CHAPTER XVI
Thegreat train thundered on straight down through the heart of France. Almost the length of it separated Quixtus and Clementina. They had seen each other only for a few moments amid the bustle of the hurrying platform—just long enough for her quick vision to perceive, in the uncertain blue light of the arc-lamps, a haunted look in his eyes that was absent when she had first met him that afternoon. He had spoken a few courteous phrases; he had inquired whether Tommy and Etta, who clung to her to the last, were to be fellow travellers, whereon Clementina had very definitely informed him that Etta was staying with friends in Paris, while Tommy had arranged to visit a painter chum at Barbizon; he had expressed the hope that when they arrived at Marseilles she would command his services, and, after a bareheaded leave-taking of the two ladies, which caused Etta afterwards to remark that it was only her short skirt that had prevented her from making her court curtsey, he had gone in search of his own compartment.
Etta had flung her arms round Clementina’s neck.
“Oh, Clementina darling, do come back soon! The Jacksons are kind, but, oh, so stuffy! And Tommy is going to Barbizon, and I shan’t see him, and if you don’t come back soon, he’ll have forgotten all about me.”
Tommy had given her a great hug and kissed her.
“Good-bye, dear. God bless you. Come back soon. We can’t do without you.”
And Clementina, pausing on the first step of the railway carriage, had turned and raised her hand—the unfilled finger-ends of her cotton gloves projecting comically—and cried:
“Good-bye, you dear, selfish, detestable, beloved children!”
And neither of the twain had known what in the world she meant.
The great train thundered on through the country which Clementina had traversed a month or so before with Tommy—Dijon, Macon, Lyons. . . . Things had changed since then. Then a sweet rejuvenescence had crept through her veins; then she had amused herself with the idea of being a lady. The towns, whose names shouted through the awful stillness of the stations otherwise only broken by the eerie clank of the wheel-testers’ hammers were now but abstract stages on her journey, then had a magical significance. . . . That must be Vienne through which they were dashing. . . . If the bitter-sweet, the tragi-comedy, the cardiac surgery of Vienne had not brought a smile to Clementina’s lips in the dark solitude of her compartment, would she have been the sturdy, humorous Clementina who had cried her farewell to the children? Things had changed since then, she assured herself. She was just Clementina again, fighting her battles alone, impatient, contemptuous, unfeeling; no longer a lady, merely a female dauber, ready once more to paint elderly magnates’ trousers at so much per leg. . . . She sighed and laughed. Those had been pleasant times. . . . That she should be going over the same ground now with Quixtus seemed a freakish trick of destiny.
At nine o’clock in the morning the train entered Marseilles Station. Quixtus came speedily up to Clementina as she stepped on to the platform, and offered his services. He trusted she had slept well and had a comfortable journey.
“Didn’t sleep a wink,” said Clementina. “Did you?”
Quixtus admitted broken slumbers. The strangeness of the adventure had kept him awake.
“You’re looking ill this morning,” said Clementina, glancing at him sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”
He seemed careworn, feverish, and an unnatural glitter had replaced the haunted look in his eyes. Clementina did not know how the approaching consummation of a deed of real wickedness terrified the mild and gentle-natured man. Hitherto his evil doings had been fantastic, repaired almost at once as if mechanically by the underlying instinct of generosity; his visions of sin had been fantastic, too, harmless, unpractical; but this sin of vengeance which he had intellectually conceived and fostered loomed great and terrible. So does the braggart who has sworn to eat up a lion alive, totter at the knees when he hears the lion’s roar. His night had been that of a soul on fire.
“Something’s wrong. What is it?” asked Clementina.
He answered vaguely. This summons had upset him. It had set him thinking, a tiring mental process. He remembered, said he, how Hammersley, when they were boys together, had called him to see a dying butterfly on a rose-bush. The yellow wings were still flapping languidly; then slower and slower; then strength gave out and they quivered in the last effort; and then the hold on the rose-bush relaxed and the butterfly fell to the earth—dead.
“What does Monsieur wish done with the baggage?” asked the attendant porter, who had listened uncomprehendingly to the long and tragical tale.
Quixtus passed his hand across his forehead and looked at the porter as if awakening out of a dream.
“What you like,” said he.
So forlorn and hag-ridden did he appear, that a wave of pity swept through Clementina. The deadly phrase of the judge in the Marrable trial occurred to her: “Such men as you ought not to be allowed to go about loose.” The mothering instinct more than her natural forcefulness, made her take charge of the situation.
“The omnibus of the Hôtel du Louvre,” she said to the man, and taking Quixtus by the arm, she led him like a child out of the station.
“Get in,” she said with rough kindliness, pushing him towards the step of the omnibus. But he moved aside for her to precede him. Clementina said “Rubbish!” and entered the vehicle. She was no longer playing at being a lady. Quixtus followed her, and the omnibus clattered down the steep streets and jolted and swayed through the traffic and between the myriad tramcars that deface and deafen the city. The morning sun shone fiercely. The pavements baked. The sun-drenched buildings burned hot to the eye and the very awnings in the front of shops and over stalls in the markets suggested heat rather than coolness. Far away at the end of the Cannebière, the strip of sea visible glittered like a steel blade.
“Whew!” gasped Clementina, “what heat!”
“I feel it rather chilly,” said Quixtus.
