WHY?ISAIDI would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw Orion fling himself out of the window.Her story is in two parts. You will wonder how it is that I know both sides. It is because I met James Pray and got to know him very well soon after his wife died. He put Betty to boarding-school, let the cottage furnished, came back to London, and lived in the Inn until he married again.His second wife is an artist too—a very sensible, capable woman—with mediocre pictures on the line and accounts of her artistic At Homes in the leading fashion papers. She keeps Pray well in hand. He is a successful portrait painter—of the third-rate sort. They live in Kensington. I go to see them sometimes.When first he came to the Inn he used to talk to me incessantly of Adeline. Oddly enough, it was Murphy’s old set he took. He talked to me aboutAdeline. I used to listen—with my tongue in my cheek. Sometimes it really seemed a little uncanny, and I had half a mind to tell him everything, and so quiet him. But Adeline, poor dead girl, was always begging me not to. He was forever asking—why, why? I could have told him. The very room could have told him. We sat and smoked and drank and talked—at least he talked—in that paneled room which some former fool had grained to imitate maple. The ghosts of Murphy and of Adeline—a guilty pair—seemed to glide between us and stand shadowy in the clouds of tobacco as poor Pray asked—why?The very wood on the walls could have told him, the very oak, that black, discreet door which holds so much, was pregnant with an answer to that mournful query of his—why, why?He talked of Adeline. He painted a nervous, evanescent creature, full of moods and always plaintively tender. It was not the Adeline I remembered. She had been fine, full, and strong, with steady gray eyes and skin of ivory, all health and life and fun and witchery and wicked daring. Though I neversaw so very much of her. She was a lady, you understand; Murphy usually sported his oak when she came. He only asked me once to dinner, and I thought her most charming.*****“PRAY.—Adeline, wife of James Pray.”“If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said—“and you needn’t frown, because one of us must be first—you’ll put that in the paper.”She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the dripping trees.“Rubbish!” Pray said briefly.“Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper is to avow one’s self commonplace—to brand one’s self commonplace through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.”She laughed and added wistfully:“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die! I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life, how could I be expected to liestill? Ah! I wish you were not so uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.”“Other people being—the majority, that is——”“Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions. There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool. You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it in the paper—Adeline, wife of James Pray.”“Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply—the sharpness with which husbands of some years’ standing veil concern—“and don’t talk nonsense. You’ll take cold.”“Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown?That sounds like a patent-medicine query—inverted,” she said idly.They had been to the river to gather flowering rushes, and had been caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin rested in the scooped hollows of her hands.“These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained.“Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?”“Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt—you’d never permit it. Blue serge—especially when it is touched up with cardinal—sounds so safe, so sane; it seemsto shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!”James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine intolerance of her nonsense.How is it that I know so much—the very details of their looks and words? In after days—when Adeline and Murphy were dead—Pray used to talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.He looked down at her. His first painful impression was that she had grown very thin; he had not noticed it before. However, this impression passed, and he watched her with the ardent eye of an artist. Her gray eyes stared out troublously, vaguely, from the shelter of the great elm, at the heavy rain falling in the open. He loved her intensely. I expect he loved her more, in his steady, level-headed way, than she loved him. He never talked about it; these women with so many words of love are very often only words.She must have been very tiresome, judging from what he told me. She was always fondling him; aman gets sick of that. He said that she seemed to have a sort of agonized remorse in her tenderness. I could have explained.Suddenly the rain stopped, and a bar of yellow broke the slaty sky.“Come on,” he said; “never mind the rushes.”“But I do mind.” She picked up the bundle, with its wide, delicate flowers and sword-like leaves, and carried it against her breast, making the front of her bodice dark with moisture.As they went along in the watery sun she shivered.“You’ve caught cold. I——”“Told me so. I haven’t caught cold. But I have saved from utter ruin the gown which took you some pains to design.”Then she added, catching his loose hand in hers:“I onlysaystupid things. I get a little tired of being different, that is all; no doubt other people get just as tired of being the same.”They were in sight of their cottage gate. Three-year-old Betty, their only child, was hanging overit, hauling a kitten round the middle. Adeline pulled up in the shadow of the irregular hazel hedge.“You promise?”Her eyes were half mirthful, half tragic.“Promise what?”“How men forget! To—put it in the paper.”He turned on her angrily.