CHAPTER XVIII
Letus take the case of a refined and sensitive man who has fallen, as many have fallen, under the influence of drink. Let us suppose him to have sunk lower and lower into the hell of it until delirium tremens puts a temporary end to his excesses. Let us suppose him to be convalescent, in sweet surroundings, in capable hands, relieved, for the time at least, by the strange gold drug of his craving for alcohol. His mind is clear, his perceptions are acute, he is once more a sane human being. He looks back upon his degradation with wondering horror. It is not as though he has passed through a period of dark madness of which the memory is vague and elusive. He remembers it all—all the incidents, all the besotted acts, all the benumbed, enslaved surrender of his soul. His freed self regards perplexedly the self that was in bondage. They are two different entities—and yet they are unquestionably the same. He has not been mad, because he has felt all the time responsible for his actions, and yet he must have been mad so to dishonour the divine spirit within him. The latter argument prevails. “I have been mad,” he says, and shivers with disgust.
In some such puzzled frame of mind did Quixtus, freed from the obsession of the Idea, regard his self of the last few months. He remembered how it had happened. There had been several shocks; the Marrable disaster, the discovery of Angela and Hammersley’s betrayal, that of the disloyalty of his three pensioners, the cynical trick of his uncle. He remembered toying with the Idea on his homeward journey, the farcical faithlessness of the drunken housekeeper—and then, click! the hag Idea had mounted on his shoulders and ridden away with him, as Al Kohol (the very devil himself) rides away with the unresisting drunkard. Every action, every thought of this strange period was clear in his memory. He could not have been mad—and yet he must have been.
To strain the analogy a trifle, the nightmare in the train and the horror of the morning had been his delirium tremens. But here the analogy suffers a solution of continuity. From that climax of devil work, the drunkard descends but slowly and gradually through tortures innumerable to the normal life of man. Shock is ineffective. But in Quixtus’s case there was a double shock—the seismic convulsion of his being at the climactic moment, and the sudden announcement of that, which to all men born is the only Absolute, final, immutable.
And then click! the hag that had ridden him had been thrown from his shoulders, and he had looked upon the dead through the eyes of a sane man. And now, through the eyes of a sane man he regarded the incredible spectacle of his self of yesterday. He turned from it with shivers of disgust. He must have been mad. A great depression came upon him. He had suffered grievous wrongs, it is true; no man since Job had been more sorely afflicted; the revelations of human baseness and treachery had been such as to kill his once childlike faith in humanity. But why had loss of faith sent him mad? What had his brain been doing to allow this grotesque impulse to over-master it? At the present moment, he assured himself, he had neither more nor less faith in mankind than when he had walked a maniac through the London streets, or during last night’s tortured journey in the train. Yet now he desired to commit no wickedness. The thought of evil for evil’s sake was revolting. . . . The self that he had striven to respect and keep clean all his life, had been soiled. Wherein lay purification?
Had he been mad? If so, how could he trust his memory as to what had happened? By the grace of God those acts of wickedness whose contemplation he remembered, had been rendered nugatory. Even Tommy had not materially suffered, seeing that he had kept the will intact and had placed two thousand pounds to his banking account. But could he actually have committed deeds of wickedness which he had forgotten? Were there any such which he had committed through the agency of the three evil counsellors? He racked his memory in vain.
The time at Marseilles passed gloomily. Poynter, the good Samaritan, started the first evening for Devonshire to satisfy his hungry soul with the unutterable comfort of English fields. Clementina and Quixtus saw him off at the station and walked back through the sultry streets together. The next day he was left much to his own company, as Clementina broke the news of death to the child and stayed with her for comfort. He wandered aimlessly about the town, seeking the shade, and wrapping himself in his melancholy. When he saw Sheila in the afternoon she was greatly subdued. She understood that her father had gone to Heaven to stay with her mother. She realised that she would never see him again. Clementina briefly informed Quixtus of the child’s grief. How she had cried and called for him most of the morning, how she had fallen asleep and had awakened more calm. To distract her mind and to give her the air, they hired a taxi-cab and drove on the Corniche Road past the Restaurant de la Réserve. Sheila’s tiny body easily nestled on the seat between them, and she seemed comforted by the human contact. From Pinkie she also derived great consolation. Pinkie was stupid, she explained, and she couldn’t talk; but really she was a fairy princess, and fairy princesses were always affectionate. Pinkie was stuffed with love as tight as she could hold.
“Have you ever been in a motor-car before?” asked Quixtus.
“Oh yes. Of course I have,” she replied in her rich little voice. “Daddy had one in Shanghai. He used to take me out in it.”
Then her lips quivered and the tears started and she flung herself weeping against Clementina.
“Oh, daddy! I want my daddy!”
The essential feminine in Clementina sprang to arms.
“Why did you start her off like this by talking of motor-cars?”
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” said Quixtus. “But how was I to know?”
“Just like a man,” she retorted. “No intuition worth a cent.”
