To Matthew Strang, who still had a vague reverence for duchesses, it was troubling to see them through the eyes of relatives for whom they were common clay. But this had always been his disappointment, the further he penetrated into the arcana of aristocracy and into the ranks of the distinguished—nobody ever seemed quite so imposing as his or her name in the paper. Taken in the mass, aristocracy of birth or brain was dazzling, overwhelming; but the individual was always amiably imperfect, with the exception, of course, of the one perfect being in the universe, Eleanor Wyndwood.
“You don’t think much of your family, Miss Regan,” he said, smiling.
“No, and they return the compliment. They don’t realize how near Doomsday is for us aristocrats. We must disappear. We have played our part.”
“What part?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose the upper classes, the people of leisure, existed to evolve culture. That can now be grafted on to the artisan, and both the upper and the lower classes can disappear. We want the amalgam now—culture without its vices, and work without its vulgarity.”
“Shall we ever get what we want?”
She smiled with ineffable sadness and weariness. “I sometimes think that that makes life worth living. That and bishops. This is the only world in which bishops could happen. There is some consolation, too, in Royal Drawing-rooms and kangaroos. Do you think there is any other planet in which ladies walk backward or animals hop? I wonder. When one feels weary of the burden of existence, one thinks of the humor of Creation and stays on. It is a delicious world.”
“Do you mean that you enjoy the imperfections of life?”
“I don’t know what I mean. I hate to see ill-fed people, and I hate to see well-fed people. Unhappy people pain me and happy people irritate me. WhatdoI mean? Oh, I think I see it at last. It is the unintelligent people that I hate to see unhappy, and the intelligent people that I hate to see happy. People who have brains and are happy can’t have souls. The fools ought to have creature comforts because they are fools enough to value them before all else. How I envy my maid’s capacity for envying me! Thank you, Mr. Strang, you have enabled me to understand myself.”
The music stopped, but the player was at once monopolized by the bishop. Fragments of their conversation reached the ears of the couple.
“She’s trying to convert him to Christianity,” Olive observed, gravely; “didn’t I tell you she was the most unpractical creature? She’s always leading forlorn hopes.”
“How is Herbert—my cousin—painting her?” he asked.
“Oh! he’s only had one sitting. She’s to be doneà l’ordinaire, but she had her hair dressed specially—such a waste of time—and was manicured, and the man took as long manicuring her as if she had been Briareus.”
“I mean, what will she wear?”
“Oh! a sentimental expression—the sort of look you see ina girl’s face when she’s sitting on the stairs with her hand in a man’s.”
A shudder traversed her shoulders, crinkling the blue bodice that covered them. “For the rest, she will be clothed in one of those creamy low-necked gowns that become her so well.”
Before the evening was over Olive was induced to sing. Matthew Strang was startled to find her choosing a love-song, and he was as astonished by the passionate intensity of her vocalization as by the beauty of her rich contralto voice.
“Ninon, Ninon,” she sang. “Que fais-tu de la vie—toi qui n’as pas d’amour?” And the notes melted exquisitely in pity. The tears returned to his eyes. It was his tragedy, it was Eleanor’s tragedy, it was everybody’s tragedy. “Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?”
Very few days went by before he rang Mrs. Wyndwood’s bell. The mental image of Eleanor sitting to Herbert was the motor that drove him to call. He had only seen his volatile cousin once or twice since they had dined together at the Limners’—Herbert Strang’s curious facility for taking up and dropping people had persisted unchanged. But the couple were destined to meet now, for victorias and hansoms hovered outside Mrs. Wyndwood’s house, and Matthew Strang found that he had stumbled upon a formal “At Home,” at which Herbert was fetching and carrying strawberry-ices to perspiring beauty. The popular painter noted with a novel thrill of alarm the boyish good looks of his friend, whose spruce, smiling figure was so visibly the cynosure of feminine eyes. Happily for his peace of mind, Eleanor was too busy welcoming her miscellaneous visitors to allot much attention to Herbert, who seemed, indeed, amply content with engaging the interest of half a dozen fair women, not counting an occasional interlude of Miss Regan. Matthew Strang slowly ploughed his way to the hostess, a cool-looking angel in white, through the block of bonneted ladies, amid which an occasional man stood out unpicturesque.
“You seem surprised to see me,” he said, in low tones, into which he infused an intimate note.
“Yes, indeed,” said Eleanor, with a little frank laugh. “How did you know it was my day?”
He smiled mysteriously, wondering the while if she could hear his heart beat above the feminine babble.
“You ought not to have come,” pursued Eleanor, with a little pout that made her face adorable. “We pay you the compliment of not asking you to our tea-fights, and this is how you appreciate it.”
“Forgive me,” he said, intoxicatingly flattered. “I do appreciate it. I didn’t know. I came for a cup of tea, with no idea of fighting for it.”
“Then let me give it you. Do you take sugar?”
And she handed him the cup, which he took with a hand that trembled. Then a press of fresh people cut him off from her, and she made no effort to keep him by her side. Gloom invaded his breast again. He had to speak to some of the crowd, and he did his duty with ill grace. He feared it would be too presumptuous to outstay the intrusive crew, so he resolved to escape as soon as possible. But Herbert captured him with a hearty hand-shake, and introduced him—with a certain proprietary pride—to his bevy of dames, and he was perforce added to the applausive circle in the centre of which Herbert quizzed the rest of the company and the universe at large.
“Isn’t that Lily O’Reilly talking with Mrs. Wyndwood?” he said, catching Olive’s passing eye.
“Sure, and it is that,” answered Olive, permitting the eye an unwonted roguish twinkle. “She is talking about her new novel.”
“Wonderful woman,” soliloquized Herbert for the benefit of his galaxy. “She is more read by the superfine critics than any other lady novelist in London.”
“Oh, Mr. Strang,” protested Lady William Dallox, a petite, elegant creature with an air of having stepped off a decorative panel, “why, the critics all slate her awfully.”
“I know. But that’s her revenge—to threaten her reviewers with libel actions, so that they have to read her to see if she deserved their slatings.”
“You’re a saucy cynic, sir,” said Olive, laughingly.
“What is a cynic?” airily retorted Herbert. “An accurate observer of life.”
“Beyond that definition cynicism cannot go,” said Olive, ceasing to smile.
“What a pity!” said Herbert. “At any rate, it is true as far as it goes. To call Miss O’Reilly’s hair chameleon-colored would be considered cynical. Yet it is but accurate observation. The inaccurate observer of life would call it auburn, not seeing that it is only auburnpro tem., and that it goes through as many editions as her books. Similarly, to call her complexion hand-painted—”
“Would be rudeness,” interrupted Olive, more severely, “especially as I heard her asking Mrs. Wyndwood to introduce to her the young man who looked so much like the hero of one of her novels.”