She stared at him, wiping a damp forehead. What was the matter with the man?
When they entered the fairly cool vestibule of the hotel, the manager met them and assigned the rooms. They asked for Hammersley. Alas, said the manager, he was very ill. The doctor was with him even now. An elderly man in thin, sunstained tweeds, who had been sitting in a corner playing with a child of five or six in charge of a Chinese nurse, came forward and greeted them.
“Are you the friends Mr. Hammersley telegraphed for? Miss Wing and Dr. Quixtus? My name is Poynter. I was a fellow passenger of Mr. Hammersley’s on the ‘Moronia.’ He was a sick man when he started; and got worse on the voyage. Impossible to land at Brindisi. Arrived here, he could go no further either by boat or train. He was quite helpless, so I stayed on till his friends could come. It was I who wrote out and sent the telegrams.”
“That was very good of you,” said Clementina.
Quixtus bowed vaguely, but spoke not a word. His lips were white. He held the front edges of his jacket crushed in a nervous grip. Poynter’s voice sounded far away. He barely grasped the meaning of his words. A dynamo throbbed in his head instead of a brain.
“Is he dying?” asked Clementina.
Mr. Poynter made an expressive gesture. “I’m afraid so. He collapsed during the night and they’ve been giving him oxygen this morning. Yesterday he was desperately anxious to see you both.”
“Is it possible or judicious to go to him now?” asked Clementina.
“You may inquire. If you will allow me, I’ll show you the way to his room.”
He led the way to the lift. They entered. For Quixtus his companions had ceased to exist. He was conscious only of going to the dying man, and the dynamo throbbed, throbbed. During the ascent Clementina said abruptly to Poynter:
“How long is it since you’ve been home?”
“Twenty-five years,” he replied with a grim smile. “And it has been the dream of my life for ten.”
“And you’ve stopped off in this Hades of a place for the sake of a sick stranger? You must be a good sort.”
“You would have done the same,” said Poynter.
“Not I.”
He smiled again and looked at her with his calm, certain eyes. “A man does not live in the far Orient for nothing. I know you would. This way,” he said, as the lift-door opened. He led them down a corridor, Quixtus following, a step or two behind, like a man in a trance.
The awful moment was at hand, the moment which, in the tea-shop and in the hotel, had seemed far, far distant, hidden in the mists of some unreal devil-land; which at dinner had begun to loom through the mists; which all night long had seemed to grow nearer and nearer with every rhythmic thud of the thundering train, until, at times, it touched him like some material horror. The moment was at hand. At last he was about to fulfil his destiny of evil. His enemy lay dying, the spirit faintly flapping its wings like the butterfly. In a moment they would enter a room. He would behold the dying man. He would curse him and send a blackened, anguished soul into eternity.
The dynamo in his brain and the beating of his heart made him fancy that they were walking to the sound of muffled drums. Nearer, nearer. This was real, actual. He was a devil walking to the sound of muffled drums.
Poynter and Clementina stopped before a door. Quixtus stood still shaking all over, like a horse in front of a nameless terror.
“This is his room,” said Poynter, grasping the handle.
Quixtus gave a queer cry and suddenly threw himself forward and clutched Poynter’s arm convulsively, his features distorted with terror.
“Wait—wait! I can’t do it! I can’t do it! It’s monstrous!”
He leaned up against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Overwrought nerves,” whispered Poynter.
There happened to be a bench near by, placed for the convenience of the chambermaid of the floor. Clementina made him sit down.
“I don’t think you’re quite up to seeing him just now,” she said.
He shook his head. “No. Not just now. I feel faint. It’s death. I’m not used to death. You go in. Give him my love. I’ll see him later. But give him my love.”
“Very well,” said Clementina.
She rapped gently at the door. It was opened and a sister of charity in a great white coif appeared on the threshold.
She looked at the visitors sadly.
“C’est fini,” she whispered.
Quixtus staggered to his feet.
“Dead?”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
The sweat broke out in great drops on his forehead.
“Dead!” he repeated.
“Vous pouvez entrer si vous voulez,” said the sister.
Then Quixtus reeled as if some one had dealt him a crushing blow. Poynter saved him from falling and guided him to the seat. For a long, long second all was darkness. The dynamo stopped suddenly. Then, as had happened once before, a little thread seemed to snap in his brain. He opened his eyes feeling sick and giddy. The sister quickly disappeared into the room, and returned with some brandy. The others stood anxiously by. Presently the spirits took effect and enabled him to co-ordinate his faculties. With an effort of will he rose and straightened himself.
“I am better now. Let us go in.”
“Wiser not,” said Clementina, a thousand miles from suspecting the psychological phenomenon that had occurred.
Quixtus slightly raised a protesting hand.
“I assure you there is no reason why I should not go in,” he said in a shaky voice.
“All right,” said Clementina. “But you can’t go tumbling all over the place.”
Once more she took his arm in her strong grip, and, leaving Poynter outside, they entered the death-chamber together. The windows were flung wide, but the outside shutters were closed, darkening the room and cooling it from the baking sun. A man in a frock coat and narrow black tie—the doctor—was aiding his assistant in the repacking of the oxygen apparatus. On the bed, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, and pinched, lay all that was left of Hammersley. Only his blonde hair and beard, with scarcely a touch of grey, remained of that which was familiar. The laughing eyes which had charmed men and women were hidden for ever beneath the lids. Clementina’s hand crept half-mechanically downwards and clasped that of Quixtus, which returned the pressure. So hand in hand they stood, in silence, by the death-bed.
