MISS CONSTANTINE’S suppression of names, and her studious use of the hypothetical mood in putting her case, forbade me saying she had told me that in her opinion Valentine Hare was a nobody and Oliver Kirby a great man, although the world might be pleased to hold just the opposite view. Still less had she told me that, in consequence of this opinion of hers, she would let the nobody go and cling to the great man; she had merely discerned and pictured that course of action as being a very splendid and a very brave thing—more splendid and brave, just in proportion to the world’s lack of understanding. Whether she would do it remained exceedingly doubtful; there was that heavy weight of what was expected of her. But what she had done, by the revelation of her feelings, was to render the problem of whether she would embrace her great venture or forgo it one of much interest to me. The question of her moral courage remained open; but there was now no question as to her intellectual courage. Her brain could see and dared to see—whether or not she would dare to be guided by its eyes. Her achievement was really considerable—to look so plainly, so clearly and straight, through all externals; to pierce behind incomparable Val’s shop-window accomplishments, his North Africa, his linguistic accomplishments, Duc de Reichstadt, French plays, literary essays, even his supremely plausible and persuasive “Religion of Primitive Man” (which did look so solid on a first consideration)—to go right by all these, and ask what was the real value of the stock in the recesses of the shop! And, conversely,to pick up bullet-headed Kirby from the roadside, so to speak, to find in him greatness, to be “spoilt” (she, the rich, courted beauty) by being allowed to hear the thuds of his sledge-hammer mind, to dream of giving “everything” to his plain form and face because of the mind they clothed, to think that thing the great thing to do, if she dared—yes, she herself stood revealed as a somewhat uncommon young woman.
Her appraisement of Val I was not inclined to dispute; it coincided with certain suspicions which I myself had shamefacedly entertained, but had never found courage to express openly. But was she right about Kirby? Had we here the rare “great man”? Concede to her that we had, her case was still a hard one. Kirby had no start; he was in a rut, if I may say so with unfeigned respect to the distinguished service to which he belonged—an honourable useful rut, but, so far as personal glory or the prospects of it went, a rut, all the same. Unless some rare chance came—they do come now and then, but it was ill to gamble on one here—his main function would be to do the work, to supply the knowledge secretly, perhaps to shape a policy some day in the future; buttulit alter honores. Not to him would the public raise their cheers, and posterity a statue. Her worship of him must be, in all likelihood, solitary, despised, and without reward. Would it be appreciated as it ought to be by her hero himself? But here, perhaps, I could not get thoroughly into the skin of the devotee; the god is not expected to be overwhelmed by his altars and his sacrifices—his divinityship is merely satisfied.
“Mr Hare is behaving splendidly,” Jane reported to me. She had a constant—apparently a daily—report of him from Lady Lexington, his unremitting champion. Indeed the women were all on his side, and it was surprising how many of them seemed to know his position; I cannot help thinking that Val, in his turn, had succumbed to the temptations of sympathy. Theyspoke of him as of a man patient under wrong, amiable and forgiving through it all, puzzled, bewildered, inevitably hurt, yet with his love unimpaired and his forgiveness ready.
“Do you suppose,” I asked Jane, “that he’s got any theory why she hesitates?”
“Theory! Who wants a theory? We all know why.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” My “exclusive information” seemed a good deal cheapened. “Has she told you, may I ask?”
“Not she; but she goes every afternoon, just after lunch, to Mrs Something Simpson’s—that’s the man’s aunt. She lives in a flat in Westminster, and he goes from his office to lunch at his aunt’s every day, now.”
While I had been musing, Jane had been getting at the facts.
“Val knows that?”
“Of course Lady Lexington told him. Let’s have fair play, anyhow!” said Jane rather hotly.
“What does he say about it?”
“He’s perfectly kind and sweet; but he can’t, of course, quite conceal that he’s”—Jane paused, seeking a word. She flung her hands out in an expressive gesture, and let me have it—“Stupefied!” A moment later she added, “So are we all, if it comes to that.”
“If one dared!” Katharine Constantine’s words came back. They were all stupefied at the idea. Would she dare to pile stupefaction on stupefaction by confronting them with the fact?
In the course of the next few days the Powers That Be in the land took a hand—doubtless an entirely unconscious one—in the game. A peer died; his son, going up to the House of Lords, vacated the post of Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Amid a chorus of applause and of flattering prophecies Valentine Hare was appointed in his place. I met, at one of my clubs, a young friend who had recently entered the ColonialOffice, and he told me that the new member of Administration’s secretary would in all probability be Oliver Kirby. “And it’ll give him a bit of a chance to show what’s he’s made of,” said my young friend, with the kindly patronage of youth.
But, under present circumstances, it might create a slight awkwardness, say, about lunch-time, mightn’t it? I doubted whether that appointment would be made.
NOW I come to my share in this history. I confess that I approach it with doubt and trembling; but it has to be told here. It will never be told anywhere else—certainly not at the Lexingtons’, nor above all, for my peace’ sake, to my sister Jane.
The following day was a Sunday, and, according to a not infrequent practice of mine, I took a walk in Hyde Park in the morning—in the early hours before the crowd turned out. The place was almost deserted, for the weather was raw and chilly; but there, by some supernatural interposition as I am convinced, whether benign or malignant only the passage of years can show, in a chair at the corner of the Row sat Oliver Kirby. I stopped before him and said “Hallo!”
I had forgotten how entirely formal our previous acquaintance had been, perhaps because I had been thinking about him so much.
He greeted me cordially, indeed gladly, as I fancied, and, when I objected to sitting in the chilly air, he proposed to share my walk. I mentioned the secretaryship, remarking that I understood it was a good thing for a man to get. He shrugged his shoulders, then turned to me, and said, with a sudden twinkle lighting up his eyes, “One might be able to keep our friend straight, perhaps.”
“You think he needs it?”
“It’s only a matter of time for that man to come a cropper. The first big affair he gets to handle, look out! I’m not prejudiced. He’s a very good fellow, and I like him—besides being amused at him. But what I say is true.” He spoke with an uncanny certainty.
“What makes you say it?”
Kirby took my arm. “The man is constitutionally incapable of thinking in the right order. It’s always the same with him, I don’t care whether it’s an article about North Africa or that book of his about primitive man. He always—not occasionally, but always—starts with his conclusion and works backwards to the premises. North Africa ought to be that shape—it is! Primitive man ought to have thought that—he did! You see? The result is that the facts have to adapt themselves to these conclusions of his. Now that habit of mind, Wynne, makes a man who has to do with public affairs a dangerous and pernicious fool. He oughtn’t to be allowed about. What, I should like to know, does he think the Almighty made facts for! Not to be looked at, evidently!”
I was much refreshed by this lively indignation of the intellect. But, “You’re quite sure you’re not prejudiced?” said I.
“I said it all in a review of his book before I ever met him, or came into——”
“Conflict with him?” I ventured to interpose.
