The two tall policemen who had been standing for some minutes in front of Mr. Stonor in readiness to serve him, seeming to feel there was no further need of them in this quarter, shouldered their way to the left, leaving exposed the hitherto masked figure of the tall gentleman in the motor cap. He moved uneasily, and, looking round, he met Jean's eyes fixed on him. As each looked away again, each saw that for the first time Vida Levering had become aware of his presence. A change passed over her face, and her figure swayed as if some species of mountain-sickness had assailed her, looking down from that perilous high perch of hers upon the things of the plain. While the people were asking one another, 'What is it? Is she going to faint?' she lifted one hand to her eyes, and her fingers trembled an instant against the lowered lids. But as suddenly as she had faltered, she was forging on again, repeating like an echo of a thing heard in a dream—
'Justice and chivalry! Justice and chivalry remind me of the story that those of you who read the police-court news—I have begun only lately to do that—butyou've seen the accounts of the girl who's been tried in Manchester lately for the murder of her child.'
People here and there in the crowd regaled one another with choice details of the horror.
'Not pleasant reading. Even if we'd noticed it, we wouldn't speak of it in my world. A few months ago I should have turned away my eyes and forgotten even the headline as quickly as I could.'
'My opinion,' said a shrewd-looking young man, 'is that she's forgot what she meant to say, and just clutched at this to keep her from drying up.'
'Since that morning in the police-court I read these things. This, as you know, was the story of a working girl—an orphan of seventeen—who crawled with the dead body of her new-bornchild to her master's back door and left the baby there. She dragged herself a little way off and fainted. A few days later she found herself in court being tried for the murder of her child. Her master, a married man, had of course reported the "find" at his back door to the police, and he had been summoned to give evidence. The girl cried out to him in the open court, "You are the father!" He couldn't deny it. The coroner, at the jury's request, censured the man, and regretted that the law didn't make him responsible. But'—she leaned down from the plinth with eyes blazing—'he went scot free. And that girl is at this moment serving her sentence in Strangeways Gaol.'
Through the moved and murmuring crowd, Jean forced her way, coming in between Lady John and Stonor, who stood there immovable. The girl strained to bring her lips near his ear.
'Why do you dislike her so?'
'I?' he said. 'Why should you think——'
'I never saw you look as you did;' with a vaguely frightened air she added, 'as you do.'
'Men make boast'—the voice came clear from the monument—'that an English citizen is tried by his peers. What woman is tried by hers?'
'She mistakes the sense in which the word was employed,' said a man who looked like an Oxford Don.
But there was evidently a sense, larger than that one purely academic, in which her use of the word could claim its pertinence. The strong feeling that had seized her as she put the question was sweeping the crowd along with her.
'A woman is arrested by a man, brought before a man judge, tried by a jury of men, condemned by men, taken to prison by a man, and by a man she's hanged! Where in all this wereher"peers"? Why did men, when British justice was born—why did they so long ago insist on trial by "a jury of their peers"? So that justice shouldn't miscarry—wasn't it? A man's peers would best understand his circumstances, his temptation, the degree of his guilt. Yet there's no such unlikeness between different classes of men as exists between man and woman. What man has the knowledge that makes him a fit judge of woman's deeds at that time of anguish—that hour that some woman struggled through to put each man here into the world. I noticedwhen a previous speaker quoted the Labour Party, you applauded. Some of you here, I gather, call yourselves Labour men. Every woman who has borne a child is a Labour woman. No man among you can judge what she goes through in her hour of darkness.'
Jean's eyes had dropped from her lover's set white face early in the recital. But she whispered his name.
He seemed not to hear.
The speaker up there had caught her fluttering breath, and went on so low that people strained to follow.
'In that great agony, even under the best conditions that money and devotion can buy, many a woman falls into temporary mania, and not a few go down to death. In the case of this poor little abandoned working girl, what man can be the fit judge of her deeds in that awful moment of half-crazed temptation? Women know of these things as those know burning who have walked through fire.'
Stonor looked down at the girl at his side. He saw her hands go up to her throat as though she were suffocating. The young face, where some harsh knowledge was struggling for birth, was in pity turned away from the man she loved.
The woman leaned down from the platform, and spoke her last words with a low and thrilling earnestness.
'I would say in conclusion to the women here, it's not enough to be sorry for these, our unfortunate sisters. We must get the conditions of life made fairer. We women must organize. We must learn to work together. We have all (rich and poor, happy and unhappy) worked so long and so exclusively for men, we hardly know how to work for one another. But we must learn. Those who can, may give money. Those who haven't pennies to give, even those people are not so poor but what they can give some part of their labour—some share of their sympathy and support. I know of a woman—she isn't of our country—but a woman who, to help the women strikers of an oppressed industry to hold out, gave a thousand pounds a week for thirteen weeks to get them and their children bread, and help them to stand firm. The masters were amazed. Week after week went by, and still the people weren't starved into submission. Where did this mysterious stream of help come from? The employerscouldn't discover, and they gave in. The women got back their old wages, and I am glad to say many of them began to put by pennies to help a little to pay back the great sum that had been advanced to them.'
'She took their pennies—a rich woman like that?'
'Yes—to use again, as well as to let the working women feel they were helping others. I hope you'll all join the Union. Come up after the meeting is over and give us your names.'
As she turned away, 'You won't get any men!' a taunting voice called after her.
The truth in the gibe seemed to sting. Forestalling the chairman, quickly she confronted the people again, a new fire in her eyes.
'Then,' she said, holding out her hands—'thenit is to the women I appeal!' She stood so an instant, stilling the murmur, and holding the people by that sudden concentration of passion in her face. 'I don't mean to say it wouldn't be better if men and women did this work together, shoulder to shoulder. But the mass of men won't have it so. I only hope they'll realize in time the good they've renounced and the spirit they've aroused. For I know as well as any man could tell me, it would be a bad day for England if all women felt about all menas I do.'
She retired in a tumult. The others on the platform closed about her. The chairman tried in vain to get a hearing from the swaying and dissolving crowd.
