STELLA loved the garden, even when autumn came and flowers were rare; for still there was the gold and russet glory of the trees. Also the garden was a bit of her Promised Land; the road beyond the gate ran into the heart of the world. And the open air brought strength. On sunny days her wheel-chair was brought down and set on a gravel path, and there, wrapped in furs, she sat, generally alone save for the old hound always on guard beside her. She read, and dreamed her innocent dreams, and looked up at the ever-novel canopy of the sky, exulting quietly in her freedom. Those around her knew her needs and gave her at such times the familiar solitude which she craved.
“Don't be left alone, darling, a moment longer than you want,” said Lady Blount. “Too much of that sort of thing is n't good for you.”
And Stella, trying to interpret herself, would reply, “I just want to make friends with nature.”
“I wish I could understand you, dear, like Walter,” said Lady Blount. “What exactly do you mean?”
Stella laughed, and said truthfully that she did not know. Perhaps, it was that, the sea having taken her to its heart, she feared lest earth might not be so kindly, and she sought conciliation. But such flutterings of the spirit are not to be translated into words. A day or two before she had driven through a glade of blazing beech, carpeted deep brown, and the shadows twisted themselves into dim shapes, stealing through the mystery of the slender trunks, and the longing to be left alone among them and hear the message of the woodland had smitten her like pain.
One morning she sat warmly wrapped up, a fur toque on her head, in the pale autumn sunshine, with Constable by her side, when a draggled-tailed woman, carrying a draggled-bodied infant, paused by the front gate, taking stock of the place in the tramp's furtive way; and, spying the gracious figure of the girl at a turn of the gravel path, walked boldly in. Before she had advanced half-way, Constable, hidden by Stella's chair, rose to his feet, his ears cocked, and growled threateningly. The woman came to a scared halt. Stella looked up and saw her. Quickly she laid her hand on the dog's head, and rated him for a silly fellow and bade him lie down and not move till she gave the order. Constable, like an old dog who knew his place, but felt bound to protest, grumblingly obeyed. He had lived for eleven years under the fixed conviction that though female tramps with babies were permitted by some grotesque authority to wander on sufferance along the road, they could enter the gates of the Channel House only under penalty of instant annihilation. His goddess, however, through some extraordinary caprice ordaining them to live, the matter was taken out of his hands. Let them live, then, and see what came of it. It was beyond his comprehension.
“Don't be afraid,” cried Stella in her clear voice. “The dog won't hurt you.”
“Sure, Miss?”
“Quite sure.” She smiled bountiful assurance. The draggled-tailed woman approached. “What do you want?”
The woman, battered, dirty, and voluble, began the tramp's tale. She had started from Dover and was bound for Plymouth, where she was to meet her husband, a sailor, whose ship would arrive to-morrow. What she had been doing in Dover, except that she had been in 'orspital (which did not account for the child's movements), she did not state. But she had slept under hedges since she had started, and had no money, and a kind gentleman, Gawd bless him! had given her a hunk of bread and cheese the day before, and that was all the food they had had for twenty-four hours.
As she talked, Stella's unaccustomed eyes gradually took in the scarecrow details of her person: the blowzy hat, with its broken feathers; the greasy ropes of hair; the unclean rags of raiment; the broken and shapeless boots; the huddled defilement of the staring, unwholesome child; and she began to tremble through all her body. For a while the sense of sight was so overwhelming in its demands that she lost the sense of hearing. What was this creature of loathsome ugliness doing in her world of beauty? To what race did she belong? From what planet had she fallen? For what eccentric reason did she choose to present this repulsive aspect to mankind?
At last, when her sight was more or less familiarized with the spectacle of squalor, the significance of the woman's words came to her as to one awaking from a dream.
“Not a bit of food has passed my lips since yesterday at twelve o'clock, Miss, and Gawd strike me dead, Miss, if I ain't telling the blessed truth.”
“But why have n't you bought food?” asked Stella.
The woman stared at her. How could she understand Stellamaris?
“I have n't a penny in the world, Miss. The day afore yesterday a lady give me twopence, and I spent it in milk for the child. S'welp me, I did, Miss.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Stella, whose face had grown tense and white, “that it's impossible for you to get food for yourself and your baby?”
“Indeed I do, Miss.”