At dinner, a melancholy meal—theirs was the only table occupied in the vast, ghostlysalle à manger—she apologised, in her gruff way.
“I was wrong about the motor-car. How the deuce could you have known? Besides, if you talked to the child about triple-expansion boiler, her daddy would be sure to have had one at Shanghai. Poor little mite!”
“Yes, poor little mite,” said Quixtus, meditatively. “I wonder what will become of her.”
“That has got to be our look-out,” she replied sharply. “You don’t seem to realise that.”
“I don’t think I do quite—even after what you said to me yesterday. I must accustom myself to the idea.”
“Yesterday,” said Clementina, “you declared that you had fallen in love with her.”
“Many a man,” replied Quixtus with a faint smile, “has fallen in love with one of your sex and has not in the least known what to do with her.”
The grim setting of Clementina’s lips relaxed.
“I think you’re becoming more human. And, talking of humanity—there’s a question that must be cleared up between us, before we settle down to this partnership. Are you intending to keep up your diabolical attitude towards Tommy Burgrave?”
The question had been burning her tongue for over twenty-four hours; from the moment that he had appeared in the vestibule the day before, after his sleep, and seemed to have recovered from the extraordinary nervous collapse which had aroused her pity. With considerable self-restraint she had awaited her opportunity. Now it had come—and when an opportunity came to Clementina, she did not go by four roads to take it. Quixtus laid down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair. Knowing her attachment to the boy, he had expected some reference to his repudiation. But the direct question disconcerted him. Should he have to render equally sudden account of all the fantastic iniquities of the past? Then something he had not thought of before entered his amazed head. He had never countermanded the order whereby the allowance was automatically transferred from his own banking account to Tommy’s. He had intended to write the letter after having destroyed the will, but his reflections on plagiarism in wickedness which had led to the preservation of that document, had also caused him to forget the other matter entirely. And he had not thought of it from that day to this.
“As a matter of fact,” said he, looking at his plate, “I have not disinherited Tommy; I have not discontinued his allowance, and I have placed a very large sum of money to his credit at the bank.”
Clementina knitted her brows and stared at him. The man was a greater puzzle than ever. Was he lying? If Tommy had found himself in opulence, he would have told her. Tommy was veracity incarnate.
“The boy hasn’t a penny to his name—nothing except his mother’s fifty pounds a year.”
He met her black, keen eyes steadily.
“I am telling you the facts. He can’t have inquired about his bank balance recently.” He passed his hand across his forehead, as realisation of the past strange period came to him. “I suppose he can’t have done so, as he has never written to acknowledge the—the large amount of money.”
The man was telling the truth. It was mystifying.
“Then why in the name of Bedlam did you play the fool with him like that?”
“That is another matter,” said he, lowering his eyes. “For the sake of an answer, let us say that I wanted to test his devotion to his art.”
“We can say it as much as we please, but I don’t believe it.”
“I will ask you, Clementina,” said he, courteously, “as a great personal favour to let it pass at that.”
“All right,” said Clementina.
He went on with his dinner. Presently another thing struck him. He was to find a plaguey lot of things to strike him in connection with his lunacy.
“If Tommy was penniless,” said he, “will you explain how he has managed to take this expensive holiday in France.”
“Look here, let us talk of something else,” she replied. “I’m sick of Tommy.”
Visions of Tommy’s whooping joy, of Etta’s radiance; when they should hear the astounding news, floated before her. She could hear him telling the chit of a girl to put on her orange-blossoms and go out with him at once and get married. She could hear Etta say: “Darling Clementina, do run out and buy me some orange-blossoms.” Much the two innocents cared for darling Clementina! There were times when she really did not know whether she wanted to take them both in her arms in a great splendid hug, or to tie them up together in a sack and throw them into the Seine.
“I’m sick of Tommy,” she declared.
But the normal brain of the cultivated man had begun to work.
“Clementina,” said he, “it is you that have been paying Tommy’s expenses.”
“Well, suppose I have?” she replied, defiantly. She added quickly, womanlike divining the reproach to Tommy, underlying Quixtus’s challenge: “He’s a child and I’m an old woman. I had the deuce’s own job to make him accept. I couldn’t go careering about France all by myself—I could, as a matter of practical fact—I could career all over Gehenna if I chose—but it wouldn’t have been gay. He sacrificed his pride to give me a holiday. What have you to say against it?”
A flush of shame mounted to Quixtus’s cheek. It was intolerable that one of his house—his sister’s son—should have been dependent for bread on a woman. He himself was to blame.
“Clementina,” said he, “this is a very delicate matter, and I hope you won’t misjudge me; but as your great generosity was based on a most unhappy misunderstanding——”
“Ephraim Quixtus,” she interrupted, seeing whither he was tending, “go on with your dinner and don’t be a fool!”
There was nothing for it but for Quixtus to go on with his dinner.
“I tell you what,” she said, after a pause, in spite of her weariness of Tommy as a topic of conversation; “when Tommy met you in Paris, he didn’t know what you’ve just told me. He thought you had unreasonably and heartlessly cut him adrift. And yet he greeted you as affectionately and frankly as if nothing had happened.”
