CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
If you look into life, you will find that the key-note of every woman's existence is love—the broad, the great, the grand passion. She may take up a million causes, champion a thousand aims; but the end that she reaches—is love. To fail in such an end—to lose the grasp of it when once it might have been hers—this is the most bitter of aloes; gall that eats into her blood and corrodes her clearest vision. A man, forging destinies, is a king, to be mated only with a woman who loves.
There are exceptions; but these are not needed to prove the rule; for there hangs even some doubt, like a fly in the amber, in the history of Jeanne D'Arc, the most patent an example of them all. Yet whether, as some chronicles would say, she was never burnt as a witch, but smuggled into the country, and there mated in love—and it would seem a shame unpardonable to rob history of a great martyr and the Church of Rome of a saint—it makes no odds in the counting. Great women have loved greatly—lesser women have loved less—but all who are of the sex have made the heart their master, and obeyed it whenever it has truly called.
So it had come to Sally. Beyond all doubt, she loved; beyond all question, she was prepared to obey the faintest call that her heart prompted. Janet, tender to her that night, fondling her and caressing her, answering to her with the very heart that she had tried to stifle within herself, was Janet herself again the next morning. But Sally was unchanged.
She dressed herself silently before the mirror, looking out through the window at the grey river-fog that fell gloomily across the water and Janet lay in bed, her hands crossed behind her head, a cigarette hanging between her lips and the smoke curling up past her eyes. The school of Art did not open until eleven o'clock that morning. Sally had to be at the office at nine.
"There'll be a fog up in Town," said Janet. She did not take the cigarette out of her mouth. It jerked up and down with the words.
"Sure to be," Sally replied.
"Suppose Mr. Traill will come and take you out to lunch?"
Sally turned quickly. "I told you last night," she said bitterly. "We shan't see each—"
"Oh yes, I know that. But do you think he means it?"
"I'm sure he does."
"I'm not."
Sally unpinned a coil of her hair and re-arranged it more carefully, unconscious that she did it because Janet had suggested the vague hope in her mind that he might come.
"Why are you so different this morning?" she asked.
Janet brushed away a piece of glowing ash that had fallen like a cloud of dust into one of the hollows below her neck.
"Didn't know I was very different."
"You are."
"Well, I've been thinking—" She threw the end of her cigarette away and jumped out of bed, walking on her heels over the cold, linoleumed floor to the washstand. "I've been thinking," she repeated as she poured out the cold water into the basin—"and as far as I can see"—she dipped her face with a rush into the icy water, and her words became a gurgle of speeding bubbles—"there was really no need for all your crying and misery—heavens! this water'd nip a tenderer bud than I am. Ain't I a bud, Sally?" She laughed and shivered her shoulders as she struggled to work the soap into a lather.
"I never can understand you when you talk like that," said Sally. "I never know whether you really mean what you say."
"Well, I mean every word of it. It's the only time I do mean things, when I talk like that. Where'd you put the towel? We want a clean towel, Sally. I sopped up some tea I spilt with this last night. No—but can't you see, there's no need for you to be so miserable as you think. Men only make a sacrifice when they really love a woman. He'll come back to you, like a duck to the water. You know he will. Do you think if he'd cared for you at all, he'd have given tuppence whether he taught you what most men teach most women. The only woman a man thinks he has no real claim to, is the woman he loves; he believes he has a proprietary right to nearly every other blessed one he meets, and has only got to assert it."
"How do you know these things, Janet? What makes you say them?"
"You mean who's taught me them—eh? What man has ever taken a sufficient interest in me to show me so much of his sex? Isn't that what you mean?"
"No!"
"Oh, I know I'm ugly enough. That glass has a habit of reminding me of it every morning. I could smash that glass sometimes with the back of a hair-brush, only it might break the hair-brush."
"Janet, you're cruel sometimes! Things like that never enter my dreams!" Sally exclaimed passionately.
"Bless your heart," said Janet, "facts never do. You take facts as they come; you act on them instinctively, but you don't realize them. Iamugly. There's no doubt about it. You don't think I'm ugly, but you see I am. That prompts your question without knowing it. But men have made fools of themselves—even over me. There was one man at the school last year—took a fancy to me, I believe because I was so ugly. Just like James II. and the ugly maids-of-honour. I was going to live with him. Can you believe that? And one night at one of the dances, we were kicking up a row a bit—dancing about as if we were lunatics—and my hair fell down—there's not much for a pin to stick into at the best of times. I remember laughing and looking across the room at him. Well, I saw an expression in his eyes that settled it. He looked as if he could see me—just like I know I am—in the mornings when I first wake up—all frowsy and fuddled, with this little bit of a mat I've got, sticking out in tails, about as long as your hand, on the pillow. It takes a bit of courage for a man to even go and live with a woman after he's seen her like that. I assure you it didn't take me much courage to tell him I'd changed my mind."
