This time the voice broke in unmistakable merriment, wholly spontaneous, as of relief, even of mischievous triumph; and Mr. Iglesias, looking up, found himself confronted by a young woman. She advanced slowly, her trailing string-coloured lace skirts gathered up lazily in one hand. About her shoulders she wore a long blue-purple silk scarf, embroidered with dragons of peacock, and scarlet, and gold. These rather violent colours found repetition in the nasturtium leaves and flowers that crowned her lace hat, the wide brim of which was tied down with narrow strings of purple velvet, gipsy fashion, beneath her chin. Under her arm she carried another tiny spaniel, the creature's black morsel of a head peeping out quaintly from among the forms of the embroidered dragons, which last appeared to writhe, as in the heat of deadly conflict, as their wearer moved. Her face was in shadow owing to the breadth of the brim of her hat. Otherwise the sunshine embraced her whole figure, conferring on it a glittering yet singularly unsubstantial effect, as though a column of pale windswept dust were overlaid, here and there, with splendour of rich enamel.
And it was just this effect of something unsubstantial, in a way fictitious and out of relation to sober fact, which struck Dominic Iglesias, robbing him for the moment of his dignified courtesy. Frankly he stared at this appearance, so strangely at variance with the realities of his own melancholy thought. Meanwhile the little dog snuggled up yet closer against him.
"Yes—pray don't disturb yourself," the young lady went on volubly "It's too bad, I know, to intrude on you like this. But as Cappadocia refuses to come to me, it is clear I have to come after Cappadocia. It's simply disgraceful the way she carries on when one takes her out, making acquaintances like this, casually, all over the place. The maids flatly refuse to air her, even on a string. They say it becomes a little too compromising. But, as I explain to them, she's not a bit the modern woman. She belongs to a stage of social development when pretty people infinitely preferred being compromised to being squelched." The speaker laughed again quietly. "I'm not altogether sure they weren't right. When you are squelched, finished, done for, it matters precious little whether you've been compromised first or not. Don't you agree? Any way, Cappadocia's not going to be squelched if she can help it. She's horribly scared, or pretends to be, at motors. Let one toot and she forgets all her fine-lady manners, and just skips to anybody for protection. She'll take refuge in the most unconventional places to escape."
The part of wisdom, in face of this very forthcoming young person, would have been no doubt to arise and withdraw. But to Dominic Iglesias, just then, dogs, woman, conversation, were alike so remote and unreal, part merely of the scene which he had been contemplating, that he failed to take them seriously. Divorced from routine, he was divorced, in a way, from habitual modes of mind and conduct. He neither consented nor refused, but just let things happen, attaching little or no meaning to them. If this feminine being chose to prattle—well, let her do so. Really he did not care.
"I am not very modern myself," he said, with a shade of weariness. "So perhaps your small dog had some intuition of a kindred spirit when taking refuge with me."
"All the same, you hardly date from the social era of Charles II., I fancy," the young lady answered quickly.
As she spoke she raised her chin with a slightly impudent movement, thus bringing her countenance into the sunlight. For the first time Iglesias clearly saw her face. It was small, the features insignificant, the skin smooth and fine in texture, but sallow. Her hair, black and very massive, was puffed out and dressed low, hiding her ears. Her lips were rather positively red, and the tinge of colour on either cheek, though slight, was not wholly convincing in tone. Even to a person of Mr. Iglesias' praiseworthy limitation of experience in such matters, her face was vaguely suggestive of the footlights—would have been distinctly so but for her eyes. These were curiously at variance with the rest of her appearance. They belonged to a quite other order of woman, so to speak—a woman of finer physique, of higher intelligence, possibly of nobler purposes. They were arrestingly large in size, thereby helping to dwarf the proportions of her face. In colour they were a rather light warm hazel, with a slight film over both iris and pupil, and a noticeably bluish shade in the whites of them. In these last particulars they were like a baby's eyes; but very unlike in the reflective intensity of their observation as she fixed them upon Dominic Iglesias.
"Cappadocia may be a fool about motors," she remarked, "but she's uncommonly shrewd in reading character. She seems to like you, to have taken you on, don't you know; and she's generally right. So I'll sit down, please. Oh! no, no, come along now"—this as Mr. Iglesias rose and made a movement to depart—"why, dear man, the very point of the whole show is that you should sit down, too."
And so it came about that the Lady of the Windswept Dust sat at one end of the flat bench and Dominic Iglesias at the other, with the two absurd and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the footlights. It passed the time. Presently he would get up, taking the whole of his rather sorrowful personality along with him, and go out by the main entrance, while she left by the stage door—and so vanished, little dogs and all.
"It's my habit to play fair," she announced. "If I'm going to ask personal questions at the finish, I always lead up to them by supplying personal information at the start. It's mean to induce other people to give themselves away unless you give yourself away first—also, I observe it is usually quite unsuccessful. Well, then, to begin with, his name"—she gently poked the tiny spaniel beside her, causing it to wriggle uneasily all the length of its satiny back—"is Onions. Graceful and distinguished, isn't it? But I give you my word I couldn't help myself. Cappadocia's so duchessy that I had to knock the conceit out of her somehow, or it would not have been possible to live with her. She was altogether too smart for me—used to look at me as if I was a cockroach. So I consulted a friend of mine about it; for it's a little too much to be made to feel like a black-beetle in your own house, and by a thing of that size, too! And he—my friend—said there is nothing to compare with amésalliancefor taking the stuffing out of anyone. I own I was not exactly off my head about that speech of his. In a way it was rather a facer; but when I got cool I saw he was right. After all, he knew, and I knew—and he knew that I knew——"
The lady paused. Her voice had taken on a plaintive inflection. She looked away at the domed heads of the enormous elm trees above the range of oak palings.
"For the life of me I can't imagine why you're here," she exclaimed, "instead of inside there with all the rest of them! However, we haven't got as far as that yet. I was telling you about my King Charleses. So my friend brought me this one"—again she poked the little dog gently. "His pedigree's pretty fair, but of course it's not a patch on Cappadocia's. Her prizes and the puppies—you don't mind my alluding quite briefly to the puppies—are a serious source of income to me. But I believe she would have ignored the defective pedigree. He is rather nice-looking, you see, and Cappadocia is rather superficial. It is the name that worries her—Onions, Willie Onions, that's where the real trouble comes in. Not like it? I believe you. She's capable of saving up all her pocket-money to buy him a foreign title, as a rich, ugly woman I once knew did who married a man called Spittles. He was a bad lot when she married him, and he stayed so. But as the Comte d'Oppitale it didn't matter. Vices became merely quaint little eccentricities. If he beat her it was with an umbrella with a coronet on the handle, and that made all the difference. Everything for the shop window, you see, with a nature like hers or Cappadocia's. But I don't rub it in, I assure you I don't. I only remind Cappadocia of the fact by calling her Mrs. W. O. when she's a pest and a terror. And that's better than smacking her, anyhow, isn't it?"