“That the two of you might die of starvation?”
“We 're a-dying of it now, Miss,” said the woman.
God knows that she lied. The tramp's life is not a path of roses, and it is not one suitable for the rearing of tender babes, and the fact of its possibility is a blot on our civilization; but the hard-bitten vagabond of the highroad has his or her well-defined means of livelihood. This was a mistress of mumpery.
She had passed the night in the comfortable casual ward of a workhouse five miles away, and had slept the dead sleep of the animal, and she and her baby had started the day with a coarse, though sustaining, meal. She was wandering on and on, aimlessly from workhouse to workhouse, as she had wandered from infancy, begging a sixpence here, and a plate of victuals there, impeded in her stray-cat freedom only by the brat in her arms, yet fiercely fond of it and regardful of its needs. She was a phenomenon that in our civilization ought not to exist. She was acquainted with hunger and thirst and privation; she was anything of misery that you like to describe; but she was not dying or likely to die of starvation.
The sociology of the tramp, however, was leagues outside the knowledge of Stellamaris. She looked at the woman in awful horror until her delicate face seemed to fade into a pair of great God-filled eyes.
“And you have no roof to shelter you from the cold and rain?”
After the manner of her kind the woman assured her that such was the fact. She put her head on one side, wheedling in the time-honoured way.
“If you would help a poor woman with a shilling or two, kind lady—”
“A shilling or two?” Stella's voice broke into a cracked falsetto. “You shall have pounds and pounds. I 'll see that you don't die of starvation. I have no money to give you,—I've scarcely ever seen any,—but I have thousands of pounds in the house, and you shall have them all. If I could only walk, I would ask some one to fetch them to you. But I can't walk. I've never been able to walk all my life. You see, I 'm tied here till my maid comes for me. What can I do?” She wrung her hands, desperately, stirred to the roots of her being.
“Never walked?” said the woman, taken aback, the elementary human fact appealing more to her dulled senses than the phantasmagorical promise of wealth. “Lor'! Poor young lady! I 'd sooner be as I am, Miss, than not be able to walk. And such a sweet young lady!” Then the gleam of the divine being spent, she said, “Can't you call anybody, Miss?”
But there was no need to call anybody; for one of the maids, having caught sight of the intruder through a window of the house, came flying down the path, a protecting flutter of apron-strings.
“What do you mean by coming in here? Go away at once! We have nothing to do with tramps. Be off with you!”
She was breathless, excited, indignant.
“Hold your tongue, Mary!” cried Stella in a tone so unfamiliar that it petrified the simple maid. “How dare you interfere between me and the person I am talking to?” It must be remembered that Stella was of mortal clay. She had her faults, like the rest of us. She was born and bred a princess, an autocrat, a despot, a tyrant. And here was one of the white-hot moments of life when the princess was the princess and the tyrant the tyrant. The new commotion brought the old dog again to his feet. For the only time in her life she struck him in anger, though physically he felt it as much as the fall of an autumn leaf.
“Down, Constable, down!” And turning to the maid: “Wheel my chair into the drawing-room and ask Lady Blount to come to me. You follow us!” she commanded the tramp.
The bewildered Mary obeyed. The procession was formed: Stella, in her chair; Mary; Constable, head down, wondering like an old dog at the queer, newfangled ways of the world; and the bedraggled woman, with her pallid and staring baby.
The chair was wheeled across the threshold of the drawing-room. The tramp paused irresolute. Bidden to enter and sit down, she chose a straight-backed chair near the door. Mary sped to fetch her mistress to deal with the appalling situation. In a moment or two Lady Blount hurried in. The woman rose and sketched a vague curtsy.
Lady Blount began:
“My darling Stella—”
But Stella checked her, stretching out passionate hands.
“Aunt Julia, give me two or three thousand pounds at once, please, please!”
“My dear, what for?” asked the amazed lady.
“To give to this poor woman. She and her baby are dying of starvation. They are dressed in rags. They have no home. It 's dreadful, horrible! Can you conceive it?”
Lady Blount turned to the woman.
“Go round to the kitchen entrance, and they will give you some food. I 'll see you myself later.”
The woman thanked her and blessed her, and disappeared.
“My dearest,” said Lady Blount, gently, “you can't give such people vast sums of money.”
