AN INTERLUDE.ITwas only Mrs. Conifer. Thought the woman would never go! Poor soul! What a curse a conscience is. She was a fool to come back! Said she couldn’t help it! She loathes the very memory of Kinsman—she adores her husband—and yet she comes back to-night. That is so deliciously like a woman—to come back. To come creeping through the gate, dodging the porter, like she used to do, just to get the flavor of those old, distasteful days on her tongue again.Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains—very dingy—at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor and blue plates hung by wire along the walls.He was a languid, artistic chap—played theviolin, hung about old bookstalls andbric-à-bracshops in the lanes off Holborn.He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand, half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental bowls—“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully—he gave you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally.He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square. Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs. Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.You don’t know the oppressively respectable side of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is altering fast. The change pains me. I wish some fellow who could write would immortalize the old place before it disappears. Every time I go outside the gates of the Inn some change hits me in the face. I seehoardings with up-to-date posters and the addresses of house-breakers in places where once there was a familiar, flat-faced house, with wide-framed windows. The old shops are going, little fusty shops—eating houses, furniture stores, undertakers. I saw the last typical eating house this morning. There was nothing in the window but a big blue dish—Kinsman would have admired it—and a row of pressed beef tins, with a haddock hanging flabbily over each tin.Bloomsbury is forever in the violent stage—always going up or down. Directly they took away our exclusive gates and let the cabs run straight through to Kings Cross and Euston, there was an epidemic of boarding houses. I believe that every house in Woburn Place takes lodgers—more or less genteelly. An old fellow who had the first floor set at 3 when I came to the Inn remembered the days when only carriage folk lived in Great James Street. The first professional brass plate on a door ruffled the inhabitants considerably.Great James Street, Doughty Street, and a few more belong to the Tichborne family. I remembera charwoman who used to say viciously—at times when she considered herself imposed upon by those she worked for:“Ah! Wait till Sir Roger comes out o’ quod, and then they’ll see.”Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a story to others, made gardens of the mews—and ruined the place for all sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in Mrs. Conifer’s time.She was on the respectable side, of course: where people subscribe to Mudie’s and make the changing of books the great business of the day, where the men come home punctually to dinner at seven and the women stroll down Oxford Street regularly onfine afternoons. You may still see them swarming out of Hanway Street, very well dressed as a rule, and very often Jewesses.Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet by-ways—down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street, across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had shaded windows—it was summer time at first—and a dainty tea. He liked her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a littleafraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also—after dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study. She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than once myself—always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who never goes out alone after dark.And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure—I told you she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman, whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect—seal plush instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to blaze,and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She said, with an offensive touch of comradeship:“Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.”How did she find out? How do women learn these things?Youcan say perhaps—Igive it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very careful—as careful as a man knows how.Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy, tawdry, dark creature in the doorway.“I—I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I—excuse me—I do not know you.”She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to blackmail her.“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give yourself such airs—you are not a bit better than girls like me. If everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!”Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy, and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been delicious, piquant, dangerous—like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.” Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and understood.She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as thefirst tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia rose before her—triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair.She went tottering up her own doorsteps. As she slipped along the hall, and past the study door, Conifer called out:“Is that you, Freda?”