"So that's why you find Jemmie Alison so dull," her friend laughed.
"My dear, what has he got to do with Jemmie Alison?"
"A great deal, I should imagine, by your blushes."
"Did I never tell you about young Menard, when we were at thepension?"
Daisy shook her head.
"Of course, it happened before you came. When I was there during the war." She related briefly the tale of Pierre's determination to fight for his country. "And the other day we met again quite by accident."
"And no doubt will go on meeting quite by accident," said Daisy dryly.
"I must take Mac somewhere," Mary protested.
Two days later she met Pierre by the banks of the Serpentine on a May noon that held the city in a web of silver. The tall houses of Bayswater, reflected in that shimmering expanse of water, appeared like the battlements of an enchanted palace above the trees that masked their prosaic beginnings. The white peacocks haunting the slopes toward Hyde Park made one feel that life was a dream and that the children and nurses, the meditative loiterers, even the old maids with their pet dogs, would all presently be turned into birds to fly above this cloud-cuckoo-town of London.
No sooner were they seated on two of those green chairs, which in their emptiness speak as eloquently as musical instruments of latent emotions, than Pierre took Mary's hand and said: "Mademoiselle, I have given up Marechal et Cie. Presently I shall find something better to do. But so long as I was theiremployéI could not tell you that I loved you. At this moment I am poor, but I am free. Mary, I hope you will love me until I can win you in marriage?"
She let her hand remain in his. Citizen and citizeness of cloud-cuckoo-town, they floated far above ordinary life.
"I only know that I love you, Pierre," she whispered.
He bent over and touched her fingers with his lips. Then for a long time they sat in silence.
"You had better come and speak to my grandmother this afternoon."
He nodded pensively.
"She might raise some difficulties," Mary went on, trying to realize that there was another existence outside the serene and silver world in which the beating of her own heart sounded so loud. "Come about four," she said, rising. "I will explain how all this has happened."
He kissed once more her hand and stood watching her as she floated across the level grass toward home.
It was only when Mary heard the door of the house in King's Gate close behind her and the gong chime for lunch that she began to wonder if it was all going to be as easy as it had seemed by the banks of the pale blue Serpentine. However, Pierre was coming this afternoon, and Grandmamma must be warned. Lunch was surely unusually disturbed to-day. The maids were always in and out with new dishes. Perhaps it would be best to wait until they went up to the drawing-room for coffee. Would that mean Grandmamma's missing her nap? If it did, it could not be helped. At least she must be told that there was such a person.
"Did I ever tell you about a boy called PierreMenard?" Mary asked when she had poured out the coffee. It took a long time to describe that scene ten years ago when Pierre followed the drum to glory, so long that Grandmamma was nodding before Mary had finished. But when Mary added that curiously enough she had met him again the other day, met him once or twice in fact, and that he had asked her if he could call this afternoon, Grandmamma sat upright and looked more wide-awake than Mary had ever seen her yet.
"Is the young man going to call on you or me?"
"On you, Grandmamma."
"Oh," the old lady grimly commented. "Then I'd better go and take my rest at once."
Mary could not make up her mind whether she should stay in the drawing-room until Pierre came or whether it would be wiser to let him interview her grandmother first. In the end she decided upon the latter course, and in great agitation of spirit she went upstairs to her own room where she tried to distract her thoughts by trying on several new dresses with which Lady Flower had insisted on replenishing her wardrobe, so that she should not carry an end-of-the-season air about her, the old lady had said. But the new dresses were incapable of keeping her from running out on the landing every few minutes to hear if the front door was being opened. It became impossible to remain in her room, and she went back to the drawing-room sothat she might see Pierre first and warn him that her grandmother was likely to be difficult.
At last Pierre arrived, looking trim and slim in a frock-coat. Mary was glad that he had dressed ceremoniously, for she knew how much importance Grandmamma attached to ceremony.
"Oh, Pierre," she exclaimed. "I only wanted to see you for a moment just to advise you to talk in French to Lady Flower. She is half French herself, you know, and I'm sure it will all sound much better in your own language. It's not that you don't speak English perfectly, but you might make a slip in a foreign tongue. You might give quite a wrong impression."
Pierre agreed with her about the wisdom of this, and then he took her in his arms.
"Ma bien aimée," he whispered. "Will you give me courage with one kiss?"
She fluttered upon his arms more lightly than a bird, more lightly than a moth, more lightly than a crimson leaf that is blown whispering along a window-pane. Then hearing her grandmother's step she fled from the room through the domed conservatory past the staring eyes of the pelargoniums and the pug-faced, toothless calceolarias.
Twenty minutes later, Mary found Pierre gone and her grandmother readingThe Timesas if she were trying to assure herself that normal life would continue in spite of a presumptuous young Frenchman, who without prospects asked for the hand of an heiress.