“That’s true,” Quixtus admitted. “He did.”
“It proves to you what a sound-hearted fellow Tommy is.”
“I see,” said Quixtus. “Well?”
“That’s all,” said Clementina. “Or if it isn’t it ought to be.”
Quixtus made no reply. There was no reply possible, save the real explanation of his eccentric behaviour; and that he was not prepared to offer. But Clementina’s rough words sank deep in his mind. Judged by ordinary standards, his treatment of Tommy had been unqualifiable; Tommy’s behaviour all that was most meritorious. In Tommy’s case wherein lay the proof of the essential depravity of mankind? His gloomy faith received a shock which caused him exceeding discomfort. You see, if you take all the trouble of going mad for the sake of a gospel, you rather cling to it when you recover sanity. You are rather eager to justify to yourself the waste of time and energy. It is human nature.
After dinner she dismissed him. He must go out to a café and see the world. She had to look after the child’s slumbers, and write letters. Quixtus went out into the broad, busy streets. The Cannebière was crowded with gasping but contented citizens. On every side rose the murmur of mirth and cheerfulness. Solid burgesses strolled arm in arm with their solider wives. Youths and maidens laughed together. Swarthy workmen with open shirt-collars showing their hairy throats, bareheaded workgirls in giggling knots, little soldiers clinging amorously to sweethearts—all the crowd wore an air of gaiety, of love of their kind, of joy in comradeship. At the thronged cafés, too, men and women found comfort in the swelter of gregariousness. Night had fallen over the baking city, and the great thoroughfare blazed in light—from shop windows, cafés, street lamps, from the myriad whirling lamps of trams and motors. Above it all the full moon shone splendid from the intense sky of a summer night. Quixtus and the moon appeared to be the only lonely things in the Cannebière.
He wandered down to the quay and back again in ever-growing depression. He felt lost, an alien among this humanity that clung together for mutual happiness; he envied the little soldier and his girl gazing hungrily, their heads almost touching, into a cheap jeweller’s window. A sudden craving such as he had never known in his life, awoke within him; insistent, imperious—a craving for human companionship. Instinctively he walked back to the hotel, scarcely realising why he had come; until he saw Clementina in the vestibule. She had stuck on her crazy hat and was pulling on her white cotton gloves; evidently preparing to go out.
“Hullo! Back already?”
“I have come to ask you a favour, Clementina,” said he. “Would it bore you to come out with me—to give me the pleasure of your company?”
“It wouldn’t bore me,” replied Clementina. “Precious few things do. But what on earth can you want me for?”
“If I tell you, you won’t mock at me?”
“I only mock at you, as you call it, when you do idiotic things. Anyhow, I won’t now. What’s the matter?”
He hesitated. She saw that her brusqueness had checked something natural and spontaneous. At once she strove to make amends, and laid her hand on his sleeve.
“We’ve got to be friends henceforth, Ephraim; if only for the child’s sake. Tell me.”
“It was only that I have never felt so dismally alone in my life, as I did in that crowded street.”
“And so you came back for me?”
“I came back for you,” he said with a smile.
“Let us go,” said Clementina, and she put her arm through his and they went out together and walked arm in arm like hundreds of other solemn couples in Marseilles.
“That better?” she asked after a while, with a humorous and pleasant sense of mothering this curiously pathetic and incomprehensible man.
The unfamiliar tone in her voice touched him.
“I had no idea you could be so kind, Clementina. Yesterday morning, when I was ill—I can scarcely remember—but I feel you were kind then.”
“I’m not always a rhinoceros,” said Clementina. “But what am I doing that’s kind now?”
He pressed her arm gently. “Just this,” said he.
Then Clementina realised, with an odd thrill of pleasure, how much more significance often lies in little things than in big ones.
They walked along the quay and looked at the island of the Château d’If standing out grim in the middle of the moonlit harbour, turned up one of the short streets leading to the Rue de Rome, and so came into the Cannebière again. A table, just vacated on the outer edge of the terrace of one of the cafés, allured them. They sat down and ordered coffee. The little sentimental walk arm in arm had done much to dispose each kindly towards the other. Quixtus felt grateful for her rough yet subtle sympathy, Clementina appreciated his appreciation. The atmosphere of antagonism that had hitherto surrounded them had disappeared. For the first time since their arrival in Marseilles they talked on general topics. Almost for the first time in their lives they talked of general topics naturally, without constraint. Hitherto she had always kept an ear cocked for the pedant; he for the scoffer. She had been impatient of his quietism; he had nervously dreaded her brutality. Now a truce was declared. She forebore to jeer at his favourite pursuit, it not entering her head to do so; Quixtus, a man of breeding, never rode his hobby outside his ring, except in self-defence. They talked of music—a band was playing in the adjoining café. They discovered a common ground in Bach. Desultory talk led them to modern opera. There was a little haunting air, said he, inHans Joueur de Flûte.