To this proposition Mr. Iglesias gravely assented. The lady drew her blue-purple scarf a little closer about her shoulders, causing the embroidered dragons to writhe as in the heat of conflict, while the sunlight glinted on the gold thread of their crests and claws, and glittered in their jewelled eyes. She gazed at the elm trees again.
"It's quite nice to hear you speak, you know," she remarked parenthetically. "The conversation has been a little one-sided so far. I was beginning to be afraid you might be bored. But now it's all right. I flourish on encouragement! So, to go on, my name is Poppy—Poppy St. John—Mrs. St. John. Rather good, isn't it?"
"Distinctly so," said Mr. Iglesias. Her unblushing effrontery began to entertain him somewhat. And then he had sallied forth in search of amusement. This was not the form of amusement he would have selected; but—since it presented itself?
"I'm glad you like it," she returned. "I've always thought it rather telling myself—an improvement on Mrs. Willie Onions, anyhow. Oh! yes, a vast improvement," she repeated. "My friend was quite right. I tell you it's an awful handicap to have a name which gives you away socially. The man, the husband, I mean, may be the best of the good. Still, it's difficult to forgive him for labelling you with some stupidity like that. There's no getting away from it. You feel like a bottle of pickles, or boot-polish, or a tin of insecticide whenever a servant announces you. Everybody knows where you do—and don't—come in. But, to go on, I am barely three—only I fancy you are the sort of person who is rather rough on lying, aren't you? Well, in that case, quite between ourselves—I am just turned nine-and-twenty."
She faced round on Dominic Iglesias, fixing on him those curiously arresting eyes, which at once emphasised and redeemed the commonness of her face, as the sweetness of her voice emphasised and redeemed the commonness of her accent, and the quietude of her manner and movements mitigated the impertinence of her words and vulgarity of her diction.
"And really that's about all it is necessary for you to know at present," she asserted. "We shall see later, if we keep it up—if Cappadocia keeps it up, I mean, of course. She is fearfully gone on you now, that's clear; and she may be capable of a serious attachment. I can't tell. An unfortunate marriage has been known to turn that way before now. Anyhow, we'll give her the benefit of the doubt."
Poppy laughed softly, leaning forward and still looking at Mr. Iglesias from under the shadow of her wide-brimmed hat.
"Now," she said, "come along. I've shown you I play fair all round, even to a stuck-up little monkey of a thing like Cappadocia. It's your turn to stand and deliver. I had been watching you and speculating for ever so long before our introduction. Tell me, who on earth are you?"
Iglesias' figure stiffened a little; but it was impossible to be annoyed with her. To begin with, she was too unreal, too unsubstantial a being. And, to go on with, invincible good-temper is so very disarming.
"Who am I? Nobody," he answered gravely.
"Bless us, here's a find!" Poppy cried, apparently addressing the little dogs. "Hasn't he so much of a name even as Willie Onions? Where's it gone to? It must be nearly as awkward for him as it was for the man who had no shadow. Come, though," she added in tones of remonstrance, "you must play fair. Cards on the table and no humbugging. To put it another way, what do you do?"
"Since yesterday, nothing," he answered.
The young lady regarded him with increasing interest.
"But, my gentle lunatic," she said, "you didn't exactly begin your acquaintance with this planetary sphere yesterday—couldn't, you know, though you are very beautiful to look at. So, if you don't very particularly much mind, we'll hark back to before yesterday."
Dominic Iglesias' gravity gave way slightly. He smiled in spite of his natural pride and reticence.
"For over thirty-five years I was a clerk in a city bank."
"Pshaw!" Poppy cried hotly. "And pray what variety of congenital idiot do you take me for? If you are going to decline upon fiction, please let it be of a higher order than that. I tell you it's unworthy of you!"
She pursed up her lips and moved her head slowly from side to side in high disgust.
"Don't be childish," she said. "Don't be transparently silly. If you want to gas, do put a little more intelligence into it. You—you—out of sight the most distinguished-looking man I've ever met except Lord—well, we won't name names, it sounds showy—you a clerk in a city bank! There, excuse me, but simply—" Poppy snapped her fingers like a pair of castanets, making the little dogs start and whimper. "Fiddle!" she cried; "tell it to a bed-ridden spinster in a blind asylum!—Fiddle-de-dee!"
And for the life of him Dominic Iglesias could not help laughing. It was a new sensation. It occurred to him that he had not laughed for years—hardly since the days of poor Pascal Pelletier and the little garden in Holland Street, Kensington.
Poppy watched him, her eyes dancing. Her expression was very charming, wholly unselfconscious, in a way maternal, just then. But Iglesias was hardly sensible of it.
"That's good," she said. "Now you'll feel a lot better. I saw there was something wrong with you from the start which needed breaking up. Now, suppose you quit inadequate inventions and just tell the truth."
"Unfortunately, I have done so already," Mr. Iglesias said.
The lady paused a moment, her face full of inquiry and doubt.
"Honest injun?"
The term was not familiar to her hearer, but he judged it to be of the nature of an asseveration, and assented.
"And do you mean to tell me that for all those years you went through that drudgery every day?"
"I had my Sundays," Iglesias answered; "and, since their invention, my bank holidays. Latterly I got three weeks' holiday in the summer, formerly a fortnight."
Laughter had speedily evaporated; and, his harsher mood returning upon him, Iglesias found a certain bitter enjoyment in setting forth the extreme meagreness of his life before this light-hearted, unsubstantial piece of womanhood. Again he classed her with the absurd and exquisite little dogs as something superfluous, out of relation to sad and sober realities.
"And yet you manage to look as you do! It beats me," Poppy declared. "I tell you it knocks me out of time completely. For, if you'll excuse my being personal, there is an air about you not usually generated by an office stool—at least, in my experience. Where do you get it from? You can't be English?"
"I am a Spaniard by extraction," Mr. Iglesias said, with a slight lift of the head.
"There now, my dear man, don't you go and freeze up again. We were just beginning to get along so nicely," Poppy put in quickly. "I am having a capital good time, and you're not having an altogether bad one, are you? But, tell me, how long ago were you extracted?"
"Very long ago. I was brought to England as a baby child."
"Oh! I didn't mean it that way," she returned. "I was not touching on the unpardonable subject of age; not that it would matter much in your case, for you are one of the lucky sort with whom age does not count. I only meant are you an all-round foreigner?"
"Practically—my mother was partly Irish."
Dominic Iglesias looked away to those densely wooded slopes of Sheen and Roehampton, against the purple-green gloom of which the home signals of Barnes Station—hard white lines and angles tipped with scarlet and black—stood out like the gigantic characters of some strange alphabet. The air was sweet with the scent of new-mown hay. The birds flirted up and down the hawthorn bushes and furze brakes. It was all very charming; yet that same emptiness and distrust of the future were very present to Iglesias. He forgot all about his companion, aware only that those two unbidden guests, Old Age and Loneliness, stood close beside him, claiming harbourage and entertainment.
"Ah! your mother," Poppy said slowly, with the slightest perceptible inflection of mockery. "And she is alive still?"
