PAUL had been four years on the stage. Save as a memory they had as little influence on the colour of his after-life as his years at Bludston or his years in the studios. He was the man born to be king. The attainment of his kingdom alone mattered. The intermediary phases were of no account. It had been a period of struggle, hardship and, as far as the stage itself was concerned, disillusion. After the first year or so, the goddess Fortune, more fickle in Theatreland, perhaps, than anywhere else, passed him by. London had no use for his services, especially when it learned that he aspired to play parts. It even refused him the privilege of walking on and understudying. He drifted into the provinces, where, when he obtained an engagement, he found more scope for his ambitions. Often he was out, and purchased with his savings the bread of idleness. He knew the desolation of the agent's dingy stairs; he knew the heartache of the agent's dingy outer office.
He was familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven producer. Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the ill-paid itinerant troupe. The discomforts affected Paul but little, he had never had experience of luxuries, and the life itself was silken ease compared with what it would have been but for Barney Bill's kidnapping. It never occurred to him to complain of nubbly bed and ill-cooked steak and crowded and unventilated dressing rooms; but it always struck him as being absurd that such should continue to be the lot of one predestined to greatness. There was some flaw in the working of destiny. It puzzled him.
Once indeed, being out, but having an engagement ahead, and waiting for rehearsals to begin, he had found himself sufficiently prosperous to take a third-class ticket to Paris, where he spent a glorious month. But the prosperity never returned, and he had to live on his memories of Paris.
During these years books were, as ever, his joy and his consolation. He taught himself French and a little German. He read history, philosophy, a smattering of science, and interested himself in politics. So aristocratic a personage naturally had passionate Tory sympathies. Now and again—but not often, for the theatrical profession is generally Conservative—he came across a furious Radical in the company and tasted the joy of fierce argument. Now and again too, he came across a young woman of high modern cultivation, and once or twice narrowly escaped wrecking his heart on the Scylline rock of her intellect. It was only when he discovered that she had lost her head over his romantic looks, and not over his genius and his inherited right to leadership, that he began to question her intellectual sincerity. And there is nothing to send love scuttling away with his quiver between his legs like a note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his "fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which he longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, so that no woman should ever look at him again and no man accuse him in vulgar jest.
He played small utility parts and understudied the leading man. On the rare occasions when he played the lead, he made no great hit. The company did not, after the generous way of theatre folks, surround him, when the performance was over, with a chorus of congratulation. The manager would say, "Quite all' right, my boy, as far as it goes, but still wooden. You must get more life into it." And Paul, who knew himself to be a better man in every way than the actor whose part he was playing, just as in his childhood days he knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge, could not understand the general lack of appreciation. Then he remembered the early struggles of the great actors: Edmund Kean, who on the eve of his first appearance at Drury Lane cried, "If I succeed I shall go mad!"; of Henry Irving (then at his zenith) and the five hundred parts he had played before he came to London; he recalled also the failure of Disraeli's first speech in the House of Commons and his triumphant prophecy. He had dreams of that manager on his bended knees, imploring him, with prayerful hands and streaming eyes, to play Hamlet at a salary of a thousand a week and of himself haughtily snapping his fingers at the paltry fellow.
Well, which one of us who has ever dreamed at all has not had such dreams at twenty? Let him cast at Paul the first stone.
And then, you must remember, Paul's faith in his vague but glorious destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in everything, so now he could not appreciate the charge of wooden inferiority brought against him by theatrical managers.
He had been on the stage about three years when for the first time in his emancipated life something like a calamity befell him. He lost Jane. Like most calamities it happened in a foolishly accidental manner. He received a letter from Jane during the last three weeks of a tour—they always kept up an affectionate but desultory correspondence—giving a new address. The lease of her aunt's house having fallen in, they were moving to the south side of London. When he desired to answer the letter, he found he had lost it and could not remember the suburb, much less the street and number, whither Jane had migrated. A letter posted to the old address was returned through the post. The tour over, and he being again in London, he went on an errand of inquiry to Cricklewood, found the house empty and the neighbours and tradespeople ignorant. The poorer classes of London in their migrations seldom leave a trail behind them. Their correspondence being rare, it is not within their habits of life to fill up post-office forms with a view to the forwarding of letters. He could not write to Jane because he did not in the least know where she was.
He reflected with dismay that Jane could, for the same reason, no longer write to him. Ironic chance had so arranged that the landlady with whom he usually lodged in town, and whose house he used as a permanent address, had given up letting lodgings at the beginning of the tour, and had drifted into the limbo of London. Jane's only guide to his whereabouts had been the tour card which he had sent her as usual, giving dates and theatres. And the tour was over. On the chance that Jane, not hearing from him, should address a letter to the last theatre on the list, he communicated at once with the local management. But as local managements of provincial theatres shape their existences so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind save the maintenance of their bars and the deduction of their percentages from the box-office receipts, Paul knew that it was ludicrous to expect it to interest itself in the correspondence of an obscure member of a fourth-rate company which had once played to tenth-rate business within its mildewed walls. Being young, he wrote also to the human envelope containing the essence of stale beer, tobacco and lethargy that was the stage doorkeeper. But he might just as well have written to the station master or the municipal gasworks. As a matter of fact Jane and he were as much lost to one another as if the whole of England had been primaeval forest.
It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay. He had many friends of the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and execrably bad young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him as little Paul Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met—and in the theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with the whole gamut of the sex—gave him just the same close, intimate, comforting companionship. From Jane he hid nothing. Before all the others he was conscious of pose. Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies, her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very structure of his being. Only when he had lost her did he realize this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one thing that was real. She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of the model days the memory of which made him shiver. She alone (save Barney Bill) knew of his high destiny—for Paul, quick to recognize the cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not revealed the Vision Splendid to any of his associates. To her he could write; to her, when he was in London, he could talk; to her he could outpour all the jumble of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and poetry that was his very self, without thought of miscomprehension. And of late she had mastered the silly splenetics of childhood. He had an uncomfortable yet comforting impression that latterly she had developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as she had developed a calm, generous personality. The last time he had seen her, his quick sensitiveness had noted the growth from girl to woman. She was large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed. She had not worried him about other girls. She had reproved him for confessed follies in just the way that man loves to be reproved. She had mildly soared with him into the empyrean of his dreams. She had enjoyed whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to which he had taken her—as a member of the profession he had, in Jane's eyes, princely privileges—and on the top of the Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter and gusto of her twenty years, the exotic sandwiches he had bought at the delicatessen shop in Leicester Square. She was the ideal sister.
And now she was gone, like a snow-flake on a river. For a long while it seemed absurd, incredible. He went on all sorts of preposterous adventures to find her. He walked through the city day after day at the hours when girls and men pour out of their honeycombs of offices into the streets. She had never told him where she was employed, thinking the matter of little interest; and he, in his careless way, had never inquired. Once he had suggested calling for her at her office, and she had abruptly vetoed the suggestion. Paul was too remarkable a young man to escape the notice of her associates; her feelings towards him were too fine to be scratched by jocular allusion. After a time, having failed to meet her in the human torrents of Cheapside and Cannon Street, Paul gave up the search. Jane was lost, absolutely lost—and, with her, Barney Bill. He went on tour again, heavy-hearted. He felt that, in losing these two, he had committed an act of base ingratitude.