Sally watched her and the pain that she felt as she listened furrowed her brow into frowns. She knew that there was more than this, more than the bare statement behind this little story. That was Janet's way of putting it, the way Janet made herself look on at life, the apparently heartless aspect in which she viewed everything. To sympathize would only sting her to still more bitter sarcasm. Sally said nothing, the pity was in her eyes.
"I've never told you that before, have I?" said Janet.
"No."
"And I suppose you're terribly shocked because I even ever thought of living with a man?"
"No, I'm not. If you loved him and—and he couldn't marry you."
Out of the corner of her eyes Janet watched her, rubbing her face vigorously with the towel to conceal her observation. In that moment then, she saw the end of Sally, drew the matter out in her mind, as, with hurried strokes, she might have sketched a passing face upon the slip of paper.
"Well, you run on down to breakfast," she said. "You'll be late; it's five minutes to eight."
A whole week passed by, and Sally heard no more of Traill. Every day, when she went out to lunch, or left the office after work was over, she looked up and down King Street in the hope, almost the expectation, of seeing him waiting for her to come. Then the expectation died away; the hope grew fainter and fainter, like a shadow that the sun casts upon the sundial until, at an hour before setting, it is scarcely discernible.
Another week sped its days through. It was as the unwinding of a reel of silk, each day a round, each round and the body of the reel grew thinner and thinner, and the coils of silk lay wasted—entangled on the floor.
Deep shadows settled under Sally's eyes. The disease of love-sickness has its common symptoms, the whole world knows them; the hungry self-interest that wears itself out into a hypochondriacal morbidity; the perverted power of vision, the hopeless want of philosophy; not to mention the hundred ailments of the body that beset every single one who suffers from the complaint.
Janet watched Sally closely through it all until, as the time passed by, even she began to think that her calculations had been at fault.
At last, one morning, there lay on the breakfast-table in the kitchen, a little brown-paper parcel addressed to Sally. She picked it up eagerly and the flame flickered up into her cheeks as she laid it down again, unopened, in her lap. Janet smiled across at her, but said nothing. When breakfast was over, she let Sally go away by herself up to her bedroom, while she remained behind and talked to Mrs. Hewson. Ten minutes, she gave her; then she mounted the stairs as well. She did not knock. She walked straight into the bedroom and there she found Sally, seated near the window, the tears coursing down her cheeks, while she held out her wrist and stared at a woven gold bangle that bore on it her name in diamond letters. By the side of the empty box was a letter, well-folded, so that it could fit within, and on the floor lay the string and the brown paper, just as it had been torn off.
Janet stood in front of her, hands on hips, warmed with the sense of being a prophet in her own country.
"Are you satisfied now?" she asked.
Sally looked up; the pride of the woman in the bauble blent in her eyes with the disappointment of the woman in love.
"Isn't it lovely?" she said pathetically. "Oh, it is lovely. I've never had anything so beautiful before. But I can't keep it. How can I keep it?"
"Can't keep it!" exclaimed Janet. "What are you talking about? Do you think it was given to you to look at and then return? Why shouldn't you keep it? It's got your name on. He can't give it to anybody else, unless there's more than one Sally down his alley, which I should think is very doubtful. What do you mean—you can't keep it? You make me feel like Job's wife."
Sally unclasped the bangle and laid it back in the little velvet box with lingering fingers. Then she picked up the letter.
"Read that," she said.
Janet swept her eyes to it. To her, as she read, it seemed to be the condensation of more than one letter that had been written before. A man, she argued, who gives such a present, is more than probably in love; and a man who is in love, cannot write so directly to the point in his first attempt.
This was the letter:—
"DEARMISSBISHOP—"
(To call her "Sally" in diamonds and "Miss Bishop" in ink, was ridiculous. Ink was infinitely cheaper; and if he could afford the one, then why not the other?)
"I make it a habit to discharge debts. With this to you, I wipe out my debit sheet and stand clear. You remember my bet on the Hammersmith 'bus. I hope you were none the worse for my foolishness of our last evening. I have regretted my thoughtlessness many times since.
"Yours sincerely,"J.HEWITTTRAILL."
"What foolishness?" asked Janet, looking up quickly at the end. "What did he do?"
Of the fight and her fainting, Sally had told her nothing. She told her nothing now. The fear that Traill might be thought selfish—a thought which love had refused to give entrance to in her own mind—had led her to defend him with silence. Now she told the deliberate lie, unblushingly, unfearingly.