“Why not? She has none. We have a lot. How can we live in comfort when she and her baby are wandering about penniless. They will die. Don't you understand? They will die.”
“We can't provide for them for the rest of their lives, dear.”
“But we must,” she cried. “How can you be so cruel?”
“Cruel? My dearest, if I give her a plate of food, and some milk for the baby, and send her away with a shilling, she will be hugely delighted. A woman like that is not a very deserving object for charity.”
Stella's bosom rose and fell, and she regarded Lady Blount in sudden, awful surmise.
“Auntie darling, what do you mean? Why are n't you horrified?”
“She's only a tramp. Neither she nor the baby is going to die of starvation. And, darling, you must n't let folks like that come near you. Goodness knows what horrible diseases they may be suffering from.”
“But that makes it all the worse. If she is ill, we must help her to get well.”
“My poor innocent lamb,” said Lady Blount, “there are thousands like her. They are the dregs of our civilization. We could n't possibly keep them all in luxury, could we? Now, don't be distressed, dear,” she added, bending down and kissing the girl's cheek.
“I 'll go and have a word with the woman. I 'll treat her quite generously, for your sake, you may be assured.”
She smiled, and went out of the room, leaving Stella crushed beneath an avalanche of knowledge. Filthy, starving shreds of humanity were common objects in the beautiful world—so common as to arouse little or no compassion in the hearts of kind women like the maid Mary and her Aunt Julia. All they had thought of was of her, Stella, her danger and possible contamination. Toward the woman they were callous, almost cruel. What did it mean? Her chivalrous anger died down; reaction came. She looked about her beautiful world piteously, and then for the first time in her life she wept tears of bitter sorrow.
They told her afterward of the tramp's wayward, wandering life, of the various charities that existed for the regeneration of such people, of the free hospitals for the sick, of the workhouse system, and they gave her John Risca's famous little book to read. Eventually she was convinced that it was quixotic folly to bestow a fortune on the first beggar that came along, and she acquitted her aunt of cruelty. But a cloud hung heavy for a long time over her spirits, and a stain soiled the beauty of the garden, so that it never more was the perfect paradise. And, henceforward, when she drove through the streets of the great watering-place near by, and through the villages which still held something of their summer enchantment, her eyes were opened to sights of sorrow and pain to which they had been happily blind before.
Winter came, and the routine of her life went on, despite revolutionary changes of habit. Her heart had learned not to be affected by the transition from the prone to the sitting posture. No longer did beholders realize her as nothing but a head and neck and graceful arms, and no longer was a dressing-jacket the only garment into which she could throw her girlish coquetry. Her hair was done up on the top of her head in the manner prescribed by fashion, and she wore the whole raiment of womankind.
John, when he first saw her reclining in her invalid chair, dressed in a soft gray ninon gown, a gleam of silk stocking peeping between the hem and a dainty-shoe, hung back for a second or two from a feeling of shyness. It was a shock to find that Stella had feet like anybody else, and very prettily shaped, adorable little feet. It seemed almost indelicate to look at them, as it would be to inspect too curiously the end of a mermaid's tail. She held out both hands to greet him, laughing and blushing.
“How do you like me?” she asked.
The lights of the drawing-room were dim, and the firelight danced caressingly over her young beauty.
“I 've never seen anything so lovely,” said John, looking at her in stupid admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion.
“I did n't mean me, you silly Belovedest. I meant my new dress, my general get-up. Don't you think it's pretty?”
“I do,” said John, fervently.
But what cared he, or what would have cared any man worth the name of man, for the details of her feminine upholstery, when the revelation of her complete deliciousness burst upon him? It was then that he realized her as woman. It was from that moment that she haunted his dreams not as Stellamaris, star of the sea, child of cloud and mystery, but as a sweet and palpitating wonder in a marvel of flesh and blood.
Despite dangers, and through the stress of tradition, the Unwritten Law still prevailed. The episode of the tramp caused her to ask many questions; but they answered them discreetly. Even when she grew strong enough to take her active share in the world's doings her life would still be a sheltered one. Knowledge would come gradually and unconsciously. Why wantonly give her the shocks of pain? But even a guarded house and garden could not be the sanctuary of the sea-chamber. Breaths of evil and sighs of sorrowful things come on the winds of the earth into most of the habitations of man. The newsboy alone flings into every household his reeking record of sin. This last did not penetrate into the sea-chamber; but lying about the rooms, it could not escape a girl's natural curiosity.
