And so it came about that a more tranquil spirit, touched with sober gladness, possessed Dominic Iglesias as, leaving that house of many memories, he pursued his way down Church Street and, passing into Kensington High Street opposite St. Mary Abbot's Church, turned eastward once again. A few doors short of the gateway leading into Palace Gardens was an unpretentious Italian restaurant where he proposed to dine. For it grew late. He had spent longer than he had supposed in wordless prayer before the altar of his dead. The remembrance of the book-loving little caretaker's gratitude remained by him pleasantly, softening his humour towards all his fellow-men. Simple kindness has great virtue, uplifting to the heart. To Iglesias it seemed those five shillings had been eminently well invested.
The streets were clearer now; and he walked slowly, enjoying the cooler air born of the sunset, and drawing from the leafy spaces of Kensington Gardens and the park. Presently he became aware of a figure, not altogether unfamiliar, threading its way among the intermittent stream of pedestrians along the pavement a few paces ahead. His eyes followed it reluctantly. In his present peaceful humour its aspect struck a jarring note. Soiled white flannel trousers, a short blue boating coat, a soft grey felt hat, tennis shoes, a shambling and uncertain gait as of one who neither knows nor cares whither he is going or why he goes—the whole effect purposeless, slovenly, inept.
Then followed a little scene which caused Iglesias to further slacken his pace. For the seedy figure, reaching the open door of the restaurant, hesitated, standing between the clipped bay trees set in green tubs which flanked the entrance on either hand. Stepped aside, craning upward to see over the yellow silk curtains drawn across the lower half of the windows. Moved back to the door and stood there undecided. Finally, as a smiling waiter, napkin on arm, came forward, the man crushed his hat down on his forehead, forced his hands deep into his trouser pockets and turned away with an audible oath. This brought him face to face with Mr. Iglesias, who recognised in him his fellow-lodger, Mr. de Courcy Smyth.
"What, you!" he exclaimed snarlingly, while his pasty face flamed. "There seems no escape from our dear Cedar Lodge to-night."
Then with an uneasy laugh he made an effort to recover himself.
"Really, I beg your pardon, Mr. Iglesias," he continued, "but my nerves are villainously on edge. I have just met those two young idiots, Farge and Worthington, waltzing home arm in arm like a pair of demented turtle-doves. Having to associate with such third-rate commercial fellows and witness their ebullitions of mutual admiration makes a man of education, like myself, utterly sick. I came out this evening to get free of the whole Cedar Lodge lot. You did the same, I suppose. Pray don't let me frustrate your purpose. I sympathise with it. I will remove myself."
The splotchy red had died out of the speaker's face. Notwithstanding the warmth of the evening he stood with his shoulders raised and his knees a little bent, as a poorly clad man stands in a chill wind on a wintry day. Iglesias observed his attitude, and in his present mood it influenced him more than the surly greeting had done.
"I intended to dine here," he said quietly. "So, I fancy, did you."
"Oh! I have changed my mind, thank you," Smyth answered.
"In consequence of my arrival, I am afraid?"
"No, I had other reasons."
"In any case I should be very glad if you would reconsider your decision and remain," Dominic said. "I am, as you see, alone, and I have not often the pleasure of meeting you. I shall be very happy if you will stay and dine with me, as my guest."
Smyth gave an odd, furtive look at the open door of the restaurant and the row of white tables within. A light had come into his pale blue eyes, making them uncomfortably like those of some half-starved animal.
"I am at a loss to know why I should accept hospitality from you," he remarked, at once cringingly and insolently.
"Simply because you would give me pleasure by doing so. I should value your society."
"I am not in evening dress."
"Nor am I," Dominic answered, with admirable seriousness. There was something pitiful to him in the conflict, obviously going forward in the other's mind, between hunger and reluctance to incur an obligation. He cut it short with gentle authority. "There is a vacant table in the corner where we can talk free from interruption. Let us go in and secure it."
At the beginning of the meal the conversation was intermittent, the burden of supporting it lying with Mr. Iglesias. But, as course followed course, hot and succulent, while thechiantiat once steadied his circulation and stimulated his brain, de Courcy Smyth became talkative, not to say garrulous. Finally he began to assert himself, to swagger, thereby laying bare the waste places of his own nature.
"You may think I was hard on Farge and Worthington just now, Mr. Iglesias," he said. "I own they disgust me; not only in themselves, but as examples of certain modern tendencies which are choking the life out of me and such men as me. You business people are on the up grade just now, and you know it. Whoever goes under, you are safe to do yourselves most uncommonly well. I don't mean anything personal, of course. I am just stating a self-evident fact. Commerce is in the air—you all reek of success. And so even shopwalkers, like Worthington, and that thrice odious puppy Farge, grow sleek, and venture to spread themselves in the presence of their betters—in the presence of a scholar and a gentleman, who is well connected and has received a classical education, like myself."
Smyth paused, turning sideways to the table, leaning his elbow on it, crossing his legs and staring gloomily down the long room.
"But what do they know or care about scholarship?" he continued. "What they do know is that the spirit of this unspeakably vulgar age is with them and their miserable huckstering. They know that well enough and act upon it, though they are too illiterate to put it into words—know that trade is in process of exploding learning, of exploiting literature and art to its own low purposes, in process of scaling Olympus, in short, and ignominiously chucking out the gods."
Dominic Iglesias had listened to this astonishing tirade in silence. The man was evidently suffering from feelings of bitter injury, also he was his—Iglesias'—guest. Both pity and hospitality engaged him to endurance. But there are limits. And at this point professional dignity and a lingering loyalty towards the house of Barking Brothers & Barking enjoined protest.
"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance."
"Only as one discriminates between a little dog and a big one. The little dog is the easier to kick. I can't get at the Rothschilds and Rockefellers; and so I go for the Farges and Worthingtons," Smyth answered. "In principle I am right. Trade, commerce, finance, juggle with the names as you like, it all comes back to the same thing in the end, namely, the murder of intellect by money. Comes back to the worship of Mammon, chosen ruler of this contemptiblefin de siècle, and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century. What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None, absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have no earthly use for us. We have not the ghost of a chance."
He altered his position, looking quickly and nervously at his host.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "For the moment I forgot you were on the other side, among the conquerors, not the conquered. Probably this conversation does not interest you in the least."
"On the contrary, it interests me very deeply," Dominic replied gravely.
"All the same, out of self-respect I ought to hold my tongue about it, I suppose. For I have accepted the position, Mr. Iglesias. I have learned to do that. Only on each fresh occasion that it is brought home to me—and it has been brought home abominably clearly to-night—my gorge rises at it. And it ought to be so. For it is an outrage—you yourself must admit—that a man who started with excellent prospects and with the consciousness of unusual talents—of genius, perhaps—should be ruined and broken, while every miserable little counter-jumper——"
He leaned his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook.
"For I have talent," he cried, in a curiously thin voice. "Before God I have. They may refuse to publish me, refuse to play me, force me to pick up scraps of hack-work on fourth-rate papers to earn a bare subsistence—at times hardly that. Yet all the same, no supercilious beast of an editor or actor-manager—curse the whole stinking lot—shall rob me of my faith in myself—of my belief that I am great—if I had justice, nothing less than that, I tell you, nothing less than great."