“Ah, that puts another complexion on the matter,” said Herbert, lightly. Under cover of the confusion of feminine compliment that greeted the quick sally, Matthew Strang slipped away, leaden-hearted, from the sight of the smiles and the sound of the laughter. Even had he been free, what chance would he have had, pitted against his brilliant cousin? He knew himself a silent man, scarcely speaking, unless abnormally moved, much less scintillating. He had only one talent—one poor talent for expressing the Beautiful to one sense—and this one talent he had prostituted. Everything grew black to his morbid mood. The dying afternoon, cool, sun-glinted, had no beauty for him; the speckless grooms outside the door irritated him; the shining carriages dashing along the great arteries of the West End, bearing their lolling occupants to dress and dinner, stirred him to something of the same revolt that he had felt when he had walked the metropolis of wealth and fashion in broken boots. After all, he had never really entered this circle of pleasure, it had always been a fairy-ring he could not step into. Beautiful as his boots were externally, there had always been a nail, a pebble inside; that adverse atom which, according to the philosopher, suffices to destroy happiness. His had always been a life of labor, of misery. He was still of the down-trodden classes, of those whom fate, if not man, grinds down, whose lives slip by in a vain yearning for the sun, who see happiness as a phantasm that is only solid forothers, and love as the mocking mirage of a beauty that is far away. He was angry—so unreasonably angry that the unreason seemed a reason for fresh anger with himself. And he was angry, not only with himself, but with Herbert, with the world, aye, with Eleanor Wyndwood and her idle, hare-brained visitors, reeking of the toilet-table, chattering of poems, pictures, and symphonies.
The thought of his mother came up from dim recesses of memory—still babbling in the asylum that was her haven of refuge after a life of storm and stress and sorrow and weary watchings for a vagrant mate—and he was jealous of Eleanor for her sake, jealous of her beauty, her breeding, her wealth, her fine dresses, her carriage, her fashionable visitors; jealous of all that made her different from his mother, of all that made her life fuller, freer, higher, richer—of all, in fine, that made him love her! Ah, God, how he loved her! He could scarcely keep back the hysteric sobs that swelled at his throat. But they had always been shut out from the sunshine, his mother and he. Happiness! oh, to clasp it, to hold it tight! Nothing counted except happiness—ambition, success, art, money, alike vain gauds, shadows. He walked past his turning, and far beyond. Lights began to twinkle in the great tired city; the summer evening brooded, fresh and cool, over the vast stretches of dusty stone. When at last he reached his studio the sun had set. He saw the pale rose-glow, mystically tender, at the end of the long suburban avenue of green trees and yellow street-lamps; it spoke to him of peace and rest and resignation, and some secret beauty behind all.
Not many days later his restless feet took him again to the Mayfair house. He would speak out—at some opportunity which the shrewd, kindly Olive would not fail to afford him—he would tell Eleanor all she meant to him, how she was becoming the pivot of his thought, how she and she alone might inspire his art to higher purpose. He would not ask for love, only for a noble friendship; he needed an understanding soul to sympathize with his inmost self, his aspirations, his agonies. He had always been hedged in by thick barriers of ice, through which no human soul had ever pierced. No one knew whattinder for divine fires lay awaiting the spark within, nor how cold and lonely he felt in his glacial isolation.
But at first his visit threatened to be even more disappointing than the last. Another man was taking tea—or rather, eating nougat with Mrs. Wyndwood and Miss Regan—young and fascinating of feature, but with a fatal air of the minor poet. And a poet, indeed, he proved to be: a poet of considerable pretensions, who might win the bays if only he could get over his unfortunate appearance, which seemed to tie him down to sugared prettiness and elegant concetti. Matthew Strang had read one of his dainty, gilt-edged volumes, wherein dapper lyrics posed in the centre of broad-margined pages, and he wondered resentfully why Mrs. Wyndwood did not lecture him into spirituality instead of feeding him with nougat, which his poetry already resembled. But though Harold Lavender was accommodating enough to go soon, Matthew Strang profited little by his retirement from the field, for Eleanor seemed to be in a freakish mood, as if the contagion of Olive had infected her, or the nougat had made her terrestrial, and she played a lively second to her vivacious friend in recapitulating the charms of their dog, Roy, a slumbrous Scotch collie, that he had barely noted before, but which now became the climax of creation.
“We’ve only hired him,” Mrs. Wyndwood explained. “Lady Arthur, to whom the house belongs, asked us to take charge of him, so he’s in the inventory. His father was a pedigree dog, and won five hundred guineas.”
“Yes, her ladyship had him catalogued completely, lest we should lose a bit of him,” said Olive, rolling the animal over, and digging her fingers affectionately into his fur and pulling his ears and his paws and his tail to illustrate her recital of his perfections. “Brown-and-white coat—the brown of an autumn filbert, with a collar and shirt-front of white fur over skin as pink as rosebuds—look at it—black gums and palate, with the whitest of teeth, canines, I believe; a tail of russet and black and white that waves like a palm-tree. Observe the little black ring; we identified him once by it, though we had never noticed it before, had we, my beauty?”
Mrs. Wyndwood took up the ball. “He was lost, stolen, orstrayed, and information was lodged at a police-station that a collie with a black ring round his tail had been found. We told the superintendent ours had no such ring.”
“The inaccurate observation of life, you see, Mr. Strang,” broke in Olive, “which, according to your cousin, delivers one from cynicism.”
“But cynicism has something to do with dogs, hasn’t it?” observed Mrs. Wyndwood, smilingly.
“Yes,” said Olive. “We must get Mr. Strang to define cynicism as the accurate observation of dogs. Don’t forget to tell him, Nor, when you sit to him to-morrow.”
Matthew Strang moved uncomfortably on his seat, raging inwardly, and scarcely knowing whether he was more jealous of Herbert or of Roy.
“Well, that superintendent must have been a cynic,” Mrs. Wyndwood went on, “for he recommended us to go and look at the dog all the same. It was a wild expedition—nearly eleven o’clock at night—we routed out a nest of costers who lived over a stable, and were invaded by means of a ladder. I felt like a robber Viking, all heart-beat and adventure. It was glorious!”
“Yes; and Roy came bounding out and nearly toppled you over. And all the little costers came crowding out of bed in their night-dresses, and you gave Mrs. Coster a sovereign for them in mistake for a shilling.”
Mrs. Wyndwood went into a fit of mirth over the recollection. For once her melodious laugh grated upon his ears. What in the world was there to laugh about? It seemed all the most puerile nonsense. He could have cried more easily.
“Remark his lively air,” said Olive. “His intuitive sympathy is wonderful. He is sad when you weep, and merry when you frivol.”
The painter merely heard the dog panting like an impatient steam-engine.
“He wants a run, I think,” he observed, ungraciously.
“Aye, you should see him run!” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “It makes one feel young again to see him scampering up hill and down dale. Even a mudhill delights him; it reminds him of his native moors, doesn’t it, Roy, dear?”
Roy stared at her with large, unblinking eyes.
“But we are not dressed well enough to go out with him now,” said Olive. “I told you what a snob he was, Mr. Strang. Shake paws with the gentleman, dear. He’s smart enough even for your tastes. See how he likes you, Mr. Strang. If he didn’t, the skin over his dear old nose would snarl up into gathers and puckers and frills. There! That’s his favorite attitude—on his hind-legs, with his fore-paws placably on a beloved lap. Now he is happy. How simple life is for him! Lucky dog!”
“Ah, you forget that he, too, has his ideal, his unachieved aspiration,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “The disappointment of his life is that he can’t catch birds. He snaps at everything that soars in air—even insects; it exasperates him to find things hovering mockingly overhead in defiance of gravity. He sits on his haunches and wails over the emptiness of life.”
