He stopped abruptly.
"But I forgot," he muttered. "I can't explain."
"Is one to understand," she asked, a little puzzled, "that you have had difficulties in your business?"
"I have never been in business," he answered quickly. "My name is Romilly, but I am not Romilly the manufacturer. For the last eight years I have lived in a garret in London, teaching false art in a third-rate school some of the time, doing penny-a-line journalistic work when I got the chance; clerk for a month or two in a brewer's office and sacked for incapacity—those are a few of the real threads in my life."
"At the present moment, then," she observed, "you are an impostor."
"Exactly," he admitted, "and I should probably have been repenting it by now but for your words last night."
She smiled at him and the sun shone once more. It wasn't an ordinary smile at all. It was just as though she were letting him into the light of her understanding, as though some one from the world, entrance into which he had craved, had stooped down to understand and was telling him that all was well. He drew his chair a little closer to hers.
"We are all more or less impostors," she said. "Does any one, I wonder, go about the world telling everybody what they really are, how they really live? Dear me, how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be! You are so wise, my new friend. You know the value of impulses. You tell me the truth, and I am your friend. I do not need facts, because facts count for little. I judge by what lies behind, and I understand. Do not weary me with explanations. I like what you have told me. Only, of course, your work must have suffered from surroundings like that. Will it be better for you now?"
"I shall land in New York," he told her, "with at least a thousand pounds. That is about as much as I have spent in ten years. There is the possibility of other money. Concerning that—well, I can't make up my mind. The thousand pounds, of course, is stolen."
"So I gathered," she remarked. "Do you continue, may I ask, to be DouglasRomilly, the manufacturer?"
He shook his head a little vaguely.
"I haven't thought," he confessed. "But of course I don't. I have risked everything for the chance of a new life. I shall start it in a new way and under a new name."
He was suddenly conscious of her pity, of a moistness in her eyes as she looked at him.
"I think," she said, "that you must have been very miserable. Above all things, now, whatever you may have done for your liberty, don't be fainthearted. If you are in trouble or danger you must come to me. You promise?"
"If I may," he assented fervently.
"Now I must hear the play as it stood in your thoughts when you wrote it," she insisted. "I have a fancy that it will sound a little gloomy. Am I right?"
He laughed.
"Of course you are! How could I write in any other way except through the darkened spectacles? However, there's a way out—of altering it, I mean. I feel flashes of it already. Listen."
The story expanded with relation. He no longer felt confined to its established lines. Every now and then he paused to tell her that this or that was new, and she nodded appreciatively. They walked for a time, watched the seagulls, and bade their farewell to the Irish coast.
"You will have to re-write that play for me," she said, a little abruptly, as she paused before the companionway. "I am going down to my room for a few minutes before lunch now. Afterwards I shall bring up a pencil and paper. We will make some notes together."
Philip walked on to the smoking room. He could scarcely believe that the planks he trod were of solid wood. Raymond Greene met him at the entrance and slapped him on the back:
"Just in time for a cocktail before lunch!" he exclaimed. "I was looking everywhere for a pal. Two Martinis, dry as you like, Jim," he added, turning round to the smoking room steward. "Sure you won't join us, Lawton?"
"Daren't!" was the laconic answer from the man whom he had addressed.
"By-the-bye," Mr. Raymond Greene went on, "let me make you two acquainted. This is Mr. Douglas Romilly, an English boot manufacturer—Mr. Paul Lawton of Brockton. Mr. Lawton owns one of the largest boot and shoe plants in the States," the introducer went on. "You two ought to find something to talk about."
Philip held out his hand without a single moment's hesitation. He was filled with a new confidence.
"I should be delighted to talk with Mr. Lawton on any subject in the world," he declared, "except our respective businesses."
"I am very glad to meet you, sir," the other replied, shaking hands heartily. "I don't follow that last stipulation of yours, though."
"It simply means that I am taking seven days' holiday," Philip explained gaily, "seven days during which I have passed my word to myself to neither talk business nor think business. Your very good health, Mr. Raymond Greene," he went on, drinking his cocktail with relish. "If we meet on the other side, Mr. Lawton, we'll compare notes as much as you like."
"That's all right, sir," the other agreed. "I don't know as you're not right. We Americans do hang round our businesses, and that's a fact. Still, there's a little matter of lasts I should like to have a word or two with you about some time."
"A little matter of what?" Philip asked vaguely.
"Lasts," the other repeated. "That's where your people and ours look different ways chiefly, that and a little matter of manipulation of our machinery."
"Just so," Philip assented, swallowing the rest of his cocktail. "What about luncheon? There's nothing in the world to give you an appetite like this sea air."
"I'm with you," Mr. Raymond Greene chimed in. "You two can have your trade talk later on."
He took his young friend's arm, and they descended the stairs together.
"What the mischief is a last?" he inquired.
"I haven't the least idea," Philip replied carelessly. "Something to do with boots and shoes, isn't it?"
His questioner stared at him for a moment and then laughed.
"Say, you're a young man of your word!" he remarked appreciatively.
Philip Romilly was accosted, late that afternoon, by two young women whose presence on board he had noticed with a certain amount of disapproval. They were obviously of the chorus-girl type, a fact which they seemed to lack the ambition to conceal. After several would-be ingratiating giggles, they finally pulled up in front of him whilst he was promenading the deck.
"You are Mr. Romilly, aren't you?" one of them asked. "Bob Millet told us you were going to be on this steamer. You know Bob, don't you?"
Philip for a moment was taken aback.
"Bob Millet," he repeated thoughtfully.
"Of course! Good old Bob! I don't mind confessing," the young woman went on, "that though we were all out one night together—Trocadero, Empire, and Murray's afterwards—I should never have recognised you. Seems to me you've got thinner and more serious-looking."
"I am afraid my own memory is also at fault," Philip remarked, a little stiffly.
"I am Violet Fox," the young woman who had accosted him continued. "This my friend, Hilda Mason. She's a dear girl but a little shy, aren't you, Hilda?"
"That's just because I told her that we ought to wait until you remembered us," the slighter young woman, with the very obvious peroxidised hair, protested.
"Didn't seem to be any use waiting for that," her friend retorted briskly. "Hilda and I are dying for a cocktail, Mr. Romilly."