Jean made a blind forward movement towards the monument. Stonor called out, in a toneless voice—
'Here! follow me!'
'No—no—I——' The girl pressed on.
'You're going the wrong way.'
'Thisis the way——'
'We can get out quicker on this side.'
'I don'twantto get out.'
'What?'
He had left Lady John, and was following Jean through the press.
'Where are you going?' he asked sharply.
'To ask that woman to let me have the honour of working with her.'
The crowd surged round the girl.
'Jean!' he called upon so stern a note that people stared and stopped.
Others—not Jean.
A little before six o'clock on that same Sunday, Jean Dunbarton opened the communicating door between her own little sitting-room and the big bare drawing-room of her grandfather's house in Eaton Square. She stood a moment on the threshold, looking back over her shoulder, and then crossed the drawing-room, treading softly on the parquet spaces between the rugs. She went straight to the window, and was in the act of parting the lace curtains to look out, when she heard the folding doors open. With raised finger she turned to say 'Sh!' The servant stood silently waiting, while she went back to the door she had left open and with an air of caution closed it.
When she turned round again the butler had stepped aside to admit Mr. Stonor. He came in with a quick impatient step; but before he had time to get a word out—'Speak low, please,' the girl said. He was obviously too much annoyed to pay much heed to her request, which if he thought about it at all, he must have interpreted as consideration for the ailing grandfather.
'I waited a full half-hour for you to come back,' he said in a tone no lower than usual.
The girl had led the way to the side of the room furthest from the communicating door. 'I am sorry,' she said dully.
'If you didn't mind leaving me like that,' he followed her up with his arraignment, 'you might at least have considered Lady John.'
'Is she here with you?' Jean stopped by the sofa near the window.
'No,' he said curtly. 'My place was nearer than this and she was tired. I left her to get some tea. We couldn't tell whether you'd be here, orwhathad become of you!'
'Mr. Trent got us a hansom.'
'Trent?'
'The chairman of the meeting.'
'Got us——?'
'Miss Levering and me.'
Stonor's incensed face turned almost brick colour as he repeated, 'Miss Lev——!'
Before he got the name out, the folding doors had opened again, and the butler was saying, 'Mr. Farnborough.'
That young gentleman was far too anxious and flurried himself, to have sufficient detachment of mind to consider the moods of other people. 'At last!' he said, stopping short as soon as he caught sight of Stonor.
'Don't speak loud, please,' said Miss Dunbarton; 'some one is resting in the next room.'
'Oh, did you find your grandfather worse?'—but he never waited to learn. 'You'll forgive the incursion when you hear'—he turned abruptly to Stonor again. 'They've been telegraphing you all over London,' he said, putting his hat down in the nearest chair. 'In sheer despair they set me on your track.'
'Who did?'
Farnborough was fumbling agitatedly in his breast-pocket. 'There was the devil to pay at Dutfield last night. The Liberal chap tore down from London, and took over your meeting.'
'Oh? Nothing about it in the Sunday paper I saw.'
'Wait till you see the press to-morrow! There was a great rally, and the beggar made a rousing speech.'
'What about?'
'Abolition of the Upper House.'
'They were at that when I was at Eton.' Stonor turned on his heel.
'Yes, but this man has got a way of putting things—the people went mad.'
It was all very well for a mere girl to be staring indifferently out of the window, while a great historic party was steering straight for shipwreck; but it really was too much to see this man who ought to be taking the situation with the seriousness it deserved, strolling about the room with that abstracted air, looking superciliously at Mr. Dunbarton's examples of the Glasgow school. Farnborough balanced himself on wide-apart legs and thrust one hand in his trousers' pocket. The other hand held a telegram. 'The Liberal platform as defined at Dutfield is going to make a big difference,' he pronounced.
'You think so,' said Stonor, dryly.
'Well, your agent says as much.' He pulled off the orange-brown envelope, threw it and the reply-paid form on the table, and held the message under the eyes of the obviously surprised gentleman in front of him.
'My agent!' Stonor had echoed with faint incredulity.
He took the telegram. '"Try find Stonor,"' he read. 'H'm! H'm!' His eyes ran on.
Farnborough looked first at the expressionless face, and then at the message.
'You see!'—he glanced over Stonor's shoulder—'"tremendous effect of last night's Liberal manifesto ought to be counteracted in to-morrow's papers."' Then withdrawing a couple of paces, he said very earnestly, 'You see, Mr. Stonor, it's a battle-cry we want.'
'Clap-trap,' said the great man, throwing the telegram down on the table.
'Well,' said Farnborough, distinctly dashed, 'they've been saying we have nothing to offer but personal popularity. No practical reform, no——'
'No truckling to the masses, I suppose.'
Poor Farnborough bit his lip. 'Well, in these democratic days, you're obliged (I shouldthink), to consider——' In his baulked and snubbed condition he turned to Miss Dunbarton for countenance. 'I hope you'll forgive my bursting in like this, but'—he gathered courage as he caught a glimpse of her averted face—'I can see you realize the gravity of the situation.' He found her in the embrasure of the window, and went on with an air of speaking for her ear alone. 'My excuse for being so officious—you see it isn't as if he were going to be a mere private member. Everybody knows he'll be in the Cabinet.'
'It may be a Liberal Cabinet,' came from Stonor at his dryest.
Farnborough leapt back into the fray. 'Nobody thought so up to last night. Why, even your brother——' he brought up short. 'But I'm afraid I'm really seeming rathertoo——' He took up his hat.
'What about my brother?'
'Oh, only that I went from your house to the club, you know—and I met Lord Windlesham as I rushed up the Carlton steps.'
'Well?'
'I told him the Dutfield news.'
Stonor turned sharply round. His face was much more interested than any of his words had been.
As though in the silence, Stonor had asked a question, Farnborough produced the answer.
'Your brother said it only confirmed his fears.'
'Said that, did he?' Stonor spoke half under his breath.