At last Clementina whispered:
“Whatever may have been the misunderstanding between you, all is over now. May his sins be forgiven him.”
“Amen,” said Quixtus.
Tears rolled down Clementina’s cheeks and fell on her bodice. The dead man had belonged to her youth—the dreary youth that had taken itself for grim, grey eld. He had brought into it a little laughter, a little buoyancy, much strength, much comfort; all, so simply, so kindly. At first, in her fierce mood of revolt, she had rebuffed him and scorned his friendship. But he was one of the gifted ones who could divine a woman’s needs and minister to them; so he smiled at her rejection of his offerings, knowing that she craved them, and presented them again and again until at last, worn out with longing, she clutched at them frantically and hugged them to her bosom. A generous gentleman, a loyal friend, a very help in time of trouble, he lay there dead before her in the prime of his manhood. She let the tears fall unchecked, until they blinded her.
A dry, queer voice broke a long silence, whispering in her ear:
“I told you to give him my love, didn’t I?”
She nodded and squeezed Quixtus’s hand.
The doctor stood by waiting till their scrutiny of the dead should be over. Clementina was the first to turn to him and to ask for information as to the death. In a few words the doctor told her. When she entered the room he had been dead five minutes.
“Who, Madame, you or this gentleman, is responsible for what remains to be done?”
“I am. Don’t you think so, Ephraim?”
Quixtus bowed his head.
“I sent him my love,” he murmured.
“And now,” said the Sister of Charity, “we must make thetoilette du mort. Will you have the kindness to retire?”
She smiled sadly and opened the door.
“There is a packet in the drawer for this lady and gentleman,” said Poynter, who had stood waiting for them in the corridor.
“Ah! bon,” said the Sister. She crossed the room and returned with the packet, which she handed to Clementina. It was sealed and addressed to them jointly. “To Ephraim Quixtus and Clementina Wing. To be opened after my death.” Clementina stuffed it in the pocket of her skirt.
“We’ll open it together by-and-by. Now we’d better go to our rooms and tidy up and have some food. Only a fool goes through such a day as is before us on an empty stomach. What’s your number? I’ll tell them to send you up some coffee and rolls.”
He thanked her dreamily. She arranged a meeting at noon in order to go through the packet. They walked along the corridor, Poynter accompanying them. He proposed, it being convenient to them, to take the night train to Paris and home. In the meanwhile his services were at their disposal.
“I wish I could pack you off to Piccadilly by Hertzian wave, right away,” said Clementina.
“It’s Devonshire I’m longing for,” said he.
They arrived at the lift door.
“You’ll love it all the better for having played the Angel in Hades,” said Clementina with moist eyes. “Good-bye for the present.”
She extended her hand. He took it, held it in a hesitating way. An expression of puzzledom came over his tanned, lined features.
“Are you going to your room now?”
“Yes,” said Clementina.
“Pardon my presumption,” said he, “but—but aren’t you going to see the child?”
“Child?” cried Clementina. “What child?”
“Why—Mr. Hammersley’s—didn’t you know? She’s here——”
“Here?”
“When you came into the vestibule, didn’t you notice a little girl I was playing with—and a Chinese nurse——”
“Lord have mercy upon us!” exclaimed Clementina. “Do you hear that, Ephraim?”
“Yes, I hear,” said Quixtus tonelessly. The conflict within him between Mithra and Ahriman had left him weak and non-recipient of new impressions. “Hammersley has a little daughter. I wasn’t aware of it. I wonder how he got her. She must have a mother somewhere.”
“The mother’s dead,” said Poynter. “From what I could gather from Hammersley, the child has no kith or kin in the world. That was why he was so desperately anxious for you to come.”
Clementina peered at him with screwed-up monkey face, as if he were sitting for his portrait.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” She clapped her hand to her pocket. “And this sealed envelope? Do you know anything about it?”
“I do,” said Poynter. “It contains a letter and a will. I wrote them both at his dictation ten days ago. The will is a properly attested document appointing Dr. Quixtus and yourself his executors and joint trustees of the little girl. A dear little girl,” he added, with a touch of wistfulness. “You’ll love her.”
“God grant it!” cried Clementina fervently. “But what an old maid like me and an old bachelor like him are going to do with a child between us, the Lord Almighty alone knows.”
Yet, as she spoke, the picture of the child—in spite of her preoccupation on entering the hotel, her sharp vision had noted the fairy fragility of the English scrap contrasting with the picturesque materialism of the fat Chinese nurse—the picture of the child enthroned on cushions (a feminine setting!) in the studio in Romney Place, flashed with acute distinctness before her mind, and some foolish thing within her leapt and stabbed her with a delicious pain.
Quixtus brushed his thinning hair from his forehead.
“I understand,” said he faintly. “I understand that I am a trustee for Hammersley’s daughter. I wasn’t expecting it. I hope you’ll not think it discourteous if I leave you? I’m not quite myself to-day. I’ll go and rest.”
He entered the lift which had been standing open for some time. There is not a feverish hurry in Marseilles hotels between steamers in June. Clementina with a gesture checked the lift-boy. The man must be looked after at once. She turned to Poynter.