“This?” cried Clementina, leaning across the table and humming it. “You’re the only English creature I’ve come across who has ever heard of it.”
They talked of other things—of travel. Her tour through France was fresh in her mind. Sensitive artist, she was full of the architecture. Wherever she had gone, Quixtus had gone before her. To her after astonishment, for she was too much interested in the talk to consider it at the time, he met her sympathetically on every point.
“The priceless treasures of France,” said he, “are the remains of expiring Gothic and the early Renaissance. Of the former you have the Palais de Justice at Rouen—which everybody knows—and the west front of the Cathedral at Vendôme.”
“But I’ve just been to Vendôme!” cried Clementina. “That wonderful flamboyant window!”
“The last word of Gothic,” said Quixtus. “The funeral pyre of Gothic—that tracery—the whole thing is on fire—it’s all leaping flame—as if some God had said ‘Let this noble thing that is dead have a stupendous end.’ Vendôme always seems to me like the end of the Viking. They sent the hero away to sea in a blaze of fire.”
Richelieu, the little town not far from Tours where every one goes, yet so unknown—built by the great Cardinal for his court and to-day standing with hardly change of stick or stone, just as Richelieu left it, Quixtus had visited.
“But that’s damnable!” cried Clementina. “I thought we had discovered it.”
He laughed. “So did I. And I suppose everybody who goes there views it with the eyes of a little Columbus.”
“What did you like best about it?”
“The pictures of the past it evoked. The cavalcade of Richelieu’s nobles—all in their Louis Treize finery—the clatter of the men-at-arms down that broad, cobble-paved central street. The setting was all there. It was so easy to fill it.”
“That’s just what Tommy did,” said Clementina. “Tommy made a fancy sketch on the spot of the Cardinal entering in state in his great heavycarrossewith his bodyguard around him.”
This led them on to pictures. She found that he was familiar with all the galleries in Europe—with most of the works of the moderns. She had never suspected that he had ideas of his own on pictures. He hated what he called the “nightmare of technique” of the ultra-modern school. Clementina disliked it also. “All great art was simple,” he remarked. “Put one of Hobbema’s sober landscapes, the Saint Michael of Raphael, amidst the hysteria of the Salon des Indépendants, and the four walls would crumble into chaotic paint.
“Which reminds me,” said he, “of a curious little experience a good many years ago. It was at the first International Art Exhibition in London. Paris and Belgium and Holland poured out their violences to unfamiliar eyes—mine were unfamiliar, at any rate. There were women sitting in purple cafés with orange faces and magenta hair. There were hideous nudes with muscles on their knee-caps, writhing in decadent symbolism. There were portraits so flat that they gave you the impression of insects squashed against the wall. I remember going through, not understanding it one bit; and then in the midst of all this fever I came across a little gem—so cool, so finished, so sane, and yet full of grip, and I stood in front of it until I got better and then went away. It was a most curious sensation, like a cool hand on a fevered brow. I happened not to have a catalogue, so I’ve never known the painter.”
“What kind of a picture was it?” asked Clementina.
“Just a child, in a white frock and a blue sash, and not a remarkably pretty child either. But it was a delightful piece of work.”
“Do you remember,” she asked, “whether there was a mother-o’-pearl box on a little table to the left of the girl?”
“Yes,” said Quixtus. “There was. Do you know the picture?”
Clementina smiled. She smiled so that her white, strong teeth became visible. Quixtus had never seen Clementina’s teeth.
“Painted it,” said Clementina, throwing forward both her hands in triumph.
One of her hands met the long glass of coffee and sent it scudding across the table. Quixtus instinctively jerked his chair backward, but he could not escape a great splash of coffee over his waistcoat. Full of delight, gratitude, and dismay, Clementina whipped up her white cotton gloves and before waiters with napkins could intervene, she wiped him comparatively dry.
“Your gloves! Your gloves!” he cried, protesting.
She held up the unspeakable things and almost laughed as she threw them on the pavement, whence they were picked up carefully by a passing urchin—for nothing is wasted in France.
“I would have wiped you clean with my—well, with anything I’ve got, in return for your having remembered my picture.”
“Well,” said he, “the compliment being quite unconscious, was all the more sincere.”
The waiter mopped up the flooded table.
“Let us be depraved,” said Clementina in high good humour, “and have some green chartreuse.”
“Willingly,” smiled Quixtus.
So they were depraved.
And when Clementina went to bed she wondered why she had railed at Quixtus all these years.
CHAPTER XIX
Clementinawent to bed a happier woman than she had been for many a day. Distrusting the ministrations of the Chinese nurse, she had set up a little bed for Sheila in her own room. The child lay there fast asleep, the faithful Pinkie projecting from a folded arm in a staring and uncomfortable attitude of vigilance. Clementina’s heart throbbed as she bent over her. All that she had struggled for and had attained, mastery of her art, fame and fortune, shrank to triviality in comparison with this glorious gift of heaven. She remembered scornful words she had once spoken to Tommy: “Woman has always her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit.” She recognised the truth of the saying and thanked God for it. She undressed very quietly and walked about the room in stocking-feet, feeling a strange sacredness in the presence of the sleeping child.