'Yes. Defeat is inevitable, he thinks, unless——' Farnborough waited, intently watching the big figure that had begun pacing back and forth. It paused, but no word came, even the eyes were not raised.
'Unless,' Farnborough went on, 'you can manufacture some political dynamite within the next few hours. Those were his words.'
As Stonor resumed his walk he raised his head and caught sight of Jean's face. He stopped short directly in front of her.
'You are very tired,' he said.
'No, no.' She turned again to the window.
'I'm obliged to you for troubling about this,' he said, offering Farnborough his hand with the air of civilly dismissing him. 'I'll see what can be done.'
Farnborough caught up the reply-paid form from the table. 'If you'd like to wire I'll take it.'
Faintly amused at this summary view of large complexities, 'You don't understand, my young friend,' he said, not unkindly. 'Moves of this sort are not rushed at by responsible politicians. I must have time for consideration.'
Farnborough's face fell. 'Oh. Well, I only hope some one else won't jump into the breach before you.' With his watch in one hand, he held out the other to Miss Dunbarton. 'Good-bye. I'll just go and find out what time the newspapers go to press on Sunday. I'll be at the Club,' he threw over his shoulder, 'just in case I can be of any use.'
'No; don't do that. If I should have anything new to say——'
'B-b-but with our party, as your brother said, "heading straight for a vast electoral disaster," and the Liberals——'
'If I decide on a counter-blast, I shall simply telegraph to headquarters. Good-bye.'
'Oh! A—a—good-bye.'
With a gesture of 'the country's going to the dogs,' Farnborough opened the doors and closed them behind him.
Jean had rung the bell. She came back with her eyes on the ground, and paused near the table where the crumpled envelope made a dash of yellow-brown on the polished satinwood. Stonor stood studying the carpet, more concern in his face now that there was only Jean to see it.
'"Political dynamite," eh?' he repeated, walking a few paces away. He returned with, 'After all, women are much more Conservativenaturallythan men, aren't they?'
Jean's lowered eyes showed no spark of interest in the issue. Her only motion, an occasional locking and unlocking of her fingers. But no words came. He glanced at her, as if for the first time conscious of her silence.
'You see now'—he threw himself into a chair—'one reason why I've encouraged you to take an interest in public questions. Because people like us don't go screaming about it, is no sign we don't—some of us—see what's on the way. However little they may want to, women of our class will have to come into line. All the best things in the world, everything civilization has won, will be in danger if—when this change comes—the only women who have practical political training are the women of the lower classes. Women of the lower classes,' he repeated, 'and'—the line between his eyebrows deepening—'women inoculated by the Socialist virus.'
'Geoffrey!'
He was in no mood to discuss a concrete type. To so intelligent a girl, a hint should be enough. He drew the telegraph-form that still lay on the table towards him.
'Let us see how it would sound, shall we?'
He detached a gold pencil from one end of his watch-chain, and, with face more and more intent, bent over the paper, writing.
The girl opened her lips more than once to speak, and each time fell back again on her silent, half-incredulous misery.
When Stonor finished writing, he held the paper off, smiling a little, with the craftsman's satisfaction in his work, and more than a touch of shrewd malice—
'Enough dynamite in that,' he commented. 'Rather too much, isn't there, little girl?'
'Geoffrey, I know her story.'
He looked at her for the first time since Farnborough left the room.
'Whose story?'
'Miss Levering's.'
'Whose?' He crushed the rough note of his manifesto into his pocket.
'Vida Levering's.'
He stared at the girl, till across the moment's silence a cry of misery went out—
'Why did you desert her?'
'I?' he said, like one staggered by the sheer wildness of the charge. 'I?'
But no comfort of doubting seemed to cross the darkness of Jean's backward look into the past.
'Oh, why did you do it?'
'What, in the name of——? What has she been saying to you?'
'Some one else told me part. Then the way you looked when you saw her at Aunt Ellen's—Miss Levering's saying you didn't know her—then your letting out that you knew even the curious name on the handkerchief—oh, I pieced it together.'
While she poured out the disjointed sentences, he had recovered his self-possession.
'Your ingenuity is undeniable,' he said coldly, rising to his feet. But he paused as the girl went on—
'And then when she said that at the meeting about "the dark hour," and I looked at her face, it flashed over me——Oh, why did you desert her?'
It was as if the iteration of that charge stung him out of his chill anger.
'Ididn'tdesert her,' he said.
'Ah-h!' Her hands went fluttering up to her eyes, and hid the quivering face. Something in the action touched him, his face changed, and he made a sudden passionate movement toward the trembling figure standing there with hidden eyes. In another moment his arms would have been round her. Her muffled voicesaying, 'I'm glad. I'm glad,' checked him. He stood bewildered, making with noiseless lips the word 'Glad?' She was 'glad' he hadn't tired of her rival? The girl brushed the tears from her eyes, and steadied herself against the table.
'She went away from you, then?'
The momentary softening had vanished out of Geoffrey Stonor's face. In its stead the look of aloofness that few dared brave, the warning 'thus far and no farther' stamped on every feature, he answered—
'You can hardly expect me to enter into——'
She broke through the barrier without ruth—such strength, such courage has honest pain.
'You mean she went away from you?'
'Yes!' The sharp monosyllable fell out like a thing metallic.
'Was that because you wouldn't marry her?'
'I couldn't marry her—and she knew it.' He turned on his heel.
'Did you want to?'
He paused nearly at the window, and looked back at her. She deserved to have the bare 'yes,' but she was a child. He would soften a little the truth's harsh impact upon the young creature's shrinking jealousy.
'I thought I wanted to marry her then. It's a long time ago.'
'And why couldn't you?'
He controlled a movement of strong irritation. 'Why are you catechizing me? It's a matter that concerns another woman.'
'If you say it doesn't concern me, you're saying'—her lip trembled—'saying that you don't concern me.'
With more difficulty than the girl dreamed, he compelled himself to answer quietly—
'In those days—I—I was absolutely dependent on my father.'
'Why, you must have been thirty, Geoffrey.'
