Dear Mr. Rosser,—Pray do not consider yourself bound to return as you suggested, and resume our childish relations. Your long silence has proved you now know your own mind, and I have already found someone worthy of a woman's esteem and affection.—Your sincere friend,Carol Silver.
Dear Mr. Rosser,—Pray do not consider yourself bound to return as you suggested, and resume our childish relations. Your long silence has proved you now know your own mind, and I have already found someone worthy of a woman's esteem and affection.—Your sincere friend,
Carol Silver.
She reserved the posting till night, after the coming of Yate, who was due at dinner. In the evening the young man arrived. He had fought his way on foot through a deluge of rain and a thundering blast. The tussle suited his mood, which had rebelled against the suavity of conveyance to his enchanting goal. A handsome colour glowed through the tan of his cheeks, and the sombre green-grey of his eyes shone gallant and golden with the illuminations of love. At first glimpse of him Carol recognised in his personality that almost godlike quality which welds mere dust into heroes. What devotion he was prepared to give her! A crown of sovereignty to lift the chosen one above princes and peoples, pain and penury, and privation. But the diadem was too large, too massive; her poor ignoble head might sink under it. And then princes and peoples would become but a mob, antagonistic or inane, and the pinch of pain, privation, and penury would eternally grip at the strings of her love-famished heart.
She showed him her renouncement of Rosser, and sent it forth to post. His heartbounded, for her composure deceived him and masked the cost of the decisive action.
After dinner, Mrs Silver, complaining of the elements outside and the leaden temperature within, retired to lie down in the adjacent boudoir. They were alone. On a distant pedestal a lamp, petalled like a poppy, threw sleepy rays across the room; at the piano some smaller flowers leant their rose blush to the winking candles. She was seated at the keys in a gown, gauzy white, with two dreamy hands expressing some twilight theme of Schumann's—a reverie of sorrow and sighing. He sat passive, but it was the passivity of the spinning-top. His greedy eyes looked at the wandering fingers and longed to detain them, leant on the mignonette which cast a languid breath from the muslin folds of her bodice—fastened gladly, almost possessively, on the tiny blue speck that marred the outline of her under lip. Poor sweet speck! Oh, that it might there remain for ever as seal royal of the eternity of his truth! At last she lifted her hands and rose. He rose in sympathy and advanced, half afraid; restrained by the indefinable awe with which we allapproach joys that are too delicious to be seized.
For a moment she scanned him earnestly but not regretfully, and, as she gazed, she noted the passage of his eyes as they travelled conqueror-wise to the dark flaw on the margin of her mouth. His glance let loose the words that had swelled her heart with pent-up purpose.
She held out her hand. He grasped it eagerly; but there was a stiff wrist and elbow at the back of it which dictated the distance from him to her.
"Yate—Mr Tyndall—I want you to go away!"
"What!—now?—this moment?"
"Yes, and for ever!"
She spoke deliberately, without a quaver of sorrow, and every word on his heart spat like hailstones coming down a chimney on live coal.
His huge frame trembled and swayed an instant. Then he laughed. It was a jarring, joyless convulsion.
"You don't mean it—you are doing it to try me—say you don't, Carol, my darling."
"But I do," she explained. "Listen. I have behaved infamously to you. I will take all the blame. You were so good, so noble, so loving. You came just when I was dying of heartbreak—people do die of it, no matter what the philosophers say. You saved me, you lifted me to life and womanly pride, you prevented me from writing cringing letters to——in short you saved me from throwing myself at Mr Rosser's head. Nay, don't speak. I told you I had loved him."
"You love him still!" he cried.
"No. I showed you my letter this evening to prove it. But that is no reason for loving you."
"But you'll try and love me? I would make you—you said I might," he murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.
"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes as if to sweep away a blighting memory. "No, it was then I knew myself, then I took courage to face the future without him—without you——"
"But because you refuse him, why——"
"I will not become a thief. Because my own gold has been filched and squandered Ishould be no less a thief were I to fill my purse with what I can never earn—never repay."
"My love is a free gift, Carol—I don't make reservations," he mumbled, hopelessly, for he knew her tones dictated rather than argued.
"Won't you see that it is because your gift is so lavish, so rare—because I cannot return—I cannot take it? Offerings of real worth cannot be so accepted without degradation. Dear Yate, good-bye. Some day when you have recovered this you will know I am right. Perhaps, even, you may place me, faults and all, in some special heart-niche reserved for defunct yet exotic truths."
She affected flippancy, but her mirth hung lank, like the curls of a drowning man.
He bent over her hand and kissed it.
Then he said thickly, in a drunkard's voice, "I'll go ... by the garden way——" and rushed out.
She heard the conservatory door bang behind him, and lost the sound of his footsteps in the howl of the storm.
They took him over the soaking lawn, along the orchard, out by the wicket, into theavenue of copper-beech and acacia where last night they had stood together. There he beat his head against the senseless bark of the dripping trees and wept aloud. And the burst of his sobs mingled with the roaring of the wind as it swept over him and expended its wild tumult against the closed windows of her house.