Matthew Strang gave Roy a kindlier pat. But the creature was still stretched on the tapis of conversation, and Olive proceeded to a whimsical account of the partition of Roy between Eleanor and herself, as joint house-keepers. Since they could not bisect the collie, he belonged to each on alternate days, so that if he were lost again, the onus would rest on the mistress for the day.
By this time the painter could hardly refrain from kicking the dog, and when Mrs. Wyndwood added that Roy was only eighteen months old, he rose to go.
Mrs. Wyndwood’s expression changed.
“You’re not running away yet?” she said.
“I must,” he murmured, his ill-humor abating under the sweet seriousness of her face.
“Why, you haven’t talked to us at all—we want to hear more about technique.”
“Technique can’t be talked,” he said, still surly.
“We haven’t any materials for practical demonstrations,” said Olive, “not even a black-board.”
“I should love to be an artist,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “To feel beauty growing under one’s hand—what a sense of creative divinity. I never sitto an artist without thinking what a privilege is his—— Now whatareyou laughing at, Olive?”
“Nothing, except your subtle way of complimenting yourself on your good looks. Now, if Mr. Strang will be good, and waste a little more valuable time on two foolish women, I will pay him a compliment.”
He sat down, his curiosity stimulated, and Olive, producing a box of Turkish cigarettes, asked if he objected to her smoking. Permission being obtained, she got him to apply a light to her cigarette, and then bade him smoke one himself. He was relieved to find Mrs. Wyndwood an abstainer.
“There,” said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud, “that is the highest compliment I can pay a man—to expose myself in all my horror. I smoke neither for toothache nor neuralgia, but for sheer viciousness. See the result of our visit to Podnieff—Nor picked up ideals, and I, smoke. Perhaps they are the same thing in the long-run.”
Matthew Strang dissented vehemently. “Ideals are the only realities.”
“Nonsense, they are the only things that change,” retorted Miss Regan. “The ideal woman of to-morrow will smoke shag and birdseye in long clay pipes.”
Eleanor Wyndwood came to his assistance, and together they did battle with Olive, who took up the most perverse Philistine positions and fought as if for life, eluding, shuffling, dodging, equivocating, turning, twisting, doubling upon herself with the most daring defiance of consistency, and the most bizarre flashes of wit and argument. She would snatch a victory by specious logic that could only hold for a moment, and stand in as serenely mocking triumph upon a crumbling sand-heap as if she knew herself upon a rock, and was not about to bound off to the next sand-heap the instant the tide of reason swept this one hopelessly away. The painter found a celestial knitting of soul in thus fighting side by side with Eleanor; he did not blench even when she quoted a quatrain from Harold Lavender to enforce her point. But the shades of earth returned when she referred to Herbert Strang.
“Here is an example of a man who has absolutely nothing to gain from Art—who doesn’t need it, who has means—to whose sceptical spirit the applause of the world is indifferent. Andyet the other morning—when the sunshine called one to the joys of thedolce far niente—he sat for hours toiling painfully at his Art, and fretting because he had allowed his right hand to lose its cunning. He had neglected the Ideal, but now his soul thirsts for it again, and the Ideal is avenged.”
Matthew Strang felt a malicious satisfaction in the thought that Herbert was not getting on very well with the portrait. He had a sudden curiosity to see it.
“You are really too simple, Nor,” said Olive, plaintively. “Can’t you see the man’s only trying to spread out the sittings so as to have you come there? I dare say he can paint as well as the present Mr. Strang.”
Eleanor flushed, hotly. “Oh, there’s no deception about his limitations. I am almost sorry I consented.”
Matthew Strang’s heart leaped exultant. “He did let his gifts rust,” he said, magnanimously. “But I dare say his old talent will come back after a little practice. He had a fine color-sense in the old days.”
His magnanimity seemed to please both ladies, especially Olive, and the discussion wound up suddenly in a congruity as unexpected as any of her arguments.
“You were great chums then, weren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes; he was my cicerone in artistic society. I might almost say in civilized society. I owe him a good deal.” He had no shame in hinting at his humble origin to these two unconventional gentlewomen.
“Where is his studio?” he asked.
They told him; but Miss Regan seemed to be suddenly uneasy. A little clock on the mantel-piece struck six silvery notes. He thought his hostesses might want to dress elaborately for some dinner-party or the theatre, so he tore himself away, and, jumping into a hansom, drove, on the impulse of the moment, to Herbert’s studio.
Olive sighed wearily, and leaned her head upon her elbows, which were planted on the tea-table. Eleanor stooped and kissed her.
“Lie down, dear, till dinner. The heat has been too much for you. You look tired to death.”
“Heigho! I wish I was really. What’s the use of living, Nor, darling?”
“Oh, life is so beautiful!” exclaimed Eleanor, with shining eyes. “Think of Art, think of Nature! Cheer up, Olive. The horrid season will soon be over, and then hey for Devonshire!”
“And the Creamery,” added the girl, in hollow accents. “But let’s get away at once, dear.”
“We must stay for a few things yet—we promised,” Mrs. Wyndwood reminded her sweetly. “There’s the dance at Lady Surbiton’s, and the reception of—”
Olive interrupted her with a burst of laughter that sounded hysterical to her friend’s anxious ears. “Oh, it’s a mad, bad world! But there are Lady Surbiton’s tea-gowns!”
“Do lie down, dear.”
“Why aren’t there convents for unbelievers, Nor? It’s an oversight. I’d get me into a nunnery, but I should be suspected of piety. The hospitals are overrun. They are as impossible as Ramsgate; and your nurse is suspected of being a heroine. When will people understand that altruism is a passion, and that nobody wants to be patted on the back for gratifying instinct? When I did that month’s hard in the Dublin Hospital—but that was before I knew you, dear—half my family thought me mad, and the other half a saint. But I was only incapable, Nor, dearest. I couldn’t dress ugly wounds as if I wasn’t feeling the pain of them. No, I’m a failure. There’s nothing for it save suicide.”
“Or marriage,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, softly, laying her cheek to her friend’s.
Olive moved her head away, shuddering violently. “I’d breed dogs rather.” She rose to her feet and stretched her arms. “They are happy, aren’t you, Roy?” She leaned down and pulled the collie’s jaws apart. “Eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating. Why didn’t Evolution stop with you, instead of going further and faring worse? But still there are those birds, Roy. And on our side there’s Art and there’s Nature, Eleanor Wyndwood says. Which Art is it going to be, by-the-way, Eleanor Wyndwood—Poetry or Painting? But it’s two to one on Painting.”
“You’re feverish, darling,” said Eleanor, troubled. “Don’t talk at random.”
“I’m talking straight, dear. Two Strangs to one Lavender. And what has become of Spirit, dearest? That used to come before Art and Nature!”
“And who said it doesn’t still?” Eleanor answered, deprecatingly. Then, with a passionate cry that set her beautiful bosom heaving, “My God, Olive, why do you misjudge me? Can’t you understand earnest seeking?” Tears came into her eyes and trickled down her face.
Olive kissed them away. “I’m a brute, Eleanor. The heat’s too much for both of us. Good-night!”
“Going to lie down, dearest?”
“No; going to bed.”