“Like a dear good soul,” she said, in her frank way, “go down and prepare the child for such a rough-and-tumble stepmother as me. I’ll be with you in a few minutes. What’s your number, Ephraim?” He showed her the ticket. “Two hundred and seventy?”
“Au troisième, Madame.”
The lift gate clicked. They mounted a couple of floors. The chambermaid of theétageshowed them into number two hundred and seventy. Then Clementina took command. In less than two minutes windows were opened and shutters adjusted, the waiter was despatched for coffee, the valet was unpacking and arranging Quixtus’s personal belongings, and the chambermaid spreading the bed invitingly open. When Clementina was a lady, she behaved in the most self-effacing and early Victorian ladylike way in the world. But when she was Clementina and wanted to do things, she would have ordered the devil about like a common lackey, and boxed the ears of any archangel who ventured to interfere with her.
Quixtus, unprepared for this whirlwind ministration on the part of Clementina, whom he had hitherto regarded rather as an antagonistic principle than as a sympathetic woman, sat bolt upright on the edge of the sofa and looked on with an air of mystification. Yet, feeling weak and broken, he was content to let her tend him.
“Take off your clothes and go to bed,” said Clementina, standing, hands on hips, in front of him. “For two pins I’d undress you myself and put you to sleep like a baby.”
A wan smile flickered over his features.
“I’m very grateful to you for your kindness. Perhaps a little rest will bring mental adjustment. That’s what I think I need—mental adjustment.”
He repeated the words several times, and sat staring in front of him.
On the threshold Clementina turned and crossed the room again.
“Ephraim,” she said, “I think if you and I had been better friends all these years, there wouldn’t have been so much of this adjusting necessary. It has been my fault. I’m sorry. But now that we have a child to bring up, I’ll look after you. You poor man,” she added, touching his arm very kindly and feeling ridiculously sentimental. “You must be the loneliest thing that ever happened.” She caught up his suit of pyjamas and threw them by his side on the sofa. “Now for God’s sake stick on these things and go to bed.”
Downstairs, in the vestibule, she found Poynter with the little girl on his knees. The Chinese nurse sat like a good-tempered idol a few feet away.
“This is your new auntie,” said Poynter, as Clementina approached.
The child slipped from his knees and looked up at her with timorous earnestness. She was fair, with the transparent pallor of most children born and bred in the East, a creature of delicate fragility and grace. Clementina saw that she had her father’s frank hazel eyes. The child held out her hand.
“Good morning, auntie,” she said in a curiously sweet contralto.
Clementina took the seat vacated by Poynter, and drew the child towards her.
“Won’t you give me a kiss?”
“Of course.”
She put up her little lips. The appeal to the woman was irresistible. She caught the child to her and clasped her to her bosom, and kissed her and said foolish things. When her embrace relaxed as abruptly as it had begun, the child said:
“I like that. Do that again.”
“Bless you, my darling, I could do it all day long,” cried Clementina.
She held the child with one arm, the little face pillowed on her bosom, and with her free hand groped in her pocket for her handkerchief. This found, she blew her nose loudly and glanced at Poynter who was surveying the pair with his grave, wise smile.
“I’m sure you don’t mind if I make a fool of myself,” she said. “And I’m sure I don’t.”
CHAPTER XVII
Foras much of the day as she could spare from the miserable formalities and arrangements attendant on the death of a human being, Clementina made a fool of herself over the child. It was a feminine scrap hungering for love, kitten-like in its demand for caresses. Contentedly nestling in Clementina’s arms, she related, piecemeal, her tiny history. Her name was Sheila, and she loved her father who was very ill. So ill that she had only been able to see him once since they had come off the ship. That was yesterday, and she had been frightened, for he said that he was going to mummy. Now mummy had gone to heaven, and when people go to heaven you never see them again. With a pang Clementina asked her if she remembered when her mummy went to heaven. Oh yes. It was ever so long ago—when she was quite little. Daddy cried, cried, cried. She, too, would cry if daddy were to go to heaven. . . . Clementina thought it best to wait and accustom the child both to the idea of the eternal parting and to herself, before breaking the disastrous news. But her heart was wrung. Sometimes Sheila revolted and clamoured to see him; but on the whole she showed herself to be reasonable and docile. She hugged to her side a shapeless and very dirty white plush cat, her inseparable companion. . . . They had lived in a big house in Shanghai, with lots of servants; but her father had sold it and sold all the furniture, and they were going to live in England for ever and ever. England was a place all full of green trees and grass and cows and flowers. Did Clementina know England?
“Suppose daddy goes to heaven, would you like to come and live with me?” asked Clementina.
Sheila replied seriously that she would sooner live with her than with Na. Na was a new Na. Her old Na was in Shanghai. Her husband wouldn’t let her come to England. Only Clementina would have to cuddle her to sleep every night, like her daddy. Na didn’t cuddle her to sleep. She thought she didn’t know how. Daddy, she repeated like a young parrot, had said that was the worst of getting a nurse who had never had children of her own. They were so darned helpless. Clementina winced; but she put her arm round the child again.
“You’re not afraid of my not being able to cuddle you, Sheila?”
“Oh, you—you cuddle lovely,” murmured Sheila.