"He did nothing," she replied; "that's only a joke of his. But you see, I can't keep the bangle," she went on quickly, covering the lie with words, as Eugene Aram hid the body of his victim with dead leaves. "I must send it back to him. I never knew he really meant it when he made that bet. I never even thought he meant it when he reminded me of it that day after lunch."
"No more he did mean it," said Janet, sharply. "If he'd seen you again and again—he'd never have paid it—not as he's pretending to pay it now."
"Pretending?"
"Yes."
Sally took up the bangle in her fingers.
"You don't call this pretence, do you?" she asked. "Why, it's worth even much more than he said in his bet. He paid more than ten pounds for this."
"Exactly," said Janet, shrewdly; "doesn't that prove it? If he was only paying his bet, you can make pretty sure that he'd have sent the money and not a penny more than he owed."
"Yes; but do you think he'd do a thing like that?" said Sally, with pride. "He'd know I wouldn't accept it that way."
"Well, perhaps not," Janet agreed; "but then he wouldn't have bought a thing that cost a penny more than ten pounds, if so much. You don't know men when they're parting with money that they've had to whip some one else to get. You say he's not so very well off. At any rate, he wouldn't have given you a thing that cost fifteen or twenty pounds—those diamonds aren't so small—when he only owed you ten."
"But he didn't owe it to me!" Sally interrupted.
"Very well, he didn't. Then why do you think he's sent you this?"
"Because he thinks he does."
"Very well, again; then why does he send you something that's worth so much more?"
Janet folded her arms in a triumph of silence. For a long time Sally could frame no reply. It had seemed, only an hour before, that she would have been so willing to seize at any straw which the tide of affairs should bring her, and now that the solid branch had floated to her reach, she could not find the confidence to throw her whole weight upon it. It was the letter that thwarted her; the letter that warned her from too great a hope.
"But read the letter," she said at last. "Read the letter again. Would he ever have written as abruptly as that if—if what you suggest is right? He might have asked me to—to think sometimes when I wore it—"
"Why? Is he a sentimentalist?"
"My goodness! No!"
"Well, then, he wouldn't. That's a stock phrase of the sentimentalist. The sentimentalist is always thinking, that's all he does, and he breaks his heart over it if other people don't act what he thinks."
"Well, he's not a sentimentalist, certainly."
She even smiled when she thought of his exclamations during the fight.
"What are you smiling at?" asked Janet, quickly. "Something he said?"
"Yes."
"That wasn't sentimental?"
"Yes."
"Well, he certainly wouldn't have told you to think about him when you wore it. I imagine I can guess exactly what sort he is."
"How can you guess?"
"Well, because I know what sort you are, and I fancy I know just the type of man whom you'd fall in love with as rapidly as you've fallen in love with this Mr. Traill. He's hard—he can bend you—he can break you—he can crush you to dust, and there'll still be some wind or other that'ud blow your ashes to his feet. He's all man—man that's got the brute in him, too—and you're all woman, woman that's got the mating instinct in her, and will go like the lioness across the miles of desert, without food and without water, when once she hears the song of sex in the hungry throat of her mate. Oh, it's a pretty little story, too strong for a drawing-room; but Darwin'll tell it you, Huxley'll tell it you. But you'll never read Darwin, and you'll never read Huxley—except in a man's eyes. Oh, I know you think I'm a beast, I know you think I've got no sense of refinement at all, that I might have been a man just as well as a woman. Lord! how your friend Traill would hate me, 'cause he's got all I've got and more—in himself. But I don't care what you say about that letter—the letter's nothing. It's the gift that's the thing. That's the song of sex if you like; and whether you return it, or whether you don't, you'll answer it, as he meant you to. You'll go creeping across the desert, and you won't touch water, and you won't touch food, till you've reached him."
She stood there, shaking the words out of her, the revolutionary in her eyes and God's truth fearlessly in her breath. Then she lit a Virginian cigarette and walked out of the room.
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
There were occasions, as he had said, when Traill met his sister. They were infrequent, as infrequent as he could make them. And they were seldom, if ever, at her house in Sloane Street.
One evening, some three weeks or less after his parting with Sally, he took her out to dinner. He donned evening dress, loudly cursing the formality, and brought her to a fashionable restaurant, where he gently cursed the abject civility of the waiters beneath his breath.
"They're not men," he said to his sister; "they're worms of the underworld, waiting for the corpse to be lowered its regulation six feet."
Mrs. Durlacher shuddered. "You make use of horrible similes sometimes, Jack," she said.
"I see some horrible things," said Traill. "Look at that waiter, hovering like a vulture, while the fat old gentleman from Aberdeen goes through the items of the bill. He might just as well shut one eye and stand on one leg to make the picture complete. That's rather a pretty girl, too, at the same table."
His sister looked in the direction. "Why, he's not from Aberdeen," she said, daintily. "That's Sir Standish-Roe; he sits on boards in the city."