“This is unlike you—even you. This is too ridiculously, wickedly morbid.”“Isn’t it? But—but you promise just the same.”“Yes, anything—if you’ll go up at once and change your shoes,” he returned a little moodily, and kissing her with habitual carelessness on the hot lips she held up.She ran through the gate. He heard her humming lightly as she went upstairs. He picked up baby Betty with a sigh, and swung her on his back, feeling grateful that she at least had no complex emotions. A sugar-stick would bare her little simple soul.*****A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed into pneumonia. She wasa creature all nerves and no muscle.Iknow that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love—all the things which had moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?”James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly beautiful. He remembered everything—down to a green caterpillar which crawled on her hair.Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper, and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him.“I wonder why?” he said, in a voice choked by tenderness, and then he went up to her.Their bedroom, like the rest of the cottage, spoke of the persistent struggle for individuality. The bed was a tent, with curtains and canopy of brown and white; old chintz the color of coffee which is three parts milk. There was a patchwork quilt. She had made it from sentiment, not industry. There was the shine of oak and the twinkle of metal about the furniture. The chairs had rush seats, and had been collected, one by one, from other cottages.He sat down and looked at the figure which was stretched so quietly under the canopy of sad brown. I try to picture him as he sat in that room with his unconventional clothes—you know the sort of thing, velvet coat, baggy knickerbockers, and streaming ends of a vivid necktie—and rugged, simple face; he might have been a man of a hundred years back. He could have had no place in this whirling, struggling nineteenth century, this common age.The cuckoo was calling, with a voice much the worse for wear, “Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuck-cuck-cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck. Cuck.” He groaned, rememberingthat she would never hear a word against the cuckoo—that genus of birds who scorned dull routine and domesticity. She used to add a bit mournfully, with one of those fierce sudden kisses which had bothered him so at the time, and which he would have given all his art for now, that a cuckoo sort of woman would have suited him. She filled the world—this dead, perplexing Adeline of his. Would he ever be able to touch or hear, or speak, or see without that tender, pensive ghost at his side!He looked about him as the cuckoo called. The room was dear, so dear, from the days when Betty, a funny, bald baby, had kicked and gurgled in that queer oak cradle beside the bed. They had made the child participate in their eccentricities from the very start. She never had a perambulator, her dolly was a grotesque, home-made one, her clothes were made from mediæval designs.Dear! with so many common, precious details. How many mornings hadshesat before that shield-shaped glass, and wound the silk of her long, pale hair about her head! That little drawer on the leftwas sacred to her ribbons—an end of rose was hanging out.And then he looked at her, going close to the bed and stooping as if to caress her. But the dead face tantalized him. The eternal, remorseful tenderness was strong on her lips of steel. There had always been a sprig of rue in her love. Why? that maddening why—never to be answered. There had been a locked chamber in her heart.He turned away, not even kissing her brow. This still, white woman on the bed was not his. He and this soulless face were strangers. He felt her more in the never-ceasing call of the bird, in tall heads of lilies in the garden, and ephemeral patches of Shirley poppies which she had sown in March, in Betty’s ringing shout as she darted like a hummingbird across the grass.The room became suddenly hateful; every corner, every picture on the wall was a pang. Her gown—the delicate gown she had given her life for—hung fresh on the nail. It seemed mutely to hold her shape: in the sleeves, the folds across the bosom, the short, round waist.The sight of it was more than he could bear. She had been so clever, so daring, so different. Clever, not in a positive, productive way,—stupid women could produce,—but she had thrown her capacity about with royal lavishness; putting it into everything she did, if it were only a pudding, or a new border in the garden.He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that bloomed in the wood. He would on no account tolerate mourning, but the pitying country woman who was their servant had tied a black ribbon on the child’s flaxen head.Adeline had made that frock. Adeline had ferretedout the stuff at the village shop and carried it home in triumph, knowing he would be pleased. Adeline! Adeline! He seemed to see her fleet white fingers moving along the seams.They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read again—the one paragraph on the whole sheet.“Adeline, wife of James Pray.”*****That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his rooms—that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know James Pray.Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop—one of those shops where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window.Murphy was middle-aged—with a wide margin. I should have said fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his contemptible tricks;he was just like a woman. The things we love and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should call a pretty chap—all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip. Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His influence over them was quite uncanny.Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle.“I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY.Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter—we had ordered the dinner from across the way—came in.“Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally.“Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the notice aloud.You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper from her and was reading the notice for himself.“Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward a chance admirer.“A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly.Carrie flushed. She resented the word—in these days of universal ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus.Her round, childish face grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.Murphy began to eat savagely, talking to me in a jerky way as he did so.“Dead!” he said in a dazed way, with his jaws working nervously as he swallowed some bread. “Why, she was quite a young woman; she couldn’t have been thirty——”“Thirty!” echoed Carrie, in a scornful undertone.“We dined here, five years ago—you were of the party. We cooked the dinner ourselves; she thought it such fun. The soup was salt—you must remember.”His voice was so anxious that I said soothingly, “Of course I do.”“What a handsome girl she was!” he continued with sad enthusiasm. “It was the night of the Duke of York’s wedding.”“The Duke of York’s wedding?” cried irrepressible Carrie. “That is ever so long ago. We had a holiday from school. My mother went to see the illuminations and got her pocket picked.”She looked at Murphy with a new expression. He had been doing exactly the same thing five years before—only the girl was different. He must be quite old. She had not thought of that before. She had only considered that he was a gentleman. She felt depressed by the antique flavor of her company. I could see that she was thinking fervently that in future she would go straight back to Battersea.“We were a jolly party,” Murphy went on. “What a row Elizabeth made next day!”“Elizabeth?”“Married sister. Lived in Colville Gardens. Husband a parson—but a decent fellow. I used to visit them—of course they did not suspect—Adeline was clever, but she got found out like all the clever ones. There was a deuce of a row. Soon after she married Pray. Neither of them had a penny. Went and starved in the country. I could not have married her. It was out of the question altogether. She did not expect it. How fond she was of me!” He smiled, more with vanity than regret.“You couldn’t marry her, of course,” I echoed,just for the sake of saying something. “She wouldn’t expect it.”“She said that when she died she’d let me know,” Murphy went on, looking a little scared. He was superstitious, like all Irishmen. “It was in Colville Square, the night before her wedding. She crept out after dinner. I can see her now in her light gown with her big arms bare to the elbow and a thin chain round her neck. I remember that we stayed out a long time, walking round and round the railings. It was so late that I couldn’t get a cab back to the Inn and had to walk all the way. She looked so queer. She said she’d——”“Haunt you,” I finished, sick of his maunderings. “Well, she made sure of poor Pray. I’m sorry for that fellow. He put in the notice, of course—for you to see. She did the most that was possible in these practical days.”He did not seem to hear me.“Dead!” he went on, in a monologue sort of way, while Carrie, her fork halfway to her mouth and her elbows on the table, stared at him scornfully. “Her eyes! Gray, Irish eyes. She wasan Irish girl—the Mahoneys of Roscommon. You remember the dinner? She sat where you are now—facing the cupboard.”A long, clear note came from the set over the way, with the gay rattle of piano keys beneath quick fingers.“How well that girl of Martin’s sings!” I said irrelevantly.“I saw her once afterward. She was with her husband; itmusthave been Pray, a long-faced, badly dressed chap. I was with Bob Piety, at the Aquarium. I suppose they had come up from the country, determined on amusement; married people have their moments ofennui.They looked out of place. Adeline was so changed that I was not sure of her. Her good looks were gone and her mouth was harsh. She looked at me; I looked at her. I turned to Bob and said in a loud voice:“‘Auntie!’“That used to be my pet name for her. She turned to her husband and returned very clearly:“‘Yes.’“That was all. We both made our explanations—Ito Bob, she to her husband. I didn’t see her again that evening; I’ve never seen her since. Dead!”He got up hurriedly and looked round for his hat.“See after her,” he said huskily, jerking his head toward pretty Carrie, “I can’t—to-night. Take her to a music hall—anything.”He went away abruptly, leaving me a fair field. He was bent as he walked. He looked too old for the Inn; we don’t want graybeards.“What’s up with him?” demanded Carrie.“Liver. Have some more champagne?”I caught up the bottle.“No, thanks.” She snatched her glass away and the wine slobbered out on the cloth.“Who was she?” she persisted. “I don’t care a brass farthing. She’d be as old as the hills, if she was alive. But—who was she?”“A lady that he knew years ago.”“Lady!” sneered Carrie, spitefully, with a nasty, upward curl of her ripe lip. “Why, she was the same as me—he said so.”“She was a woman, my dear; that’s all. Haveyou really finished? Then where shall we go?”She put on her hat in a hurry and cast decisively for a popular contortionist at one of the halls—I think it was the Royal.“They say he twists himself about something awful,” she added, with a little grimace and a gleeful shudder.We clattered down the stairs. The oak thudded heavily behind our quick feet, as if it had regrets for Adeline.
ISAIDI would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw Orion fling himself out of the window.