“Young ladies don't read newspapers, dear,” said Lady Blount, asking Heaven's forgiveness for her lie.
“Why?” A natural question.
“They contain accounts of things which are not fit reading for young girls.”
Stella pondered over this reason for some time; but one day she said:
“I am no longer a young girl. I am a grown-up woman. I want to know what the world is like. I hear every one talking of parliament and politics and foreign countries, and I am ignorant of it all, my dear Exquisite Auntship. I have a right to know everything about life. You must let me read the newspapers.”
“Well, wait just a little, dearest,” said Lady Blount.
And the next time John Risca and Walter Herold came down, she took counsel of them, and they reluctantly agreed that no longer could the old régime of the Unwritten Law be enforced. Stella must have her newspaper. Thenceforward, every morning, the portentous package of “The Times” (none of your sensational half-penny shockers!) was laid upon Stella's lap, and she read, poor child, the foreign news, and the leaders, and all the solemn and harmless and unimportant matters in big print until she yawned her pretty head off, in vast disappointment with newspapers. It all seemed to her ingenuous mind such a wordy fuss about nothing. Still, she read conscientiously about tariff reform and naval armaments and female suffrage and the pronouncements of the German Emperor and home rule for Ireland, in the puzzled assurance that thereby she was fitting herself for her future place in the great world.
But one day Lady Blount, going into the pleasant morning room where Stella now usually had her being, found her sitting with tragic face, staring out of the window, the decorous “Times” lying a tousled, crumpled mass on the floor. She was alarmed.
“Darling, what's the matter?”
“Oh, it's hateful! It's unthinkable! Why did n't you tell me that such things happened nowadays?”
“What things?”
Stella pointed to the outraged organ of British respectability.
“A day or two ago—it 's all true that 's in the newspaper, is n't it? It's not made up? It all happens?—a day or two ago, while we were laughing here, a man took a knife and killed his wife and three children. It's incredible that there can be such monsters in the world.”
“My darling, when you know a little more,” faltered Lady Blount, “you will learn that there are abnormal people who do these dreadful things and get reported in the newspapers. But they have nothing to do with us. You must n't be frightened. We never come across them. Our life is quite different.”
“But what does that matter?” cried the girl, with agonized eyes. “They exist. They are among us, whether we happen to meet them or not. They are like the tramps.”
The world-worn woman, lined and faded, her red hair turned almost gray now, put her arms around the girl, and sought physically to bring the comfort that her intelligence was not acute enough to convey in speech. Stella hid her face against the kind bosom and sobbed.
“Auntie dear, I'm frightened, so frightened!”
“Of what, darling?”
“Of ugliness and wickedness and horror.”
“Nothing of that, dear, can ever come our way. It does n't come the way of decent folk. People like us don't have anything to do with that side of life.”
Stella still sobbed. The words brought no conviction. Lady Blount continued her unenlightened consolation. Let the precious ostrich stick her head in a bush, and that which she could not see could by no chance happen.
“But men are out there—” she waved her arm vaguely—“who kill women and little children.”
“But we never meet the men,” cried poor Lady Blount, insistently. “Our lives are free from all that.”
She preached her narrow gospel. There was a class of beings in the world who did all kinds of ferocious, criminal, cruel, mean, and vulgar things; but they were a class apart. In the world in which she herself and Stella and John and Walter dwelt all was beauty and refinement. Stella dried her eyes. At one-and-twenty one cannot weep forever. She allowed herself to be half persuaded of the truth of her Aunt Julia's sophistries. But the little, impish devil who stage-manages the comedies of life arranged a day or two afterward a sardonic situation.
It was the mildest of December mornings. Old Autumn humped a brave and kindly shoulder against Winter's onrush. A faint south-west wind crept warmly over the Channel, and sweet odours came from the moist, unsmitten earth. A pale sun clothed the nakedness of the elms and chestnuts in the garden, and brightened to early spring beauty the laurels and firs. Stella, with Constable near by, sat in the sunshine, by the ivy-clad north-eastern front of the old Channel House, and her chair was beneath the window of the morning-room. Now that she could sit upright, she had learned to use her hands in many ways. She could knit. She was knitting now, vaguely and tremulously hoping that the result might be a winter waistcoat for her Great High Belovedest, intent on her counting, one, two, three, four, pearl one, when suddenly voices in altercation broke upon her ear.