Dominic Iglesias drew himself up, sitting very still, his lips rigid, not from defect, but from excess of sympathy. The restaurant was empty now, save for a man, four tables down, safely ensconced behind the pink pages of an evening paper, and for a couple, at the far end, in the window—a young Frenchwoman, whose coquettish hat and trim rounded figure were silhouetted against the yellow silk curtain, and a precocious black-haired youth, with a skin like pale, pink satin, round eyeglasses and an incipient moustache. His attention was entirely occupied with the young woman; hers entirely occupied with herself. And of this Dominic Iglesias was glad. For the matter immediately in hand was best conducted without witnesses. He found it strangely engrossing, strangely moving. However vain, however madly exaggerated even, de Courcy Smyth's estimate of himself, there could be no question but that his present emotion was as actual and genuine as his past hunger had been. The man was utterly spent in body and in spirit. Offensive in speech, slovenly in person, yet these distasteful things added to, rather than detracted from, Iglesias' going out of sympathy towards him. He had rarely been in contact with a fellow-creature in such abandonment of distress. It was terrible to witness; yet it gave him a sense of fellowship, of nearness, even of power, which had in it an element of deep-seated satisfaction. While he waited for the moment when it should become clear to him how to act, his thought travelled back to the Lady of the Windswept Dust. He saw, not her over-red lips, but her serious eyes; saw her tearful and in a way broken, for all her light speech, her fanciful garments, and her antics with her absurd little dogs amid the sweetness of sunshine and summer breeze on Barnes Common. She was far enough away, so he judged, in sentiment and circumstance from the embittered and poverty-haunted man sitting opposite to him. Yet though superficially so dissimilar, they were alike in this, that both had dared to reveal themselves, passing beyond conventional limits in intercourse with him, Iglesias. Both had cried out to him in their distress. And then, thinking of that recently visited altar of the dead, thinking of the one perfect relationship he had known—his relationship to his mother—it came to him as a revelation that not participation in the pride of life and the splendour of it—still less association in mere pleasure and amusement—forms the cement which binds together the units of humanity in stable and consoling relationship; but association in sorrow, the cry for help and the response to that cry, whether it be help to the staying of the hunger of the heart and of the intellect, or simply to the staying of that baser yet very searching hunger of overstrained nerves and an empty stomach. The revelation was partial. Iglesias groped, so to speak, in the light of it uncertain and dazzled. But he received it as real—an idea the magnitude of which, in inspiration and application, he was as yet by no means equal to measure. Still he believed that could he but yield himself to it, and, in yielding, master it, it would carry him very far, teaching him that language of the spirit which he desired to acquire; and hence placing in his hand that earnestly coveted key to an adjustment between the exterior and interior life, the life of the senses and the life of the spirit, which must needs eventuate, manward and godward alike, in triumphant harmony.
Meanwhile there sat de Courcy Smyth, blear-eyed, sandy-red bearded, unsavoury, trying, poor wretch, to rally whatever of manhood was left in him and swagger himself out of his fit of hysteria. The Latin, however dignified, is instinctively more demonstrative than the Anglo-Saxon. Iglesias leaned across the table and laid his hand on the other man's shoulder.
"Wait a little," he said. "Drink your coffee and smoke. We need not hurry to move."
There was a pause, during which Smyth obediently swallowed his coffee, swallowed hischasseof cognac.
"I have made an egregious ass of myself," he said sullenly.
"No, no," Iglesias answered. "You have honoured me by taking me into your confidence. It rests with me to see that you never have cause to regret having done so."
"I believe you mean that."
"Certainly I mean it," Iglesias answered.
Smyth's hands trembled as he took a cigar and held a match to it.
"I am unaccustomed to meeting with kindness," he said in a low voice. Then recovering himself somewhat, he began to speak volubly again. "Of course I understand it all well enough. They are simply afraid of my work, those beasts of editors and playwrights. It is too big for them, they dare not face it and the consequences of it. It is strong stuff, Mr. Iglesias, strong stuff with plenty of red blood in it, and with scholarship, too. And so they pigeon-hole my stories and drames in self-defence, knowing that if these once reached the public, either in print or in action, their own fly-blown anæmic productions would be hissed off the stage or would ruin the circulation of the periodical which inserted them. It is all jealousy, I tell you, Mr. Iglesias, rank, snakish jealousy, bred by self-interest out of fear—a truly exalted parentage!"
He shifted his position restlessly, again setting his elbows upon the table and fingering the broken bread upon the cloth.
"At times, when I can rise above the immediate injustice and cruelty which pursue me," he went on, "I glory in my martyrdom. I range myself alongside those heroes of literature and art, who, because they were ahead of the age in which they lived, were scorned and repudiated by their contemporaries; but they found their revenge in the worship of succeeding generations. My time will come just as theirs did. It must—I tell you it must. I know that. I am safe of eventual recognition; but I want it now, while I am alive, while I can glut myself with the joy of it. I want to see the men who lord it over me, just because they have influence and money, who affect to despise me because they are green with envy and fear of me, brought to their knees, flattened so that I can wipe my boots on them. And—and"—he looked full at Dominic Iglesias, spreading out both hands across the narrow table, his pale prominent eyes blood-shot, his face working—"I want to see someone else—a woman—brought to her knees also. I want to make her feel what she has lost—curse her!—and have her come back whining."
"And if she did come back," Iglesias asked, almost sternly, "what would you do? Forgive her?"
De Courcy Smyth's hands dropped with a queer little thud on the table.
"I don't know. I suppose so. If she wanted to she could always get round me." Then he turned on Iglesias with hysterical violence. "But what do you know? Why do you ask that? Are you among her patrons? I trusted you. I believed you were a gentleman in feeling—and it is a dirty trick to get me in here and fill me up with food and liquor, when you must have seen my nerves were all to pieces, and then spring this upon me. Oh! hell!" he cried, "is there no comfort anywhere? Is everyone a traitor?"
And seeing his utter abjectness, Iglesias' heart went out to the unhappy man in immense and unqualified pity.
"I am grieved," he said gently, "if I have pained you unnecessarily. But truly I have sprung nothing upon you. How could I do so? I know nothing whatever of your circumstances save that which you yourself have told me during the last hour."
"Then why did you ask that question about—about her?"
"Because," Dominic answered, "I am ready to fight for you, in as far as you will allow me to do so; but I do not fight against women."
"You must have had uncommonly little experience of them then," Smyth answered with a sneer.
To this observation Mr. Iglesias deemed it superfluous to make any answer. A silence followed. The restaurant was empty, but for the waiters, who stood in a little knot about the door amusing themselves by watching the movement of the street. Looking round to make sure no one was within hearing, Smyth rose unsteadily to his feet.
"You meant what you said just now, Mr. Iglesias—that you were ready to fight for me?" he asked ungently yet cringingly.
"Certainly I meant it," Dominic replied, "the proviso I have made being respected."
"Yes, yes, of course—but what do you understand by fighting for me? Money?"
Dominic had risen, too. He remained for a moment in thought.
"Within reasonable relation to my means, yes," he said.
"I only want my chance," the other asserted. "The rest will follow as a matter of course. You would risk nothing, Mr. Iglesias. It would be an investment, simply an investment. The play is not finished yet—I have been too disheartened and disgusted recently to be able to work at it. But it is great, I tell you, great. When it is done will you give me my chance, and take a theatre for me and finance a couple ofmatinées?"