He led them with an unwillingness of which they seemed frankly unaware, towards the lounge. They drank two cocktails and found themselves unfortunately devoid of cigarettes, a misfortune which it became his privilege to remedy. They were very friendly young ladies, if a little slangy, invited him around to their staterooms, and offered to show him the runs around New York. Philip escaped after about an hour and made his way to where Elizabeth was reclining in her deck chair.
"That fellow Romilly," he declared irritably, "the other one, I mean, seems to have had the vilest tastes. If I am to be landed with any more of his ridiculous indiscretions, I think I shall have to go overboard. There was an enterprising gentleman named Gayes in Liverpool, who nearly drove me crazy, then there's this Mr. Lawton who wants to talk about lasts, and finally it seems that I dined at the Trocadero and spent the evening at the Empire and Murray's with the two very obvious-looking young ladies who accosted me just now. I am beginning to believe that Douglas' life was not above suspicion."
She smiled at him tolerantly. An unopened book lay by her side. She seemed to have been spending the last quarter of an hour in thought.
"I am rather relieved to hear," she confessed, "that those two young people are a heritage from the other Mr. Romilly. No, don't sit down," she went on. "I want you to do something for me. Go into the library, and on the left-hand side as you enter you will see all the wireless news. Read the bottom item and then come back to me."
He turned slowly away. All his new-found buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him. He cursed the imagination which lifted his feet from the white decks and dragged his eyes from the sparkling blue sea to the rain-soaked, smut-blackened fields riven by that long thread of bleak, turgid water. The horrors of a murderous passion beat upon his brain. He saw himself hastening, grim and blind, on his devil-sped mission. Then the haze faded from before his eyes. Somehow or other he accomplished his errand. He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of typewritten messages, passing them all over, heedless of what their message might be, until he came to the last and most insignificant. Four lines, almost overlapped by another sheet—
Acting upon instructions received, the police are investigating a somewhat curious case of disappearance. Philip Romilly, a teacher of art in a London school, visited Detton Magna on Friday afternoon and apparently started for a walk along the canal bank, towards dusk. Nothing has since been heard of him or his movements, and arrangements have been made to drag the canal at a certain point.
The letters seemed to grow larger to him as he stood and read. He remained in front of the message for an inordinately long time. Again his imagination was at work. He saw the whole ghastly business, the police on the canal banks, watching the slow progress of the men with their drags bringing to the surface all the miserable refuse of the turgid waters, the dripping black mud, perhaps at last….
He was back again on the deck, walking quite steadily yet seeing little. He made his way to the smoking room, asked almost indifferently for a brandy and soda, and drained it to the last drop. Then he walked up the deck to where Elizabeth was seated, and dropped into a chair by her side.
"So I am missing," he remarked, almost in his ordinary tone. "I really had no idea that I was a person of such importance. Fancy reading of my own disappearance within a few days of its taking place, in the middle of the Atlantic!"
"There was probably some one there who gave information," she suggested.
"There was the young lady whom I went to visit," he assented. "She probably watched me cross the road and turn in at that gate and take the path by the canal side. Yes, she may even have gone to the station to see whether I took the only other train back to London, and found that I did not. She knew, too, that I could only have had a few shillings in my pocket, and that my living depended upon being in London for my school the next morning. Yes, the whole thing was reasonable."
"And they are going to drag the canal," Elizabeth said thoughtfully.
"A difficult business," he assured her. "It is one of the most ghastly, ill-constructed, filthiest strips of water you ever looked upon. It has been the garbage depository of the villages through which it makes its beastly way, for generations. I don't envy the men who have to handle the drags."
"You do not believe, then, that they will find anything—interesting?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"That type of man," he continued, "must have a morbid mind. There will be dead animals without a doubt, worn-out boots, filthy and decomposed articles of clothing—"
"Don't!" she interrupted. "You know what I mean. Do leave off painting your ghastly pictures. You know quite well what I mean. Philip Romilly is here by my side. What can they hope to find there in his place?"
His evil moments for that afternoon were over. He answered her almost carelessly.
"Not what they are looking for. Have you brought the paper and pencil you spoke of? I have an idea—I am getting fresh ideas every moment now that I picture you as my heroine. It is queer, isn't it, how naturally you fall into the role?"
She drew a little nearer to him. He was conscious of a mysterious and unfamiliar perfume, perhaps from the violets half hidden in her furs, or was it something in her hair? It reminded him a little of the world the keys into which he had gripped—the world of joyousness, of light-hearted pleasures, the sunlit world into which he had only looked through other men's eyes.
"Perhaps you knew that I was somewhere across the threshold," she suggested. "Did you drag your Mona wholly from your brain, or has she her prototype somewhere in your world?"
He shook his head.
"Therein lies the weakness of all that I have ever written," he declared. "There have been so few in my world from whom I could garner even the gleanings of a personality. They are all, my men and women, artificially made, not born. Twenty-three shillings a week has kept me well outside the locked doors."
"Yet, you know, in many ways," she reflected, "Mona is like me."
"Like you because she was a helper of men," he assented swiftly, "a woman of large sympathies, appealing to me, I suppose, because in my solitude, thoughts of my own weakness taunted me, weakness because I couldn't break out, I mean. Perhaps for that reason the thought of a strong woman fascinated me, a woman large in thoughts and ways, a woman to whom purposes and tendencies counted most. I dreamed of a woman sweetly omnipotent, strong without a shadow of masculinity. That is where my Mona was to be different from all other created figures."
"Chance," she declared, "is a wonderful thing. Chance has pitchforked you here, absolutely to my side, I, the one woman who could understand what you mean, who could give your Mona life. Don't think I am vain," she went on. "I can assure you that my head isn't the least turned because I have been successful. I simply know. Listen. I have few engagements in New York. I should not be going back at all but to see my mother, who is too delicate to travel, and who is miserable when I am away for long. Take this pencil and paper. Let us leave off dreaming for a little time and give ourselves up to technicalities. I want to draft a new first act and a new last one, not so very different from your version and yet with changes which I want to explain as we go on. Bring your chair a little nearer—so. Now take down these notes."
They worked until the first gong for dinner rang. She sat up in her chair with a happy little laugh.
"Isn't it wonderful!" she exclaimed. "I never knew time to pass so quickly. There isn't any pleasure in the world like this," she added, a little impulsively, "the pleasure of letting your thoughts run out to meet some one else's, some one who understands. Take care of every line we have written, my friend."