'What? Oh—thereabouts.'
'And everybody says you're so clever.'
'Well, everybody's mistaken.'
She left the table, and drew nearer to him. 'It must have been terribly hard——'
Sounding the depth of sympathy in the gentle voice, he turned towards her to meet a check in the phrase—
'——terribly hard for you both.'
He stood there stonily, but looking rather handsome in his big, sulky way. The sort of person who dictates terms rather than one to accept meekly the thing that might befall.
Something of that overbearing look of his must have penetrated the clouded consciousness of the girl, for she was saying—
'You! a man likeyounot to have had the freedom, that even the lowest seem to have——'
'Freedom?'
'To marry the woman they choose.'
'She didn't break off our relations because I couldn't marry her.'
'Why was it, then?'
'You're too young to discuss such a story.' He turned away.
'I'm not so young,' said the shaking voice, 'as she was when——'
'Very well, then, if you will have it!' His look was ill to meet, for any one who loved him. 'The truth is, it didn't weigh upon her as it seems to on you, that I wasn't able to marry her.'
'Why are you so sure of that?'
'Because she didn't so much as hint at it when she wrote that she meant to break off the—the——'
'What made her write like that?'
'Whywillyou go on talking of what's so long over and ended?'
'What reason did she give?'
'If your curiosity has so got the upper hand,ask her.'
Her eyes were upon him. In a whisper, 'You're afraid to tell me,' she said.
He went over to the window, seeming to wait there for something that did not come. He turned round at last.
'I still hoped, atthattime, to win my father over. She blamed me because'—again he faced the window and looked blindly out—'if the child had lived it wouldn't have been possible to get my father to—to overlook it.'
'You—wanted—itoverlooked?' the girl said faintly. 'I don't underst——'
He came back to her on a wave of passion. 'Of course youdon't understand. If you did you wouldn't be the beautiful, tender, innocent child you are.' He took her hand, and tried to draw her to him.
She withdrew her hand, and shrank from him with a movement, slight as it was, so tragically eloquent, that fear for the first time caught hold of him.
'I am glad you didn't mean to desert her, Geoffrey. It wasn't your fault, after all—only some misunderstanding that can be cleared up.'
'Cleared up?'
'Yes, cleared up.'
'You aren't thinking that this miserable old affair I'd as good as forgotten——'
He did not see the horror-struck glance at the door, but he heard the whisper—
'Forgotten!'
'No, no'—he caught himself up—'I don't mean exactly forgotten. But you're torturing me so that I don't know what I'm saying.' He went closer. 'You aren't going to let this old thing come between you and me?'
She pressed her handkerchief to her lips, and then took it away.
'I can't make or unmake the past,' she said steadily. 'But I'm glad, at least, that you didn't mean to desert her in her trouble. You'll remind her of that first of all, won't you?'
She was moving across the room as she spoke, and, when she had ended, the handkerchief went quickly to her lips again as if to shut the door on sobbing.
'Where are you going?' He raised his voice. 'Why should I remindanybody of what I want only to forget?'
'Hush! Oh, hush!' A moment she looked back, holding up praying hands.
His eyes had flown to the door. 'You don't meanshe's——'
'Yes. I left her to get a little rest.'
He recoiled in an access of uncontrollable anger. She followed him. Speechless, he eluded her, and went for his hat.
'Geoffrey,' she cried, 'don't go before you hear me. I don't know if what I think matters to you now, but I hope it does. You can still'—her voice was faint with tears—'still make me think of you without shrinking—if you will.'
He fixed her for a moment with eyes more stern than she had ever seen.
'What is it you are asking of me?' he said.
'To make amends, Geoffrey.'
His anger went out on a wave of pity. 'You poor little innocent!'
'I'm poor enough. But'—she locked her hands together like one who summons all her resolution—'I'm not so innocent but what I know you must right that old wrong now, if you're ever to right it.'
'You aren't insane enough to think I would turn round in these few hours and go back to something that ten years ago was ended forever!' As he saw how unmoved her face was, 'Why,' he burst out, 'it's stark, staring madness!'
'No!' She caught his arm. 'What you did ten years ago—that was mad. This is paying a debt.'
Any man looking on, or hearing of Stonor's dilemma, would have said, 'Leave the girl alone to come to her senses.' But only a stupid man would himself have done it. Stonor caught her two hands in his, and drew her into his arms.
'Look, here, Jeannie, you're dreadfully wrought up and excited—tired, too.'
'No!' She freed herself, and averted the tear-stained face. 'Not tired, though I've travelled far to-day. I know you smile at sudden conversions. You think they're hysterical—worse—vulgar. But people must get their revelation how they can. And, Geoffrey, if I can't make you see this one of mine, I shall know your love could never mean strength to me—only weakness. And I shall be afraid,' she whispered. Her dilated eyes might have seen a ghost lurking there in the commonplace room. 'So afraid I should never dare give you the chance of making me loathe myself.' There was a pause, and out of the silence fell words that were like the taking of a vow. 'I would never see you again.'
'How right I was to be afraid of that vein of fanaticism in you!'
'Certainly you couldn't make a greater mistake than to go away now and think it any good ever to come back. Even if I came to feel different, I couldn'tdoanything different. I shouldknowall this couldn't be forgotten. I should know that it would poison my life in the end—yours too.'
'She has made good use of her time!' he said bitterly. Then, upon a sudden thought, 'What has changedher? Has she been seeing visions too?'
'What do you mean?'
'Why is she intriguing to get hold of a man that ten years ago she flatly refused to see or hold any communication with?'
'Intriguing to get hold of? She hasn't mentioned you!'
'What! Then how, in the name of Heaven, do you know—she wants—what you ask?'
'There can't be any doubt about that,' said the girl, firmly.
With all his tenderness for her, so little still did he understand what she was going through, that he plainly thought all her pain had come of knowing that this other page was in his life—he had no glimpse of the girl's passionate need to think of that same long-turned-over page as unmarred by the darker blot.