"Although, considering what he is," said Lady Flower, "the young man behaved very well. I was able to show him at once how ridiculous it was that he should aspire to marry you."
"But I love him," Mary interposed.
"I have no doubt that at this moment you do love him. It is my business, dear child, to protect you against impulse."
Lady Flower was once more sitting in her boudoir at Barton Hall with her son before her. She had made the mistake then of sneering at Mary's mother, and although in this case it was unlikely that Mary would take matters into her own hand, it would be imprudent to run the risk of her doing so. With experience of a similar situation she ought to be able this time to have her own way. The old lady looked at Mary with an unwonted warmth of affection: Mary was Edward's daughter. The fact seemed to strike her for the first time. Edward's daughter ... Edward who was drowned twenty years ago. Poor Edward, so like his mother! And there was Mary holding her hands just as he had held them on that June afternoon, the day before he married and tore himself forever from the bosom of family life, as perhaps she herself might have held her hands fifty years ago if she had had to oppose the wishes of that stern old general who fought at Waterloo or of that daintymother who bred in exile had yet kept about her the remote grace and grandeur of theancien régime.
"It is not that he is of humble birth," she began to explain. "A Frenchman can surmount that disadvantage more easily than an Englishman, at any rate in England. But he has no money, and so far as I can gather no immediate prospects of ever having any money. Even if I were disposed to give you such a dowry as would enable you to indulge yourself in the luxury of marriage with a poor man, I should not permit myself to do so. For I should be wrong. Few men have the moral strength to live decently upon their wives. I know you will think that this is only the opinion of a cynical old woman, and I should be sorry if at your age you thought differently. But at my age one is no longer shocked by the nakedness of truth; at my age we begin to return to the shamelessness of childhood. How your dear grandfather would have disliked that last remark of mine. He had such a profound belief in old age. Any religious feelings he had, all centered round his respect for the age of God. Your poor grandfather ... dear me, I am going back into the past instead of grappling with the present."
Mary had been listening to her grandmother in astonishment. She had expected a fierce and bitter opposition, which she had promised herself to defy; but it seemed that the old lady was going to argue with her, and that would be disconcerting. Grandmother's arguments were always so difficult to answer.
"I think perhaps I won't talk about this business any more to-day," Grandmamma was saying. "I have to make up my mind whether or not I will tell you something. Meanwhile, may I ask you not to see the young man until I have decided what to do?"
Mary promised this, and wrote to Pierre giving him a tryst by the Serpentine three days hence. Adèle was sent to beg Daisy Harland to come at once to talk over some important news Mary had to tell her. Mary would have gone herself, but she could see that her grandmother would not be able to avoid being suspicious of her meeting Pierre, and she did not want to do anything that would prejudice the old lady still more against him.
Daisy was much more discouraging than Grandmamma; she thought it was madness to think of marrying a French clerk who was the son of a common gardener, and who had at the moment neither money nor employment.
"My dearest Mary, it's the most absurd idea I ever heard! Why, you would have to live in squalor unless you lived with Lady Flower, which of course would be impossible. You're too old for this kind of foolishness now. I saw no reason for your getting married in such a hurry. But I begin to understand now why your grandmother is so anxious to tie you up. She evidently knows you better than I do. Of course, he's a good-looking and—if thatattracts you—a romantic young man. But there are dozens of them in England. As for being in love, you know as well as I do that love runs its course like measles or scarlet fever. You can recover from love, but you can't recover from marriage, which in this case would be like a serious accident. You'd be lame for the rest of your life."
Lady Flower remarked how much surprised she had been to find that Mary's friend had grown so sensible.
"It must be hunting, I suppose."
"You only find her sensible because she dislikes the idea of my marrying Pierre."
"She sees the position from the standpoint of an outsider. Listen, Mary, I have never said anything about your father to you. I don't even know how much you have guessed."
Mary blushed hotly. The moment that she had dreaded for years was upon her. That dreadful secret, the consciousness of which had always clouded her intimate thoughts, was about to be revealed. She must steel herself to hear the proclamation of her illegitimacy. The definition in the dictionary flamed across her memory ...not authorized by law...improper...not born in lawful wedlock...bastard.Bâtard!How often had she shivered over that in the French dictionary. How sedulously had she tried to ascertain what it really meant, in the way that no dictionary dares to reveal. And then those sickeninghints from horrid girls ... the girls who came from South America were always the horridest....
No wonder Grandmamma looked serious and uncomfortable. If only a small portion of what was hinted were true, she must scarcely know how she was to look her granddaughter in the face and tell her not merely about herself, but about life and those mysterious beginnings of life that seemed to involve men and women in such horrors.
"I have guessed a good deal," Mary admitted bravely.
"Naturally, you must have done so. And I dare say those people with whom you lived. What was their name? Fox? Fawkes?"