“Yes, it is I.”“Come in.”She stepped over the threshold and stood in the warm room, her pale head hanging and her half-shut eyes filled with dread. She forced herself to look up at last and to stammer out:“We drove down to Terry’s Theater, Mrs. Hart and I. But the house was full—so—so we drove back. That is all—really.”Conifer was sitting over the big table as usual, and as usual it was strewn with papers. But the doubleknot of anxiety was untied from above his eyes and the packets of paper were pushed back. There was a new tenderness on his face, or, rather, the revival of on old one.“I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’ve got time to talk to you to-night, darling. I shall have time to take you about again myself. I’ve been awfully worried lately about business—you wouldn’t understand, it would only bother you. But I was afraid once that it meant ruin. I’ve been in a very tight place. But it’s all right now.”He set back his shoulders and sighed, as if he threw off at that moment the burden of months.“I shall,” he repeated, laughing foolishly, “have time foryounow.”Mrs. Conifer’s pretty, weak face stiffened into horror. She was thinking of the quiet Inn, with its perpetual, sanctified taste of cloisters and the Middle Ages; thinking of Kinsman’s rooms, with the high-art furbelows, the violin under the table, the untidy dhurries on the floor, the impressionist daubs which he had painted himself and hung on the wall to keep the blue plates company. She thought ofthe black, dingy doorway, of the girl with the savage face and the twinkling earrings.“Talk to me.” Conifer, who had shut the door carefully, half lifted her into the great chair by the fire and stretched himself at her feet on the rug, like a faithful dog.Their eyes met; his full of worship, hers of lava-like tears.“You love me?” she asked incredulously, the frozen look creeping more stiffly over her face. “I —I began to think——”She looked such a small, shrunken thing—as he told her afterward—that he felt quite anxious and remorseful.“Love!” he cried out boyishly; “I should think I did. Only business worries, you know, darling, enchain a man. He can’t be always saying it.”He took her in his arms. She shivered as he kissed her, taking her full punishment from his ardent lips. She had loved him all along—only him. She thought of Kinsman, in his stuffy, wooden room, with a fierce, ashamed loathing. She kept quiet a little, her head on her husband’s breastand his lips just flicking her face now and then. At last she broke out beseechingly:“Let us go away for a holiday.”“Very good idea. When?”“To-night—to-morrow, I mean. And, Dick—”“Yes.”“Let’s give up this house and go into the country. You can have a pony trap and a season ticket.”“That isn’t half a bad idea,” he responded lazily—he was too happy to be positive or vehement about anything. “The rent here is very high and I don’t see what we get for it.”*****They went abroad for two months, and when they returned they took a house somewhere in Surrey. They lived there for four years—with a pony trap, a man for the garden, and all the other accessories of rural gentility. Mrs. Conifer was very happy. She had two charming children. She was in the third best set—the set which draws the line at tenant farmers, but thinks it rather a privilege to be invited to the Vicarage.She never thought of Kinsman, of that dazed,magic time when she had been a traitor to Dick. She only heard of him twice—once when they saw his name in the newspaper—co-respondent in a divorce suit or something of that sort—and wondered if it were the same man—theirKinsman—casually over dinner.That was all. Except for that, she never gave Kinsman a thought, not even a shudder. She was too happy, too prosperous, too busy. She had her children. She had also her dogs, her bees, her poultry—all the live things that women gather about them in the country, to take the place of shopping. She had her little social excitements—summer garden parties and winter hockey. She had her little heart-burnings and triumphs—being snubbed by this woman or dropping that one.But one day when she was out alone on her bicycle she came upon Kinsman in a lane near the house. He was very shabby, obviously very down on his luck. She remembered all at once that he had never given her back her letters—those foolish, imprudent letters in which she had bared her soul. She gripped the handle bars of her machine desperately.He was standing in her path. For a moment she had a wild plan of running him down. But the next moment her foot was on the ground. She had dismounted and faced him.That was the first of many meetings. He was on his last legs, he was absolutely unscrupulous, and he regularly bled the poor little woman. Once her husband commented on her shabby hat, offered to raise her allowance, and gave her five sovereigns to go on with. The yellow coins dropped like burning blood into her palm. Twice a week she met Kinsman in the lane—Kinsman, shabby and dissolute and a blackmailer. I don’t know what he had been up to in those four years, something queer, no doubt. He was always a bit of an enigma. He cleaned her out at last. She had to tell him that she could not give him another penny. It was in the lane as usual. A wet, sodden October afternoon. The