He looked at me gravely. I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business. I have so little that I never welcome that injunction. Then he smiled.
“I forgot that I’d met you at the Lexingtons’,” he said.
“I don’t think you need have told me that you’d forgotten.”
“Well, I had,” said he, staring a little.
“But you needn’t have said so—needn’t have put it that way.”
“Oh!” He seemed to be considering quite a new point of view.
“Not that I’m offended. I only point it out for your good. You expect people to be too much like you. The rest of us have feelings——”
“I’ve feelings, Wynne,” he interrupted quickly.
“Fancies——”
“Ah, well—perhaps those too, sometimes.”
“Fears——”
He squeezed my arm. “You’ve struck me the right morning,” he said.
“Think what you’re asking of—the person we mean.”
“She’s to give me her answer after lunch to-day.”
“I believe it will be ‘No’—unless you can do something.”
He looked at me searchingly, “What’s in your mind?” he asked. “Out with it! This is a big thing to me, you know.”
“It’s a big thing to her. I know it is. Yes, she has said something to me. But I think she’ll say ‘No,’ unless—well, unless you treat her as you want Val Hare to treat North Africa and primitive man. Apply your own rules, my friend. Reason in the right order!”
He smiled grimly. “Develop that a little,” he requested, or, rather, ordered.
“It’s not your feelings, or your traditions, or your surroundings, that count now. And it’s not what you think she ought to feel, nor what she ought as a fact to feel, nor even what’s she’s telling herself she ought to be brave enough and strong enough to feel. It’s what she must feel, has been bred to feel, and in the end does feel. What she does feel will beat you unless you find a way out.”
“What does she feel?”
“That it’s failure, and that all the other girls will say so—failure in the one great opportunity of her life, in the one great thing that’s expected of her; that it’s final; that she must live all her life a failure amongthose who looked to her for a great success. And the others will make successes! Would it be a small thing for a man? What is it to a girl?”
“A failure, to marry me? You mean she feels that?”
“Facts, please! Again facts! Not what you think you are, or are sure you are, or are convinced you could be; just what you are—Mr Kirby of the Colonial Office, lately promoted—it is promotion, isn’t it?—to be secretary to——”
“Stop! I just want to run over all that,” he said.
At, and from, this point I limit my liability. I had managed to point out—it really was not easy to set up to tell him things—where I thought he was wrong. Somehow, amid my trepidation, I was aware of a pleasure in talking to a splendidly open and candid mind. He was surprised that he had been wrong—that touch of a somewhat attractive arrogance there was about him—but the mere suspicion of being wrong made him attentive to the uttermost. Tell him he hadn’t observed his facts, and he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, rest till he had substantiated, or you had withdrawn, the imputation. But, as I say, to suggest the mistake was all I did. I had no precise remedy ready; I believe I had only a hazy idea of what might be done by a more sympathetic demeanour, a more ample acknowledgment of Miss Constantine’s sacrifice—a notion that she might do the big thing if he made her think it the enormous thing; aren’t even girls like that sometimes? The sower of the seed is entitled to some credit for the crop; after all, though, the ground does more. I take none too much credit for my hint, nor desire to take too much responsibility.
He caught me by the arm and pulled me down on to a bench—a free seat just by the east end of the Serpentine.
“Yes, I see,” he said. “I’ve been an ass. Just since you spoke, it’s all come before me—in a sort of way it grew up in my mind. I know how she feels now—bothways. I only knew how she felt about my end of the thing before. I was antagonistic to the other thing. I couldn’t see Val as a sort of Westminster Abbey for the living—that’s the truth. Never be antagonistic to facts—you’ve taught me that lesson once more, Wynne.” He broke into a sudden amused smile. “I say, if your meddling is generally as useful as it has been to me, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go on meddling, old chap.”
I let that pass, though I should have preferred some such word as “interpose” or “intervene,” or “act as an intermediary.” I still consider that I had been in some sense invited—well, at any rate, tempted—to—well, as I have suggested, intervene.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Settle it,” replied Mr Oliver Kirby, rising from the bench.
He might have been a little more communicative. It is possible to suggest that. As a matter of fact, he was the best part of the way to Hyde Park Corner before I realised that I was sitting alone on the bench.
HAD Kirby been at my elbow, his bullet head almost audibly pricing my actions, relentlessly assessing them, even while he admitted that they had done him good, I imagine that I should not have gone. His epithet rankled. I a meddler! I can only say that it is a fortunate circumstance that he never knew Jane.
However, I did call on Lady Lexington that afternoon, and found just a snug family party—that was what my hostess called it. In fact, besides myself, the only outsider was Valentine Hare; and could he be called an outsider? His precise appellation hung in suspense. Talk was intimate and bright.
In view of Val’s appointment, it was natural that it should turn on the Colonies. Val himself hinted that the Foreign Office would have given more scope for his specialty (he meant North Africa, not the “Religion of Primitive Man”); but Miss Constantine was hot on the Colonies, going so far, indeed, as to get out an atlas and discuss thousands of square miles, and wheat belts, and things like that. Once or twice I fancied that the new Under-Secretary would have been glad not to be quite so new; a few days of coaching from, say, Kirby (Had she had—? At lunch? No; it was hardly thinkable; he couldn’t have taken that moment to instruct her) would have equipped him better for her excellently informed conversation. As for poor Lexington, he broke down entirely when she got out to Assiniboia and Saskatchewan, and said frankly that in his opinion there was more of Canada than any man could be expected to know about. That did not seem to be at all Miss Constantine’s view. She was stopped only by the ocean. I am not sure that a vaulting ambition did not confederate Japan.
Val was delighted. Miss Constantine was so cordial, so interested, so congratulatory on his appointment. There was, as it seemed to me, a serenity in her manner which had recently been lacking—a return of her old assurance, softened still, but not now by the air of appeal; it was rather by an extreme friendliness. Val must have felt the friendliness too, I think, for he expanded wonderfully, discoursing with marvellous fecundity, and with a knowledge as extensive as it was indefinite, of the British possessions beyond the seas. All said and done, he knew a lot more than I did; but, then, I was not his competitor.
So we got on splendidly together. Lady Lexington beamed, her lord warmed himself happily, Miss Constantine was graciousness itself, Val basked and blossomed—and I wondered what the deuce had happened at Mrs Something Simpson’s flat in Westminster.(Her real name was Whitaker Simpson, and I believe Jane knew it quite well.)
Yes, she was monstrously friendly—distrust that in your mistress whether wooed or won. She would do everything for Val that afternoon, except be left alone with him. The Lexingtons went—you can hardly stop people going in their own house; Miss Boots and Mr Sharpies, who were both there, went—to church. I tried to go, but she wouldn’t let me. Her refusal was quite obvious: Val—he was impeccable in manners—saw it. After precisely the right interval he rose and took his leave. I had the atlas on my knees then (we had got back to Assiniboia), and I studied it hard; but, honestly, I couldn’t help hearing. The tones of her voice, at least, hinted at no desire for privacy.