Again Dominic Iglesias thought for a moment, and again, driven by that strange necessity of fellowship—though knowing all the while he was putting his hand to a very questionable adventure—he replied in the affirmative.
On that same evening, and at the same hour at which Dominic Iglesias bound himself to the practical assistance of a personally unsavoury and professionally unsuccessful playwright, a conversation was in progress between two persons of more exalted social station in the drawing-room of a pleasant house in Chester Square. The said drawing-room, mid-Victorian in aspect, was decorated in white and gold and unaggressive green. The ground of the chintz was very white, sprinkled over with bunches of shaded mauve roses unknown to horticulture. Lady Constance Decies' tea-grown was white and mauve also. For she was still in half-mourning for her father, the late Lord Fallowfeild, who had died some eighteen months previously at a very venerable age, and with a touching modesty as though his advent in another world might savour of intrusion. He had always been a humble-minded man. He remained so to the last.
The windows stood open to the balcony. And the effect of the woman, and of the soft lights and colours surrounding her, was reposeful. For at the age of fifty Lady Constance, though stately, was a mild and very gentle person upon whom the push of the modern world had laid no hand. All the active drama of her life had been crowded into a few weeks of the early summer of her eighteenth year; since which, now remote, period she had enjoyed a tranquil existence, happy in the love of her husband and the care of her children. Her pretty brown hair was beginning to turn grey upon the temples. Her eyes, set remarkably far apart, had a certain vagueness and a great innocence of expression. She was naturally timid, and cared but little for any society beyond that of her near relations. To-night she was particularly content, mildly radiant even, thanks to the presence of her favourite brother, the present Lord Fallowfeild, and his avowed admiration of her younger daughter—a maiden of nineteen, who stood before her, with shining eyes, in all the delicate splendour of a spotless ball-dress.
"Yes, darling, you look very sweet," she said. "Just lean down—the lace has got caught in the flowers on yourberthe. That's right. Don't keep your father too late."
"And in all things be discreet"—this from Lord Fallowfeild. "It's been my motto through life, as your mother knows. And you couldn't have a brighter example of the excellent results of it than myself. Good-night, my dear. Enjoy yourself," and he patted her on the cheek, avoiding the kiss which she in all innocence proffered him. "Pretty child, Kathleen, uncommonly pretty," he continued as the door closed behind the graceful figure. "It strikes me, Con, your girls have all the good looks of the family in the younger generation, with the exception of Violet Aldham. But she's getting pinched, a bit pinched and witch-like. Then she makes up too much. I have no prejudice against a woman's improving upon nature where nature's been niggardly. But it is among the things that'll keep. It's a mistake to begin it too early. In my opinion Violet has begun it too early—might quite well have given herself another ten years' grace.—Maggie's girls are gawky, you know; and, between ourselves, so terribly flat, poor things, both fore and aft. Upon my word, I'm not surprised they don't marry."
"I am afraid Maggie feels it a good deal," said Lady Constance. Satisfaction mingled with pity in her soul. The disabilities of other women's children are never wholly distressing to a tender mother's heart. "You see, she's so anxious the girls should not marry the bishop's chaplains; and yet really they hardly see any other young men. I think it is a very difficult position, that of a bishop's wife."
Lord Fallowfeild smiled, settling himself back in the corner of the wide sofa and crossing his long legs. He had thought more deeply on a good many subjects than the majority of his acquaintance supposed; with the consequence that he occasionally surprised his fellow-peers by the acuteness of his observations in debate. Lord Fallowfeild, it may be added, took his recently acquired office of hereditary legislator with a commendable mixture of humour and seriousness.
"Their position is an anomalous one," he said; "and an anomalous position is inevitably a difficult one—ought to be SO; in my opinion. But that's not to the point. We were talking, not about the episcopal ladies, but about this little business of Kathleen's. So you believe Lady Sokeington has views and intentions?"
"I know that she has. But you see, Shotover," Lady Constance went on, returning to the name which that gentleman had rendered somewhat notorious in earlier years by a record in sport, in debts, in amours, and in irresistible sweetness of temper—"I want to be quite sure he is really good. Because the affair has not gone very far yet and it might be put a stop to—at least I hope and think it might—without making darling Kathleen too dreadfully unhappy. You do believe he really is good?"
Lord Fallowfeild leaned forward and rubbed a hardly perceptible atom of fluff off his left trouser leg just above the ankle.
"My dear Con," he answered, "you are very charming, but you are a trifle embarrassing, too, you know. Haven't you learned, even at this time of day, that very few men in our world are good in a good woman's sense of the word?"
Lady Constance's smooth forehead puckered into fine little lines.
"Shotover, dear," she said, "you're not getting embittered, I hope?"
"Me? Bless you, no, never in life!" he returned, smiling very reassuringly at her. "Don't worry yourself under that head. I quarrel with nobody and nothing, not even the consequences of my past iniquities. It is a very just world, take it all round, and has been kinder to me than I deserve."
"Oh! but you do nothing, you—you are what—you won't think me rude, Shotover?—what the boys call 'very decent' now."
Lady Constance spoke hurriedly, her colour rising in the most engaging manner.
"As decent as I know how, you dear soul," he said, taking her hand in his. "But that makes no difference to one's knowledge of one's own ways, in the past, or of the ways of other men."
"But Alaric Barking?"
"Neither better nor worse than the rest."
Then Lord Fallowfeild shut his small and beautiful mouth very tight, as though he would be glad to avoid further cross-questioning. Lady Constance's forehead remained puckered.
"It's dreadfully difficult when one's girls grow up," she said plaintively. "One can be comfortable about them, poor darlings, and enjoy them when they are in the nursery—even in the schoolroom, though governesses are worrying. They know so much about quantities of subjects which seem to me not to matter. One never refers to them in ordinary conversation; and if one should be obliged to it is so easy to ask somebody to tell one. And yet they manage to make me feel dreadfully uncomfortable and ignorant because I know nothing about them. But when they grow up——"
"Who, the governesses?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired. "I never supposed they stood in need of that process—thought they started out of the egg all finished, as you might say, and ran about at once like chickens."
"No, no, the girls, poor darlings," Lady Constance replied. "One does get dreadfully anxious about them, Shotover, really one does—specially if one has escaped something very frightening oneself and has been very happy—lest they should fall in love with the wrong people, or lest they should be anything which one did not know beforehand and then everything should turn out dreadful. I should be so miserable. I don't think I could bear it. I know it is wrong to say that, because if one was really good, one would accept whatever God sent without murmuring. So I could for myself, I think. In any case I should earnestly try to. But for the children it is so much harder. If they were unhappy I should feel ashamed of having had them—as if I'd done something horribly selfish; because, you see, there can be nothing so delightful as having children."
She looked at Lord Fallowfeild in the most pathetic manner, the corners of her mouth a-shake. And he took her hand and held it again, touched by the sincerity of her confused utterance, and the great mother-love resident in her. Touched, perhaps, by the age-old problem of man and maid, also.