It was merely an unhappy, ignoble quarrel such as for many years had marred that house of sweet-seeming. Fierce hatred and uncharitableness were unchained and sped their clamorous and disastrous way. Bitter words uttered in strident and unnatural tones wounded the quiet air. The woman lost her dignity in vain recrimination. The man snarled savage and common oaths. Suddenly the door slammed violently, and there was the silence of death. The scene had lasted only a few moments. Sir Oliver, in his foolish anger, had evidently followed his wife into the morning room and left her abruptly. But the few moments were enough for Stella, who had heard everything. Her heart seemed frost-bitten, and her blood turned to ice.
The cruel, vulgar, and hideous things of life were not the appanages of a class apart. They entered into her own narrowed world. Her beautiful world! Her hateful, horrible terror of a world!
Miss Lindon, in pathetic despair, had abandoned her notion of turning Unity into a young lady of young-ladylike accomplishments. She could perform whatever marvels of exquisite sewing Miss Lindon could imagine, but there her proficiency in the elegances came to an end. The girl's tastes, Miss Lindon lamented, were so plebeian! She would sooner make puddings than afternoon calls; she would sooner sweep and dust and polish than read instructive or entertaining literature. In her child-of-the-people's practical way, she had ousted Miss Lindon from the management of the household, thereby coming into conflict with the stern Phoebe, no longer feared, who hitherto had carried out, according to her own fancy, the kind lady's nebulous directions. Miss Lindon sighed, and surrendered her keys, inwardly thankful to be relieved of crushing responsibilities. She had never known how to order dinner for John. If, after agonized searching, she had decided on lamb, and sweet peas and grouse and asparagus, it was only to be told that some or all of them were out of season. And she could never check the laundry-list, so eternally mysterious were the garments worn by man.
Unity was a born economist. As soon as she took over the seals of office, she abolished the easy and expensive system of tradesmen calling for orders. She herself marketed, and that was her great joy. Every day she took her market-bag and busied herself among the shops in the Kilburn High Road, choosing her meat with an uncanny sureness of vision, knocking extortionate pennies off the prices of vegetables, and seeing generally that she had good value for her money. Miss Lindon, accompanying her on one or two of these excursions, was shocked and scared at her temerity. How dared she talk like that to the greengrocer? Unity replied that she would talk to him until he did n't know himself if he gave her any more of his nonsense. She was n't going to allow her guardian to be robbed by any of them, not she; she was up to all their tricks.
“I suppose you thought that was a good lettuce, Auntie?”
“I am no judge, dear,” said Miss Lindon; “but surely you ought n't to have hurt his feelings by saying that its proper place was the dust-bin, and not a respectable shop.”
“He understands me all right,” laughed Unity.
All the tradesmen did, and they respected the shrewdness of the businesslike little plebeian, whom they recognized and treated as one of their own class; and Unity saved her beloved guardian many shillings a week, which was a matter of proud gratification. She held her head high nowadays. She had found herself.
Once chatting casually with Herold, John said with the air of Sir Oracle:
“Unity has got quite a strong character.”
Herold laughed. “Did n't I tell you so nearly three years ago? You would n't believe me.”
“You talked some nonsense about love,” growled John.
“Well, have n't you given it to her in your bearish way? What would you do in this house without her? You'd be utterly miserable.”
“I suppose I should,” said John. “But I wish you would get out of the infernal habit of always being in the right.”
One afternoon—it was the Saturday before Christmas—Unity took the market-bag and went out to do her shopping. Evening had fallen on a thin, black fog. The busy thoroughfare was a bewildering fusion of flare and gloom. The Christmas crowd, eager to purchase or to gladden their eyes with good things unpurchaseable, thronged the pavements—an ordinary, crowd of middle-class folk, careless of the foggy air, enjoying the Christmas promise in shops almost vulgarly replete. A hundred rosetted carcasses in a butcher's shop where ten hung the day before is marvel enough to attract the comfortable loiterer, and the happy butcher's “Buy! Buy!” as he stands in a blaze of light sharpening his knife, is an attraction peculiarly fascinating. What with the stream entering and issuing from shops, the wedges of loiterers glued to shop windows, the two main currents of saunterers, progress was difficult. In the murky roadway motor-omnibuses and carts flashed mysteriously by in endless traffic. All was uproar and ant-heap confusion.
