Ah me! Even the longest and happiest day must have an ending!” sighed Vestalia.
“It is not a new thought,” replied David. “But I have never before comprehended how unwelcome it could make itself.”
They spoke to each other in soft, regretful, musing tones, through the still darkness of the clouded summer night. They had been the last to quit the Greenwich boat, on its last return to its City moorings, and they halted for a moment on the floating pier after the others had gone—the gentle undulation of the tide beneath their feet, their gaze dwelling upon the black silent expanse of the river.
In retrospect, the day had been very long indeed, and altogether happy. Its structure of delight had been reared on the simplest and most innocent of foundations. They had gone first to the Zoological Garden, which fortuitously suggested itself to Mosscrop’s mental search as an unexceptional resource. Nor did inspiration fail him there, for when the great man-eating cats had been fed, and the foul hyenas next door had yelped themselves hoarse, and the charms of natural history had otherwise begun to wane, the notable thought of the fish dinner at Greenwich rose with splendid opportuneness in his mind.
It was after this feast, while the two strolled beneath the big trees, that twilight found them out. The shadows, as they deepened among the distant shipping, and stole downward to dim the reflected whiteness of the eastern sky beyond the river, brought reverie in their train. Mosscrop found a bitter taste in his cigar, and lit another impatiently. The girl leant upon his arm with a new suggestion of dependence. They moved down to the wharf by tacit consent, before the appointed time, and, taking their seat on a bench at the end, looked absently at the water with but an occasional word. Evening closed in about them as they sat thus. Then the boat came, and they went on board, and established themselves in relative seclusion at the stern, still in almost unbroken silence.
And now the completed journey lay behind them as well. They stood close together, swaying with the slight motion of the raft upon the lapping waters, and ruminating sadly upon the fact that their day was done.
“We finish as we began—with the river,” murmured Vestalia. She trembled to his touch as she spoke.
“Do you remember Henley’s lines,” said David, meditatively—=
```“‘The smell of ships (that earnest of romance),
```A sense of space and water, and thereby
```A lamplit bridge touching the troubled sky,
```And look, O look! a tangle of silvery gleams,
```And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams,
```His dreams of a dead past that cannot die.’”=
“No, it cannot die,” said Vestalia, slowly. “But its burial time is close at hand, none the less. Ah, the beautiful day!”
They turned and paced up the ascent, and then through obscure, deserted thoroughfares made their way at length to the open space about St. Paul’s. The clouds had parted, and the great dome loomed in immensity against a straggling light from the sky. They paused to look at it, and while they stood the fleecy mists far overhead cleared away, and the round moon’s full radiance flooded the prospect. Mosscrop gazed up at the flaring satellite, then down at his companion. A new thought sparkled in his eyes.
“And ah, the beautiful to-morrow, too!” he said, confidently. “My good child, do you conceive that the world comes to an end when the sun goes down? Am I less your friend by moonlight than I was in the day-time? Are we changed by the fact that the lamps are lit?”
Vestalia turned her face into the shadow, and said nothing. Mosscrop felt her deep breathing against his arm.
“You have been very dutiful and obedient all day,” he began, as they moved along toward Ludgate Hill. “I repudiate the suggestion that you are capable of mutiny now. Let us speak plainly, dear little lady. How can you suppose that, having watched over you all day and gladly made myself responsible for your well-being since before breakfast, I could wash my hands of you now, and calmly say ‘goodbye’ at a street corner?”
“You have been veryverykind,” faltered Vestalia.
“And for that reason it follows that I should be very callous and brutal now, does it? I don’t see the logic myself.”
“I haven’t meant that at all,” she interposed in a low voice. She bent her head so that Mosserop could not see her face.
“We will develop and analyze your meanings at our leisure,” he said, with a note of authority. “It is more important for the moment to make clear whatImean. The facts are simplicity itself. You have no home, no belongings, no place to sleep, no knowledge of where the morning’s breakfast is to come from. You are a beautiful girl, and it is true our civilisation is so arranged that beautiful girls rarely starve to death. I do not recall having heard of a single instance, for that matter. But your position makes an imperative demand for assistance from somebody. It cried aloud for help at an early hour this morning. It happened that the appeal was heard and answered. If we were superstitious, we should call it providential.”
“Oh, but I do!” protested the girl.
“Very well, then, wearesuperstitious, and itwasprovidential. These things are governed, I am informed, by immutable laws. Ergo, it is still providential. Who are we, that we should fly in the face of Providence? I adjure you to put away such impious thoughts!”
A little sobbing catch of the breath was her only answer. He divined that there were tears in her eyes, and slowed his pace as they walked along in the gloom of the deserted descent. At the bottom, under the bridge, the sparkling lights of Fleet Street recalled to him that shops were still open.
“I mentioned that you had no belongings,” he resumed, after they had traversed the Circus in silence. “There are little odds and ends of things that you want—the necessities of the toilet,et cetera. Here is a shop; take this sovereign and get the bits of haberdashery that occur to you—such as a lady would put in her dressing-bag if she were to stop overnight in the country. I will go across the way and get the bag itself, and come back for you.”