sky was gray and unrelenting, like Kinsman’s face. When they parted, after a piteous scene on her part, it was on the understanding that he would come to the house that night and give her husband those letters. That was all.On her way home she met one or two people—her best friends. They chatted a bit of little social things—the hockey ball, a wedding, to which she had not been asked, some new people at a house on the hill, on whom nobody had yet called.That afternoon she did not change her dress, but went indoors and threw herself on the drawing-room sofa in her short, bicycling skirt. In front of the window she faced was a cherry tree, its boughs bent by the wind and its long, dry leaves floating yellow to the grass. She tried to form her plans. Would Dick turn her out that night? It was beginning to rain; inside, the fire was cheery. The room had never looked so nice. Her wild eyes roved over her little cherished gimcracks on the tables—the dainty rubbish that housekeepers accumulate and love. When she heard wheels outside she did not rise. She was afraid. Perhaps Kinsman had stopped the trap on the way from the station. But Dick came in and gave her the usual temperate kiss and asked in the usual hearty way how the youngsters were and whether dinner was going to be punctual. He sat sprawling in slippersand an old coat by the fire, saying comfortably what a rough night it was and how the wind had lashed into his eyes as he drove home.She turned on her cushions and watched him. He was growing fat and bald—there were prosperous, uninteresting curves all over him. He had ripened into a flourishing business man who liked his dinner and a good cigar, who considered his wife as one of his comforts—and very little more. But she loved him. How she loved him! Would he send her away that night?He was mumbling sleepily that it was not fit weather in which to turn a dog out. Would he turn her out? Would he let her take the baby?She stared out at the autumn sky and tossing trees; in, at the firelight chasing round the warm, picture-loaded walls. Where would to-morrow find her? To-morrow she would be an outcast.All the time her ears were pricking for the door bell and, when it clanged, she started to her feet, with a choking sound in her dry throat. Her face was clay above the severe line of her rigidly cut cloth bodice. The bell rang again. She got up and almostcrawled toward that deep chair by the fire and kissed her husband—a kiss of relinquishment. He patted her hair and looked at her in lazy surprise. Then he said in a voice of mild irritation:“That can’t be Crook” (he was the curate). “He said he’d look in one night for a game of chess. But I didn’t ask him to dinner, and he surely wouldn’t turn out in such weather. I hope it isn’t Crook. I want to do some work to-night.”He glanced at his black bag, which was bloated with papers which he had brought from the City.Mrs. Conifer looked at it too—resentfully. She was thinking, with her woman’s logic, that it was this ardent devotion to business on her husband’s part which had made her drift. If he had not, in the Russell Square days, brought home that bag so often, she would not be in such a pitiable plight to-night. There was a hurried opening of doors downstairs, voices in the hall, then a sharp report and another.Mrs. Conifer shrieked. Her husband pulled himself out of the depths of the chair and rushed downstairs. Presently she stole after him, herlegs like lead and her wild heart thumping in her throat.The hall was brightly lighted with a red and yellow light, filtering through colored glass lanterns. Face downward on the tesselated floor was the body of a man, his prone head in a pool. The door was flung back. Black night outside and the sob of the wind!Two men, the gardener and another, lifted something from the step and carried it in. Mrs. Conifer dragged herself forward. The world swung round with her—they were bringing in another woman. They stretched her beside the man—a woman with the wreck of a gaudy black beauty. It was a face which Mrs. Conifer had seen once—in the doorway of the Inn, the face of Sophia Dominy, her savior.The servants were telling Dick how it happened. Kinsman had called and asked for him. The woman must have been close behind. As he stepped across the threshold she fired, then turned the weapon to her own head.Kinsman was always a puzzle. What had he been doing in the intervening four years? Howhad he disgraced himself? Had Sophia been with him all the time? No one will ever know. One thing only is certain; that Sophia, who was a very jolly, good sort of girl, had been bitterly jealous of Mrs. Conifer.Dead eyes blankly regarding her; blood circling sluggishly on the floor; October wind moaning in and lifting sadly the draggled end of smartness on the poor girl’s dress!She lost all control, drew her shaking hands from her breast, and gave a long cry of horror and despair. She couldn’t even be grateful for her escape—couldn’t realize it. Dick turned. He saw her there for the first time. He put an arm about her and led her upstairs—to the firelit room, with the open piano, the bowls of autumn flowers, and the pleasant litter of magazines. She flung herself into his arms, choking with emotion.“My God!” she gasped—suddenly, horribly vehement for so childish and dainty a creature—“if—if—if——”She was on the verge of a confession, but Dick’s trust was so complete that he thought her merelyhysterical—as well she might be. He lifted her distorted face from its burrow in his coat and put his wife with tender insistence on the sofa.