Matthew Strang had rung several times before he could gain admittance to his cousin’s studio. Herbert appeared in his shirt-sleeves, grinning and yawning.
“Tit for tat,” he said. “But I’m awfully glad you came, old man. I was just dreaming of you. By Jove, isn’t it hot?”
When Herbert said “old man,” in his caressing voice, Matthew became as clay in the hands of the potter. It seemed so good to have the friendship of this sunny being. He answered affectionately that itwashot.
“You haven’t seen this den before?” said Herbert. “Not so swell as yours. But then I’m hard up.”
Matthew smiled incredulously, for the studio was charming.
“You’re doing a portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, I hear.”
“Who told you?”
“I was there this afternoon.”
“Yes? Did you see her friend Miss Regan?”
“She is always there.”
“I know. Isn’t she a jolly little girl?”
“She’s very odd,” said Matthew.
“Odd? You Philistine! She’s the most amusing girl in London. And so unaffected! You can say anything to her—talk about anything. No beastly prudishness. That’s what I like in a woman. The other day she was complaining gravelythat a woman couldn’t be a burglar because it would land her in compromising situations. Therefore there never could be thorough equality of the sexes, she maintained. Wasn’t it quaint? She sits here smoking cigarettes while I paint that saintly friend of hers, and all the while rattles on in the most delightful fashion. What a flow of spirits! And, by Jove! the clever, biting things she says make your hair curl. I’m not in it with her, though I try hard. I draw her out to talk about her relations—it’s better than Thackeray. She’s no end of a swell, you know.”
“I know.”
“And disgustingly rich. In short, she’d be intolerable if she wasn’t herself. What an enviable lot! All the B’s—Beauty, Bullion, Blue Blood, and Brilliancy. No wonder she’s light-hearted! They say she had an eccentric dad, which accounts for her—a man who wasted one of his fortunes on socialistic experiments! But she knows better than that. Eccentricity in the parent is epigram in the child.”
“Which is an epigram,” said Matthew, laughing, and considerably relieved by this outburst on his cousin’s part. “Butyourparents were not eccentric.”
“Indeed? Don’t you see any eccentricity in the poor old governor’s trying to make an artist out of me?”
“Whereisthat portrait?” asked Matthew, amused.
“Here it is, you duffer, staring you in the face on the easel all the time. Don’t say you didn’t recognize it. Please don’t.”
“Now that I know who it is,” began Matthew, laughing.
“Itisghastly, old man, isn’t it? But that girl distracts me with her talk.”
“What made you attempt it?” asked Matthew, candidly.
“I wanted to hear her talk.”
“Whom?”
“Miss Regan.”
Matthew felt a great wave of affection for his cousin.
“But why don’t you painther?”
“She wouldn’t sit. I had to ask her friend, knowing she’d accompany her. But I’m half sorry I undertook it now.”
“You’re certainly not doing her justice!”
There was still plenty of light. He took up the brush, and within a quarter of an hour Mrs. Wyndwood’s sweetly spiritual face gleamed unmistakably upon the canvas. Herbert watched with admiration those sure, swift strokes, behind which lay so arduous a training, so irrepressible an instinct.
“You seem to have her face by heart,” he said at last, with a suspicious twinkle. “But don’t let me interrupt you.” And lighting a cigarette, he threw himself on a lounge in an attitude that curiously recalled old times to the painter.
Matthew Strang painted on lovingly till he could no longer see his palette, then Herbert took him to his new club—the Epicurean—and gave him a delightful dinner for his pains, and over the kümmel and the coffee borrowed a hundred pounds from him so as not to sell out a stock that was depreciated for the moment.
Herbert Stranghad gone down to Devonshire to finish his portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, whose dress was still unrecognizable, and who was so agreeably surprised by the face that she graciously consented to continue the sittings at the “Creamery.” Matthew had arranged to join him—on the excellent pretext of keeping his old friend company—but before he left town for his holiday, Conscience began working hard, ominously presageful of the complications that might spring up in the solitudes of hills and waters. The inner voice whispered strenuously to him to profit by Eleanor’s absence to fight down his impossible passion, not intensify it unendurably by following in her train. Thoughts of his wife began to haunt him—thoughts which, while he was only an absentee husband, had been but pale shadows of remorse, dogging his few unoccupied moments, but which, now that another woman had at last enthroned herself in the vacant temple of his soul, assumed shapes more solid andinsistent. Home plucked at his heart, subtly transformed to something more than an unpleasant recollection. In a spasm of compunction and foreboding, he resolved to pay a visit to his wife to strengthen himself against temptation. The idea, once conceived, drove him to instant execution. Ere the train had drawn up at Camden Town he had determined to elude temptation altogether by accompanying his own family on its annual jaunt.
The visit began inauspiciously. When he had passed the ivy-clad turreted church, which was the one picturesque object on the road from the station, he was back in the old familiar mesh of gray streets, any one like any other, with rows of shabby semi-genteel stone-fronted houses, exactly alike, broken at corners by baker-shops and green-grocers. The August afternoon was depressed, with misty, sputtering rain. A few tradesmen’s carts rattled forlornly down the drab avenues of apathetic houses. A diminutive barrel-organ wheezed a lively air. Never had his street seemed so hopeless. His ardor grew chill.
He paused before the door of the little studio where he had painted his first success—“Motherhood.” The discolored wood—set in the blankness of a long brick wall—was scrawled over with chalk inscriptions and sketches by the urchins of the neighborhood. The house was round the corner, and, after a melancholy moment, he walked listlessly towards the front gate, swung it on its creaking hinges, and mounted the chipped stone steps, washed ashen-gray by the drippings of rain.
There was a new face, heavy and smudged, under the ill-adjusted cap of the maid-of-all-work who opened the door, and as he entered the narrow hall the sickly smell of boiled cabbage saluted his nostrils, and justified him to himself. But he was grimly embarrassed at having to explain himself to the girl.
“Is your mistress in?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Will you wait in the drorin’-room, sir? What name, sir?”
He felt mortified and a whit ashamed. The servant’s ignorance was an unconscious rebuke that counterbalanced the boiled cabbage.
“Oh, tell her Matthew,” he said, flushing. “She’ll know.”
“Yes, sir.” And the girl’s cap, stuck on askew for the edification of unexpected company, disappeared down the kitchen stairs.
He would have liked to brush majestically past her, but delicacy prevented so abrupt an intrusion upon his wife in the recesses of domesticity. His coming was already sufficient surprise. A few hours ago he himself had not foreseen that a swamping wave of moral emotion would sweep him homeward. He walked about the room, morbidly fascinated by the flashy vases with the hand-painted shepherds, and wondering what Rosina would say if he made away with them, as decency demanded. To his bitter amusement he heard her voice from the passage remonstrating with Billy—in a very audible whisper—for the servant’s indiscretion in admitting to the drawing-room a stranger who might do havoc among her cherished possessions.
“Goodness knows what he may not pocket,” she grumbled, uneasily, as she approached the door.
“It’s all right, Rosina,” he called out, coming into the passage. “It’s only me.”
“Gracious!” ejaculated Mrs. Matthew Strang, angrily, putting her hand to her heart. “What a turn you gave me! So you’re the Mr. Matthews! I really do wish you wouldn’t come sneaking in and prying and ferreting and frightening a body out of her wits.”