He performed his part of the enterprise with an almost childlike delight. Ladies’ dressing-bags cost more than he had imagined, but the shopman said he would take a cheque. David found something to his mind—a dainty yet capacious trifle, with pretty silver flasks ranged on one side, and a surprisingly comprehensive collection of small implements—scissors, curling-tongs, a manicure set, and other tools the significance of which he could not even guess—packed about in quaint little pockets and crevices. The outer leather was rich to the eye and delicate to the touch.
A few doors away shone the symbolical red and blue lights of a chemist. Hurrying thither, he flung himself eagerly into the task of buying fluids to fill those imposing flasks. The shopman advised him, at first coldly, then with rising enthusiasm. The best perfumes and vinaigres were expensive, certainly, but then theywerethe best, and would vouch for themselves to any cultivated feminine mind. There were recondite soaps, and cosmetics to thrill any gentle heart. And in the matter of brushes—here were some silver-backed, and the comb also—to match the flasks. So the list was filled out, and David wrote another cheque with a proud smile.
Vestalia stood at the door of the shop, waiting with a small paper parcel in her hands. Mosscrop was disappointed at its size, and thrust it into the bag with a disdainful shove. They strolled on up the street, and he looked into every lighted window with a hopeful eye. The display of mere masculine or neutral wares affronted him. The shopping fantasy possessed his soul.
“But you really ought to have them. You’re not behaving nicely to me in continually saying ‘no,’” he urged more than once, as the pressure of his companion’s arm drew him away from the tempting windows. She did consent at last to the purchase of some slippers—and he saw to it that they were the choicest that the shelves afforded—soft, luxurious little things, with satin linings and buckles of mother-of-pearl. When these went into the bag, it was filled. He recognised the fact with a regretful sigh.
The creaking old clock-machinery in the belfry of St. Clement Danes set itself in motion as they passed, and the ancient chimes clanged out the full hour. It was nine o’clock.
“I had some thought of a music-hall,” he remarked. “But we’ve had a pretty full day—and a long day, too. I know you must be tired.”
“Perhaps—just a little,” she answered, softly.
“Then we’ll go home,” he said, with decision.
It was not a part of London which Vestalia knew very well. Mosscrop led her along the Strand for a little way, then crossed and went up a side street, then turned into a still narrower by-way. The ragged loungers on the walk had an evil aspect, and almost every building seemed to be a public-house. At the last corner a piano-organ of unusual volume shook the air with deafening mechanical din. The man turned the crank so fast, and the dancing children in the radiance from the open-doored tavern on the pavement raised such a racket of their own, that she could barely distinguish the movement of the vulgar tune. On the borders of darkness beyond were discernible still other children, playing noisily about at the base of groups of fat women in fog-coloured shawls and white aprons. Over all the tumult and squalid clusterings of humanity there brooded the acrid, musty stench of an antique mid-London slum.
The two turned under an archway, and as by magic the atmosphere freshened and the hubbub ceased. A small square of venerable buildings disclosed itself vaguely in the uncertain light from the sky. Here and there a lamp behind some curtained window made a dim break in the obscurity. The faint sweet moaning of a ’cello rose from somewhere at the farther end of the space. A stout man with a gold band upon his tall hat revealed himself for a noiseless moment, lifted his finger in salute to Mosscrop, and melted away again into the shadows. Whether they had passed him, or he them, Vestalia could hardly tell. It was all very strange—and a little sombre. A streak of moonlight glanced down between shifting clouds, and fell across the fronts of the houses opposite. There were pale grey tablets of ornamentation set into their mass of dusky brickwork, which looked like tombstones. The girl trembled, and hung back upon Mosscrop’s arm as if to halt.
Suddenly, after a brief preliminary scale of piano notes, a woman’s clear, practised voice fell upon the silence in a song—a grave and simple melody full of tenderness. They paused to listen for an instant, and Vestalia traced the sound to an illuminated upper floor at the end of the square.
“Then people live here!” she said, with hesitating re-assurance in her voice.
“Bless you, yes,” replied David. “Welive here, among others.”
He entered the open doorway of the house next to that before which they had paused. The hall was lighted by a single gas-jet at the rear, which only deepened the darkness of the narrow staircase up which he led the way. It was a very ancient and ricketty staircase, with steps worn into queer bumps and hollows by generations of feet. There was not room for her to walk abreast of her guide. He strode ahead, striking matches on the wall as he went. She followed him timorously up the winding ascent, noting the rows of names painted on the big closed doors of each landing they passed.
Mosscrop stopped only when the stairs came to an end. He put down the bag, and she heard the rattle of a key in a lock. Then a match was struck, and a sudden flare of gas lit up the small square hall-way they stood in.
As he pushed open a door to the left, he turned with a smiling face towards his companion. He discovered her drawn back at the edge of the stairs, her hands pressed against her bosom. Her eyes were fastened on him with a troubled look, and the sound of her breathing, quick and laboured, reached his ears.