'You absurd, ridiculous child!' With immense relief he dropped into the nearest chair. 'Then all this is just your own unaided invention. Well, I could thank God!' He passed his handkerchief over his face.
'For what are you thanking God?'
He sat there obviously thinking out his plan of action.
'Suppose—I'm not going to risk it—butsuppose——' He looked up, and at the sight of Jean's face he rose with an expression strangely gentle. The rather hard eyes were softened in a sudden mist. 'WhetherIdeserve to suffer or not, it's quite certainyoudon't. Don't cry, dear one. It never was the real thing. I had to wait till I knew you before I understood.'
Her own eyes were brimming as she lifted them in a passion of gratitude to his face.
'Oh! is that true? Loving you has made things clear to me I didn't dream of before. If I could think that because of me you were able to do this——'
'You go back to that?' He seized her by the shoulders, and said hoarsely, 'Look here! Do you seriously ask me to give up the girl I love—to go and offer to marry a woman that even to think of——'
'You cared for her once!' she cried. 'You'll care about her again. She is beautiful and brilliant—everything. I've heard she could win any man——'
He pushed the girl from him. 'She's bewitched you!' He was halfway to the door.
'Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you aren't going away like that? This isn'tthe end?'
The face he turned back upon her was dark and hesitating. 'I suppose if she refused me, you'd——'
'She won't refuse you.'
'She did once.'
'She didn't refuse to marry you.'
As she passed him on the way to her sitting-room he caught her by the arm.
'Stop!' he said, glancing about like one hunting desperately for a means of gaining a few minutes. 'Lady John is waiting all this time at my house for the car to go back with a message.'
'That'snot a matter of life and death!' she said, with all the impatience of the young at that tyranny of little things which seems to hold its unrelenting sway, though the battlements of righteousness are rocking, and the tall towers of love are shaken to the nethermost foundation-stones.
'No, it's not a matter of life and death,' Stonor said quietly. 'All the same, I'll go down and give the order.'
'Very well.' Of her own accord this time she stopped on her way to that other door, behind which was the Past and the Future incarnate in one woman. 'I'll wait,' said Jean. She went to the table. Sitting there with her face turned from him, she said, quite low, 'You'll come back, if you're the man I pray you are.'
Her self-control seemed all at once to fail. She leaned her elbows on the table and broke into a flood of silent tears, with face hidden in her hands.
He came swiftly back, and bent over her a moved, adoring face.
'Dearest of all the world,' he began, in that beautiful voice of his.
His arms were closing round her, when the door on the left was softly opened. Vida Levering stood on the threshold.
She drew back as soon as she saw him, but Stonor had looked round. His face darkened as he stood there an instant, silently challenging her. Not a word spoken by either of them, no sound but the faint, muffled sobbing of the girl, who sat with hidden face. With a look of speechless anger, the man went out and shut the doors behind him. Not seeing, only hearing that he had gone, Jean threw her arms out across the table in an abandonment of grief. The other woman laid on a chair the hat and cloak that she was carrying. Then she went slowly across the room and stood silent a moment at Jean's side.
'What is the matter?'
The girl started. Impossible for her to speak in that first moment. But when she had dried her eyes, she said, with a pathetic childish air—
'I—I've been seeing Geoffrey.'
'Is this the effect "seeing Geoffrey" has?' said the other, with an attempt at lightness.
'You see, I know now,' Jean explained, with the brave directness that was characteristic.
The more sophisticated woman presented an aspect totally unenlightened.
'I know how he'—Jean dropped her eyes—'how he spoiled some one else's life.'
'Who tells you that?' asked Miss Levering.
'Several people have told me.'
'Well, you should be very careful how you believe what you hear.'
'You know it's true!' said the girl, passionately.
'I know that it's possible to be mistaken.'
'I see! You're trying to shield him——'
'Why should I? What is it to me?'
'Oh-h, how you must love him!' she said with tears.
'I? Listen to me,' said Vida, gravely. As she drew up a chair the girl rose to her feet.
'What's the use—what's the use of your going on denying it?' As she saw Vida was about to break in, she silenced her with two words, 'Geoffrey doesn't.' And with that she fled away to the window.
Vida half rose, and then relinquished the idea of following the girl, seemed presently to forget her, and sat as one alone with sorrow. When Jean had mastered herself, she came slowly back. Not till she was close to the motionless figure did the girl lift her eyes.
'Oh, don't look like that,' the girl prayed. 'I shall bring him back to you.'
She was on her knees by Vida's chair. The fixed abstraction went out of the older face, but it was very cold as she began—
'You would be impertinent—if—you weren't a romantic child. You can't bring him back.'
'Yes, yes, he——'
'No. But'—Vida looked deep into the candid eyes—'there is something youcando——'
'What?'
'Bring him to a point where he recognizes that he is in our debt.'
'Inourdebt?'
Vida nodded. 'In debt to Women. He can't repay the one he robbed.'
Jean winced at that. The young do not know that nothing but money can ever be paid back.
'Yes,' she insisted, out of the faith she still had in him, ready to be his surety. 'Yes, he can. He will.'
The other shook her head. 'No, he can't repay the dead. But there are the living. There are the thousands with hope still in their hearts and youth in their blood. Let him helpthem. Let him be a Friend to Women.'
'I understand!' Jean rose up, wide-eyed. 'Yes,thattoo.'
The door had opened, and Lady John was coming in with Stonor towering beside her. When he saw the girl rising from her knees, he turned to Lady John with a little gesture of, 'What did I tell you?'
The moment Jean caught sight of him, 'Thank you!' she said,while her aunt was briskly advancing, filling all the room with a pleasant silken rustling, and a something nameless, that was like clear noonday after storm-cloud or haunted twilight.
'Well,' she said in a cheerful commonplace tone to Jean; 'you rather gave us the slip! Vida, I believe Mr. Stonor wants to see you for a few minutes, but'—she glanced at her watch—'I'd like a word with you first, as I must get back. Do you think the car'—she turned to Stonor—'your man said something about recharging——'
'Oh, did he? I'll see about it.' As he went out he brushed past the butler.