"Dear little Con, dear little Con," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you should be worried, but I'm afraid we've got to look facts in the face. And it's no kindness for me to lie to you about these matters. I don't pretend to say what's right or what's wrong; I only say what it is. We can't make society, and the ways of it, all over again even to save Kathleen a heartache. I don't want to seem a brute, but she must just take her chance along with the rest of you. Marriage always has been a confounded uncertain business, and will always remain so, I suppose. The sort of remedies excited persons suggest to mitigate the dangers of it are a good deal worse than the disease, in my opinion. Every woman has to take her chance. Every man has to take his, too, you know—and the chance strikes some of us as such an uncommonly poor one, that, upon my honour, it seems safest to wash one's hands of it altogether."
"But you're not unhappy, Shotover, dear? You're not lonely?" Lady Constance inquired anxiously.
"Abominably so sometimes, Con. But I manage, oh! I manage. I have my consolations"—he smiled at her, perhaps a trifle shamefacedly. "But now about Kathleen," he went on, "as I say, she must take her chance along with the rest of you, poor little dear. After all, you took your chance when you married Decies, and it has not turned out so badly, you know."
Lady Constance became radiant once more, as some mild-shining summer moon emerging from behind temporarily obscuring clouds.
"Oh! but then," she said, "of course that was so entirely different."
Lord Fallowfeild patted her hand, his head bent, looking at her somewhat merrily.
"Was it, my dear, was it?—I wonder," he said.
She withdrew her head with a certain dignity. Notwithstanding her softness and tenderness, there were occasions—even with those she loved best—when Lady Constance could delicately mark her displeasure.
"I think you are a little embittered, Shotover," she asserted.
He leaned back, still smiling, and shaking his head at her.
"Old and wise—unpleasantly old, and not quite such a fool as I used to be, that's all," he answered.
For a time there was silence, both brother and sister thinking their own thoughts. Then the latter spoke. Like many gentle persons, she was persistent. She always had been so.
"I should be so grateful if you would tell me, because I think I ought to know, and then I should try to turn the course of darling Kathleen's affections before it all becomes too pronounced. Is there any entanglement, anything amounting to what one calls an impediment, in—well—you understand—against Alaric Barking?"
Lord Fallowfeild got up, took a turn across the room, came back, and stood in front of her.
"I wish you wouldn't, Con," he said. "Upon my soul, I wish you wouldn't. It's a nasty thing for an old man, who has gone the pace in his day pretty thoroughly, to give away a lad who may have made a slip just at the start, and who is doing his best to get his feet again and run straight. Alaric Barking's a good fellow. I like him. I never have been and never shall be partial to that family. Your sister Louisa cried up their virtues and their confounded solvency, in the old days, till she made them a positive nuisance. She's not a happy way of inculcating a moral economic lesson, hasn't Louisa. But I own I'm fond of this boy. He's far the best of the whole lot—gentlemanlike, and a sportsman, and good-looking—unusually so for one of that family—and, my dear, he's downright honestly in love with Kathleen. I've watched him—did so when he was down at Ranelagh one day last month with her and Victoria Sokeington—and I know the real thing when I see it."
"But—but, I am afraid, Shotover, you mean me to understand there is some impediment?" Lady Constance repeated.
"Oh! well, hang it all, I'm awfully sorry, but if you are determined to have it, Connie, perhaps there is. Only for heaven's sake don't be in too much of a hurry. Between ourselves, I happen to know the boy's doing his best to shake himself free in an honourable manner. So don't rush the business. Like the dear tender-hearted creature you are, have a little mercy on the poor beggar. Let the whole affair drift a little. It may straighten out."
Lady Constance meditated for a minute or so.
"It's very dreadful that there should be any impediment," she said.
"I'll back Alaric to agree with you there," Lord Fallowfeild answered.
"You'll do what you can, Shotover, won't you, to help Kathleen? I never forget how you helped me once!"
Lord Fallowfeild's handsome face expressed rather broad amusement.
"I'm afraid the two cases are hardly parallel, my dear," he said.
"The play's on the other side, the crowd's on the other side, all the fun's on the other side, and I am on this side with nothing more lively than you, you little shivering idiot, for company."
Poppy St. John drew the spaniel's long silky ears through her fingers slowly.
"I am bored, Cappadocia," she said, with a yawn which she made not the slightest effort to stifle, "bored right through to my very marrow. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, how I do wish something would happen!"
Poppy sat, propped up with scarlet silk cushions, in a cane deck-chair, on the white-railed balcony upon which the first-floor bedroom windows opened. Around her were strewn illustrated magazines and ladies' papers; but unfortunately the stories in the former appeared to her every bit as silly as the fashion-plates in the latter. Both had equally little to do with life as the ordinary flesh and blood human being lives it. She was filled with a rebellious sense of the banality of her surroundings this afternoon. Even from her coign of vantage upon the balcony, whence wide prospects disclosed themselves, everything looked foolish, pointless, of the nature of an unpardonably stale joke.
The said balcony, divided into separate compartments by the interposition of wooden barriers, extended the whole length of the terrace of twenty-seven houses. And these were all precisely alike, with white wood and stucco "enrichments," as the technical phrase has it. Cheap stained and leaded glass adorned the upper panels of the twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps—thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with couples of bay windows. There was a determination of cheap smartness, a smirking self-consciousness about the little houses, a suggestion of having put on their best frocks and high-heeled shoes and standing very much on tiptoe to attract attention. The balconies, narrow where the upper bays encroached on them, wide where the house fronts were recessed above the twin front doors, broke forth into a garland of flower-boxes. Cascades of pink ivy-leaf geranium, creeping-jenny, and nasturtiums backed by white or yellow Paris daisies, flowed outward between the white ballusters and masked the edge of the woodwork. The effect, though pretty, was not quite satisfactory—being suggestive of millinery, of an over-trimmed summer hat.
Immediately below was the roadway, bordered by an asphalt pavement on either side, then the high impenetrable oak paling, which had baffled Dominic Iglesias' maiden effort at participation in the amusements of the rich. From Poppy's balcony, however, the palings offered no impediment to observation. All the green expanse of the smaller polo-ground was visible. So was the whole height of the grove of majestic elms on the right and the back of the club house; and, and the left, betweenmassifsof shrubbery, a vista of lawns sloping towards the river peopled by a sauntering crowd.
It was upon this last that Poppy directed her gaze. To the naked eye the units composing it showed as vertical lines of grey, brown, and black, blotted with bright delicate colour, and splashed here and there with white, the whole mingling, uniting, breaking into fresh combinations kaleidoscope fashion. Through the opera-glasses figures of men, women, and horses detached themselves, becoming quaintly distinct, neat as toys, an assemblage of elegant highly finished marionnettes. There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant, clear-cut silent little things upon that amazingly verdant carpet of grass. But it was a fascination which, for Poppy, had by now worn somewhat thin. The interest proved too far away, too impersonal. Indeed it may be questioned whether any who have not within themselves large store of resignation, or of hope, can look on at gaiety, in which they have no share, without first sadness and then pretty lively irritation. And of those two most precious commodities, resignation and hope, Poppy had but limited reserve stock at present. So she pulled the little dog's ears rather hard and lamented:
"Oh! my good gracious me, if only something would happen!"
Then, the words hardly out of her mouth, she shot the much-enduring Cappadocia off her lap and, restoring her elbows on the rails, leaned right out over the balcony.