She stood there—no more pleasing than the vases—the features, that had once threatened to be pretty, sharpened shrewishly, though the figure had grown plumper except where the breasts had fallen. She did not look her youth. The face was weary, the pale blue eyes had lost their softness. She had hastily donned a cheap black cashmere dress trimmed with jet. The painter was glad the usual effusion of affection was wanting. Notwithstanding the pitch of reaction to which he was wrought up, all his being shrank from the desecrating embrace of the woman he did not love. Nevertheless he was conscious of an undercurrent of astonishment. Longer intervals than this last had parted them, yet she had never failed to exhibit amorous emotion, even though it took the shape of jealous reproach.This afternoon there was a suggestion of resentment in her greeting—for the first time he felt unwelcome. He was puzzled, albeit relieved. But the secret of her mood did not leak out yet; and in the meantime there was Billy, sulkily awaiting his famous brother’s recognition. The young man looked whiter and thinner than on Matthew’s last visit to the house.
“How glad he’ll be to come for a holiday with me,” thought the painter, with a pang of joyful repentance. “He oughtn’t to live in London at all. We’ll all go down to some pretty little village where I can paint if necessary, and we’ll stay till the winter.” The cripple churlishly took the hand which his brother extended. His palm burned.
“All right, Billy?” questioned Matthew, cheerfully.
“It doesn’t matter how I am,” snapped the younger man. “It’s months since you’ve been nigh us.”
Rosina turned upon Billy. “Don’t you take my part—I can speak for myself. You can’t expect to see your brother in the summer when all the fashionable folks come up to London to be painted.”
Billy murmured something inarticulate, and looked doggedly at Matthew, leaning on his crutch.
“I suppose I must ask you to walk in and take a chair, since you are such a stranger,” said Mrs. Matthew Strang.
Her husband meekly retreated into the drawing-room, and sat down with his back to the vases that adorned the mantel-piece. But now a new horror caught his eye—nothing less than a framed oleograph of “Motherhood,” which had found its way into the house in the days when its wide popularity still gave him a certain interest in it not far removed from pride. On his soul, tensely strung by Eleanor’s hand for the high notes of imagination, this cheap domesticity now jarred abominably. The picture glared at him, it loomed suddenly symbolic. It was representative of Rosina and her influence. This was her height of poetry, the top measure of her soul—the mother carrying the little girl who carried the doll. The work he wanted to do—nay, the work he had always wanted to do—that was what Eleanor stood for—the rare, the fine, the ethereal. Years of insincere work had blunted and torpified him—Eleanor had recreatedhis soul, had given him freshness of feeling, and something of the early ardor of aspiration.
This passed through his mind before Billy had stumped in and taken a chair opposite him. Rosina remained standing at the open door in an attitude expressive of household duties plucking at her skirts.
The painter shifted nervously on his chair. There was a dead silence. It permitted the tootling of a tin whistle to become audible, and gave the painter the happy thought of asking after the children.
“Clara’s at school,” replied Rosina, ungraciously. “She’s the second girl in her class, and could be top if she wasn’t so sulky.”
“And Davie?”
“Can’t you hear for yourself? He’s only too quiet as a rule, but since you brought him that whistle he’s been unbearable. It’s the only thing that rouses him. It was stopped up for a fortnight, and he went about like a little ghost till Billy put it right. If he only had a notion of music! Billy tried to teach him to play on it, but he’s got no head for anything. There! did you ever hear such a squeal?”
“Oh! he’s such a baby yet,” said her husband, deprecatingly.
Then the conversation languished again, and Davie’s lugubrious whistle held the field.
Billy drew vague designs on the carpet with his crutch. Matthew fidgeted and at last got up. He was meditating how to turn the conversation into a tenderer channel, and broach the holiday in common. Rosina maintained her inconclusive attitude in the doorway.
“You’ve still got those vases,” Matthew said. There being no other thought in the way, this thought escaped.
“Yes,” she rejoined; “but I don’t wonder at your asking; any day may see the end of them, servants are growing that careless. Even as it is, they only dust their outsides. If I didn’t wash them myself with tea-leaves they’d be choked up in a month.”
She walked to the mantel-piece, and ran her forefinger downone of them. The finger grew black as with anger; her brow darkened.
“Why, Amy is worse than Jane!” she cried, harshly. “I won’t stand any more of her nonsense. Do you know what she did last week?” Here she walked back to the door and shut it tightly, lest her words should reach the kitchen. “She washed the colored things in the same water as the whites. And then, after the wash, I missed a pair of Billy’s red socks, and I hunted high and low for them, and made a fuss. The next day Billy found them mysteriously mixed up with his flannels. I am convinced she stole them, not knowing she had a sharp eye to deal with. I know they’ll worry me into the grave, these servants. This morning I particularly said to her, ‘Have you dusted the drawing-room?’ and she said, bold as brass, ‘Yes, mum.’ And this is what she calls dusting.” She held up her gloomy forefinger. Then, lowering her voice as if it might penetrate even through the closed door, she hissed menacingly at the brothers—“I’ll give her a piece of my mind, that I will. If she don’t know when she’s got a good place, the great hulking brute, she shall pack herself off this very afternoon. A charwoman I give her every Monday to help her; two shillings I have to pay and her beer money, to say nothing of the work I do with my own hands. Often and often I make the beds myself, for there isn’t a girl in creation you can trust to shake out the bedding, they leave it all lumpy. And what is the reward for all my kindness? I hate them all; I wish their necks were screwed.”
“I wish they were,” said Billy, impatiently. “I’m sick of hearing about them.”
Rosina turned upon him again. “And who asks you to stay here? I’m sure I’m sick of hearing you grumbling and whining about the house.”
Billy’s eyes blazed. A red spot burned in each white cheek.
“Won’t you give me a cup of tea, Rosina?” interposed Matthew, gently.
“I dare say Amy has let the fire go out,” she snapped. “Ring the bell, you’re nearest it.”
Matthew rang the bell, and Amy appeared.
“Can you make some tea, Amy?” Rosina inquired, in sweet, seductive accents.
“Yes, mum.”
“My husband has just come from abroad,” she explained, deferentially and apologetically, “and we sha’n’t be wanting any more at tea-time. We’ll have tea a little earlier, and you can keep the water hot for Miss Clara.”
“Yes, mum.” Amy disappeared.
“Did you see the smudge on her cheek?” asked Rosina, despairingly. “She can’t even dust her face.”
While Rosina was speaking, her husband fretted under her conversation; the awkward silence that ensued when she ceased made him wish she would go on talking.
“How is business?” she asked, finding him dumb.
He suppressed a grimace. “Pretty fair. You know I’ve always got as much to do as I care for.”
“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Rosina replied, in a softened and more confidential tone. “You ought to make enough to be able to retire one day. Why should you always live away from me?—it’s as bad as marrying a drummer. At No. 49 there’s one—a commercial traveller they call them in England—and his wife tells me—it’s the house with the striped linen blinds—she doesn’t see him half a dozen times a year, and you’re getting almost as scarce, particularly this year.” She dropped into a chair, finally dismissing her tentative attitude.
This seemed a favorable opening at last, so her husband plunged into it.
“You haven’t been out of town yet?” he began.