"We might go on after dinner," he suggested eagerly.
She shook her head.
"I'd rather not," she admitted. "My brain is too full. I have a hundred fancies dancing about. I even find myself, as we sit here, rehearsing my gestures, tuning myself to a new outlook. Oh! You most disturbing person—intellectually of course, I mean," she added, laughing into his face. "Take off my rugs and help me up. No, we'll leave them there. Perhaps, after dinner, we might walk for a little time."
"But the whole thing is tingling in my brain," he protested. "Couldn't we go into the library? We could find a corner by ourselves."
She turned and looked at him, standing up now, the wind blowing her skirts, her eyes glowing, her lips a little parted. Then for the first time he understood her beauty, understood the peculiar qualities of it, the dissensions of the Press as to her appearance, the supreme charm of a woman possessed of a sweet and passionate temperament, turning her face towards the long-wished-for sun. Even the greater things caught hold of him in that moment, and he felt dimly what was coming.
"Do you really wish to work?" she asked.
He looked away from her.
"No!" he answered, a little thickly. "We will talk, if you will."
They neither of them moved. The atmosphere had suddenly become charged with a force indescribable, almost numbing. In the far distance they saw the level line of lights from a passing steamer. Mr. Raymond Greene, with his hands in his ulster pockets, suddenly spotted them and did for them what they seemed to have lost the power to do.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "I've been looking for you two everywhere. I don't want to hurt that smoking room steward's feelings. He's not bad at his job. But," he added confidentially, dropping his voice and taking them both by the arm, "I have made a cocktail down in my stateroom—it's there in the shaker waiting for us, something I can't talk about. I've given Lawton one, and he's following me about like a dog. Come right this way, both of you. Steady across the gangway—she's pitching a little. Why, you look kind of scared, Mr. Romilly. Been to sleep, either of you?"
Philip's laugh was almost too long to be natural. Elizabeth, as though by accident, had dropped her veil. Mr. Raymond Greene, bubbling over with good nature and anticipation, led them towards the stairs.
Mr. Raymond Greene could scarcely wait until Philip had taken his place at the dinner table that evening, to make known his latest discovery.
"Say, Mr. Romilly," he exclaimed, leaning a little forward, "do you happen to have seen the wireless messages to-day?—those tissue sheets that are stuck up in the library?"
Philip set down the menu, in which he had been taking an unusual interest.
"Yes, I looked through them this afternoon," he acknowledged.
"There's a little one at the bottom, looks as though it had been shoved in at the last moment. I don't know whether you noticed it. It announced the mysterious disappearance of a young man of the same name as your own—an art teacher from London, I think he was. I wondered whether it might have been any relation?"
"I read the message," Philip admitted. "It certainly looks as though it might have referred to my cousin."
Mr. Raymond Greene became almost impressive in his interested earnestness.
"Talk about coincidences!" he continued. "Do you remember last night talking about subjects for cinema plays? I told you of a little incident I happened to have noticed on the way from London to Liverpool, about the two men somewhere in Derbyshire whom I had seen approaching a tunnel over a canal—they neither of them came out, you know, all the time that the train was standing there."
Philip helped himself a little absently to whisky and soda from the bottle in front of him.
"I remember your professional interest in the situation," he confessed.
"I felt at the time," Mr. Raymond Greene went on eagerly, "that there was something queer about the affair. Listen! I have been putting two and two together, and it seems to me that one of those men might very well have been this missing Mr. Romilly."
Philip shook his head pensively.
"I don't think so," he ventured.
"What's that? You don't think so?" the cinema magnate exclaimed. "Why not, Mr. Romilly? It's exactly the district—at Detton Magna, the message said, in Derbyshire—and it was a canal, too, one of the filthiest I ever saw. Can't you realise the dramatic interest of the situation now that you are confronted with this case of disappearance? I have been asking myself ever since I strolled up into the library before dinner and read this notice—'What about the other man?'"
Philip had commenced a leisurely consumption of his first course, and answered without undue haste.
"Well," he said, "if this young man Romilly is my cousin, it would be the second or third time already that he has disappeared. He is an ill-balanced, neurotic sort of creature. At times he accepts help—even solicits it—from his more prosperous relations, and at times he won't speak to us. But of one thing I am perfectly convinced, and that is that there is no man in the world who would be less likely to make away with himself. He has a nervous horror of death or pain of any sort, and in his peculiar way he is much too fond of life ever to dream of voluntarily shortening it. On the other hand, he is always doing eccentric things. He probably set out to walk to London—I have known him do it before—and will turn up there in a fortnight's time."
Mr. Raymond Greene seemed rather to resent having cold water poured upon his melodramatic imaginings. He turned to Elizabeth, who had remained silent during the brief colloquy.
"What do you think, Miss Dalstan?" he asked. "Don't you think that, under the circumstances, I ought to give information to the British police?"
She laughed at him quite good-naturedly, and yet in such a way that a less sensitive man than Mr. Raymond Greene might well have been conscious of the note of ridicule.
"No wonder you are such a great success in your profession!" she observed. "You carry the melodramatic instinct with you, day by day. You see everything through the dramatist's spectacles."
"That's all very well," Mr. Greene protested, "but you saw the two men yourself, and you've probably read about the case of mysterious disappearance. Surely you must admit that the coincidence is interesting?"
"Alas!" she went on, shaking her head, "I am afraid I must throw cold water upon your vivid imaginings. You see, my eyesight is better than yours and I could see the two men distinctly, whilst you could only see their figures. One of them, the better-dressed, was fair and obviously affluent, and the other was a labourer. Neither of them could in any way have answered the description of the missing man."
Mr. Raymond Greene was a little dashed.
"You didn't say so at the time," he complained.
"I really wasn't sufficiently interested," she told him. "Besides, without knowing anything of Mr. Romilly's cousin, I don't think any person in the world could have had the courage to seek an exit from his troubles by means of that canal."
"But my point," Mr. Raymond Greene persisted, "is that it wasn't suicide at all. I maintain that the situation as I saw it presented all the possibilities of a different sort of crime."
"My cousin hadn't an enemy in the world except himself," Philip intervened.
