She had picked up a quilt from the bed and wrapt it round him. Having drawn a chair to the fire, she sat rocking with his head against her shoulder. Since she had left the man, she had not spoken. Once the tapestry, falling into place, rustled as though the door were being opened. She turned gladly with a welcoming smile and remained staring into the darkness long after the smile had vanished. A footstep came along the passage. Again she turned, her lips parted in readiness to bid him enter. The footstep slowed as it reached the bedroom, hesitated and passed on.
She had ceased expecting; Teddy knew that by her “Don’t care” shrug of annoyance. Though she held him closely, she seemed not to notice him. With her head bent forward and her mouth a little trembling, she watched the dancing of the flames. He stirred against her.
“Comfy?” she murmured.
“Very.”
She laughed softly. Her laughter had nothing to do with his answer; it was the last retort in a bitter argument which had been waging in the stillness of her mind. When she spoke it was as though she yawned, rubbing unpleasant dreams from her eyes. “Well, little fellow, what are you going to do with me?”
The implied accusation that he had carried her off thrilled him. It was the way she said it—the coaxing music of her voice: it told him that she was asking for his adoration. His arms reached up and went about her neck; his lips stole up to hers. Made shy by what he had done, he hid his face against her breast.
She rested her hand on his head, ruffling his hair and trying to persuade him to look up.
“And I don’t even know your name! What do they call you? And do you kiss all strange ladies like that?”
His throat was choking. He knew that the moment he heard his own voice his eyes would brim over. But he was getting to an end of the list of first things—getting to an age when it wasn’t manly to cry just because the soul was stirred. So he bit his lip and kept silent.
“Ah, well,” she shook her head mournfully, “I can see what would happen. If we married, you would make an obstinate husband. You don’t really love me.”
Her despair sounded real. “Oh, it’s not that. It’s not that,” he cried, dragging her face towards him with both hands.
She took his hands away and held them. “Then, what Is it?”
“You’re so beautiful. I can’t—can’t speak. I can’t tell you.”
She clasped him closer. “Oh, I’m sorry. It was only my fun. I didn’t mean to make you cry. You’re the second person I’ve hurt to-night. But you—you’re only a little boy, and such a dear little boy! We were going to be such good friends. I must be bad-hearted to hurt everybody.”
“You’re not bad-hearted.” The fierceness with which he defended her made her smile. “You’re not bad-hearted, and I do love you. And I want to marry you only—only I’m so little, and you said it only in fun.”
She mothered him till he had grown quiet Then, with her lips against his forehead, “Don’t be ashamed of crying; I like you for it. I’m so very glad we met to-night I think—almost think—you were sent. I hadn’t been kind, and I wasn’t feeling happy. But I’d like to do something good now; I think I’d like to make you smile. How ought I to set about it?”
“Sing to me. Oh, please do.”
In the firelit room she sang to him in a half-voice, her long throat stretched out and throbbing like a bird’s as she stooped above him. She sang lullabies, making him feel very helpless; and then of lords and cruel ladies and knights. Shadows, sprawling across walls and ceiling, took fantastic shapes: horsemen galloping from castles; men waving swords and grappling in fight A footstep in the passage! He felt her arms tighten. “Close your eyes,” she sang, “close your eyes.”
She held up a hand as Mrs. Sheerug entered. “Shish!”
“Asleep?”
She nodded.
Mrs. Sheerug came over to the fire and gazed down. He could feel that she was gazing and was afraid that she would detect that he was awake. It was a relief when he heard her whisper: “It’s too bad of you, Vashti; he’d just reached the turning-point. You’re as irresponsible as a child when your moods take you.”
A second chair was drawn up. Vashti had made no reply. Mrs. Sheerug commenced speaking again: “Hal——”
“Hal’s gone out. I suppose you’ve been——”
“Yes, quarreling. My fault, as usual.”
The older woman’s tones became earnest “My dear, you’re not good to my boy. How much longer is it going to last? You’re not—not a safe woman for a man like Hal. He needs some one more loving; you could never make him a good wife. Your profession—I wish you’d give him up.” Then, after a pause, “Won’t you?”
The little boy listened as eagerly as Hal’s mother for the reply. At last it came, “I wish I could.”