Ardilaun Vyse,a popular poet; andCynicus Neere,an old bachelor.
Ardilaun.I can't think why we discuss it. It's as useless to expect sentiment from you as——
Cynicus.To import coals to Newcastle. Who hawks goods in a stocked market?
Ardilaun.One likes sympathy.
Cynicus.I sympathise profoundly; but talking about a leak doesn't stop it.
Ardilaun.This can't be stopped. It means the wreck of two lives—Letitia's and mine.
Cynicus.Together?
Ardilaun.Together! Why, the universe would be re-created! It is severment that ruins. There is she, brilliant, beautiful, famous, tied for life to a money-grubber on 'Change: a wretch who cuts the leaves of her books with his thumb, and snores over them like an apoplectic pug.
Cynicus.He earns his dose.
Ardilaun.Money again! That's all you think of—it's all my wife thinks about. Petty parsimonies, cramping retrenchments, harrowing details of household economy——
Cynicus.Very necessary, even in themenageof a popular poet.
Ardilaun.They needn't be flaunted. To come in and read your most brilliant stanzas to a woman who never looks up from darning——
Cynicus.Your socks?
Ardilaun.When you know of another who would listen to every word and criticise——
Cynicus.Pick holes, not mend them!
Ardilaun.Who would share your highest exaltations and lift you——
Cynicus.Off your feet, till you bashed your crown against the hard fact of orthodox opinion.
Ardilaun.What is opinion to souls the law of the higher intelligence has made twin?
Cynicus.A thorny briar, with twenty prickles to the rose.
Ardilaun.What were a thousand prickles to one such rose?
Cynicus.I concede, Letitia is too fine a prize to be lost for a scratch—a thousand scratches.
Ardilaun.Well said—now you speak like a man.
Cynicus.She must be grasped and all the little spikes allowed to probe their way through the skin. You can rise at cock-crow and salve your wounds with morning dew—you rival the lark sometimes, don't you?—you——
Ardilaun.Nothing to laugh at. I find my best inspirations at sunrise, when the first glow of day blushes through the trees.
Cynicus(scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling). Letitia sleeps till nine. Her inspirations blaze best in moonlight. At dawn her rest commences and is never broken—no, not even by the "apoplectic pug." He slinks off on tip-toe to his money-grubbing in the city.
Ardilaun.Does she work so hard?
Cynicus.Books like Letitia's are not written without mental strain. Poets may weave, like spiders, from their innermost, but authors grind.
Ardilaun.Noble woman! Yet she shows no signs of fatigue.
Cynicus.The "pug" again. Snacks before she goes out, snacks when she comes home; oysters and stout at eleven, by his orders. Saves the digestion and helps to recuperate, he thinks.
Ardilaun.But eating in the usual way——
Cynicus.Couldn't be done by genius; nothing so conventional.
Ardilaun.Me you put outside the pale?
Cynicus.Oh no; you've your vagaries, though not as to time. How about the vegetarian diet and distilled water?
Ardilaun.The simplicity of the philosophers.
Cynicus.Troublesome to keep going?
Ardilaun.Not so; my meals are perfect—fit for a king.
Cynicus.Your wife's recipes, I suppose? Our English cooks are dolts at vegetable dressing.
Ardilaun.They are. She superintends—she prefers cookpots to poetry. That is the hard part of it. Were it Letitia——
Cynicus.The vegetables might go to the——
Ardilaun.Nothing of the kind. A clever woman could master such trivial details in a trice.
Cynicus.And pen her books with a squint eye on the saucepan?
Ardilaun.You say she only works at night.
Cynicus.And your matutinal repast?
Ardilaun.My milk and lentils at eight—anyone could manage that——
Cynicus.And Letitia's coffee and roll in bed at nine, herdéjeuner à la Fourchetteat eleven, your lunch at one, her snack at four, your tea at five——
Ardilaun.Come, you're overdrawing it. We should at least have dinner together.
Cynicus.Yes; Letitia is what you call a flesh-eater and wine-bibber like myself. We'd have a good square meal, finishing up with some fine "fruity." I forgot; in the ideal household the "pug's" noted port would be conspicuous by its absence.
Ardilaun.Poets don't gamble to fill their cellars.
Cynicus.So they go empty. Poor Letitia!
Ardilaun.Letitia would prefer love to the rarest vintage that was ever pressed.
Cynicus.How about the machinery? The nectar of the gods won't drive a cog-wheel.
Ardilaun.I suppose I have machinery, as you call it?
Cynicus.Greased on special principles, too. Drop your principles and bang goes everything.
Ardilaun.Puns won't silver your moral bolus. You can't convince me.
Cynicus.Morally? I don't attempt to, but practically I can show you it is one thing to love flowers, rave over their colour and scent, and another to crack your spine in digging and hoeing, watering, slug-catching, and all the rest of it.