"And I would give you the filming of my next play for nothing," Elizabeth ventured, "if either of those two men could possibly have been an art teacher…. Can I have a little more oil with my salad, please, steward, and I should like some French white wine."
Mr. Raymond Greene took what appeared to be a positive disappointment very good-naturedly.
"Well," he said, "I dare say you are both right, and in any case I shouldn't like to persist in a point of view which might naturally enough become distressing to our young friend here. Tell you what I'll do to show my penitence. I shall order a bottle of wine, and we'll drink to the welfare of the missing Mr. Philip Romilly, wherever he may be. Pommery, steward, and bring some ice along."
Philip pushed away his whisky and soda.
"Just in time," he remarked. "I'll drink to poor Philip's welfare, with pleasure, although he hasn't been an unmixed blessing to his family."
The subject passed away with the drinking of the toast, and with the necessity for a guard upon himself gone, Philip found himself eating and drinking mechanically, watching all the time the woman who sat opposite to him, who had now engaged Mr. Raymond Greene in an animated conversation on the subject of the suitability for filming of certain recent plays. He was trying with a curious intentness to study her dispassionately, to understand the nature of the charm on which dramatic critics had wasted a wealth of adjectives, and of which he himself was humanly and personally conscious. She wore a high-necked gown of some soft, black material, with a little lace at her throat fastened by her only article of jewellery, a pearl pin. Her hair was arranged in coils, with a simplicity and a precision which to a more experienced observer would have indicated the possession of a maid of no ordinary qualities. Her mouth became more and more delightful every time he studied it; her voice, even her method of speech, were entirely natural and with a peculiarly fascinating inflexion. At times she looked and spoke with the light-hearted gaiety of a child; then again there was the grave and cultured woman apparent in her well-balanced and thoughtful criticisms. When, at the end of the meal, she rose to leave the table, he found himself surprised at her height and the slim perfection of her figure. His first remark, when he joined her upon the stairs, was an almost abrupt expression of his thoughts.
"Tell me," he exclaimed, "why were all my first impressions of you wrong?To-night you are a revelation to me. You are amazingly different."
She laughed at him.
"I really can't do more than show you myself as I am," she expostulated.
"Ah! but you are so many women," he murmured.
"Of course, if you are going to flatter me! Give me a cigarette from my case, please, and strike a match, and if you don't mind struggling with this wind and the darkness, we will have our walk. There!" she added, as they stood in the companionway. "Now don't you feel as though we were facing an adventure? We shan't be able to see a yard ahead of us, and the wind is singing."
They passed through up the companionway. She took his arm and he suddenly felt the touch of her warm fingers feeling for his other hand. He gripped them tightly, and his last impression of her face, before they plunged into the darkness, was of a queer softness, as though she were giving herself up to some unexpected but welcome emotion. Her eyes were half closed. She had the air of one wrapped in silence. So they walked almost the whole length of the deck. Philip, indeed, had no impulse or desire for speech. All his aching nerves were soothed into repose. The last remnants of his ghostly fears had been swept away. They were on the windward side of the ship, untenanted save now and then by the shadowy forms of other promenaders. The whole experience, even the regular throbbing of the engines, the swish of the sea, the rising and falling of a lantern bound to the top of a fishing smack by which they were passing, the distant chant of the changing watch, all the night sights and sounds of the seaborne hostel, were unfamiliar and exhilarating. And inside his hand, even though given him of her great pity, a woman's fingers lay in his.
She spoke at last a little abruptly.
"There is something I must know about," she said.
"You have only to ask," he assured her.
"Don't be afraid," she continued. "I wish to ask you nothing which might give you pain, but I must know—you see, I am really such a ordinary woman—I must know about some one whom you went to visit that day, didn't you, at Detton Magna?"
He answered her almost eagerly.
"I want to talk about Beatrice," he declared. "I want to tell you everything about her. I know that you will understand. We were brought up together in the same country place. We were both thrown upon the world about the same time. That was one thing, I suppose, which made us kindly disposed towards one another. We corresponded always. I commenced my unsuccessful fight in London. I lived—I can't tell you how—week by week, month by month. I ate coarse food, I was a hanger-on to the fringe of everything in life which appealed to me, fed intellectually on the crumbs of free libraries and picture galleries. I met no one of my own station—I was at a public school and my people were gentlefolk—or tastes. I had no friends in London before whom I dared present myself, no money to join a club where I might have mixed with my fellows, no one to talk to or exchange a single idea with—and I wasn't always the gloomy sort of person I have become; in my younger days I loved companionship. And the women—my landlady's daughter, with dyed hair, a loud voice, slatternly in the morning, a flagrant imitation of her less honest sisters at night! Who else? Where was I to meet women when I didn't even know men? I spent my poor holidays at Detton Magna. Our very loneliness brought Beatrice and me closer together. We used to walk in those ugly fields around Detton Magna and exchanged the story of our woes. She was a teacher at the national school. The children weren't pleasant, their parents were worse. The drudgery was horrible, and there wasn't any escape for her. Sometimes she would sob as we sat side by side. She, too, wanted something out of life, as I did, and there seemed nothing but that black wall always before us. I think that we clung together because we shared a common misery. We talked endlessly of a way out. For me what was there? There was no one to rob—I wasn't clever enough. There was no way I could earn money, honestly or dishonestly. And for her, buried in that Derbyshire village amongst the collieries, where there was scarcely a person who hadn't the taint of the place upon them—what chance was there for her? There was nothing she could do, either. I knew in my heart that we were both ready for evil things, if by evil things we could make our escape. And we couldn't. So we tried to lose ourselves in the only fields left for such as we. We read poetry. We tried to live in that unnatural world where the brains only are nourished and the body languishes. It was a morbid, unhealthy existence, but I plodded along and so did she. Then her weekly letters became different. For the first time she wrote me with reserves. I took a day's vacation and I went down to Detton Magna to see what had happened."
"That was the day," she interrupted softly, "when—"
"That was the day," he assented. "I remember so well getting out of the train and walking up that long, miserable street. School wasn't over, and I went straight to her cottage, as I have often done before. There was a change. Her cheap furniture had gone. It was like one of those little rooms we had dreamed of. There was a soft carpet upon the floor, Chippendale furniture, flowers, hothouse fruit, and on the mantelpiece—the photograph of a man."
