bank of potted plants and bright, costly greenhouse flowers, was a young man fast asleep. Her eye took in as well her sister, who sat near the head of the sofa, but she could wait. The interest centered in this sleeping stranger, who made himself so much at home in the shelter of his remarkable floral barricade. She moved round the better to scrutinize his face, which was tilted up as if proudly held even in slumber. Upon examination she recognized the countenance; and in a swift moment of concentration tried to think what his presence might signify. Then she turned to her sister, and lifted her calm brows in mute inquiry.
“Oh, my dear—what splendid business!” whispered Cora, her glance beaming upward from the sofa to the standing figure. “And mind, Frank, I’m in it! I’m in it up to my neck! I sent him to you, dear.”
The girl looked down at them both, and deliberated before she spoke. “If you brought him here,” she said, “I think you’d better take him away again. I can let you out by this other door. Let us have no more publicity than necessary.”
“But you don’t in the least understand!” protested Cora, with her finger raised in an appeal for quiet tones.
“No, I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand,” replied Frances coldly. “There’s one thingyoudon’t understand either, Cora: This is my typewriting office; it isn’t a greenroom at all.”
“Then it well might be,” retorted the other, with a latent grin. “Anything greener than its owner I never saw. Now listen—don’t be a silly cuckoo! I met the youngster last night—and I worked him up till he was mad to learn where you were to be found. I told him—and then I went home, and I couldn’t sleep for thinkin’ of you, dear—and so I turned out at some extraordinary hour this mornin’—it is mornin’ by this time, isn’t it?—and I came here, just to tell you that he was askin’ after you—and I come in here—and lo! here’s the bird on his little nest!—and see the flowers he’s brought from Covent Garden for you!—and so I sit here like Patience on a monument, afraid to wink an eyelash, so’s not to wake him till you come. That’s what I’ve done foryou, dear—and presently, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear what you’ll do for me.”
Frances put a knee upon the chair before her, and rested with her hands upon its back. She sighed a little, and bit her lips. A troubled look came into her gray eyes.
“You might as well say all you have to say,” she said, slowly. “I don’t in the least see what you’re up to—but then I never did.”
“No, dear, you never did,” responded Cora, smiling as if in pleased retrospect. “But that’s no reason why I shouldn’t be a good sister to you. If it’s one’s nature to be a good sister, why, then one will be—and there you are, don’t you see? I take no credit to myself for it.”
“Go on,” said the other. The two women spoke in hushed whispers, and with each sentence stole glances of precaution toward the sleeper.
“Well, Frank, I look to you not to forget what I’ve done. I spent two or three very hard hours last night talkin’ him round, and singin’ your praises to him—and I put Covent Garden into his head, too—-and here he is! And I kept Eddy and Gus off his back, too—they were frightfully keen to get at him—but I said no, and I held ’em to heel. It was all for you, dear. They might have queered the whole pitch, if I’d given ’em their heads. But now about myself. I’m tired, dead tired, of bein’ poor. Of course we get a little something from Lord Julius. But Eddy—you know what Eddy is! No sooner does he pick himself up from Epsom than Ascot gives him a fair knockout, and if he lives through the Sandown Eclipse there’s Goodwood waitin’ for him with a facer. I can’t understand it; other men seem to win sometimes—you’d think the unluckiest duffer would get a look-in once in a while—but no, he just gets hammered one meeting after another. And I’m tired of it, Frank! If I could only go back to work! But if I get an engagement, then Eddy will go playin’ the goat—he’s jealous of everybody about the place from the bandmaster down to the carpenter’s boy—and that makes me unpopular—and there we are, don’t you see! I’m worn out with it. But if I could have eight hundred a year, or even six hundred or five at a pinch—God knows, my wants are simple enough!—and have it paid to me personally, do you see—why, then, life would be worth livin’. Now, what do you say?”
Frances looked moodily down at her distinguished sister, her lips twisted in stormy amusement. “Why not say a thousand and be done with it?” she demanded between set teeth, after an ominous pause. “One would be as intelligent as the other. And oughtn’t I to set your Eddy up with a racing stud while I’m about it? It’s true that I have about twenty pounds a year for my own personal use, and Tom has a standing grievance that I don’t give eventhatto him—but don’t let that interfere with your plans. Whatever you feel that you would like, just give it a name. Couldn’t I lease one of the new Kaffir mansions in Park Lane for you? Or would you prefer something in Grosvenor Square?”