She was happier, too, in that she had forgiven Quixtus; for the first time since she had known him she felt a curiosity regarding him, a desire for his friendship; scarcely formulated, arose a determination to bring something vital into his life. As the notable housewife entering a forlorn man’s neglected house longs to throw open windows, shake carpets, sweep down cobwebs, abolish dingy curtains, and fill the place with sunlight and chintz and other gaiety, so did Clementina long to sweep and garnish Quixtus’s dusty heart. He had many human possibilities. After all, there must be something sound in a man who had treasured in his mind the memory of her picture. Sheila and herself, between them, would transform him into a gaunt angel. She fell asleep smiling at the thought.
Clementina did not suffer fools gladly. That was why, thinking Quixtus a fool, she had not been able to abide him for so many years. And that was why she could not abide the fat Chinese nurse, who showed herself to be a mass of smiling incompetence. “The way she washes the child makes me sick,” she declared. “If I see much more of her heathen idol’s grin, I’ll go mad and bite her.” So the next day Clementina, with Quixtus as a decorative adjunct, hunted up consular and other authorities and made with them the necessary arrangements for shipping her off to Shanghai, for which she secretly pined, by the next outward-bound steamer. When they got to London she would provide the child with a proper Christian nurse, who would bring her up in the fear of the Lord and in habits of tidiness; and in the meanwhile she herself would assume the responsibility of Sheila’s physical well-being.
“I’m not going to have a flighty young girl,” she remarked. “I could tackle her, but you couldn’t.”
“Why should I attempt to tackle her?” asked Quixtus.
“You’ll be responsible for the child when she stays in Russell Square.”
“Russell Square?” he echoed.
“Yes. She will live partly with you and partly with me—three months with each of us, alternately. Where did you expect the child to live?”
“Upon my soul,” said he, “I haven’t considered the matter. Well—well——”
He walked about the vestibule, revolving this new and alarming proposition. To have a little girl of five planted in his dismal, decorous house—what in the world should he do with her? It would revolutionise his habits. Clementina watched him out of a corner of her eye.
“You didn’t suppose I was going to have all the worry, did you?”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “Of course not. I see I must share all responsibilities with you. Only—won’t she find living with me rather dull?”
“You can keep a lot of cats and dogs and rocking-horses, and give children’s parties,” said Clementina.
Sheila, who had been apparently absorbed in the mysteries of the Parisian toilet of a flaxen-haired doll which Clementina had bought for her at an extravagant price, cheerfully lifted up her face.
“Auntie says that when I come to stay with you, I’m to be mistress of the house.”
“Indeed?” said Quixtus.
“And I’m to be a real lady and sit at the end of the table and entertain the guests.”
“I suppose that settles it?” he said, with a smile.
“Of course it does,” said Clementina, and she wondered whether his masculine mind would ever be in a condition to grasp the extent of the sacrifice she was making.
That day the remains of Will Hammersley were laid to rest in the little Protestant cemetery. The consular chaplain read the service. Only the two elders stood by the graveside, thinking the ordeal too harrowing for the child. Clementina wept, for some of her wasted youth lay in the coffin. But Quixtus stood with dry eyes and set features. Now he was sane. Now he could view life calmly. He knew that his memory of the dead would always be bitter. Reason could not sweeten it. It were better to forget. Let the dead past bury its dead. The dead man’s child he would take to his heart for her own helpless, sweet sake. Should she, in years to come, turn round and repay him with treachery and ingratitude, it would be but the way of all flesh. In the meanwhile he would be loyal to his word.
After the service came to a close he stood for a few moments gazing into the grave. Clementina edged close to him and pointed down to the coffin.
“He may have wronged you, but he trusted you,” she said in a low voice.
“That’s true,” said Quixtus. And as they drove back in silence, he murmured once or twice to himself, half audibly:
“He wronged me, but he trusted me.”
That evening they started for Paris.
Undesirous of demonstrative welcome at half-past eight in the morning, Clementina had not informed Tommy and Etta of the time of her arrival, and Quixtus had not indulged in superfluous correspondence with Huckaby. The odd trio now so closely related stood lonely at the exit of the Lyons Station, while porters deposited their luggage in cabs. Each of the elders felt a curious reluctance to part—even for a few hours, for they had agreed to lunch together. Sheila shed a surprised tear. She had adjusted her small mind to the entrance of her Uncle Ephraim into her life. The sudden exit startled her. On his promising to see her very soon, she put her arms prettily round his neck and kissed him. He drove off feeling the flower-like pressure of the child’s lips to his, and it was very sweet.