Rosina bounded wrathfully from her chair.
“There! I knew that that was what you came to spy out. Isn’t it enough that you’ve left your brother here to be a spy on all my comings and goings? It’s rather me that ought to be setting a spy on you, God knows, what with your studios and your models and your fashionable, false-hearted women. Well, there he is to witness, anyhow. We havehadour fortnight at the sea-side. Haven’t we, Billy?”
Billy nodded.
“There! There’s your own brother to witness. We wentlast month, and all to save you money, though I know you think I’m making a stocking. They charged us so much last year for lodgings at Margate in August that I made up my mind I wouldn’t be swindled any more, and so we went in July. And we did save—it’s no use my denying it, with that spy of yours ever at my tail—but I’ve had to spend twice as much in London, with everything gone up in price. They’re asking a shilling a peck for peas—you can go round and ask Delton, the green-grocer, if you don’t believe me—it’s enough to ruin anybody. And then there was the rise in coals in the spring on account of the strike—something frightful, and such a lot of slag. And then poor Clara has been so poorly; I sent for the doctor once, and then he would keep on coming to see her every day—there was no getting rid of him, and that brother of yours hadn’t the spunk to tell him straight out not to come any more. Goodness knows what his bill has run up to. They’re simply blood-squeezers, these doctors. So there! If you think you’ve caught me out, coming down on me like a detective in my sea-side week, you’re nicely mistaken, Mr. Slyboots. What are you glaring at me for? Looking for the brown? I’d have given myself a coat of paint if I had known you were coming, though I don’t pretend to be so clever at it as you, or your fine ladies either, for the matter of that.”
As Rosina stood over him, breathlessly pouring forth her impassioned defence of the position she took up in financial matters, Matthew Strang felt he understood why men sometimes kill women. He had long since given up attempting to make her understand that her thoughts were not his thoughts, that, despite his hard training in the value of money, details of expenditure had ceased to occupy his consciousness the moment the pinch of need was become a thing of the past. He was inured to her financial apologetics, her tedious justifications of what he (in his ignorance that she was indeed hoarding money secretly, and, like all women, saving on her house-keeping) never called into question. He had steeled himself to a simulation of attention when she elaborately accounted for every farthing he had given her, and, habituated to money perpetually passing from his hands, he had never even reflected that her style of livingcould not possibly exhaust the sums with which he supplemented her own income; to his heedless mind a growing family vaguely explained everything. But to-day the prosaic minutiæ, though painfully familiar, set up an inward fume that, intensified by her misconstruction of his visit and by her digs at Billy, approached insanity. He controlled himself with a great effort.
“It is you that are mistaken, Rosina,” he rejoined, clinching his palms. “I came merely to propose that you should take your holiday now. I thought we might go somewhere together.”
“Well, then, you’re a bit too late,” she replied, with no diminution of ill-temper. “And what’s come over you that you want my company all of a sudden? I thought you couldn’t spare me a week ever. I reckon the truth is that work’s got slack.”
“Nonsense, I told you my hands were full,” he said, losing his self-control.
“That’s no reason why you should waste money on me. I can’t go twice to the sea-side.”
“I didn’t want you to go twice. I didn’t know you had been.”
“I explained to you why I went,” she retorted, hotly. “They wanted three guineas last year for a sitting-room and two poky bedrooms, and there was no key to the chiffonier, and I’m sure the landlady nibbled at our provisions.”
“But I would have gladly let you have a little extra if you wanted to go in August.”
“I’d much rather you spent the money on the children. Clara wears out her shoes frightfully—the expense turns my hair gray.”
“Then you wouldn’t care to go with me?”
“No; it would be sinful extravagance to go twice. Give me the money if you’re so anxious to get rid of it.”
“Do be reasonable, Rosina. I dare say the children will enjoy another week of—”
“The children! Much you care about the children. You haven’t asked to see Davie yet, and as for Clara—” Rosina’s scornful accents dried up suddenly. Her acute ear had caught the gentle clatter of the mounting tray. She opened the door for Amy. “You’re sure the water was boiling?” she inquired, pleasantly.
“Yes, mum.”
The mistress produced a little key from her bosom. “You will find a cake in the cupboard under the dining-room sideboard. And bring up the blue-bordered plates, the little ones, please.”
“Yes, mum.”
When the tea was duly served, Rosina resumed: “And as for Clara, I didn’t even write to you she had been ailing. I knew you took so little interest in the poor child. She might die and be buried for all you’d know.”
“I can’t know if you don’t tell me,” he said, sulkily, stung by the germ of truth in her words. “Why don’t you let Davie come up to me?—you ought to have sent him up as soon as you knew I was here.”
Rosina threw open the door again with a jerk, and leaned over the kitchen stairs. “Davie,” she bawled, “stop that dreadful noise, and come up at once, do you hear? Your father is dying to see you.”
The painter bit his lips. An irrelevant memory rang in his brain with a Russian accent. “I do not like this word, dying.” The face of Eleanor Wyndwood swam up on the cabbage-scented air. The patter of Davie’s feet was heard, toddling up the stairs.
The child stumbled shyly into the room, the tin whistle clasped distrustfully to his breast—a pathetic, anæmic little figure with flaxen curls and big gray eyes that easily brimmed over with tears. He wore serge knickerbockers, and the rest of him aped the sailor, picturesquely enough. The child paused near the door, clutching his mother’s skirt.
“This way, my little man,” said Matthew, smiling encouragingly from the green sofa that sprawled across the centre of the room. “Come to your daddy.”
“Go to the gentleman, dear,” said Rosina, with withering sarcasm.
But the boy hung back, clutching her skirt and his whistle tighter.
“Don’t be afraid, Davie. I won’t take your whistle from you—don’t you remember, I gave it you?” He held up a piece of Rosina’s home-made cake. Thus adjured and enticed, Davie moved cautiously forward, waves of returning recollection agitating the wee wan face.
A lump swelled in the father’s throat as he surveyed the weakling. The poor child suddenly appeared to him the scape-goat for an unholy union. Life had taught him from what fount of sacred love children should spring.
While he was hoisting the child on his knee, responsive to that strong appeal of feeble creatures, but with no specific stirrings of paternity, Davie wistfully held up his disengaged hand for the cake, which he grabbed as soon as it came within range of his little arm. His mouth was too preoccupied with cake to return his father’s kiss, to which he submitted passively.
The painter laid his hand tenderly on the flaxen hair.
“Did you enjoy yourself at Margate, Davie?”
Rosina uttered an exclamation of disgust.
“Well, I never! Who’ll you be cross-examining next? Perhaps you think Billy and me are in a conspiracy; that I’ve gained over your spy. I’d better go down-stairs so as not to influence the child’s evidence.”
And turning on her heel, she marched haughtily kitchenwards.
Matthew sighed wearily.
“What’s the matter with her, Billy?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me. She’s been as cross as two sticks ever since they’ve had new curtains at No. 53 opposite. And the weather has been so muggy. And your coming has upset her.”
“But she seems to have turned against you, too. You used to get on so well together.”
“She’s so difficult to live with,” replied Billy, fretfully. “So quarrelsome and discontented.”
“What is she discontented about?” Matthew asked, uneasily. “She’s got plenty of money.”