“These stairs are the very deuce when you’re not used to them,” he said, pleasantly. “I oughtn’t to have rushed you up them at such a pace.”
“Thatdoesn’t matter,” panted the girl. “It is I who mightn’t to have come up at all.”
David’s smile deepened and mellowed as he regarded her. “My dear Vestalia,” he began, laying a slight and kindly stress upon this first use of her name, “you speak hastily. You must offer no further remarks until you have quite recovered your breath. I will employ the interval by calling your attention to the inscription on the closed door, there, opposite to mine. You will observe that it is ‘Mr. Linkhaw.’ Have you ever heard it before?”
She shook her head.
“And are you conscious of no novel emotions at hearing it now? Does not the sight of those painted letters cause you to thrill with strange and mysterious sensations? No? What becomes then of the boasted intuition of the feminine mind?”
There seemed to be a jest hidden somewhere in all this, and she smiled plaintively, dubiously. She took her hand from her breast, to show that her breathing was calmer.
“You really assure me,” he went on, with a twinkling eye, “that the spectacle of this particular sported-oak does not especially stir your pulses, and peculiarly impress your imagination?”
“Why should it?”
“Why indeed! Ah, young woman, your sex gets much credit that it ill deserves. A mere man could do no worse in the matter of instinct. My dear friend, behind that door lies your present abode. That name ‘Linkhaw’ is the sign of your home—and you looked at them both and never guessed it!”
Vestalia did not so much as glance at the door in question, but she gazed with much intentness at Mosscrop. “I don’t understand—what it is all about?” she said, slowly.
He had stepped inside his own door, lighted the gas and pulled down the blinds. He returned, and stretched out his hand to take hers. “Do me the honour to come in and sit down,” he said, holding up her gloved fingers, and bowing over them. “You are my nearest neighbour, and yet you have never called upon me.”
She followed him into his sitting-room, and took the easy chair he wheeled out toward the table for her. It was a larger apartment than the narrow staircase and cramped landing had promised. The ceiling was low and dreadfully smoky, it was true, and the appointments and furniture were old-fashioned. But the whole effect, if somewhat meagre and unadorned, was comfortable and honest.
“Put off your hat and gloves, and look as if you felt at home,” urged David. “You’ve but a step to go.”
He busied himself meanwhile in bringing from a recess of the sideboard two tumblers, a heavy decanter filled with an amber liquid, and a big bottle of soda water.
“You’ll join me in some whisky and soda?” he asked pleasantly, fumbling with the wire.
“Oh mercy, no!” said Vestalia. “Really I mustn’t touch anything more. I see now that I have been drinking far too much, all day long.”
“Tut!” he answered. “How could there be too much on a birthday? And now I think of it, there were two of them! I pledge my word, it has been a singularly dry occasion for a double birthday. We must hasten to make good the deficiency.”
Vestalia had drawn off her gloves. She rose now, and standing before the mantel-mirror, lifted her hat from her head. Then she turned and, half-playfully, half in pleading, shook her bright curls at him. “I thought it was going to be different hereafter,” she said, softly.
He looked inquiry for an instant, then nodded comprehension. “Ay,” he said, with gravity, “you’re a wise virgin. This one glass shall last me the night. You are very welcome here, my lady!”
She smiled at the lifted tumbler, over which his eyes regarded her. “What lots of books you have!” she exclaimed, a moment later, and began an inspection of the room, lingering in turn before each of the old prints on the dingy walls, and examining the rows of volumes in detail. He loitered beside her for a little, passing comments on what seemed to interest her. Then he disappeared in an adjoining room, and returned presently in a loose velveteen jacket and slippers. He took the famous dressing-bag from the table.
“Your visit isn’t at all over yet,” he remarked; “but I am consumed with a desire to see you sitting opposite me, here, in those wee soft slippers of yours. It will make a sweet picture for me to carry into dreamland. And so first I will show you your new home.”
She followed him out into the hall, and then through the doors he unlocked into the apartments of the mysterious “Mr. Linkhaw.” The first room disclosed itself, when the gas was lit, to be similar to David’s in size, but all else was strangely different. The Turkey red carpet was brilliant, almost garish, in its newness, and the ceiling was covered with a bright pink paper. All round three sides were broad divans, heaped with soft red cushions and downy pillows. No chairs were to be seen. More singular still, the walls were crowded with the stuffed heads of animals—bisons, bears, moose, elks, antelopes, wolves, and endless varieties of deer. Vestalia gazed at these trophies of the chase with surprise.
“Linkhaw is a mighty hunter before the Lord,” Mosscrop explained. “Yon is the bedroom. It is fairly carpeted with the skins of tigers, lions, leopards, and such like beasts. If you dream of jungles and Noah’s ark to-night, and don’t like it, we’ll throw them all out in the morning.”
“But what am I doing in this Mr. Link-haw’s rooms?” inquired the girl. “I don’t understand it at all. Suppose he should come?”
