The clock of St. Martin's was striking ten as Archdeacon Yale, of Studbury, in Gloucestershire, who had taken breakfast at the Athenæum, walked down the club steps, eastward bound. He was a man of fresh complexion and good presence; of tolerable means and some reputation as the author of a curiously morbid book, "Timon Defended." As he walked the pavement briskly, an unopened letter which peeped from his pocket seemed--and rightly--to indicate a man free from anxieties: a man without a care.
Before he left the dignified stillness of Pall Mall, however, he found leisure to read the note. "I enclose," wrote his wife, "a letter which came for you this morning. I trust, Cyprian, that you are not fretting about the visitation question and that you get your meals fairly well cooked." The Archdeacon paused at this point and smiled as at some pleasant reminiscence. "Give my love to dear Jack. Oh--h'm--I do not recognise your correspondent's handwriting."
"Nor do I!" the Archdeacon said aloud; and he opened the enclosure with a curiosity that had in it no fear of trouble. After glancing at the signature, however, he turned into a side street and read the letter to the end. He sighed. "Oh dear, dear!" he muttered. "What can I do? I must go! There is no room for refusal. And yet--oh dear!--after all these years. Number 14, Sidmouth Street, Gray's Inn Road? What a place!"
It was a shabby third-rate lodging-house place, as perhaps he knew. But he called a cab and had himself driven thither forthwith. At the corner of the street he dismissed the cab and looked about him furtively. For a man who had left his club so free from care, and whose wife at Studbury and son at Lincoln's Inn were well, he wore an anxious face. It could not be--for he was an Archdeacon--that he was about to do anything of which he was ashamed. Bishops, and others of that class, may be open to temptations, or have pages of their lives folded down, which they would not wish turned. But an Archdeacon?
Yet when he was distant a house or so from No. 14 he started guiltily at a very ordinary occurrence; at nothing more than the arrival of a hansom cab at the door. True, a young woman descended from it, and let herself into the house with a latchkey. But young women and latchkeys are common in London, as common as--as dirt. It could hardly be that which darkened his face as he rang the bell.
In the hall, where a dun was sitting, there was little to remove the prejudice he may have conceived; little, too, in the dingy staircase, cumbered with plates and stale food; or in the first-floor rooms, from which some one peeped and another whispered, and both giggled; or in that second-floor room, at once smart and shabby, and remarkable for many photographs of one young girl, where he was bidden to wait--little or nothing. But when he had pished and pshawed at the tenth photograph, he was called into an inner room, where a strange silence prevailed. Involuntarily he stepped softly. "It was kind of you to come," some one said--some one who was lying in a great chair brought very near to the open window that the speaker might breathe more easily--"very kind. And you have come so quickly."
"I have been in London some days," he answered gently, the fastidious expression gone from his face. "Your daughter's letter followed me from the country and reached me an hour ago. It has been no trouble to me to come. I am only pained at finding you so ill."
"Ah!" she answered. Doubtless her thoughts were busy; while his flew back nearly thirty years to a summer evening, when he had walked with her under the trees in Chelsea Gardens and heard her pour into his ear--she was a young actress in the first blush of success--her hopes and ambitions. There was nothing in the memory of which he had need to be ashamed. In those days he had been reading for orders, and, having lodgings in a respectable street, had come by chance to know two of his neighbours--her mother and herself. The two were living a quiet domestic life, which surprised and impressed him. The girl's talent and the contrast between her notoriety and her simple ways had had a charm for him. For some months the neophyte and the actress were as brother and sister. But there the feeling had stopped; and when his appointment to a country curacy had closed this pretty episode in his life, the exchange of a few letters had but added grace to its ending.
Now old feelings rose to swell his pity as he traced the girl's features in the woman's face. "You have a daughter. You have been married since we parted," he said.
"Yes. It is for her sake I have troubled you," was her answer. "She is a good girl--oh, so good! But she has no one in the world except me, and I am leaving her. Poor Grissel!"
"She is on the stage?" he inquired gravely.
"Yes; and she has succeeded young, as I did. We have not been unhappy together. You remember the life my mother and I had? I think it has been the same over again."
She smiled ever so little. He remembered something of the quiet pathos of that life. "Your husband is dead?" he asked.
"Dead! I wish he were!" she answered bitterly, the smile passing from her face. "My girl had better be alone than with her father. Ah, you do not know! When he went to America years ago--with another woman--I thanked God for it. Dead? Oh, no! There is no chance that he is dead."
Mr. Yale was shocked. "You have not got a divorce?" he said.
"No. After he left me I fell ill, and there were expenses. We were very poor until last year, when Grissel made a good engagement. That is why we are here. Now that her name is known he will come back and find her out. She plays as Kittie Latouche, but the profession know who she is, and--and what can I do? Oh, Mr. Yale! tell me what I can do for her."
Her anxiety unnerved him. Her terror of the future, not her own, but her child's, wrung his heart. He had a presentiment whither she was leading him; and he tried to escape, he tried to murmur some commonplace of encouragement.
"You may yet recover," he urged. "At any rate, there will be time to talk of this again."
"There will not be time," she entreated him. "I have scarcely three days to live, and then my child will be alone. Oh, Mr. Yale! help me. She is young and handsome, with no one to guide her. If her father return, he will be her worst enemy. There is some one, too--some gentleman--who has fallen in with her, and been here. He may be a friend--what you were to me--or not! Don't you understand me?" she cried piteously. "How can I leave her unless you--there is no one else whom I can ask--will protect her?"
He started and looked round for relief, but found none. "I? It is impossible!" he cried. "Oh dear, dear! I am afraid that it is impossible, Mrs. Kent."
"Not impossible! I do not ask you to give her a home or money! Only care. If you will be her guardian--her friend----"
She was a woman dying in sore straits. He was a merciful man. In the end he promised to do what she wished. Then he hastened to escape her gratitude, unconscious, as he passed down the stairs, of the whispering and giggling, the slatternliness and dirt, which had been so dreadful to him on his entrance.