Dominic Iglesias turned upon the poor Lady of the Windswept Dust fiercely. She had come too close, come from her proper place—were not her lips painted?—behind the footlights, and laid her hands upon that which was holy. He was filled with unreasoning anger towards her—anger towards himself, too, that he should have departed from his habitual silence and reticence, submitted to be cross-questioned, and listened to her feather-headed patter so long. He rose to his feet, for the moment young, alert, full of a pride at once militant and protective.
"God forbid!" he said sternly. "Dear saint and martyr, she is safe from all misreading at last. She is dead."
He stood a moment trying to choke down his anger before addressing her again.
"It is time I should go," he said presently. "I think we have talked enough."
But Poppy St. John presented a singular appearance. All the audacity had departed from her. She sat huddled together, looking very small and desolate; her eyes—the one noble feature of her face—swimming with tears.
"No, no; don't go," she cried in tones of childlike entreaty. "Why should you go? I like you, and I meant no harm. I've had the beastliest day, and meeting you was a let-up. You did me good somehow. Cappadocia was quite right in taking to you. I only wanted to know about you because—well, you are different. Pshaw, don't tell me. I know what I am talking about. You're straight. You're good right through."
The words were poured forth so rapidly that Iglesias hardly gathered the exact purport of them. But one thing was clear to him—namely, that this frivolous and meretricious being must be human after all, since she could suffer.
"Don't go," she repeated. "I'm miserable. I'll explain. I'll tell you. Just sit down again. It would be awfully kind. You see, I've been expecting a friend. It was all-important I should see him to-day, because there were things to be said. I've been awake half the night screwing up my courage to saying them. And then he never turned up. I got nerves waiting hour after hour—anybody would, waiting like that. And I began to imagine every kind of pestilent disaster."
Poppy swallowed a little and dabbed her pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
"I shall be all right in a minute," she went on. "Do sit down, please. You say you're nobody and have nothing to do, so you can't very well be in a hurry. I am like this sometimes. It's awfully silly, but I can't help it. Some rotten trifle sets me off, and then I can't stop myself. I begin to go over all my worst luck.—Doesn't it occur to you there's no earthly good in standing? It obliges me to talk loud, and it's stupid to take all Barnes Common into our confidence. Thanks; that's very nice of you.—Well, you see when I'm like his, the flood-gates of memory are opened—which sounds pretty enough, but the prettiness is strictly limited to the sound for most of us, at least as far as my experience goes. The water is generally a bit dirty, and there are too many dead things floating about in it; and, when they reel by, as the current takes them, they turn and seem to struggle and come half alive."
She paused, hitching the embroidered dragons up about her shoulders.
"That is why I put on this scarf to-day. It was given me by a man who was awfully fond of me before—I married. He bought it in the bazaar at Peshawur, and sent it home to me just as he was starting on one of those little frontier wars the accounts of which they keep out of the English papers. And he was killed, poor dear old boy, in some footy little skirmish. And this is all I've got left of him."
Poppy spread out the ends of the scarf for Mr. Iglesias' inspection.
"It must have cost a lot of money. The stones are real, you see; and that gold thread is tremendously heavy. Just feel the weight. It was all his people's doing. They didn't consider me smart enough for him—or rather for themselves. They weren't anybody in particular, but they were climbing. The society microbe had bitten them badly. So they bundled him off to India. What another pair of shoes it would have been for me if he'd lived! At least it seems so to me when I'm down on my luck, as I am to-day. But after all, I don't know." Poppy began to be impudent, to laugh again, though somewhat brokenly. "Sometimes I don't believe one can count on any of you men till you are well dead, and then you're not much use, you know, faithful or unfaithful."
She dabbed her eyes once more and looked at Mr. Iglesias, smiling ruefully.
"Life's a pretty rotten business, at times, all round, isn't it?" she said. "You must have found it so with that thirty years' drudgery in a city bank. By the way, what bank was it?"
And Dominic Iglesias, touched by that very human story, attracted, in spite of himself, by the frankness of his companion, a little shaken by the novelty of the whole situation, answered mechanically:
"The bank? Oh, yes! Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking of Threadneedle Street."
For a moment Poppy sat silent, her mouth round as an O. Then she drew her open hand down sharply behind poor Willie Onions, and shot the small dog, in a sitting position, off the bench on to the rough grass. His fringed legs stuck out stiff as sticks, while his enormous lappets of ears flew up and back, giving him the most wildly demented appearance during this brief inglorious flight through space.
"Catch birds!" she cried, "catch birds, I tell you! Think of your figure. My good child, take exercise or you'll be as round as a tub!"
She clapped her hands encouragingly, but the little animal, half-scared, half-offended, came closer, fawning upon her trailing string-coloured skirts. Poppy leaned down, resting her elbows upon her knees, and napped at the unhappy Onions with her handkerchief.
"Go away, you silly billy. Have a little decent pride, can't you? Don't bestow attentions when they're unwelcome." Then she addressed herself to Mr. Iglesias, but without looking up. "I beg your pardon, all this must seem rather abrupt. But sometimes one's duty to one's family takes one on the jump, as you may say; and one repairs neglect right away also on the jump. But—but—there's one thing I should like to know—when I told you my name just now—Poppy St. John, Mrs. St. John—you remember?"
"I remember," he said.
"Well, didn't it convey—didn't it mean anything special to you?"
"I am afraid not," Iglesias answered. "You must pardon my ignorance, since I have lived very much out of the world. I know nothing of society."
"So much the better. The world is a vastly overrated place, and society is about the biggest fraud going." She left off teasing the little dog, sat bolt upright, and looked full at Dominic Iglesias, her eyes serious, redeeming all the insignificance of her features and those little doubtful details of the general effect of her. "Don't make any mistake about either of them," she said. "Let the world and society alone as you value your peace of mind and independence. They're dead sea fruit to all outsiders such as—well—you and me. I hate them; only they've got me, and will have me in some form or other till the end, I suppose. But you are different, and I warn you"—Poppy's voice took on an odd inflection of mingled bitterness and tenderness—"they are not a bit adapted for a beautiful, innocent, uncrowned king like you."
She got up as she spoke, gathering her trailing skirts about her, and called sharply to the little dogs.
"The dew is rising," she said, "and Cappadocia's a regular cry-baby if she gets her feet wet. I must take her home. There's my card. You see the address? You can come when you like, only let me know the day beforehand, because I should be sorry to have people with me or to be out. Cappadocia 'll want you. So shall I. You do me good. I'll play quite fair, I promise you. Good-night."
The sun stood in a triumph of crimson and gold, which passed into the fine blue of a belt of earth mist. Eastward the sky blushed, too, but with brazen blushes, tarnished by the breath of the great city—the pure blue of the earth mist exchanged for the murk of coal smoke and the thousand and one exhalations of steaming streets, public-houses and restaurants. Poppy St. John walked slowly along the footpath, her figure dyed by the effulgence of the skies to the crimson and gold of her name. About her shoulders the embroidered dragons glittered as she moved, while the two tiny spaniels trotted humbly at her heels. For a brief space she showed absolutely resplendent. Then suddenly an interposing terrace of smart much-be-balconied and beflowered little houses shut off the sunset; and in their rather vulgar shadow Dominic Iglesias, watching, beheld her transformed into the unsubstantial, in a way fictitious, Lady of the Windswept Dust and of the footlights once again.