He sat up. She saw the reproach in his eyes, but she gave no sign. “Hulloa! Wakened? Time you were in bed, old fellow.”
He was conscious that she was using him as a barrier between herself and further conversation. Rising, she carried him over to the high four-poster bed. While she tucked him in, he could hear the clinking of a glass, and knew that his tribulations had recommenced. Mrs. Sheerug crossed from the fireplace: “Here’s another drink of the nice medicine.”
He buried his face in the pillow. He didn’t want to get better. He wanted to die and to make people sorry.
“Teddy,” it was her voice, “Teddy, if you take it, I’ll sing to you. Do it for my sake.”
She turned to Mrs. Sheerug. “He will if I sing to him. You accompany me. He says it’s a promise.”
She stood beside the pillow holding his hand. Over by the window the faery-godmother was taking her seat; stars peeped through the harp-strings curiously. What happened next was like arms spread under him, carrying him away and away. “Oh, rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him.” Her voice sprang up like a strong white bird; at every beat of its wings the harp-strings hummed like the weak wings of smaller birds following. “Oh, rest in the Lord”—the white bird rose higher with a braver confidence and the little birds took courage, plunging deeper into the grave and gentle stillness. “Oh, rest in the Lord”—it was like a sigh of contentment traveling back from prepared places out of sight. The room grew silent.
It was Vashti who had moved. She bent over him, “I’m going.” He stretched out his arms, but they failed to reach her. At the door Mrs. Sheerug stood and stayed her. Vashti halted, very proud and sweet. “What is it? You said I wasn’t safe. You can tell Hal he’s free—I won’t trouble him.”
Mrs. Sheerug caught her by the hands and tried to draw her to her. “I was mistaken, Vashti; you’re good. You can always make me forgive you: you could make any one love you when you’re singing.”
Vashti shook her head. “I’m not good. I’m wicked.” The older woman tried to reach up to kiss her. Again Vashti shook her head, “Not to-night.”
The medicine had been taken. By the easel a shaded lamp had been lighted—lighted for hours. It must be very late; the faery-godmother still worked, sorting her wools and pushing her needle back and forth, clothing Joseph in the presence of Potiphar’s wife. Every now and then she sighed. Sometimes she turned and listened to catch the regular breathing of the little boy whom she supposed to be sleeping. Presently she rose and undressed. The lamp went out In the darkness Teddy could hear her tossing; then she seemed to forget her troubles.
But he lay and remembered. Vashti had asked him to marry her. Perhaps she had not meant it. How long would it take to become a man? Did little boys ever marry grown ladies?
When his father entered Teddy was eating his breakfast propped up in bed, balancing a tray on his humped-up legs.
“Well, shrimp, you seem to have had a lucky tumble. Can’t say there seems to be much the matter.”
A large bite of hot buttered toast threatened to impede conversation. “It’s the brown stuff,” Teddy mumbled; “she wanted to see if it ’ud make me wet.”
“Kind of vivisection, eh? And did it?”
“All over—like in a bath playing ship-wrecked sailors.” The excavation of an egg absorbed the little boy’s attention. His father seated himself on the edge of the bed. He was a large childish man, unconsciously unconventional His brown velvet jacket smelt strongly of tobacco and varnish. It was spotted with bright colors, especially on the left sleeve between the wrist and elbow, where he had tested his paints instead of on his palette. His trousers bagged at the knees from neglect rather than from wear; their shabbiness was made up for by an extravagant waistcoat, sprigged with lilac. Double-breasted and cut low in a V shape, it exposed a soft silk shirt and a large red tie with loosely flowing ends. His head was magnificent—the head of a rebel enthusiast, too impatient to become a leader of men. It was broad in the forehead and heavy with a mane of coal-black ringlets. His mouth was handsome—a rare thing in a man. His nose was roughly molded, Cromwellian, giving to his face a look of rude strength and purpose. A tuft of hair immediately beneath his lower lip bore the same relation to his mustache that a tail bears to a kite—it lent to his expression balance. It was his eyes that astonished—they ought to have been fiercely brown to be in keeping with the rest of his gypsy appearance; instead they were a clear gray, as though with gazing into cloudy distances, as are the eyes of men who live by seafaring.