“Once more a thousand congratulations—a thousand hopes for your success,” she said, giving him her hand, as I suppose—my eyes were on the atlas.
“After that, I shall feel I’m working for you,” he replied gallantly. No doubt his very fine eyes pointed the remark.
“Shall you?” she said, and laughed a little. “Oh, you’ll—I’ll write you a note quite soon—to-morrow or Tuesday. I won’t forget. And—good-bye!”
“To-morrow or Tuesday? That’s certain?” His voice had an eagerness in it now.
“Yes, certain. I won’t forget. And—good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” he said, and I heard the door open.
“A thousand hopes!” she said again.
I suppose he made some response, but in words he made none. The door closed behind him.
I put the atlas on the sofa by me, got up, and went to her.
“I suppose I may go now, too?” I said.
“How clever you’re growing, Mr Wynne! But just let him get out of the house. We mustn’t give it away.”
A moment or two we stood in silence. Then shesaid: “You understand things. You shall have a note too—and a thousand hopes. And—good-bye!”
Not a suspicion of the meaning of this afternoon’s scene crossed my mind, which fact proved me, I daresay, to be very stupid. But Val was hardly likely to see more clearly, and I can’t altogether justify the play she made with the atlas and Assiniboia. As an exercise in irony, however, it had its point.
IDO not know what was in Val’s note: more of good-bye, and more than a thousand hopes, I imagine. Is it fanciful to mark that she had always said “hope” and never “confidence”? Mine bade me be at a certain corner of a certain street at eleven-thirty. “Where you will find me. Say nothing about it.” It was a little hard to say nothing whatever to Jane.
I went and met them at the corner—Mrs Something Simpson, Kirby, and Miss Constantine. Thence we repaired to a registry office, and they (I do not include Mrs Simpson) were married. They were to sail from Liverpool that afternoon, and we went straight from the office to Euston. I think it was only when the question of luggage arose that I gasped out, “Where are you going?”
“To Canada,” said Kirby briskly.
“For your trip?”
“For good and all,” he answered. “I’ve got leave—and sent in my resignation.”
“And I’ve sent in my resignation too,” she said. “Mr Wynne, try to think of me as only half a coward.”
“I—I don’t understand,” I stammered.
“But it’s your own doing,” he said. “Over there she won’t be a failure all her life!”
“Not because I’ve married him, at any rate,” Katharine said, looking very happy.
“I told you I should settle it—and so I did,” Kirby added. “And I’m grateful to you. I’m always grateful to a fellow who makes me understand.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “You’re not making me responsible?”
“For all that follows!” she answered, with a merry laugh. “Yes!”
That’s all very well, but suppose he gets to the top of the tree, as the fellow will, and issues a Declaration of Independence? At least he’ll be Premier, and come over to a conference some day. Val will be Secretary for the Colonies, probably (unless he has come that cropper). There’s a situation for you! Well, I shall just leave town. I daresay I sha’n’t be missed.
Lady Lexington carried it off well. She said that, from a strain of romance she had observed in the girl, the marriage was just what was to be expected of Katharine Constantine.
“WHAT did he get? “I asked. I had been working in my own room all the morning and had not seen the papers—they arrived from London about half-past eleven.
“Seven years’ penal servitude,” said our host the Major with grim satisfaction.
“Stiff!” I commented.
“Not a bit too much,” asserted the Major, helping himself to game pie again—he is a good luncher. “He’s a thoroughly bad lot—a professional thief, and a deuced clever one. It’s his first conviction, but it ought to have been his tenth, I should say.”
“He was certainly in that big American bond robbery,” said Crookes, “though he got off that time. Oxford man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. In fact, I believe I was up one term with him,” said Millington. “I must have seen him, I think, but I can’t remember him.”
“Dear, dear!” our hostess observed, shocked apparently at this close proximity to the criminal classes.
“Rather good what the chap said when he’d been sentenced,” drawled Charlie Pryce. “See it? Well, he bowed to the judge, and then he bowed to the jury, and smiled, and shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘The risks of the profession, gentlemen!Au revoir!’ Jolly good cheek!” Charlie’s round red face—he is very well nourished, as they say at inquests—beamed almost sympathetically.
“I suppose he owes his nickname to his professional dexterity?” said I.
“Suppose so,” agreed Charlie.
“No,” said Mrs Pryce, who was at the other end of the table. “His name is James——”
“Yes, James Painter Walsh,” interposed the Major, accurate always.
“But he was called ‘Slim-Fingered’ because he had beautiful hands with very slender tapering fingers.”
“Hallo, Minnie!” cried Pryce. “How do you know that?”
“He told me himself,” she answered with a smile and the hint of a blush. “I crossed from America with him the time he was arrested at Queenstown for the bond robbery, and—well, we got acquainted. Of course, nobody knew who he was.”
A torrent of questions overwhelmed Mrs Pryce. She had achieved fame—she had known the hero of the last great jewel robbery. She spoke of him from first-hand knowledge. The unrivalled attraction of crime—crime in the grand manner—fascinates us all. But she wouldn’t say much.
“He was just an acquaintance for the voyage,” she told us; “though, of course, it was rather a shock when he was arrested at Queenstown.”
“Oh, what a surprise!” exclaimed Charlie Pryce jovially.
“A surprise?” She seemed to me to start ever so little. “Oh yes, of course—terrible!” she went on the next instant.
“Was he nice?” asked our hostess.
“Yes, he was very—very attractive,” she answered. And somehow I fancy her glance rested for a moment on her husband—indeed on a particular portion of him. Charlie was just lighting the after-lunch cigarette. Charlie’s hands—he is a very good fellow and well off—are decidedly red and particularly podgy.
ILIKED Mrs Pryce very much. She was pretty, dainty, bright, and—well, bachelors are so apt to think that pretty married women have a dull time at home that I will lay no stress on my own private opinion as to her domestic lot. Enough that I was always glad to talk with her, and that it was pleasant to walk with her in the Major’s quiet old garden on a fine night when the wind stirred the boughs and the moon shone. Inside they had taken to pool—and whisky-and-soda. I play the former badly, and take the latter when the evening is more advanced.
“Beautiful moon!” I observed, enjoying Nature, my company, and my cigar.
She was silent a moment. Then she said: “It shone just like that the third night out from New York.”
“Your last trip?” She crosses pretty often, as Charlie has business connections on the other side.
“No. The one when—the one we were talking about at lunch.”
“Ah! When our friend of the slim fingers——?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s sit down,” I suggested. We were just passing a garden seat.
She smiled at me half sadly, half mockingly. She saw through me; she knew I wanted to hear more about it. By some sort of sympathy I knew that she wanted to talk about it. It was queer, too, to consider through what window that moon was shining on Slim-Fingered Jim. Did it—and his other surroundings—remind him of the broad Atlantic? “The risks of the profession, gentlemen!”
“Yes, he had beautiful hands,” she murmured.