"The Fawcuses," said Mary. From the past the vision of Mrs. Fawcus came back to her like the page of a fairy tale. In all stories about illegitimate children, there was a woman like Mrs. Fawcus who looked after them, kept them hidden, and guarded their secret. Why had she not made another effort to readJane Eyresince it was taken away from her by Mademoiselle Lucinge only the week before she left school? In that book she might have pierced the dreadful mystery.
"You may have guessed," Grandmamma was saying, "that your father married beneath him, married a very beautiful girl, the daughter of one of our own tenant farmers."
"Then I'm not illegitimate!" Mary could not help exclaiming.
"Good gracious me!" said Lady Flower crossly. "What minds modern young women have. Is no kind of decent veil to be left over the unpleasant side of life? Why, at your age I did not know the meaning of illegitimate."
Mary would have liked to retort that she only knew the endless circle of a dictionary's definitions, that she did not really know its meaning. However, let her mother have been never so humble, she was married to her father.
"But you cannot have guessed all the misery that your father's marriage brought in its train. It killed him: it killed your mother: it killed your mother's father: it might have killed you. Your father was dependent upon his father. He defied him, and what was the result?"
Lady Flower left out nothing in the tale of the romantic marriage that could bring home to her granddaughter what it meant to run in the face of class tradition.
"The situation is almost the same now as when I entreated your father twenty years ago to think what he was doing. But in this case it is worse, because in this case it is the man who is of lower station. Mary, I implore you to give up this good-looking but hopelessly ineligible young Frenchman."
Lady Flower burst into tears, and Mary, who would have been less amazed to behold tears run down the cheeks of a marble statue, promised to give up Pierre.
This was the letter she wrote:
23 King's Gate, W.,May 22, 1880.I am afraid that I am not the wonderful being you have so often told me that I was. I cannot meet you to-morrow on the banks of the Serpentine, however fine the day is. I do not regret for an instant that I let myself fall in love with you. No, not for an instant, Pierre. I don't know why I say "let myself fall in love," because I could not help it. It was nothing to do with me. But I have promised my grandmother never to see you again and to give you up. I couldn't explain why, even if I were to see you. It has nothing to do with you, but only with me. If I married you I should have to elope, and though I should be happy when I was with you, I should be feeling all the while that my grandmother's old age was being made unhappy. You must not blame her. She is convinced that we are not meant for each other. My father and mother were drowned many years ago, because they eloped; she has lost her husband and her eldest son also: she is entirely alone in the world, and she was kind to me when I was a little girl. Forget me, Pierre, and try to forgive me. Do not think that I do not love you. Don't think that, Pierre. I believe that I have loved you ever since I first saw you at Châteaublanc. Why do I go on writing? I don't know; but somehow I can't bear to finish this letter whichis the last I shall ever write to you. Don't think of me too unkindly. If you ever do think of me, think of me that morning by the Serpentine when you first kissed my hand. Pierre, I can feel that kiss still. I shall feel it till I'm an old woman. I've nothing more to say, and yet I can't stop....
23 King's Gate, W.,May 22, 1880.
I am afraid that I am not the wonderful being you have so often told me that I was. I cannot meet you to-morrow on the banks of the Serpentine, however fine the day is. I do not regret for an instant that I let myself fall in love with you. No, not for an instant, Pierre. I don't know why I say "let myself fall in love," because I could not help it. It was nothing to do with me. But I have promised my grandmother never to see you again and to give you up. I couldn't explain why, even if I were to see you. It has nothing to do with you, but only with me. If I married you I should have to elope, and though I should be happy when I was with you, I should be feeling all the while that my grandmother's old age was being made unhappy. You must not blame her. She is convinced that we are not meant for each other. My father and mother were drowned many years ago, because they eloped; she has lost her husband and her eldest son also: she is entirely alone in the world, and she was kind to me when I was a little girl. Forget me, Pierre, and try to forgive me. Do not think that I do not love you. Don't think that, Pierre. I believe that I have loved you ever since I first saw you at Châteaublanc. Why do I go on writing? I don't know; but somehow I can't bear to finish this letter whichis the last I shall ever write to you. Don't think of me too unkindly. If you ever do think of me, think of me that morning by the Serpentine when you first kissed my hand. Pierre, I can feel that kiss still. I shall feel it till I'm an old woman. I've nothing more to say, and yet I can't stop....
Mary put down her pen for a minute, and stared in front of her. Tick-tick! Tick-tick! Tick-tick! Tick-tick! The ormulu clock swung Pierre out of her life. She leaned over quickly and wrote:
Good-by, good-by,Mary.
Good-by, good-by,Mary.
Adèle came into the room.
"Mr. Alison is downstairs in the drawing-room withMiladi, Mademoiselle."
"I'll come down at once, Adèle. Please take this letter to the post."