Ardilaun.You've shifted your premises.
Cynicus.Pardon me; instead of preaching I used the Kodak. Tableau: Two precious exotics; to right, the "pug," armed with spade and watering-pot; to left, your wife, darning-needle in hand, impaling slugs.
Ardilaun.Bosh! You're too irritating for words; I'm off. (Exit in a rage.)
Cynicus.To develop the negative, eh?
"Love's wings are over-fleet,And like the panther's feetThe feet of love."
"Love's wings are over-fleet,And like the panther's feetThe feet of love."
The little travelling clock on his mantel struck with soft, gong-like chime; it seemed to speak from a great way off, like a person facing you, who answers your questions with an absent eye. Half-past six, and he was due from the Continent every moment. His lamp—green-shaded because his vision was weak from over-work—some soda water and a spirit stand were awaiting him on the table, and a small mass of letters and papers was congregated in front of his chair. All these were tones in the gamut of expectation that found its keynote in myself.
We had been "inseparables" before his going, and we would be so never again I felt convinced. She had absorbed him: mind, desire, future were packed in the little palm of her hand. Yet I was not vulgarly jealous. I loved Aubrey Yeldham better than I couldhave loved a brother, but I had seen her and had caught the reflection of his sentiment, though in a tempered degree. I had met her but once, for on the day after our chance encounter—in a verdurous Devon lane where she had lost her bearings and we had come to her assistance—I had been summoned to the bedside of a sick relative in town. Returning to the old haunts, I naturally expected to resume our fishing expeditions in the picturesque valley of the Exe, but I soon discovered Yeldham to have found other pellucid purple depths that interested him superlatively. I had watched the drama from a distance, and administered cautions with the cool pulse of an umpire. But he was past redemption. I suspected the truth when I made an impressionist sketch of her—milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer—and saw his greedy eyes fixed on the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a charitable dole. I learnt more from the attitude of reverence, almost of awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried it to his own sanctum, hid itfrom me, the maker of it, as though to veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. But here I was of no use, and decided we had come to the supreme moment of life—there is always one—when we must let things slide.
Her name was Ruth Lascelles, and she was a widow; that was the sum total of our knowledge of her. She might have been twenty, but we estimated her age at twenty-five, deducing our theory from a certain fatigued languor of voice and expression that accorded ill with the girlish satin of her skin. This was arrived at on the first day of our meeting—we had not discussed her since. I had not been Yeldham's friend, his disciple, a mental sitter at his feet, without learning to walk warily where the fuse of his passions flickered. For some time there was a tacit agreement to ignore the impending danger, to talk of trivialities, wheeling round the central idea without ever settling there. But one morning when he had called at the little farm cottage where she lived and had found her flownwithout a word or a regret, his despair had been too much for him. The whole story rolled from his lips: his love for her, her seeming reciprocity, their wanderings in the woods, her reliant, trusting attitude—which had taught him to wish himself some knight of the Round Table and not a mere besmirched man of many passions—her flutterings of childish gaiety and sombre philosophy that had tinted her speech garishly as rainbows on thunder-clouds: he gave forth all, and asked, with an expression jejune as Sahara, what the sudden flight could mean.
I was so out of it, as the phrase is, that I could volunteer small elucidation: that she was a coquette of the first order seemed the most feasible solution, and I offered it. He derided the notion—it was apparently so frivolous a venture that it failed to anger him—he never set hands on the cudgels for defence. "She is not shallow," he had merely said, and his poor brain had tackled the enigma so often and to so little purpose that its purport had become an unmeaning and vacuous reiteration. But one day, after we had returned to town and were workingwell in harness, he with his book, I with my illustrations for it, he burst out afresh.
"She unintentionally let out where she lived: it is a little village on the coast of France. She must have returned."
"Well?" I said, suspending my work and pretending to extract a hair from the fine point of my drawing-pen.
"Well," he burst out, "the world is our oyster, and if we shirk opening it we can't hope to filch pearls!"
"That means?" I hinged expectantly.
"That means, in plain words, that I don't intend to give up the biggest pearl that God ever sent to make a man rich."
"You intend to follow her?" I questioned—needlessly, indeed, for his kindling eye contained a fire of decision and energy that for fourteen days, since the sorry one of her disappearance, had smouldered.
"Yes, follow her, make her love me by every art, divine or devilish—I don't care which, so long as she loves me—and keep her till the same grave closes over us."
And he went.
He had been absent but a week when Ireceived the telegram announcing his intended return. I stood—with my back against the mantel, and hands warming themselves behind my sheltering coat-tails—eager to recognise his rampant mount of the stairs, to feel the clasp of his hand or its thump on my shoulder-blade, and hear his cheery "Congratulate me, old fellow!" that I knew must come. A cab stopped outside, and a key turned in the lock. Then a slow, heavy tread ascended. We met in the passage. There was no need for more than a glance at him to abridge the exuberance of welcome that had bubbled to my lips. I settled with the cabman, and in a cowardly fashion lingered unduly outside among the rugs and the travelling impedimenta. I felt somehow that he would prefer to come face to face with his home in silence. He drank a pretty stiff dose of brandy before sitting down, and moved the lamp away from his eyes.