Her story is in two parts. You will wonder how it is that I know both sides. It is because I met James Pray and got to know him very well soon after his wife died. He put Betty to boarding-school, let the cottage furnished, came back to London, and lived in the Inn until he married again.
His second wife is an artist too—a very sensible, capable woman—with mediocre pictures on the line and accounts of her artistic At Homes in the leading fashion papers. She keeps Pray well in hand. He is a successful portrait painter—of the third-rate sort. They live in Kensington. I go to see them sometimes.
When first he came to the Inn he used to talk to me incessantly of Adeline. Oddly enough, it was Murphy’s old set he took. He talked to me aboutAdeline. I used to listen—with my tongue in my cheek. Sometimes it really seemed a little uncanny, and I had half a mind to tell him everything, and so quiet him. But Adeline, poor dead girl, was always begging me not to. He was forever asking—why, why? I could have told him. The very room could have told him. We sat and smoked and drank and talked—at least he talked—in that paneled room which some former fool had grained to imitate maple. The ghosts of Murphy and of Adeline—a guilty pair—seemed to glide between us and stand shadowy in the clouds of tobacco as poor Pray asked—why?
The very wood on the walls could have told him, the very oak, that black, discreet door which holds so much, was pregnant with an answer to that mournful query of his—why, why?
He talked of Adeline. He painted a nervous, evanescent creature, full of moods and always plaintively tender. It was not the Adeline I remembered. She had been fine, full, and strong, with steady gray eyes and skin of ivory, all health and life and fun and witchery and wicked daring. Though I neversaw so very much of her. She was a lady, you understand; Murphy usually sported his oak when she came. He only asked me once to dinner, and I thought her most charming.
*****
“PRAY.—Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
“If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said—“and you needn’t frown, because one of us must be first—you’ll put that in the paper.”
She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the dripping trees.
“Rubbish!” Pray said briefly.
“Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper is to avow one’s self commonplace—to brand one’s self commonplace through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.”
She laughed and added wistfully:
“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die! I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life, how could I be expected to liestill? Ah! I wish you were not so uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.”
“Other people being—the majority, that is——”
“Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions. There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool. You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it in the paper—Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
“Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply—the sharpness with which husbands of some years’ standing veil concern—“and don’t talk nonsense. You’ll take cold.”
“Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown?That sounds like a patent-medicine query—inverted,” she said idly.
They had been to the river to gather flowering rushes, and had been caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin rested in the scooped hollows of her hands.
“These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained.
“Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?”
“Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt—you’d never permit it. Blue serge—especially when it is touched up with cardinal—sounds so safe, so sane; it seemsto shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!”
James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine intolerance of her nonsense.
How is it that I know so much—the very details of their looks and words? In after days—when Adeline and Murphy were dead—Pray used to talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.
He looked down at her. His first painful impression was that she had grown very thin; he had not noticed it before. However, this impression passed, and he watched her with the ardent eye of an artist. Her gray eyes stared out troublously, vaguely, from the shelter of the great elm, at the heavy rain falling in the open. He loved her intensely. I expect he loved her more, in his steady, level-headed way, than she loved him. He never talked about it; these women with so many words of love are very often only words.
She must have been very tiresome, judging from what he told me. She was always fondling him; aman gets sick of that. He said that she seemed to have a sort of agonized remorse in her tenderness. I could have explained.
Suddenly the rain stopped, and a bar of yellow broke the slaty sky.
“Come on,” he said; “never mind the rushes.”
“But I do mind.” She picked up the bundle, with its wide, delicate flowers and sword-like leaves, and carried it against her breast, making the front of her bodice dark with moisture.
As they went along in the watery sun she shivered.
“You’ve caught cold. I——”
“Told me so. I haven’t caught cold. But I have saved from utter ruin the gown which took you some pains to design.”
Then she added, catching his loose hand in hers:
“I onlysaystupid things. I get a little tired of being different, that is all; no doubt other people get just as tired of being the same.”
They were in sight of their cottage gate. Three-year-old Betty, their only child, was hanging overit, hauling a kitten round the middle. Adeline pulled up in the shadow of the irregular hazel hedge.
“You promise?”
Her eyes were half mirthful, half tragic.
“Promise what?”
“How men forget! To—put it in the paper.”
He turned on her angrily.
“This is unlike you—even you. This is too ridiculously, wickedly morbid.”
“Isn’t it? But—but you promise just the same.”
“Yes, anything—if you’ll go up at once and change your shoes,” he returned a little moodily, and kissing her with habitual carelessness on the hot lips she held up.