“There, there,” he said, patting her softly. “Don’t you give way. It’s a beastly business. What the deuce could poor Kinsman have wanted with me? I must go, dearie; there is a great deal to be arranged. I’ll send one of the maids to look after you.”“No,” she cried sharply, “I want to be alone.”He kissed her and went away. After a little she heard him leave the house. Then the baby wailed in the room above and the nurse crooned it quiet. She heard the tramp of feet in the hall; heard the study door shut stealthily, and guessed what this dread, subdued bustle meant.She got up stiffly and went round and round the room, taking up every little toy from the tables thoughtfully, arranging mats and flowers—touching everything with a wistful clinging because it had been spared to her. And then she suddenly remembered—rememberedthat she was not quite safe yet.Everything downstairs was still. She stole to the door and listened. Then she pattered out onto the landing, stooped down, and taking off her slippers carried them in her hand. She crept down the stairs—cursing the steady tick of the tall clock, the rustle of her silk petticoat. She reached the study and waited outside the door for a moment. She was gathering courage to save her honor. She turned the handle at last. Someone had lighted the lamp—the reading lamp with the green shade. It cast a faint yellowish flicker on the horrible shrouded things that were stretched, side by side, on the big table.In the drawer of that table Conifer kept a flask of brandy. She took it out and tipped some of the blazing spirit down her throat. It nerved her to peel the sheet from Kinsman’s face, to draw it lower, to thrust her delicate hand, heavy with Conifer’s jewels, into the inner pocket of the dead man’s coat and steal her letters.Then she drew the sheet back—heart, hand, andhead heavy with recollection. All sorts of minor things flashed through her dizzy head—things which had been romantic, daring, delightful at the time—which she exaggerated now into deadly sins, never, never to be wiped out. At Sophia she did not look. But her light blue eyes fixed on Kinsman. His thin lips seemed to have taken a mocking curve—although she had the best of the game. His mouth was shut forever and her letters were back in her own possession. She tucked them into her bodice, remembered to pick up her slippers from the floor, and stole away.There was a servant in the drawing room tending the fire; there was another, as she could hear, busy in the bedrooms, preparing for the night. But the nurse was downstairs and the nurseries were empty, except for the sleeping children.She crept in, looking furtively round the firelit walls. She went over to the hearth, dug the unclean letters fiercely in, and watched them burn. There was a little white frock airing on the guard. She took it up in her hot hands and kissed it. Toys were all over the floor; one, a fur monkeywith one eye missing and the other fiery-red, seemed to blink up malignantly—and as if it knew and would one day tell her children.She went into the night nursery and looked at two small heads and two small bodies curled under flowery eider downs. The children were both babies under three. There were toys here too and little socks that she had knitted. These two rooms filled her with a wilder misery and terror than she had known before, because she had been so near losing those little heads on the pillows.Heavy with shame, thinking of those two—things—below, she slipped to the floor and tried to pray—for the souls of the dead and the peace of the living. But her knees stiffened. She stumbled to her feet, moaning. A grotesque memory beat in on her. She remembered the old superstition—that no witch could shed a tear; that this was the witches’ most bitter punishment. Well, here was hers. She could not pray. She had sinned, but she had come through the fire. She was faithful to Conifer with a double fervor. She had a high constancy and love which the mere faithful wife, who has neverbeen tempted, cannot attain. Still—she must bear the burden—of an interlude—all her days.*****She was out of sorts for a long time afterward—taking no interest in her bees, her poultry,—they are rose-comb Andalusians, she told me impressively,—or her children. The local doctor said that her nerves were all wrong. He recommended raw eggs and a thorough change. Conifer has brought her up to town. He has been taking her the round of the theaters—French plays, farces—imagine her sitting through them! On this, her first free night—he’s dining with a City company—she came to me! came creeping through the Inn in the old way, because she couldn’t help it.What an impulsive, delightful, compromising fool a true woman is! I only met her twice—for a minute, by accident—with Kinsman—and yet she came to me to-night. Put herself absolutely in my power. I might blackmail her as Kinsman did. I might tell Conifer. Fortunately for her I shan’t.She sat and talked, elaborated every detail, shredded every sensation, just as Pray did. I wishthese remorseful, perplexed, sinned against and sinning people would not come to me. They shove their skeletons in my face, rattling every bone, speaking of the past—always, always the past—to a fellow who wants to keep young, who doesn’t feel his age.