It helped him to take up the threads of Paris where he had left them, a difficult task. Deep shame smote him. What could be henceforward his relations with Huckaby whom, with crazy, malevolent intent, he had promised to maintain in the path of clean living? With what self-respect could he look into the eyes of Mrs. Fontaine, innocent and irreproachable woman, whose friendship he had cultivated with such dastardly design? She had placed herself so frankly, so unsuspectingly in his hands. To him, now, it was as unimaginable to betray her trust as to betray that of the child whose kiss lingered on his lips. If ever a woman deserved compensation, full and plenteous, at the hands of man, that was the woman. An insult unrealised is none the less an insult; and he, Quixtus, had insulted a woman. If only to cleanse his own honour from the stain, he must make compensation to this sweet lady. But how? By faithful and loyal service.
When he solemnly reached this decision I think that more than one angel wept and at the same time wanted to shake him.
And behind these two whom he would meet in Paris, loomed the forbidding faces of Billiter and Vandermeer. He shivered as at contact with something unclean. He had chosen these men as ministers of evil. He had taken them into his crazy confidence. With their tongues in their cheeks, these rogues had exploited him. He remembered loathsome scenarios of evil dramas they had submitted. Thank Heaven for the pedantic fastidiousness that had rejected them! Billiter, Vandermeer, Huckaby—the only three of all men living who knew the miserable secret of his recent life! In a rocky wilderness he could have raced with wild gestures like the leper, shouting “Unclean! Unclean!” But Paris is not a rocky wilderness, and the semi-extinct quadruped in the shafts of the modern Paris fiacre conveys no idea of racing.
Yet while his soul cried this word of horror, the child’s kiss lingered as a sign and a consecration.
The first thing to do was to set himself right with Huckaby. Companionship with the man on the recent basis was impossible. He made known his arrival, and an hour afterwards, having bathed and breakfasted, he sat with Huckaby in the pleasant courtyard of the hotel. Huckaby, neat and trim and clear-eyed, clad in well-fitting blue serge, gave him the news of the party. Mrs. Fontaine had introduced him to some charming French people whose hospitality he had ventured to accept. She was well and full of plans for little festas for the remainder of their stay in Paris. Lady Louisa had found a cavalier, an elderly French marquis of deep gastronomic knowledge.
“Lady Louisa,” said he with a sigh of relief and a sly glance at Quixtus, “is a charming lady, but not a highly intellectual companion.”
“Do you really crave highly intellectual companions, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus.
Huckaby bit his lip.
“Do you remember our last conversation?” he said at last.
“I remember,” said Quixtus.
“I asked you for a chance. You promised. I was in earnest.”
“I wasn’t,” said Quixtus.
Huckaby started and gripped the arm of his chair. He was about to protest when Quixtus checked him.
“I want you to know,” said he, “that great changes have taken place since then. I left Paris in ill-health, I return sound. I should like you to grasp the deep significance underlying those few words. I will repeat them.”
He did so. Huckaby looked hard at his patron, who stood the scrutiny with a grave smile.
“I think I understand,” he replied slowly. “Then Billiter and Vandermeer?”
“Billiter and Vandermeer I put out of my life for ever; but I shall see they are kept from want.”
“They can’t be kept from wanting more than you give them,” said Huckaby, whose brain worked swiftly and foresaw blackmail. “You must impose conditions.”
“I never thought of that,” said Quixtus.
“Set a thief to catch a thief,” said the other bitterly; “I’m telling you for your own good.”
“If they attempt to write to me or see me, their allowances will cease.”
He covered his eyes with his hand, as though to shut out their hateful faces. There was a short silence. Huckaby’s lips grew dry. He moistened them with his tongue.
“And what about me?” he asked at last.
Quixtus drew away his hand with a despairing gesture, but made no reply.
“I suppose you’re right in classing me with the others,” said Huckaby. “Heaven knows I oughtn’t to judge them. I was in with them all the time”—Quixtus winced—“but I can’t go back to them.”
“My treating you just the same as them won’t necessitate your going back to them.”
Huckaby bent forward, quivering, in his chair. “As there’s a God in Heaven, Quixtus, I wouldn’t accept a penny from you on those terms.”
“And why not?”
“Because I don’t want your money. I want to be put in a position to earn some honourably for myself. I want your help as a man, your sympathy as a human being. I want you to help me to live a clean, straight life. I kept the promise, the important promise I made you, ever since we started. You can’t say I haven’t. And since you left I’ve not touched a drop of alcohol—and, if you promise to help me, I swear to God I never will as long as I live. What can I do, man,” he cried, throwing out his arms, “to prove to you that I’m in deadly earnest?”
Quixtus lay back in his chair reflecting, his finger-tips joined together. Presently a smile, half humorous, half kindly, lit up his features—a smile such as Huckaby had not seen since before the days of the hostless dinner of disaster, and it was manifest to Huckaby that some at least of the Quixtus of old had come back to earth.
“In the last day or two,” said Quixtus, “I have formed a staunch friendship with one who was a crabbed and inveterate enemy. It is Miss Clementina Wing, the painter, whom you saw, in somewhat painful circumstances, the other day at the tea-room. I will give you an opportunity—I hope many—of meeting her again. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, my dear Huckaby—but so many strange things have happened of late, that I, for the present, mistrust my own judgment. I hope you understand.”