He walked along Oxford Street in a reverie, "Poor thing!" falling from him at intervals, until he reached the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and his eye rested upon a hoarding--at the first idly, then with a purpose, finally with a sidelong glance. The advertisement which had caught his attention was a coarse engraving of half a dozen heads, arranged in a circle, with one in the centre. Under this last, which was larger and more staring, and less to be evaded than the others, appeared the words, "Miss Kittie Latouche." He went on with a shiver, crossing here and there to avoid the hoardings, but only to fall in with a string of sandwich-men bearing the same device. He plunged into the haven of Soho as if he were a political conspirator.
The portrait and the name of his ward! In a few days he would be left in charge of an actress whose name was known to all London--guardian,in loco parentis, what you will, of the closest and most responsible, to a giddy girl of unknown antecedents, and too well-known name! He wondered whether Archdeacon had ever been in such a position before, a position which it would be hard to acknowledge and impossible to explain. He could talk of his old friendship for her mother, the actress, and his duty to a dying woman. But would the world believe him? Would even his wife believe him? Would not she read much between the lines, though the space were white as snow? He, a man of nearly sixty, grew red and white by turns as he thought of this.
"I will tell Jack the story," was his first resolve. "I will tell it him at dinner to-night," he groaned. But would he have the courage? He had much respect for his son's practical nature. He had heard him called "hard as nails." And when he found himself opposite to him, and eyed the close-shaven young lawyer, who looked a decade older than his years, he resorted to a subterfuge.
"Jack," he said, "I want your opinion for a friend of mine."
"It is at your service, sir," his son said, his hand upon the apricots. "What is the subject? Law?"
"Not precisely," the Archdeacon replied, clearing his throat. "It is rather a question of knowledge of the world. You know, my boy," he went on, "that I have a very high opinion of your discretion."
"You are very good," said Jack. And he did that which was unusual with him. He blushed; but the other did not observe it.
"My friend, who, I may say, is a clergyman in my archdeaconry," the elder gentleman resumed, "has been appointed guardian--it is a ridiculous thing for a man in his position--to a--a young actress. She is quite a girl, I understand, but of some notoriety."
"Indeed," said Jack drily. "May I ask how that came about? Wards of that kind do not fall from heaven--as a rule."
The Archdeacon winced. "He tells me," he explained, "that her mother was an old friend of his, and when she died, some time back, she left the girl as a kind of legacy, you see."
"A legacy to him, sir?"
"To him, certainly," the elder man said in some distress. "You follow me?"
"Quite so," said Jack. "Oh, quite so! A common thing, no doubt. Did you say that your friend was a married man, sir?"
"Yes," the Archdeacon replied faintly.
"Just so! just so!" his son said, in the same tone, a tone that was so dreadful to the Archdeacon that it needed Jack's question, "And what is the point upon which he wants advice?" to induce him to go on.
"What he had better do, being a clergyman."
"He should have thought of that earlier--ahem!--I mean it depends a good deal on the young lady. There are actressesandactresses, you know."
"I suppose so," the Archdeacon admitted grudgingly. He was in a mood to see the darkest side of his difficulty.
"Of course there are!" Jack said, for him quite warmly. And indeed that is the worst of barristers. They will argue in season and out of season if you do not agree with them quickly. "Some are as good--as good girls as my mother when you married her, sir."
"Well, well, she may be a good girl--I do not know," the elder man allowed.
"You always had a prejudice against the stage, sir."
The Archdeacon looked up sharply, thinking this uncalled for; unless, horrible thought! his son knew something of the matter, and was chaffing him. He made an effort to get on firmer ground. "Granted she is a good girl," he said, "there are still two difficulties. Her father is a rascal, and there is a man, probably a rascal too, hanging about her, and likely to give trouble in another way."
Jack nodded and sagely pondered the position. "I think I should advise your friend to get some respectable woman to live with the girl," he suggested, "and play the duenna--first getting rid of your second rascal."
"But how will you do that? And what would you do about the father?"
"Buy him off!" said Jack curtly. "As to the lover, have an interview with him. Say to him, 'Do you wish to marry my ward? If you do, who are you? If you do not, go about your business.'"
"But if he will not go," the Archdeacon said, "what can my friend do?"
"Well, indeed," replied Jack, looking rather nonplussed, "I hardly know, unless you make her a ward of court. You see," he added apologetically, "your friend's position is a little--shall I say a little anomalous?"
The Archdeacon shuddered. He dropped his napkin and picked it up again, to hide his dismay. Then he plunged into a fresh subject. When his son upon some excuse left him early, he was glad to be alone. He had now a course laid down for him, and acting upon it, he next day saw the landlady in Sidmouth Street and requested her to take charge of the young lady in the event of the mother's death and to guard her from intrusion until other arrangements could be made. "You will look to me for all expenses," the Archdeacon added, seizing with eagerness the only ground on which he felt himself at home. To which the landlady gladly said she would, and accepted Mr. Yale's address at the Athenæum Club as a personal favour to herself.
So the Archdeacon, free for the moment, went down to Studbury, and as he walked about his shrubberies with the scent of his wife's old-fashioned flowers in the air, or sat drinking his glass of Leoville '74 after dinner while Vinnells the butler, anxious to get to his supper, rattled the spoons on the sideboard, he tried to believe it a dream. What, he wondered, would Vinnells say if he knew that master had a ward, and that ward a play-actress? Or, as Studbury would prefer to style her, a painted Jezebel? And what would Mrs. Yale say, who loved lavender, and had seen a ballet--once? Was Archdeacon ever, he asked himself, in a position so--so anomalous before?
"My dear," his wife remarked when he had read his letters one morning, a week or two later, "I am sure you are not well. I have noticed that you have not been yourself since you were in London."
"Nonsense," he replied tartly.
"It is not nonsense. There is something preying on your mind. I believe," she persisted, "it is that visitation, Cyprian, that is troubling you."
"Visitation? What visitation?" he asked incautiously. For indeed he had forgotten all about that very important business, and could think only of a visitation more personal to himself. Before his wife could hold up her hands in astonishment, "What visitation! indeed!" he had escaped into the open air. Mrs. Kent was dead.
Yes, the blow had fallen; but the first shock over, things were made easy for him. He wrote to his ward as soon after the funeral as seemed decent, and her answer pleased him greatly. Ready as he was to scent misbehaviour in the air, he thought it a proper letter, a good girl's letter. She did not deny his right to give advice. She had not, she said, seen the gentleman he mentioned since her mother's death, although Mr. Charles Williams--that was his name--had called several times. But she had given him an appointment for the following Tuesday, and was willing that Mr. Yale should see him on that occasion.