David laughed lightly. “It’s a far cry from Uganda to Dunstan’s Inn. Or maybe he’s in the Hudson Bay Territory. It’s a year and more since I knew of his whereabouts. The most unheard-of and God-forgotten wilderness on earth—that’s where you may always count on his being, unless he has learned of some still more impossible and repellent wild, just discovered, in the meantime. He is an old friend and school-fellow of mine, and leaves his keys with me. I just have a look at the place now and then, to keep the laundress up to the mark.”
He passed on into the bedroom, struck a light, and threw a scrutinising glance round. “You’ll be needing fresh sheets and the like,” he said, returning. “I’ll bring them.”
He came back with an armful of linen, and heaped it on the bed. “Now you’re right as a trivet,” he cried, cheerily. “Everything has been aired. And now I’ll be waiting for you to come back to me, with the pretty little slippers. Mind, I’m capable of great excesses in drink if you delay over-long.”
Vestalia’s delay was inconsiderable. They sat for an hour or more, she with the dainty new footgear on the fender, he, lounging low in his chair, stretching out his own feet close to the rail beside hers. “I could wish it were winter,” he mused, once, “so that we might have a fire. We have an old saying about two pairs of slippers on the hearth. I never thought before what homely beauty there was in it. Ah, there’ll be cool nights coming on now, and then we’ll start a blaze. But even with a black grate, it is the dearest evening of my life.”
“And of mine,” responded the girl.
Hours later, David still sat by the empty fireplace, and ruminated over his pipe. He had put the decanter and glass resolutely back into the sideboard, and turned a key on them. He had taken down a book, but it lay unregarded on the floor beside him. He desired to do nothing but think, and yet even that it was not easy to contrive. Thoughts would not marshal themselves in any ordered sequence.
The whole day had yielded an extraordinary experience, involving all thoughts of momentous possibilities, which he said over and over again to himself demanded the coolest and most conservative consideration. But when he strove to fasten his mind to the task, straightway it swerved and curveted and danced off beyond control. One memory returned to him ceaselessly: the way Vestalia had risen finally to say good-night, and insisted strenuously on his not quitting his chair, and then, all at once, had bent swiftly down and kissed him before she ran from the room. And well, why not? he asked himself at last; why shouldn’t he abandon himself to remembering it? What else was there equally well worth recalling? The early morning on the bridge rose again before him; the tenderly compassionate intimacy which, stealing slowly over them, seemed yet to have burst forth in ripe fulness from the very beginning; the delightful meals together, the long walks and talks, the little gifts which brought such happiness to the donor; the languorously saddened twilight on the river, the silent homecoming, the surprise, the kiss—so the sweet chain of reverie coiled and unfolded itself, with quickened heart-beats for links.
Once a thought came to him—a thought which seemed hard and cold as his native granite, and rough with the bristling spikes of his own hillside heather—that he had spent in that one day more than his whole week’s income. In other times the fact would have disturbed David. Now he looked it calmly in the face, and smiled at it derisive dismissal. The savings of a year, or of four years—what were even they when weighed in the balance against the fact that next door, under these very roof-beams, the dear Vestalia was peacefully sleeping?
It must have been long after midnight when, in the act of filling his pipe once more, it occurred to him to go to bed instead. Upon reflection, he was both tired and sleepy. He rose and yawned, and then smiled upon his own image in the mirror at remembering how happy he was as well. It was a queer mess, to be sure, but there was no element in it which he regretted or would have changed. It was all delicious, through and through.
As he glanced again at his reflection in the glass, and warmed his heart by the flame of triumphant joy which gleamed through the eyes he looked into, a sudden rhythmical noise rose upon the profound stillness of the old inn. It caught his ear, and he turned to listen.
“It is that blessed creature snoring—breathing, I mean,” was his first thought. But no, it was in too rapid a measure for that. Then the sound waxed louder, and he recognised that it was of footsteps steadily ascending the stairs. “The watchman, coming to make sure of the lights,” he thought, with re-assurance.
But this hypothesis fell to the ground also.
The footsteps mounted to the landing close outside. The noise ceased, and then there came the unmistakable jingle of a key—nay, the very grating of it in the lock of the door opposite.
David’s veins, for a confused moment, ran cold. Then, with an excited ejaculation, he ran to his door, and flung it open.
“Stop that, you idiot!” he commanded, in muffled but ferocious tones.
“Ah, Davie, Davie! Still at the bottle!” replied a well-known voice from out of the obscurity.
Mosscrop groaned at recognition of the voice in the dark.
“Of all inopportune creatures in the animal kingdom!” he bewailed under his breath. “Sh! for Heaven’s sake, man, don’t talk so loud. Come inside here, and walk softly.”
“What is it you’re stalking, Davie—snakes?” queried the newcomer, with obvious sarcasm. But he lowered his voice, and came forward into David’s room. The latter closed the door noiselessly, and drew a long sigh of consolation. The two men looked at each other for a minute in silence.
“You don’t mean that there are burglars in the house?” asked the intruder. A gleam of hopeful light shone in his eyes as he spoke, then died down at David’s shake of the head.