'Mr. Trent has called, miss, to take the lady to the meeting,' said that functionary.
'Bring Mr. Trent into my sitting-room,' said Jean hastily, and then to Miss Levering, 'I'll tell him you can't go to-night.'
Lady John stood watching the girl with critical eyes till she had disappeared into the adjoining room and shut the door behind her. Then—
'I know, my dear'—she spoke almost apologetically—'you're not aware of what that impulsive child wants to insist on. I feel it an embarrassment even to tell you.'
'I know.'
'You know?' Lady John waited for condemnation of Jean's idea. She waited in vain. 'It isn't with your sanction, surely, that she makes this extraordinary demand?'
'I didn't sanction it at first,' said the other slowly; 'but I've been thinking it over.'
Lady John's suavity stiffened perceptibly. 'Then all I can say is, I am greatly disappointed in you. You threw this man over years ago, for reasons, whatever they were, that seemed to you good and sufficient. And now you come in between him and a younger woman, just to play Nemesis, so far as I can make out.'
'Is that what he says?'
'He says nothing that isn't fair and considerate.'
'I can see he's changed.'
'And you're unchanged—is that it?'
'I'm changed even more than he.'
Lady John sat down, with pity and annoyance struggling for the mastery.
'You care about him still?'
'No.'
'No? And yet you—I see! There are obviously certain things he can give his wife, and you naturally want to marry somebody.'
'Oh, Lady John,' said Vida, wearily, 'there are no men listening.'
'No'—she looked round surprised—'I didn't suppose there were.'
'Then why keep up that old pretence?'
'What pret——'
'That to marryat all costsis every woman's dearest ambition till the grave closes over her. You and Iknowit isn't true.'
'Well, but——' Her ladyship blinked, suddenly seeing daylight. 'Oh! It was just the unexpected sight of him bringing it all back!Thatwas what fired you this afternoon. Of course'—she made an honest attempt at sympathetic understanding—'the memory of a thing like that can never die—can never even be dimmed for the woman.'
'I mean her to think so.'
'Jean?'
Vida nodded.
'But it isn't so?'
Lady John was a little bewildered.
'You don't seriously believe,' said Vida, 'that a woman, with anything else to think about, comes to the end of ten years still absorbed in a memory of that sort?'
Lady John stared speechless a moment. 'You've got over it, then?'
'If it weren't for the papers, I shouldn't remember twice a year there was ever such a person as Geoffrey Stonor in the world.'
'Oh, I'msoglad!' said Lady John, with unconscious rapture.
Vida smiled grimly. 'Yes, I'm glad, too.'
'And if Geoffrey Stonor offered you—er—"reparation," you'd refuse it?'
'Geoffrey Stonor! For me he's simply one of the far back links in a chain of evidence. It's certain I think a hundred times of other women's present unhappiness to once that I remember that old unhappiness of mine that's past. I think of the nail and chainmakers of Cradley Heath, the sweated girls of the slums; I think,' her voice fell, 'of the army of ill-used women, whose very existence I mustn't mention——'
Lady John interrupted her hurriedly. 'Then why in heaven's name do you let poor Jean imagine——'
Vida suddenly bent forward. 'Look—I'll trust you, Lady John. I don't suffer from that old wrong as Jean thinks I do, but I shall coin her sympathy into gold for a greater cause than mine.'
'I don't understand you.'
'Jean isn't old enough to be able to care as much about a principle as about a person. But if my old half-forgotten pain can turn her generosity into the common treasury——'
'What do you propose she shall do, poor child?'
'Use her hold over Geoffrey Stonor to make him help us.'
'To help you?'
'The man who served one woman—God knows how many more—very ill, shall serve hundreds of thousands well. Geoffrey Stonor shall make it harder for his son, harder still for his grandson, to treat any woman as he treated me.'
'How will he do that?' said the lady coldly.
'By putting an end to the helplessness of women.'
'You must think he has a great deal of power,' said her ladyship, with some irony.
'Power? Yes,' answered the other, 'men have too much over penniless and frightened women.'
'What nonsense! You talk as though the women hadn't their share of human nature.Wearen't made of ice any more than the men.'
'No, but we have more self-control.'
'Than men?'
Vida had risen. She looked down at her friend. 'You know we have,' she said.
'I know,' said Lady John shrewdly, 'we mustn't admit it.'
'For fear they'd call us fishes?'
Lady John had been frankly shocked at the previous plain speaking, but she found herself stimulated to show in this moment of privacy that even she had not travelled her sheltered way through the world altogether in blinkers.
'They talk of our lack of self-control, but,' she admitted, 'it's the last thing menwantwomen to have.'
'Oh, we know what they want us to have! So we make shift to have it. If we don't, we go without hope—sometimes we go without bread.'
'Vida! Do you mean to say that you——'
'I mean to say that men's vanity won't let them see it, but the thing's largely a question of economics.'
'Youneverloved him, then!'
'Yes, I loved him—once. It was my helplessness that turned the best thing life can bring into a curse for both of us.'
'I don't understand you——'
'Oh, being "understood"! that's too much to expect. I make myself no illusions. When people come to know that I've joined the Women's Union——'
'But you won't'
'——who is there who will resist the temptation to say "Poor Vida Levering! What a pity she hasn't got a husband and a baby to keep her quiet"? The few who know about me, they'll be equally sure that, not the larger view of life I've gained, but my own poor little story, is responsible for my new departure.' She leaned forward and looked into Lady John's face. 'My best friend, she will be surest of all, that it's a private sense of loss, or lower yet, a grudge, that's responsible for my attitude. I tell you the only difference between me and thousands of women with husbands and babies is that I am free to say what I think.They aren't!'
Lady John opened her lips and then closed them firmly. After all, why pursue the matter? She had got the information she had come for.
'I must hurry back;' she rose, murmuring, 'my poor ill-used guests——'
Vida stood there quiet, a little cold. 'I won't ring,' she said. 'I think you'll find Mr. Stonor downstairs waiting for you.'