He paused, and they took the whole one long turn along the wind-swept, shadowy deck in silence.
"Presently she came," he continued. "The change was there, too. She was dressed simply enough, but even I, in my inexperience, knew the difference. She came in—she, who had spoken of suicide a short time ago—singing softly to herself. She saw me, our eyes met, and the story was told. I knew, and she knew that I knew."
It seemed as though something in his tone might have grated upon her.Gently, but with a certain firmness, she drew her hand away from his.
"You were very angry, I suppose?" she murmured.
Some instinct told him exactly what was passing in her thoughts. In a moment he was on the defensive.
"I think," he said, "that if it had been any other man—but listen. The photograph which I took from the mantelpiece and threw into the fire was the photograph of my own cousin. His father and my father were brought up together. My father chose the Church, his founded the factory in which most of the people in Detton Magna were employed. When my grandfather died, it was found that he was penniless. The whole of his money had gone towards founding the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company. I won't weary with the details. The business prospered, but we remained in poverty. When my mother died I was left with nothing. My uncle made promises and never kept them. He, too, died. My cousin and I quarrelled. He and his father both held that the money advanced by my grandfather had been a gift and not a loan. They offered me a pittance. Well, I refused anything. I spoke plain words, and that was an end of it. And then I came back and I saw his picture, my cousin's picture, upon the mantelpiece. I can see it now and it looks hateful to me. All the old fires burned up in me. I remembered my father's death—a pauper he was. I remembered how near I had been to starvation. I remembered the years I had spent in a garret whilst Douglas had idled time away at Oxford, had left there to trifle with the business his father had founded, had his West End club, hunters, and shooting. It was a vicious, mad, jealous hatred, perhaps, but I claim that it was human. I went out of that little house and it seemed to me that there was a new lust in my heart, a new, craving desire. If I had thrown myself into that canal, they might well have called it temporary insanity. I didn't, but I was mad all the same. Anything else I did—was temporary insanity!"
Her hand suddenly came back again and she leaned towards him through the darkness.
"You poor child," she whispered. "Stop there, please. Don't be afraid to think you've told me this. You see, I am of the world, and I know that we are all only human. Now, twice up and down the deck, and not a word. Then I shall ask you something."
So they passed on, side by side, the touch of her fingers keeping this new courage alive in his heart, his head uplifted even to the stars towards which their rolling mast pointed. It was wonderful, this—to tell the truth, to open the door of his heart!
"Now I am going to ask you something," she said, when they turned for the third time. "You may think it a strange question, but you must please answer it. To me it is rather important. Just what were your feelings for Beatrice?"
"I think I was fond of her," he answered thoughtfully. "I know that I hated her when she came in from the schoolhouse—when I understood. Both of us, in the days of our joint poverty, had scoffed at principles, had spoken boldly enough of sin, but I can only say that when she came, when I looked into her eyes, I seemed to have discovered a new horror in life. I can't analyse it. I am not sure, even now, that I was not more of a beast that I had thought myself. I am not sure that part of my rage was not because she had escaped and I couldn't."
"But your personal feelings—that is what I want to know about?" she persisted.
He dug down into his consciousness to satisfy her.
"Think of what my life in London had been," he reminded her. "There wasn't a single woman I knew, with whom I could exchange a word. All the time I loved beautiful things, and beautiful women, and the thought of them. I have gone out into the streets at nights sometimes and hung around the entrances to theatres and restaurants just for the pleasure of looking at them with other men. It didn't do me any good, you know, but the desire was there. I wanted a companion like those other men had. Beatrice was the only woman I knew. I didn't choose her. It wasn't the selective instinct that made her attractive to me. It was because she was the only one. I never felt anything great when I was with her," he went on hoarsely. "I knew very well that ours were ordinary feelings. She was in the same position that I was. There was no one else for her, either. Do you want me to go on?"
She hesitated.
"Don't be afraid—I am not quite mad," he continued, "only I'll answer for you the part of your question you don't put into words. Beatrice was nothing to me but an interpretress of her sex. I never loved her. If I had, we might in our misery have done the wildest, the most foolish things. I will tell you why I know so clearly that I never loved her. I have known it since you have been kind to me, since I have realised what a wonderful thing a woman can be, what a world she can make for the man who cares, whom she cares for."
Her fingers gripped his tightly.
"And now," she said, "I know all that I want to know and all that it is well for us to speak of just now. Dear friend, will you remember that you are sharing your burden with me, and that I, who am accounted something in the world and who know life pretty thoroughly, believe in you and hope for you."
They paused for a moment by the side of the steamer rail. She understood so well his speechlessness. She drew her hand away from his and held it to his lips.
"Please kiss my fingers," she begged. "That is just the seal of our friendship in these days. See how quickly we seem to plough our way through the water. Listen to the throbbing of that engine, always towards a new world for you, my friend. It is to be an undiscovered country. Be brave, keep on being brave, and remember—"
The words seemed to die away upon her lips. A shower of spray came glittering into the dim light, like flakes of snow falling with unexpected violence close to them. He drew her cloak around her and moved back.
"Now," she said, "I think we will smoke, and perhaps, if you made yourself very agreeable to the steward in the smoking room, you could get some coffee."
"One moment," he pleaded. "Remember what? Don't you realise that there is just one word I still need, one little word to crown all that you have said?"
She turned her head towards him. The trouble and brooding melancholy seemed to have fallen from his face. She realised more fully its sensitive lines, its poetic, almost passionate charm. She was carried suddenly away upon a wave of the emotion which she herself had created.
"Oh, but you know!" she faltered. "You see, I trust you even to know when … Now your arm, please, until we reach the smoking room, and mind—I must have coffee."
Philip Romilly, on the last day of the voyage, experienced to the full that peculiar sensation of unrest which seems inevitably to prevail when an oceangoing steamer is being slowly towed into port. The winds of the ocean had been left behind. There was a new but pleasant chill in the frosty, sunlit air. The great buildings of New York, at which he had been gazing for hours, were standing, heterogeneous but magnificent, clear-cut against an azure sky. The ferry boats, with their amazing human cargo, seemed to be screeching a welcome as they churned their way across the busy river. Wherever he looked, there was something novel and interesting, yet nothing sufficiently arresting to enable him to forget that he was face to face now with the first crisis of his new life. Since that brief wireless message on the first day out, there had been nothing disquieting in the daily bulletins of news, and he had been able to appreciate to the full the soothing sense of detachment, the friendliness of his fellow voyagers, immeasurably above all the daily association with Elizabeth. He felt like one awaking from a dream as he realised that these things were over. At the first sight of land, it was as though a magician's wand had been waved, a charm broken. His fellow passengers, in unfamiliar costumes, were standing about with their eyes glued upon the distant docks. A queer sense of ostracism possessed him. Perhaps, after all, it had been a dream from which he was now slowly awaking.