The Earl of Drumpipes, in the peerage of Scotland, was a year younger than his friend the Culdee Professor. The gaslight revealed him now to be a tall, burly, rubicund man, with a broad, strongly-marked face of a severe aspect. His yellowish hair was cut close over a head which seemed unduly large for even his powerful frame, and was thinning towards baldness on the top. The collar of a woollen shirt showed a good deal of his thick neck, burnt a bright red at the back by a fiercer sun than warms these British islands. His prominent blue eyes bulged forth more than ever, now, in mystified inspection of David’s countenance. While he still gazed, it occurred to him to hold out his hand, as mighty as a blacksmith’s, in perfunctory greeting, and David took it with an effusiveness which was novel to them both.
“I’m really delighted to see you, Archie. I give you my word lam!” he protested, eagerly.
“You have your own way of showing it,” growled the other. “Yet you seem sober enough. What ails you, man?”
“Oh, the strangest story!” said David. “Sit down here, and I’ll get out the whisky.” He busied himself between the sideboard and table, talking as he did so, while the other sprawled his large bulk in one of the easy chairs and lit a pipe.
“See here, Drumpipes, damn it all,” he began, “I’m a gentleman, am I not?”
“You are a professional man, a person of education,” the Earl assented, cautiously.
“Well, this is the first day in long years that I have felt like a gentleman.”
“You were ever a bit susceptible to hallucinations, Davie,” said the other. “There’s a streak of unreality in your nature. Hold there! Not so much soda. I’m sore in need of a bath, I know; but everything at its proper time. Well, go on—how are you accounting for this extraordinary occurrence? You’ve felt all day like a gentleman! It arouses my curiosity.”
“Chuck that, Archie, or you’ll hear nothing at all.”
“Very well, my boy. I’ll just drink this, then, and go to my bed. It will be welcome, I can tell you.”
He drained the tumbler, and made as if to rise. David hurled himself forward with a restraining arm. “Don’t be an ass, old man! I’ve told you once, you mustn’t go near your place to-night,” he urged petulantly. “I’ll give you my bed, and I’ll sleep on the sofa here. It’s all right, I assure you. If you must know, there is somebody sleeping in your room.”
The Earl frowned up at his friend. “That was not in the bargain, Mosscrop,” he said, with sharpness. “I don’t like it.”
“All I can say is,” retorted David, “that if you’d been in my place you’d have done the same thing—or no, I’m not so sure about that; but under the circumstances it was the only thingIcould do. It’s a young lady who is occupying your room, Drumpipes.”
“Aha!” cried the Earl, “let’s have her out! I’m not so sleepy as I thought. You can do something in the way of a supper, can’t you?”
“No, I can’t, and if I could I wouldn’t. You misapprehend the situation entirely, my friend. This is a poor girl who——” and David went on and told, in brief fashion, the story of the day.
“Nine pounds odd your whistle cost you, eh, Davie?” was the listener’s comment, at the conclusion of the narrative. “Well, each man has his own notion of what he wants for his money. It is not mine, I’ll say frankly. And what’s the programme for to-morrow? South Kensington Museum and Hampton Court? The next day you might do the Tower and Epping Forest. Then Westminster Abbey and Richmond—but you’ll come soon to the end of your rope. And sooner, still, I’m thinking, to the end of your banking account.”
“That’s my affair,” returned Mosscrop, testily.
“I might be said to have some small concern in the matter,” Drumpipes observed, “seeing that I provide furnished lodgings for this beautiful experiment in combined philanthropy and instruction. But you’re drinking nothing.”
“No; I had my one glass before you came. I’m taking care of myself these days.”
“And high time, too!” admitted the candid friend. “I’ll not say you’ll not be the better for it.”
“Well, and don’t you see?” urged Mosscrop, with earnestness, “it’s just the fact of her being there yonder that makes it seem worth while to go to bed sober. It alters my whole conception of myself. It gives me entirely new ideas of what I ought to do. So long as I led this solitary life here there was nothing for me but to drink. But it’s different now.”
The Earl grinned. “And how long will you be content to have this improving influence radiated to you from across the passage?” he asked, with cynicism. “Supposing, of course, that I give up my rooms to the reform-dynamo, so to speak.”
“Oh, of course, no one is asking that of you. Obviously, your return makes other arrangements imperative.”
“What will the other arrangements be like?”
“That remains to be seen. But I’m quite clear about one thing. I will not turn back from what I have undertaken. She shall not know what want is, and she shall be respected. I swear that, Drumpipes; and I want you to remember it.”
“Oh, I respect her immensely already,” said the Earl. “By George, a girl must possess extraordinary qualities who can come out early and catch a Professor of Culdees off her own bat, and work him for a tenner, and then leave him to forswear whisky on one side of a passage while she sleeps the sleep of the just in borrowed apartments on the other. It’s really splendid, old man. I take off my hat to her.”
“Archie,” remarked David, slowly, “I’m smaller than you are, and no athlete, God knows; but if we have any more of that I will hit you in the eye, and chance it.”