'Oh—a—he will have left word about the car in any case.'
Lady John's embarrassment was not so much at seeing that her friend had divined the gist of the arrangement that had been effected downstairs. It was that Vida should be at no pains to throw a decent veil over the fact of her realization that Lady John hadcome there in the character of scout. With an openness not wholly free from scorn, the younger woman had laid her own cards on the table. She made no scruple at turning her back on Lady John's somewhat incoherent evasion. Ignoring it she crossed the room and opened the door for her.
Jean was in the corridor saying good-bye to the chairman of the afternoon.
'Well, Mr. Trent,' said Miss Levering in even tones, 'I didn't expect to see you this evening.'
He came forward and stood in the doorway. 'Why not? Have I ever failed?'
'Lady John,' said Vida, turning, 'this is one of our allies. He is good enough to squire me through the rabble from time to time.'
'Well,' said Lady John, advancing quite graciously, 'I think it's very handsome of you after what she said to-day about men.'
'I've no great opinion of most men myself,' said the young gentleman. 'I might add, or of most women.'
'Oh!' Lady John laughed. 'At any rate I shall go away relieved to think that Miss Levering's plain speaking hasn't alienatedallmasculine regard.'
'Why should it?' he said.
'That's right.' Lady John metaphorically patted him on the back. 'Don't believe all she says in the heat of propaganda.'
'Idobelieve all she says. But I'm not cast down.'
'Not when she says——'
'Was there never,' he made bold to interrupt, 'a misogynist ofmysex who ended by deciding to make an exception?'
'Oh!' Lady John smiled significantly; 'ifthat'swhat you build on!'
'Why,' he demanded with an effort to convey 'pure logic,' 'why shouldn't a man-hater on your side prove equally open to reason?'
'That aspect of the question has become irrelevant so far as I'm personally concerned,' said Vida, exasperated by Lady John's look of pleased significance. 'I've got to a place where I realize that the first battles of this new campaign must be fought by women alone. The only effective help men could give—amendment of the law—they refuse. The rest is nothing.'
'Don't be ungrateful, Vida. Here is this gentleman ready to face criticism in publicly championing you——'
'Yes, but it's an illusion that I, as an individual, need a champion. I am quite safe in the crowd. Please don't wait for me and don't come for me again.'
The sensitive dark face flushed. 'Of course if you'd rather——'
'And that reminds me,' she went on, unfairly punishing poor Mr. Trent for Lady John's meaning looks, 'I was asked to thank you, and to tell you, too, that they won't need your chairmanship any more—though that, I beg you to believe, has nothing to do with any feeling of mine.'
He was hurt and he showed it. 'Of course I know there must be other men ready—better known men——'
'It isn't that. It's simply that we find a man can't keep a rowdy meeting in order as well as a woman.'
He stared.
'You aren't serious?' said Lady John.
'Haven't you noticed,' Miss Levering put it to Trent, 'that all our worst disturbances come when men are in charge?'
'Ha! ha! Well—a—I hadn't connected the two ideas.'
Still laughing a little ruefully, he suffered himself to be taken downstairs by kind little Miss Dunbarton, who had stood without a word waiting there with absent face.
'That nice boy's in love with you,' said Lady John,sotto voce.
Vida looked at her without answering.
'Good-bye.' They shook hands. 'Iwishyou hadn't been so unkind to that nice boy.'
'Do you?'
'Yes; for then I would be more sure of your telling Geoffrey Stonor that intelligent women don't nurse their wrongs indefinitely, and lie in wait to punish them.'
'You arenotsure?'
Lady John went up close and looked into her face with searching anxiety. 'Areyou?' she asked.
Vida stood there mute, with eyes on the ground. Lady John glanced nervously at her watch, and, with a gesture of perturbation, hurriedly left the room. The other went slowly back to her place by the table.
The look she bent on Stonor as he came in seemed to take noaccountof those hurried glimpses at the Tunbridges' months before, and twice to-day when other eyes were watching. It was as if now, for the first time since they parted, he stood forth clearly. This man with the changed face, coming in at the door and carefully shutting it—he had once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day, beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened fastidiousness—mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple, and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the part of one who once had been so near—something that lames advance and hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the need of justifying their presence and defending their value.
As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the past grew plainer.
However ludicrous the result may look in the last analysis, it is clear that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching to their graves.
But the shining superiority of the man seemed to be a little dimmed for the woman sitting there. The old face and the new face, she saw them both through a cloud of long-past memories and a mist of present tears.
'Well, have they primed you?' she said very low. 'Have you got your lesson—by heart at last?'
He looked at her from immeasurable distance. 'I am not sure that I understand you,' he said. He waited an instant, then, seeing no explanation vouchsafed, 'However unpropitious your mood may be,' he went on with a satirical edge in his tone, 'I shall discharge my errand.'
Still she waited.
Her silence seemed to irritate him. 'I have promised,' he said, with a formality that smacked of insolence, 'to offer you what I believe is called "amends."'
The quick change in the brooding look should have warned him.
'You have come to realize, then—after all these years—that you owed me something?'
He checked himself on the brink of protest. 'I am not here to deny it.'
'Pay, then,' she said fiercely—'pay.'
A moment's dread flickered in his eye and then was gone. 'I have said that, if you exact it, I will.'
'Ah! If I insist, you'll "make it all good"! Then, don't you know, you must pay me in kind?'
He looked down upon her—a long, long way. 'What do you mean?'
'Give me back what you took from me—my old faith,' she said, with shaking voice. 'Give me that.'
'Oh, if you mean to make phrases——' He half turned away, but the swift words overtook him.
'Or, give me back mere kindness—or even tolerance! Oh, I don't meanyourtolerance.' She was on her feet to meet his eyes as he faced her again. 'Give me back the power to think fairly of my brothers—not as mockers—thieves.'
'I have not mocked you. And I have asked you——'
'Something you knew I should refuse. Or'—her eyes blazed—'or did you dare to be afraid I wouldn't?'