Who was her mother? Clementina had no notion. Hammersley had never announced the fact of his marriage. The last time she had seen him was six years ago. The child gave herself out to be five and a half. Hammersley must have married just before leaving England. He had breathed not a word to anybody. But so had Will Hammersley acted all his life. He was one who gave and never sought; a man who received the confidence of all who knew him, and kept the secrets both of joy and sorrow of his own life hidden behind his smiling eyes.
One of the secrets—the dainty secret that lay in her arms—was out now; a fact in flesh and blood. And for the guidance of this sensitive wisp of humanity to womanhood she, Clementina, and Ephraim Quixtus were jointly responsible. It was a Puckish destiny that had brought their lives to this point of convergence. With the dead man lying cold and stark upstairs, the humour of it appeared too grim for smiles. She wished that the quiet, capable man of wise understanding and unselfish heart, who had missed the express train at Brindisi that would have sped him swiftly to his longed-for Devonshire, and had come on to Marseilles with the sick stranger, had been appointed her coadjutor. Poynter could have helped her mightily with his kindly wisdom and his knowledge of the hearts and the ways of men, as he was helping her that day in the performance of the dreary duties to the dead. But Quixtus! He was as much of a child as the one confided to his care. Anxious, however, that Sheila should be prepossessed in his favour, she drew a flattering picture of the new uncle that would shortly come into her life.
“Is he your husband?” asked Sheila.
“Good Lord, no!” cried Clementina, aghast at the grotesque suggestion. “Whatever put that in your head, child?”
It appeared that Dora Smith, one of her little friends in Shanghai, had an uncle and aunt who were married. She thought all uncles and aunts were married.
“Do you think he’ll like my frock?” asked Sheila.
The vanity of the feminine thing! Clementina laughed for the first time that dismal day.
“Do you think he’ll like mine?”
Sheila looked critically at the soiled, ill-fitting blouse, and the rusty old brown skirt, and reddened. She paused for a moment.
“I’m sure he’ll say that he does,” she replied sedately.
Clementina caught a whimsical gleam in Poynter’s eye.
“Oriental diplomacy!” she remarked.
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. Go deeper.”
Clementina flushed and stroked the child’s fair hair.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to learn a lot of things.”
“In the most exquisite school in the world,” said Poynter.
Quixtus came downstairs about four o’clock, pale and shaky, and found Clementina in the dark and stuffy writing-room of the hotel. She had petted the child to her afternoon sleep, about half an hour before, and had left her in the joint care of the Chinese nurse and the dirty white plush cat tightly clasped to her breast. She had just finished a letter to Tommy. Either through the fault of the deeply encrusted hotel pen, or by force of painting habit, a smear of violet ink ran a comet’s course across her cheek. She had written to Tommy:
“If you don’t want to know what has happened, you ought to. I find my poor friend dead on my arrival. Elysian fields for him, which I’m sure are not as beautiful as the English lanes his soul longed for. To my amazement he has left a fairy child to the joint guardianship of your uncle and myself. Your uncle’s a sick man, and needs looking after. What I’m going to do with all you helpless chickens, when I ought to be painting trousers, God alone knows. I once was an artist. Now I’m a hen. Yours, Clementina.”
She had also written to Etta in similar strain, and at the same inordinate length, and was addressing the envelope when Quixtus entered the room.
She wheeled round.
“Better?”
“Thank you,” said he. “Though I’m ashamed of myself for sleeping all this time.”
“Jolly good thing you did go to sleep,” replied Clementina. “It has probably saved you from a breakdown. You were on the verge of one.”
“Can I help you with any of the unhappy arrangements that have to be made in these circumstances?”
“Made ’em,” said Clementina. “Sit down.”
Quixtus obeyed, meekly. He wore an air of great lassitude, like a man who has just risen from a bed of sickness. He passed his hands over his eyes:
“There was a sealed packet, if I remember rightly, and a child. I think we might see now what the packet contains.”
“Are you fit to read it?” she asked. He smiled vaguely, for her tone softened the abruptness of the question.
“I am anxious to do so,” he replied.
Clementina opened the envelope and drew out the two documents, the letter and the will, and read them aloud. Neither added greatly to the information given by Poynter. Hammersley charged them as his two oldest, most loved and trusted friends, to regard themselves as the parents and guardians of his orphaned child, to whom he bequeathed a small but comfortable fortune, to be administered by them jointly in trust, until she should marry or reach the age of twenty-five years. No mention being made of the dead wife, her identity still remained a mystery. Like Clementina, Quixtus had not heard of his marriage, could think of no woman whom, six years ago, while he was in England, he could have married.
But six years ago. . .! Quixtus buried his face in his hands and shuddered. Had the man been false to every one—even to the wife of the friend he had betrayed?
Suddenly he rose with a great cry and a passionate gesture of both arms.
“I am lost! I am lost! I am floundering in quicksands. The meaning of the earth has gone from me. I’m in a land of grotesques—shapes that mop and mow at me and have no reality. The things they do the human brain can’t conceive. They have been driving me mad, mad!” he cried, beating his head with his knuckles, “and yet I am sane now. Did you ever know what it was to be so sane that your soul was tortured with sanity? Oh, my God!”
He walked about the room quivering from the outburst. Clementina regarded him with amazed interest. This was a new, undreamed of Quixtus, a human creature that had passed through torment.
“Tell me what is on your mind,” she said quietly. “It might ease it.”