He had been four years on the stage and had grown from youth into manhood. But one day at three-and-twenty he found himself as poor in pence, though as rich in dreams, as at thirteen.
Necessity had compelled him to take what he could get. This time it was a leading part; but a leading part in a crude melodrama in a fit-up company. They had played in halls and concert rooms, on pier pavilions, in wretched little towns. It was glorious July Weather and business was bad—so bad that the manager abruptly closed the treasury and disappeared, leaving the company stranded a hundred and fifty miles from London, with a couple of weeks' salary unpaid.
Paul was packing his clothes in the portmanteau that lay on the narrow bed in his tiny back bedroom, watched disconsolately by a sallow, careworn man who sat astride the one cane chair, his hat on the back of his head, the discoloured end of a cigarette between his lips.
"It's all very well for you to take it cheerfully," said the latter. "You're young. You're strong. You're rich. You've no one but yourself. You haven't a wife and kids depending on you."
"I know it makes a devil of a difference," replied Paul, disregarding the allusion to his wealth. As the leading man, he was the most highly paid member of the disastrous company, and he had acquired sufficient worldly wisdom to know that to him who has but a penny the possessor of a shilling appears arrogantly opulent. "But still," said he, "what can we do? We must get back to London and try again."
"If there was justice in this country that son of a thief would get fifteen years for it. I never trusted the skunk. A fortnight's salary gone and no railway fare to London. I wish to God I had never taken it on. I could have gone with Garbutt in The White Woman—he's straight enough—only this was a joint engagement. Oh, the swine!"
He rose with a clatter, threw his cigarette on the floor and stamped on it violently.
"He's a pretty bad wrong 'un," said Paul. "We hadn't been going a fortnight before he asked me to accept half salary, swearing he would make it up, with a rise, as soon as business got better. Like an idiot, I consented."
His friend sat down again hopelessly. "I don't know what's going to become of us. The missus has pawned everything she has got, poor old girl! Oh, it's damned hard! We had been out six months."
"Poor old chap!" said Paul, sitting on the bed beside his portmanteau. "How does Mrs. Wilmer take it?"
"She's knocked endways. You see," cried Wilmer desperately, "we've had to send home everything we could scrape together to keep the kids—there's five of them; and now—and now there's nothing left. I'm wrong. There's that." He fished three or four coppers from his pocket and held them out with a harsh laugh. "There's that after twenty years' work in this profession."
"Poor old chap!" said Paul again. He liked Wilmer, a sober, earnest, ineffectual man, and his haggard, kindly-natured wife. They had put on a brave face all through the tour, letting no one suspect their straits, and doing both him and other members of the company many little acts of kindness and simple hospitality. In the lower submerged world of the theatrical profession in which Paul found himself he had met with many such instances of awful poverty. He had brushed elbows with Need himself. That morning he had given, out of his scanty resources, her railway fare to a tearful and despairing girl who played the low-comedy part. But he had not yet come across any position quite so untenable as that of Wilmer. Forty odd years old, a wife, five children, all his life given honestly to his calling—and threepence half-penny to his fortune.
"But, good God!" said he, after a pause, "your kiddies? If you have nothing—what will happen to them?"
"Lord knows," groaned Wilmer, staring in front of him, his elbows on the back of the chair and his head between his fists.
"And Mrs. Wilmer and yourself have got to get back to London."
"I've got the dress suit I wear in the last act. It's fairly new. I can get enough on it."
"But that's part of your outfit—your line of business; you'll want it again," said Paul.
Wilmer had played butlers up and down the land for many years. Now and again, when the part did not need any special characterization, he obtained London engagements. He was one of the known stage butlers.
"I can hire if I'm pushed," said he. "It's hell, isn't it? Something told me not to go out with a fit-up. We'd never come down to it before. And I mistrusted Larkins—but we were out six months. Paul, my boy, chuck it. You're young; you're clever; you've had a swell education; you come of gentlefolk—my father kept a small hardware shop in Leicester—you have"—the smitten and generally inarticulate man hesitated—"well, you have extraordinary personal beauty; you have charm; you could do anything you like in the world, save act—and you can't act for toffee. Why the blazes do you stick to it?"
"I've got to earn my living just like you," said Paul, greatly flattered by the artless tribute to his aristocratic personality and not offended by the professional censure which he knew to be just. "I've tried all sorts of other things-music, painting, poetry, novel-writing—but none of them has come off."
"Your people don't make you an allowance?"
"I've no people living," said Paul, with a smile—and when Paul smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half braggart—"I've been on my own ever since I was thirteen."
Wilmer regarded him wearily. "The missus and I have always thought you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth."
"So I was," Paul declared from his innermost conviction. "But," he laughed, "I lost it before my teeth came and I could get a grip on it."
"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Wilmer, "that you're not doing this for fun?"
"Fun?" cried Paul. "Fun? Do you call this comic?" He waved his hand comprehensively, indicating the decayed pink-and-purple wall-paper, the ragged oil-cloth on the floor, the dingy window with its dingier outlook, the rickety deal wash-stand with the paint peeling off, a horrible clothless tray on a horrible splotchy chest of drawers, containing the horrible scraggy remains of a meal. "Do you think I would have this if I could command silken sloth? I long like hell, old chap, for silken sloth, and if I could get it, you wouldn't see me here."
Wilmer rose and stretched out his hand. "I'm sorry, dear boy," said he. "The wife and I thought it didn't very much matter to you. We always thought you were a kind of young swell doing it for amusement and experience—and because you never put on side, we liked you."
Paul rose from the bed and put his hand on Wilmer's shoulder. "And now you're disappointed?"
He laughed and his eyes twinkled humorously. His vagabond life had taught him some worldly wisdom. The sallow and ineffectual man looked confused. His misery was beyond the relief of smiles.
"We're all in the same boat, old chap," said Paul, "except that I'm alone and haven't got wife and kids to look after."
"Good-bye, my boy," said Wilmer. "Better luck next time. But chuck it, if you can."
Paul held his hand for a while. Then his left hand dived into his waistcoat pocket and, taking the place of his right, thrust three sovereigns into Wilmer's palm. "For the kiddies," said he.
Wilmer looked at the coins in his palm, and then at Paul, and the tears spurted. "I can't, my boy. You must be as broke as any of us—you—half salary—no, my boy, I can't. I'm old enough to be your father. It's damned good of you—but it's my one pride left—the pride of both of us—the missus and me—that we've never borrowed money—"
"But it isn't borrowed, you silly ass," cried Paul cheerfully. "It's just your share of the spoils, such as they are. I wish to God it was more." With both hands he clasped the thin, ineffectual fingers over the coins and pushed the man' with his young strength out of the door. "It's for the kiddies. Give them my love," he cried, and slammed the door and locked it from the inside.
"Poor old chap!" said he.