"Come here, dear beautiful lunatic, come here," she cried. "For pity's sake don't pass by!"
Perhaps fortunately this very unconventional invitation was lost upon Dominic Iglesias, soberly crossing the road with due observance of the eccentricities of the drivers of motor-cars and riders of bicycles. Looking up, he was aware of a vision quite sufficiently indicative of welcome, without added indiscretion of words.—The white balustrade, the trailing fringe of nasturtiums, succulent leaves and orange-scarlet blossoms; the woman's bust and shoulders in her string-coloured lace gown, her small face, curiously vivid in effect, capped by the heavy masses of her black hair, her singular eyes full of light, the red of her lips and tinge of stationary pink in her cheeks supplemented by a glow of quick excitement. A few weeks ago the ascetic in Iglesias might have taken alarm. Now it was different. He had his idea, and, walking in the strength of it, dared adventure himself in neighbourhoods otherwise slightly questionable.
Five minutes later Poppy advanced across the little drawing-room to meet him.
"Well," she said, "of course you might have come sooner. But, equally of course, you might never have come at all, so I won't quarrel with you about the delay, though I would like you to know it has worried me a good deal."
"Has it? I am sorry for that," Dominic answered gravely.
"Yes, be sorry, be sorry," she repeated. "It is comfortable to hear you say so."
She looked at him with the utmost frankness, took his hand and led him to a settee filling in the right angle between the fireplace and the double doors at the back of the room.
"Sit down," she said, "and let us talk. Have another cushion—so—and if you're good I'll give you tea presently. And understand, you needn't be careful of yourself. I'll play perfectly fair with you. I've been thinking it all out during this time you didn't come; and I never go back on my word once given. So, look here, you needn't account for yourself in any way. I don't even want to know your name—specially I don't want to know that. It might localise you, and I don't want to have you localised. Directly a person is localised it takes away their restfulness to one. One begins to see just all the places where they belong to somebody else, notice-boards struck up everywhere warning one to keep off the grass. And that's a nuisance. It raises Old Nick in one, and makes one long to commit all manner of wickedness which would never have entered one's head otherwise."
Poppy held her hands palm to palm between her knees, glancing at Dominic Iglesias now and again sideways as she spoke. The bodice of her dress, cut slightlyen coeur, showed the nape of her neck, and the whole of her throat, which was smooth and rounded though rather long. Her make altogether was that not uncommon to London girls of the lower middle-class: small-boned and possibly anæmic, but prettily moulded, and with an attraction of over-civilisation as of hot-house-grown plants. Just now her head seemed bowed down by the weight of her dark hair, as she sat gathered together, making herself small as a child will when concentrating its mind to the statement of some serious purpose.
"I've knocked about a lot," she went on. "It's right you should know that. And there's not very much left to tell me about a number of things not usually set down in conversation books designed fordébutants. But just on that account I may be rather useful to you in some ways.—Don't go and be offended now, there's a dear, good man," she added coaxingly. "Because judging by what you told me the other day, there's no doubt that, under some heads, you are very much of adébutant."
"I suppose I am," Iglesias said slowly. It was very strange to him to find himself in so sudden and close an intimacy with this at once so wise and so artificial woman creature. But he had his idea. Moreover, increasingly he trusted her.
"Of course you are," she asserted. "That's just where the beauty of it all comes in. You're the veriest infant. One has only to look into your face to see that.—Don't go and freeze up now. You belong to another order of doctrine and practice to that current in contemporary society."
Poppy gazed at the floor, still making herself small, the palms of her hands pressed together between her knees.
"And that's just why you can be useful to me, awfully useful, if you choose—I don't mean money, business, anything of the kind. I'm perfectly competent to manage my own affairs, thank you. But you're good for me, somehow. You rest me."
She began to rock herself gently backwards and forwards, but without taking the heels of her shoes off the ground.
"Yes, you rest me, you rest me," she repeated.
"I am glad," Iglesias said. He felt soberly pleased, thankful almost.
Again Poppy glanced at him sideways.
"Yes, I believe you are," she said. "And that shows things have happened to you—in you, more likely—since we last met. You have come on a great piece."
"I doubt if I have come on, so much as gone back, to influences of long ago," he answered; "to things which had been overlaid by the dust of my working years almost to the point of obliteration."
"Was it pleasant to go back?" Poppy asked.
"Not at all. The going was painful. It required some courage to brush off the dust."
"It usually does require courage—at least that's my experience—to brush off the dust."
Dominic Iglesias made no immediate answer. He was a little startled at his companion's acute reading of him, a little touched by her confidence. Her words seemed to suggest the possibility of a relationship which fitted in admirably with the development of his idea. He sat looking away across the room, and, doing so, became aware that the said room possessed unexpected characteristics, calculated to elucidate his impressions of its owner's character. It was a man's room rather than a woman's, innocent of furbelows and frills. Two low, wide settees, well furnished with cushions and upholstered in dark yellowish-red tapestry, fitted into the corners on either side the double doors. A couple of large armchairs and a revolving book-table occupied the centre of the room. An upright piano, in an ebonised case, draped across the back with an Indian phulkari—discs of looking-glass set in coarsely worked yellow eyelet holes forming the border of it—stood at right angles to the wall just short of the bay window. In the window, placed slant-wise, was a carved black oak writing-table, a long row of photographs stuck up against the back shelf of it. The walls were hung with a set of William Nicolson's prints, strong, dark, distinct, slightly sinister in effect; a fine etching of Jean François Millet'sGleaners; and, in noticeable contrast to this last, a mezzotint of Romney's picture of Lady Hamilton spinning. Upon the book-table were a silver ash-tray and cigarette-box. The air was unquestionably impregnated with the odour of tobacco, which the burning of scent-sticks quite failed to dissemble.
While Mr. Iglesias thus noted the details of his surroundings, his companion observed him, closely, intently. Suddenly she flung herself back against the piled-up cushions.
"Let the dust lie, let it lie," she cried, almost shrilly. And as Dominic turned to her, surprised at her vehemence, she added, "Yes, it's safest so. Let it lie till it grows thick, carpeting all the surface, so that, treading on it, one's footsteps are muffled, making no sound!"
Poppy jumped up, crossed swiftly to the writing-table, swept the long row of photographs together and pushed them into a drawer.
"There you go, face downwards, every man Jack of you," she said. "And, for all I care, there you may stay."
Then she turned round, confronting Dominic Iglesias, who had risen also, her head carried high, her teeth set.
"You may not grasp the connection of ideas—I don't the very least see how you should, and I've no extra special wish that you should. But you must just take my word for it that's one way of thickening the dust, in my particular case, and not half a bad way either!"
She pushed the heavy masses of her hair up from her forehead, crossed the little room again and stood before Iglesias smiling, her hands clasped behind her back.
"Yes, you rest me," she said, "you do, even more than I expected. I wanted awfully to see you; and yet I was half afraid if I did we mightn't pull the thing off. But we are going to pull it off, aren't we?"
This direct appeal demanded a direct answer; and Iglesias, looking down at her, felt nerved to a certain steadiness of resolve.
"Yes, we are," he said gravely. "That, at least, is my purpose. I have very few friends. I should value a new one." Then he added, with a certain hesitancy, "I am glad you are not disappointed."