That weekly ceremony—well known to Trimmer's Green—Mrs. Lovegrove's afternoon at-home, was in progress. She wore her black satin gown, and her white Maltese lace fichu, just to give it a touch of summer lightness. It must be added that she was warm and uncomfortable, having conscientiously superintended preparations in respect of commissariat in the overheated atmosphere of the basement; hurried upstairs—the imagined tinkle of the front-door bell perpetually in her ears—to pull her stays in at the waist and project herself into the aforementioned official garments—a very trying process on a June day to a person of ample contours and what may be described as the fluidic temperament. Later she had cooled off, or tried so to cool—for on such occasions there is invariably some window-blind, ornament, or piece of furniture actively in need of straightening—sitting in her somewhat fog-stained and sun-faded drawing-room during that evil period of waiting in which the intending hostess first suffers acute mortification because she is "quite sure nobody will come," and then gets hot all over from the equally agitating certainty that everybody she has ever known will appear simultaneously, and that there will be neither cakes nor conversation enough to go round.
But this disquieting and oft-repeated preface to the afternoon's festivity was now happily over. And the good lady, oblivious of discomfort and a slightly disorganised complexion, sat purring with satisfaction upon her best Chesterfield sofa, Dr. Giles Nevington beside her. "Pleasure, not business, to-day, Mrs. Lovegrove. For once I am going to make no demands on my faithful and able coadjutor. This call is a purely friendly one—no subscription lists of any sort or description in my pocket," the clergyman had said in his resonant bass when clasping her hand.—A large, dark, clean-shaven man of forty, a studied effect of geniality and benevolence about him, slightly tempered, perhaps, by cold and watchful blue-grey eyes, fixed—so said his detractors—with unswerving determination upon the shovel-hat, apron, and gaiters of the Anglican episcopate.
Rhoda Lovegrove, however, was very far from being among the detractors. She relished this gracious speech enormously. She also approved the attitude of her husband at this juncture; since, with praiseworthy tact, he engaged the attention of her two other guests, a Mrs. Ballard and her daughter. These ladies were rich, the younger had pretensions both to beauty and fashion; but their present was, alas! stained by Noncomformity, their past contaminated by association with retail trade. At the entrance of the vicar, remembering these sad defects, George Lovegrove rose to the occasion. Gently, but firmly, he pranced round them heading them towards the doorway.
"Who are those?" Dr. Nevington inquired, with some interest. "Not parishioners, I fancy."
"Not in any true sense," Mrs. Lovegrove replied. "Dissenters, and I am sorry to say rather spiteful against the Church."
The clergyman leaned back and crossed his legs comfortably.
"Ah! well, poor human nature! A touch of jealousy perhaps," he remarked.
Mrs. Lovegrove beamed.
"Very likely—still I should be just as well pleased not to continue their acquaintance. I don't like to hear things that are disrespectful. I should have ceased to call, but relatives of theirs are old friends of Mr. Lovegrove's mother's family."
"Quite so, quite so," the other returned. Even when silent the sound of him seemed to encompass him, as the roll of a drum seems to salute you when merely beholding that instrument. His speech filled all the room, flowing forth into every corner, sweeping upward in waves to the very cornice. The feminine members of his congregation found this most beautiful; having, indeed, been known to declare that did he preach in Chinese, they would still receive edification and spiritual benefit.—"Quite so," he repeated, "the breaking of old family ties is certainly to be avoided. And then, moreover, we should always guard against any appearance of harshness or illiberality in dealing with Christians from whom we have reason to differ in minor questions of doctrine or practice. We must never forget that the Nonconformists, though they went out from us, do remain the brethren of all right-minded Churchmen in a very special sense, since they have the great lessons of the Reformation at heart. I could wish that certain parties within the Church were animated by the same manly and intelligent intolerance of idolatry and superstition as the majority of the dissenters whom I meet. Personally I should welcome greater freedom of intercourse, and a frequent interchange of pulpits."
"We know who'd be the gainers," Mrs. Lovegrove put in gracefully.
"Ah! well, I am prepared to believe that the gain might not be exclusively on one side."
Mrs. Lovegrove folded her fat hands, purring almost audibly. He seemed to her so very wise and good.
"That's so like you, Dr. Nevington," she said. "As I always tell Mr. Lovegrove, we have a great responsibility in having you for our pastor and friend. You are a standing rebuke to many of us, being so wide-minded yourself."
"Hardly that, hardly that," he answered with becoming modesty. "In my humble way I do strive towards unity, that is all. Even towards the Church of Rome I would extend a friendly and helpful hand. We cannot, of course, go to her, yet she should never be discouraged from coming to us.—But here is your good husband back again—ceased to be unevenly yoked with the unbeliever, eh, Lovegrove?"
"I was glad you took them away, Georgie," Mrs. Lovegrove put in. "Still I'm sorry for you, for the vicar's been talking so nobly. You've missed such a lot."
"Ah, hardly that. I have merely been giving your dear good wife a little lecture on Christian charity. How is Mrs. Nevington? Thank you, wonderfull well, earnest and energetic as ever. I do not know how I could meet the demands of this large parish without her."
"A true helpmeet," purred Mrs. Lovegrove.
"Truly so—and specially in all questions of organisation. She is altogether my superior in administrative capacity. Indeed, it is an understood thing between us that I relieve her of what may be called the bad third of her marriage vow. If she will love and honour, I assure her I am ready to obey. A capital working rule for husbands—eh, Lovegrove?—always supposing they have found the right woman, as you and I have."
In the midst of this delicious badinage the hostess had to rise to receive further guests. Conflicting emotions struggled within her ample bosom—namely, regret at leaving that thrice happy sofa, and satisfaction that others should behold the glory thereon so visibly enthroned.
"How d'ye do, Mrs. Porcher? How d'ye do, Miss Hart?" she said. "Very kind of you to come and call. Only a few friends as yet, but perhaps that's just as pleasant this warm afternoon. Dr. Nevington, as you see, and at his very best"—she lowered her voice discreetly. "So at home, so full of great thoughts, and yet so comical—quite a privilege for all to hear him talk."