ITwas only Mrs. Conifer. Thought the woman would never go! Poor soul! What a curse a conscience is. She was a fool to come back! Said she couldn’t help it! She loathes the very memory of Kinsman—she adores her husband—and yet she comes back to-night. That is so deliciously like a woman—to come back. To come creeping through the gate, dodging the porter, like she used to do, just to get the flavor of those old, distasteful days on her tongue again.
Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains—very dingy—at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor and blue plates hung by wire along the walls.
He was a languid, artistic chap—played theviolin, hung about old bookstalls andbric-à-bracshops in the lanes off Holborn.
He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand, half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental bowls—“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully—he gave you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally.
He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square. Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs. Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.
You don’t know the oppressively respectable side of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is altering fast. The change pains me. I wish some fellow who could write would immortalize the old place before it disappears. Every time I go outside the gates of the Inn some change hits me in the face. I seehoardings with up-to-date posters and the addresses of house-breakers in places where once there was a familiar, flat-faced house, with wide-framed windows. The old shops are going, little fusty shops—eating houses, furniture stores, undertakers. I saw the last typical eating house this morning. There was nothing in the window but a big blue dish—Kinsman would have admired it—and a row of pressed beef tins, with a haddock hanging flabbily over each tin.
Bloomsbury is forever in the violent stage—always going up or down. Directly they took away our exclusive gates and let the cabs run straight through to Kings Cross and Euston, there was an epidemic of boarding houses. I believe that every house in Woburn Place takes lodgers—more or less genteelly. An old fellow who had the first floor set at 3 when I came to the Inn remembered the days when only carriage folk lived in Great James Street. The first professional brass plate on a door ruffled the inhabitants considerably.
Great James Street, Doughty Street, and a few more belong to the Tichborne family. I remembera charwoman who used to say viciously—at times when she considered herself imposed upon by those she worked for:
“Ah! Wait till Sir Roger comes out o’ quod, and then they’ll see.”
Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a story to others, made gardens of the mews—and ruined the place for all sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in Mrs. Conifer’s time.
She was on the respectable side, of course: where people subscribe to Mudie’s and make the changing of books the great business of the day, where the men come home punctually to dinner at seven and the women stroll down Oxford Street regularly onfine afternoons. You may still see them swarming out of Hanway Street, very well dressed as a rule, and very often Jewesses.
Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet by-ways—down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street, across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had shaded windows—it was summer time at first—and a dainty tea. He liked her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a littleafraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also—after dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study. She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than once myself—always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who never goes out alone after dark.
And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure—I told you she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman, whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect—seal plush instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to blaze,and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She said, with an offensive touch of comradeship:
“Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.”
How did she find out? How do women learn these things?Youcan say perhaps—Igive it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very careful—as careful as a man knows how.
Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy, tawdry, dark creature in the doorway.
“I—I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I—excuse me—I do not know you.”
She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to blackmail her.
“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give yourself such airs—you are not a bit better than girls like me. If everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!”
Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy, and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been delicious, piquant, dangerous—like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.” Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and understood.
She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as thefirst tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia rose before her—triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair.
She went tottering up her own doorsteps. As she slipped along the hall, and past the study door, Conifer called out:
“Is that you, Freda?”
“Yes, it is I.”
“Come in.”
She stepped over the threshold and stood in the warm room, her pale head hanging and her half-shut eyes filled with dread. She forced herself to look up at last and to stammer out:
“We drove down to Terry’s Theater, Mrs. Hart and I. But the house was full—so—so we drove back. That is all—really.”
Conifer was sitting over the big table as usual, and as usual it was strewn with papers. But the doubleknot of anxiety was untied from above his eyes and the packets of paper were pushed back. There was a new tenderness on his face, or, rather, the revival of on old one.
“I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’ve got time to talk to you to-night, darling. I shall have time to take you about again myself. I’ve been awfully worried lately about business—you wouldn’t understand, it would only bother you. But I was afraid once that it meant ruin. I’ve been in a very tight place. But it’s all right now.”
He set back his shoulders and sighed, as if he threw off at that moment the burden of months.
“I shall,” he repeated, laughing foolishly, “have time foryounow.”