He had made repeated efforts to curb his picturesqueness; he knew that it didn’t pay in an age when the ideal for males is to be undecorative. He knew that his appearance appealed as affectation and bred distrust in the minds of the escutcheoned tradesmen who are England’s art patrons. When they came to confer a favor, they liked to find a gentlemanly shopkeeper—not a Phoenician pirate, with a voice like a gale. His untamedness impressed them as immorality. He always felt that they left him thoroughly convinced that he and Dearie were not married.
Whatever editors, art patrons and publishers might think about James Gurney, Teddy followed in his mother’s footsteps: to him James Gurney was Jimmie Boy, the biggest-hearted companion that a son ever had—a father of whom to be inordinately proud. There was no one as great as his father, no one as clever, no one as splendid to look at in the whole wide world. When he walked down the street, holding his father’s hand, he liked to fancy that people stared after him for his daring, just as they would have stared had he walked with his hand in the mane of a shaggy lion. It was wonderful to be friends with a father so fierce looking. And then his father treated him as a brother artist and borrowed notions from him—really did, without pretense; he’d seen the notions carried out in illustrations. His father had come to borrow from him now.
“Any ideas this morning, partner—any ideas that you don’t want yourself?”
Teddy hitched himself upon the pillow, trying to look as grave and important as if he wore spectacles. “Yes. A room like this, only lonely with a fire burning and an old, old woman sitting over there.” He pointed to the window and the gilded harp. “I’d let her be playing, Daddy; and a big white bird, that you can see through, must be beating its wings against the panes, trying and always trying to get out.”
“A ghost bird?” his father suggested.
“Don’t know—just a big white bird and a woman so old that she might be dead.”
“What’s the meaning of the bird, old chap? Dreams, or hopes, or memories—something like that?”
Teddy could find nothing more in the egg. “Don’t know; that’s the way I saw it” He ceased to be elderly, took off his imaginary spectacles and looked up like a dog who stands wagging his tail, waiting to be patted. “Was that an idea, Daddy?”
His father nodded.
“A good idea?”
“Quite a good idea. But, oh, while I remember it, Mr. Sheerug wanted to see you. You and he must have struck up a great friendship. The faery-godmother won’t let him—says you’re not well. He seems quite upset.”
Teddy was puzzled. “Mr. Sheerug!”
“Yes, a big fat man with whom you have a secret. He followed me up the stairs and asked me to thank you for not telling.”
“Was that Mr. Sheerug?” Teddy’s eyes became large and round. “Why, he’s the mur——I mean, the man who was in the garden.”
“That’s right He carried you in when you fainted. What made you faint, Teddy?”
The little boy looked blank. If he were to tell, he would get the fat man into trouble; an aggravated murderer, living only six doors removed, would make an awkward neighbor. There was another reason why he looked blank: were he to tell his father of Mr. Sheerug’s special hobby, he would certainly be forbidden to enter Orchid Lodge, and then—why, then he might never meet Vashti. He weighed his fear against his adoration, and decided to keep silent.
His father had fallen into a brown study. He had forgotten his inquiry as to the cause of Teddy’s fainting. “Theo.”
Something important was coming. To be called Theo was a warning.
“Theo, it hasn’t happened. When it’s so difficult to earn a living, I don’t know whether we ought to be sorry or glad.”
“What hasn’t happened?”
“There’s still only you and me and, thank God, Dearie.”
“But—” the small brain was struggling to discover a meaning—“but could there have been any one else?”
The large man took the little boy’s hand. “You don’t understand. Yes, there could have been several other people; but not now.” Rising, he walked over to the window and stood there, looking out. “Perhaps it’s just as well, with a fellow like me for your father, who spends all his time in chasing clouds and won’t—can’t get on in the world.”
Teddy couldn’t see his father’s face, but he thought he knew what was the matter. If Dearie had been there, she would have slipped her arms round the big man’s neck, calling him “Her Boy,” and would have made everything happy in a second. In her absence Teddy borrowed her comforting words—he had heard them so often. “Your work’s too good,” he said emphatically. “Every great man has been neglected.”
The phrase, uttered parrot-wise by the lips of a child, stirred the man to a grim humor. He saw himself as that white bird, battering itself into exhaustion against invisible panes that shut it out from the heavens. Every time it ceased to struggle the dream music recommenced, maddening it into aspiration; the old woman, so old that she might be dead, who fingered the strings of the harp was Fate.