"A vigorous exercise like that ought to reduce his bulk," said Traill. "Do you know them, then?"
"Yes."
"Who's the girl?"
"That's his daughter. I'll introduce you after dinner if they're not hurrying off to a theatre."
"No you don't," said Traill; "baited traps don't catch me, however alluring they are."
So they talked, all through dinner, criticizing in idle good-humour the various people about them. Whenever he was in his sister's company Traill sharpened his wits. Putting on the social gloss, he called it, whenever she laughed at his remarks and told him he would be a God-send at some of her dinners.
"Is it quite hopeless?" she asked him that evening.
"Quite! As far removed from possibility as I am from a seat in the Cabinet."
"But you might if you took up politics."
"Exactly, the point of absolute certainty being that I never shall."
She waited awhile, letting the conversation drift as it liked; then she dipped her oar again.
"Do you ever hunt or shoot now?"
"Hunt, yes, for jobs. I've made that feeble joke before to somebody else. No—neither."
"We had some rather good days with the pheasants this year down at Apsley."
"Did you?"
"Yes, Harold got sixty-seven birds one day."
"Lucky dog! Have you finished? Well, look here, we'll come along to my rooms—I'm on the first floor now; I hate talking in these places. You won't have to climb up all those stairs this time, and I'll give you some more of that coffee."
She needed no second persuasion. In the drift of her mind, she fancied she saw impressions floating by, first one and then another, impressions that he was more tractable this evening, more likely to be won a little to her side; for social though she was—the blood in her veins to the finger tips—she still cared for this Bohemian brother of hers; considered it trouble well spent to bring him to her way of thinking. We are all of us apt to think thus generously of those whom we hold dear.
"There aren't many women who come up these stairs in evening dress, I can assure you," he said, as they mounted the flight together.
She laughed. "And I suppose the ones who do are on their way to see you?"
"Dolly, I'm ashamed of you," he replied.
"Well, you've made yourself the reputation; don't grumble at it or shirk it."
"Shirk it? Why should I?" He stood aside to let her pass in. "I've nothing to be ashamed of. I don't wear the garment of respectability, but then I'm not stark naked. Every man clothes himself in some article of faith, virtue if you like." The name of Sally and Sally's face swept across his mind. There was one virtue at least which he could put on. "You people, the set you want me to join, the hunting set, the country house set—all you wear—I don't mean you particularly. God! If you were like that!" He was too intent upon what he was saying to notice the smile of ice that twisted her pretty lips. "All you wear is the big, comprehensive cloak of respectability, and sometimes you're not particular whether that's tied up properly."
Dolly broke into low laughter. "If you'd come down to Apsley," she said, "one week end, I'd get a certain number of people down there, and when they are all congregated in the drawing-room after dinner, you could stand with your back to the fire, command the whole room and, at a signal from me, make that speech. You'd be the lion of the evening."
"What does being the lion of the evening mean?" he asked, with the ironical turn of the lip. "That your bedroom door is liable to open, I suppose, and admit whatever lady is most hampered in the way of debts."
"Jack!" She sat upright in the chair she had taken, eyes well lit with a forced blaze, breath cunningly driven through the nostrils.
"What?"
"How dare you talk to me like that?"
"Don't know," he replied, imperturbably. "It is daring, I suppose, seeing that I'm not one of you. You'd listen to that on the hunting field from a man whom you'd met once before. But it was daring of me; I'm only your brother, and not in the crew at that."
Her eyes glittered more vividly, the breath came quicker still. Then it all blew away like sea-froth, and she shook with charming laughter.
"You talk like a Jesuit," she said. "Do you really feel those things as keenly as that?"
"Me?" He laughed with her and went for his pipe. "I don't feel them at all. What's there to feel about in them? I only want to show you that I'm not totally ignorant of what your set is like, the set you want me to become a lion-of-the-evening in. Lion-of-the-evening, beautiful lion, eh? Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks. Then why are you so hard on us?"
"Hard! I'm not hard." He lit a match for her, watched by the light of it her lineless face, deftly made up with its powder and its dust of rouge, the eyebrows cunningly pencilled, the lashes touched with black. None of it was obvious. It was only by the match's glare, held close to her face, that he could see the art that, in any less vivid an illumination, concealed the art. He smiled at it all, and her eyes, lifting, as the cigarette glowed, found the smile and sensitively questioned it.
"Why the smile?" she said, quickly.
"Why? Oh, I don't know. A comparison. I suppose you people really are artists. Mind you, I don't mean you. I'm not talking about you. If it were you—well, I shouldn't talk about it."
For the first moment in all their conversation of that evening, she looked ill-at-ease. A cloud passed over the sun of her self-assurance. It seemed, on the instant, to turn her eyes from blue to grey.