"Ah! you have come on—not a question about it," Poppy cried. "Sit down again. You needn't go yet. And we are through with disturbances for this afternoon anyhow. An anti-cyclone, as the weather reports put it, is extending over all our coasts. I feel quite happy. Let me enjoy the anti-cyclone while it lasts—and I'll give you your tea."
But of that tea Dominic Iglesias was fated not to drink. A ring at the bell, a parley at the front door, followed by the advent of an elderly parlourmaid bearing a card on a small lacquer tray.
"His lordship says if you're engaged he could wait a little, ma'am. But he wants particularly to see you to-day."
Poppy took the card, glanced at it, and then at Dominic Iglesias.
"I'm afraid, I'm awfully afraid I shall have to let you go," she said. She took both his hands, and holding them, without pressure but with a great friendliness, went on: "Don't be offended, or you'll make me miserable. But he's an old friend; and he's been a perfect brick to me—stood by me through all my worst luck. I can't send him away. You won't be off ended?"
"No," Iglesias said.
"And you will come again? You make me feel all smooth and good. You promise you'll come?"
"Yes," Iglesias said.
In the narrow passage a tall, eminently well-dressed middle-aged gentleman stood aside to let him pass. Dominic Iglesias received the impression of a very handsome person, whose possible insolence of bearing received agreeable modification, thanks to the expression of kindly humorous eyes and a notably beautiful mouth.
Upon the centre table of the square first-floor sitting-room at Cedar Lodge a note awaited Mr. Iglesias, addressed in George Lovegrove's neat business hand.
"Dear old friend," it ran—"the wife asks you to take supper with us to-morrow night. Step across as early as you like. My cousin, Miss Serena Lovegrove, is paying us a visit. Yours faithfully, G. L.—N. B. Come as you are: no ceremony. G. L."
"Hullo, girlie," called the red and green parrot, as it helped itself up the side of its zinc cage with beak as well as claws.
Serena Lovegrove had opened the door suddenly. Then, seeing that Mr. Iglesias alone occupied the room, neither her host nor hostess being present, she paused in the doorway, a large floppy yellow silk work-bag in her hands, undecided whether to retreat or to proceed. And it was thus that the bird, discovering her advent, announced it, while the pupils of his hard, round yellowish grey eyes dilated and contracted—"snapped," as Serena would have said—maliciously.
Serena was a tall, elegant, faded woman, dressed in black, her little upright head balanced upon a long thin stalk of neck. Though undeniably faded, there was, as now seen in the quiet evening light, a suggestion of youthfulness about her. He brown eyes, pretty though rather small, snapped even as did those of the parrot. Excitement—to-night she was very much excited—invariably produced in Serena an effect of clutching at her long-departed girlhood, an effect sufficiently pathetic in the case of a woman well on in the forties. And it was precisely this ineffectual throw-back to a Serena of seventeen or eighteen which lent a sharp edge of irony to the strident salutations of the parrot, as it called out again:
"Hullo, girlie! Polly's own pet girlie," then with a prolonged and ear-piercing whistle:—"Hi, four-wheeler! girlie's going out." And hoarsely, with a growl in its throat: "Move on there, stoopid, can't yer? Shut the door."
During the delivery of these final admonitions Mr. Iglesias had recognised the shadowy figure standing on the threshold and advanced. This decided Serena. Still twisting the ribbons of the yellow work-bag round her thin fingers, she drifted into the room.
"I think I have had the pleasure of meeting you once or twice before, Miss Lovegrove," Dominic said. His manner was specially gentle and courtly, for he could not but feel the poor lady was at a disadvantage, owing to the very articulate indiscretions of the parrot.
"Oh! yes," Serena answered. "Certainly we have met. But you are wrong as to the number of times. It is more than once or twice. Five times, I think; or it may have been six. No, it is five, because I remember you were expected, in the evening, the day before I went home the winter before last; and at the last moment you were unable to come. That would have made six. Now it is only five."
"You have an excellent memory," Iglesias said. "It is kind of you to remember so clearly."
"I wonder if it is—I mean, I wonder whether it is kind," Serena rejoined.
She was quite innocent of any intention of sarcasm. But her mind, like those of so many unoccupied, and consequently self-occupied persons, was addicted to speculation of a minor and vacuous sort. She was also liable—as such persons often are—to mistake cavilling for spirit and wit—a most tedious error!
"Still you are right in saying I have a good memory," she added. "People generally observe that. But then I was always taught it was rude to forget. Forgetfulness is the result of inattention. At school I never had any difficulty in learning by heart."
"You must have found that both a useful and pleasant talent."
"Perhaps," Serena replied negligently. She was determined not to commit herself, having arrived at the conclusion that Mr. Iglesias' address was too civil. "It was bad manners of him not to remember how often we had met," she said to herself, "and now he is trying to pass it off. But that won't do!" Serena had many and distinct views on the subject of manner and manners. She was never certain that civility did not argue a defect of sincerity. She agreed with herself to think that over again later. Meanwhile she would carefully remark Mr. Iglesias. "If he is insincere, as I fear he is, he is sure to betray it in other ways. Then I shall be on my guard." Forewarned is, of course, forarmed, and Serena felt very acute. Though against exactly what she was taking such elaborate precautions, it would have been difficult for her, or for anyone else, to have stated. However, just now it was incumbent upon her to make conversation. As is the way with persons not very fertile in ideas, she had recourse to the simple expedient of asking a leading question.
"Are you fond of animals?" she inquired.
"I am afraid I have very little knowledge of animals," Iglesias replied.
Serena laughed dryly. This was so transparent a subterfuge.
"What a very odd answer!" she said. "Because everybody must really know whether they like animals or not."
"I am afraid I stand by myself then, a solitary exception. I have had little or nothing to do with animals, and have therefore had no opportunity of discovering whether they attract me or not."
"How very odd!" Serena repeated.
She moved across to the centre-table where Mr. Lovegrove's books of picture postcards, the miscellaneous consequences of many charity bazaars, and kindred aesthetic treasures reposed, and deposited her work-bag in their company. Her movement revived the attention of the parrot, who had been nodding on its perch.
"Poor old girlie, take a brandy and soda? Kiss and be friends. Good-night, all," it murmured hoarsely, half asleep.
"If your question bore reference to that particular animal, I stand in no doubt as to my sentiments," Dominic remarked. "I am anything but fond of it. I think it an odious bird."
"Ah! you see you do know," Serena exclaimed. "I was sure you did." She felt justified in her suspicion of his sincerity. "But nobody would agree with you, Mr. Iglesias, because of course it is really a very clever parrot. They very seldom learn to say so many things."
"How fortunate!" Dominic permitted himself to ejaculate.
"I don't see why you should say it is fortunate."
"Do not its remarks strike you as somewhat impertinent and intrusive?"
"I wonder if an animal can be impertinent," Serena said reflectively.
But here to her vexation, for it appeared to her that she had just started a really interesting subject of discussion, Mrs. Lovegrove bustled into the room.
"Well, Mr. Iglesias," she began, "I am sure I am very delighted to see you, and so will Georgie be. He was remarking only yesterday we don't seem to see so much of you as we used to do. He's just a little behind time, is Georgie, having been kept by the dear vicar at a meeting about the Church Workers' Social Evenings Guild at the Mission Room in Little Bethesda Street. You wouldn't know where that is, Mr. Iglesias—though I can't help hoping you will some day—but Serena knows, don't you, Serena? It's where Susan—her elder sister, Miss Lovegrove"—this aside to Dominic—"gave an address once to the members of the Society for the Conversion of the Jews."