Then he went through his pockets and laid the contents on the narrow mantel-piece. These were a gold watch and chain, a cornelian heart fixed to the free end of the chain, a silver cigarette case, a couple of keys, one sovereign, four shillings, three pennies and two half-pennies. A trunk already fastened and filled with books and clothes, and the portmanteau on the bed, contained the rest of his possessions. In current coin his whole fortune amounted to one pound, four shillings and fourpence. Luckily he had paid his landlady. One pound four and fourpence to begin again at three-and-twenty the battle of life on which he had entered at thirteen. He laughed because he was young and strong, and knew that such reverses were foreordained chapters in the lives of those born to a glorious destiny. They were also preordained chapters in the lives of those born to failure, like poor old Wilmer. He was conscious of the wide difference between Wilmer and himself. Good Heavens! To face the world at forty-three, with wife and children and threepence-halfpenny, and the once attendant hope replaced by black-vestured doom! Poor Wilmer! He felt certain that Wilmer had not been able to pay his landlady, and he felt that he had been mean in keeping back the other sovereign.
The sudden loss, however, of three-fourths of his fortune brought him up against practical considerations. The more he had in his pocket when he arrived in London, the longer could he subsist. That was important, because theatrical engagements are not picked up in a hurry. Now; the railway fare would swallow a goodly number of shillings. Obviously it was advisable to save the railway fare; and the only way to do this was to walk to London. His young blood thrilled at the notion. It was romantic. It was also inspiring of health and joy. He had been rather run down lately, and, fearful of the catastrophe which had in fact occurred, he had lived this last week very sparingly—-chiefly on herrings and tea. A hundred and fifty miles' tramp along the summer roads, with bread and cheese and an occasional glass of beer to keep him going, would be just the thing to set him up again. He looked in the glass. Yes, his face was a bit pinched and his eyes were rather too bright. A glorious tramp to London, thirty or forty miles a day in the blazing and beautiful sunshine, was exactly what he needed.
Joyously he unpacked his trunk and took from it a Norfolk jacket suit and stockings, changed, and, leaving his luggage with his landlady, who was to obey further instructions as to its disposal, marched buoyantly away through the sun-filled streets of the little town, stick in hand, gripsack on shoulder, and the unquenchable fire of youth and hope in his heart.
MISS URSULA WINWOOD, hatless, but with a cotton sunshade swinging over her shoulder, and with a lean, shiny, mahogany-coloured Sussex spaniel trailing behind, walked in her calm, deliberate way down the long carriage drive of Drane's Court. She was stout and florid, and had no scruples as to the avowal of her age, which was forty-three. She had clear blue eyes which looked steadily upon a complicated world of affairs, and a square, heavy chin which showed her capacity for dealing with it. Miss Ursula Winwood knew herself to be a notable person, and the knowledge did not make her vain or crotchety or imperious. She took her notability for granted, as she took her mature good looks and her independent fortune. For some years she had kept house for her widowed brother, Colonel Winwood, Conservative Member for the Division of the county in which they resided, and helped him efficiently in his political work. The little township of Morebury—half a mile from the great gates of Drane's Court—felt Miss Winwood's control in diverse ways. Another town, a little further off, with five or six millions of inhabitants, was also, through its newspapers, aware of Miss Winwood. Many leagues, societies, associations, claimed her as President, Vice-President, or Member of Council. She had sat on Royal Commissions. Her name under an appeal for charity guaranteed the deserts of the beneficiaries. What she did not know about housing problems, factory acts, female prisons, hospitals, asylums for the blind, decayed gentlewomen, sweated trades, dogs' homes and Friendly Societies could not be considered in the light of knowledge. She sat on platforms with Royal princesses, Archbishops welcomed her as a colleague, and Cabinet Ministers sought her counsel.
For some distance from the porch of the red-brick, creeper-covered Queen-Anne house the gravel drive between the lawns blazed in the afternoon sun. For this reason, the sunshade. But after a while came an avenue of beech and plane and oak casting delectable shade on the drive and its double edging of grass, and the far-stretching riot of flowers beneath the trees, foxgloves and canterbury bells and campanulas and delphiniums, all blues and purples and whites, with here and there the pink of dog-roses and gorgeous yellow splashes of celandine. On entering the stately coolness, Miss Winwood closed her sunshade and looked at her watch, a solid timepiece harboured in her belt. A knitted brow betrayed mathematical calculation. It would take her five minutes to reach the lodge gate. The train bringing her venerable uncle, Archdeacon Winwood, for a week's visit would not arrive at the station for another three minutes, and the two fat horses would take ten minutes to drag from the station the landau which she had sent to meet him. She had, therefore, eight minutes to spare. A rustic bench invited repose. Graciously she accepted the invitation.
Now, it must be observed that it was not Miss Winwood's habit to waste time. Her appointments were kept to the minute, and her appointment (self-made on this occasion) was the welcoming of her uncle, the Archdeacon, on the threshold of Drane's Court. But Miss Winwood was making holiday and allowed herself certain relaxations. Her brother's health having broken down, he had paired for the rest of the session and gone to Contrexeville for a cure. She had therefore shut up her London house in Portland Place, Colonel Winwood's home while Parliament sat, and had come to her brother's house, Drane's Court, her home when her presence was not needed in London. She was tired; Drane's Court, where she had been born and had lived all her girlhood's life, was restful; and the seat in the shade of the great beech was cunningly curved. The shiny, mahogany-coloured spaniel, prescient of siesta, leaped to her side and lay down with his chin on her lap and blinked his yellow eyes.
She lay back on the seat, her hand on the dog's head, looking contentedly at the opposite wilderness of bloom and the glimpses, through the screen of trees and shrubs, of the sunlit stretches of park beyond. She loved Drane's Court. Save for the three years of her brother's short married life, it had been part of herself. A Winwood, a very younger son of the Family—the Family being that of which the Earl of Harpenden is Head (these things can only be written of in capital letters)—had acquired wealth in the dark political days of Queen Anne, and had bought the land and built the house, and the property had never passed into alien hands. As for the name, he had used that of his wife, Viscountess Drane in her own right,—a notorious beauty of whom, so History recounts, he was senilely enamoured and on whose naughty account he was eventually run through the body by a young Mohawk of a paramour. They fought one spring dawn in the park—the traditional spot could be seen from where Ursula Winwood was sitting.
Ursula and her brother were proud of the romantic episode, and would relate it to guests and point out the scene of the duel. Happy and illusory days of Romance now dead and gone! It is not conceivable that, generations hence, the head of a family will exhibit with pride the stained newspaper cuttings containing the unsavoury details of the divorce case of his great-great-grandmother.