“What’ll they look like when——?”
She caught my hand sharply in hers. “Hush, hush!” she whispered. I felt ashamed of myself, but of courseI couldn’t have known that—well, that she’d feel it like that.
“I was quite a girl,” she went on presently. “Yes, it’s six years ago—and the first two days of that voyage were like days in heaven. You know what it can be when it’s fine? You seem never to have known what space was before—and bigness—and blueness. Do you know what I mean?”
“It’s very exhilarating.”
“Oh, don’t be silly! Of course nobody was ill—anyhow only the people who meant to be before they started—and we had an awfully jolly table.”
“Mr Walsh one of your party?”
“Yes, he was at our table. I—sat next to him.”
I turned half round and looked at her. The moon was strong, I could see her eyes.
“Look here, do you want to go on with this story?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so—I’ve never told it before. But perhaps I’ll skip a little of it.”
“At the beginning?”
“Yes. Will you imagine the sun shining by day and the moon by night?”
“Yes. And a sparkling sea? And nothing to do?”
“Yes. And a young girl—quite a young girl.”
“Yes. And beautiful hands—and the rest to match?”
“Yes—including a voice.”
“Yes. Let’s skip to the second evening, shall we, Mrs Pryce?”
“Will you be a little more imaginative and skip to the third afternoon?”
“The third afternoon be it. What’s happening when we begin the story again?”
“I’m in my mother’s state-room, getting a tremendous lecture. I’m not sure you ought to hear it.”
“Oh, I know all about it. You meant no harm, probably, but really it was time you learnt to be morecareful. Attractive girls couldn’t be too careful. Men were so ready to think this and that—and say this and that—and then go and boast about it in the smoking-room. And what did you or your mother know about him? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! No doubt he was a gentleman, and very pleasant and amusing—but really you knew nothing. He was probably an adventurer. And anyhow—well, really it wasn’t quite—notquite—ladylike to—to——”
“Yes, that’s not a bad imagination,” interrupted Mrs Pryce. “Add mamma’s pince-nez, and it’s quite life-like.”
“And the result?”
“Great constraint in my manner towards Mr Walsh at dinner that evening.”
“And—further result—a melancholy walk by you on the deck after dinner—a walk at first solitary—subsequently shared by a puzzled and humble Mr Walsh?”
“I begin to think you have more experience than you always admit,” said Mrs Pryce. “But I think you’ll go wrong if you try to guess any more.”
“Then I won’t guess any more. Take up the thread. It’s now the third night out, and the moon is shining like that.” I pointed to the orb which was illuminating the Major’s garden—among other places where sundry of that liner’s former passengers might chance to be.
“I’ll go on,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me for a little while. There was a very light wind—you hardly felt it aft—and I was standing looking over the sea. He came up to me and began to talk about some trifle—I forget what it was, but it doesn’t matter. But I was afraid mamma would come up and look for me, so I said I was going down to read. But I waited for just a minute more—I suppose I expected him to ask me not to go. He said nothing, but took one big pull at his cigar, gave one big big puff of smoke out of his mouth and nose, and then threw the cigar overboard. ‘Good-night, Mr Walsh,’ I said. He looked at me—itwas as light as it is now—and said: ‘Will you give me one minute, Miss Cochrane?’ ‘Well, only a minute,’ I said, smiling. I was really afraid about mamma. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. I wonder if I blushed—and whether he could see if I did. I expect I did, and that he saw, because he went on very quickly: ‘Something that doesn’t matter much to you, but matters a bit to me.’ ‘Go on,’ I said. I was quite calm again now, because—well, because I saw he was going to say something serious—I mean, not of the sort I—I had thought he might be going to say before.”
“You saw he wasn’t making love to you, you mean?”
“I told you not to interrupt—but I daresay that’s putting it as nearly right as you can understand.”
I murmured thanks for this rather contemptuous forgiveness.
“Then he told me,” Mrs Pryce went on, “just simply told me—and said he was going to make some excuse for asking the purser to put him at another table.”
“But you can’t leave it like that!” I expostulated. “You’re throwing away all your dramatic effect. What did he say? His words, his words, Mrs Pryce!”
“He didn’t use any—not in the sense you mean. He just told me. He didn’t even put me on my honour not to tell anybody else. He said he didn’t care a hang about anybody else on board, but that he wanted to spare me any possible shock, and that he’d been concerned in the bond robbery and would probably be arrested at Queenstown, but that he expected to get off this time. I think I repeated ‘This time!’ because I remember he said then that he was a thief by profession, and couldn’t expect good luck every time. That was like what he said yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“And what did you say? It must have been a bad quarter of an hour for you. Because you’d liked him a good deal, hadn’t you?”
“Yes, a lot. But”—she turned to me, smiling now—“it wasn’t bad at all, really.”
She gave a little laugh—a laugh with pleasant reminiscence in it.
“You were a cool hand for your age,” I ventured to observe.
“It was the way he did it,” she said. “Somehow I felt he was paying me a very high compliment.”
“Oh, I agree!” I laughed.
“And one I was glad to have. It must have been the way he did it. There are some people who abolish one’s moral scruples, aren’t there? He was very quiet generally, but he had a way of just moving those hands of his with a little waving gesture. And when he said that of course it wasn’t right——”
“Oh, he admitted that?”
“Yes, but that little wave of those hands seemed to wave right and wrong right out of the way.”
“Overboard?”
“Absolutely overboard. Then he looked at me a moment and said: ‘That’s all I had to say. Thanks for listening to me, Miss Cochrane. Good-night.’ ”
“And what did you say?”
She rested her chin in her hand, looking sideways at me.
“I said: ‘Good-night, Mr Walsh. We meet at breakfast to-morrow as usual?’ ”
“The deuce you did!”
“ ‘At our table?’ he asked. And I said ‘Yes.’ He gave a little laugh, and so did I, and I held out my hand. He shook hands and left me, and I went down and read with mamma.”
“Nothing else said?”
“He said nothing else. I believe I whispered: ‘It’ll be rather fun—because youwillget off!’ But I know I didn’t say anything more than that.”
There was a pause. I lit another cigarette, snatching a mean advantage by stealing a look at my friend inthe light of the match. She was not looking at me, but straight ahead of her: there was a pensive smile on her lips.
“And what happened afterwards?” I asked.
“I suppose you’ll be shocked?”
“Being shocked is an emotion hostile to art—I never have it.”
“Well, then, I never had such fun. Of course we were careful, because of mamma (mamma’s idea became funny too!), and because we knew what was going to happen. But we managed to get no end of talks in quiet places—the library’s very good in fine weather—and he told me all sorts of wonderful things. It was like reading the very best detective stories, only ever so much better—so much more vivid, you know.”
“More personal interest?”
“A thousand times! And it was fun, too, at meals, and when there was a concert, and so on. I used to find him looking at me, with his eyes all full of laughter; and I looked back at him, enjoying the secret and the way he was making fools of all the rest. We were just like two children with some game that the grown-up people know nothing about.”