“Not quite. You don’t mean to tell——”
Quixtus flushed and drew himself up.
“After twenty years, do you know me so little as that?”
“I beg your pardon,” said the other humbly.
Again Quixtus smiled, at a reminiscent phrase of Clementina’s.
“At any rate, my dear fellow,” said he, “even if she doesn’t approve of you, she will do you a thundering lot of good.”
At the smile Huckaby took heart of grace; but at the same time the memory of Clementina, storming over the tea-table, for all the world like a French revolutionary general, filled his soul with wholesome dismay. Well, there was no help for it; he must take his chance; so he filled a philosophic pipe.
A little later Quixtus met the spotless flower of womanhood whom he had so grievously insulted. She greeted him with both hands outstretched. Without him Paris had been a desert. Why had he not sent her the smallest, tiniest line of news? Ah! she understood. It had been a sojourn of pain. Never mind. Paris, she hoped, would prove to be an anodyne. Only if she would administer it in the right doses; said Quixtus gallantly. Dressed with exquisite demureness, she found favour in his sight. He realised with a throb of thanksgiving that henceforward he could meet her on equal terms—as an honourable gentleman—no grotesque devilry haunting the back of his mind and clouding the serenity of their intercourse.
“Tell me what you have been doing with yourself,” she said, drawing him to a seat. The little air of intimacy and ownership so delicately assumed, captivated the remorseful man. He had not realised the charm that awaited him in Paris.
He touched lightly on Marseilles happenings, spoke of his guardianship, of Sheila, of her clinging, feminine ways, drew a smiling picture of his terror when Clementina had first left him alone with the child.
Mrs. Fontaine laughed sympathetically at the tale, and then, with a touch of tenderness in her voice that perhaps was not deliberate, said:
“In spite of the worries, you have benefited by the change. You have come back a different man.”
“In what way?”
“I can’t define it.”
“Try.”
A quick glance met earnest questioning in his eyes. She looked down and daintily plucked at the sunshade across her lap.
“I should say you had come back more human.”
Quixtus’s eyelids flickered. Clementina had used the same word. Was there then an obvious transformation from Quixtusfurensto Quixtus sane?
He remembered the child’s kiss. “Perhaps it’s my new responsibilities,” he said with a smile.
“I should so much like to see her. I wonder if I ever shall,” said Mrs. Fontaine.
“She is coming here to lunch with Miss Wing,” replied Quixtus, eager now that his good friends should know and appreciate each other. “Won’t Lady Louisa and yourself join us?”
“Delighted,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “Miss Clementina Wing is quite a character. I should like to see more of her.”
Quixtus, his mind full of sweet atonement, did not detect any trace of acidity in her words.
On the stroke of one, the time appointed for luncheon, Clementina and Sheila appeared at the end of the long lounge, Tommy and Etta straggling in their wake. Quixtus rose from the table where his three friends were seated, and advanced to meet them. Sheila ran forward and he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“You didn’t ask these children to lunch, but I brought ’em.”
“They’re very welcome,” said Quixtus, smiling.
Tommy, his fair face aflame with joy, wrung his hand. “I told you I would look you up in the Hôtel Continental. By Jove! I am glad to see you. I’ve been an awful ass, you know. Of course I thought——”
“Hush! Hush!” said Quixtus. “My dear Miss Concannon, I am delighted to see you.”
“She goes by the name of Etta,” said Tommy, proudly.
Clementina jerked her thumb towards them:
“Engaged. Young idiots!”
“My dear Miss Etta,” said Quixtus, taking the hand of the furiously blushing girl—“My friend, Tommy, is an uncommonly lucky fellow.” He nodded at Sheila, who hung on to his finger-tips. “Have you made friends with this young lady?”
“She’s a darling!” cried Etta.
“Clementina,” said Tommy, “you’re a wretch. You shouldn’t have given us away.”
“You gave yourselves away, you silly geese. People have been grinning at you all the time you were walking here.” Then her glance fell upon the expectant trio a little way off. “Oh Lord!” she said, “those people again!”
“They’re my very good friends,” said Quixtus, “and I want you to meet them again in normal circumstances. I want you to like them.”
He looked at her in mild appeal. Clementina’s lips twisted into a wry smile.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be civil.”
So it came to pass that the two women again faced each other; Mrs. Fontaine all daintiness and fragrance in her simple but exquisitely cut fawn costume, the chaste contours of her face set off by an equally simple ten-guinea black hat with an ostrich feather; Clementina, rugged, powerful, untidy in her ill-fitting mustardy brown stuff skirt and jacket, and heavy, businesslike shoes; and again between the two pairs of eyes was the flicker of rapiers. And as soon as they were disengaged and Clementina turned to Lady Louisa, she felt the other’s swift glance travel from the soles of her feet to the rickety old rose in her hat. There are moments when sex gives a woman eyes in the back of her head. She turned round quickly and surprised the most elusive ghost of a smile imaginable. For the first time in her life Clementina felt herself at a disadvantage. She winced; then mentally, so as to speak, snapped her fingers. What had she to do with the woman, or the woman with her?