Drumpipes was amused at the notion, and chuckled. Then his face and voice lapsed into solemnity. “Davie,” he said, “I’ve no wish to vex you, but it’s a bad business. You’ll not win your way through without much expense and soreness of heart. You can take that from me, who should know if any man does.”
Mosscrop accepted the portentous gravity of the tone in good faith. He nodded, as he looked hard at his friend. “Ay, I know,” he said, softly. “But I have no despair, and few doubts about it all, Archie. I am very happy in the thought of going forward with it; so happy that I see I never knew what happiness meant before. And if—we’ll put it at the worst possible—if disappointment should come out of it, why, I shall already have had the joy. And even if it broke me, what would it matter? I should only be back again where I was yesterday, and no one on earth would be the worse for that. But with you it was different.”
The Earl nodded in turn, and smoked his pipe. At last, without lifting his voice or disclosing special interest in his hews, he said, “Man, she’s dead.”
David’s eyes dilated. “What’s that—she—your wife, do you mean, is dead?”
“Ay, four months since,” replied the other quietly.
Mosscrop came over and shook hands with his friend. “Iwilltake a drink with you, after that,” he said, and filled a glass. “Tell me about it.”
“I know nothing about it—except that she is dead. That is enough, quite enough.” He lifted his tumbler. “Here’s to the heating arrangements in the warmest corner down below.”
“A foul cat!” said David, with a harsh tremor in his voice, sipping the toast.
“A very pretty woman,” answered the Earl, musingly. “Hair like a new primrose, face like an earl Christian martyr, dearest little feet you ever imagined. You never saw her. You would have wanted to die for her on the spot. She would have made a single bite of you, my friend. I was a good deal tougher mouthful, but I got mangled more or less in the operation. These are the things that make one grateful for the religious influences of childhood. I should be downhearted just now if I were not able to believe in a Hell.”
“There is no doubt about the thing—she is really dead?”
“Dead as a mackerel, thank God. My lawyers certify to the blessed event. They ought to know. They have stood in the breach for four years, warding off writs, injunctions, mandamuses, and appeals, with which she and the unscrupulous scoundrels, her solicitors, bombarded them. The costs those ancient parties must have charged up against me! Man, I’m fair frightened to go into the City and face them. There are three attempts at judicial separation, one divorce suit, two petitions for restoration of conjugal rights, three examinations of witnesses by commission, four appeals—the thought of those bills sickens me, Davie.”
“You’re well out of the noose at any cost.”
“Well, then, if your neck is free, keep it so, man!”
David smiled with gentle self-assurance.
“Ah, laddie, if you could have seen the innocence of her. She drank Capri at breakfast, and then champagne at luncheon, and more of the same at dinner, with old tawny port on top of it—all as trustingly and confidingly as a babe. It softened one’s heart to see her lack of guile, her pretty inexperience.”
The Earl sniffed audibly. “Oh, ay, it’s a beautiful spectacle, no doubt, and very touching. The pity is that magistrates will not always view it in that light next morning. But then so many things look different in the morning.”
Again Mosscrop smiled. “Save your moans, Archie,” he advised, “till you see her yourself. You’ll meet the lady at breakfast.”
“I’m damned if I do,” said Drumpipes.
“Now then, you’re talking like an idiot. You, a hunter of lions and crocodiles and wild asses of the desert, to turn tail and run from one wee yellow-headed lassie! and desert an old friend, moreover, who needs your advice and judgment in the most important matter of his life! You know you’re flatly incapable of it.”
“I’ll not promise to be civil to her if I stop,” the other growled. “The mere thought of yellow-haired women is nauseating to me. Why on earth, man, if you must make a stark-staring lunatic of yourself, could you not hit on a decent and reputable colour?”
“Never a dye has touched it,” protested David. “It’s as natural as the sunshine—and as radiant.”
“Then you’re a ruined man, Davie,” the Earl gravely declared, between puffs at his pipe. “There may be some saving quality in a woman who merely dyes her hair. An honest nature may persist beneath the painted wig, in spite of her endeavours. But if she’s a tortoise-shell tabby born, then you might better be dead than sitting there mooning about her. I give you up as a lost creature!”
“Then all the more reason you should help me to cook a fine breakfast, to confront my doom upon,” replied Mosscrop, lightly. “I didn’t quite promise that I’d call her in time to assist. It will be more of a surprise to have it all ready, spread in her honour, when she comes in. What do you think of soft roes grilled on toast, eh? You can get them in tins. And some little lamb cutlets—or perhaps venison—and then some eggsBercy—you do those fit for a queen, and we might have——”
“The truth is,” put in the other, reflectively, “that black is the only wholly satisfying hair for a woman. The intervening compromises—all the browns and chestnuts and reds and auburns—are a delusion. I see that very clearly now. Give me the hair that throws a purplish shadow, glossy and thick and growing well down upon the forehead, and then a straight-nosed face, wide between the eyes and rounded under the chin, and a complexion of a soft, pale olive. There’s nothing else worth talking about.”