He wandered into the lounge to find Elizabeth surrounded by a little group of journalists. She nodded to him pleasantly and waved a great bunch of long-stemmed pink roses which one of them had brought to her. Her greeting saved him from despair. She, at least, was unchanged.
"See how my friends are beginning to spoil me!" she cried out. "Really, I can't tell any of you a thing more," she went on, turning back to them, "only this, and I am sure it ought to be interesting. I have discovered a new dramatist, and I am going to produce a play of his within three months, I hope. I shan't tell you his name and I shan't tell you anything about the play, except that I find more promise in it than anything I have seen or read for months. Mr. Romilly, please wait for me," she called after him. "I want to point out some of the buildings to you."
A dark young man, wearing eyeglasses, with a notebook and pencil in his hand, swung around.
"Is this Mr. Douglas Romilly," he enquired, "of the Romilly Shoe Company? I am from theNew York Star. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Romilly. You are over here on business, we understand?"
Philip was taken aback and for the moment remained speechless.
"We'd like to know your reason, Mr. Romilly, for paying us a visit," the young man continued, "in your own words. How long a trip do you intend to make, anyway? What might your output be in England per week? Women's shoes and misses', isn't it?"
Elizabeth intervened swiftly, shaking her finger at the journalist.
"Mr. Harris," she said, "Mr. Romilly is my friend, and I am not going to have him spend these few impressive moments, when he ought to be looking about him at the harbour, telling you silly details about his business. You can call upon him at his hotel, if you like—the Waldorf he is going to, I believe—and I am sure he will tell you anything you want to know."
"That's all right, Miss Dalstan," the young man declared soothingly. "See you later, Mr. Romilly," he added. "Maybe you'll let us have a few of your impressions to work in with the other stuff."
Romilly made light of the matter, but there was a slight frown upon his forehead as they passed along the curiously stationary deck.
"I am afraid," he observed, "that this is going to be a terribly hard country to disappear in."
"Don't you believe it," she replied cheerfully. "You arrive here to-day and you are in request everywhere. To-morrow you are forgotten—some one else arrives. That newspaper man scarcely remembers your existence at the present moment. He has discovered Mr. Raymond Greene…. Tell me, why do you look so white and unhappy?"
"I am sorry the voyage is over," he confessed.
"So am I, for that matter," she assented. "I have loved every minute of the last few days, but then we knew all the time, didn't we, that it was just an interlude? The things which lie before us are so full of interest."
"It is the next few hours which I fear," he muttered gloomily.
She laughed at him.
"Foolish! If there had been any one on this side who wanted to ask you disagreeable questions, they wouldn't have waited to meet you on the quay. They'd have come down the harbour and held us up. Don't think about that for a moment. Think instead of all the wonderful things we are going to do. You will be occupied every minute of the time until I come back to New York, and I shall be so anxious to see the result. You won't disappoint me, will you?"
"I will not," he promised. "It was only for just a moment that I felt an idiot. It's exciting, you know, this new atmosphere, and the voyage was so wonderful, such a perfect rest. It's like waking up, and the daylight seems a little crude."
She held out her hand.
"You see, the gangways are going down," she pointed out. "I can see many of my friends waiting. Remember, with your new life begins our new alliance. Good luck to you, dear friend!"
Their fingers were locked for a moment together. He looked earnestly into her eyes.
"Whatever the new life may mean for me," he said fervently, "I shall owe to you."
A little rush of people came up the gangway, and Elizabeth was speedily surrounded and carried off. They came across one another several times in the Custom House, and she waved her hand to him gaily. Philip went through the usual formalities, superintended the hoisting of his trunks upon a clumsy motor truck, and was himself driven without question from the covered shed adjoining the quay. He looked back at the huge side of the steamer, the floor of the Custom House, about which were still dotted little crowds of his fellow passengers. It was the disintegration of a wonderful memory—his farewell….
* * * * *
At the Waldorf he found himself greeted with unexpected cordiality. The young gentleman to whom he applied, after some hesitation, for a room, stretched out his hand and welcomed him to America.
"So you are Mr. Romilly!" he exclaimed. "Well, that's good. We've got your room—Number 602, on the ninth floor."
"Ninth floor!" Philip gasped.
"If you'd like to be higher up we can change you," the young man continued amiably. "Been several people here enquiring for you. A young man from the 'Boot and Shoe Trades Reporter' was here only half an hour ago, and here's a cable. No mail yet."
He handed the key to a small boy and waved Philip away. The small boy proved fully equal to his mission.
"You just step this way, sir," he invited encouragingly. "Those packages of yours will be all right. You don't need to worry about them."
He led the way down a corridor streaming with human beings, into a lift from which it appeared to Philip that he was shot on to the ninth floor, along a thickly-carpeted way into a good-sized and comfortable bedroom, with bathroom attached.
"Your things will be up directly, sir," the small boy promised, holding out his hand. "I'll see after them myself."
Philip expressed his gratitude in a satisfactory manner and stood for a few moments at the window. Although it was practically his first glimpse of New York, the wonders of the panorama over which he looked failed even to excite his curiosity. The clanging of the surface cars, the roar and clatter of the overhead railway, the hooting of streams of automobiles, all apparently being driven at breakneck speed, alien sounds though they were, fell upon deaf ears. He could neither listen nor observe. Every second's delay fretted him. His plans were all made. Everything depended upon their being carried out now without the slightest hitch. He walked a dozen times to the door, waiting for his luggage, and when at last it arrived he was on the point of using the telephone. He feed the linen-coated porters and dismissed them as rapidly as possible. Then he ransacked the trunks until he found, amidst a pile of fashionable clothing, a quiet and inconspicuous suit of dark grey. In the bathroom he hastily changed his clothes, selected an ordinary Homburg hat, and filled a small leather case with various papers. He was on the point of leaving the room when his eyes fell upon the cable. He hesitated for a moment, gazed at the superscription, shrugged his shoulders, and tore it open. He moved to the window and read it slowly, word for word:
"Just seen Henshaw. Most disturbing interview. Tells me you have had notice to reduce overdraft by February 1st. Absolutely declines any further advances. Payments coming in insufficient meet wages and current liabilities. No provision for 4th bills, amounting sixteen thousand pounds. Have wired London for accountant. Await your instructions urgently. Suggest you cable back the twenty thousand pounds lying our credit New York. Please reply. Very worried. Potts."