“Oh, it isn’t the money,” replied Billy, morosely. “She’s lucky, is Rosina. She has money of her own. Do you know,her little American property has gone up a good deal lately. Her income is nearer nine hundred than eight hundred dollars.”
“Indeed?” murmured his brother, dimly interested.
“Yes, old Coble wrote to her, telling her things were looking up, and he was right. No, it isn’t Rosina that’s got cause of complaint about money matters. She isn’t like me—she isn’t dependent on you for every farthing.” His words rang bitterly, resentfully.
“But surely you don’t mind taking money from me, Billy?” he said, with infinite gentleness.
“And why shouldn’t I mind taking money from a stranger?”
“A stranger!”
“Yes, you’re naught else. Do you think I don’t know of your goings-on, your gaddings about to parties and banquets? Because Rosina don’t read the papers, you mustn’t think I’m ignorant, too. I’ve got a heap of things about you in my study, all cut out and pasted in books. I don’t tell Rosina, because it would only make her discontented, but it riles me, I tell you straight, to be left here, leading this wretched, lonesome life. Why can’t I live with you?”
“You could live with me to-morrow if you liked, Billy. But don’t you see you’d be just as wretched and lonesome? All day I should be at work, and when I went out you couldn’t accompany me. I can’t foist my relatives on the people who invite me out. They only wantme—and that only as a curiosity,” he added, with a bitter perception of how extrinsic he really was to the charmed circles of Society; of how little affinity there was between him and the bulk of those who gushed over his Art.
“But if you would only help me to get my work published, they’d make a fuss over me, too. But you’ve never moved your little finger to help me.”
“I got Wilson and Butler to read some of your MSS. I couldn’t do any more. It isn’t my fault if they don’t think your work good enough.”
“Nonsense! I don’t believe they ever saw it. You only said they did to pacify me.”
“Oh, Billy!” cried Matthew, in shocked reproach.
“Well, even if they did,” said Billy, tetchily, “they’re notinfallible. They’re prejudiced. They think two brothers can’t both be clever. I’m sure my stories are as good as anything that appears in their magazines, and a damned sight better. But there are any amount of other editors that you come across, for I’ve seen your name printed with theirs in the lists of guests at public dinners. But you go your own way, and never spare a thought for me, eating my heart out here. I come in handy to keep your wife company and to prevent her feeling deserted, and you think that’s about all I’m good for.” His white face was worked up to a flush of anger. He had the common delusion of the unsuccessful, that the successful in any department can pull the ropes in every other. Nor could he understand that Matthew disliked approaching people, and people disliked being approached.
“Whatever you’re good for you’ll be,” said Matthew, soothingly. “If your work is really first-class—it will come to the front in the long-run.” He shrank from adding that he did not think it even second-class; it was no use making the boy more miserable.
“Yes, but I can’t run—I’m a cripple!” Billy burst forth, passionately. “Who knows whether I shall live to see the end of the long-run? Perhaps they’ll give me a stone when I’m dead—but what’s the good ofthatto me? You have everything that makes life worth living: you have love—you have a wife whenever you choose to come; you have money, and heaps of it, all earned by the sweat of your own brow; you have fame—your name is in all the papers; you have fashionable folk courting and caressing you. I dare say some fine-scented lady fixed that rose so beautifully in your button-hole; I can smell her white fingers. It’s all roses and sunshine for you. But you take jolly good care to keep ’em to yourself.”
The imbittered words carried no sting to the painter’s breast. But he was sick at heart as he replied, gently:
“You don’t really mean what you’re saying, Billy. You know I’ve offered to defray the cost of publication of ‘By Field and Flood’ if you’d only let me.”
“Yes, but that’s making me more of a drag on you. Besides, you told me it’s only the rotten houses that publish novelsat the author’s expense, and that the critics look askance on them. But if I could earn enough on my short stories to pay for a book, I’d chance that.” His voice took on a maundering, pitiful intonation. “I’m sure I’ve worked hard enough, toiling at my desk and denying myself every pleasure in life; you can’t say I don’t keep sober now. I never go beyond one glass of ale at meal-times.”
“Yes, you’re very good, Billy. You’ve been good for a long time.”
“Good!” echoed Billy, in the same testy, lachrymose accents. “What’s the good of being good? I wish I was dead. Why don’t you let me drink my fits back again?” His breast heaved, he seemed on the point of sobs. The painter sat in mute misery.
A blood-curdling shriek from the whistle destroyed the intolerable situation. Davie, having finished munching his cake, had his mouth free again for musical operations.
“Put your fingers over the holes, Davie,” said his father, “then it ’ll play nicer.”
“It’s no use,” put in Billy, moodily. “I tried to teach him.”
“Look, I’ll move my fingers, Davie, and you shall blow, and we’ll play a pretty tune together. No, don’t be alarmed. I’m not taking the whistle away, only putting my fingers on it. See, you shall hold the end fast in your mouth.”
The child blew spasmodically. His father mechanically played the first tune that came into his fingers. A gleam of excited interest leaped into the child’s eyes as he heard the notes varying mysteriously in a rough jingle. But the painter broke off suddenly. He realized that he was playing “Home, Sweet Home.” It was too ghastly.
“More, more!” panted Davie, imperatively.
Matthew Strang obediently started “Yankee Doodle,” and had to grant two encores before the juvenile tyrant was robbed of breath and desire.
“What’s your name, my little man?” he asked, thoughtlessly, to make conversation.
“Davie.”
“Davie what?”
“Davie Thrang.”
“Ah! and how old are you?”
“I’se nearly four,” replied Davie, adding in a burst of new confidence, “when I come to my fourf birfday, mummy says she’ll gi’ me a penny every week all to mythelf.”
“Really?” said the painter, with a sad smile. “A whole penny?”
Davie shook his head in vehement affirmation: “Yeth, and I am thinkin’ what I shall buy mummy wi’ my firth penny—appleth or a flower.”
A thrill shot down the painter’s spine. The poor, sickly infant appeared suddenly lovable to him; for the first time, too, he realized the child as an independent entity, with thoughts of its own at work in the queer little brain. Whatever the quality of this little brain, Davie’s heart was sound enough. And this heart was evidently entirely given to his mother. The momentary prick of irrational jealousy that the discovery caused the father was forgotten in softer feelings. His conception of the mother rose with his conception of the child. She was the other side of the relation, and there must be something beautiful in her to correspond with the beauty of her child’s sentiment. The oleograph of “Motherhood” caught his eye again; he saw how insincerely he had painted it, from a mere intellectual idea, unfelt, unrealized; but he saw also the secret of its popularity, each observer contributing the emotion the painter had not felt. His eye dwelt upon it more tolerantly.
“Kiss me, Davie,” he said, “and you shall have a penny now to buy mummy a flower.”
Davie readily put up his lips to clinch the bargain, and his father gave him the coin. The boy regarded it wistfully.
“What do you say?” Billy put in, more amiably.
“Fank you,” said Davie.
“Thank you, da—” prompted Billy.
“Daddy,” wound up Davie, triumphantly. “There ain’t no flower-womans now,” he added, dubiously. “They was a lot at Margit.”
“I’ll be a flower-woman, Davie,” said his father, cheerily. “Wouldn’t you like to have this beautiful flower—this rose in my button-hole—for your penny, to give to mummy?”