Encouraged by recent commendation, George Lovegrove again rose with praiseworthy tact to the occasion. It may be stated in passing that, in person, he was below the middle height, a thick oblong man, his figure, indeed, not unsuggestive of a large carapace, from the four corners of which sprouted short arms and legs. His face was round, fresh-coloured, and clean to the point of polish. His yellowish grey hair, well flattened and shining, grew far back on his forehead. And this, combined with small blue eyes, clear as a child's, a slight inward squint to them, produced an effect of permanent and innocent surprise not devoid of pathos. In character he was guileless and humble-minded. The spectacle of cruelty or injustice would, however, rouse him to the belligerent attitude of the proverbialbrebis enragé. He believed himself to be very happy—an added touch of pathos perhaps—and was pained and surprised if it was brought home to him that others found life a less comfortable and kindly invention than he himself did. Hence reports of suicides worried him sadly. He would always have returned a verdict of temporary insanity, this being to him the only explanation conceivable of a voluntary exit from our so excellent present form of existence. Yet George Lovegrove was not without his little secret sorrow—who indeed is? A deep-seated regret for nonexistent small Lovegroves possessed him, the instinct of paternity being strong in him. He loved children, and, when alone, often lingered beside perambulators in Kensington Gardens fondly observing their contents. Yet not for ten thousand pounds sterling would he have admitted this weakness, lest in doing so he should hurt "the wife's feelings." And it was in obedience to consideration for the said feelings that he now threw himself gallantly into the breach. For, after acting as appreciative chorus to an interlude of sonorous trifling on the part of the clergyman with the newcomers, he adroitly—under promise of showing her recent additions to his collection of picture postcards—detached Miss Eliza Hart from the neighbourhood of the sofa and conveyed her to the farther side of the room. Mrs. Porcher, neat, pensive, and sentimental, could be trusted to play the part of attentive listener; but the great Eliza, as he knew by experience, was liable to develop dangerous energy, to get a little above herself, shake her leonine mane of upstanding sandy hair, and become altogether too talkative, not to say loud, for such distinguished company. Personally he had a soft spot in his heart for Eliza. But, if she put herself forward, he feared for "the wife's feelings," therefore did he skilfully detach her.
And he had reason to congratulate himself on this manoeuvre, for Eliza undoubtedly was in a frolicsome humour.
"Yes," she remarked, contemplating the portrait of a celebrated actress. "That is very taking and stylish; and it is just what I should like to have done with my Peachie." This gracefulsobriquetwas generally understood to bear testimony to the excellence of Mrs. Porcher's complexion. "Now, if we wanted a gentleman guest or two more at any time, a picture postcard of her like this, just slightly tinted, in answer to inquiries?"
Miss Hart, her head on one side, looked playfully at Mr. Lovegrove.
"What about a subsequent summons for over-crowding?" he chuckled. The whole breadth of the room, well understood, was between him and the wife's feelings, not to mention the august presence beside her upon the sofa.
"No doubt that has to be thought of!" Eliza nodded sagely. "But is she not looking sweeter than ever to-day? Do not pretend you have not noticed it, Mr. Lovegrove. There's no deceiving me! I know you."
Like all mild and moral men, Lovegrove flushed with delight at any suggestion that he was a gay dog, a dashing blade. His good, honest face took on a higher polish than ever.
"You are too clever by half, Miss Hart."
"Well, somebody has to keep their wits about them, with such a love as Peachie to care for. I dressed her myself to-day. 'The pearl-grey gown if you like,' I said, 'but not a scrap of black with it. Just a touch of colour at the throat, please.' 'No, dear Liz,' she said, 'it would call for remark, since I have never done so since I lost Major Porcher.' But there, Mr. Lovegrove, I insisted. For why she should go on wearing complimentary mourning all her life for a wretch that nearly broke her heart and ruined her, passes me. 'Forget the serpent,' I said, 'and put on a little turquoise tulle pompom.' Now just look at her!"
"Rather dangerous for some people, is it not?" Lovegrove inquired quite slyly.
"Hard on our gentlemen, you mean? Well, perhaps it is. But then they always have the sight of me to put up with.—No compliments, thank you. I have my eyesight and my toilet-glass, and they have let me know I was no Venus ever since I can remember. It would not do to depress our gentlemen too much. They might leave, and then wherever would Cedar Lodge be?"
Miss Hart became suddenly serious and confidential. "And that reminds me," she went on. "I wanted to have a private word with you to-day about a certain gentleman."
"Who may be?" the good George inquired.
"You can guess, can't you? Your own candidate."
"Mr. Iglesias?"
The lady nodded.
"Peachie must be spared anxiety, therefore I speak, Mr. Lovegrove. Something is going on, and she is getting worried. You cannot approach the person to whom we are alluding as you can either of our others. Rather stand-offish, even now after nearly eight years that he has been with us. Between you and me and the bedpost, Mr. Lovegrove, I am just a wee bit nervous of that person. So if you could hint, quite in confidence, what his plans may be for the future it would' be really friendly."
"Dear me, dear me! Plans? I do not quite follow you, Miss Hart. Nothing wrong with him, I trust?"
"That is just what we cannot find out. No spying, of course, Mr. Lovegrove. Neither Peachie nor I would descend to such meanness. Our gentlemen have perfect liberty. We would scorn to put questions. But it is close on a week now since the person we are alluding to has been to the City."
"Bless me! You surprise me. He cannot have left Barking Brothers & Barking?"
The great Eliza shook her leonine mane.
"I believe that is just exactly what he has done."
"You do surprise me. I can hardly credit it. Nearly a week, and he as punctual and regular as clockwork! I must run over this evening and catch him. Something must be wrong. And yet why has he not been here? Dear me. Miss Hart, you——"
But the end of the sentence was lost in the bass notes issuing from the presence upon the sofa.
"Truly, the prosperity of the nation," Dr. Nevington was saying, "of this dear old England of ours that we so love, is wholly bound up with the prosperity of her national Church. I use the word prosperity in a plain, manly, straightforward sense. Personally I should rejoice to see the bonds of Church and State drawn closer. It could not fail to make for the welfare of both. Then, among other benefits, we should see the poverty of many members of my cloth, which is now a crying scandal—"
"You do hear very sad tales from the country districts, certainly," sighed Mrs. Lovegrove.
"The state of affairs is more than sad, it is iniquitous. And therefore the Church must assert herself. The individual minister must assert himself, and claim a higher scale of remuneration. Help yourself, show push and principle, cultivate practical aims—that is what I preach to young men reading for Holy Orders. We have no place in these days for visionaries and dreamers. We want men who march with the times, who are interested in politics, and can make themselves felt."
So did the great voice roll on and outward. Very beautiful to the listeners in sound—though, in sense, it may be questioned whether it conveyed very definite ideas to them—but highly embarrassing to the house-parlourmaid, whose feminine tones quite failed to make headway against the volume of it. With the consequence that Dominic Iglesias was left standing in the shadow of the doorway unheeded.
He was aware, and that not without surprise, how much these few days of freedom and leisure had quickened his perceptions. His mental attitude had changed. His demand had ceased to be moderate. Hence he suffered a hundred offences to taste and sensibility hitherto unknown, or at least unregistered. He knew when a woman was plain, when a conversation was vapid or vulgar, a manner pretentious, a speech lacking in sincerity. Consciously he stood aside, no longer out of humility or indifference, but critically observant, challenging things however familiar, and passing judgment upon them. For example, the unlovely character of Mrs. Lovegrove's drawing-room engrossed his attention—the dirty-browns and tentative watery blues of it, the multiplicity of flimsy, worthless, little ornaments revealing a most lamentable absence of artistic perception. In that fine booming clerical voice he detected a kindred absence of delicate perception, a showiness born of very inadequate conception of relative values. Indeed, the voice and the sentiments given forth by it, in as far as he caught the drift of them, raised a definite spirit of antagonism in him. The voice seemed to trample. Dominic Iglesias was taken with an inclination—very novel in him—to trample, too. He crossed the room, an added touch of gravity and dignity in his aspect and manner.