All this in a formal and precise way; but there was something in the tone of her reference to Mr. Williams which led the Archdeacon to smile. "She is over head and ears in love," he thought. And in his reply, after saying that he would be in Sidmouth Street on Tuesday at the hour named, he added that if there appeared to be nothing against Mr. Charles Williams he, the Archdeacon, would have pleasure in forwarding his ward's happiness.
"I am going to London to-morrow, my dear, for two nights," he said to his wife on the Sunday evening. "I have some business there."
Mrs. Yale sat silent for a moment, as if she had not heard. Then she laid down her book and folded her hands. "Cyprian," she said, "what is it?"
The Archdeacon was fussing with his pile of sermons and did not turn. "What is what, my dear?" he asked.
"Why are you going to London?"
"On business, my dear; business," he said lightly.
"Yes, but what business?" replied Mrs. Yale with decision. "Cyprian, you are keeping something from me; you were not used to have secrets from me. Tell me what it is."
But he remained obstinately silent. He would not tell a lie, and he could not tell the truth.
"Is it about Jack?" with sudden conviction. "I know what it is; he has entangled himself with some girl!"
The Archdeacon laughed oddly. "You ought to know your son better by this time, my dear. He is about as likely to entangle himself with a girl as--as I am."
But Mrs. Yale shook her head unconvinced. The Archdeacon was a landowner, though a poor one. It was his ambition, and his wife's, that Jack should some day be rich enough to live at the Hall, instead of letting it, as his father found it necessary to do. But while the Archdeacon considered that Jack's way to the Hall lay over the woolsack, his wife had in view a short cut through the marriage market; being a woman, and so thinking it a small sin in a man to marry for money. Consequently she lived in fear lest Jack should be entrapped by some penniless fair one, and was not wholly reassured now. "Well, I shall be sure to find out, Cyprian," she said warningly, "if you are deceiving me."
And these words recurred disagreeably to the Archdeacon's mind on his way to town and afterwards. They rendered him as sensitive as a mole in the sunshine. He found London almost intolerable. He could not walk the streets without seeing those horrid placards, nor take up a newspaper without being stared out of countenance by the name "Kittie Latouche." While his conscience so multiplied each bill and poster and programme that in twenty-four hours London seemed to him a great hoarding of which his ward was the sole lessee.
Naturally he shrank into himself as he passed down Sidmouth Street next day. He pondered, standing on the steps of No. 14, what the neighbours thought of the house; whether they knew that "Kittie Latouche" lived there. He was spared the giggling and dirty plates on the stairs, but looking round the room at the ten photographs, and thinking what Mrs. Yale would say could she see him, he shuddered. Nervously he picked up the first pamphlet he saw on the table. It was a trifle in one act: "The Tench," Lacy's edition, by Charles Williams. He set it down with a grimace, and a word about birds of a feather. And then the door by which he had entered opened behind him, and he turned.
One look was enough. The kindly expression faded from his handsome features. His face turned to flame. The veins of his forehead swelled with passion, and he strode forward as though he would lay hands on the intruder. "How dare you," he cried when he could find his voice--"how dare you follow me? How dare you play the spy upon me, sir? Speak!"
But Jack--for Jack it was--had no answer ready. He seemed to have lost for once (astonished at being taken in this way, perhaps) his presence of mind. "I do not--understand," he said helplessly.
"Understand? You understand," the Archdeacon cried, his son's very confusion condemning him unheard, "that you have meanly followed me to--to detect me in--in----" And then he came to a deadlock, and, redder than before, thundered, "Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir?"
"I thought I saw a back I knew," Jack muttered, looking everywhere but at his father, which was terribly irritating. "I was coming through the street."
"You were coming through the street? I suppose you often pass through Sidmouth Street!" retorted the Archdeacon with withering sarcasm. But his wrath was growing cool.
"Very often," said Jack so sturdily that his father could not but believe him, and was further sobered. "I saw a back I thought I knew, and I came in here. I had no intention of offending you, sir. And now I think I will go," he added, looking about him uneasily, "and--and speak to you another time."
But the Archdeacon's anger was quite gone now. A wretched embarrassment was taking its place as it dawned upon him that after all Jack might by pure chance have seen him enter and have followed innocently. In that case how had he committed himself by his outbreak--how indeed! "Jack," he said, "I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon, Jack. I see I was mistaken. Do not go, my boy, until I have explained to you why I am here. It is not," he went on, smiling a wretched smile at the pretty faces round him, "quite the place in which you would expect to find me."
"It is certainly not the place in which I did expect to find you," Jack said bluntly. And he looked about him, also in a dazed fashion, as if the Archdeacon and the photographs were not a conjunction for which he was prepared.
"No, no," assented the Archdeacon, wincing, however. "But it is the simplest piece of business in the world which has brought me here." And he recalled to his son's memory their talk at the club.
"Ah, I understand!" Jack said, as if he did, too. "You have come about your friend's business."
The Archdeacon could not hide a spasm. "Well, not precisely. To tell you the truth, there never was a friend, Jack. But," he went on hurriedly, holding up a hand of dignified protest, for Jack was looking at him queerly, very queerly, "you know me too well to doubt me, I hope, when I say there is no ground for doubt?"
The son's keen eyes met the father's for an instant, and then a rare smile softened them as the men's hands met. "I do, sir. You may be sure of that!" he said brightly.
The Archdeacon cleared his throat. "Thank you," he said; "now I think you will understand the position. Miss Kent, the young lady in question, lives here; and I have called to-day to see her by appointment."
"The dickens you have! It is like your impudence!" cried some one--some one behind them.
Both men swung round at the interruption. In the doorway, holding the door open with one hand, while with the other set against the wall he balanced himself on his feet, stood a smart Jewish-looking man. "The dickens you have!" this gentleman repeated, leering on the two most unpleasantly. "So that is your game, is it? Ain't you ashamed of yourself," he continued, addressing himself to the shuddering Archdeacon--and how far away seemed Vinnells and the lavender, and the calm delights of Studbury at that moment!--"ain't you ashamed of yourself, old man?"