He stared across the wintry gardens, blackened and impoverished by frost; each one like a man’s life—curtailed, wall-surrounded, monotonously similar, yet grandly roofed with eternity. Along the walls cats crept like lean fears; trees, stripped of leaves, wove spiders’ webs with their branches. So his work was too good and every great man had been neglected! His boy said it confidently now; as he grew older he might say it with less and less sincerity.
He laughed quietly. “So you’ve picked up my polite excuse, Ted! Yes, that’s what we all say of ourselves—we failures: ’My work’s too good.’”
“But it needn’t be an excuse, Mr. Gurney. It may be the truth. I often use the same consolation.”
Mrs. Sheerug stood, a burlesque figure of untidy optimism, smiling severely in the doorway. She was clad in her muddled plum-colored dressing-gown; her gray hair was disordered and sprayed about her neck; her tired blue eyes, peering above the silver-rimmed spectacles, took in the room with twinkling merriment. She came to the foot of the bed with the ponderous dignity of a Cochin-China hen, important with feathers.
“Yes, my dear sir,” she said, “you may not know it, but I, too, consider myself a genius. I believe all my family to be geniuses—that’s why I never interfere with the liberty of my children. Even my husband, he’s a genius in his fashion—a stifled fashion, I tell him; I let him go his own way in case it may develop. Genius must not be thwarted—so we all live our lives separately in this house and—and, as I dare say you know, run into debt. There’s a kind of righteousness about that—running into debt; the present won’t acknowledge our greatness, so we make it pay for our future. But, my dear sir, I caught you indulging in self-pity. It’s the worst of all crimes. You men are always getting sorry for yourselves. Look at me—I’ve not succeeded. I ask you, do I show it?”
“If to be always smiling—-” Mr. Gurney broke off.
“This is really a remarkable meeting, Mrs. Sheerug—three geniuses in one room! Oh, yes, if Teddy’s not told you yet, he will soon: he’s quite certain that he’s going to be a very big man. Aren’t you, Teddy?”
The little boy wriggled his toes beneath the counterpane and watched them working. “I have ideas,” he said seriously.
“What did I tell you?”
Mrs. Sheerug signified by the closing of her eyes that she considered it injudicious to discuss little boys in their presence. When she opened them again it was to discuss herself.
“As between artists, Mr. Gurney, I want your frank opinion. If you don’t like my work, say so.”
“Your work!” He looked about. “Oh, this!” His eyes fell on the unfinished woolwork picture on the easel. “It has—it has a kind of power,” he said—“the power of amateurishness and oddity. You’re familiar with the impelling crudity of Blake’s sketches? Well, it’s something like that What I mean is this: your colors are all impossible, your drawing’s all wrong and there’s no attempt at accuracy. And yet—— The result is something so different from ordinary conceptions that it’s almost impressive.”
Mrs. Sheerug, not sure whether she was being praised or blamed, shook her head with dignity. “You’re trying to let me down lightly, Mr. Gurney.”
“No, I’m not and I’ll prove it Joseph is supposed to be in the process of being tempted. Well, he isn’t tempted in your picture; he’s simply scared. I don’t know whether you intended it or whether it’s the unconscious way in which your mind works, but your prize-fighting negress, in the rôle of Mrs. Potiphar threatening a Cockney consumptive in an abbreviated nightgown, is a distinctly original interpretation of the Bible story; it achieves the success that Hogarth aimed at—the effect of the grotesque. It’s the same with your Absalom. You were so prejudiced against him that you even extended your prejudice to his horse. Every time you stuck your needle in the canvas you must have murmured, ’Serve him jolly well right. So perish all sons who fight against their fathers.’ So, instead of remembering that he was a prince of Israel, you’ve made him an old-clothes blood from Whitechapel who’s got into difficulties on a hired nag at Hampstead. I think I catch your idea: you’re a Dickens writing novels in woolwork. You’re Pickwickizing the Old Testament. In its way the idea’s immense.”
Mrs. Sheerug jerked her spectacles up the incline of her nose till they covered her eyes. “If I have to leave you now, don’t think that I’m offended.”