The clergyman gazed at him with some curiosity, while Mrs. Lovegrove surged up off the sofa.
"Mr. Iglesias! Well, of all people! Whoever would have expected to see you at this early hour of the day?"
"Talk of a certain gentleman and that gentleman appears," Miss Eliza Hart whispered. Then wagging her finger at her host, "Now don't you forget that little question of mine. Find out his intentions, just, as you may say, under the rose. But there's Peachie signalling to go."
In the ensuing interval of farewells, which were slightly protracted owing to friskiness on the part of the fair Eliza, Iglesias found himself standing beside the clergyman. The latter still regarded him with curiosity. But, whatever his faults, not his worst enemy could accuse Dr. Nevington of being a respecter of persons unless he was well assured beforehand whom such persons might be. He therefore turned to Iglesias with the easy air of patronage not uncommon to his cloth, as one who should say: "My good sir, don't be afraid. I am a man of the world as well as a Christian. I will handle you gently. I won't hurt you."
"I think I caught a foreign name," he remarked. "You are paying a visit to London? I hope our capital makes an agreeable impression upon you."
"The visit has been of such long duration," Iglesias answered, "that impressions have, I am afraid, become slightly blurred by usage."
"Ah! indeed—no doubt that happens in some measure to all of us. I am to understand that you are a resident?"
Iglesias assented.
"In this district?"
Again he assented.
"Indeed. Really, I wish I had known it sooner. It always gives me pleasure to meet persons of another nationality than my own. Intercourse with them makes for liberality of view. It often dispels anti-English prejudice. I am always glad to be helpful to strangers."
"You are very kind," Iglesias said with gravity.
"Not at all—not at all. I hold very practical views not only regarding the duties of the Englishman to the alien, but of the pastor towards his flock. But I find it almost impossible, I regret to say, to become personally acquainted with all my parishioners. My curates are capital young fellows—earnest, active, go-ahead. But in a large area such as this there is always a shifting population with which the clergy, however energetic, find it difficult to keep in touch. We are obliged to discriminate between dwellers and sojourners. As soon as any person is proved to be abona fidedweller my curates pass his or her name on to me, and either I or my wife call in due course."
Dominic Iglesias permitted himself to smile.
"An excellent system, no doubt," he remarked.
"I find it works very well on the whole. But no system is infallible. There must be occasional oversights, and you have been the victim of one. I mention this to disabuse your mind of the idea of any intentional neglect. Well, Mrs. Lovegrove, and so our good friends Mrs. Porcher and Miss Hart have gone—estimable women both of them in their own line. I ought to be running away, too, and I have just been having a word with your other guest here, Mr.——"
"Iglesias," Dominic put in coldly. He was in a state of pretty high displeasure. To hear his name mispronounced might, he felt, precipitate a catastrophe.
"Iglesias?—ah! yes, thank you—I have been explaining to Mr. Iglesias our system of parochial visiting and quoting our well-known joke about the dwellers and sojourners. You remember it? He has, I regret to find, been counted among the latter, while he has qualified as one of the former. The mistake must be remedied. Well, good-by to you, Mrs. Lovegrove; I shall see your good husband on my way downstairs. Good-day to you, Mr. Iglesias. I shall hope to meet you again."
And with that he, and the encompassing sound of him, moved towards the door. Mrs. Lovegrove subsided upon the sofa. The supreme glory had departed, yet an afterglow from the effulgence of it remained in her beaming face as she looked up at Mr. Iglesias.
"It was a good fairy that brought you in so early to-day," she said. "Really, I am pleased you should have had the chance to meet Dr. Nevington. And I could see he was quite taken with you, by the way he began to talk before I had the chance to introduce you. But that's the vicar all over! He never is one to stand upon ceremony."
"So I can believe," Dominic said.
"You saw it? Ah, part of his thoughtfulness, wanting to put everybody at their ease. And I'm sure if there's one thing more disheartening than another, it is to have two of your friends standing up side by side, as stiff as a couple of pokers, without so much as a word. I know I am too ready to enter into conversation with strangers; but if there is a thing I cannot bear, it's any appearance of coolness."
She passed her handkerchief round her forehead and across her lips. She was marshalling her energies for a daring effort.
"Very warm, is it not?" she remarked, perhaps superfluously. Then she came to the point. "I know you are not very much of a churchgoer, Mr. Iglesias."
"I am afraid not"—he paused a moment. "You see, I was born and brought up in another faith."
"Yes—so George has told me. But I am sure none of us would ever be so illiberal as to throw that up against you. The vicar has been talking so beautifully about Christian charity; and we all know it was a thing you could not help. It was your misfortune, anybody would understand that, not your fault. Too, it's all over long ago and forgotten."
Dominic looked rather hard at her; but it was clear her words were innocent of any intention of offence.
"I suppose it is," he said sadly, Old Age and Loneliness laying their hands upon him, for some reason, very sensibly once again.
"Not that that's anything to be otherwise than thankful for," she added, with a slightly misplaced effort at consolation. "Of course anyone must feel how providential it is to be saved from all those terrible false doctrines and practices—not that I know anything about them. There's so much, don't you think, it is so much better not to know anything about. Then one feels more at liberty to speak."
Mr. Iglesias smiled.
"I am not sure that the matter had occurred from exactly that point of view before."
"Really now, and a clever person like you!" Mrs. Lovegrove passed her handkerchief across her forehead again. "George has a wonderful opinion of your cleverness, you know. And that is why I have always wished you and the vicar could be brought together. I have—yes, I own to it—I have been afraid sometimes you were a little unsettled about religion, and that it might unsettle Georgie, too. But I knew if you once met the vicar that would all be set right. As I often say to George, let anybody justseeDr. Nevington and then they will begin to have an inkling of all they miss in not hearing him in the pulpit."
But here, perhaps fortunately, the master of the house trotted back. He, too, beamed. He was filled with innocent rejoicing. Had he not successfully protected the wife's feelings, and was not Iglesias—who remained to him a wonderful being, stirring whatever element of romance might be resident in his guileless nature—present in person?
"Why, what's the meaning of this, Dominic?" he chuckled. "You've turned over a new leaf, gadding round to at-home days! Where's Threadneedle Street? What's come over you?"
"Threadneedle Street and I have agreed to part company."
"What, for good? Never?" this from both husband and wife.
"Yes, for good," Iglesias said.
Mr. Lovegrove ceased to beam. He became anxious again, and consequently solemn.
"Well, you do surprise me," he said. "Nothing gone wrong, I trust? Not any unpleasantness happened?"
"None," Iglesias answered. In breaking the news to these kindly but rudimentary souls he had determined to treat it very lightly. "I have come to the conclusion that I have worked long enough. It is a mistake to risk dying in harness. You retired, Lovegrove, three years ago. I am going to look about me a little and see what the rest of the world is doing."