Unity, resolute, squat little figure, made her purchases, and, having made them, lingered, joyously in the throbbing street, her hereditary element. She was never so happy as when rubbing shoulders with her kind. The whistling shop-boy and the giggling work-girl were her congeners. For the sake of her guardian and Aunt Gladys she never spoke to such ungenteel persons, but in their swiftly passing company she had a sense of comfort and comradeship. Often she went out without knowing why. The street called her.
The sights and sounds of it provided an ever-changing, ever-exciting drama. A street accident, a fallen horse, a drunken man, held her fascinated. And tonight the abnormal life of the street afforded an extra thrill of exhilaration; there was so much to see. At last she found her progress blocked by a crowd hanging about a confectioner's window. She wormed her way through, and was rewarded by the enthralling spectacle of a huge clock-work figure of Father Christmas, who drew from his wallet the shop's special plum-pudding at ninepence-halfpenny a pound. It was mighty fine, and Unity never heeded the tossing and buffeting of the admiring crowd..The light shone hard on the ring of pink faces framed by the blackness beyond. Then eager sight-seers jostled her into the background.
Suddenly she felt a sharp and awful pain in her side. She shrieked aloud and turned. The baffling figure of a woman in black hurrying into the maw of the darkness met her eyes before the startled crowd closed about her. She put her hand instinctively to the tortured spot, and drew out from her flesh a long hat-pin; then she fainted.
An assistant in the shop, coming out to know the cause of the hubbub, recognized her and had her brought indoors. The policeman on the beat soon shouldered his way in. They put poor Unity on a shutter, covered her with rugs, and, followed by a tail of idlers, bore her to the house.
John came home soon afterwards and found an agitated Aunt Gladys in process of being reassured by a kindly doctor that Unity was not dead. The wound, though ugly and painful, was little more than flesh deep. The hat-pin had glanced off a corset bone and penetrated obliquely. Straightly driven, however, it would have been a deadly thrust. Of the murderous intent there could hardly be any doubt. A sergeant of police was also waiting for John; but John let him wait, and rushed in his bull-like way upstairs.
Unity, who had long since recovered consciousness, lay in bed, her wound tended, a cheerful fire lit, and Phoebe in attendance. John dismissed the latter with a gesture and flung himself on his knees by the head of the bed.
“'My God! child, what has happened?”
For all the difference of surroundings,—the pretty room and fine linen,—the common little face on the pillow was singularly like that which he had seen in the orphanage infirmary. But there was a deeper trust in the girl's eyes, for they were lit with a flash of joy at his great distress.
She recounted simply what had occurred.
“You saw the woman disappear?”
“I think so. It was all so quick.”
It was a woman's stab. What man would use a hat-pin? And there could be only one woman alive who would stab Unity.
“Did you recognize her?”
His voice was hoarse, and his rugged face full of pain. She regarded him steadily.
“No, Guardian.”
“It was not—she?”
“No,” said Unity.
“Are you sure?”
Unity clenched her hands and turned away, and her eyes grew hard.
“If it was, I should have known her.”
John rose to his feet and stood over her, his arms folded, and looked at her from beneath his heavy brows. Unity met his gaze. And so they remained for a second or two, and each knew that the other knew who had dealt the blow.
“It was n't her,” said Unity.
The words were stamped with finality. John, meeting the girl's set gaze, had a glimpse of rocky strata far beneath. No process of question invented by man would induce her to unsay the words.
“There's a police sergeant downstairs,” said he.
“I did n't see no woman either,” said Unity, significantly.
And John did not notice her unusual relapse into orphanage speech.
Soon afterward he left her and joined the sergeant in the hall. The policeman asked the stereotyped questions. John replied that Miss Blake—it was, as far as he knew, the first time he had given Unity her full style and title, and the name sounded odd in his ears—that Miss Blake had seen nothing of her assailant and could give no information whatever.