Mrs. Sheerug went out of the room like a cottage-loaf on legs. The door closed behind her trotting, kindly figure.
Mr. Gurney turned helplessly to Teddy. “And I meant to flatter her. In a worthless way they’re good. I was trying not to tell her the worthless part of it. Believe I’ve hurt her feelings, and after all her kindness—— I’m horribly sorry.”
“Father, when people marry, must they live together always?”
The irrelevancy of the question rather startled Mr. Gurney; Teddy’s questions had a knack of being startling. “Eh! What’s that? Live together always! Why, yes, it’s better. It’s usual.”
“But must they begin from the moment they marry?”
Mr. Gurney laughed. “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t marry. It’s because they think that they’ll go on wanting to be every minute of their lives together that they do it.”
“Ah, yes.” Teddy sighed sentimentally. His sigh said plainly, “Whatever else I don’t know, I know that.” He cushioned his face against the pillow. “But what I meant,” he explained, “is supposing one hasn’t any money, and one’s father can’t give one any, and one wants to be with some one every minute, and—and very badly. Would they live together then from the beginning?”
Mr. Gurney gave up thinking about Mrs. Sheerug; Teddy’s questions grew interesting. “If any one hadn’t any money and the lady hadn’t any money, I don’t believe they’d marry. But the lady might have money.”
Teddy gave himself away completely. “But to live on her money! Oh, I don’t think I’d like that.”
His father seated himself on the bed, with one leg curled under him. “Hulloa, what’s this? Been losing your heart to Mrs. Sheerug? She’s got a husband. It won’t do, old man.”
“It isn’t Mrs. Sheerug. It’s just—just curiosity, I expect.”
No encouragement could lure him into a more explicit confession. All that day, after his father had left, he lay there with his face against the pillow, endeavoring to dis-cover a plan whereby a little boy might procure the money to marry a beautiful lady, of whom he knew comparatively nothing.
He had not seen her again. It was now four days since she had sung to him. For her sake, in the hope of her returning, he had made himself the accomplice of Mrs. Sheenes plans. By looking languid he invited the terrors of her medicines. By restraining his appetite and allowing half his meals to be carried away untasted, he gave to his supposed illness a convincing appearance of reality. Even Mrs. Sheerug, whose knowledge of boys was profound, was completely deceived by Teddy. It had never occurred to her that there was a boy in the world who could resist good food when he was hungry.
“Is your head aching? Where is it that you don’t feel better?”
“It’s just all over.”
More physic would follow. He swallowed it gladly—was willing to swallow any quantities, if it were the purchase price of at length seeing Vashti. Every day gained was a respite to his hope, during which he could listen for her coming. Perhaps her footstep in the passage would first warn him—or would it be her voice? He liked to think that any moment she might enter on tiptoe and lean across his pillow before he was aware. When in later years the deluge of love swept over him, destroying that it might recreate his world, he was astonished to find how faithfully it had been foreshadowed by this embryo passion of his childhood.
For three days Mrs. Sheerug had asked him where he ached most, and had invariably received the same answer, “It’s just all over.” Her ingenuity in prescribing had been sorely tested: she had never had such an uncomplaining victim for her remedies. However unpleasantly she experimented, she could always be sure of his murmured thanks.
Under his gentleness she began to allow her fondness to show itself. She held old-fashioned notions about children, believing that they were spoilt by too much affection. Her kind heart was continually at war with her Puritan standards of sternness; the twinkle in her eyes was always contradicting the harsh theories which her lips propounded. Sitting by her easel in the quiet room, she would carry on gossiping monologues addressed to Teddy. He gathered that in her opinion all men were born worthless; husbands were saved from the lowest depths of inferiority by the splendid women they married. All women were naturally splendid, and all bachelors so selfish as to be beneath contempt. She gave Teddy to understand that women were the only really adult people in the world; they pretended that their men were grown up as a mother plays a nursery game with children. She quoted instances to Teddy to prove her theories—indiscreet instances from her own experiences and the experiences of her friends.
“To hear me speak this way, you may wonder why I married, and why I married Alonzo of all men. Even I wondered that on the day I said yes to him, and I wondered it on the day I eloped with him, and I’ve not done wondering yet Yes, little boy, you may look at me and wonder whether I’m telling the truth, but my father was Lord Mayor of London and I could once have married anybody. I was a very pretty girl—I didn’t know how pretty then; and I had a host of suitors. I could have been a rich lady to-day with a title—but I chose Alonzo.”