Mrs. Conifer’s pretty, weak face stiffened into horror. She was thinking of the quiet Inn, with its perpetual, sanctified taste of cloisters and the Middle Ages; thinking of Kinsman’s rooms, with the high-art furbelows, the violin under the table, the untidy dhurries on the floor, the impressionist daubs which he had painted himself and hung on the wall to keep the blue plates company. She thought ofthe black, dingy doorway, of the girl with the savage face and the twinkling earrings.
“Talk to me.” Conifer, who had shut the door carefully, half lifted her into the great chair by the fire and stretched himself at her feet on the rug, like a faithful dog.
Their eyes met; his full of worship, hers of lava-like tears.
“You love me?” she asked incredulously, the frozen look creeping more stiffly over her face. “I —I began to think——”
She looked such a small, shrunken thing—as he told her afterward—that he felt quite anxious and remorseful.
“Love!” he cried out boyishly; “I should think I did. Only business worries, you know, darling, enchain a man. He can’t be always saying it.”
He took her in his arms. She shivered as he kissed her, taking her full punishment from his ardent lips. She had loved him all along—only him. She thought of Kinsman, in his stuffy, wooden room, with a fierce, ashamed loathing. She kept quiet a little, her head on her husband’s breastand his lips just flicking her face now and then. At last she broke out beseechingly:
“Let us go away for a holiday.”
“Very good idea. When?”
“To-night—to-morrow, I mean. And, Dick—”
“Yes.”
“Let’s give up this house and go into the country. You can have a pony trap and a season ticket.”
“That isn’t half a bad idea,” he responded lazily—he was too happy to be positive or vehement about anything. “The rent here is very high and I don’t see what we get for it.”
*****
They went abroad for two months, and when they returned they took a house somewhere in Surrey. They lived there for four years—with a pony trap, a man for the garden, and all the other accessories of rural gentility. Mrs. Conifer was very happy. She had two charming children. She was in the third best set—the set which draws the line at tenant farmers, but thinks it rather a privilege to be invited to the Vicarage.
She never thought of Kinsman, of that dazed,magic time when she had been a traitor to Dick. She only heard of him twice—once when they saw his name in the newspaper—co-respondent in a divorce suit or something of that sort—and wondered if it were the same man—theirKinsman—casually over dinner.
That was all. Except for that, she never gave Kinsman a thought, not even a shudder. She was too happy, too prosperous, too busy. She had her children. She had also her dogs, her bees, her poultry—all the live things that women gather about them in the country, to take the place of shopping. She had her little social excitements—summer garden parties and winter hockey. She had her little heart-burnings and triumphs—being snubbed by this woman or dropping that one.
But one day when she was out alone on her bicycle she came upon Kinsman in a lane near the house. He was very shabby, obviously very down on his luck. She remembered all at once that he had never given her back her letters—those foolish, imprudent letters in which she had bared her soul. She gripped the handle bars of her machine desperately.He was standing in her path. For a moment she had a wild plan of running him down. But the next moment her foot was on the ground. She had dismounted and faced him.
That was the first of many meetings. He was on his last legs, he was absolutely unscrupulous, and he regularly bled the poor little woman. Once her husband commented on her shabby hat, offered to raise her allowance, and gave her five sovereigns to go on with. The yellow coins dropped like burning blood into her palm. Twice a week she met Kinsman in the lane—Kinsman, shabby and dissolute and a blackmailer. I don’t know what he had been up to in those four years, something queer, no doubt. He was always a bit of an enigma. He cleaned her out at last. She had to tell him that she could not give him another penny. It was in the lane as usual. A wet, sodden October afternoon. The sky was gray and unrelenting, like Kinsman’s face. When they parted, after a piteous scene on her part, it was on the understanding that he would come to the house that night and give her husband those letters. That was all.
On her way home she met one or two people—her best friends. They chatted a bit of little social things—the hockey ball, a wedding, to which she had not been asked, some new people at a house on the hill, on whom nobody had yet called.