She ran through the gate. He heard her humming lightly as she went upstairs. He picked up baby Betty with a sigh, and swung her on his back, feeling grateful that she at least had no complex emotions. A sugar-stick would bare her little simple soul.
*****
A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed into pneumonia. She wasa creature all nerves and no muscle.Iknow that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love—all the things which had moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?”
James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly beautiful. He remembered everything—down to a green caterpillar which crawled on her hair.
Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper, and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him.
“I wonder why?” he said, in a voice choked by tenderness, and then he went up to her.
Their bedroom, like the rest of the cottage, spoke of the persistent struggle for individuality. The bed was a tent, with curtains and canopy of brown and white; old chintz the color of coffee which is three parts milk. There was a patchwork quilt. She had made it from sentiment, not industry. There was the shine of oak and the twinkle of metal about the furniture. The chairs had rush seats, and had been collected, one by one, from other cottages.
He sat down and looked at the figure which was stretched so quietly under the canopy of sad brown. I try to picture him as he sat in that room with his unconventional clothes—you know the sort of thing, velvet coat, baggy knickerbockers, and streaming ends of a vivid necktie—and rugged, simple face; he might have been a man of a hundred years back. He could have had no place in this whirling, struggling nineteenth century, this common age.
The cuckoo was calling, with a voice much the worse for wear, “Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuck-cuck-cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck. Cuck.” He groaned, rememberingthat she would never hear a word against the cuckoo—that genus of birds who scorned dull routine and domesticity. She used to add a bit mournfully, with one of those fierce sudden kisses which had bothered him so at the time, and which he would have given all his art for now, that a cuckoo sort of woman would have suited him. She filled the world—this dead, perplexing Adeline of his. Would he ever be able to touch or hear, or speak, or see without that tender, pensive ghost at his side!
He looked about him as the cuckoo called. The room was dear, so dear, from the days when Betty, a funny, bald baby, had kicked and gurgled in that queer oak cradle beside the bed. They had made the child participate in their eccentricities from the very start. She never had a perambulator, her dolly was a grotesque, home-made one, her clothes were made from mediæval designs.
Dear! with so many common, precious details. How many mornings hadshesat before that shield-shaped glass, and wound the silk of her long, pale hair about her head! That little drawer on the leftwas sacred to her ribbons—an end of rose was hanging out.
And then he looked at her, going close to the bed and stooping as if to caress her. But the dead face tantalized him. The eternal, remorseful tenderness was strong on her lips of steel. There had always been a sprig of rue in her love. Why? that maddening why—never to be answered. There had been a locked chamber in her heart.
He turned away, not even kissing her brow. This still, white woman on the bed was not his. He and this soulless face were strangers. He felt her more in the never-ceasing call of the bird, in tall heads of lilies in the garden, and ephemeral patches of Shirley poppies which she had sown in March, in Betty’s ringing shout as she darted like a hummingbird across the grass.
The room became suddenly hateful; every corner, every picture on the wall was a pang. Her gown—the delicate gown she had given her life for—hung fresh on the nail. It seemed mutely to hold her shape: in the sleeves, the folds across the bosom, the short, round waist.
The sight of it was more than he could bear. She had been so clever, so daring, so different. Clever, not in a positive, productive way,—stupid women could produce,—but she had thrown her capacity about with royal lavishness; putting it into everything she did, if it were only a pudding, or a new border in the garden.
He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.
He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that bloomed in the wood. He would on no account tolerate mourning, but the pitying country woman who was their servant had tied a black ribbon on the child’s flaxen head.
Adeline had made that frock. Adeline had ferretedout the stuff at the village shop and carried it home in triumph, knowing he would be pleased. Adeline! Adeline! He seemed to see her fleet white fingers moving along the seams.
They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read again—the one paragraph on the whole sheet.
“Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
*****
That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his rooms—that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know James Pray.
Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop—one of those shops where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window.
Murphy was middle-aged—with a wide margin. I should have said fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his contemptible tricks;he was just like a woman. The things we love and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should call a pretty chap—all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip. Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His influence over them was quite uncanny.
Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle.
“I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY.
Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter—we had ordered the dinner from across the way—came in.
“Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally.
“Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the notice aloud.
You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.
But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper from her and was reading the notice for himself.
“Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward a chance admirer.
“A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly.
Carrie flushed. She resented the word—in these days of universal ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus.Her round, childish face grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.
Murphy began to eat savagely, talking to me in a jerky way as he did so.