"No doubt I remember; but Susan is always giving addresses somewhere," Serena said loftily.
"And very good and kind of her it is to give addresses," Mrs. Lovegrove rejoined. "Even the dear vicar says what a remarkable gift she has as a speaker, and there's no question as to the worth of his praise."
"I wonder if it is—I mean I wonder if it is good and kind of Susan to give addresses," Serena remarked. "Because of course she enjoys giving them. Susan likes to have a number of people listening to her."
"But if the object is a noble one?"—this from Mrs. Lovegrove, a little nonplussed and put about.
"Still, if you enjoy doing anything, how can it be good and kind to do it?" Serena said argumentatively. "Susan is very fond of publicity. I think people very often deceive themselves about their own motives."
She looked meaningly at Dominic Iglesias as she spoke. And he looked back at her gravely and kindly, though with a slightly amused smile. His thoughts had travelled away—they had done so pretty frequently during the last twenty-four hours—to the smirking self-conscious little house on the verge of Barnes Common. Unpromising though it had appeared outwardly, yet within it he believed he had found a friend—a friend who was also an enigma. Perhaps, as he now reflected, all women are enigmas. Certainly they are amazingly different. He thought of Poppy. He looked at Serena. Yes, doubtless they all are enigmas; only—might Heaven forgive him the discourtesy—all are not enigmas equally well worth finding out.
George Lovegrove arrived. Supper, a somewhat heavy and hybrid meal, followed—"all comfortable and friendly," as Mrs. Lovegrove described it, "no ceremony and fal-lals, but everything put down on the table so that you could see it and please yourself."
Serena, however, was difficult to please. She picked daintily at the food on her plate. Her host observed her with solicitude.
"Do take a little more," he said, in an anxious aside, Mrs. Lovegrove being safely engaged in conversation with Mr. Iglesias, "or I shall begin to be nervous lest we aren't offering you quite what you like."
But Serena was obdurate.
"Pray don't mind, George," she said. "You know I never eat much. I am quite different from Susan, for instance. She always has a large appetite, and so have all her friends. Low Church people always have, I think. But I never care to eat a great deal, especially in hot weather."
Serena was really very glad indeed to come to London just now. Still, there were self-respecting decencies to be observed, specially in the presence of another guest. Relationship does not necessarily imply social equality; and, as Serena reminded herself, the family always had felt that poor George had married beneath him. Therefore it was well to keep the fact of her own superior refinement well in view. In the case of good George Lovegrove this was, however, a work of supererogation. For he had a, to himself, positively embarrassing respect for Serena's gentility—embarrassing because at moments it came painfully near endangering the completeness of his consideration for "the wife's feelings." The two ladies frequently differed upon matters of taste and etiquette, with the result that the good man's guileless breast was torn by conflicting emotions. For had not Serena's father been a General Officer of the Indian army? And had not Serena herself and her elder sister Susan—a person of definite views and commanding character—long been resident at Slowby in Midlandshire, an inland watering-place of acknowledged fashion? It followed that her pronouncements on social questions were necessarily final. Yet to uphold her judgment, as against that of the wife, was to risk mortifying the latter. And to mortify the wife would be to act as a heartless scoundrel. Hence situations, for George Lovegrove, difficult to the point of producing profuse perspiration.
That night Serena prepared for rest with remarkable deliberation. Clad in a blue and white striped cotton dressing-gown, she sat long at her toilet-table. And all the time she wondered—a far-reaching, mazelike, elaborately intricate and wholly inconclusive wonder. Hers was a nature which suffered perpetual solicitation from possible alternatives, hearing warning voices from the vague, delusive regions of the might-be or might-have-been. She had never grasped the rudimentary but very important truth that only that which actually is in the least matters. And so to arrive at what is, with all possible despatch—in so far as such arriving is practicable—and then to go forward, comprises the whole duty of the sane human being. Par from this, Serena's mind forever fitted batlike in the half-darkness of innumerable small prejudices and ignorances. She moved, as do so many women of her class, in a twilight, embryonic world, untouched alike by the splendour and terror of living.
Nevertheless, on this particular occasion, as she brushed her hair and inserted the tortoise-shell curling-pins which should secure to-morrow's decorative effects, she felt almost daring and dangerous. She wondered whether she had really enjoyed the evening or not; whether she had held her own and shown independence and spirit. She laboured under the quaint early-Victorian notion that, in the presence of members of the opposite sex, a woman is called upon always to play something of a part. She should advance, so to speak, and then retreat; provoke interest by a studied indifference; yield a little, only to become more elegantly fugitive. It may be doubted whether these wiles have even been a very successful adjunct to feminine charms. But in the case of so negative and colourless a creature as Serena, they were pathetically devoid of result. Play a part industriously as she might, the majority of her audience was wholly unaware that she was, in point of fact, playing anything at all! They might think her a little capricious, a little foolish, but that there was intention or purpose in her pallid flightiness passed the bounds of imagination. Never mind, if the audience had no sense of the position, Serena had, and she enjoyed it. Excitement possessed her, and her eyes snapped even yet as, thinking it all over, she fastened the curlers in her hair.
She wondered whether George and Rhoda—how intensely she disliked the name Rhoda!—had any special reason for asking her just now, and talking so much about Mr. Iglesias, or whether it was a coincidence.
"Of course it is not of the slightest importance to me whether they have or not," she reflected. "I think it would be rather an impertinence if they had. Still, I think I had better find out; but without letting Rhoda suspect, of course. If you give her any encouragement Rhoda is inclined to go too far and say what is rather indelicate. I always have thought Rhoda had a rather vulgar mind. I wonder if poor George feels that? I believe he does, before me. Once or twice to-night he was very nervous. How dreadfully coarse poor Rhoda's skin is getting! I wonder if Rhoda has given Susan a hint, and if that was what made Susan so gracious about my leaving home? But I don't believe she did—I mean that Susan suspected that George and Rhoda had any particular reason for inviting me. I wonder if I shall ever make Susan see that I am not a cipher? Of course if George and Rhoda really have any particular reason, and Susan comes to know it, that will show her that other people do not consider me a cipher. I wonder what most people would think of Mr. Iglesias? Of course he has only been a bank clerk; but then so has George. Only then he is a foreigner, and that makes a difference. I wonder whether, if anything came of it, Susan would make his being a foreigner an objection?"
But this was growing altogether too definite and concrete. With a sort of mental squeak Serena's thought flitted into twilight and embryonic regions.
"I think if they have any particular reason, it is rather scheming of George and Rhoda. I wonder if it is nice of them? If they have, I think it is rather deceitful. I wonder if they have said anything to Mr. Iglesias?"
Serena, with the aid of a curling-pin, was controlling the short fuzzy little hairs just at the nape of her neck; and this last wonder proved so absorbing a one that she remained, head bent and fingers aimlessly fiddling with the bars of the curler, till it suddenly occurred to her that she was getting quite stiff.
"If they have, I think it is very presuming of them," she continued wrathfully, stretching her arms, for they ached—"very presuming. How glad I am I was on my guard. I wonder if they saw I was on my guard? I believe George did. I wonder if that helped to make him nervous?"