This aspect of family history seldom presented itself to Ursula Winwood. It did not do so this mellow and contented afternoon. Starlings mindful of a second brood chattered in the old walnut trees far away on the lawn; thrushes sang their deep-throated bugle-calls; finches twittered. A light breeze creeping up the avenue rustled the full foliage languorously. Ursula Winwood closed her eyes. A bumble-bee droned between visits to foxglove bells near by. She loved bumble-bees. They reminded her of a summer long ago when she sat, not on this seat—as a matter of fact it was in the old walled garden a quarter of a mile away—with a gallant young fellow's arms about her and her head on his shoulder. A bumble-bee had droned round her while they kissed. She could never hear a bumble-bee without thinking of it. But the gallant young fellow had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen eighty-five, and Ursula Winwood's heart had been buried in his sandy grave. That was the beginning and end of her sentimental history. She had recovered from the pain of it all and now she loved the bumble-bee for invoking the exquisite memory. The lithe Sussex spaniel crept farther on her lap and her hand caressed his polished coat. Drowsiness disintegrated the exquisite memories. Miss Ursula Winwood fell asleep.
The sudden plunging of strong young paws into her body and a series of sharp barks and growls awakened her with a start, and, for a second, still dazed by the drowsy invocation of the bumble-bee, she saw approaching her the gallant fellow who had been pierced through the heart by a Soudanese spear in eighteen eighty-five. He was dark and handsome, and, by a trick of coincidence, was dressed in loose knickerbocker suit, just as he was when he had walked up that very avenue to say his last good-bye. She remained for a moment tense, passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties. Then clear awake, and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer, sudden interest at the newcomer. He was young, extraordinarily beautiful; but he staggered and reeled like a drunken man. The spaniel barked his respectable disapproval. In his long life of eighteen months he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane's Court had been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a trespasser. With unparalleled moral courage he told him exactly what he thought of him. But the trespasser did not hear. He kept on advancing. Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up. The young man threw out his hands towards her, tripped over the three-inch-high border of grass, and fell in a sprawling heap at her feet.
He lay very still. Ursula Winwood looked down upon him. The shiny brown spaniel took up a strategic position three yards away and growled, his chin between his paws. But the more Miss Winwood looked, and her blue eyes were trained to penetrate, the more was she convinced that both she and the dog were wrong in their diagnosis. The young man's face was deadly white, his cheeks gaunt. It was evidently a grave matter. For a moment or so she had a qualm of fear lest he might be dead. She bent down, took him in her capable grip and composed his inert body decently, and placed the knapsack he was wearing beneath his head. The faintly beating heart proved him to be alive, but her touch on his brow discovered fever. Kneeling by his side, she wiped his lips with her handkerchief, and gave herself up to the fraction of a minute's contemplation of the most beautiful youth she had ever seen. So there he lay, a new Endymion, while the most modern of Dianas hung over him, stricken with great wonderment at his perfection.
In this romantic attitude was she surprised, first by the coachman of the landau and pair as he swung round the bend of the drive, and then by the Archdeacon, who leaned over the door of the carriage. Miss Winwood sprang to her feet; the coachman pulled up, and the Archdeacon alighted.
"My dear Uncle Edward"—she wrung his hand—"I'm so glad to see you. Do help me grapple with an extraordinary situation."
The Archdeacon smiled humorously. He was a spare man of seventy, with thin, pointed, clean-shaven face, and clear blue eyes like Miss Winwood's. "If there's a situation, my dear Ursula, with which you can't grapple," said he, "it must indeed be extraordinary."
She narrated what had occurred, and together they bent over the unconscious youth. "I would suggest," said she, "that we put him into the carriage, drive him up to the house, and send for Dr. Fuller."
"I can only support your suggestion," said the Archdeacon.
So the coachman came down from his box and helped them to lift the young man into the landau; and his body swayed helplessly between Miss Winwood and the Archdeacon, whose breeches and gaiters were smeared with dust from his heavy boots. A few moments afterwards he was carried into the library and laid upon a sofa, and Miss Winwood administered restoratives. The deep stupor seemed to pass, and he began to moan.
Miss Winwood and the housekeeper stood by his side. The Archdeacon, his hands behind his back, paced the noiseless Turkey carpet. "I hope," said he, "your doctor will not be long in coming."
"It looks like a sunstroke," the housekeeper remarked, as her mistress scrutinized the clinical thermometer.
"It doesn't," said Miss Winwood bluntly. "In sunstroke the face is either congested or clammy. I know that much. He has a temperature of 103."
"Poor fellow!" said the Archdeacon.
"I wonder who he is," said Miss Winwood.
"Perhaps this may tell us," said the Archdeacon.
From the knapsack, carelessly handled by the servant who had brought it in, had escaped a book, and the servant had laid the book on the top of the knapsack. The Archdeacon took it up.
"Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Urn Burial. On the flyleaf, 'Paul Savelli.' An undergraduate, I should say, on a walking tour."
Miss Winwood took the book from his hands—a little cheap reprint. "I'm glad," she said.
"Why, my dear Ursula?"
"I'm very fond of Sir Thomas Browne, myself," she replied.
Presently the doctor came and made his examination. He shook a grave head. "Pneumonia. And he has got it bad. Perhaps a touch of the sun as well." The housekeeper smiled discreetly. "Looks half-starved, too. I'll send up the ambulance at once and get him to the cottage hospital."
Miss Winwood, a practical woman, was aware that the doctor gave wise counsel. But she looked at Paul and hesitated. Paul's destiny, though none knew it, hung in the balance. "I disapprove altogether of the cottage hospital," she said.
"Eh?" said the doctor.
The Archdeacon raised his eyebrows. "My dear Ursula, I thought you had made the Morebury Cottage Hospital the model of its kind."
"Its kind is not for people who carry about Sir Thomas Browne in their pocket," retorted the disingenuous lady. "If I turned him out of my house, doctor, and anything happened to him, I should have to reckon with his people. He stays here. You'll kindly arrange for nurses. The red room, Wilkins,—no, the green—the one with the small oak bed. You can't nurse people properly in four-posters. It has a south-east aspect"—she turned to the doctor—"and so gets the sun most of the day. That's quite right, isn't it?"
"Ideal. But I warn you, Miss Winwood, you may be letting yourself in for a perfectly avoidable lot of trouble."
"I like trouble," said Miss Winwood.
"You're certainly looking for it," replied the doctor glancing at Paul and stuffing his stethoscope into his pocket. "And in this case, I can promise you worry beyond dreams of anxiety."
The word of Ursula Winwood was law for miles around. Dr. Fuller, rosy, fat and fifty, obeyed, like everyone else; but during the process of law-making he had often, before now, played the part of an urbane and gently satirical leader of the opposition.
She flashed round on him, with a foolish pain through her heart that caused her to catch her breath. "Is he as bad as that?" she asked quickly.
"As bad as that," said the doctor, with grave significance. "How he managed to get here is a mystery!" Within a quarter-of-an-hour the unconscious Paul, clad in a suit of Colonel Winwood's silk pyjamas, lay in a fragrant room, hung with green and furnished in old, black oak. Never once, in all his life, had Paul Kegworthy lain in such a room. And for him a great house was in commotion. Messages went forth for nurses and medicines and the paraphernalia of a luxurious sick-chamber, and-the lady of the house being absurdly anxious—for a great London specialist, whose fee, in Dr. Fuller's quiet eyes, would be amusingly fantastic.
"It seems horrible to search the poor boy's pockets," said Miss Winwood, when, after these excursions and alarms the Archdeacon and herself had returned to the library; "but we must try to find out who he is and communicate with his people. Savelli. I've never heard of them. I wonder who they are."