"This is a private room," Jack said sternly, anticipating his father's outburst. "You do not seem to be aware of it, my friend."
"A private room, is it?" the visitor replied, closing one eye with much enjoyment. "A private room, and what then?"
"This much, that you are requested to leave it."
"Ho, ho!" the man replied; "so you would put me out of my daughter's room, would you--out of my own daughter's room? I daresay that you would like to do it." Then, with a sudden change to ferocity, he added, "You are bragging above your cards, young man, you are! Dry up, do you hear? Dry up."
And Jack did dry up, falling back against the table with a white face. The Archdeacon, even in his own misery--misery which far exceeded his presentiments--saw and marvelled at his son's collapse. That Jack, keen, practical, hard-headed, should be so completely overwhelmed by collision with this creature, so plainly scared by his insinuations, infected the Archdeacon with a kind of terror. Yet, struggling against the feeling, he forced himself to say, "You are Mr. Kent, I presume?"
"I am, sir; yours to command," swaggered the wretch.
"Then I may tell you that your daughter," the Archdeacon continued, resuming something of his natural self-possession, "was left in my charge by your wife, and that I am here in consequence of that arrangement."
"Gammon!" Mr. Kent replied, distinctly, putting his tongue in his cheek. "Gammon! Do you think that that story will go down with me? Do you think it will go down with any one?"
"It is the truth."
"All right; but look here, when did you see my wife? On her death-bed. And before that--not for twenty years. Well, what do you make of it now? Why," he exclaimed, with admiration in his tone, "you have the impudence of the old one himself! Fie on you, sir! Ain't you ashamed of hanging about stage doors, and following actresses home at your age? But I know you. And your friends shall know you, Archdeacon Yale, of the Athenæum Club. You will hear more of this!"
"You are an insolent fellow!" the clergyman cried. But the perspiration stood in great beads upon his brow, and his quivering lips betrayed the agony of his soul as he writhed under the man's coarse insinuations. The awkwardness, the improbability of the tale he would have to tell in his defence flashed across his mind while the other spoke. He saw how cogently the silence he had maintained about the matter would tell against him. He pictured the nudge of one friend, the wink of another, and his own crimsoning cheeks. His son's unwonted silence, too, touched him home. Yet he tried to bear himself as an innocent man; he struggled to give back look for look. "You are a madman and a scoundrel, besides being drunk!" he said stoutly. "If it were not so, or--or I were as young as my son here----"
"I do not see him," the man answered curtly.
"Jack!" the Archdeacon cried, purple with indignation. "Jack! if you have a voice, speak to him, sir!"
"It won't do," Mr. Kent replied, shaking his head. "Call him Charley, and I might believe you."
"Charley?" repeated the Archdeacon mechanically.
"Ay, Charley--Charley Williams. Oh I know him, too," with vulgar triumph. "I have not been hanging about this house for two days for nothing. He has been here heaps of times! What you two are doing together beats me, I confess. But I am certain of this, that I have caught you both--killed two birds with one stone."
It was the Archdeacon's turn to fall back, aghast. The light that shone upon him with those words so blinded him that every spark of his anger paled and dwindled before it. His son, Charles Williams? He sought in that son's eyes some gleam of denial. But Jack's eyes avoided his; Jack's downcast air seemed only too strongly to confirm the charge. The shock was a severe one, taking from him all thought of himself. The why and wherefore of his presence there could never again be questioned. A real sorrow, a real trouble, gave him courage. "Jack!" he said, "we had better go from here. Come with me. For you, sir," he continued, turning to the actor, "your suspicions are natural to you. Nothing I can say will remove them. So be it. They affect me not one whit. It is enough for me that I came here in all honour, and with an honourable purpose."
"Indeed," replied Mr. Kent mockingly. "Indeed? And your son, Mr. Charles Jack Williams Yale, Archdeacon? No doubt you will answer for him, as he has not got a word to say for himself? He, too, came with an honourable purpose, I suppose? Oh yes, of course; we are all honourable men!"
For an instant the Archdeacon quailed. He saw the pitfall dug before him. He knew all that his answer would imply of disappointed hopes and a vain ambition. He recognised all that might be made of it by his listeners, friend or foe, and he blenched. But the cynical eye and sneering lip of the wretch recalled him to himself. Nay, he seemed to rise above himself, as he replied more sternly, "Yes, sir; Iwillanswer for my son, as for myself! I will answer for him that he came here in all honour."
The man sneered still. But he knew better things if he did not ensue them, and he stood aside with secret respect and let the two go unmolested.
"Sir," Jack said, when they had walked halfway down the street in silence, which his father showed no sign of breaking, "you are thinking more ill of me than I deserve."
"You gave a false name," the Archdeacon snarled.
"Not in a sense--not wilfully, I mean. I wrote a play some time ago, and, as is usual for professional men, I submitted it under anom de plume. I was known as Charles Williams at the theatre, and I had no more idea of doing wrong when I was introduced to Grissel in that name than I have now."
"I hope not," the Archdeacon said grimly. He was not a man to go back from an engagement. "I trust not," he added with a bitterness. "You may break your word to the girl if you please, but I will not break mine to the mother. So help me Heaven!"
"Sir," Jack said, his utterance a little husky, "God bless you! She is a good girl, and some day she will honour you as I do."
They parted without more words. The Archdeacon, hardly master of his thoughts, walked on until he reached the corner of Oxford Street. There he paused, and seeing girls pass, young, graceful, soft-eyed, leaning back in carriages with parcels round them, ay, and thinking that Jack might have chosen out of all these, while he had chosen in Sidmouth Street--Sidmouth Street, Gray's Inn Road--he could not stifle a groan. He plunged recklessly across and found himself presently in St. James' Square, and round and round this he walked, fighting the battle with himself. His poor wife, that was the burden of his cry. His poor wife, and the shock it would be to her, and the downfall of hopes! He knew that she a woman would recoil from such a daughter-in-law far more than he did, who had known Grissel's mother, and knew that actresses may be good and true women. It would be dreadful for her, with her old-world notions; the Archdeacon knew it. But he valued one thing above even the peace of his home, and that was his honour. It was not in sarcasm we called him a good man. To break his word to the dead woman who had trusted him; to leave this girl, whom it behooved him to protect, in the hands of her wretched father, and so to leave her with her faith in goodness shattered--this he could not do.