“No,” said he, halting before her. “Not to my dying day. There are things one must keep within oneself till they eat away one’s vitals. I wish I had never come here.”
“You came here on an errand of mercy, and as far as you were concerned you performed it.”
“I came here with hate in my heart, I tell you. I came here on an errand of evil. And outside the door of his room my purpose failed me—and I sent him my love. And then I went in and saw him—dead.”
“And you forgave him,” said Clementina.
“No; I prayed that God would.”
He turned away. Clementina rose from her chair by the writing-table and followed him.
“What was between you and Will Hammersley?”
For an instant he had an impulse to tell her, she looked so strong, so honest. But he checked it. Confidence was impossible. The shame of the dead must be buried with the dead. He pointed to the documents lying on the table.
“He thought I never knew. I never knew,” said he.
“I give it up,” said Clementina.
A memory smote him. He bent his brows upon her. His eyes were sad and clear.
“You have no inkling of the matter?”
“None in the least. Good Lord!” she broke out impatiently, “if I had, do you suppose I’d be cross-questioning you? I’d be trying to help you, as I want to do.”
He threw himself wearily into a chair and leant his head on his hand.
“I’ve had queer experiences of late,” he said. “I’ve learned to trust nobody. How can I tell that you’re sincere in saying you want to help me?”
Clementina puckered up her face.
“What’s that? Here am I, who have been abusing you all your life, now doing violence to my traditions and saying let us kiss and be friends—just at the very moment when you want friends more than you ever did in your born days—and you ask me if I’m sincere! Lord in heaven! Did you ever know me to be even decently polite to creatures I didn’t care about?”
Clementina was indignant. The faint shadow of a smile passed across Quixtus’s face.
“You’ve not always been polite to me, Clementina. This change to solicitude is surprising.Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.Which means——”
“Do you suppose you’re the only person who knows tags out of the Latin grammar?” she snapped. Then she laughed in her dry way. “Don’t let us begin to quarrel. We’ve got a child, you and I. I hope you realise that. If we were its real father and mother we might quarrel with impunity. As we’re not, we can’t. What are we going to do?”
Quixtus thought deeply for a long time. His sensitive nature shrank from the duty imposed. If he accepted it he would be the dead man’s dupe to the end of the chapter.
“You have seen the little girl?” he inquired at last.
“Yes. Been with her most of the day.”
“Do you like her?”
She regarded him with whimsical pity.
“Oh yes, I like her,” she said.
“Then why not keep her to yourself? I am not bound by Hammersley’s wishes. All I have to do is to decline to act either as executor or trustee.”
Clementina’s heart leaped in the most unregenerate manner. To have Sheila all to herself, without let or hindrance from her impossible co-trustee! She was staggered by the sudden, swift temptation which struck at the roots of her unfulfilled womanhood. For a while she dallied with it deliciously.
“If it’s agreeable to you, I’ll decline to act,” said Quixtus, after the spell of silence.
Clementina strangled the serpent in a flash and cast it from her. To purchase happiness at the price of human infirmity? No. She would play squarely with life. Feminine instinct told her that the care of the child was needful for this weary man’s salvation. She attacked him with more roughness than she intended—the eddy of her own struggle.
“What right have you to shirk your responsibilities? That’s what you’ve always done—and see where it has landed you. I’m not going to be a party to it. It’s pure and simple cowardice, and I have no patience with it.”
“Perhaps I deserve your reproaches,” said Quixtus mildly. “But the present circumstances are so painful——”
“Painful!” she interrupted. “Lord above, man, what does it matter whether they’re painful or not? Do you suppose I’ve gone through six and thirty years without pain? I’ve had awful pain, hellish pain, as much pain as a woman and an artist and a scarecrow can suffer. That’s new to you, isn’t it? But you’ve never seen me making a hullabaloo about it. We’ve got to bear pain in the world, and the more we grin, the better we bear it, and—what is a precious sight more useful—the more we help others to bear it. Who are you, Ephraim Quixtus, that you should be exempt from pain?”
She turned to the yellow packet of “Maryland” on the marble mantlepiece and rolled a cigarette. Quixtus said nothing, but sat tugging at his scrubby moustache.
“That child,” she said—and she paused to lick the cigarette—“That child of five is doomed to pain. Some of it all the love in the world can’t prevent. It’s a law of life. But some it can. That’s another law of life, thank God. By taking pain upon us, we can also save others pain. That’s another law. I suppose we have to thank Jesus Christ for that. And fate has put this tender thing into our hands to save it, if possible, from the pain that both you and I have endured. To reject the privilege is the act of a cowardly devil, not of a man.”
As she stood there in her slatternly blouse and tousled hair, brandishing the wetted cigarette between nicotine stained fingers, yet enunciating as she had seldom condescended to do to a fellow creature her ruggedly tender philosophy of life, she looked almost beautiful in the eyes of the man who had awakened from a nightmare into the sober greyness of an actual dawn.
She lit the cigarette with fingers unwontedly trembling, and feverishly drew in the first few puffs.
“Well? What are you going to do?”
Quixtus breathed hard, with parted lips, and stared at the future. It is difficult, after a nightmare madness, to adjust the mind to the sane outlook. But she had moved him to the depths—the depths that through all his madness had remained untroubled.
“You are right, Clementina,” he said at last, in a low voice. “I will share with you this great responsibility.”