That afternoon she did not change her dress, but went indoors and threw herself on the drawing-room sofa in her short, bicycling skirt. In front of the window she faced was a cherry tree, its boughs bent by the wind and its long, dry leaves floating yellow to the grass. She tried to form her plans. Would Dick turn her out that night? It was beginning to rain; inside, the fire was cheery. The room had never looked so nice. Her wild eyes roved over her little cherished gimcracks on the tables—the dainty rubbish that housekeepers accumulate and love. When she heard wheels outside she did not rise. She was afraid. Perhaps Kinsman had stopped the trap on the way from the station. But Dick came in and gave her the usual temperate kiss and asked in the usual hearty way how the youngsters were and whether dinner was going to be punctual. He sat sprawling in slippersand an old coat by the fire, saying comfortably what a rough night it was and how the wind had lashed into his eyes as he drove home.
She turned on her cushions and watched him. He was growing fat and bald—there were prosperous, uninteresting curves all over him. He had ripened into a flourishing business man who liked his dinner and a good cigar, who considered his wife as one of his comforts—and very little more. But she loved him. How she loved him! Would he send her away that night?
He was mumbling sleepily that it was not fit weather in which to turn a dog out. Would he turn her out? Would he let her take the baby?
She stared out at the autumn sky and tossing trees; in, at the firelight chasing round the warm, picture-loaded walls. Where would to-morrow find her? To-morrow she would be an outcast.
All the time her ears were pricking for the door bell and, when it clanged, she started to her feet, with a choking sound in her dry throat. Her face was clay above the severe line of her rigidly cut cloth bodice. The bell rang again. She got up and almostcrawled toward that deep chair by the fire and kissed her husband—a kiss of relinquishment. He patted her hair and looked at her in lazy surprise. Then he said in a voice of mild irritation:
“That can’t be Crook” (he was the curate). “He said he’d look in one night for a game of chess. But I didn’t ask him to dinner, and he surely wouldn’t turn out in such weather. I hope it isn’t Crook. I want to do some work to-night.”
He glanced at his black bag, which was bloated with papers which he had brought from the City.
Mrs. Conifer looked at it too—resentfully. She was thinking, with her woman’s logic, that it was this ardent devotion to business on her husband’s part which had made her drift. If he had not, in the Russell Square days, brought home that bag so often, she would not be in such a pitiable plight to-night. There was a hurried opening of doors downstairs, voices in the hall, then a sharp report and another.
Mrs. Conifer shrieked. Her husband pulled himself out of the depths of the chair and rushed downstairs. Presently she stole after him, herlegs like lead and her wild heart thumping in her throat.
The hall was brightly lighted with a red and yellow light, filtering through colored glass lanterns. Face downward on the tesselated floor was the body of a man, his prone head in a pool. The door was flung back. Black night outside and the sob of the wind!
Two men, the gardener and another, lifted something from the step and carried it in. Mrs. Conifer dragged herself forward. The world swung round with her—they were bringing in another woman. They stretched her beside the man—a woman with the wreck of a gaudy black beauty. It was a face which Mrs. Conifer had seen once—in the doorway of the Inn, the face of Sophia Dominy, her savior.
The servants were telling Dick how it happened. Kinsman had called and asked for him. The woman must have been close behind. As he stepped across the threshold she fired, then turned the weapon to her own head.
Kinsman was always a puzzle. What had he been doing in the intervening four years? Howhad he disgraced himself? Had Sophia been with him all the time? No one will ever know. One thing only is certain; that Sophia, who was a very jolly, good sort of girl, had been bitterly jealous of Mrs. Conifer.
Dead eyes blankly regarding her; blood circling sluggishly on the floor; October wind moaning in and lifting sadly the draggled end of smartness on the poor girl’s dress!
She lost all control, drew her shaking hands from her breast, and gave a long cry of horror and despair. She couldn’t even be grateful for her escape—couldn’t realize it. Dick turned. He saw her there for the first time. He put an arm about her and led her upstairs—to the firelit room, with the open piano, the bowls of autumn flowers, and the pleasant litter of magazines. She flung herself into his arms, choking with emotion.
“My God!” she gasped—suddenly, horribly vehement for so childish and dainty a creature—“if—if—if——”
She was on the verge of a confession, but Dick’s trust was so complete that he thought her merelyhysterical—as well she might be. He lifted her distorted face from its burrow in his coat and put his wife with tender insistence on the sofa.
“There, there,” he said, patting her softly. “Don’t you give way. It’s a beastly business. What the deuce could poor Kinsman have wanted with me? I must go, dearie; there is a great deal to be arranged. I’ll send one of the maids to look after you.”