All the presentations having been made, Quixtus led the way to the restaurant of the hotel.
“Clementina,” said he, “may I ask you to concede the place of honour for this occasion to my unexpected but most charming and most welcome guest?”
He indicated Etta still blushing into whose ear Tommy whispered that his uncle always spoke like a penny book with the covers off.
“My dear man,” said Clementina, “stick me anywhere, so long as it’s next the baby and I can see that nobody feeds her on anchovies and lobster salad.”
She understood perfectly. The second seat of honour was Mrs. Fontaine’s. She confounded Mrs. Fontaine. But what was Mrs. Fontaine to her or she to Mrs. Fontaine?
They took their places at the round table laid for eight. On Quixtus’s right, Etta; on his left, Mrs. Fontaine; then Sheila, somewhat awed at the grown-up luncheon party and squeezing Pinkie very tight so as to give her courage; then Clementina with Huckaby as left-hand neighbour; then Lady Louisa, and Tommy next to Etta.
Clementina kept her word and behaved with great civility. Tommy politely addressed Lady Louisa to the immense relief of Huckaby, who thus temporarily freed from his Martha, plunged into eager conversation with Clementina about her picture in the Salon, which had attracted considerable attention. He did not tell her that, in order to refresh his memory of the masterpiece, he had revisited the Grand Palais that morning. He praised the technique. There was in it that hint of Velasquez which so many portrait-painters tried for and so few got. This pleased Clementina. Velasquez was the god of her art. One bright space in her dreary youth was her life with Velasquez in Madrid.
“I too once tried to know something about him,” said Huckaby. “I wrote a monograph—a wretched compilation only—in a series of Lives of Great Painters for a firm of publishers.”
Hack work or not, the authorship of a Life of Velasquez was enough to prejudice her in Huckaby’s favour. She learned, too, that he was a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a university contemporary of Quixtus. Huckaby, finding her not the rough-tongued virago from whom Quixtus had always shrunk, and of whom, at their one meeting in the tea-room, he, himself, had not received the suavest impression, but a frank, intelligent woman, gradually forgot his anxiety to please and talked naturally as became a man of his scholarship. The result was that Clementina thought him a pleasant and sensible fellow, an opinion which she expressed later in the day to Quixtus.
With regard to Mrs. Fontaine, her promise of ladylike behaviour was harder to keep. All through the meal her dislike grew stronger. That Quixtus should bend towards Etta, in his courtly fashion, and pay her little gallant attentions, was but natural; indeed it was charming courtesy towards Tommy’s betrothed; but that he should do the same to Mrs. Fontaine and add to it a subtle shade of intimacy, was exasperating. In the lady’s attitude, too, towards Quixtus, Clementina perceived an air of proprietorship, a triumphant consciousness of her powers of fascination. When Quixtus addressed a remark across the table to Clementina, Mrs. Fontaine adroitly drew his attention to herself. Her manner gave Clementina to understand that, although a frump of a portrait painter might be an important person in a studio, yet in the big world outside, the attractive woman had victorious pre-eminence. Now Clementina was a woman, and one whose nature had lately gone through unusual convulsions. She found it difficult to be polite to Mrs. Fontaine. Only once was there a tiny eruption of the volcano.
Sheila’s seat at the table being too low for her small body, Clementina demanded a cushion from the maître d’hôtel. When, after some delay, a waiter brought it, she was engaged in talk with Huckaby. She turned in time to see Mrs. Fontaine about to lift Sheila from her seat. With a sudden, rough movement she all but snatched the child out of the other’s arms, and herself saw to Sheila’s sedentary comfort.
She didn’t care what Quixtus or any one else thought of her. She was not going to have this alien woman touch her child. The hussy flirtation with Quixtus she could not prevent. But no woman born of woman should come between her and the beloved child of her adoption.
The incident passed almost unnoticed. The meal ended pleasantly. With the exception of the two women in their mutual attitude, everybody was surprisedly delighted with everybody else. Etta thought Quixtus the very dearest thing, next to Admiral Concannon, that had ever a bald spot on the top of his head. Clementina, in a fit of graciousness, gave Huckaby the precious freedom of her studio. He could come and look at her pictures whenever he liked. Sheila, made much of, went away duly impressed with her new friends. Quixtus rubbed his hands at the success of his party. The apparently irreconcilable were reconciled, difficulties were vanishing rapidly, his path stretched out before him in rosy smoothness.
But Tommy’s quick eyes had noticed the snatching of Sheila.
“Etta,” said he, “I’ve known Clementina intimately all these years, and I find I know nothing at all about her.”
“What do you mean?” asked the girl.
“For the first time in my life,” said he, “I’ve just discovered that the dear old thing is as jealous as a cat.”