Word by word, Philip read the cable twice over. Then it fluttered from his fingers on to the table. It told its own story beyond any shadow of a mistake. His cousin's great wealth was a fiction. The business to which his own fortune and the whole of his grandfather's money had been devoted, was even now tottering. He remembered the rumours he had heard of Douglas' extravagance, his establishment in London, the burden of his college debts. And then a further light flashed in upon him. Twenty thousand pounds in America!—lying there, too, for Douglas under a false name! He drew out one of the documents which he had packed and glanced at it more carefully. Then he replaced it, a little dazed. Douglas had planned to leave England, then, with this crisis looming over him. Why? Philip for a moment sat down on the arm of an easy-chair. A grim sense of humour suddenly parted his lips. He threw back his head and laughed. Douglas Romilly had actually been coming to America to disappear! It was incredible but it was true.
He left the cable carefully open upon the dressing-table, and, picking up the small leather case, left the room. He reached the lift, happily escaping the observation of the young lady seated at her desk, and descended into the hall. Once amongst the crowd of people who thronged the corridors, he found it perfectly simple to leave the hotel by one of the side entrances. He walked to the corner of the street and drew a little breath. Then he lit a cigarette and strolled along Broadway, curiously light-hearted, his spirits rising at every step. He was free for ever from that other hateful personality. Mr. Douglas Romilly, of the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company, had paid his brief visit to America and passed on.
After a fortnight of his new life, Philip took stock of himself and his belongings. In the first place, then, he owned a new name, taken bodily from certain documents which he had brought with him from England. Further, as Mr. Merton Ware, he was the monthly tenant of a small but not uncomfortable suite of rooms on the top story of a residential hotel in the purlieus of Broadway. He had also, apparently, been a collector of newspapers of certain dates, all of which contained some such paragraph as this:
Early on Monday morning, the police of the city were invited to investigate a case of curious disappearance. Mr. Douglas Romilly, an English shoe manufacturer, who travelled out from England on board theElletania, arrived at the Waldorf Hotel at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon and was shown to the reservation made for him. Within an hour he was enquired for by several callers, who were shown to his room without result. The apartment was found to be empty and nothing has since been seen or heard of Mr. Romilly. The room assigned to him, which could only have been occupied for a few minutes, has been locked up and the keys handed to the police. A considerable amount of luggage is in their possession, and certain documents of a somewhat curious character. From cables received early this afternoon, it would appear that the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company, one of the oldest established firms in England, is in financial difficulties.
Then there was a paragraph in a paper of later date:
The police have been unable to discover any trace of the missing Englishman. From further cables to hand, it appears that he was in possession of a considerable sum of money, which must have been on his person at the time of disappearance, and it is alleged that there was also a large amount, with which he had intended to make purchases for his business, standing to his credit at a New York bank. Nothing has since been discovered, however, amongst his belongings, of the slightest financial value, nor does any bank in New York admit holding a credit on behalf of the missing man.
"Perhaps it is time," Philip murmured, "that these were destroyed."
He tore the newspapers into pieces and threw them into his waste-basket. On his writing-table were forty or fifty closely written pages of manuscript. In his pocketbook were sixteen hundred dollars, and a document indicating a credit for a very much larger amount at the United Bank of New York, in favor of Merton Ware and another. The remainder of his belongings were negligible. He stood at the window and looked out across the city, the city into whose labyrinths he was so eager to penetrate—the undiscovered country. By day and night its voices were in his ears, the rattle and roar of the overhead railway, the clanging of the street cars, the heavy traffic, the fainter but never ceasing foot-fall of the multitudes. He had sat there before dawn and watched the queer, pinky-white light steal with ever widening fingers through the darkness, heard the yawn of the city as it seemed to shiver and tremble before the battle of the day. At twilight he had watched the lights spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of the sky signs. He knew it all so well, by morning, by noon and night; in rainstorm, storms which he had watched come up from oceanwards in drifting clouds of vapour; and in sunshine, clear, brilliant sunshine, a little hard and austere, to his way of thinking, and unseasonable.
"A week," he muttered. "She said a week. Tonight I will go out."
He looked at himself in the glass. He wore no longer the well-cut clothes of Mr. Douglas Romilly's Saville Row tailor, but a ready-made suit of Schmitt & Mayer's business reach-me-downs, an American felt hat and square-toed shoes.
"She said a week," he repeated. "It's a fortnight to-day. I'll go to the restaurant at the corner. I must find out for myself what all this noise means, what the city has to say."
He turned towards the door and then stopped short. For almost the first time since he had taken up his quarters here, the lift had stopped outside. There was a brief pause, then his bell rang. For a moment Philip hesitated. Then he stepped forward and opened the door, looking out enquiringly at his caller.
"You Mr. Merton Ware?"
He admitted the fact briefly. His visitor was a young woman dressed in a rather shabby black indoor dress, over which she wore an apron. She was without either hat or gloves. Her fingers were stained with purple copying ink, and her dark hair was untidily arranged.
"I live two stories down below," she announced, handing him a little card. "Miss Martha Grimes—that's my name—typewriter and stenographer, you see. The waiter who brings our meals told me he thought you were some way literary, so I just stepped up to show you my prospectus. If you've any typewriting you want doing, I'm on the spot, and I don't know as you'd get it done much cheaper anywhere else—or better."
There was nothing particularly ingratiating about Miss Martha Grimes, but, with the exception of a coloured waiter, she happened to be the first human being with whom Philip had exchanged a word for several days. He felt disinclined to hurry her away.
"Come in," he invited, holding the door open. "So you do typing, eh? What sort of a machine do you use?"