"What do you mean by—a comparison?" she inquired, "and saying we're artists? Artists at what? I believe you like to talk in riddles. That's another thing too that 'ud be in your favour. People 'ud think you so awfully clever. But what do you mean by comparison?"
He blew through his pipe, set it burning comfortably—took his favourite seat on the table with his legs swinging like a schoolboy's.
"A comparison—I mean a comparison between the women of your set, and the women who toil at the same job in the streets of London."
"Yes, but you said that when you looked at me, when you smiled while I was lighting the cigarette." The words hurried out of her lips, dropping metallically with a hard sound on his ears.
"I know, but I told you I didn't refer to you. Good God!" He gripped the table. "Do you think I could think about you like that? Look here, it's no good having this nonsense; I won't say another word if you think I am."
"Very well; all right. But tell me, at any rate, why you said it when you looked at me."
"Because you're made-up—made-up to perfection. I should never have seen it if I hadn't held the match up to your face. And there's the difference—there's the comparison. The women in your set are artists. There's all the difference in a Sargent and a man with half a dozen coloured chalks on the pavement, between them and the women you'll find in Piccadilly at night. But they're both workers in the same dignified profession. When you think of the way those poor wretches shove on their rouge—a little silk bag turned inside out with eider-down on it and rouge powder on that, then the whole thing jammed on to the face before a mirror in one of Swan & Edgar's shop windows; any night you can see 'em doing it—and then look at a society woman done up, with a maid in attendance and a mirror lighted up, as if it were an actor's dressing-table—my heavens, you're liable to make a comparison then."
Dolly shuddered at the picture. "I think you've got a loathsome mind, Jack," she said with conviction.
"Of course you do, and you're quite right. It is a loathsome idea to think that a man of the type of Sargent is of the same noble profession as the pavement artist. You can only disinfect its loathsomeness in a degree by assuring people that they don't work in the same street. But it always is loathsome in this country to see facts as they really are, and when you know of society women who send nude portraits of themselves—"
"Jack!"
"—Up to wealthy men whom they have not had the pleasure of meeting, it's naturally a beastly conception of life to compare them with those unfortunate women whose existence of course we all know about, but would much rather not discuss. I really quite agree with you, I have a loathsome mind."
Dolly rose with perfect dignity to her feet. "Do you think you ought to talk about things like that to me, Jack?"
"I don't know. I suppose it is questionable whether one ought to treat one's sister as a simple innocent, or talk to her, as undoubtedly you do talk in society to other men's wives and other men's daughters. I think myself that it doesn't really matter. You're not thinking of the impropriety of it. That doesn't worry you in the least. Many a man has talked to you sympathetically on similar subjects before. You've listened to them. The fault in me is the gentle vein of irony. Irony's an insidious thing when you grind it out of the truth. Sit down, Dolly; I won't talk about it any more. I'll pour the sweetest nothings you ever heard into your ears. Come on—sit down. It's not much after nine. I only wanted to show you why I don't appreciate society. I wouldn't mind it, if it admitted its vices and called them by their names; I think I'd permit myself to be dragged into it by a woman who was clean right through; but as it is, and as it describes itself, I prefer the pavement artist with his little sack of coloured chalks. There's not much reality, I admit, in his portrait of Lord Roberts or his beautiful pink and blue mackerel with its high light, that never shone on land or sea, except on the scales of that fish; there's not much reality in them, when they're finished, but there's a hell of a lot of it in the doing of them."
He sat and puffed at his pipe, while she remained standing, looking down into the fire.
The silence was long, then it was broken abruptly. A knock rattled gently on the door. It was soft, timid, but it rushed violently through their silence. Traill slid to his feet. His sister stood erect. Her eyes fastened to his face, and she watched him calculating the possibilities, as if he were counting them on his fingers, of whom it might be.
Then it came again.
"Who do you think it is?" she whispered. She was beginning already to shrink at the thought that some woman had come to see him. He heard that in her voice and casually smiled.
"It's all right," he said quietly. "I shan't let any one in who'd offend your sense of propriety. However I talk, we're related. Stay there."
She watched him cross to the door; turned, so that she could still observe him and yet with one twist of the head, if any one entered, seem to have been untouched by any curiosity.
He opened the door. It cut off his face from view; but she heard his sudden exclamation of surprise, and allowed a thousand speculations to travel through her brain.
"You!" he said.
"Yes," a woman's voice replied in a nervous undertone. "I came to see you, to see if you were in. I—I wanted to see you." The words were stilted with nervous repetitions.
"Of course, of course; come in; let me introduce you to my sister. Oh—you must—come in—please; we've been dining together and came on here—for coffee—"
He threw the door wide open, and Sally walked apprehensively into the room.