But he was tempted to think hard things of Jack, to think that Jack, who had never given him the heartache before, had better not have been born than bring this trouble on them. It went no farther than temptation; and he was marvellously thankful next morning that he had not framed the thought in words; for, as he entered the breakfast-room, looking a year older than he had looked, chipping his egg yesterday, the hall-porter put a telegram into his hands. "Come at once--Jack," were the words that first made themselves intelligible to him; and then, a few seconds later, the address "St. Thomas's Hospital."
How swiftly does a great misfortune, a great loss, a great pain, expel a less! I have known a man lose his wife and go heavily for a month, and then losing a thousand pounds become as oblivious of her as if she had never been born. But the Archdeacon was not such a man, and rattling towards Westminster in a cab he felt not only that a thousand pounds would be a small price to pay for his son's safety, but that, if Providence should take him at his thought, he might have worse news for his wife than those tidings which had almost aged him in a night.
His son, however, met him at the great gates, whole and sound, but with a grave face. "You are too late, sir," he said quietly. But he flushed a little at the grasp of his father's hand, and a little more when the Archdeacon told him to pay the cabman a double fare. "I have brought you here for nothing. He died a quarter of an hour ago, sinking very rapidly after I sent to you."
"Who? Who died?" the Archdeacon asked, pressing one hand heavily on the other's shoulder, as they walked back towards the bridge.
"Mr. Kent."
The elder man said nothing for a while--aloud at least. But presently he asked Jack to tell him about it.
"There is little to tell. After we left him he went out. Going home late last night, and not I fear sober, he was run down by a road-car. When they brought him to the hospital he was hopelessly injured, but quite sensible. They fetched his daughter, and then he asked for me--as your son. He did not know my address, but the assistant-surgeon happened to be a friend of mine, and did, and he sent a cab for me."
And really that seemed all. "It is very, very sudden; but--Heaven forgive me!--I cannot regret his death," the clergyman said. "It is impossible."
They had reached the corner of the bridge. "There is something else I should tell you," Jack said nervously. "When he had sent for me he had a lawyer brought, and made his will."
"His will!" the Archdeacon repeated, somewhat startled. "Had he anything to leave?" He asked the question, rather in pity for so wretched a creature as the man seemed to him, than out of curiosity.
"If we may believe him," Jack said slowly, "and I think he was telling the truth, he was worth thirty thousand pounds."
"Impossible!" the Archdeacon cried.
"I do not know," replied Jack. "But we shall learn. He said he had made it in oil, and had come home a poor man to see how his wife and child would receive him. I do not think he was all bad," Jack continued thoughtfully. "There must have been a streak of romance in him."
"I fear," the Archdeacon muttered very sensibly, "that it is all romance!"
But it was not all romance; there is oil in the States yet, and Mr. Kent, of whom since he is dead we all speak with respect, by hook or crook had got his share. The thirty thousand pounds were discovered pleasantly fructifying in Argentine railways, and proved as many reasons why Mrs. Yale, when Jack's fate became known to her, should smile again. The Archdeacon put it neatly: To marry an actress is a grave offence because a common one, and one easily committed; but to marry an actress with thirty thousand pounds! Such ladies are not blackberries, not do they grow on every bush.
"Mr. and Mrs. John Yale have not yet established themselves at the Hall. They live at Henley, and their house is the summer resort of all kinds of people, among whom the Archdeacon is a very butterfly. An idea prevails--though a few of us are in the secret--that Mrs. Jack comes, in common with so many pretty women, of an old Irish family; and the other day I overheard an amusing scrap of conversation at her table. 'Mrs. Yale,' some one said, 'do you know that you remind me, I if may say it without offence, of Miss Kittie Latouche, the actress?'"
"Indeed?" the lady replied with a charming blush. "But do you know that you are on dangerous ground? My husband was in love with that lady before he knew me. And I believe that he regrets her now."
"Tit for tat!" cried Jack. "Let us all tell tales. If my wife was not in love with one Mr. Charles Williams a month--only a month--before she married me, I will eat her."
"Oh, Jack!" the lady exclaimed, covered with confusion. But this story would not be believed in Studbury, where Mrs. John passes for being a little shy, a little timid, and not a little prudish.
"Clare," I said, "I wish that we had brought some better clothes, if it were only one frock. You look the oddest figure."
And she did. She was lying head to head with me on the thick moss which clothed one part of the river bank above Breistolen near the Sogne Fiord. We were staying at Breistolen, but there was no moss there, nor in all the Sogne district, I often thought, so deep and soft, and of so dazzling an orange and white and crimson as that particular patch. It lay quite high upon the hills, and there were gigantic grey boulders peeping through the moss here and there, very fit to break your legs if you were careless. Little more than a mile above us was the watershed, where our river, putting away with reluctance a first thought of going down the farther slope towards Bysberg, parted from its twin brother--who was thither bound with scores upon scores of puny green-backed fishlets--and instead, came down our side gliding and swishing and swirling faster and faster, and deeper and wider, and full, too, of red-speckled yellow trout all half-a-pound apiece, and very good to eat.
But they were not so sweet or toothsome to our girlish tastes as the tawny-orange cloud-berries which Clare and I were eating as we lay. So busy was she with the luscious pile we had gathered that I had to wait for an answer. And then, "Speak for yourself," she said. "I'm sure you look like a short-coated baby. He is somewhere up the river, too." Munch, munch, munch!
"Who is, you greedy little chit?"
"Oh, you know," she answered. "Don't you wish you had your grey plush here, Bab?"
I flung a look of calm disdain at her; but whether it was the berry juice which stained our faces that took from its effect, or the free mountain air which father says saps the foundations of despotism, that made her callous, at any rate she only laughed scornfully and got up and went down the stream with her rod, leaving me to finish the cloud-berries, and stare lazily up at the snow patches on the hillside--which somehow put me in mind of the grey plush--and follow or not as I liked.