“Alonzo sounds a fine name,” said Teddy. “Did he ride on a horse and carry a sword in the Lord Mayor’s Show?”
“Ride on a horse!” Mrs. Sheerug laughed gently; she was remembering. “Ride on a horse! No, he didn’t, Teddy. You see, he was called Sheerug as well as Alonzo. The Sheerug rather spoils the Alonzo, doesn’t it?”
“Sheerug sounds kind and comfy,” murmured Teddy, trying to make the best of a disappointment.
Mrs. Sheerug smiled at him gratefully. “Yes, and just a little careless. I ran away with him because he was kind and comfy, and because he needed taking care of more than any man I ever met. He’s cost me more mothering than any child I ever——”
Teddy’s hands were tangled together; his words fell over one another with excitement. “Oh, tell me about the running. Did they follow you? And was it from the Lord Mayor’s house that you ran? And did they nearly catch you?”
Glancing above her spectacles disapprovingly, Mrs. Sheerug was recalled to the tender years of her audience. As though blaming the little boy for having listened, she said severely: “A silly old woman like myself says many things that you mustn’t remember, Teddy.”
On the morning of the fourth day she arrived at a new diagnosis of his puzzling malady. He knew she had directly she entered: her gray hair was combed back from her forehead and was quite orderly; she had abandoned her plum-colored dressing-gown. She halted at the foot of the bed and surveyed him.
“You rather like me?”
“Very much.”
“And you didn’t at first?”
He was too polite to acquiesce.
“And you don’t want to leave me?”
He looked confused. “Not unless you want—— Not until I’m well.”
A little gurgling laugh escaped her; it seemed to have been forced up under high pressure.
“You’ve been playing the old soldier, young man. Took me in completely. But I’m a woman, and I always, always find out.”
She shook her finger at him and stood staring across the high wall that was the foot of the bed. As she stared she kept on nodding, like the wife of a mandarin who had picked up the habit from her husband. Two fingers, spread apart, were pressed against the corners of her mouth to prevent it from widening to a smile.
“Humph!” she gave a jab to a hairpin which helped to fasten the knob at the back of her head. “Humph! I’ve been nicely had.” Then to Teddy: “We’ll get you well slowly. Now I’m going to fetch your clothes and you’ve got to dress.”
Clad as far as his shirt and knickerbockers, with a counterpane rolled about him, he was carried downstairs.
In the long dilapidated room that they entered the thin and the fat man were playing cards. They were too absorbed to notice that any one had entered.
“What d’you bet?” demanded the fat man.
“Ten thousand,” Mr. Hughes answered promptly.
“I’ll see you and raise you ten thousand. What’ve you got?”
Mr. Hughes threw down three aces; the fat man exposed a full house. “You’re twenty thousand down, Mr. Ooze.”
“Twenty thousand what?” asked Mrs. Sheerug contemptuously.
“Pounds,” Mr. Hughes acknowledged sheepishly. “Twenty thousand pounds, that’s wot I’ve lost—and it isn’t lunch time. ’urried into the world—that’s wot I was—that’s ’ow my bad luck started. You couldn’t h’expect nothing of a man ’oo was born in a ’ansom-cab.”
“You babies!” Mrs. Sheerug shifted her spectacles higher up her nose. “You know you never pay. It doesn’t matter whether you play for millions or farthings. Why don’t you work?”
When they had left, she made Teddy comfortable in a big armchair. Before she went about her household duties, she bent down and whispered: “No one shall ever know that you pretended. I’m—I’m even glad of it. Oh, we women, how we like to be loved by you useless men!”
In the conducting of a first love-affair one inevitably bungles. When the young gentleman in love happens to be older than the lady, his lack of finesse may be forgiven by her still greater inexperience. When the young gentleman is considerably less than half his fiancée’s years and, moreover, she is an expert in courtship by reason of many suitors, the case calls for the utmost delicacy.