"Letters," I indicated.
"Bother letters! Open them or throw them in the fire."
I did neither, but transferred them to his bureau. Then, seeing he was disinclined forconversation, I relit my old briar pipe that had been suffered to go out, and lolled in an arm-chair facing the fender. Presently I surveyed him from the side of an eye. His chin was sunk on his chest, he was staring at his boots with the blank look of a gambler who has staked his last. There was something in his attitude that made me wish myself a dog or a woman, that I might lick, or croon, or croodle some softness into that stony mask. The silence was so long—so pregnant with unsyllabled anguish—that at last I closed a warm hand over his fingers as they clasped the arm-end of his chair.
"Well?"
"Well," he said, huskily, starting a little from his coma and poking a coal with the toe of his boot, "it's over."
"So I suppose; and the pearl was not——"
"Not for my handling," he interrupted. "I knew you'd think something hard of her, but you won't, you won't when I tell you——"
He stretched his hand to his glass and emptied it before continuing.
"It came about sooner than I intended—thehorizon was so serene I wanted to lay-to for a bit—but it was no use. We were talking of something—I forget what—and I made a quotation. You know the chap who said, 'Show me a woman's clothes at different periods of her life and I will tell you her history'?"
"Yes; I forget his name, but I think it was a Frenchman."
"Well, I quoted him. Pretended to a like perspicacity: it was a sneaking, cowardly ruse to know more of her."
"Had she told you nothing?"
"All this week I had known no more than what we both knew or surmised—that there was a secret panel somewhere."
"And in your tapping for hollows——?"
"The spring flew; yes, but not as you suppose. I pretended that a sight of even a few of her past dresses might suggest a fragmentary romance, though of course she was too young for histories such as were meant by the originator of the idea. She is only twenty-four," he parenthesised, "was married at nineteen; I learnt that."
"Well?"
"She snapped at my offer—was almost ardent in her wish to test me.
"'I could show you the most important dresses I have worn in the last seven years,' she said. 'I used to clothe myself in gowns to match my moods at one time,' she added.
"I saw myself face to face with the last fence, and baulked. I began backing out. There were soft places, I could not tell how deep or how soft, beyond, and I was nervous.
"'Come,' she urged, spurring with almost excited insistence, 'if you outline with the smallest correctness I will supply the lights and shades truthfully.'
"She said the last words with pathetic emphasis that frightened me.
"I determined to change the subject. Caught the little finger of her left hand and kissed it. Did I tell you she had never shaken hands with me with her right—that she had explained she kept it for secular and the other for sacred use? I kissed it, in the centre of her palm, and her body curled like a sensitive plant with the warmth of my lips. I blushed for having doubted her purity or her love."
He buried his head in his hands and seemeddisinclined to reveal more. But after a long pause he began afresh.
"I'm telling you everything—exactly as it happened—that you may reverence her. She's too clean and transparent to be clouded by vulgar doubt," he said, rather to himself than to me.
"She insisted on my accompanying her to a sparsely-furnished room," he went on. "The walls were fitted with hooks and slides to improvise a wardrobe.
"'I have kept some of my gowns since I was a girl,' she sighed.
"'Those, I suppose, that were episodic?' I affected to laugh to waive her seriousness.
"'Oh, the everyday ones were thrown away—worn out: these were most of them connected with'—she hesitated—'eventful occasions.'
"I again wavered—allusions to these eventful occasions seemed to portend grief to her and pain incidentally to me.
"I caught her wrist as it turned the handle of the wardrobe door, and remonstrated. 'I refuse to see them; I know nothing of clothes and I'm not a detective, I won't pry intoyour past secrets, either of sorrow or of joy.'
"Her hand shook in my clasp.
"'Don't stop me,' she cried, imperatively. 'Help me—I want you to know them.'
"'So be it,' I said, and pushed back the door. Then she suddenly flung herself in front of it, between me and the row of dainty frocks and shimmering laces. She looked like Cassandra—in a soft, yellowy flannel gown with loose sleeves falling away from her pink arms that blushed with the heaving blood in her warm breasts—like Cassandra guarding the gate of a citadel, though her lips said in a tone richer than wine, sweeter than music, 'Kiss me first.'"
There was a long pause—Yeldham sat blankly staring at the coals, and I gazed intently into the mists of nicotine that curled upwards to the ceiling. Through them I could conjure a vision of her bronzed coronal and Aubrey's massive muscularity, and could picture her glowing arms around his neck—a convolvulus entwining a Gothic column.
"There are some kisses," he said presently, "that are worth the whole sum of humanpleasure. Pleasure! Faugh!—a rotten word—belonging to those who only half live!"
He handled a cigarette mechanically and lit it.