Clare has a wicked story of how I gave in to father, and came to start without anything but those rough clothes. She says he said--and Jack Buchanan has told me that lawyers put no faith in anything that he says she says, or she says he says, which proves how little truth there is in this--that if Bab took none but her oldest clothes, and fished all day and had no one to run her errands--he meant Jack and the others--she might possibly grow an inch in Norway. As if I wanted to grow an inch! An inch indeed! I am five feet one and a half high, and father, who puts me an inch shorter, is the worst measurer in the world. As for Miss Clare, she would give all her inches for my eyes. So there!
After Clare left it began to be dull and chilly. When I had pictured to myself how nice it would be to dress for dinner again, and chosen the frock I would wear upon the first evening, I grew tired of the snow patches, and started up stream, stumbling and falling into holes, and clambering over rocks, and only careful to save my rod and my face. It was no occasion for the grey plush, but I had made up my mind to reach a pool which lay, I knew, a little above me. I had filched a yellow-bodied fly from Clare's hat with a view to that particular place.
Our river--pleased to be so young, I suppose--did the oddest things hereabouts. It was not a great churning stream of snow water foaming and milky, such as we had seen in some parts, streams which affected to be always in flood, and had the look of forcing the rocks asunder and clearing their paths even while you watched them with your fingers in your ears. Our river was none of these; still it was swifter than English rivers are wont to be, and in parts deeper, and transparent as glass. In one place it would sweep over a ledge and fall wreathed in spray into a spreading lake of black, rock-bound water. Then it would narrow again until, where you could almost jump across, it darted smooth and unbroken down a polished shoot with a swoop like a swallow's. Out of this it would hurry afresh to brawl along a gravelly bed, skipping jauntily over first one and then another ridge of stones that had silted up weir-wise and made as if they would bar the channel. Under the lee of these there were lovely pools.
To be able to throw into mine, I had to walk out along the ridge on which the water was shallow, yet deep enough to cover my boots. But I was well rewarded. The "forellin"--the Norse name for trout, and as pretty as their girls' wavy fair hair--were rising so merrily that I hooked and landed one in five minutes, the fly falling from its mouth as it touched the stones. I hate taking out hooks. I used at one time to leave the fly in the fish's mouth to be removed by father at the weighing house; until Clare pricked her tongue at dinner with an almost new, red tackle, and was so mean as to keep it, though I remembered what I had done with it, and was certain it was mine--which was nothing less than dishonest of her.
I had just got back to my place and made a fine cast, when there came--not the leap, and splash, and tug which announced the half-pounder--but a deep, rich gurgle as the fly was gently sucked under, and then a quiet, growing strain upon the line which began to move away down the pool in a way that made the winch spin again and filled me with mysterious pleasure. I was not conscious of striking or of anything but that I had hooked a really good fish; and I clutched the rod with both hands and set my feet as tightly as I could upon the slippery gravel. The line moved up and down, and this way and that, now steadily and as with a purpose, and then again with an eccentric rush that made the top of the rod spring and bend so that I looked for it to snap each moment. My hands began to grow numb, and the landing-net, hitherto an ornament, fell out of my waist-belt and went I knew not whither. I suppose I must have stepped unwittingly into deeper water, for I felt that my skirts were afloat, and altogether things were going dreadfully against me, when the presence of a reinforcement was announced by a cheery shout from the far side of the river.
"Keep up your point! Keep up your point!" some one cried briskly. "That is better!"
The unexpected sound--it was a man's voice--did something to keep up my heart. But for answer I could only shriek, "I can't! It will break!" as I watched the top of my rod jigging up and down, very much in the fashion of Clare performing what she calls a waltz. She dances as badly as a man.
"No, it will not," he cried bluntly. "Keep it up, and let out a little line with your fingers when he pulls hardest."
We were forced to shout and scream. The wind had risen and was adding to the noise of the water. Soon I heard him wading behind me. "Where's your landing-net?" he asked, with the most provoking coolness.
"Oh, in the pool! Somewhere about. I don't know," I answered, wildly.
What he said to this I could not catch, but it sounded rude. Then he waded off to fetch, as I guessed, his own net. By the time he reached me again I was in a sad plight, feet like ice, and hands benumbed, while the wind, and rain, and hail, which had come down upon us with a sudden violence, unknown, it is to be hoped, anywhere else, were mottling my face all kinds of unbecoming colours. But the line was taut. And wet and cold went for nothing five minutes later, when the fish lay upon the bank, its prismatic sides slowly turning pale and dull, and I knelt over it half in pity and half in triumph, but wholly forgetful of the wind and rain.
"You did that very pluckily, little one," said the on-looker; "but I am afraid you will suffer for it by-and-by. You must be chilled through."
Quickly as I looked at him, I only met a good-humoured smile. He did not mean to be rude. And after all, when I was in such a mess it was not possible that he could see what I was like. He was wet enough himself. The rain was streaming from the brim of the soft hat which he had turned down to shelter his face; it was trickling from his chin, and turning his shabby Norfolk jacket a darker shade. As for his hands, they looked red and knuckly, and he had been wading almost to his waist. But he looked, I don't know why, all the manlier and nicer for these things, because, perhaps, he cared for them not a whit. What I looked like myself I dared not think. My skirts were as short as short could be, and they were soaked; most of my hair was unplaited, my gloves were split, and my sodden boots were out of shape. I was forced, too, to shiver and shake with cold, which was provoking, for I knew that it made me seem half as small again.
"Thank you, I am a little cold, Mr. ----, Mr. ----?" I said gravely, only my teeth would chatter so that he laughed outright as he took me up with--
"Herapath. And to whom have I the honour of speaking?"
"I am Miss Guest," I said, miserably. It was too cold to be frigid with advantage.
"Commonly called Bab, I think," the wretch answered. "The walls of our hut are not soundproof, you see. But come, the sooner you get back to dry clothes and the stove, the better, Bab. You can cross the river just below, and cut off half a mile that way."
"I can't," I said, obstinately. Bab, indeed! How dared he?
"Oh yes, you can," he answered, with intolerable good temper. "You shall take your rod and I the prey. You cannot be wetter than you are now."