She blew out a puff of smoke; “I don’t think it ought to turn our hair white, anyhow,” she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa. “The child’s past teething, so we shan’t have to sit up at nights over ‘Advice to Mothers,’ and our common sense will tell us not to fill her up every day with pâté de foie gras. When she’s ill we’ll send for a doctor, and when we want to do business we’ll send for a lawyer. It strikes me, Ephraim, that having another interest in life besides dead men’s jawbones, will do you a thundering lot of good.”
“Would you like something to do me good?” he asked, with a touch of wistful banter.
Clementina, as she afterwards confessed, felt herself to be on such a sky-high plane of self-abnegation and altruism, that she thrust down, figuratively speaking; angelic arms towards him. Really, the mothering instinct again clamoured. She threw her half-smoked cigarette away and came and, standing over him; clutched his shoulder.
“My good Ephraim,” she said, “I would give anything to see you a happy human being.”
Then, in her abrupt fashion, she sent him out to take the air. That also would do him good. She thrust his hat and stick in his hand.
“What are you going to do, Clementina?” he asked.
“A thousand things. First I must go upstairs and see whether the child’s awake. I hate trusting her with that heathen imbecile.”
“Au revoir, then,” said Quixtus, moving away.
“Come back in good time to make the child’s acquaintance,” she shouted after him.
He paused on the threshold and looked at her irresolutely. He had a nervous dread of meeting the child.
He walked through the sun-filled streets, down the Cannebière, absently watched the baking quays, and then, returning to the main thoroughfare, sat down beneath the awning of a café. An hour passed. It was time to go back and see his ward. He shrank morbidly from the ordeal. With a great effort he rose at last and walked to the hotel.
Clementina, Poynter, and the child were in the vestibule, the two elders seated in the wickerwork chairs; the little one squatting on the ground at their feet and playing with the mongrel and somewhat supercilious dog of the hotel. Quixtus halted in front of the group. The child lifted her flower-like face to the new-comer.
“Is this——” he began.
“This is Sheila,” said Clementina. “Get up, dear, and say how d’ye do to your new uncle.”
She held out her hand with shy politeness—he looked so long and gaunt, and towered over her tiny self.
“How do you do, uncle—uncle——?” she turned to Clementina.
“Ephraim,” she prompted.
“Uncle Ephraim.”
“No wonder the poor innocent doesn’t remember such a name,” said Clementina.
He bent and solemnly wagged the soft hand for some time; then, not knowing what to do with it, he let it go.
“Do you know Bimbo?”
“No,” said Quixtus.
“Bimbo—patte.”
The mongrel lifted his paw.
“You must shake hands with him and then you will know him,” she said seriously.
Quixtus, with a grave face, bent lower and shook hands with the dog.
“And Pinkie.”
She lifted the dirty white plush cat. In an embarrassed way he wagged a stumpy fore-foot.
Sheila turned to Clementina. “Now he knows everybody.”
Clementina kissed her and rose from her seat; Poynter rising also.
“You’ll be a good girl if I leave you with Uncle Ephraim for a while?”
“My dear Clementina!” cried Quixtus aghast. “What do you mean?”
A gleam of kind malice flickered in her eyes.
“I find I must have some air, in my turn—and some absinthe which Mr. Poynter has promised to give me. Au revoir! I shan’t be long, Sheila dear.”
She moved with Poynter towards the door.
“But, Clementina——”
“If she bites you’ve only to call that lump of Celestial idiocy over there,” pointing to the fat Chinese nurse who sat smiling in her dark corner. “You’re protected. And, by the way,” she added in a whisper, “She doesn’t know her father’s dead yet. Leave it to me to break the news.”
She was gone. Quixtus sank; a perspiring embarrassment, into one of the wicker chairs. A scurvy trick; he thought, of Clementina to leave him in this appalling situation. Yet shame prevented flight. He sat there bending his mild, china-blue eyes on Sheila, who had returned unconcernedly to Bimbo; putting him through his tricks. He gave his paw and sat up on end, and while doing so yawned in a bored fashion. During this latter posture Sheila sat up on her little haunches and held her hands in front of her and yawned in imitation. Then she set Pinkie on end facing the dog. Lastly she looked up at her new uncle.
“You do that too. Then we’ll all be doing it.”
“God bless my soul,” said the startled man. “I—I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too old.”
She seemed, for the moment, satisfied with the reason and resumed her game with Bimbo. After the yawn he grinned with doggy fatuity, and his red long tongue lolled from the corner of his mouth. Sheila stuck out her little red tongue; in droll mimicry.
“Don’t wag your tail, Bimbo. It isn’t fair, because I’ve got no tail. Why haven’t I a tail, Uncle Eph—Eph—Uncle Ephim?”
“Because you’re a little girl and not a dog.”
At that moment the plush cat, insecurely balanced; toppled over.
“God bless my soul,” cried the little parrot, “you’re too old, Pinkie.”
“Sheila,” said Quixtus, realising in a frightened way his responsibility. “Come here.”
With perfect docility she rose, and laid a hand on his knee. Bimbo, perceiving himself liberated from the boredom of mountebank duty, twisted himself up and snarled comfortably at fleas in the middle of his back.
“You mustn’t say ‘God bless my soul,’ my dear.”
“Why not? You said it.”