“Yeth—I wants it,” said Davie, clutching greedily for it.
“Gently, or all the lovely pink leaves will fall out. And you must give me your penny, you know.”
Davie, with a perplexed air, vaguely conscious of commercial transactions too complicated for his intellect, hesitatingly retendered the penny, and, receiving the rose, was set down on the carpet. He ran eagerly to the door, blowing one disconsolate, irrelevant blast on the whistle, and then the brothers heard him tumble down the oilcloth-covered stairs with three thuds, followed by shrill ululations. They ran to the head of the stairs, but Rosina had already rushed forth to pick up her child, and her soothing prattle, varied by scolding for his careless hurry, made a duet with his howls.
“Where did you get that flower from? You’ve crumpled it all to pieces.” She extracted it from the fingers that had closed upon it tenaciously when the fall commenced.
“From the gen’leman. Him what I calls daddy. It’s for you, mummy.”
“Tell him he can keep it!”
Davie’s howls recommenced.
Matthew Strang’s heart contracted. He went half-way down the stairs to where Rosina ministered to her bruised offspring.
“I didn’t send you the flower, Rosina,” he said, gently. “It’s a gift from the child.”
“Oh, is it? Then he’s better-hearted than his father, that’s all I can say. Thank you, my poor darling, thank you. Dry your little eyes, and mummy shall take you out to see all the pretty shops.”
“Won’t you come up-stairs and finish your tea, Rosina?” Matthew pleaded.
“I’m busy,” she said, tartly. “I’m giving Clara her tea. She’s just come home from school.”
“Let her bring her tea up-stairs; then she can talk to me.”
“I’ll tell her you’re here. I dare say she’ll remember you—she generally gets something out of you.”
He bit his lips to keep back angry speech, and remounted to the drawing-room. Clara came close upon his footsteps, and ran to offer her lips. She was a tall child of seven, with a low forehead,dark hair and eyebrows, a heavy jaw, and a high color—handsome after a rather Gallic fashion. The painter always trod gingerly with her, knowing she had her grandmother’s temper. Rosina, lacking the clew, was less delicate with the girl, whose sullen phases irritated her immeasurably. This afternoon Clara was conciliated by sixpence, and chatted amicably with her father about her lessons. Presently her mother came up too, with Davie in her train, and there was the outward spectacle of a happy family group united at tea. The painter was emboldened to strengthen an idea that was gradually forming in his mind by expressing it.
“Billy feels very lonely down in this part of the town,” he began, timidly.
“And what must I feel?” Rosina snapped.
“Then why can’t we all live together, Rosina?” he said, more boldly.
“Are you beginning that again?” she asked, sharply. “You won’t come and live here, will you?”
“You know it is impossible.”
“And you know it is impossible for me to move to your neighborhood. I’ve told you a thousand times you can’t afford one of those big houses—it would be ruinous; you’d have to keep a staff of servants to match, and things would be coming to the house at extravagant prices from aristocratic tradespeople, whereas here I go out and do my bit of marketing, and pick up a bargain here and a bargain there; I’ve found out a place in Holloway where I get the best meat a penny a pound cheaper than anywhere in Camden Town, and it only means a penny tram there and back. You don’t know how much I save you a year when you suspect me of making a stocking for myself out of my sea-side allowance. And even if you can afford such a house, rather give me the money and let me put it by for the children.”
He made a despairing gesture. “We could get a small house,” he said. “I could work harder for a year or two. Perhaps I could get a few more rooms added to my studio. There’s a piece of ground I use at the back for open-air studies.”
“And what would be the use of my living with you?” inquired Rosina, brutally. “You don’t want me any more. I dare say you could come home at night now if you wanted to.”
“Hush!” said her husband, flushing. “Clara, my dear, take Davie out and buy him some candy. This penny is really his.”
“Yes, father.” And the joyous children disappeared.
“Poor orphans!” said Rosina. “Perhaps it’s just as well there won’t be any more of them.”
Matthew Strang was startled, yet not quite surprised by the revelation of his wife’s mood. She had never before so openly resented or dissented from the situation that had gradually grown up—one of those strange, complex, undefined situations of which life is so full, and which are only able to exist by virtue of not being put into words.
He stirred the dregs of his tea with his spoon, painfully embarrassed.
“I shall talk to an architect I know,” he said at last, ignoring her allusion. “The cost mightn’t be much, and it needn’t be all paid off at once. Besides,” he added, with forced playfulness, “that extra hundred dollars a year of yours must be used up somehow.”
Rosina turned eyes of flame upon the unhappy Billy. “I knew it!” she said, cuttingly. “I knew you were here to spy upon me. So you have sneaked about that, have you?”
Matthew lost his temper at last.
“Don’t be a fool, Rosina!” he said, roughly. “Do you think I care a pin whether you spend a wretched hundred dollars more or less?”
“No; I dare say you would rather have a wife that would bring you to the workhouse. They had the bailiffs in at No. 36Aonly yesterday. There’s a wife there that would just suit you. The husband’s something in your way of business, an author or a poet, and she’s a tall, stuck-up creature who sits at the window in strange long gowns without stays, and reads books to him and never goes to church. My! You should see her out marketing—they swindle her at every turn; she doesn’t know a horse from a ham sandwich. I don’t wonder they’ve come to a bad end—you should see the dust on herVenetian blinds. I prophesied the crash last winter—ask Billy if I didn’t. They took in their coals by the hundred-weight. Don’t you fancy I don’t know that’s the sort of woman you’re hankering after. Ever since my Davie was born, and you got mixed up with those sort of creatures, you’ve been sorry you married me. Oh, it’s no use denying it. You want a fine lady that would scorn to soil her fingers with housework, and expect you to cover ’em with diamonds, a creature that would faint at the sight of a black-beetle. But you were glad enough to marry me once upon a time, when you hadn’t a dollar to your name. They say you’re a fine painter, and who made you a fine painter? Who took you abroad, and supported you while you were studying? They think you’re a fine gentleman, and who made you a fine gentleman? Oh yes, I know I’m not one of your fine ladies—but if I had been, where would you have been now? In the bankruptcy court—perhaps back again in the jail from which I dragged you.”
Matthew crimsoned furiously. Billy leaped in his chair.
“You fish-wife! How dare you say such things to my brother?” he cried, choking with rage. “Matt in jail, indeed!”
“Let her talk,” said Matthew, wearily. “I see it was a mistake to have come here at all.”
Rosina cast a glance of venomous triumph at her drooping husband. The jail was a chance shot. In long, lonely, agonizing watches the resentful suspicion had germinated and grown.
“It’s true,” she said, defiantly. “Let him deny it.”
“Why did you take a husband from jail?” retorted the painter, with a flash of fire.
“I didn’t know it; I was tricked and bamboozled, and I had a heart in my breast then, not a stone. If I had been a fine lady I might have been more particular to examine your pedigree.”
A sense of guilt damped the man’s fire. The jail episode was not the only thing he had concealed.
“If you’re sorry you married me we can separate,” he murmured.
“Separate—aren’t we separated enough? Do you mean you’d like a divorce? Oh no, not for this child. So that you maymarry one of your fine ladies. Perhaps make an honest woman of her?”