He had his way, of course, since I did not foresee that at the ford he would lift me up bodily and carry me over the deeper part without a pretence of asking leave, or a word of apology. It was done so quickly that I had no time to remonstrate. Still I was not going to let it pass, and when I had shaken myself straight again, I said, with all the haughtiness I could assume, "Don't you think, Mr. Herapath, that it would have been more--more----"
"Polite to offer to carry you over, child? No, not at all. And now it will be wiser and warmer for you to run down the hill. Come along!"
And without more ado, while I was still choking with rage, he seized my hand and set off at a trot, lugging me through the sloppy places much as I have seen a nurse drag a fractious child down Constitution Hill. It was not wonderful that I soon lost the little breath his speech had left me, and was powerless to complain when we reached the bridge. I could only thank Heaven that there was no sign of Clare. I think I should have died of mortification if she had seen us come down the hill hand-in-hand in that ridiculous fashion. But she had gone home, and at any rate I escaped that degradation.
A wet stool-car and wetter pony were dimly visible on the bridge; to which, as we came up, a damp urchin creeping from some crevice added himself. I was pushed in as if I had no will of my own, the gentleman sprang up beside me, the boy tucked himself away somewhere behind, and the little "teste" set off at a canter, so deceived by the driver's excellent imitation of "Pss," the Norse for "Tchk," that in ten minutes we were at home.
"Well, I never!" Clare said, surveying me from a respectful distance, when at last I was safe in our room. "I would not be seen in such a state by a man for all the fish in the sea!"
And she looked so tall, and trim, and neat, that it was the more provoking. At the moment I was too miserable to answer her; and I had to find comfort in promising myself, that when we were back in Bolton Gardens I would see that Fräulein kept Miss Clare's pretty nose to the grindstone though it were ever so much her last term, or Jack were ever so fond of her. Father was in the plot against me, too. What right had he to thank Mr. Herapath for bringing "his little girl" home safe? He can be pompous enough at times. I never knew a stout Queen's Counsel--and he is stout--who was not, any more than a thin one, who did not contradict. It is in their parents, I believe.
Mr. Herapath dined with us that evening--if fish and potatoes and boiled eggs, and sour bread and pancakes, and claret and coffee can be called a dinner--but nothing I could do, though I made the best of my wretched frock and was as stiff as Clare herself, could alter his first impression. It was too bad; he had no eyes! He either could not or would not see any one but the draggled Bab--fifteen at most and a very tom-boy--whom he had carried across the river. He styled Clare, who talked Baedeker to him in her primmest and most precocious way, Miss Guest; and once at least during the evening he dubbed me plain Bab. I tried to freeze him with a look then, and father gave him a taste of his pompous manner, saying coldly that I was older than I seemed. But it was not a bit of use; I could see that he set it all down to the grand airs of a spoiled child. If I had put my hair up, it might have opened his eyes, but Clare teased me about it and I was too proud for that.
When I asked him if he was fond of dancing, he said good-naturedly, "I don't visit very much, Miss Bab. I am generally engaged in the evening."
Here was a chance. I was going to say that that no doubt was the reason why I had never met him, when father ruthlessly cut me short by asking, "You are not in the law?"
"No," he replied. "I am in the London Fire Brigade."
I think that we all upon the instant saw him in a helmet sitting at the door of the fire station by St. Martin's Church. Clare turned crimson, and his host seemed on a sudden to call his patent to mind. The moment before I had been as angry as angry could be with our guest, but I was not going to look on and see him snubbed when he was dining with us and all. So I rushed into the gap as quickly as surprise would let me with, "Oh, dear, what fun! Do tell me all about a fire!"
It made matters--my matters--worse, for I could have cried with vexation when I read in his face that he had looked for their astonishment; while the ungrateful fellow set down my eager remark to childish ignorance.
"Some time I will," he said with a quiet smilede haut en bas; "but I do not often attend one in person. I am the Chief's private secretary, aide-de-camp, and general factotum."
It turned out that he was the son of a certain Canon Herapath, so that father lost sight of his patent box altogether, and they set to discussing Mr. Gladstone, while I slipped off to bed feeling as small as I ever did in my life and out of temper with everybody. Not for a long time had I been used to young men talking politics to him, when they could talk--politics--to me.
Possibly I deserved the week of vexation which followed; but it was almost more than I could bear. He--Mr. Herapath, of course--was always on the spot fishing or lounging outside the little white posting-house, taking walks and meals with us, and seeming heartily to enjoy father's society. He came with us when we drove to the top of the pass to get a glimpse of the Sultind peak; and it looked so brilliantly clear and softly beautiful as it seemed to float, just tinged with colour, in a far-off atmosphere of its own beyond the dark ranges of nearer hills, that I began to think at once of the drawing-room in Bolton Gardens with a cosy fire burning, and afternoon tea coming up. The tears came to my eyes, and he saw them before I could turn away from the view; and said to father that he feared his little girl was tired as well as cold--and so spoiled all my pleasure. I looked back afterwards as father and I drove down; he was walking beside Clare's cariole and they were laughing heartily.
And that was the way always. He was such an elder brother to me--a thing I never had and do not want--that a dozen times a day I set my teeth together viciously and vowed that if ever we met in London--but what nonsense that was, because, of course, it mattered nothing to me what he was thinking, only he had no right to be so rudely familiar. That was all; but it was quite enough to make me dislike him.
However, a sunny morning in the holidays is a cheerful thing, and when I strolled down stream with my rod on the day after our expedition, I felt that I could enjoy myself very nearly as much as I had, before his coming spoiled our party. I dawdled along, now trying a pool, now clambering up the hillsides to pick raspberries, and now counting the magpies that flew across, feeling altogether very placid and good and contented. I had chosen the lower river because Mr. Herapath usually fished the upper part, and I would not be ruffled this nice day. So I was the more vexed when I came upon him fishing; and fishing where he had no right to be. Father had spoken to him about the danger of it, and he had as good as said he would not do it again. Yet he was there, thinking, I daresay, that we should not know. It was a spot where one bank rose into a cliff, frowning over a deep pool at the foot of some falls. Close to the cliff the water ran with the speed of a mill race. But on the far side of this current there was a bit of slack water so promising that it had tempted some one to devise means to fish it, which from the top of the cliff was impossible. Just above the water was a ledge, a foot wide, which might have served only it did not reach the nearer end of the cliff. However, the foolhardy person had espied this, and got over the gap by bridging the latter with a bit of plank, and then had drowned himself or gone away, in either case leaving his board to tempt others to do likewise.