“No,” she cried sharply, “I want to be alone.”
He kissed her and went away. After a little she heard him leave the house. Then the baby wailed in the room above and the nurse crooned it quiet. She heard the tramp of feet in the hall; heard the study door shut stealthily, and guessed what this dread, subdued bustle meant.
She got up stiffly and went round and round the room, taking up every little toy from the tables thoughtfully, arranging mats and flowers—touching everything with a wistful clinging because it had been spared to her. And then she suddenly remembered—rememberedthat she was not quite safe yet.
Everything downstairs was still. She stole to the door and listened. Then she pattered out onto the landing, stooped down, and taking off her slippers carried them in her hand. She crept down the stairs—cursing the steady tick of the tall clock, the rustle of her silk petticoat. She reached the study and waited outside the door for a moment. She was gathering courage to save her honor. She turned the handle at last. Someone had lighted the lamp—the reading lamp with the green shade. It cast a faint yellowish flicker on the horrible shrouded things that were stretched, side by side, on the big table.
In the drawer of that table Conifer kept a flask of brandy. She took it out and tipped some of the blazing spirit down her throat. It nerved her to peel the sheet from Kinsman’s face, to draw it lower, to thrust her delicate hand, heavy with Conifer’s jewels, into the inner pocket of the dead man’s coat and steal her letters.
Then she drew the sheet back—heart, hand, andhead heavy with recollection. All sorts of minor things flashed through her dizzy head—things which had been romantic, daring, delightful at the time—which she exaggerated now into deadly sins, never, never to be wiped out. At Sophia she did not look. But her light blue eyes fixed on Kinsman. His thin lips seemed to have taken a mocking curve—although she had the best of the game. His mouth was shut forever and her letters were back in her own possession. She tucked them into her bodice, remembered to pick up her slippers from the floor, and stole away.
There was a servant in the drawing room tending the fire; there was another, as she could hear, busy in the bedrooms, preparing for the night. But the nurse was downstairs and the nurseries were empty, except for the sleeping children.
She crept in, looking furtively round the firelit walls. She went over to the hearth, dug the unclean letters fiercely in, and watched them burn. There was a little white frock airing on the guard. She took it up in her hot hands and kissed it. Toys were all over the floor; one, a fur monkeywith one eye missing and the other fiery-red, seemed to blink up malignantly—and as if it knew and would one day tell her children.
She went into the night nursery and looked at two small heads and two small bodies curled under flowery eider downs. The children were both babies under three. There were toys here too and little socks that she had knitted. These two rooms filled her with a wilder misery and terror than she had known before, because she had been so near losing those little heads on the pillows.
Heavy with shame, thinking of those two—things—below, she slipped to the floor and tried to pray—for the souls of the dead and the peace of the living. But her knees stiffened. She stumbled to her feet, moaning. A grotesque memory beat in on her. She remembered the old superstition—that no witch could shed a tear; that this was the witches’ most bitter punishment. Well, here was hers. She could not pray. She had sinned, but she had come through the fire. She was faithful to Conifer with a double fervor. She had a high constancy and love which the mere faithful wife, who has neverbeen tempted, cannot attain. Still—she must bear the burden—of an interlude—all her days.
*****
She was out of sorts for a long time afterward—taking no interest in her bees, her poultry,—they are rose-comb Andalusians, she told me impressively,—or her children. The local doctor said that her nerves were all wrong. He recommended raw eggs and a thorough change. Conifer has brought her up to town. He has been taking her the round of the theaters—French plays, farces—imagine her sitting through them! On this, her first free night—he’s dining with a City company—she came to me! came creeping through the Inn in the old way, because she couldn’t help it.
What an impulsive, delightful, compromising fool a true woman is! I only met her twice—for a minute, by accident—with Kinsman—and yet she came to me to-night. Put herself absolutely in my power. I might blackmail her as Kinsman did. I might tell Conifer. Fortunately for her I shan’t.
She sat and talked, elaborated every detail, shredded every sensation, just as Pray did. I wishthese remorseful, perplexed, sinned against and sinning people would not come to me. They shove their skeletons in my face, rattling every bone, speaking of the past—always, always the past—to a fellow who wants to keep young, who doesn’t feel his age.