Teddy was keenly sensitive to the precariousness of his situation. He was aware that, if he confessed himself, there wasn’t a living soul would take him seriously. Even Dearie and Jimmie Boy, to whom he told almost everything, would laugh at him. It made him feel very lonely; it was bard to think that you had to be laughed at just because you were young. Of course ordinary boys, who were going to be greengrocers or policemen when they grew up, didn’t fall in love; but boys who already felt the shadow of future greatness brooding over them might. In fact, such boys were just the sort of boys to pine away and die if their love went unrequited—the sort of fine-natured boys who, whether love came to them at nine or twenty, could love only once.
Here he was secretly engaged to Vashti and threatened by many unknown rivals. He didn’t know her surname and he didn’t know her address. He had to find her; when he found her he wasn’t sure what he ought to do with her. But find her he must. Four days had passed since she had accepted his hand. If he were not to lose her, he must certainly get into communication with her. How? To make the most discreet inquiries of so magic a person as Mrs. Sheerug would be to tell her everything. If she knew everything, she might not want him in her house, for she believed that he had feigned illness solely out of fondness for herself. The only other person to whom he could turn was Mr. Sheerug, with whom already he shared one guilty secret; but from this house of lightning arrivals and departures Mr. Sheerug had vanished—vanished as completely as if he had mounted on a broomstick and been whisked off into thin air. Teddy did not discover this till lunch.
Lunch was a typically Sheerugesque makeshift, consisting of boiled Spanish onions, sardines and cream-puffs. It was served in a dark room, like a Teniers’ interior, with plates lining the walls arranged on shelves. There was a door at either end, one leading into the kitchen, the other into the hall. When one of these doors banged, which it did quite frequently, a plate fell down. Perhaps it was to economize on this constant toll of breakages that Mrs. Sheerug used enamel-ware on her table. The table had a frowsy appearance, as though the person who had set the breakfast had forgotten to clear away the last night’s supper, and the person who had set the lunch had been equally careless about the breakfast. Mrs. Sheerug explained: “I always keep it set, my dear; we’re so irregular and it saves worry when our friends drop in at odd seasons.”
This room, as was the case with half the rooms in the house, had steps leading down to it, the floor of the hall being on a higher level. Whether it was that the house had muddled itself into odd angles and useless passages under the influence of Mrs. Sheerug’s tenancy, or that the mazelike originality of its architecture had effected the pattern of her character, there could be no doubt that Orchid Lodge, with its rambling spaciousness, awkward comfort, and dusty hospitality, was the exact replica in bricks and mortar of its mistress’s personality.
“What’s the matter, Teddy? Don’t you like Spanish onions? You’ll have to make yourself like them. They’re good for you. I’ve known them cure consumption.”
“I haven’t got consumption.”
“But why don’t you eat them? You keep looking about you as if you’d lost something.”
“I was wondering whether Mr. Sheerug was coming.”
She rested her fork on her plate, tapping with it and gazing at him. “Well, I never! You’re a queer child for scattering your affections. You’re the first little boy I ever knew to take a fancy to Alonzo. He’s so silent and looks so gruff.”
Teddy laughed. “But he talks to me. When shall I see him again?”
“Upon my soul! What’s the man done to you? I don’t know, Teddy—I never do know when I’m going to see him. He goes away to earn money—that’s what men are made for—and he stays away sometimes for a week and sometimes for months; it all depends on how long he takes to find it There have been times,” she raised her voice with a note of pride, “when my husband has come back a very rich man. Once, for almost a year, we lived in West Kensington and kept our carriage. But there have been times——-” She left the sentence unended and shook her head. “It’s ups and downs, Teddy; and if we’re kind when we have money, the good Lord provides for us when we haven’t. ’Tisn’t money, it’s the heart inside us that makes us happy.”
Teddy wasn’t paying attention to the faery-godmother’s philosophy; he was thinking of Alonzo Sheerug, who had gone away to earn money. He pictured him as a fat explorer, panting off into a wilderness with a pail. When the pail was filled, and not until it was filled, he would return to his wife. That was what men were made for—to be fetch-and-carry persons. Teddy was thinking that if he could reach Mr. Sheerug, he would ask him to carry an extra bucket.
That an interval might elapse between his flow of questions, he finished his Spanish onion. Then, “I’d like to write him a question if you’d send it.”
“Oh, come!” She patted his hand. “There’s no question that you could ask him that I couldn’t answer. He’s only a man.”