Cora gazed up with such intentness at her unnatural sister that a bright little tear came to shine at the corner of each eye. She put up her veil then, and breathed a cautious sigh. “I didn’t expect this of you, dear,” she said, submissively. “Of course it’s the old story—La Cigale, and ‘go-to-the ant-thou-sluggard’ and all that. I don’t see myself why a typewriting machine should make one so fearfully stony-hearted; you get callouses on your fingers, I know, but you needn’t get ’em on your sisterly affections, one would think. But however”—she wiped her eyes, drew down her veil and allowed a truculent note to sound in her voice—“however, if you won’t play, why then neither will I. I’ve been at pains to put this youngster in your way, but it won’t be much trouble to shunt him out again. You mustn’t think you can walk on me indefinitely, Frank. I’m the best-natured woman in the world, but even I draw the line somewhere.”
“Draw it now then,” said the other, with stern promptitude. “Go away, and take your friend with you and let me get to my work. I don’t know what business either of you had coming here, at all.” As she spoke, she moved to the outer private door, and turned the key in the lock. “You can send for the flowers,” she added, “or I will have them taken over to Charing Cross Hospital—whichever you like.”
Cora rose, her veiled face luminous with a sudden inspiration. “You can’t quarrel with me, dear, no matter how hard you try.” She spoke in low, cooing tones—a triumph of sympathetic voice production. “You’re hard as nails, but I know you’re straight. I will trust my interests absolutely in your hands. I leave it to you to do the fair thing by me.”
“The fair thing?” echoed Frances, in dubious perplexity. She puzzled over the words and their elusive implication. “Your interests?” she repeated—and saw Cora move round her to the unlocked door, and open it—and still sought to comprehend what it was all about. Only when her sister, smiling cordially once more, bent forward without warning and pressed her veiled lips against her chin, and with a gentle “Goodbye, dear!” stepped into the shadows without, did she recall the other features of the situation.
“Here!” she called, with nervous eagerness, yet keeping her voice down, “you’re not to run off like this. Take your man with you.”
“Softly, dear!” Cora enjoined her, from the dusk of the hallway. “Your young women wouldn’t understand. No—I caught him for you, and I leave him in your hands. I’m not in the least afraid to trust it all to you. Bye-bye, dear.”
Frances went out and glared down the staircase, with angry expostulation on her tongue’s end. But there was nobody to talk to. She could hear only the brisk rustle of Cora’s skirts on the stone steps, a floor below—and even that died away beneath the clatter of the machines inside.
Returning over the threshold, she paused, and looked impatiently at the flowers, and at the impassive, slumbering face beyond them. After a little, the lines of vexation began to melt from her brow. In a musing way, she put a hand behind her, and as if unconsciously closed and locked the hall door again. Then she moved to the table, picked up some of the loose blossoms and breathed in their fragrance, still keeping her thoughtful gaze upon the young man. She found the face much older and stronger than she remembered it—and in a spirit of fairness she said to herself that it seemed no whit less innocent. But then perhaps all sleeping faces looked innocent; she could recall that Cora’s certainly did. Holding the carnations to her lips and nostrils, she examined in meditative detail the countenance before her—delicately modeled, dark, nervously high-spirited even in repose. Associations came back as she gazed—the tender eagerness of the lad, the wistful charm with which his fancy had invested England, the frank sweetness of the temperament he had disclosed to her. He had been like a flower himself on that mellow autumn day—as fresh and as goodly to the eye as these roses on the table. But a winter had intervened since then—and what gross disillusionments, what roughening and hardening and corroding experiences had he not encountered! You could not tell anything by a face in sleep; again she assured herself of that.
Why, when one came to think of it, it was enough that Cora had brought him—or sent him, it mattered not which. Whence had she dispatched him?—from some theatrical dance or late supper. It was true that he was not in evening dress—and the thought gave her pause for a moment. But he had been at some place where those wretched cousins of his were present—for Cora had spoken of keeping both Eddy and Gus “off his back”—whatever that might mean. And it was Cora herself who had told him to go to Covent Garden and buy these flowers!
Frances, revolving these unpleasant reflections, discovered all at once that the young man, without betraying by any other motion his awakening, had opened his eyes and was looking placidly across the flowers into her face.
She caught a quick breath, and frowned slightly at him.