“He had waved your morality overboard with a vengeance,” said I.
“It was the jolliest time I ever had in my life,” said Mrs Pryce. “He recited beautifully at the concert—‘The Ballad of Beau Brocade.’ ”
“Well done him!” I said approvingly. I began rather to like the fellow myself.
“And at the end he made a little speech, thanking the captain, and saying how sorry we should all be when the voyage ended. ‘And nobody sorrier than myself,’ he said, with one of his looks at me—such a twinkling look—and a tiny wave of those hands.”
“He must have been the most popular man on board?”
“Well, the men thought him rather standoffish; hesnubbed some of them, I think. Well, you do meet some queer men on a liner, don’t you? And Mr Walsh said that out of business hours he claimed to choose his acquaintance. But the women all worshipped him—not that he ran after them, but his manner was always just right to them.”
“It’s really a pity his manner of life was so—well, so unconventional.”
“Yes, wasn’t it?” she said, welcoming my sympathy. “Because, of course, it meant that our acquaintance had to end with the voyage.”
I had, perhaps, been thinking of somewhat broader considerations, but I refrained from advancing them. In fact, we had somehow got away from ordinary standards and restraints; the memory of Slim-Fingered Jim had waved them away. We fell into silence for a moment or two, until I asked—
“And the manner of the end? Tell me that.”
“I didn’t believe in the end. I had got not to believe in it at all. I thought we might go on sailing for ever over that beautiful sea and having the most splendid fun. He could make you feel that everything was just splendid fun—that there was nothing else in the world. He made me feel that—I suppose he knew he could, or he’d never have told me his secret at all. But, of course, the end had to come.” She sighed and gave a little shiver—not that it was cold in the Major’s garden. Then she turned to me again. “I’ve told you a good deal,” she said, “and you’re not a chicken, are you?”
I ruefully admitted that I was no chicken.
“Then I needn’t say anything more about myself,” said she.
“And what about him?”
“I think he liked me tremendously; but he wasn’t in love.”
“Not at all?”
“I don’t think so. He was just the most perfect of good comrades to me—and in that way the finest gentlemanI’ve ever met. Because, you know, I can see now that I gave him opportunities of being something else. Well, I was only nineteen, and——”
“Quite so. The hands, of course!”
“It seems possible to be good and bad in—in compartments, doesn’t it? That’s rather curious!”
“If true!”
“Oh, you know it’s true!”
“Perhaps I do; but I never contradict the preacher.”
She laughed again, but now a trifle fretfully.
“In his own business I believe he’s thoroughly bad.”
“Not even the chivalrous highwayman?”
“No. Just bad—bad—bad.”
“Ah, well, business is one thing and charity another, as somebody once observed. And now for the end, please—because ends do come, even though we don’t believe in them.”
“Yes, they do; and this one came,” she said. But for an instant or two she did not begin to tell me about it; and in the silence I heard Charlie Pryce assert loudly that he had made a good shot.
“AT lunch on Friday,” Mrs Pryce resumed, “the steward told us that we were expected to reach Queenstown about one o’clock in the morning, and we all began discussing whether we should sit up. The old travellers scoffed at the idea, and mamma, though she wasn’t an old traveller, said she would never think of being so silly. But I and the two other girls at the table—they were Americans on their first trip over—said that we certainly should, and one of them asked Mr Walsh if he meant to. ‘I must,’ he said, smiling. ‘In fact, I expect to land there—that is, if I get the telegram I expect to get. Of course he glanced at me as he spoke, so that I knew what he meant, though theothers hadn’t the least idea. What would they have said?”
“I suppose they did say they were very sorry he wasn’t going on to Liverpool?”
“Yes, and even mamma said how sorry we were to part from him. Fancy mamma saying that! It was fun! Only after lunch she was terribly aggravating; she kept me down in the writing-room all the afternoon, writing letters for her to all sorts of stupid people in America and at home, saying we’d arrived safely. Of course we’d arrived safely! But if mamma so much as crosses the Channel without sinking, she writes to all her friends as if she’d come back from the North Pole. Some people are like that, aren’t they?”
“Yes; and they’re generally considered attentive. You may get a great reputation for good manners by writing unnecessary letters.”
“Yes. So I didn’t see him again till dinner. Nothing much happened then—at least I don’t remember much. The end had begun, I think, and I wasn’t feeling so jolly as I had been all the way across. But everybody else was in high spirits, and he was the gayest of all of us. I expect he saw that I was rather blue, and he followed me on deck soon after dinner, and there we had our last little talk. He told me that he thought everything would be done quite quietly; he meant to tell the purser where to find him in case of inquiry, and to be ready to go ashore at once. He was sure they’d take him ashore; but if by chance they didn’t, he would stay in his cabin, so that, anyhow, this was ‘Good-bye.’ So I said ‘Good-bye’ and wished him good luck. ‘Are you going to sit up?’ he said. I looked at him for a moment and then said ‘No.’ He smiled in an apologetic sort of way and gave that little wave of his hands. ‘It’s foolish of me to care, I suppose, but—thank you for that.’ I was a little surprised, because I really hadn’t thought he would mind me seeing; but I was pleased too. He held out both his hands,and I took them and pressed them. Then I opened my hands and looked at his as they lay there. He was smiling at me with his lips and his eyes. ‘Slim-Fingered Jim!’ he whispered. ‘Don’t quite forget him, little friend.’ ‘I suppose I shall never see you again?’ I said. ‘Better not,’ he told me. ‘But let’s remember this voyage. We’ll put a little fence round it, won’t we? and keep all the rest of life out, and just let this stand by itself—on its own merits. Shall we, dear little friend?’ ”
Mrs Pryce stayed her narrative for a moment. But my curiosity was merciless.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think I murmured something like ‘Oh, my dear, my dear!’ and then I let go of his hands and turned away to the sea; and when I looked round again, he was gone.”
“And that was the end?”
“No. The end was lying in the berth above mamma, who was sound asleep, and—well, snoring rather—lying there and feeling the ship slowing down and then stopping, and hearing the mail-boat come alongside, and all the noise and the shouting and the bustle. I knew I could hear nothing—there would be nothing to hear—but I couldn’t help listening. I listened very hard all the time, but of course I heard nothing; and at last—after hours and hours, as it seemed—we began to move again. That was the real end. I knew it had happened then; and so it had. He wasn’t at breakfast. But luckily nobody on the ship—none of the passengers, I mean—found out about it till we got to Liverpool; and as mamma and I weren’t going on to London, it didn’t matter.”
“And he got off?”
“Yes, he got off—that time.”
“I’m afraid this great man had one foible,” I observed. “He was proud of those hands! Well, Cæsar didn’t like getting bald, so I learnt at school.”
“I always remember them as they lay in mine,” she said. “His hands and his eyes—that’s what I remember.”
“Ever seen him again?”