"Well," he continued, "the first dress was white. A virginal thing of simple gauze and flummery, with a frontage of puffings to make up for bust development. Quite a girl's dress. Women, you know, are less generous in the matter of—chiffon, don't they call it?—and more so in the matter of flesh. It was her debût dress—I supposed—but she contradicted.
"'No,' she explained, 'not quite that. One's debût is a hazy affair: all excitement, wonder, blush, and clumsiness, with little or no enjoyment. Yet how many of us would give the long, grey end of life for that first night's dappling of peach bloom? It was the frock I wore on the evening I first met my husband.'
"She spoke his name with a dull accent of grief, and I buried myself amongst the flippery. Her kiss was moist on my lips, and I had no taste for allusions to the dead man.
"The next thing was a riding habit—torn across the skirt.
"'A cropper,' I remarked; 'and enjoyed, or this memento would scarcely be here?'
"'That,' she allowed, sadly, 'is a natural inference—correct in this case, but not in all.' I glanced hurriedly along the line for relics of crape—but she resumed my enlightenment. 'This was a souvenir of a grand day's hunting and a broken ankle.'
"'And someone?' I hinted.
"'Yes; George—my husband—carried me home.'
"I turned abruptly to a party frock—the colour of a rose. There was a green patch on the right breast—the blurr of crushed flowers.
"'No occasion to state what this means,' I snapped irritably. I was seized with a desire to close the wardrobe on these trophies of conquest.
"'No,' she said, with a quiver of the lips, 'we were married soon after.'
"I threw myself into an arm-chair in the sulks, but she moved on to show another gown—a bed or invalid gown—worn and faded.
"'An illness,' I said; 'you had no strength left for coquetry?'
"'Puerperal fever,' she explained. 'Mybaby died, and my brain—it seemed to get paroxysms of depression and exaltation. Don't you think that a supernatural power ordains our moods, shifts the evenness of balance, makes us sometimes irresponsible?'
"There was a lambent excitement in her manner, which was usually gentle, almost lethargic.
"'We can't be responsible for our brains in illness, particularly fever. But you recovered?' I said, pointing to some fine azure drapery encrusted with Japanese gold.
"'I recovered; yes, but I never wore that.'
"'It belonged to someone you loved?'
"'It was mine,' she said, 'and was worn by a woman I hated. She borrowed it one night after coming over in the rain; she used to attend me devotedly during my illness.'
"'Yet you hated her?' I asked, taking my cue from the curl of her lip.
"'Not then. In those days I thought men were true—George truest of all—and women good.'
"I smiled, but she was quite serious.
"'In this way;' she explained, 'I imaginedthat if they sinned, it was either for sheer love or for bare life.'
"I looked down at the gold storks on the heavy eastern silk, and said, 'And when did you change your opinion?'
"'When I hung away this gown, and determined it should never touch me.'
"'This woman showed you a new type?'
"'Yes,' she replied, very simply, 'she neither loved nor starved.'
"For a long time the poor girl remained mute, staring at the ill-fated blue garment, and one of white cambric that hung the last on the hooks. I rose to put my arm round her, to break the skein of unpleasant associations, but she moved away, and said in a hard, almost defiant, voice:—
"'There is one more; tell me its tale if you can, and if not——'
"She paused while I took the fine lace and lawn into my fingers; it seemed a summer dress, scarcely crushed; in front, however, and on the sleeve was a splash of dull red-brown.
"'Paint?' I suggested, 'or blood. An accident, perhaps?' and in questioning I met her eyes.
"'Don't, don't!' I cried, 'don't speak!' I flung myself back in the chair, and covered my face to avoid the sight of hers—the expression of horror that was staring from it.
"'I will, I must speak. Yes, blood; his blood. Oh!' she exclaimed, standing in front of me in that Cassandra-like attitude I had noticed before, 'I can see it now. George had gone to the country—so he had said—and I, to pass the time, dined with an uncle at Bignards. You know the room—the thousand lights and loaded tables, the chink of glass and glow of silver—the gay and brilliant company that is always there? We dined, and were leaving afterwards for the Opera. My uncle passed out first, and I was about to follow him, when, at a little tablea deux, I saw George and her; George looking down, down into her eyes and her bosom, with a hot red flush in his cheeks, and a lifted wine-glass in his hand. I don't know what happened; I burst between them, flung the glass from his fingers, and then——'
"I thought she must scream, but only a gasp escaped her. She looked at something on theground and added in an awed, strangely intense voice, 'He was dead!'
"The tone compelled me to her side; a torrent of agony seemed frozen at her lips.
"'Hush! Hush!' I implored. 'Your brain was deranged: you had been ill——'
"I had recovered. Did you never read of the Reymond affair? I am that miserable woman. Lucky, some people have called me, because in France they are human and class such deeds ascrimes passionels.'
"My words I cannot remember. They were violent reiterations of love, assurances that I had read and recalled the catastrophe—the fatal result of a glass splint probing an artery—and had pitied her before I knew her. I protested, raved, threatened, vowed I had come with the one object of linking my life to hers, and that now, more than ever, my mind was fixed.