“You suspect nobody?”
“Nobody at all,” said John, decisively. “You need n't trouble to pursue the matter any further, for the wound luckily is trifling, and in any case I should not prosecute.”
“As you please, sir,” said the Sergeant.
“Good evening, and thank you,” said John.
“This is the hat-pin, sir.”
“You can leave it with me,” said John.
He went into his study and examined the thing. It was of common make, the head being a ball of black glass. A million such are sold in cheap shops.
He had no doubt as to the owner. She had spied upon him craftily, bided her time, and had then struck. He had not seen her since the day they had met in Maida Vale and he had unceremoniously packed her home, and for the last few months she had not molested him. Now came this unforeseen, dastardly attack.
He rang for Phoebe, gave a message for Miss Lindon, and went out with an ugly look on his face. A taxicab whirled him swiftly across London to Amelia Mansions in the Fulham Road. Mrs. Bence answered his ring. He stepped into the hall, and in his blundering way strode down the passage. The woman checked him.
“Mrs. Rawlings is n't in, sir. She is with Mrs. Oscraft, the lady down-stairs.”
He turned abruptly.
“Has she been out this afternoon?”
“She went out to lunch with Mrs. Oscraft and came back with her an hour ago.”
He drew the hat-pin from the inside of his overcoat, where he had stuck it. “Do you recognize this?”
The woman looked puzzled. “No, sir,” she said. “Mrs. Rawlings has n't any like it?”
Mrs. Bence inspected the pin. “No, I'm sure. If she had, I would have known.” She saw the trouble in his face. “What has happened, sir?”
He told her briefly. The woman knitted a perplexed brow.
“I don't see how it could have been her, sir,” she said. “She's nearly always with Mrs. Oscraft, and very seldom goes out by herself, and to-day, as I 've said, she went out and came back with her. And I'm sure she has n't had a hat-pin like that in use.”
“What exactly is this Mrs. Oscraft?” he asked. Mrs. Bence added to his vague knowledge. Her husband was a book-maker, very often absent from home, having to frequent race-meetings and taverns and other such resorts of his trade. She had many friends, male and female, of the same kidney, a crew rowdy and vulgar, but otherwise harmless. She and Mrs. Rawlings had become inseparable.
“I 'll go down and see her,” said John.
Mrs. Oscraft, an overblown blonde, floppily attired, opened the door of her flat.
“Hello! Who are you?” she asked.
He explained that he was the husband of Mrs. Rawlings.
“So you are. She 's got a portrait of you. Besides, I 've seen you here. She 's in the drawing-room. Come along in and have a whisky and soda or a glass of champagne.”
He declined. “I owe you a thousand apologies for intruding,” said he, “but if you would answer me just one question, I should be greatly obliged.”
“Fire away,” said the lady. “Won't you really come in?”
“No, thank you,” said John. “Will you tell me where my wife has been this afternoon?”
“With me all the time,” said Mrs. Oscraft, promptly. “We 've been doing Christmas shopping in Kensington High Street, and only just got back.”
“She did n't go near Kilburn?”
“Lord bless you, no!” said the lady. “Look here, would you like to see her?”
“No,” said John. He apologized again, and bade her good evening. He descended the stone stairs with a bewildered feeling that he had made a fool of himself; and Mrs. Oscraft, as soon as the door was shut, put her thumb to her nose and twiddled her fingers in the traditional gesture of derision.
John went away sore and angry, like a bull that, charging at a man, unexpectedly butts up against a stone wall. He had no reason for disbelieving Mrs. Oscraft, and the hat-pin was not his wife's. Yet who but his wife could have been the aggressor? It might have been an accident. It might have been a man—such cases are not uncommon—with the stabbing and cutting mania. Unity's fleeting glimpse of the woman in black might have been a trick of shadow in the lamplit fog. Yet in the deed he felt the hand of the revengeful and cruel woman. He was baffled.
On his way home he called on Herold, whom he found at dinner.
“I shall never know a moment's peace of mind,” he said gloomily, after they had discussed the matter, “until she is put under restraint. If she did n't do it, as you make out—” Herold held to the theory that a person could not be in two places, Kensington and Kilbum, at the same time—“she is quite capable of it.”