“Of course not.” She sat where she was for a moment longer, then rose. “Shall we go in?”
“I think we may as well,” said I.
So we went into the billiard-room. They were still playing pool. I made for the whisky-and-soda and mixed myself a tumbler and drank thereof. When I set the tumbler down and turned round to the table Charlie Pryce was engaged in making a shot of critical importance. Everybody was looking at him. His wife was standing at the end of the table and looking at him too. She seemed as much interested in the shot as any of them. But was she? For before he played she raised her eyes and looked across at me with a queer little smile. I couldn’t help returning it. I knew what she was thinking. The billiard-table is a high trial.
When Charlie had brought off his shot—which he did triumphantly—his wife came and kissed him. This pleased him very much. He did not recognise the Kiss Penitential, which is, however, a well-ascertained variety.
I’m afraid that the magnetic current of immorality which seemed to emanate from Mr James Painter Walsh passed through the sympathetic medium of Mrs Pryce’s memory and infected, in some small degree, my more hardened intellect; for even now I can’t help hoping that Slim-Fingered Jim is being put to some light form of labour. But it’s a difficult business! Even the laundry—a most coveted department, as I am given to understand—would spoil them hopelessly.
THE rights and wrongs of the matter are perhaps a little obscure, and it is possible to take his side as well as hers. Or perhaps there is really no question of sides at all—no need to condemn anybody; only another instance of the difficulty people have in understanding one another’s point of view. But here, with a few lines added by way of introduction, are the facts as related in her obviously candid and sincere narrative.
Miss Winifred Petheram’s father had an income from landed estate of about five thousand a year, and spent, say, six or thereabouts; his manor house was old and beautiful, the gardens delightful, the stables handsome and handsomely maintained, the housekeeping liberal, hospitable, almost lavish. Mr Petheram had three sons and four daughters; but the sons were still young, and not the cause of any great expense. Mrs Petheram was a quiet body, the two girls in the schoolroom were no serious matter; in fact, apart from the horses, Mildred and Winifred were, in a pecuniary point of view, the most serious burden on the family purse. For both were pretty girls, gay and fond of society, given to paying frequent visits in town and country, and in consequence needing many frocks and a considerable supply of downright hard cash. But everybody was very comfortable; only it was understood that at a period generally referred to as “some day” there would be very little for anybody except the eldest son. “Some day,” meant, of course, when Mr Petheram reluctantly died, and thereby brought his family into less favourable worldly circumstances.
From this brief summary of the family’s position theduty of Mildred and Winifred (and, in due course of time, of the two girls in the schoolroom also) stands forth salient and unmistakable. Mildred performed it promptly at the age of nineteen years. He was the second son of a baronet, and his elder brother was sickly and unmarried; but, like a wise young man, he took no chances, went on the Stock Exchange, and became exceedingly well-to-do in an exceedingly brief space of time—something, in fact, “came off” in South Africa, and when that happens ordinary limits of time and probability are suspended. So with Mildred all was very well; and it was odds that one of the boys would be provided for by his brother-in-law. Winifred had just as good chances—nay, better; for her sensitive face and wondering eyes had an attraction that Mildred’s self-possessed good looks could not exert. But Winifred shilly-shallied (it was her father’s confidential after-dinner word) till she was twenty-one, then refused Sir Barton Amesbury (in itself a step of doubtful sanity, as was generally observed), and engaged herself to Harold Jackson, who made two hundred a year and had no prospects except the doubtful one of maintaining his income at that level—unless, that is, he turned out a genius, when it was even betting whether a mansion or the workhouse awaited him; for that depends on the variety of genius. Having taken this amazing course, Winifred was resolute and radiantly happy; her relatives, after the necessary amount of argument, shrugged their shoulders—the very inadequateultima ratioto which a softening civilisation seems to have reduced relatives in such cases.
“I can manage two hundred a year for her while I live,” said Mr Petheram, wiping his brow and then dusting his boots; he was just back from his ride. “After that——”
“The insurance, my dear?” Mrs Petheram suggested. But her husband shook his head; that little discrepancy above noted, between five and six thousand a year, hadbefore this caused the insurance to be a very badly broken reed.
Harold Jackson—for in him the explanation of Winifred’s action must be sought—was tall, good-looking, ready of speech, and decidedly agreeable. There was no aggressiveness about him, and his quiet manners repelled any suspicion of bumptiousness. But it cannot be denied that to him Winifred’s action did not seem extraordinary; he himself accounted for this by saying that she, like himself, was an Idealist, the boys by saying that he was “stuck-up,” Mr Petheram by a fretful exclamation that in all worldly matters he was as blind as a new-born puppy. Whatever the truth of these respective theories, he was as convinced that Winifred had chosen for her own happiness as that she had given him his. And in this she most fully agreed. Of course, then, all the shrugging of shoulders in the universe could not affect the radiant contentment of the lovers, nor could it avert the swift passage of months which soon brought the wedding-day in sight, and made preparations for it urgent and indispensable.
Married couples, even though they have only a precarious four hundred a year, must live somewhere—no idealism is independent of a roof; on the contrary, it centres round the home, so Harold said, and the word “home” seemed already sacred to Winifred as her glance answered his. It was the happiest day of her life when she put on her dainty new costume of delicate grey, took her parasol and gloves, matched to a shade with her gown, and mounted into the smart dog-cart which Jennie, the new chestnut mare, was to draw to the station. A letter had come from Harold to say that, after long search, he had found a house which would suit them, and was only just a trifle more expensive than the maximum sum they had decided to give for rent. Winifred knew that the delicate grey became her well, and that Harold would think herlooking very pretty; and she was going to see her home and his. Her face was bright as she kissed her father and jumped down from the dog-cart; but he sighed when she had left him, and his brow was wrinkled as he drove Jennie back. He felt himself growing rather old; “some day” did not seem quite as remote as it used, and pretty Winnie—well, there was no use in crying over it now. Wilful girls must have their way; and it was not his fault that confounded agitators had played the deuce with the landed interest. The matter passed from his thoughts as he began to notice how satisfactorily Jennie moved.
Winifred’s lover met her in London, and found her eyes still bright from the reveries of her journey. To-day was a gala day—they drove off in a hansom to a smart restaurant in Piccadilly, joking about their extravagance. Everything was perfect to Winifred, except (a small exception, surely!) that Harold failed to praise, seemed almost not to notice, the grey costume; it must have been that he looked at her face only!
“It’s not a large house, you know,” he said at lunch, smiling at her over a glass of Graves.
“Well, I sha’n’t be wanting to get away from you,” she answered, smiling. “Not very far, Harold!”
“Are your people still abusing me?”
He put the question with a laugh.
“They never abused you, only me.” Then came the irrepressible question: “Do you like my new frock? I put it on on purpose—for the house, you know.”