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
Superficially, training is everything. The heaven-born genius comes once in a century of decades to remind us, as it were, that there is such a thing as creation; but beyond the heaven-born genius, training, on a day of superficialities, must win.
This moment, when Sally stood but a few paces within Traill's room, and looked—half-appealing, half-guardedly—at Mrs. Durlacher, the perfect woman of society—perfectly robed, perfectly mannered, perfectly painted, was a moment as superficial as one, so charged with possibilities, could be. And through that moment, over it, almost as if it were an occurrence of her daily life, Mrs. Durlacher rode as a swallow rides on an upland wind—pinions stretched straightly out—the consummate absence of effort; all the training of numberless years and numberless birds of the air in its wings.
"Dolly—this is Miss Bishop—my sister, Mrs. Durlacher." Traill stamped through the ceremony, like a man through a ploughed field.
In the minute fraction of time that followed—so short that no one in reason could call it a pause—Mrs. Durlacher had moulded a swift impression of Sally. Two facts—guide-ropes across a swinging bridge—she held to for support in her sudden calculation. Firstly, Sally's appearance—the quiet, inexpensive display of a gentle taste. The blouse, showing through the little short-waisted coat—home-made—that, seen at a glance. The hat, with its quite artistic and unobtrusive colours—self-trimmed—the frame-work a year behind the fashion. The gloves, no holes in them, but well-worn. The skirt—not badly cut, but obviously a cheap material. The person, herself—more than probably a milliner's assistant. Secondly, the fact that she was in her brother's rooms. She knew Jack's dealings with women—did not even close her eyes to them—admitted them to be human and natural so long as he refrained from tying himself up with any one of them and thereby irretrievably separating himself from her and her set. With these two facts, then, she made her ultimate deduction of Sally's identity—a milliner's assistant, with a pardonable freedom of thought in the matter of propriety—and on that deduction, she acted accordingly. Ah, but it was acting that was finished and superb!
Her manner was gracious—she was compelled to accept her brother at his word, that he would let no one in who could offend her sense of propriety—yet it was graciousness which you saw through a polished glass, but could not touch. When Sally half-ventured forward with hand tentatively lifting, she bowed first—made it plain to Sally that in such a manner introductions were taken—then generously offered her hand, palpably to ease Sally's confusion.
Dressed as she was, looking as she did, in comparison with Sally, she held all the weapons. She could play them, wield them, just as she wished. Well-frocked, looking her best, a woman is a dangerous animal; but throw her in contact with another of her sex who is but poorly clad, socially beneath her, and in training her inferior, and you may behold all the grace, all the symmetry of the cobra as it unwinds its beautiful, sinuous body before the eyes of its panic-stricken prey.
The fact that her brother had admitted Sally to the room, made Mrs. Durlacher realize that he held her in special regard. Notwithstanding that Miss Bishop called upon him at his own rooms at half-past nine at night, when all young ladies who valued their reputations would be either playing incompetent bridge in the suburban home, or going respectably with relations to a harmless piece at the theatre, she took the other fact well into consideration—gave it full weight—and all in that brief moment of a pause, realized that as yet there was no intimacy between these two.
She did not look upon women as a class—the class he mixed with—as dangerous to her brother's ultimate salvation; but coming across the individual in Sally, quiet, unobtrusive—the type that valued its own possessions, and would certainly expect substantial settlement, if not marriage itself—she felt called into action and answered the call, as only such women with her training know how.
When she had shaken hands, she leant back again with one graceful elbow, bared, upon the mantelpiece—the pose of absolute ease. Sally, who, except for the students' balls, to which Janet had sometimes taken her, had not been in the presence of people in evening dress since she left home, stood, hiding her nervousness, but not hiding the fact that it was concealed. Traill's heart warmed to her. He knew his sister through and through—guessed every thought that was taking shape in her mind. But Sally—even her presence there alone—was more or less of an enigma and, seeing her almost pathetic perturbation of manner, he paid all the attentions he roughly knew to her.
"Here—you must sit down," he said easily. "We're not going to let you rush away before you've come."
For that plural of the pronoun, Sally thanked him generously in her heart; for that also, Mrs. Durlacher smiled inwardly and saw visions of the power by which Jack would eventually win his way.
"Will you have some coffee?" he added, when she had accepted the chair he proffered. "We've just had some. Good—wasn't it, Dolly?"
"Excellent."
"Will you have some?" he repeated.
"No, thank you—well—yes,—yes, I think I will."
Even to take coffee is action—action that it is an aid to conceal.
"Some milk?"
"No, thank you—black, please."
She trusted that he would not remember that she had taken it with milk before. She always did take it with milk, but the eyes of that woman by the mantelpiece were on her, and she knew well enough how coffee ought to be taken.