"You'll miss the bank, and feel a little strange at first. Georgie did, though he had his home to interest him," Mrs. Lovegrove remarked.
"Undoubtedly George was more fortunate than I am," Iglesias replied, in his most courtly manner.
"Not but that all that could be easily remedied," she added, with a touch of archness. Then Mr. Iglesias thought it time to depart. In the hall his host held him, literally by the buttonhole, looking up with squinting blue eyes into his face.
"It's all rather sudden, Dominic," he said. "I do not want to intrude upon your confidence; but if there is anything behind, anything in which I can help?"
Mr. Iglesias shook his head.
"Nothing, my good old friend," he said.
"The wife's right, you know. You'll miss the bank, the regular hours, and the occupation. She's quite right. I did at first."
"I know. But already I have pretty well got through that phase, I think."
"Ah, you have a bigger mind than mine. You can rise to a wider view. Change affects a commonplace man like myself most. I was dreadfully lost at first—more than the wife knew. Females are very sensitive, and it would have hurt her to know all I felt. If the Almighty is good enough to give a man a faithful woman to look after him, he can't be too scrupulous in sparing her pain—at least, so I think." Suddenly his tone changed. "But you are not going to leave us, Dominic?—you are not going to move, I do hope?"
He was mindful of his promise to Eliza Hart, but he was also mindful of himself. It had occurred to him for how very much in the interest and pleasure of his life Dominic Iglesias really stood.
"Why, should you regret my going? Should you miss me?" the other asked, struck by his tone.
"Miss you," he said, "and after a friendship covering forty years! I know you are my superior in every way. I know I am not on your level. All the advantage is on my side in our friendship, always has been. But that is just where it is. Why, you know, Dominic—next to the wife of course—all along you have been the best thing I had."
Then it came to Iglesias, looking down at him, that among the many millions of his fellow-mortals, this whimsical childlike being stood nearest to him in sympathy and in love. The thought moved him strangely, at once deepening his sense of isolation and lessening the load of it.
"In that case I will not move. I will stay here, at Trimmer's Green," he said.
When Mr. Lovegrove reentered the sun-faded drawing-room his wife greeted him in these words:
"Well, I have been thinking it all over, Georgie, and we shall only be doing our duty by Mr. Iglesias if we send for your cousin Serena. For my part, I don't trust Mrs. Porcher. Did you see that fly-away blue bow? Those who seem so soft are often the deepest. And widows have all sorts of little cunning ways with them." She rose from the thrice happy sofa. "I was gratified to have Dr. Nevington and Mr. Iglesias meet. But we certainly will have to send for Serena," she said.
Mr. Iglesias crossed Trimmer's Green in the dusty sunshine. He had engaged to stay; and, indeed, he asked himself what person, what objects or interests there were to take him else-whither? Nevertheless, the promise seemed, somehow, a limiting of possibility and of hope. It was destiny. London, very evidently, having got him, did not mean to let him go. And London was not attractive this evening, but blouzy and jaded from the heat. He passed on into the great thoroughfare and turned eastward, absorbed in thought. Children cried. A pungent scent of over-ripe fruit came from barrows in the roadway and open doors of green-grocers' shops. Tempers appeared to be on edge. Workmen, pouring out from a big block of flats under construction on the left, jostled him in passing, not in insolence, but simply in inattention. Their language was starred with sanguinary adjectives. The noise of the traffic was loud. Iglesias turned up one of the side streets leading on to Campden Hill. It was quieter here and the air was a trifle purer. Halfway up the hill he hesitated. There was a shrine to be visited in these regions—in it stood an altar of the dead. And above that altar, in Iglesias' imagination, hung the picture of a woman, beautiful, and, to him, infinitely sad.
He turned eastward again and made his way into Holland Street. He rarely had the courage to go back there. He had never reentered the house. But this evening he was taken by the desire to look on it all once again. For he was still pursued by the disquieting question as to whether he had shirked the possibilities of his life, or had sacrificed them to a higher duty than any duty of personal development. If the latter, however barren of active happiness both past and present, he would be in his own eyes justified, and desolation would cease to have in it any flavour of self-contempt. Perhaps this dwelling-place of his childhood, youth, and what should have been the best of his manhood, might help to answer the question and set his doubts at rest.
A board—"To Let"—was up on the narrow iron balcony of the dining-room. Iglesias rang, and after brief parley with the caretaker—a neat bald-headed little old man, in carpet slippers and a well-brushed once-smart brown check suit, altogether too capacious for his attenuated person—was admitted.
"The place is quite empty save for my bits of sticks in the basement, sir," he said. "You are at liberty to go where you please. I am afflicted with the asthma and am glad to avoid mounting the stairs." He ended up with a husky little cough. So Iglesias passed through the vacant house unattended.
He received a pathetic yet agitating impression. The rooms were even smaller than he had supposed. They were gloomy, too, from the worn paint of the high wainscots and discoloration of the low ceilings. All the windows were shut and the atmosphere was close and faint. The corners were thick with crouching shadows, merely awaiting the cover of night, as it seemed to Iglesias, to take definite shape, stand upright, and come forth to possess and people all the house. Even now it belonged so sensibly to them that his own reverent footsteps sounded to him harshly intrusive upon the bare, uneven floors. At intervals, downstairs in the basement, he could hear the little old caretaker's husky cough.
And it was strange to him to consider what those crouching shadows might represent. Not the ghosts of human beings—in such he had small belief—but an aftermath of human emotions, purposes, and passions, formulated or endured in this apparently so innocent place. To his knowledge the origins of revolution had seethed here. The walls had listened to details of political intrigue, of projected assassination, to vehement declarations of undying hate. Of the men who had plotted and dreamed here, uplifted in spirit by the magic of terrible ideas, none were left. One by one they had gone out into the silence to meet death, swift-handed or heartlessly lingering, as the case might be. And what had they actually accomplished? he asked himself. Had their death, often as must be surmised of a sufficiently hideous sort, really advanced the cause of humanity and helped on the birth of that Golden Age, in which Justice shall reign alongside Peace? Or had these men merely wasted themselves, adding to the sum total of human confusion and wrong; and wasted the hearts and happiness of those allied to them by ties of friendship and of blood, leaving the second generation to repair, in so far as it might, the ruin which their violence had worked? Dominic Iglesias could not say. But this at least, though it savoured of reproach, he could not disguise from himself—namely, that out of the intemperate heat and fierceness of these men's thought and action had come, as a necessary consequence, the narrow opportunities and cold isolation of his own.
"As physically, so morally, spiritually, socially," he said to himself, "the younger generation pays the debts contracted by the generation immediately preceding it. Justice, indeed, reigns already, always has done so—. justice of a rather tremendous sort. But peace?—Peace is still very much to seek, both for the individual and the race."
Iglesias visited his mother's bed-chamber. He visited his former nursery. Then he visited the drawing-room, the heart of this very pathetic shrine where the altar of his dead was, almost visibly set up. To this room, during the many years of his mother's mental illness, he had come back daily after work; and had ministered to her, suiting his speech to her passing humour, trying to distract her brooding melancholy, and to soothe and amuse her as though she was an ailing child. Thank God, there was nothing ugly to remember regarding her. She had never been harsh or unlovely in her ways. Still, the strain of constant intercourse with her had been very great—how great Iglesias had hardly realised until now, as he stood in the centre of the room reconstructing its former appearance in thought and replacing its familiar furnishings.