And there was Mr. Herapath fishing from the ledge. It made me giddy to look at him. The rock overhung the water so much that he could not stand upright; the first person who fished there must have learned to curl himself up from much sleeping in Norwegian beds, which were short for me. I thought of this as I watched him, and I laughed, and was for going on. But when I had walked a few yards, meaning to pass round the rear of the cliff, I began to fancy all sorts of foolish things might happen. I felt sure that I should have no more peace or pleasure if I left him there. I hesitated. Yes, I would. I would go down, and ask him to leave the place; and, of course, he would do it.
I lost no time, but ran down the slope. My way lay over loose shale mingled with large stones, and it was steep. It is wonderful how swiftly a thing that cannot be undone is done, and we are left wishing--oh, so vainly--that we could put the world, and all things in it, back by a few seconds. I was checking myself near the bottom, when a big stone on which I stepped moved under me. The shale began to slip in a mass, and the stone to roll. It was done in a moment. I stayed myself, that was easy, but the stone took two bounds, jumped sideways, struck the piece of board which only rested lightly at either end, and before I could take it in the little bridge plunged end first into the current, which swept it out of sight in an instant.
He threw up his hands, for he had turned, and we both saw it happen. He made indeed as if he would try to save it, but that was impossible. Then, while I cowered in dismay, he waved his arm to me in the direction of home--again and again. The roar of the falls drowned what he said, but I guessed his meaning. I could not help him myself, but I could fetch help. It was three miles to Breistolen, rough rocky ones, and I doubted whether he could keep his cramped position with that noise deafening him, and the endless whirling stream before his eyes, while I was going and coming. But there was no better way; and even as I wavered, he signalled to me again imperatively. For an instant everything seemed to go round with me, but it was not the time for that, and I tried to collect myself, and harden my heart. Up the bank I went steadily, and once at the top set off at a rim homewards.
I cannot tell how I did it; how I passed over the uneven ground or whether I went quickly or slowly save by the reckoning father made afterwards. I only remember one long hurrying scramble; now I panted uphill, now I ran down, now I was on my face in a hole, breathless and half-stunned, and now I was up to my knees in water. I slipped and dropped down places from which I should at other times have shrunk, and hurt myself so that I bore the marks for months. But I thought nothing of these things: all my being was spent in hurrying on for his life, the clamour of every cataract I passed seeming to stop my heart's beating with fear. So I reached Breistolen and panted over the bridge and up to the little white house lying so quiet in the afternoon sunshine, father's stool-car even then at the door ready to take him to some favorite pool. Somehow I made him understand that Herapath was in danger, drowning already, for all I knew; and then I seized a great pole which was leaning against the porch, and climbed into the car. Father was not slow either; he snatched a coil of rope from the luggage, and away we went, a man and boy whom he had hastily called running behind us. We had lost very little time, but so much may happen in a little time.
We were forced to leave the car a quarter of a mile from the river, and walk or run the rest of the way. We all ran, even father, as I had never known him run before. My heart sank at the groan he uttered when I pointed out the spot. We came to it one by one and we all looked. The ledge was empty. Mr. Herapath was gone. I suppose I was tired out. At any rate I could only look at the water in a dazed way, and cry without much feeling that it was my doing; while the men shouted to one another in strange hushed voices and searched about for any sign of his fate--"James Herapath!" So he had written his name only yesterday in the travellers' book at the posting-house, and I had sullenly watched him from the window, and then had sneaked to the book and read it. That was yesterday, and now! Oh, to hear him say "Bab" once more!
"Bab! Why, Miss Bab, what is the matter?"
Safe and sound! Yes, when I turned he was there, safe, and strong, and cool, rod in hand, and a smile in his eyes. Just as I had seen him yesterday, and thought never to see him again; and saying "Bab" exactly as of old, so that something in my throat--it may have been anger at his rudeness, but I do not think it was--prevented me answering a word until all the others came around us, and a babel of Norse and English, and something that was neither yet both, set in.
"But how is this?" my father objected, when he could be heard, "you are quite dry, my boy?"
"Dry! Why not, sir? For goodness' sake, what is the matter?"
"The matter! Didn't you fall in, or something of the kind?" father asked, bewildered by the new aspect of the case.
"It does not look like it, does it? Your daughter gave me a very uncomfortable start by nearly doing so."
Every one looked at me for an explanation. "How did you manage to get from the ledge?" I asked feebly. Where was the mistake? I had not dreamed it.
"From the ledge? Why, by the other end, to be sure. Of course I had to walk back round the hill; but I did not mind. I was thankful that it was the plank and not you that fell in."
"I--I thought--you could not get from the ledge," I muttered. The possibility of getting off at the other end had never occurred to me; and so I had made such a simpleton of myself. It was too absurd, too ridiculous. It was no wonder that they all screamed with laughter at the fool's errand they had come upon, and stamped about and clung to one another. But, when he laughed too--and he did until the tears came into his eyes--there was not an ache or pain in my body--and I had cut my wrist to the bone against a splinter of rock--that hurt me one-half as much. Surely he might have seen another side to it. But he did not; and so I managed to hide my bandaged wrist from him, and father drove me home. There I broke down entirely, and Clare put me to bed, and petted me, and was very good to me. And when I came down next day, with an ache in every part of me, he was gone.
"He asked me to tell you," said Clare, not looking up from the fly she was tying at the window, "that he thought you were the bravest girl he had ever met."
So he understood now, when others had explained it to him. "No, Clare," I said coldly, "he did not say that; he said 'the bravest little girl.'" For indeed, lying upstairs with the window open I had heard him set off on his long drive to Laerdalsören. As for father he was half-proud and half-ashamed of my foolishness, and wholly at a loss to think how I could have made the mistake.
"You've generally some common-sense, my dear," he said that day at dinner, "and how in the world you could have been so ready to fancy the man was in danger, I--can--not--imagine!"
"Father," Clare put in suddenly, "your elbow is upsetting the salt."
And as I had to move my seat at that moment to avoid the glare of the stove which was falling on my face, we never thought it out.