“It's a mercy,” said Herold, “that you did not see her and tax her with the offence, and so put the idea into her head.”
“I believe she did it all the same,” said John, obstinately.
“But why should Mrs. Oscraft have lied? Mrs. Bence saw them go out and come in together. You can't suppose the other woman was an accomplice. It's absurd.”
“I know it is,” said John. “But the absurd often turns up in a churchwarden's unhumorous kit of reality in this Bedlam of a world.”
They argued until it was time for Herold to go to his theatre, when John went home and ate a belated dinner in such a black mood that Miss Lindon dared not question him.
And that was the end of the matter. Unity's wound healed after a few days, and sturdily refusing Phoebe's protection on her walks abroad, she resumed her marketing in the Kilburn High Road. John called on the district inspector of police and obtained the ready promise that folks running amuck with hatpins should be summarily arrested and that his house and ward should be placed under special supervision.
It was characteristic of the terms of dumb confidence on which John and Unity lived together that neither of them referred again to the possible perpetrator of the outrage. When she became aware that the policemen in this district always kept her respectfully in sight and, on passing her, saluted, she knew that her guardian had so ordained things. One day in the New Year she entered his study, and stood at attention.
“Please, Guardian, may I have half-a-crown?”
He fished the coin out of his trousers' pocket and handed it to her.
“I don't want it for myself,” she said.
She had her allowance for pin-money, which she was too proud to exceed. As a matter of fact, she hoarded her pennies in the top of an old coffee-pot and out of her savings bought not only finery for herself, but startling birthday and Christmas presents for her guardian and Aunt Gladys. It was astonishing what Unity could do with elevenpence three farthings.
John, knowing her ways, smiled.
“What do you want it for, then?”
“I'm going to give it to my best policeman,” she said, and marched out of the room.
That was her only acknowledgement of her appreciation of the measures he had taken to ensure her safety. He understood, and, when telling Herold of the incident, called her, after the loose way of man, “a rum kid.” Of the obvious he was aware, and it pleased him; but subtler manifestations escaped his notice. It never occurred to him that it was more than a pleasing accident of domestic life when, on letting himself into the house with his latch-key, he should find Unity, drab and stolid, her cheeks and snub nose and prominent forehead shining in the unladylike way deplored by Miss Lindon, as if polished with yellow soap, and her skimpy hair bunched up ungracefully, with patient, unchanging eyes, awaiting him in the little hall, her hands already outstretched to take hat and stick and to help him off with his overcoat. Yet ninety-nine times out of a hundred it happened. He did not notice the orderly confusion wrought by the ingenuity of sleepless nights out of the chaos of his study. Wishes—just the poor, commonplace little wishes of household life—what could poor, commonplace little Unity, with her limited soul-horizon, do more for him? wishes vaguely formulated in his mind he found quickly and effectively realized, and worried, hard-working, honest man that he was, he took the practical comforts sometimes as a matter of course, now and then with a careless word of thanks, and never dreamed—how could he?—of the passionate endeavour whereby these poor, commonplace little things came to pass.
There can be as much beautiful expenditure of soul—as beautiful in the eyes of God, to whom, as to any philosopher with a working idea of infinity, the fall of a rose-petal must be as important as the fall of an empire—in the warming of a man's slippers before the fire by the woman who loves him as in all the heroisms of all the Joans of Arc and the Charlotte Cordays and the window-breaking, policeman-scratching, forcibly fed female martyrs of modern London that have ever existed. It is a proposition as incontrovertible as any elementary theorem of Euclid you please; but so essentially unphilosophic is man, to say nothing of woman,—for a man would sooner break stones, play bridge, go bankrupt, slaughter his wife and family, or wear a straw hat with a frock-coat than brace his mind to think—that this self-evident truth passes him by unrecognized, unperceived, unguessed.
The volcanic forces of life—essentially such as act and react between man and woman—lie hidden deep down in the soul's unknown and unsuspected cauldron, and their outward manifestations are only here and there a puff of smoke so fine and blue that it merges at once into the caressing air. The good, easy man plants his vines on the mountain-side. The sky is serene, the sun fills his grapes with joyousness. Then comes eruption, and the smiling slope is smitten into the grin of a black death's-head.