Teddy knew that he would have to ask her something; so he asked heraquestion, but notthequestion. “Who is Hal?”
“My son.”
“Does he like the lady who sang in the bedroom?”
“He——” She frowned. “You’re too curious, Teddy; you want to know too much. See, here’s Harriet waiting to take the dishes and get on with her work.”
Mrs. Sheerug rose and trundled up the steps. Since it was she who had invited his curiosity, Teddy felt a little crestfallen at the injustice of her rebuff. He was preparing to follow her, when he caught the red-headed giantess from the kitchen winking at him as though she would squeeze her eye out of its socket. In her frantic efforts to attract his notice her entire face was convulsed. As the swish of Mrs. Sheerug’s skirts grew faint across the hall, the girl tiptoed over to Teddy and stood staring at him with her fists planted firmly on the table. Slowly she bent down—so slowly that he wondered what was coming.
“Does ’e like ’er!” she whispered scornfully. “Why, ’e loves ’er, you little Gubbins. Wot on h’earth possessed yer ter go and h’arsk ’is ’eart-sick ma a h’idiot quesching like that?”
To be twice blamed for a fault which had not been of his own choosing was too much. There was anger as well as a hint of tears in his voice when he answered, “My name isn’t Gubbins. And it wasn’t an idiot question. She made me ask her something, so I asked her that.”
The girl wagged her head with an immense display of tragedy. His anger seemed only to deepen her despondency. “H’it’s tumble,” she sighed, “tumble, h’all this business abart love. ’Ere’s h’every one wantin’ some one ter love ’em, and some of ’em is lovin’ the wrong pusson, and some of ’em is bein’ loved by three or four, and some-some of h’us ain’t got no one. H’it don’t look as though we h’ever shall ’ave. If I wuz Gawd——” She checked herself, awed by the Irreverence of her supposition. “If I wuz Gawd,” she repeated, lowering her voice, “I’d come right darn from ’eaven and sort awt the proper couples. H’I wouldn’t loll around with them there h’angels till h’every gal ’ad got ‘er feller. Gawd ought ter ’ave been a woman, I tell yer strite. If ’E wuz, things wouldn’t be in this ’ere muddle. A she-Gawd wouldn’t let h’us maike such fools of h’ourselves, if you’ll h’excuse me strong lang-widge.”
Teddy stared at her. It wasn’t her “strong langwidge” that made him stare; it was the confession that her words implied. “You’re—you’re in love?”
She jerked up her head defiantly. “In love! Yus, I’m in love. And ’oo isn’t?”
He watched her clearing the table; when that was done, he followed her into the kitchen. The idea that she was suffering from his complaint fascinated him. She of all persons should be able to tell him how to proceed in the matter.
She paused in her washing of the dishes; across her shoulder she had caught him looking at her. “You may well stare,” she said. “H’I’m a cureehosity, I h’am. I wuzleft.” She nodded impressively.
He didn’t understand, but he knew the information was supposed to be staggering. “Left!”
“Yus. I wuz left—left h’at a work’ouse and brought h’up in a h’orphanage. P’raps I never wuz born. P’raps I never ’ad no parents. There’s no one can say. I wuz found on a doorstep, all finely dressed and tied h’up in a fish-basket—just left. H’I’m different from h’other gals, h’I am. My ma may ’ave been a queen—there’s never no tellin’.”
Harriet sank into a chair. Supporting her chin in her hand, she gazed wistfully into the fire. “Wot is it that yer wants wiv me, Gubbins?”
“Is it very difficult to get married?” he faltered.
She nodded. “One ‘as ter ’ave money. If a man didn’t ’ave no money, ’is wife would ’ave ter go out charing. She wouldn’t like that.”
“What’s the least a man ought to have?”
She deliberated. “Depends on the lady. If it wuz me, I should want five pounds. But look ’ere, wot maikes yer h’arsk so many queschings? Surely a little chap like you ain’t in love?”
He flushed. “Five pounds! But wouldn’t three be enough if two people were very, very much in love?”
“Five pounds, Gubbins.” She rose from her chair and went back to her dishes. “Not a penny less. I knows wot I’m talkin’ abart My ma wuz a queen, p’raps; ter h’offer a lady less would be a h’insult.”