"There is an historical Italian family of that name," said the Archdeacon.
"I was sure of it," said Miss Winwood.
"Of what?"
"That his people—are—well—all right."
"Why are you sure?"
Ursula was very fond of her uncle. He represented to her the fine flower of the Church of England—a gentleman, a scholar, an ideal physical type of the Anglican dignitary, a man of unquestionable piety and Christian charity, a personage who would be recognized for what he was by Hottentots or Esquimaux or attendants of wagon-lits trains or millionaires of the Middle West of America or Parisian Apaches. In him the branch of the family tree had burgeoned into the perfect cleric. Yet sometimes, the play of light beneath the surface of those blue eyes, so like her own, and the delicately intoned challenges of his courtly voice, exasperated her beyond measure. "It's obvious to any idiot, my dear," she replied testily. "Just look at him. It speaks for itself."
The Archdeacon put his thin hand on her plump shoulder, and smiled. The old man had a very sunny smile. "I'm sorry to carry on a conversation so Socratically," said he. "But what is 'it'?"
"I've never seen anything so physically beautiful, save the statues in the Vatican, in all my life. If he's not an aristocrat to the finger tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a nunnery—which will distress you exceedingly. And then"—she waved a plump hand—"and then, as I've mentioned before, he reads the Religio Medici. The commonplace, vulgar young man of to-day no more reads Sir Thomas Browne than he reads Tertullian or the Upanishads."
"He also reads," said the Archdeacon, stuffing his hand into Paul's knapsack, against whose canvas the stiff outline of a book revealed itself—"he also reads"—he held up a little fat duodecimo—"the Chansons de Beranger."
"That proves it," cried Miss Winwood.
"Proves what?"
His blue eyes twinkled. Having a sense of humour, she laughed and flung her great arm round his frail shoulders. "It proves, my venerable and otherwise distinguished dear, that I am right and you are wrong."
"My good Ursula," said he, disengaging himself, "I have not advanced one argument either in favour of, or in opposition to, one single proposition the whole of this afternoon."
She shook her head at him pityingly.
The housekeeper entered carrying a double handful of odds and ends which she laid on the library table—a watch and chain and cornelian heart, a cigarette case bearing the initials "P.S.," some keys, a very soiled handkerchief, a sovereign, a shilling and a penny. Dr. Fuller had sent them down with his compliments; they were the entire contents of the young gentleman's pockets.
"Not a card, not a scrap of paper with a name and address on it?" cried Miss Winwood.
"Not a scrap, miss. The doctor and I searched most thoroughly."
"Perhaps the knapsack will tell us more," said the Archdeacon.
The knapsack, however, revealed nothing but a few toilet necessaries, a hunk of stale bread and a depressing morsel of cheese, and a pair of stockings and a shirt declared by the housekeeper to be wet through. As the Beranger, like the Sir Thomas Browne, was inscribed "Paul Savelli," which corresponded with the initials on the cigarette case, they were fairly certain of the young man's name. But that was all they could discover regarding him.
"We'll have to wait until he can tell us himself," said Miss Winwood later to the doctor.
"We'll have to wait a long time," said he.
THE London physician arrived, sat up with Paul most of the night, and went away the next morning saying that he was a dead man. Dr. Fuller, however, advanced the uncontrovertible opinion that a man was not dead till he died; and Paul was not dead yet. As a matter of fact, Paul did not die. If he had done so, there would have been an end of him and this history would never have been written. He lay for many days at the gates of Death, and Miss Winwood, terribly fearful lest they should open and the mysterious, unconscious shape of beauty and youth should pass through, had all the trouble promised her by the doctor. But the gates remained shut. When Paul took a turn for the better, the London physician came down again and declared that he was living in defiance of all the laws of pathology, and with a graceful compliment left the case in the hands of Dr. Fuller. When his life was out of danger, Dr. Fuller attributed the miracle to the nurses; Ursula Winwood attributed it to Dr. Fuller; the London physician to Paul's superb constitution; and Paul himself, perhaps the most wisely, to the pleasant-faced, masterful lady who had concentrated on his illness all the resources of womanly tenderness.
But it was a long time before Paul was capable of formulating such an opinion. It was a long time before he could formulate any opinion at all. When not delirious or comatose, he had the devil of pleurisy tearing at the wall of his lung like a wild cat. Only gradually did he begin to observe and to question. That noiseless woman in coot blue and white was a nurse. He knew that. So he must be in hospital. But the room was much smaller than a hospital ward; and where were the other patients? The question worried him for a whole morning. Then there was a pink-faced man in gold spectacles, Obviously the doctor. Then there was a sort of nurse whom he liked very much, but she was not in uniform. Who could she be? He realized that he was ill, as weak as a butterfly; and the pain when he coughed was agonizing. It was all very odd. How had he come here? He remembered walking along a dusty road in the blazing sun, his head bursting, every limb a moving ache. He also vaguely remembered being awakened at night by a thunder storm as he lay snugly asleep beneath a hedge. The German Ocean had fallen down upon him. He was quite sure it was the German Ocean, because he had fixed it in his head by repeating "the North Sea or German Ocean." Mixing up delirious dream with fact, he clearly remembered the green waves rearing themselves up first, an immeasurable wall, then spreading a translucent canopy beneath the firmament and then descending in awful deluge. He had a confused memory of morning sunshine, of a cottage, of a hard-featured woman, of sitting before a fire with a blanket round his shoulders, of a toddling child smeared to the eyebrows with dirt and treacle whom he had wanted to wash. Over and over again, lately, he had wanted to wash that child, but it had always eluded his efforts. Once he had thought of scraping it with a bit of hoof-iron, but it had turned into a Stilton cheese. It was all very puzzling. Then he had gone on tramping along the high road. What was that about bacon and eggs? The horrible smell offended his nostrils. It must have been a wayside inn; and a woman twenty feet high with a face like a cauliflower—or was it spinach?—or Brussels sprouts?—silly not to remember—one of the three, certainly—desired to murder him with a thousand eggs bubbling up against rank reefs of bacon. He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been very lucky. His star had saved him. It had also saved him from a devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood quite still, calm and undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and fall off the machine. And when the devil had picked himself up, he had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; but Paul had shown him his cornelian heart, his talisman, and the devil had remounted his glowing vehicle and had ridden away in a spume of flame. The Father of Lies had tried to pass himself off as a postman. The memory of the shallow pretence tickled Paul so that he laughed; and then he half fainted in pleuritic agony.
After the interlude with the devil he could recollect little. He was going up to London to make his fortune. A princess was waiting for him at the golden gate of London, with a fortune piled up in a coach-and-six. But being very sick and dizzy, he thought he would sit down and rest in a great green cathedral whose doors stood invitingly open ... and now he found himself in the hospital ward. Sometimes he felt a desire to question the blue-and-white nurse, but it seemed too much trouble to move his lips. Then in a flash came the solution of the puzzle, and he chuckled to himself over his cunning. Of course it was a dream. The nurse was a dream-nurse, who wanted to make him believe that she was real. But she was not clever enough. The best way to pay her out for her deception was to take no notice of her whatsoever. So comforted, he would go to sleep.