“Our home!” he murmured, rather sentimentally, it must be confessed. The question about the frock he did not answer; he was thinking of the home. Winifred was momentarily grateful to a stout lady at the next table, who put up her glass, looked at the frock, and with a nod of approval called her companion’s attention to it. This was while Harold paid the bill.
Then they took another cab, and headed north—through Berkeley Square, where Winifred would haveliked, but did not expect, to stop, and so up to Oxford Street. Here they bore considerably to the east, then plunged north again and drove through one or two long streets. Harold, who had made the journey before, paid no heed to the route, but talked freely of delightful hours which they were to enjoy together, of books to read and thoughts to think, and of an intimate sympathy which, near as they were already to one another, the home and the home life alone could enable them fully to realise. Winifred listened; but far down in her mind now was another question, hardly easier to stifle than that about the frock. “Where are we going to?” would have been its naked form; but she yielded no more to her impulse than to look about her and mark and wonder. At last they turned by a sharp twist from a long narrow street into a short narrower street, where a waggon by the curbstone forced the cab to a walk, and shrill boys were playing an unintelligible noisy game.
“What queer places we pass through!” she cried with a laugh, as she laid her hand on his arm and turned her face to his.
“Pass through! We’re at home,” he answered, returning her laugh. “At home, Winnie!” He pointed at a house on the right-hand side, and, immediately after, the cab stopped. Winifred got out, holding her skirt back from contact with the wheel. Harold, in his eagerness to ring the door bell, had forgotten to render her this service. She stood on the pavement for a moment looking about her. One of the boys cried: “Crikey, there’s a swell!” and she liked the boy for it. Then she turned to the house.
“It wants a lick of paint,” said Harold cheerfully, as he rang the bell again.
“It certainly does,” she admitted, looking up at the dirty walls.
An old woman opened the door; she might be said, by way of metaphor, to need the same process as thewalls; a very narrow passage was disclosed behind her.
“Welcome!” said Harold, giving Winifred his hand and then presenting her to the old woman. “This is my future wife,” he explained. “We’ve come to look at the house. But we won’t bother you, Mrs Blidgett, we’d rather run over it by ourselves. We shall enjoy that, sha’n’t we, Winnie?”
Winnie’s answer was a little scream and a hasty clutch at her gown; a pail of dirty water, standing in the passage, had threatened ruin; she recoiled violently from this peril against the opposite wall and drew away again, silently exhibiting a long trail of dark dust on her new grey frock. Harold laughed as he led the way into a small square room that opened from the passage.
“That’s the parlour,” said the old woman, wiping her arms with her apron. “You can find your way upstairs; nothing’s locked.” And with this remark she withdrew by a steep staircase leading underground.
“She’s the caretaker,” Harold explained.
“She doesn’t seem to have taken much care,” observed Winifred, still indignant about her gown and holding it round her as closely as drapery clings to an antique statue.
Miss Petheram’s account of the house, its actual dimensions, accommodation, and characteristics, has always been very vague, and since she refused information as to its number in the street, verification of these details has remained impossible. Perhaps it was a reasonably capacious, although doubtless not extensive, dwelling; perhaps, again, it was a confined and well-nigh stifling den. She remembered two things—first, its all-pervading dirt; secondly, the remarkable quality which (as she alleged) distinguished its atmosphere. She thought there were seven “enclosures,” this term being arrived at (after discussion) as a compromise between “rooms” and “pens”; and she knew that the windows of each of these enclosures were commandedby the windows of several other apparently similar and very neighbouring enclosures. Beyond this she could give no account of her first half-hour in the house; her exact recollection began when she was left alone in the enclosure on the first floor, which Harold asserted to be the drawing-room, Harold himself having gone downstairs to seek the old woman and elicit from her some information as to what were and what were not tenant’s fixtures in the said enclosure. “You can look about you,” he remarked cheerfully, as he left her, “and make up your mind where you’re going to have your favourite seat. Then you shall tell me, and I shall have the picture of you sitting there in my mind.” He pointed to a wooden chair, the only one then in the room. “Experiment with that chair,” he added, laughing. “I won’t be long, darling.”
Mechanically, without considering things which she obviously ought to have considered, Winifred sank into the designated seat, laid her parasol on a small table, and leant her elbows on the same piece of furniture as she held her face between her gloved hands. The atmosphere again asserted its peculiar quality; she rose for a moment and opened the window; fresh air was gained at the expense of spoilt gloves, and was weighted with the drawbacks of a baby’s cries and an inquisitive woman’s stare from over the way. Shutting the window again, she returned to her chair—the symbol of what was to be her favourite seat in days to come, her chosen corner in the house which had been the subject of so many talks and so many dreams. There were a great many flies in the room; the noise of adjacent humanity in street and houses was miscellaneous and penetrating; the air was very close. And this house was rather more expensive than their calculations had allowed. They had immensely enjoyed making those calculations down there in the country, under the old yew hedge and in sight of the flower beds beneath the library window. She rememberedthe day they did it. There was a cricket match in the meadow. Mildred and her husband brought the drag over, and Sir Barton came in his tandem. It was almost too hot in the sun, but simply delightful in the shade. She and Harold had had great fun over mapping out their four hundred a year and proving how much might be done with it—at least compared with anything they could want when once they had the great thing that they wanted.
The vision vanished; she was back in the dirty little room again; she caught up her parasol; a streak across the dust marked where it had lain on the table; she sprang up and twisted her frock round, craning her neck back; ah, that she had reconnoitred that chair! She looked at her gloves; then with a cry of horror she dived for her handkerchief, put it to her lips, and scrubbed her cheeks; the handkerchief came away soiled, dingy, almost black. This last outrage overcame her; the parasol dropped on the floor, she rested her arms on the table and laid her face on them, and she burst into sobs, just as she used to in childhood when her brothers crumpled a clean frock or somebody spoke to her roughly. And between her sobs she cried, almost loudly, very bitterly: “Oh, it’s too mean and dirty and horrid!”
Harold had stolen softly upstairs, meaning to surprise the girl he loved, perhaps to let a snatched kiss be her first knowledge of his return. He flushed red, and his lips set sternly; he walked across the room to her with a heavy tread. She looked up, saw him, and knew that her exclamation had been overheard.
“What in the world is the matter?” he asked in a tone of cold surprise.
It was very absurd—she couldn’t stop crying; and from amid her weeping nothing more reasonable, nothing more adequate, nothing less trivial would come than confused murmurs of “My frock, Harold!” “My parasol!” “Oh, my face, my gloves!” He smiledcontemptuously. “Don’t you see?” she exclaimed, exhibiting the gloves and parasol.
“See what? Are you crying because the room’s dirty?” He paused and then added, “I’m sorry you think it mean and horrid. Very sorry, Winifred.”