“Dead!” he said in a dazed way, with his jaws working nervously as he swallowed some bread. “Why, she was quite a young woman; she couldn’t have been thirty——”
“Thirty!” echoed Carrie, in a scornful undertone.
“We dined here, five years ago—you were of the party. We cooked the dinner ourselves; she thought it such fun. The soup was salt—you must remember.”
His voice was so anxious that I said soothingly, “Of course I do.”
“What a handsome girl she was!” he continued with sad enthusiasm. “It was the night of the Duke of York’s wedding.”
“The Duke of York’s wedding?” cried irrepressible Carrie. “That is ever so long ago. We had a holiday from school. My mother went to see the illuminations and got her pocket picked.”
She looked at Murphy with a new expression. He had been doing exactly the same thing five years before—only the girl was different. He must be quite old. She had not thought of that before. She had only considered that he was a gentleman. She felt depressed by the antique flavor of her company. I could see that she was thinking fervently that in future she would go straight back to Battersea.
“We were a jolly party,” Murphy went on. “What a row Elizabeth made next day!”
“Elizabeth?”
“Married sister. Lived in Colville Gardens. Husband a parson—but a decent fellow. I used to visit them—of course they did not suspect—Adeline was clever, but she got found out like all the clever ones. There was a deuce of a row. Soon after she married Pray. Neither of them had a penny. Went and starved in the country. I could not have married her. It was out of the question altogether. She did not expect it. How fond she was of me!” He smiled, more with vanity than regret.
“You couldn’t marry her, of course,” I echoed,just for the sake of saying something. “She wouldn’t expect it.”
“She said that when she died she’d let me know,” Murphy went on, looking a little scared. He was superstitious, like all Irishmen. “It was in Colville Square, the night before her wedding. She crept out after dinner. I can see her now in her light gown with her big arms bare to the elbow and a thin chain round her neck. I remember that we stayed out a long time, walking round and round the railings. It was so late that I couldn’t get a cab back to the Inn and had to walk all the way. She looked so queer. She said she’d——”
“Haunt you,” I finished, sick of his maunderings. “Well, she made sure of poor Pray. I’m sorry for that fellow. He put in the notice, of course—for you to see. She did the most that was possible in these practical days.”
He did not seem to hear me.
“Dead!” he went on, in a monologue sort of way, while Carrie, her fork halfway to her mouth and her elbows on the table, stared at him scornfully. “Her eyes! Gray, Irish eyes. She wasan Irish girl—the Mahoneys of Roscommon. You remember the dinner? She sat where you are now—facing the cupboard.”
A long, clear note came from the set over the way, with the gay rattle of piano keys beneath quick fingers.
“How well that girl of Martin’s sings!” I said irrelevantly.
“I saw her once afterward. She was with her husband; itmusthave been Pray, a long-faced, badly dressed chap. I was with Bob Piety, at the Aquarium. I suppose they had come up from the country, determined on amusement; married people have their moments ofennui.They looked out of place. Adeline was so changed that I was not sure of her. Her good looks were gone and her mouth was harsh. She looked at me; I looked at her. I turned to Bob and said in a loud voice:
“‘Auntie!’
“That used to be my pet name for her. She turned to her husband and returned very clearly:
“‘Yes.’
“That was all. We both made our explanations—Ito Bob, she to her husband. I didn’t see her again that evening; I’ve never seen her since. Dead!”
He got up hurriedly and looked round for his hat.
“See after her,” he said huskily, jerking his head toward pretty Carrie, “I can’t—to-night. Take her to a music hall—anything.”
He went away abruptly, leaving me a fair field. He was bent as he walked. He looked too old for the Inn; we don’t want graybeards.
“What’s up with him?” demanded Carrie.
“Liver. Have some more champagne?”
I caught up the bottle.
“No, thanks.” She snatched her glass away and the wine slobbered out on the cloth.
“Who was she?” she persisted. “I don’t care a brass farthing. She’d be as old as the hills, if she was alive. But—who was she?”
“A lady that he knew years ago.”
“Lady!” sneered Carrie, spitefully, with a nasty, upward curl of her ripe lip. “Why, she was the same as me—he said so.”
“She was a woman, my dear; that’s all. Haveyou really finished? Then where shall we go?”
She put on her hat in a hurry and cast decisively for a popular contortionist at one of the halls—I think it was the Royal.
“They say he twists himself about something awful,” she added, with a little grimace and a gleeful shudder.
We clattered down the stairs. The oak thudded heavily behind our quick feet, as if it had regrets for Adeline.