"But she remained cold, almost severe. 'You remember,' she said, 'how I fled from you to spare myself a Tantalus torture—a hungering for spiritual peace, a thirsting for rare devotion which you seemed to be offering with laden hands?'
"'Your longings must have been slight!' I scoffed, ungenerously.
"'Listen,' she cried, still standing rigid, though the thrilling tone of her voice confessed her emotion. 'The verdict of acquittal was merely a doom to perpetual remorse. "A life for a life," was cried to me from even the day-break cheeping of the birds. I thought to make atonement by fasting and prayer: I hoped for it in attending the stricken—walking hand-in-hand with disease. On stormy nights I fancied I might save some drowning soul from wreck; earn an innocent life at the cost of my own; I was ready—craving of God the hour and the opportunity, but it never came. I have knelt and starved, I have nursed the sick to health, I have rescued a child from the depths, and yet I live!'
"I clutched her gown, kissed it, abjured her to leave her theories of atonement with Heaven, and trust her future and its serenity to me. But she put me aside.
"'Oh, Aubrey, be merciful—spare me all you can, for I am like a pilgrim who faints in sight of the Great Road. I know now that itis not the pulse of life, but the colour and the scent of it that make one's sacrifice. I believe that every guilty soul must have his moment of high opportunity—of expiation, and this is mine. You are brave, you are great, you are generous. Shall you tempt me—and stay; or will you save me—and go?'"
Poor Yeldham's voice broke to a hoarse whisper, and I laid a sympathetic hand upon his knee.
"And you, Aubrey, you went?"
"I am here," he answered, with a groan that was more pitiful than tears.
"This morn a throstle piped to me,''Tis time that mates were wooed and won—The daffodils are on the lea.'"
"This morn a throstle piped to me,''Tis time that mates were wooed and won—The daffodils are on the lea.'"
There is always a store of benevolence and magnanimity in the heart that beats at an altitude of nearly four feet from the ground. Wit, wisdom, and energy may go pit-a-pat "at the double" on lower levels, but great soulèdness and probity only come to their perfection in a steadier region.
Beyond these last-quoted virtues Ralph Danby had few. He was rather lethargic and decidedly clumsy. His six-feet-three of flesh and blood was knotty with muscle, but, in the garments of the polite, the muscularity showed like adipose tissue and spoilt him. In feature he was pronounced perfect.
"Perfect as regenerate man can well be," raved a lady artist, who, before he had been in Hampstead a week, had implored him to pose for a painting of early Scandinavian classicism. He wore a Vandyke beard—notbecause he liked it, but to avoid the casualties of his native clumsiness, which made shaving as farcical as Heidelberg duelling—and permitted its amber waves to roam caressingly close to his chin with a negligence that was the more graceful because unstudied.
At first, when it became known that young Dr Danby intended stepping into his father's practice, Hampstead resented it. Cabinet Councils of "tabbies," assembling over their postprandial Bohea, declared they would none of him. A retired Army doctor, forsooth! What would become of their nervous ailments, their specially feminine disorders? If they had the finger-ache, he would be bound to suggest amputation; if liver or neuralgia, he would insist on active employment—those were the only formulæ known to regimental sawbones, poor benighted things!
But when he came, when it saw the benign blue eyes and lordly physique of the new practitioner, the feline chorus changed its note, while neuralgia,migraine, and other indefinite and not unbecoming disorders became quite epidemical in his neighbourhood. Only a few daring persons ventured to harbouropinions in opposition to thevox populi, and those speedily argued themselves ignorant or prejudiced, or both.
There existed perhaps but one person of his acquaintance who was absolutely indifferent to the impression created in his new surroundings—the one and only person for whose goodwill Ralph Danby had ever cared. He had known her at Gibraltar, a laughing, rosy bride, brought out by the senior Major, a man almost double her years. But that seemed ages ago. The Major had been gathered to his fathers, and Mrs Cameron, with her baby girl, to the great regret of the regiment, had returned to the vicinity, if not to the care, of her parents in Maida Vale.
It was this departure, though it would have surprised him had he been told so, that inspired Ralph Danby with the notion that Army doctoring was a bore. He came to the conclusion that real work was all he wanted. What a field was open in metropolitan life with its suffering and pain for a man's labours—a man who was otherwise good for nothing! And then the reward—thesmiles of the relieved—that existed always, when other satisfaction failed.
He realised he was down on his luck, but diagnosed no further, and sent in his papers. Farewell dinners followed, and the mess tried to carry him round the table at the risk of collective apoplexy (for he was a huge favourite in every sense of the word), then thePeninsulaweighed anchor, and Gibraltar saw him no more.
It was some time, however, after taking over his new work that he ventured to call on Mrs Cameron. He respected her widowhood; he feared the renewal of his acquaintance might revive unhappy recollections; but he went at last.