At last one morning he woke, a miserably weak but perfectly sane man, and he turned his head from side to side and looked wonderingly at the fresh and exquisite room. A bowl of Morning Glow roses stood by his bedside, gracious things for fevered eyes to rest upon. A few large photographs of famous pictures hung on the walls. In front of him was the Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio, which he recognized with a smile. He had read about it, and knew that the original was in Venice. Knowledge of things like that was comforting.
The nurse, noticing the change, came up to him and spoke in a soothing voice. "Are you feeling better?"
"I think so," said Paul. "I suppose I've been very ill."
"Very ill," said the nurse.
"This can't be a hospital?"
"Oh, no. It's the house of some very kind, good friends. You don't know them," she added quickly, seeing him knit a perplexed brow. "You stumbled into their garden and fainted. And they're very anxious for you to get well and strong."
"Who are they?" asked Paul.
"Colonel and Miss Winwood. They will be so glad to see you better—at least Miss Winwood will; the Colonel's not at home."
She lifted his head gently and smoothed his pillows, and ordained silence. Presently the doctor came, and spoke kindly. "You've had a narrow shave, my friend, and you're not out of the wood yet," said he. "And you'll have to go slow and take things for granted for some time."
Then came Miss Winwood, whom he recognized as the puzzling but pleasant nurse out of uniform.
"I don't know how to thank you for taking me in, a stranger, like this," said Paul.
She smiled. "It's Providence, not me, that you must thank. You might have been taken ill by the roadside far away from anybody. Providence guided you here."
"Providence or Destiny," murmured Paul, closing his eyes. It was absurd to feel so weak.
"That's a theological question on which we won't enter," laughed Miss Winwood. "Anyhow, thank God, you're better."
A little later she came to him again. "I've been so anxious about your people—you see, we've had no means of communicating with them."
"My people?" asked Paul, surprised.
"Yes. They must be wondering what has become of you."
"I have no people," said Paul.
"No people? What do you mean?" she asked sharply, for the moment forgetful of the sick room. She herself had hundreds of relations. The branches of her family tree were common to half the country families of England. "Have you no parents—brothers or sisters—?"
"None that I know of," said Paul. "I'm quite alone in the world."
"Have you no friends to whom I could write about you?"
He shook his head, and his great eyes, all the greater and more lustrous through illness, smiled into hers. "No. None that count. At least—there are two friends, but I've lost sight of them for years. No—there's nobody who would be in the least interested to know. Please don't trouble. I shall be all right."
Miss Winwood put her cool hand on his forehead and bent over him. "You? You, alone like that? My poor boy!"
She turned away. It was almost incredible. It was monstrously pathetic. The phenomenon baffled her. Tears came into her eyes. She had imagined him the darling of mother and sisters; the gay centre of troops of friends. And he was alone on the earth. Who was he? She turned again.
"Will you tell me your name?"
"Savelli. Paul Savelli."
"I thought so. It was in the two books in your knapsack. A historical Italian name."
"Yes," said Paul. "Noble. All dead."
He lay back, exhausted. Suddenly a thought smote him. He beckoned. She approached. "My heart—is it safe?" he whispered.
"Your heart?"
"At the end of my watch-chain."
"Quite safe."
"Could I have it near me?"
"Of course."
Paul closed his eyes contentedly. With his talisman in his hand, all would be well. For the present he need take thought of nothing. His presence in the beautiful room being explained, there was an end of the perplexity of his semi-delirium. Of payment for evident devoted service there could be no question. Time enough when he grew well and able to fare forth again, to consider the immediate future. He was too weak to lift his head, and something inside him hurt like the devil when he moved. Why worry about outer and unimportant matters? The long days of pain and illness slipped gradually away. Miss Winwood sat by his bedside and talked; but not until he was much stronger did she question him as to his antecedents. The Archdeacon had gone away after a week's visit without being able to hold any converse with Paul; Colonel Winwood was still at Contrexeville, whence he wrote sceptically of the rare bird whom Ursula had discovered; and Ursula was alone in the house, save for a girl friend who had no traffic with the sick-chamber. She had, therefore, much leisure to devote to Paul. Her brother's scepticism most naturally strengthened her belief in him. He was her discovery. He grew almost to be her invention. Just consider. Here was a young Greek god—everyone who had a bowing acquaintance with ancient sculpture immediately likened Paul to a Greek god, and Ursula was not so far different from her cultured fellow mortals as to liken him to anything else—here was a young Phoebus Apollo, all the more Olympian because of his freedom from earthly ties, fallen straight from the clouds. He had fallen at her feet. His beauty had stirred her. His starlike loneliness had touched her heart. His swift intelligence, growing more manifest each day as he grew stronger, moved her admiration. He had, too, she realized, a sunny and sensuous nature, alive to beauty—even the beauty of the trivial things in his sickroom. He had an odd, poetical trick of phrase. He was a paragon of young Greek gods. She had discovered him; and women don't discover even mortal paragons every day in the week. Also, she was a woman of forty-three, which, after all, is not wrinkled and withered eld; and she was not a soured woman; she radiated health and sweetness; she had loved once in her life, very dearly. Romance touched her with his golden feather and, in the most sensible and the most unreprehensible way in the world, she fell in love with Paul.
"I wonder what made you put that Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio just opposite the bed," he said one day. He had advanced so far toward recovery as to be able to sit up against his pillows.
"Don't you like it?" She turned in her chair by his bedside.
"I worship it. Do you know, she has a strange look of you? When I was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a generous and holy bigness—the generosity of the All-woman."
Ursula flushed at the personal tribute, but let it pass without comment. "It's not a bad photograph; but the original—that is too lovely."
"It's in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice," said Paul quickly.
He had passed through a period of wild enthusiasm for Italian painting, and had haunted the National Gallery, and knew by heart Sir Charles Eastlake's edition of Kugler's unique textbook.
"Ah, you know it?" said Ursula.
"I've never been to Venice," replied Paul, with a sigh. "It's the dream of my life to go there."
She straightened herself on her chair. "How do you know the name of the church?"
Paul smiled and looked round the walls, and reflected for a moment. "Yes," said he in answer to his own questioning, "I think I can tell you where all these pictures are, though I've never seen them, except one. The two angels by Melozzo da Forli are in St. Peter's at Rome. The Sposalia of Raphael is in the Breza, Milan. The Andrea del Sarto is in the Louvre. That's the one I've seen. That little child of Heaven, playing the lute, is in the predella of an altar-piece by Vittore Carpaccio in the—in the—please don't tell me—in the Academia of Venice. Am I right?"
"Absolutely right," said Miss Winwood.
He laughed, delighted. At three and twenty, one—thank goodness!—is very young. One hungers for recognition of the wonder-inspiring self that lies hidden beneath the commonplace mask of clay. "And that," said he—"the Madonna being crowned—the Botticelli—is in the Uffizi at Florence. Walter Pater talks about it—you know—in his 'Renaissance'—the pen dropping from her hand—'the high, cold words that have no meaning for her—the intolerable honour'! Oh, it's enormous, isn't it?"