"Remington," she answered. "It's a bit knocked about—a few of the letters, I mean—but I've got some violet ink and I can make a manuscript look all right. Half a dollar a thousand words, and a quarter for carbon copies. Of course, if you'd got a lot of stuff," she went on, her eyes lighting hopefully upon the little collection of manuscript upon his table, "I might quote you a trifle less."
He picked up some of his sheets and glanced at them.
"Sooner or later," he admitted, "I shall have to have this typed. It isn't quite ready yet, though."
He was struck by the curious little light of anticipation which somehow changed her face, and which passed away at his last words. Under pretence of gathering together some of those loose pages, he examined her more closely and realised that he had done her at first scant justice. She was very thin, and the expression of her face was spoilt by the discontented curve of her lips. The shape of her head, however, was good. Her dark hair, notwithstanding its temporary disarrangement, was of beautiful quality, and her eyes, though dull and spiritless-looking, were large and full of subtle promise. He replaced the sheets of manuscript.
"Sit down for a moment," he begged.
"I'd rather stand," she replied.
"Just as you please," he assented, smiling. "I was just wondering what to do about this stuff."
She hesitated for a moment, then a little sulkily she seated herself.
"I suppose you think I'm a pretty forward young person to come up here and beg for work. I don't care if you do," she went on, swinging her foot back and forth. "One has to live."
"I am very pleased that you came," he assured her. "It will be a great convenience to me to have my typing done on the premises, and although I am afraid there won't be much of it, you shall certainly do what there is."
"Story writer?" she enquired.
"I am only a beginner," he told her. "This work I am going to give you is a play."
She looked at him with a shade of commiseration in her face.
"Sickening job, ain't it, writing for the stage unless you've got some sort of pull?"
"This is my first effort," he explained.
"Well, it's none of my business," she said gloomily. "All I want is the typing of it, only you should see some of the truck I've had! I've hated to send in the bill. Waste of good time and paper! I don't suppose yours is like that, but there ain't much written that's any good, anyway."
"You're a hopeful young person, aren't you?" he remarked, taking a cigarette from the mantelpiece and lighting it. "Have one?"
"No, thankyou!" she replied, rising briskly to her feet. "I'm not that sort that sits about and smokes cigarettes with strange young men. If you'll let me know when that work's going to be ready, I'll send the janitor up for it."
He smiled deprecatingly.
"You're not afraid of me, by any chance, are you?" he asked.
Her eyes glowed with contempt as she looked him up and down.
"Afraid of you, sir!" she repeated. "I should say not! I've met all sorts of men and I know something about them."
"Then sit down again, please," he begged.
She hesitated for a moment, then subsided once more unwillingly into the chair.
"Don't know as I want to stay up here gossiping," she remarked. "You'd much better be getting on with your work. Give me one of those cigarettes, anyway," she added abruptly.
"Do you live in the building?" he enquired, as he obeyed her behest.
"Two flats below with pop," she replied. "He's a bad actor, very seldom in work, and he drinks. There are just the two of us. Now you know as much as is good for you. You're English, ain't you?"
"I am," Philip admitted.
"Just out, too, by the way you talk."
"I have been living in Jamaica," he told her, "for many years—clerk in an office there."
"Better have stayed where you were, I should think, if you've come here hoping to make a living by that sort of stuff."
"Perhaps you're right," he agreed, "but you see I am here—been here a week or two, in fact."
"Done much visiting around?" she enquired.
"I've scarcely been out," he confessed. "You see, I don't know the city except from my windows. It's wonderful from here after twilight."
"Think so," she replied dully. "It's a hard, hammering, brazen sort of place when you're living in it from hand to mouth. Not but what we don't get along all right," she added, a little defiantly. "I'm not grumbling."
"I am sure you're not," he assented soothingly. "Tell me—to-night I am a little tired of work. I thought of going out. Be a Good Samaritan and tell me where to find a restaurant in Broadway, somewhere where crowds of people go but not what they call a fashionable place. I want to get some dinner—I haven't had anything decent to eat for I don't know how long—and I want to breathe the same atmosphere as other people."
She looked at him a little enviously.
"How much do you want to spend?" she asked bluntly.
"I don't know that that really matters very much. I have some money.Things are more expensive over here, aren't they?"
"I should go to the New Martin House," she advised him, "right at the corner of this block. It's real swell, and they say the food's wonderful."
"I could go as I am, I suppose?" he asked, glancing down at his clothes.
She stared at him wonderingly.
"Say, where did you come from?" she exclaimed. "You ain't supposed to dress yourself out in glad clothes for a Broadway restaurant, not even the best of them."
"Have you been to this place yourself?" he enquired.
"Nope!"
"Come with me," he invited suddenly.
She arose at once to her feet and threw the remains of her cigarette into the grate.
"Say, Mr. Ware," she pronounced, "I ain't that sort, and the sooner you know it the better, especially if I'm going to do your work. I'll be going."
"Look here," he remonstrated earnestly, "you don't seem to understand me altogether. What do you mean by saying you're not that sort?"
"You know well enough," she answered defiantly. "I guess you're not proposing to give me a supper out of charity, are you?"
"I am asking you to accompany me," he declared, "because I haven't spoken to a human being for a week, because I don't know a soul in New York, because I've got enough money to pay for two dinners, and because I am fiendishly lonely."
She looked at him and it was obvious that she was more than half convinced. Her brightening expression transformed her face. She was still hesitating, but her inclinations were apparent.
"Say, you mean that straight?" she asked. "You won't turn around afterwards and expect a lot of soft sawder because you've bought me a meal?"
"Don't be a silly little fool," he answered good-humouredly. "All I want from you is to sit by my side and talk, and tell me what to order."
Her face suddenly fell.
"No good," she sighed. "Haven't got any clothes."
"If I am going like this," he expostulated, "why can't you go as you are?Take your apron off. You'll be all right."
"There's my black hat with the ribbon," she reminded herself. "It's no style, and Stella said yesterday she wouldn't be seen in a dime show in it."
"Never you mind about Stella," he insisted confidently. "You clap it on your head and come along."
She swung towards the door.
"Meet you in the hall in ten minutes," she promised. "Can't be any quicker. This is your trouble, you know. I didn't invite myself."
Philip opened the door, a civility which seemed to somewhat embarrass her.
"I shall be waiting for you," he declared cheerfully.