There are instinctive answers in grown-ups, just as instinctive questions in children.
“Old people can say things that little girls mustn’t—just as old people can sit up later than little girls.”
She regarded him with frank seriousness.
“I know. Daddy says ‘damn,’ but I mustn’t. I never say it. Pinkie said it once, and I put her in a dark, dark hole for twenty million years. It wasn’treallytwenty million years, you know—it was only ten minutes—but Pinkie thought it was.”
“She must have been very frightened,” said Quixtus, involuntarily—and the echo of the words after passing his lips sounded strange in his ears.
“She got quite white,” said Sheila. She picked up the shapeless animal. “She never recovered. Look!”
“She also lost one side of her whiskers,” said Quixtus, inspecting the beast held within two inches of his nose.
“Oh no,” she replied, getting in the most entangling way between his legs. “Pinkie’s a fairy princess, and one day she’ll have a crown and a pink dress and a gold sword. It’s a wicked fairy that keeps her like a cat. And it was the wicked fairy in the shape of a big rat, bigger than twenty million, billion,hillionhouses, that bit off her whiskers. Daddy told me.”
Quixtus could not follow these transcendental flights of faërie. But he had to make some reply, as she was looking with straight challenge into his eyes. To his astonishment, he found himself expressing the hope that, when Pinkie came into her own again, the loss of one set of whiskers would not impair her beauty. Sheila explained that princesses didn’t have whiskers, so no harm was done. The bad fairy in the form of a rat wanted to bite off Pinkie’s nose, in which case her beauty would have been ruined; but Pinkie was protected by a good fairy, and just when the bad fairy was going to bite off her nose, the good fairy shook a pepper pot and the bad fairy sneezed and was only able to bite off the whiskers.
“That was very fortunate for Pinkie,” said Quixtus.
“Very,” said Sheila. She stood against him on one leg, swinging the other. Conversation came to a standstill. The man found himself tongue-tied. All kinds of idiotic remarks came into his head. He dismissed them as not being suitable to the comprehension of a child of five. His fingers mechanically twisted themselves in her soft hair. Presently came the eternal command of childhood.
“Tell me a story.”
“Good gracious!” said he, “I’m afraid I don’t know any.”
“Youmustknow little Red Riding-Hood,” she said, with a touch of scorn.
“Perhaps I do. I wonder,” said Quixtus. He clutched eagerly at a straw. “But what’s the use of my telling it to you if you know it already?”
She ran and picked up the sprawling cat and calmly established herself on his knees. Bimbo, neglected, uttered a whining growl, and curling himself up with his chin by his tail, dropped into a morose slumber.
“Tell it to Pinkie. She’s stupid and always forgets the stories. Now begin.”
Quixtus hummed and ha’d and at last plunged desperately. “There was once a wolf who ate up Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother.”
“That’s not it,” cried Sheila. “There was once a sweet little girl who lived with her grandmother. That’s the proper way.”
Quixtus floundered. Let any one who has never told a tale to a child and has never heard of Red Riding-Hood for at least five-and-thirty years, try to recount her tragical history. Quixtus had to tell it to an expert in the legend, a fearsome undertaking. At last, with her aid he stumbled through. Pinkie, staring at him through her bead eyes, evidently couldn’t make head or tail of it. Being punched in the midriff by her young protectress, she emitted a wheezy squeak.
“Pinkie says ‘thank you,’ ” Sheila remarked politely.
“And what do you say?” asked the blundering elder.
Now what had been good enough to merit Pinkie’s thanks had not been good enough to merit hers. Besides, such as it was, she had told half the story. With delicate diplomacy she had handled a difficult situation. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Good God!” murmured Quixtus in terror. “She is going to cry. What on earth can I do?”
His wits worked quickly. He remembered a recent sitting in the Folk-lore section of the Anthropological Congress.
“I suppose, my dear, a story current among the aborigines of Papua wouldn’t interest you?”
Her eyes dried magically. She snuggled up against him.
“Tell me.”
So Quixtus began a story about serpents and tigers and shiny copper-coloured children, and knowing the facts of the folk tale, gradually grew interested and unconsciously discovered a new talent for picturesque narration. One story led to another. He forgot himself and his wrongs, and pathetically strove to interest his audience and explain to her childish mind the significance of tribal mysteries which were woven into the texture of the tales. The explanation left her comparatively cold; but so long as there were tigers whose blood-curdling ferocity she adored, she found the story entrancing.
“There!” said he, laughing, when he had come to an end. “What do you think of that?”
“It’s booful,” she cried, and clambering on to both knees on his lap, she put both hands on his shoulders and held up her mouth for a kiss.
In this touching attitude Clementina and Poynter discovered them. The new-comers exchanged a whimsical glance of intelligence.
“Wise woman,” Poynter murmured.
“Obvious to any fool,” she retorted—and advanced further into the vestibule. “Feeling decidedly better?”
Quixtus blushed in confusion. Sheila climbed down from her perch and ran to Clementina.
“Oh, Auntie, Uncle Ephim has been telling me such lovely stories.”
“Lord save us!”—she turned on him—“What do you know about stories?”
“They were tribal legends of Papua,” he confessed; modestly.
“And what else have you been doing?”
Quixtus made one of his old-world bows.
“I’ve been falling in love.”
“You’re getting on,” said Clementina.