"I'm afraid I've not read my Pater as I ought," said Miss Winwood.
"But, you must!" cried Paul, with the gloriously audacious faith of youth which has just discovered a true apostle. "Pater puts you on to the inner meaning of everything—in art, I mean. He doesn't wander about in the air like Ruskin, though, of course, if you get your mental winnowing machine in proper working order you can get the good grain out of Ruskin. 'The Stones of Venice' and 'The Seven Lamps' have taught me a lot. But you always have to be saying to yourself, 'Is this gorgeous nonsense or isn't it?' whereas in Pater there's no nonsense at all. You're simply carried along on a full stream of Beauty straight into the open Sea of Truth."
And Ursula Winwood, to whom Archbishops had been deferential and Cabinet Ministers had come for, guidance, meekly promised to send at once for Pater's 'Renaissance' and so fill in a most lamentable gap in her education.
"My uncle, the Archdeacon," she said, after a while, "reminded me that the great Savelli was a Venetian general—of Roman family; and, strangely enough, his name, too, was Paul. Perhaps that's how you got the name."
"That must be how," said Paul dreamily. He had not heard of the great general. He had seen the name of Savelli somewhere—also that of Torelli—and had hesitated between the two. Thinking it no great harm, he wove into words the clamour of his cherished romance. "My parents died when I was quite young—a baby—and then I was brought to England. So you see"—he smiled in his winning way—"I'm absolutely English."
"But you've kept your Italian love of beauty."
"I hope so," said Paul.
"Then I suppose you were brought up by guardians," said Ursula.
"A guardian," said Paul, anxious to cut down to a minimum the mythical personages that might be connected with his career. "But I seldom saw him. He lived in Paris chiefly. He's dead now."
"What a poor little uncared-for waif you must have been."
Paul laughed. "Oh, don't pity me. I've had to think for myself a good deal, it is true. But it has done me good. Don't you find it's the things one learns for oneself—whether they are about life or old china—that are the most valuable?"
"Of course," said Miss Winwood. But she sighed, womanlike, at the thought of the little Paul—(how beautiful he must have been as a child!)—being brought up by servants and hirelings in a lonely house, his very guardian taking no concern in his welfare.
Thus it came about that, from the exiguous material supplied by Paul, Miss Winwood, not doubting his gentle birth and breeding, constructed for him a wholly fictitious set of antecedents. Paul invented as little as possible and gratefully accepted her suggestions. They worked together unconsciously. Paul had to give some account of himself. He had blotted Bludston and his modeldom out of his existence. The passionate belief in his high and romantic birth was part of his being, and Miss Winwood's recognition was a splendid confirmation of his faith. It was rather the suppressio veri of which he was guilty than the propositio falsi. So between them his childhood was invested with a vague semblance of reality in which the fact of his isolation stood out most prominent.
They had many talks together, not only on books and art, but on the social subjects in which Ursula was so deeply interested. She found him well informed, with a curiously detailed knowledge of the everyday lives of the poor. It did not occur to her that this knowledge came from his personal experience. She attributed it to the many-sided genius of her paragon.
"When you get well you must help us. There's an infinite amount to be done."
"I shall be delighted," said Paul politely.
"You'll find I'm a terrible person to deal with when once I've laid my hands on anybody," she said with a smile. "I drag in all kinds of people, and they can't escape. I sent young Harry Gostling—Lord Ruthmere's son, you know—to look into a working girls' club in the Isle of Dogs that was going wrong. He hated it at first, but now he's as keen as possible. And you'll be keen too."
It was flattering to be classified with leisured and opulent young Guardsmen; but what, Paul reflected with a qualm, would the kind lady say if she learned the real state of his present fortunes? He thought of the guinea that lay between him and starvation, and was amused by the irony of her proposition. Miss Winwood evidently took it for granted that he was in easy circumstances, living on the patrimony administered during his boyhood by a careless guardian. He shrank from undeceiving her. His dream was beginning to come true. He was accepted by one of the high caste as belonging to the world where princes and princesses dwelt serene. If only he could put the theatre behind him, as he had put the rest, and make a stepping-stone of his dead actor self! But that was impossible, or at least the question would have to be fought out between himself and fortune after he had left Drane's Court. In the meanwhile he glowed with the ambition to leave it in his newly acquired splendour, drums beating, banners flying, the young prince returning to his romantic and mysterious solitude.
The time was approaching when he should get up. He sent for his luggage. The battered trunk and portmanteau plastered with the labels of queer provincial towns did not betray great wealth. Nor did the contents, taken out by the man-servant and arranged in drawers by the nurse. His toilet paraphernalia was of the simplest and scantiest. His stock of frayed linen and darned underclothes made rather a poor little heap on the chair. He watched the unpacking somewhat wistfully from his bed; and, like many another poor man, inwardly resented his poverty being laid bare to the eyes of the servants of the rich.
The only thing that the man seemed to handle respectfully—as a recognized totem of a superior caste—was a brown canvas case of golf clubs, which he stood up in a conspicuous corner of the room. Paul had taken to the Ancient and Royal game when first he went on tour, and it had been a health-giving resource during the listless days when there was no rehearsal or no matinee—hundreds of provincial actors, to say nothing of retired colonels and such-like derelicts, owe their salvation of body and soul to the absurd but hygienic pastime—and with a naturally true eye and a harmonious body trained to all demands on its suppleness in the gymnasium, proficiency had come with little trouble. He was a born golfer; for the physically perfect human is a born anything physical you please. But he had not played for a long time. Half-crowns had been very scarce on this last disastrous tour, and comrades who included golf in their horizon of human possibilities had been rarer. When would he play again? Heaven knew! So he looked wistfully, too, at his set of golf clubs. He remembered how he had bought them—one by one.
"Do you want this on the dressing table?" The nurse held up a little oblong case.
It was his make-up box, luckily tied round with string.
"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed. He wished he could have told her to burn it. He felt happier when all his belongings were stowed away out of sight and the old trunk and portmanteau hauled out of the room.
Colonel Winwood came home and asked his sister pertinent questions. He was a bald, sad-looking man with a long grizzling moustache that drooped despondently. But he had a square, obstinate chin, and his eyes, though they seldom smiled, were keen and direct, like Miss Winwood's. Romance had passed him by long since. He did not believe in paragons.
"I gather, my dear Ursula," said he in a dry voice, "that our guest is an orphan, of good Italian family, brought up in England by a guardian now dead who lived in France. Also that he is of prepossessing exterior, of agreeable manners, of considerable cultivation, and apparently of no acquaintance. But what I can't make out is: what he does for a living, how he came to be half-starved on his walking tour—the doctor said so, you remember—where he was going from and where he is going to when he leaves our house. In fact, he seems to be a very vague and mysterious person, of whom, for a woman of your character and peculiar training, you know singularly little."
Miss Winwood replied that she could not pry into the lad's private affairs. Her brother retorted that a youth, in his physically helpless condition, who was really ingenuous, would have poured out his life's history into the ears of so sympathetic a woman, and have bored her to tears with the inner secrets of his soul.