There to the left of the further window, overlooking the garden, she had always sat, so that the light might fall upon her needlework—very fine Irish lace, in the making of which nearly all her waking hours were spent. She had learned the beautiful art as a young girl in her convent school; and her skill in it was great. In those sad later years when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far horizons disclosed themselves; dainty flower-gardens, crossed by open paths, and hedged about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty impediments. And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful things in this lacework also—confusions of outline, broken purposes, multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would be very glad. And Iglesias, glancing up silently from the pages of his newspaper or book, would see the sorrow pass out of her face as she leaned back in her chair and softly laughed. And he would perceive that, in the achievement of those countless but carefully ordered stitches, she had also achieved some mysterious victory of the spirit which, for a time at least, would give her freedom of soul and content. As a boy he had been rather jealous of her lacemaking, declaring that it was dearer to her than he himself was. But as he grew more experienced, more chastened, and, it must be added, more sad, he had come to understand that it veritably was as speech to her—though speech which he could but rarely interpret—expressing all that she could not, or dared not, otherwise express, all the poetry of her sweet, broken nature, its denied aspirations in religion, its tortured memories of danger and of love.
Now, standing in the centre of the empty room, and looking at the place beside the window where she habitually sat, Iglesias seemed to see once more, as he had so often seen in the past, her fine-drawn profile and softly waved upturned hair, her head and shoulders draped in a black mantilla, the lines of which followed those of her figure as she bent over her work. He could see the long delicate white hands moving rhythmically, with the assurance of perfected skill, over the web in its varying degrees of whiteness from the filmy transparency of the net foundation to the opacity of the closely wrought pattern. Those hands, in their ceaseless and exquisite industry, had troubled his imagination at times. For too often it had seemed as though they alone were really alive, intelligent, sentient, the rest of the woman dead. The impression was so vivid even yet—though Iglesias knew it to be subjective only, projected by the vividness of remembrance—that instinctively he crossed the room, laid his left hand upon the moulding of the high wainscot, leaned over the vacant space which appeared to hold her image, and spoke gently to her, so that the moving hands might find rest for a moment, while she recognised and greeted him, looking up.
There had always been a pause before the words of greeting came, while her consciousness travelled back, hesitatingly, to the actual and material world around her from the world of emotion and phantasy in which her spirit lived. There was a pause now, a prolonged silence, broken at last by the husky cough of the little old caretaker downstairs. The vacant space remained vacant. Nevertheless Dominic Iglesias received both recognition and greeting, and from these derived inward assurance that all was well—that he was justified of his past action, that he had not shirked the possibilities of his life, but sacrificed them to a higher duty than any individual and private one. The present might be empty of purpose and pleasure, the future lacking in promise and in hope; yet to him one perfect thing had been granted—namely, a human relationship of unsullied beauty, notwithstanding all its sadness, from first to last.
"And in the strength of that meat, one should surely be able to go many days!" he said, as he straightened himself up. "Thank God, I never failed her. How far she realised it or not, is but a small matter. I am obscure, perhaps as things now stand wholly superfluous, still I have, at all events, never grasped personal advantage at the expense of a fellow-creature's heart."
Yet, even so, the longing for sympathy and companionship oppressed him as never before. The sight of this place had stirred his affections and his spiritual sense. His soul cried out for some language in which to express itself—even though it were a language of symbol only, such as his mother had found in her lacemaking. How barren and vapid a thing was the exterior life, as all those whom he knew understood and lived it—his co-lodgers, his fellow-clerks, the good Lovegroves, his late employer, Sir Abel Barking, even, as he divined, that sonorous Protestant clergyman whom he had met this afternoon—as against the interior life, suggestion of which this vacant shadow-haunted house of innumerable memories presented to his mind! Was there any method by which the interior and exterior life could be brought into sane and fruitful relation, so that the former might sensibly permeate and dignify the latter?
The comfortable inward conviction, just vouchsafed him, that he was justified of his own past action, merely emphasised his consciousness that he was still very much adrift, with no definite port to steer for. He had, perhaps unwisely, promised George Lovegrove that he would stay on at Trimmer's Green, but what, after all, did that amount to? Even the exterior life was second-hand enough there; the interior life, as he judged, practically non-existent. And so his staying must be ennobled by some purpose beyond that of stepping across to smoke an after-dinner pipe with the good, affectionate Lovegrove man, or attending his estimable wife's "at homes." During the last ten days Mr. Iglesias had striven, with rare, pathetic diligence, to cultivate amusement. True, the oak palings had shut him out from Ranelagh; but, with that and a few other exceptions, amusement, as practised in great cities, is merely a matter of cash. Therefore he had dined at smart restaurants, had sampled theatres and music halls, had sat in the Park and watched the world and—in their more decent manifestations—the flesh and the devil drive by. He had to admit that unfortunately all this left him cold, had bored rather than entertained him. He had not felt out of place socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments—not, anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even commented on. At first he supposed this arose from some peculiarity of his dress or manner. Then he understood that the cause of this unsolicited attention bore a more flattering character, and in this connection certain remarks made by the Lady of the Windswept Dust occurred to his mind. But, Mr. Iglesias' pride being greatly in excess of his vanity—when the first moment of half-humorous surprise was passed—he found that these tributes to his personal appearance afforded him more displeasure than pleasure. He turned from them with a movement of annoyance, and turned from those places in which they were liable to manifest themselves likewise. No, indeed, it was something other than this he had to find, something lying far deeper in the needs of human nature, if the emptiness of his days was to be filled and the hunger of his heart and spirit satisfied!
Pondering which things he went down the creaking stairs of the house in Holland Street, Kensington, leaving the empty and, to him, sacred rooms to the crouching shadows. He had had his answer from the one person whom he had perfectly loved. And surely, in justifying the past, that answer gave promise of hope for the future? The way would be made clear, the method would declare itself. Let him have patience, only patience, as she, his mother, had had when traversing deserts and climbing Difficulty Hill in her lacework; and to him, also, should far horizons be disclosed.
In the narrow hall the neat little old caretaker met him, huskily coughing.
"The rent is low, sir," he said, "and the landlord is asking no premium. If you should wish further particulars, or to inspect the offices——"
But Mr. Iglesias put a couple of half-crowns into his hand.
"No," he answered, "I do not propose to take the house. Persons who were dear to me lived here once; and so I wanted to see it. As long as it is unlet I may come back from time to time."
The old man shuffled his slippered feet upon the bare boards, looking with mild ecstasy at the coins.
"And you will be most welcome, sir," he said. "Your generosity happens to be of great assistance to me—not that I wish it repeated. I am not grasping, sir, but I am grateful. I have a taste in literature which my reduced circumstances do not allow me to gratify. I see the prospect of many hours' enjoyment before me. I thank you."