Offence was deep and bitter in his voice; he looked at her with a sort of disgust; she stopped sobbing and regarded him with a gaze in which fright and expectation seemed mingled, as though there were a great peril, and just one thing that might narrowly avert it. But his eyes were very hard. She dried her tears, and then forlornly scrubbed her cheeks again. He watched her with hostile curiosity, appearing to think her a very strange spectacle. Presently he spoke. “I thought you loved me. Oh, I daresay you thought so too till I came into competition with your new frock. I beg pardon—I must add your gloves and your parasol. As for the house, it’s no doubt mean and horrid; we were going to be poor, you see.” He laughed scornfully, as he added, “You might even have had to do a little dusting yourself now and then! Horrible!”
“I just sat there and looked at him.” That was Winifred’s own account of her behaviour. It is not very explicit and leaves room for much conjecture as to what her look said or tried to say. But whatever the message was he did not read it. He was engrossed in his own indignation, readier to hurt than to understand, full of his own wrong, of the mistake he had made, of her extraordinary want of love, of courage, of the high soul. Very likely all this was a natural enough state of mind for him to be in. Justice admits his provocation; the triviality of her spoken excuses gave his anger only too fine an opportunity. He easily persuaded himself that here was a revelation of the real woman, a flash of light that showed her true nature, showing, too, the folly of his delusion about her. Against all this her look and what it asked for hadvery little chance, and she could find no words that did not aggravate her offence.
“This is really rather a ludicrous scene,” he went on. “Is there any use in prolonging it?” He waited for her to speak, but she was still tongue-tied. “The caretaker needn’t be distressed by seeing the awful effects of her omission to dust the room; but, if you’re composed enough, we might as well go.” He looked round the room. “You’ll be glad to be out of this,” he ended.
“I know what you must think of me,” she burst out, “but—but you don’t understand—you don’t see——”
“No doubt I’m stupid, but I confess I don’t. At least there’s only one thing I see.” He bowed and waved his hand towards the door. “Shall we go?” he asked.
She led the way downstairs, her skirt again held close and raised clear of her ankles; her care for it was not lost on Harold as he followed her, for she heard him laugh again with an obtrusive bitterness that made his mirth a taunt. The old caretaker waited for them in the passage.
“When’ll you be coming, sir?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not certain we shall come,” said he. “The lady is not much taken with the house.”
“Ah, well!” sighed the old woman resignedly.
For an account of their drive back to the station materials are, again, sadly wanting. “He hardly said a word, and I did nothing but try to get my face clean and my gloves presentable,” was Winifred’s history of their journey. But she remembered—or chose to relate—a little more of what passed while they waited for the train on the platform at Euston. He left her for a few minutes on pretext of smoking a cigarette, and she saw him walking up and down, apparently in thought. Then he came back and sat down beside her. His manner was grave now; to judge by his recorded words, perhaps it was even a little pompous; but whenmay young men be pompous, if not at such crises as these?
“It’s no use pretending that nothing has happened, Winifred,” he said. “That would be the hollowest pretence, not worthy, I think, of either of us. Perhaps we had better take time to consider our course and—er—our relations to one another.”
“You don’t want to marry me now?” she asked simply.
“I want to do what is best for our happiness,” he replied. “We cannot forget what has happened to-day.”
“I know you would never forget it,” she said.
He did not contradict her; he looked first at his watch, then along the platform for the approach of her train. To admit that he might forget it was impossible to him; in such a case forgetfulness would be a negation of his principles and a slur on his perception. It would also be such a triumph over his vanity and his pride as it did not lie in him to achieve, such a forgiveness as his faults and virtues combined to put beyond the power of his nature. She looked at him; and “I smiled,” she said, not seeming herself to know why she had smiled, but conscious that, in the midst of her woe, some subtly amusing thought about him had come into her mind. She had never been amused at him before; so she, too, was getting some glimmer of a revelation out of the day’s experience—not the awful blaze of light that had flashed on Harold’s eyes, but a dim ray, just enough to give cause to that puzzled smile for which she could not explicitly account.
So they parted, and for persons who have followed the affair at all closely it is hardly necessary to add that they never came together again. This issue was obvious, and Winifred seems to have made up her mind to it that very same evening, for she called her mother into her room (as the good lady passed on the way to bed) and looked up from the task of brushing the grey frock which she had spread out on the sofa.
“I don’t think I shall marry Mr Jackson now, mother,” she said.
Mrs Petheram looked at her daughter and at her daughter’s gown.
“You’d better tell me more about it to-morrow. You look tired to-night, dear,” she replied.
But Winifred never told her any more—in the first place, because the family was too delighted with the fact to care one straw about how it had come to pass, and, in the second place, on the more important ground that the thing was really too small, too trivial, and too absurd to bear telling—at least to the family. To me, for some reason or other, Winifred did tell it, or some of it—enough, anyhow, to enable me, with the help of a few touches of imagination, to conjecture how it occurred.
“Don’t you think it was very absurd?” she asked at the end of her story. We were sitting by the yew hedge, near the library windows, looking across the flower beds to the meadow; it was a beautiful day, and the old place was charming. “Because,” she added, “I did love him, you know; and it seems a small thing to separate about, doesn’t it?”
“If he had behaved differently——” I began.
“I don’t see how he could be expected to,” she murmured.
“You expected him to,” I said firmly. She turned to me with an appearance of interest, as though I might be able to interpret to her something that had been causing her puzzle. “Or you wouldn’t have looked at him as you say you did—or smiled at him, as you admit you did. But you were wrong to expect him to, because he’s not that kind of man.”
“What kind of man?”
“The kind of man to catch you in his arms, smother you in kisses (allow me the old phrase), tell you that he understood all you felt, knew all you were giving up, realised the great thing you were doing for him.”
Winifred was listening. I went on with my imaginary scene of romantic fervour.
“That when he contrasted that mean little place with the beauties you were accustomed to, with the beauties which were right and proper for you, when he saw your daintiness soiled by that dust, that gown whose hem he would willingly——”
“He needn’t say quite as much as that,” interrupted Winifred, smiling a little.
“Well, or words to that effect,” said I. “That when he did all this and saw all this, you know, he loved you more, and knew that you loved him more than he had dared to dream, with a deeper love, a love that gave up for him all that you loved next best and second only to him; that after seeing your tears he would never doubt again that you would face all trials and all troubles with him at your side—Don’t you think, if he’d said something of that kind, accompanying his words with the appropriate actions——” I paused.
“Well?” asked Winifred.
“Don’t you think you might have been living in that horrid little house now, instead of being about to contract an alliance with Sir Barton Amesbury?”
“How do you know I shall do that?” she cried.
“It needs,” I observed modestly, “little skill to discern the approach of the inevitable.” I looked at her thoughtful face and at her eyes; they had their old look of wondering in them. “Don’t you think that if he’d treated the situation in that way——?” I asked.
“Perhaps,” she said softly. “But he wouldn’t think of all that. He was such an Idealist.”
I really do not know why she applied that term to him at that moment, except that he used to apply it to himself at many moments. But since it seemed to her to explain his conduct, there is no need to quarrel with the epithet.
“And I hope,” said I, “that the grey frock wasn’t irretrievably ruined?”