“Ihadthought of those small Italian sausages, but I don’t know that in hot weather they——”
“Oh rot!” said the nobleman. “Who wants to talk about muffins and ham fat at this time of night? Have you no poetry in you, man? There was a divine creature on the steamer coming over—great eyes like a sloe, and the face of a Circassian princess, calm, regal, languid, yet with depths of passion underneath that seemed to call out to you to risk your immortal soul for the sake of drowning in them——”
“My word, hereischeek, if you like!” burst in Mosscrop, stormily. “You won’t let me talk aboutmygirl at all; you sneer and gibe and croak evil suspicions, and make a general nuisance of yourself at the least mention of her—and then you suppose I’m going to sit patiently and listen to such blithering twaddle as this. Damn it all, a man’s got some rights in his own room!”
“I’m told not,” commented the Earl, grimly.
“Now, why hark back to that?” demanded David, with a show of petulance. “It’s all settled and done with, hours ago. But what I was saying was, it isn’t the decent thing for you to—to obtrude talk of that sort just to throw ridicule on a subject that I feel very keen about.”
Drumpipes yawned frankly. “It’s time you turned in, Davie,” he remarked. “The lack of sleep aye makes you silly. I’ve no wish to ridicule your subject, as you call her. It’s not at all necessary. You’ll see for yourself how ridiculous it is in the morning. It merely occurred to me that if we must talk of women, I’d something in my mind worth the while—no strolling yellow-headed vagrant picked up at random on a bridge, but a gentlewoman in education and means and manners. Man, you should see her teeth when she smiles!”
“Archie,” replied David, solemnly, “I should think your own better instincts might prompt you to recall that you’ve only been a widower four months.”
“Four months?—Four hundred years!” cried the Earl, stoutly. He reached round and replenished his glass. “It is with the greatest difficulty that I recall any detail of the matrimonial state. Already the memory of my first pair of breeks is infinitely fresher to me than any of it. In another week or so the last vestige of a recollection of it will be clean gone. And a good riddance, too!”
“It was an ill thought to remind you of it,” admitted Mosscrop. “Devil take all women—or all but one——”
“And she black-haired,” interposed the Earl.
“Deuce seize them all but two, then, for the rest of the night. Where have you been the long year-and-a-half, Archie?”
“Just looking about me,” replied the other, with nonchalance. “Bechuanaland for a time, but it’s sore overrated. Then I had a shy at the Gaboon country, but there’s a conspiracy among the niggers to protect the gorilla—I think he’s a sort of uncle of theirs—and a white man can do no good by himself. I thought there might be some decent sport over in Brazil, where they advertised a revolution on, and I tried to travel around with the rebels for a while, but it wasn’t up to much. You brought down an occasional half-breed Portugueser with epaulettes on, but you couldn’t eat ’em, and you didn’t want ’em stuffed at any price; and besides, when you came to find out, the whole war was merely a fight between two firms of coffee-traders in New York, and that wasn’t good enough. I tell you what, though,” he went on, with more animation, “Arizona is damned good fun. I haven’t seen anything better anywhere than a good, square cattle-lifter hunt. They got up three or four, just on my account, I imagine, after they found I could ride, and shoot at a gallop. The charm of the thing is that there’s no close season for cattle-thieves, and they’re game to the death, I tell you. I got potted twice, and once they let daylight straight through me. I had to lie up for repairs for nearly three weeks. They went and hung the fellow while I was in bed. We had words about that. I insisted it wasn’t sportsmanlike—and that they ought to have given him a horse, and then sprung him out of a trap or something of that sort, and let him have a run for his money, the same as we do with rabbits that the ferrets bring up. But they couldn’t see it, and so I turned it up and came North. They’ll ruin the whole thing, though, if they don’t chuck that foolish hanging business. The first thing they know, everybody’ll stop running off cattle, just as a protest, and then their place won’t be worth living in. It’ll be a pity, because a cow-boy gone wrong is really the best thing there is. He’s as good as a Bengal tiger and a Russian wolf together, with a grizzly bear thrown in. You may quote me as saying so.”
“I shall not fail to do so,” said David. “Come, drink up your liquor, and we’ll toddle. I’m fair glad to see you back whole and sound, laddie—and more still, a free man.”
He brought forth from the bedroom a pillow and some blankets, and began arranging them upon the sofa. “And are the Americans so daft about lords and titles as they’re made out?” he asked as he worked. “Did they humble themselves before the handle to your name?”
Drumpipes sat up. “Do you suppose I’m such an abandoned ass as to travel with a title?” he demanded. “Man, if you knew what it cost me, even without it, it would turn your hair grey. Ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, seven dollars and a-half somewhere else—one steady and endless drain on the purse, till the marvel is I was able to get out at all! And there’s no third-class on the railways whatever. It’s just terrible, Davie! And as ill-luck would have it, I couldn’t even come home steerage on the steamer. There were passengers that I knew in the first cabin, and so I had to throw away more money there. And I’m not like you—I’ve no ten-pound notes to spare for my day’s amusement.”