He was pathetically nervous when introduced into the tiny drawing-room where Phœbe sat alone. But the moment he heard her rippling laughter he was reassured. The room was small, and Ralph was big and clumsy. In his advance one of those Algerian tables, so admirably constructed to bark the shins or bang the knees of unsuspecting mortals, gave way before him and scattered itsbric-à-bracfar and wide. This triflingincident served to put him on his old footing at once, and in fact to establish his identity, for Danby's reputation for wreckage had been universal as well as costly.
"At it again, you see, Mrs Cameron!" exclaimed he, as he hastened to right the impediment. "Allow me. I am so sorry. Allow me!" he gasped, while grovelling with her on the floor in search of some errant trinket which had rolled into space. She "laughed a merry laugh and said a sweet say" of forgiveness, while he noted a transient blush on her downy cheek. He was not a vain man, but he harboured a tiny wonder whether it had been born at sight of him or of the mere exertion of stooping.
"I have a practice quite near here," he volunteered aloud. "It was the stooping," decided the inward mentor regretfully.
"How curious!"
He did not think it so, but agreed.
"Itisstrange. My father is old, and he was quite pleased to retire when he found me fit for the berth. I thought life at Gib awfully monotonous, and was glad enough to throw it up."
He had not complained before Phœbe Cameron left, but the question of his sentiments did not come under discussion. They talked of old friends a little scrappily and with some constraint—so much had happened since they had met, and numerous recollections had to be skipped—until his hostess asked:—
"Would you like to see my wee Phœbe? She is growing wonderfully. She is nearly two years old now!"
Her voice sank with an inflexion of sorrow. The age of her child recalled the long blank which occupied the centre of her lifetime's sheet.
The big man's heart thrilled with pity. He longed to open his wide, protecting arms and fold the fragile creature to his breast; she seemed so sweet, so brave, yet so lonely.
But he answered bluntly enough:—
"Produce the youngster. I suppose she'll call me 'Dot Dandy' as the other kids used to!"
Phœbe was absent for a few moments, and then returned with a toddling article, half embroidery, half flesh, with cheeks like apples, and eyes wide with youthful criticism.
"This is Doctor Danby," introduced her parent, lifting the child and placing her on the guest's capacious knee, though still supporting the tiny waist with an assuring hand.
He and the juvenile scanned each other carefully. The grey eyes, the bronze curls, and rosy mouth—they were the exact presentments of her mother. He stooped and kissed them one by one.
Before an outsider he would have been for ever compromised, but fond mammas can see nothing extraordinary in any affectionate demonstration towards their offspring!
"Who am I, Phœbe?" asked he, dwelling tenderly on the name shared alike by parent and child.
"Ow is Dot Dandy," was the lisped reply. "Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?"
Mrs Cameron hurriedly lifted the loquacious imp from its impromptu perch. Again "Dot" noticed a delicious flush on the transparent cheek, and his heart leaped within him.
"Pooh!" sneered the inward mentor again, "the lassie is substantial—too substantial for any woman to carry without colouring!"
"Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?" clamoured Phœbe minor again.
Her mother took the precaution of ringing for the nurse before replying.
"Yes, darling. Very nice."
That time shedidblush. Ralph could have sworn it!
How he reached home he never knew. The biggest men are the largest fools sometimes. His enormous heart drew its own pattern of her perfections, and coloured it with her beauty round and about. Her reflections of him never extended beyond the locality of her brain. He did not look half smart out of uniform—was awkward as ever, but kind-hearted, and her baby liked him! If it were ill, he would be the person to send for. But Phœbe must be taught not to chatter! Had it been anyone else but Dot——!
Danby's coachman, when not cogitating on the off-chances suggested by "straight tips" from stablemen in the mews, used to puzzle himself in the days which followed at the frequency of the doctor's visits to the tiny house in Maida Vale. He became conversantwith the pattern of the window curtains, and began to cultivate a lively interest in the headgear of the "superior young person" who wheeled Miss Cameron's go-cart. As a reward of his attentions, the "superior young person," whose encyclopædic qualities were unbounded, certified to a fact he had long suspected, that there was absolutely no sickness in the establishment!
But Ralph Danby was happily unconscious of the delicate supervision of man and maid, and pursued the even tenor of his way in a delightful state of beatitude till one day he overstepped the bounds of public thoroughfare and found himself face to face with a warning to trespassers. In fact, he made an ass of himself and proposed.
Without rhyme or reason he placed his six-foot-three of cumbersome manhood at the disposal of a woman from whom he afterwards confessed he had never received the smallest encouragement. She had certainly never objected to his continual presence, but, to those who have known each other in a garrison town where daily meetings and calls are common, visits are not noted with the sameimportance as metropolitan formalities of like description.