"He has high aspirations. He has told me of them. But he hasn't bored me a bit," said Ursula.
"What does he aspire to?"
"What does any brilliant young fellow of two or three and twenty aspire to? Anything, everything. He has only to find his path."
"Yes, but what is his path?"
"I wish you weren't so much like Uncle Edward, James," said Ursula.
"He's a damned clever old man," said Colonel Winwood, "and I wish he had stayed here long enough to be able to put our young friend through a searching cross-examination."
Ursula lifted her finger-bowl an inch from the doiley and carefully put it down again. It was the evening of Colonel Winwood's arrival, and they were lingering over coffee in the great, picture-hung and softly lighted dining room. Having fixed the bowl in the exact centre of the doiley, she flashed round on her brother. "My dear James, do you think I'm an idiot?"
He took his cigar from his lips and looked at her with not unhumorous dryness. "When the world was very young, my dear," said he, "I've no doubt I called you so. But not since."
She stretched out her hand and tapped his. She was very fond of him. "You can't help being a man, my poor boy, and thinking manly thoughts of me, a woman. But I'm not an idiot. Our young friend, as you call him, is as poor as a church mouse. I know it. No, don't say, 'How?' like Uncle Edward. He hasn't told me, but Nurse has—a heart-breaking history of socks and things. There's the doctor's diagnosis, too. I haven't forgotten. But the boy is too proud to cry poverty among strangers. He keeps his end up like a man. To hear him talk, one would think he not only hadn't a care in the world, but that he commanded the earth. How can one help admiring the boy's pluck and—that's where my reticence comes in—respecting the boy's reserve?"
"H'm!" said Colonel Winwood.
"But, good gracious, Jim, dear, supposing you—or any of us—men, I mean—had been in this boy's extraordinary position—would you have acted differently? You would have died rather than give your poverty away to absolute strangers to whom you were indebted, in the way this boy is indebted to us. Good God, Jim"—she sent her dessert knife skimming across the table—"don't you see? Any reference to poverty would be an invitation—a veiled request for further help. To a gentleman like Paul Savelli, the thing's unthinkable."
Colonel Winwood selected a fresh cigar, clipped off the end, and lit it from a silver spirit lamp by his side. He blew out the first exquisite puff—the smoker's paradise would be the one first full and fragrant, virginal puff of an infinite succession of perfect cigars—looked anxiously at the glowing point to see that it was exactly lighted, and leaned back in his chair.
"What you say, dear," said he, "is plausible. Plausible almost to the point of conviction. But there's a hole somewhere in your argument, I'm sure, and I'm too tired after my journey to find it."
Thus, as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so did they fight for Paul; and in both cases they used a woman as their instrument.
Colonel Winwood, in spite of a masculine air of superiority, joined with the Archbishops and Cabinet Ministers above referred to in their appreciation of his sister's judgment. After all, what business of his were the private affairs of his involuntary guest? He paid him a visit the next day, and found him lying on a couch by the sunny window, clad in dressing gown and slippers. Paul rose politely, though he winced with pain.
"Don't get up, please. I'm Colonel Winwood."
They shook hands. Paul began to wheel an armchair from the bedside, but Colonel Winwood insisted on his lying down again and drew up the chair himself. "I'm afraid," said Paul, "I've been a sad trespasser on your hospitality. Miss Winwood must have told you it has scarcely been my fault; but I don't know how to express my thanks."
As Paul made it, the little speech could not have been better. Colonel Winwood, who (like the seniors of every age) deplored the lack of manners of the rising generation, was pleased by the ever so little elaborate courtesy.
"I'm only too glad we've pulled you round. You've had a bad time, I hear."
Paul smiled. "Pretty bad. If it hadn't been for Miss Winwood and all she has done for me, I should have pegged out."
"My sister's a notable woman," said the Colonel. "When she sets out to do a thing she does it thoroughly."
"I owe her my life," said Paul simply.
There was a pause. The two men, both bright-eyed, looked at each other for the fraction of a second. One, the aristocrat secure of his wealth, of his position, of himself, with no illusion left him save pride of birth, no dream save that of an England mighty and prosperous under continuous centuries of Tory rule, no memories but of stainless honour—he had fought gallantly for his Queen, he had lived like a noble gentleman, he had done his country disinterested service—no ambition but to keep himself on the level of the ideal which he had long since attained; the other the creation of nothing but of dreams, the child of the gutter, the adventurer, the vagabond, with no address, not even a back room over a sweetstuff shop in wide England, the possessor of a few suits of old clothes and one pound, one shilling and a penny, with nothing in front of him but the vast blankness of 'life, nothing behind him save memories of sordid struggle, with nothing to guide him, nothing to set him on his way with thrilling pulse and quivering fibres save the Vision Splendid, the glorious Hope, the unconquerable Faith. In the older man's eyes Paul read the calm, stern certainty of things both born to and achieved; and Colonel Winwood saw in the young man's eyes, as in a glass darkly, the reflection of the Vision.
"And yours is a very young life," said he. "Gad! it must be wonderful to be twenty. 'Rich in the glory of my rising sun.' You know your Thackeray?"
"'Riche de ma jeunesse,'" laughed Paul. "Thackeray went one better than Beranger, that time."
"I forgot," said Colonel Winwood. "My sister told me. You go about with Beranger as a sort of pocket Bible."
Paul laughed again. "When one is on the tramp one's choice of books is limited by their cubical content. One couldn't take Gibbon, for instance, or a complete Balzac."
Colonel Winwood tugged at his drooping moustache and again scrutinized the frank and exceedingly attractive youth. His astonishing perfection of feature was obvious to anybody. Yet any inconsiderable human—a peasant of the Campagna, a Venetian gondolier, a swaggering brigand of Macedonia—could be astonishingly beautiful. And, being astonishingly beautiful, that was the beginning and end of him. But behind this merely physical attractiveness of his guest glowed a lambent intelligence, quick as lightning. There was humorous challenge in those laughing and lucent dark eyes.
"Do you know your Balzac?" he asked.
"Oh, yes," said Paul.
"I wonder if you do," said Colonel Winwood. "I'm rather a Balzacian myself."
"I can't say I've read all Balzac. That's a colossal order," said Paul, rather excited-for, in his limited acquaintance with cultivated folk, Colonel Winwood was the only human being who could claim acquaintance with one of the literary gods of his idolatry—"but I know him pretty well. I can't stand his 'Theatre'—that's footle—but the big things—'Le Pere Goriot,' 'La Cousine Bette,' 'Cesar Birotteau'—what a great book 'Cesar Birotteau' is!—"
"You're right," said Colonel Winwood, forgetful of any possible barriers between himself and the young enthusiast. "It's one of the four or five great books, and very few people recognize it."
"'Le Lys dans la Vallee,'" said Paul.
"There's another—"
And they talked for half an hour of the Baron Nucingen, and Rastignac, and Hulot, and Bixiou, and Lousteau, and Gobsec, and Gaudissart, and Vautrin, and many another vivid personage in the human comedy.