All that Traill had told her of his sister, was racing wildly through her thoughts. She knew she was being criticized, knew that her position there was being looked upon in the least charitable light of all. She should never have come into the room. The fact that her voice had been heard, would have made no difference. But who thinks of such things when the moment is a goad, pricking mercilessly? Now she was there, her position could scarcely be worse. She would have given her life almost, in those first few moments, to sink into obscurity, no matter what peals of ironical laughter might ring in her ears as she vanished. But the thing was done now, and for every little attention he paid her, she thanked Traill with a full heart.
"What on earth have you got in that parcel?" he asked her, as he crushed down the saucepan of coffee to heat upon the fire.
Her cheeks reddened—flamed. It felt to her as if the eyes of his sister were lenses concentrating a burning sun upon her face.
"Oh it's nothing," she said, mastering confusion; "only something that I was taking home."
His eyes questioned her, noting the flaming cheeks while his sister studied the muscular development and forbidding features of James Brownrigg—heavy-weight champion in the fifties, whose portrait hung over the mantelpiece.
"Isn't this the type of man you'd call a bruiser?" she asked, with a pretty trace of doubtful confidence in her technical knowledge on the last word.
"That chap—Brownrigg? No. I should call him a gentleman. I'd have given a good deal to see him fight. He always allowed his man to have his chance, though there wasn't one in England he couldn't have knocked out in the first round. He used to keep that glorious left of his tucked up, as quiet as a pet spaniel under a lady's arm, till he'd given his man time to show what he was worth. Then he'd shake his shoulders, grin a bit with that ugly mouth—never with his eyes—and plant his blow, the kick of a mule, and his man curled up like a caterpillar on a hot brick. That stroke got to be known as James Brownrigg's Waiting Left. I've met him. He kept a public house up in Islington. Died about four years ago, with both fists clenched, and his left still waiting. It's quite possible he kept it waiting till he got to the gates of heaven."
Mrs. Durlacher looked up at the portrait again and then half-shuddered her graceful shoulders.
"I suppose a man can be a gentleman and look like that," she said. "But some one ought to have told him to grow his hair a little longer. As it is, it has a fatal suggestion of three years' imprisonment for assault and battery."
"Or the army," suggested Traill, with a laugh.
She took that well and laughed with him. "Yes, quite so; or the army; but they don't look so much like convicts as they used to. What do you think, Miss Bishop? Would you say, to look at him, that James Brownrigg was a gentleman?"
This, in a period of ten minutes, was the first remark that she had addressed to Sally. Coming, as it did, after that space of time, pitched on the casual note, the eyebrows gently lifted, there was a whip in it that stung across Sally's sensitive cheeks. The words in themselves, of course, were nothing. Traill, in fact, thought that this icicle of a sister of his was beginning to thaw, and looked towards Sally for her answer in encouraging expectancy.
Sally rose to her feet and crossed to the mantelpiece. The spirit in her prompted her to considered lethargy, as though the remark were as inconsequent to her as it had been to the maker; but the gentleness of her nature made it impossible for her to give insult for insult. Her steps were not slow—they were almost eager—and her lips smiled. She gave the very impression that she would have died rather than create—the apparent sense of pleasure in which she felt in being addressed at all.
For a moment she stood looking into the impassive, brutal face of James Brownrigg. Her expression was one of studiousness and consideration; yet the face of James Brownrigg was completely blurred in her vision. She had to force her eyes to see, and spur her mind to think. Then she turned, facing Mrs. Durlacher.
"I think if you're going to judge everybody by their outward appearance," she said, "you certainly might feel inclined to say that he wasn't a gentleman. But outward appearances always seem to me so terribly deceptive. I should never let myself be led away by them."
This was a declaration! Even Sally, in her own gentle way, could declare war. The perfect curve of her upper lip grew thin as she said it, like a bow that straightens itself after the arrow has sped. Traill cast a swift glance at her, comprehending that there lay some meaning behind her words, yet knowing nothing of the duel that was being fought under his very eyes.
Mrs. Durlacher smiled. She took the thrust as gracefully as she had given her own.
To the trained hand and to the practised eyes, these things can not only be done with dexterity, they can be done with ease and with style. There are many who imagine that the days of romance are over because gentlemen do no longer saunter through the salons of the rich with pointed rapiers tapping at their heels. But romance did not go out with the duel. The duel itself has never gone out. Words, looks—these are the weapons of romance now. They are sheathed in their scabbards of velvet politesse, but just as easy of drawing, just as light to flash out and tingle in the air as ever were the dainty little Toledo blades of some odd two hundred years ago.