Mrs Cameron had not yet returned to society, and consequently cultivated few acquaintances. Her intimates called as frequently as Ralph, whose arrival was never objectless. Sometimes there was a doll to be delivered to Phœbe minor; occasionally he produced tickets for some lecture on infancy or education; now and then he brought music which he especially wished to hear (he could recognise "God Save the Queen" if played at the end of a programme); and once he had ventured to offer flowers! But the quick march came to an abrupt halt through his own folly. Because one morning he found her with a complexion more like a rose petal than usual, because the birds made a perfect din of song outside, and the spring sun seemed to pour through every crack and cranny and say, "Winter is past," he thought her heart must be as love-flushed as his own. Always downright—blunt some people said—he invaded where angels might have feared to tread.
"Mrs Cameron—Phœbe—I love you. Willyou marry me? Will you let me make you happy again?"
Two dove-grey eyes blinked wide with amazement; then, seeing the reality of his emotion, she stepped back a pace, and seemed to freeze as she stood.
The birds sounded discordantly; the sunshine lost all its warmth—it was but a winter gleam after all; the rose-bloom of her cheek changed to deadly pallor. Big man as he was, he grew giddy as he looked. He knew at once the magnitude of his vanity and his mistake, and cursed himself for having spoken.
"Doctor Danby, I—I—you do me honour. I thank you very much, but oh! why did you spoil our friendship with such folly?"
"Folly? To love you? I have never done a wiser thing in my life!"
"Pray do not speak of love. You know—you must know—that word to me is dead for ever!"
"But some day, in the future, you might——"
"My future, Doctor Danby, belongs to my child. I shall never allow any interest to come before my love for her. Will youunderstand this, and forgive and forget to-day as though it had never been?"
He was not a really vain man, or her frigid words, her rejection of his love, would have sent him from the house angered and mortified, never to return. But he was large-souled and childishly tender of heart, and thought, even in his disappointment, that, in her unprotected state, she might at times have need of him.
Because his demand had exceeded his deserts, and because he had received a merited snub for his rashness, there was no reason, he argued, that she should be deprived the right of using him as her friend.
He smiled a sickly assent and extended his hand.
"Good-bye, and I may come and see you sometimes still? It is not as if there were anyone else——"
Mrs Cameron interrupted hurriedly.
"Please do, and we will never reopen this subject again!"
"Never again!" swore poor Danby as he left the house—and he meant it.
In his own sanctum he conned over every speech of hers and found the interview hadbeen bald to desolation. Not one green blade of sympathy even had she given to cheer the dreary wilderness of his life. She had wished to keep him as her friend, certainly; but that in itself was a dubious compliment. Had she cared for him ever so little, and felt bound by duty for her child's sake to sacrifice love, she would have avoided painful chances of meeting.
"She has evidently no fear of falling in love with me," groaned Ralph to himself. "I am not even sufficiently interesting to be dangerous."
This rankled for some time. He continued on his daily rounds, endeavouring, if possible, to avoid passing through the street in which his frosty idol dwelt. With dreary, lustreless eyes he received the blandishments of the feminine throng which had elevated him to popularity; with tired, joyless heart he buried himself in his lonely home after the treadmill hours were over. Only some exceptional case of suffering or technical interest had power to rouse him. He was but happy when ministering to the physical pain of others; if possible, he would have shared it. In mentaltrouble the absolute prick and smart of bodily injury seems a welcome inconvenience, for at least it admits of hope, the continued hope of recovery, to give impetus to life. He was neither mawkish nor sentimental—his years of scientific training had pruned such tendencies; but the inborn sympathy with his fellow-men which had prompted him to the choice of medicine as a career permeated every tissue of his medical knowledge and supplemented a powerful element of healing peculiarly its own. He had been ever ready to throw heart and soul into any case of interest or alarm, but now his patients found him more than ever devoted. They did not know that in their service alone the heart's blood of the man was kept from anæsthesia. For nearly a month Ralph Danby avoided the house in Mervan Street; then with the inconsistency symbolic of great minds, he decided to go there at once. He counselled himself that half a loaf was better than no bread, and came rightly to the conclusion that if he intended calling again, the more he postponed the ordeal the more impossible would be the resumption of the old relations which had existedso happily before he had made a fool of himself.
On the doorstep he trembled—absolutely trembled (he who, in Egypt, had bandaged wound after wound, while bullets peppered the air with their metal hail)—but once in her presence, her serene composure was infectious, he was himself again, and almost forgot his last unhappy visit and the miserable interregnum of mental nothingness from which he had suffered. He might have been uneasy or constrained, but her calm suavity left him no opportunity. About her manner there was no spark of vanity, no simpering nor restraint—she was merely a well-bred young hostess entertaining an intimate friend.
In novels heroines are credited with the exhibition of complex emotions on the smallest provocation, but women of breeding in the nineteenth century are too good actresses to hang their hearts on their sleeves without exceptional cause. So Ralph Danby's little brougham came and went as of yore, and only in the solitary evenings, when reason unprejudiced criticised his actions, did he realise that again was he building a palaceof Eros, and again its foundation was nothing but sand!
One evening, in the midst of his mental accusations, came a note:—