'Oh, I suppose'—he buttressed his good faith with bitterness—'I suppose if we set our teeth we could——'
'I couldn't—not even if I set my teeth. And you wouldn't dream of asking me if you thought there was the smallest chance.'
Ever so faintly he raised his heavy shoulders. 'I can do no more than make you an offer of such reparation as is in my power. If you don't accept it——' He turned away with an air of 'that'sdone.'
But her emotion had swept her out of her course. She found herself at his side.
'Accept it? No! Go away and live in debt. Pay and pay and pay—and find yourself still in debt—for a thing you'll never be able to give me back. And when you come to die'—her voice fell—'say to yourself, "I paid all my creditors but one."'
He stopped on his way to the door and faced her again. 'I'm rather tired, you know, of this talk of debt. If I hear that you persist in it, I shall have to——' Again he checked himself.
'What?'
'No. I'll keep to my resolution.'
He had nearly reached the threshold. She saw what she had lost by her momentary lack of that boasted self-control. She forestalled him at the door.
'What resolution?' she asked.
He looked down at her an instant, clothed from head to foot in that indefinable armour of unapproachableness. This was a man who asked other people questions, himself ill-accustomed to be catechised. If he replied it was a grace.
'I came here,' he said, 'under considerable pressure, to speak of the future. Not to reopen the past.'
'The future and the past are one,' said the woman at the door.
'You talk as if that old madness was mine alone; it is the woman's way.'
'I know,' she agreed, to his obvious surprise, 'and it's not fair. Men suffer as well as we by the woman's starting wrong. We are taught to think the man a sort of demi-god. If he tells her, "Go down into hell," down into hell she goes.'
He would not have been human had he not resented that harsh summary of those days that lay behind.
'Make no mistake,' he said. 'Not the woman alone.They go down together.'
'Yes, they go down together. But the man comes up alone. As a rule. It is more convenient so—for him. And even for the other woman.'
Both pairs of eyes went to Jean's door.
'My conscience is clear,' he said angrily. 'I know—and so do you—that most men in my position wouldn't have troubled themselves. I gave myself endless trouble.'
She looked at him with wondering eyes. 'So you've gone about all these years feeling that you'd discharged every obligation?'
'Not only that. I stood by you with a fidelity that was nothing short of Quixotic. If, woman-like, youmustrecall the past, I insist on your recalling it correctly.'
'You think I don't recall it correctly?' she said very low.
'Not when you make—other people believe that I deserted you!' The gathering volume of his righteous wrath swept the cool precision out of his voice. 'It's a curious enough charge,' he said, 'when you stop to consider——' Again he checked himself, and, with a gesture of impatience, was for sweeping the whole thing out of his way, including that figure at the door.
But she stood there. 'Well, when we do just for five minutes out of ten years—when we do stop to consider——'
'We remember it wasyouwho did the deserting. And since you had to rake the story up, you might have had the fairness to tell the facts.'
'You think "the facts" would have excused you?'
It was a new view. She left the door, and sat down in the nearest chair.
'No doubt you've forgotten the facts, since Lady John tells me you wouldn't remember my existence once a year, if the papers didn't——'
'Ah!' she interrupted, with a sorry little smile, 'you minded that!'
'I mind your giving false impressions,' he said with spirit. As she was about to speak he advanced upon her. 'Do you deny'—he bent over her, and told off those three words by striking one clenched fist into the palm of the other hand—'do you deny that you returned my letters unopened?'
'No,' she said.
'Do you deny that you refused to see me, and that when I persisted you vanished?'
'I don't deny any of those things.'
'Why'—he stood up straight again, and his shoulders grewmore square with justification—'why I had no trace of you for years.'
'I suppose not.'
'Very well, then.' He walked away. 'What could I do?'
'Nothing. It was too late to do anything.'
'It wasn't too late! You knew, since you "read the papers," that my father died that same year. There was no longer any barrier between us.'
'Oh, yes, there was a barrier.'
'Of your own making, then.'
'I had my guilty share in it, but the barrier'—her voice trembled on the word—'the barrier was your invention.'
'The only barrier I knew of was no "invention." If you had ever known my father——'
'Oh, the echoes! the echoes!' She lay back in the chair. 'How often you used to say, if I "knew your father." But you said, too'—her voice sank—'you called the greatest "barrier" by another name.'
'What name?'
So low that even he could hardly hear she answered, 'The child that was to come.'
'That was before my father died,' Stonor returned hastily, 'while I still hoped to get his consent.'
She nodded, and her eyes were set like wide doors for memory to enter in.
'How the thought of that all-powerful personage used to terrorize me! What chance had a little unborn child against "the last of the great feudal lords," as you called him?'
'Youknowthe child would have stood between you and me.'
'I know the child did stand between you and me.'
He stared at her. With vague uneasiness he repeated, 'Didstand——'
She seemed not to hear. The tears were running down her rigid face.
'Happy mothers teach their children. Mine had to teach me——'
'You talk as if——'
'——teach me that a woman may do that for love's sake that shall kill love.'
Neither spoke for some seconds. Fearing and putting from him fuller comprehension, he broke the silence, saying with an air of finality—
'You certainly made it plain you had no love left for me.'
'I had need of it all for the child.' Her voice had a curious crooning note in it.
He came closer. He bent down to put the low question, 'Do you mean, then, that after all—it lived?'
'No. I mean that it was sacrificed. But it showed me no barrier is so impassable as the one a little child can raise.'
It was as if lightning had flashed across the old picture. He drew back from the fierce illumination.
'Wasthatwhy you——' he began, in a voice that was almost a whisper. 'Was that why?'
She nodded, speechless a moment for tears. 'Day and night there it was between my thought of you and me.'
He sat down, staring at her.
'When I was most unhappy,' she went on, in that low voice, 'I would wake thinking I heard it cry. It was my own crying I heard, but I seemed to have it in my arms. I suppose I was mad. I used to lie there in that lonely farmhouse pretending to hush it. It was so I hushed myself.'
'I never knew——'