"Jack," said Mrs. Durlacher, "you've introduced me to a diplomatist. She says what she means without telling you what she says."
Traill thought that it all alluded to the portrait of James Brownrigg—imagined that Sally agreed with him, yet did not like to contradict his sister, and he laughed with amusement at the smartness of her retort. But Sally returned to her seat, conscious that she had made an enemy. She could think of no reply that had not a lash of bitterness in it and, clinging to the dignity of silence, rather than the vigour of attack, she said nothing.
When Traill had handed her her coffee, his sister moved slowly across the room to the settle where her fur coat, scarf and gloves were lying.
"You're not going?" he asked, looking up.
"Yes, I must, my dear boy. It's getting on for ten. Harold's got some people coming in after the theatre, and I believe we've got a supper. Do you think you could get me a taxi?"
"There's not a stand here. But you can get any amount of hansoms."
"Yes, but I want to get home. You're sure to find heaps of empty ones in Piccadilly Circus just at this time. Run and see—do. I'll be putting on my coat."
Traill went—obedient. They heard him taking the stairs two at a time in the darkness. Then the door slammed.
"One of these days he'll break his neck down those stairs," said Mrs. Durlacher. "Do you live in Town, Miss Bishop?"
She ran one sentence into the other inconsequently, as if they had connection.
"Well—not exactly," said Sally. "I live in Kew."
"Oh yes—Kew—it's a very pretty place. There are some delightful old houses on the Green—the gardens side—I believe they're King's property, aren't they?"
"I know the ones you mean," said Sally; "they are very nice, but I don't live there." She added that with a smile—a generous admission that she made no pretension to what she was not. Upon Mrs. Durlacher it was wasted, as was all generosity. She had not the quality herself; understood it as little as she possessed it.
"Oh, I wasn't supposing that," she replied easily. "I was thinking that that was the only part of Kew I had noticed. I think I've only been there once or twice at the most. Have you known my brother long?"
Sally's fingers gripped tight about her little parcel. "Oh no, not so very long."
"He's a quaint, int'resting sort of person. Don't you find him so?"
To Sally, this description sounded ludicrous. The fashionable way of putting things was utterly unknown to her. To think of Traill as quaint, in the sense of the word as she understood it, seemed preposterous. She could not realize that the Society idea of quaintness is anything which does not passably imitate or become one of itself.
"Interesting—yes, I certainly think he is. This room alone would show that, wouldn't it?"
"Oh, well, I don't know so much about that. He'd have this sort of room anywhere, wherever he lived. It's the fact that he chooses to live here and slave and work that I think's uncommon—so quaint. But he'll give it up—he's bound to give it up after a time. You can't wash out what's in the blood. Do you think you can? He'll drop the Bohemian one day—it's merely a phase. I'm only just waiting, you know, to give the dinner on his coming out." She drew on her long gloves and smiled in her anticipation of the event.
None of the value of this did Sally lose—none of the intent that lay behind it. She perfectly realized that it was meant to convey a candid warning to her; that if she had pretensions, she might as well light their funeral pyre immediately, burn all her hopes and ambitions, a sacrifice before the altar of renunciation. But ambitions, she had none. With her nature, she would willingly have consented to their burning at such a command as this. What hopes she possessed, certainly, were shattered; but the flame of her passion, that was only kindled the more. Now that she realized how utterly he was beyond her reach, how immeasurably he was above her, she made silent concessions to the crying demands of her heart which she would not have dreamed of admitting to herself before.
Irretrievably he was gone now. All Janet had said, strong in truth as it may have seemed at the time, had only been based upon her extraordinary view of life in general. Some cases, perhaps, it might have applied to; it did not apply to this. Janet was utterly wrong; she was not winning him. In this chance meeting with his sister, brief though it may have been, she knew that she had lost him; arriving at which conclusion, she probably reached the most dangerous phase in the whole existence of a woman's temptations.
When Traill returned, he found them both in preparation for departure. Sally had replaced the little feather boa about her neck and one of her gloves, which she had taken off when he gave her the coffee, she was buttoning at the wrist.
"You're not going, are you?" he exclaimed.
"Yes; I must."
"But you haven't told me what you wanted to see me about yet."
"No, I know I haven't; but that must wait. I can easily write to you."
Mrs. Durlacher picked up her skirts, the silk rustling like leaves in an autumn wind. As she lowered her head in the movement, the dilation of her nostrils repressed a smile of satisfaction. "You mustn't let my going force you away," she said graciously.
"Oh, but I must go," said Sally.
Traill shrugged his shoulders. Let her have her way. When women are doing things for apparently no reason, they are the most obstinate. But at the door of the room as his sister passed out first, he caught Sally's elbow in a tense grip and for the instant held her back.
"I shall wait here for you for half an hour," he whispered.