“No, you’re not like me,” responded Moss-crop, in no sympathetic tone. “I have my magnificent £432 per annum, which is over eight guineas a week. And you—you have only a paltry four thousand odd, not more than ten times as much. I wonder you’ve kept off the rates so long, Archie.”
“Ah, I know all that,” protested the Earl. “But you have no damned position to keep up. You must remember that, Davie, It’s a very important fact. It makes all the difference in the world.”
“But you only keep it up in your own mind, and that’s not an expensive place. There’s been no year since I first knew you, either as Master of Linkhaw or since you came into the whole of it, that you’ve spent the half of your income. To hear you talk, one would think you’d been scattering your capital as well with both hands.”
“Ah, but those lawyers’ bills, Davie! What think you now should they be like? Six hundred, eh? Or may be seven?”
“You’ll know soon enough. I’ll not encourage you to pass a sleepless night. Come now. You’ve got things in your bag here, haven’t you? I can let you have whatever you lack.”
“No, you keep your bed. I’ll sleep out here,” said Drumpipes. “I’m a deal more used to roughing it than you are. I give you my word, I shall sleep here like a top.”
Mosscrop strove to resist, but his friend was resolute, and the sofa had to be surrendered to him. He rose, yawning, and began to throw off his outer garments. “I’ve paid as high as eleven shillings for a bedroom for one night in New York city!” he affirmed, drowsily, “although, to give the Devil his due, they make no charge for candles and soap. Man, if they’d known I was an Earl, they’d have lifted all seven of my skins.”
“Oh, but they have a reputation for acumen,” urged Mosscrop, drily. “They’d have comprehended fine that you were but a Scotch Earl. Good night!”
The broad daylight woke David up nearly an hour later than it should have done. He had produced upon himself during the night an impression of sleeping very little—and that a light and dainty slumber, ready and eager on the instant of need to dissolve into utter wakefulness. Yet it was the fact, none the less, that he had ingloriously overslept himself. The watch on his table pointed to halfpast eight.
He hurriedly drew on some of his garments, and stepped into the sitting-room to rouse the Earl. To his great surprise that nobleman had disappeared. The tumbled bed-clothes showed where he had slept. There was his hand-bag, duly packed and closed, at the foot of the sofa.
Reasoning that Drumpipes had not promised to breakfast, and was a perverse creature anyway, and probably had been worried by early brooding over those lawyers’ bills into a restless mood, Mosscrop returned to his room, and completed the work of dressing. He shaved with exceptional care, and bestowed thought upon the selection of a neck-tie. It occurred to him that he had some better clothes than those he had worn yesterday, and, though he begrudged the time, the temptation to make the change was irresistible. He did not regret yielding, when he surveyed his full-length image in the mirror on his wardrobe door. He seemed to himself to look years younger than he had done before that momentous birthday. He smiled and nodded knowingly at the happy and confident face in the glass.
Under the circumstances, he should need help with the breakfast. The midnight notion of getting everything ready before he called his guest, submitted to abandonment without a murmur. He reverted joyfully to the original idea of letting her share all the delightful fun of preparing the meal. His fancy played with sportive tenderness about the picture of her, here in his tiny scullery which served as a kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, a towel pinned round her waist for an apron, actually cooking things for them both to eat. Very likely he knew more about that sort of thing than she did; he beheld himself giving her instructions, as they bent together over the big gas cooking-stove. Could anything be more deliciously homelike than that?
That contrary, cross-grained Drumpipes had predicted that the whole thing would seem ridiculous to him in the morning. He affirmed to himself with fervour that it seemed more charming than ever as he went out into the passage, and knocked on the opposite door.
There seemed to be no answering sound, and he struck the panel more sharply, with his ear lowered to the keyhole. Still no response came.
“I am going to Covent Garden for a few minutes,” he called through the keyhole; “shall I find you ready to help me when I get back?”
Since this, too, brought no reply, he took out his duplicate key and cautiously opened the door. The question, repeated in a much louder tone, died away in profound silence. The glass eyes of a moose on the wall opposite stared at him with an uncomfortable fixity.
The bedroom door was ajar, and David was emboldened to stride forward and beat smartly on it with his fist. Again he did this, and then, while a strange excitement welled upward within him—or was it a sinking movement instead?—flung the door open and looked in.
There was no Vestalia here at all!
The details that the bed was neatly made up, that the room showed no trace of recent occupancy, and that the dressing-bag was gone, soaked themselves vaguely through his mind. He looked about, both in this and the outer apartment, for a message of some kind, quite in vain.
His pained attention wandered again in haphazard fashion to the head of the moose, fastened between two windows. The fatuous emptiness of its point-blank gaze suddenly infuriated him, and he dealt its foolishly elongated snout a resounding whack with his open hand. The huge trophy toppled under the blow, swung half-loose on its fastening, then pitched with a crash to the floor.
Mosscrop kicked it violently again and again where it lay.