Serena fastened in the last of the curlers. There was no excuse for sitting up any longer; yet she lingered.
"I must be more on my guard than ever," she said.
Meanwhile Dominic Iglesias, after sitting in the dining-room with his old friend while the latter smoked a last pipe, made his way across the Green in the deepening mystery of the summer night. The sky was moonless; and at the zenith, untouched by the upward streaming light of the great city, the stars showed fair and bright. A nostalgia of wide untenanted spaces, of far horizons, of emotions at once intimate and rooted in things eternal, was upon him. But of Serena Lovegrove, it must be admitted, he thought not one little bit.
Only one of the trees from which Cedar Lodge derives its name was still standing. This lonely giant, sombre exile from Libanus, overshadowed all that remained of the formerly extensive garden and sensibly darkened the back of the house. Its foliage, spread like a deep pile carpet upon the wide horizontal branches, was worn and sparse, showing small promise of self-renewal. Yet though starved by the exhausted soil, and clogged by soots from innumerable chimneys, it remained majestic, finely decorative as some tree of metal, of age-old bronze roughened by a greenness of deep-eating rust. From the first moment of his acquaintance with Cedar Lodge it had been to Dominic Iglesias an object of attraction, even of sympathy. For he recognised in it something stoical, an unmoved dignity and lofty indifference to the sordid commonplace of its surroundings. It made no concessions to adverse circumstances, but remained proudly itself, owning for sole comrade the Wind—that most mysterious of all created things, unseen, untamed, mateless, incalculable. The wind gave it voice, gave it even a measure of mobility, as it swept through the labyrinth of dry unfruitful branches and awoke a husky music telling of far-distant times and places, making a shuddering and stirring as of the resurgence of long-forgotten hope and passion.
When Dominic entered into residence at Cedar Lodge, a pair of stout mauve-brown wood-pigeons—migrants from the pleasant elms of Holland Park—had haunted the tree. But they being, for all their dolorous cooings, birds of a lusty, not to say truculent, habit, grew weary of its persistent solemnity of aspect. So, at least, Dominic judged. He had been an interested spectator of the love-makings, quarrels, and reconciliations of these comely neighbours from his bedroom window daily while dressing. But one fine spring morning he saw them fly away and never saw them fly back again. Clearly they had removed themselves to less solemn quarters, leaving the great tree, save for fugitive visitations from its comrade the wind, to solitary meditation within the borders of its narrow prison-place.
Besides presenting in itself an object altogether majestical, the cedar performed a practical office whereby it earned Iglesias' gratitude. For its dark interposing bulk effectually shut off the view of an aggressively new rawly red steam laundry, with shiny slate roofs and a huge smoke-belching chimney to it, which, to the convulsive disgust of the gentility of the eastern side of Trimmer's Green, had had the unpardonable impertinence to get itself erected in an adjacent street. It followed that when, one wet evening, yellow-headed little Mr. Farge had advised himself to speak slightingly of the cedar tree, Iglesias was prepared to defend it, if necessary, with some warmth.
The conversation had ranged round the subject of the hour, namely, the possibility—as yet in the estimation of most persons an incredible one—of war with the Boer Republics, when the young man indulged in a playful aside addressed to Miss Hart, at whose right hand he was seated.
"If I could find fault with anything belonging to the lady at the head of the table," he said, "it would be the gloomy old party looking in at these back windows."
"What, the dear old cedar tree! Never, Mr. Farge!" protested Eliza.
"Yes, it would, though," he insisted, "when, as tonight, it is drip, drip, dripping all over the shop. No touch of Sunny Jim about him, is these now, Bert?"—this to the devoted Worthington sitting immediately opposite to him on Miss Hart's left.
"Truly there is not, if I may venture so far," the other young gentleman responded, playing up obediently. "And if anything could give me and Charlie a fit of the blues, I believe that old fellow would in rainy weather."
"Makes you think of the cemetery, does it not now, Bert?"
"You have hit it. Paddington—not the station though, Charlie, just starting for a cosey little trip with your best girl up the river."
"For shame, Mr. Worthington," Eliza protested again, giggling.
"Suggestive of the end of all week-ends, in short," de Courcy Smyth, who contrary to his custom was present at dinner that evening, put in snarlingly. "One last trip up the River of Death for you, with a ticket marked not transferrable, eh, Farge? Then an oblong hole in the reeking blue clay, silence and worms."
His tone was spiteful to the point of commanding attention. A hush fell on the company, broken only by the drifting sob of the rain through the branches of the great cedar. Mr. Farge went perceptibly pale. Mrs. Porcher sighed and turned her fine eyes up to the ceiling. Iglesias looked curiously at the speaker. Eliza Hart was the first to find voice.
"Pray, Mr. Smyth," she said, "don't be so very unpleasant. You're enough to give one the goose-skin all over."
"I am sorry I have offended," he answered sullenly. "But I beg leave to call attention to the fact that I did not start this subject. I was rather interested in the previous discussion, which gave an opportunity of intelligent conversation not habitual among us. Farge is responsible for the interruption, and for the cemeteries, and consequently for my comment. Still, I am sorry I have offended."
He shifted his position, glancing uneasily first at his hostess, and then at Dominic Iglesias, who sat opposite him in the place of honour at that lady's right hand.
"You have not offended, Mr. Smyth," Mrs. Porcher declared graciously. "And no doubt it is well for us all to be reminded of death and burial at times. Though some of us hardly need reminding"—again she sighed. "We carry the thought of them about with us always." And she turned her fine eyes languidly upon Mr. Iglesias.
"My poor sweet Peachie," the kind-hearted Eliza murmured, under her breath.
"But at meals, perhaps, a lighter vein is more suitable, Mr. Smyth," Mrs. Porcher continued. "At table the thought of death does seem rather disheartening, does it not? But about our poor old cedar tree now, Mr. Farge? You were not seriously proposing to have it removed?"
"Well, strictly between ourselves, I am really half afraid I actually was."
"You forget it sheltered my childhood. It is associated with all my past."
"Can a rosebud have a past?" Farge cried, coming up to the surface again with a bounce, so to speak.
Mrs. Porcher smiled, shook her head in graceful reproof, and turned once more to Dominic.
"I think we should all like to know how you feel about it, Mr. Iglesias," she said. "Do you wish the poor old tree removed?"
"On the contrary, I should greatly regret it's being cut down," he answered. "It would be a loss to me personally, for I have always taken a pleasure both in the sound and the sight of it. But that is a minor consideration."
"You must allow me to differ from that opinion," Mrs. Porcher remarked, with gentle emphasis. "We can never forget, can we, Eliza, who is our oldest guest? Mr. Iglesias' opinion must ever carry weight in all which concerns Cedar Lodge."
Here Farge and Worthington made round eyes at one another, while de Courcy Smyth shuffled his feet under the table. He had received a disquieting impression.
"Oh! of course, Peachie, dear," Miss Hart responded. She hugged herself with satisfaction. "The darling looks more bonny than ever," she reflected. "To-night what animation! What tact! She seems to have come out so lately, since that Serena Lovegrove has been stopping over the way. Not that there could be any rivalry between her and that poor thread-paper of a thing!"