Mac rose from his place on the hearthrug and waddled after his mistress.
Chapter Four
THE WIFE
Chapter Four: The Wife
On a wet November afternoon a brougham drawn by a pair of gray horses and coming from the direction of Kensington drove along the Knightsbridge road and pulled up outside Lady Flower's house in King's Gate. From it alighted a young woman who by some indefinable effect of maturity, some sedate expression of achievement, revealed that she was married. The age at which women decide to be matrons varies like feminine fashions, and in the year 1890 English women still clung, if less tightly every year, to the fashion of a middle age as long as Queen Victoria's reign.
Mary Alison at thirty should have been in the zenith of her beauty. That auburn hair had deepened in ten years like a gathered chestnut, but like a chestnut it had preserved the gloss of youth. Experience had given her blue eyes those profundities of color which inaccurate and ambitious observers have miscalled violet. Her complexion held the exquisite translucent hues of a September rose. And yet so much of her young grace was destroyed by the dress, which made any woman of the period appear like Noah's wife in a toy Ark, that she seemed less lovely now than ten years ago when she had stood by the drawing-room window of thishouse, up the steps of which she was now walking with such slow and stately ease of movement. With her long forefinger pressing the bell, she turned and said to the coachman:
"Burton, you had better leave Mac at home when you come back for me at six."
At the sound of his mistress' voice, the grizzled head of the Dandie Dinmont gazed anxiously through the closed windows of the brougham. She raised a warning finger to bid him be good, and a moment later was lost to sight in the darkling hall.
"How is her ladyship, Adèle?"
"Miladigrows very weak, madame," the maid replied, leading the way upstairs. Across Mary's mind floated the picture of herself as a little girl in Paris following Adèle upstairs to bed. Even so had she led the way in those days and from time to time had turned round with flashing, frightening eyes to see if her charge was close behind her. How shadowy those days in Paris now, shadowy like this flight of London stairs, on which Adèle alone stood out clear, with her sallow face and eyebrows like the hair of a Japanese doll. Shadows.... Shadows....
"Mrs. Alison is here,Miladi."
Adèle stood aside to let Mary enter the room, where under a canopy of purple velvet, looking hardly more substantial than a lace handkerchief left upon the pillow, Lady Flower sat huddled in her last bed. One hand fluttered down upon the quiltlike a faded white petal to greet her granddaughter, who took it gently in her own that was still fresh and taper as a rosebud.
"I shall die very soon now, Mary," whispered the old lady. "At any moment. At any moment. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps this afternoon. Did you tell Burton to wait?"
"No. I sent him back to Campden Hill. I wanted to stay with you till you went to sleep."
"To sleep," her grandmother echoed. "I feel disinclined to sleep. I have such a long sleep before me."
Mary could not bring herself to make the conventionally optimistic reply. It did not seem worth while to pretend with phrases in the presence of this old woman already seemingly discarnate for that obscure event of death.
"A long sleep," the old lady went on in her tenuous voice. "A very long sleep. And yet I wonder. Ah, well, it was all said by Shakespeare, was it not? Though frankly I never cared greatly for Shakespeare. It is all too excitable. And yet I wonder."
"What are you wondering, Grandmamma?"
"If this really is the end. There might be something else, you know. Give me my vinaigrette."
The old lady sniffed it as if she would ward off the odors of eternity, just as twenty years ago she had used it against the odors of a much shorter journey to Lyons. She had been only too anxious to sleep then. But now.... How bright her eyeswere, like precious stones, like pools of water holding out against the encroaching frost of death.
"I do not really want to die," she said. "It seems such a little while since I began to feel younger again. Of late lying here I have remembered so much that I had forgotten. Odd little incidents of childhood have come back to me so sharply, so very vividly and clearly. Earlier this afternoon, before you came, I saw my father in that corner in his Hessian boots and cocked hat; and he said to me, 'Where's your Mamma?' It was so vivid that I made a movement to get out of bed and run to look for her. And then he asked me to fill his snuff-box with maccaboy. I have often wondered why a man so particular about his personal appearance should be a slave to snuff. But he was. Do you know what maccaboy is?"
Mary shook her head.
"It is a snuff scented with attar of roses, of which he was passionately fond. He acquired the habit when he was fighting in the West Indies. Long ago. Long ago. And of course this vision of him was nothing but an hallucination caused by weakness. Nothing but that. There cannot be anything before us when we lie like this. And yet I wonder. I cannot feel perfectly sure."
Mary did not know what to say. Here was really an opportunity for a clergyman to be useful; but she was afraid of suggesting such a visitor. Yet her grandmother might be hoping that somebody wouldsuggest a clergyman; for, although she would be too proud to ask for one herself, she might want one to be pressed upon her just as she had wanted the doctor pressed upon her.
Mary decided to risk the proposal.
"A clergyman?" echoed the old lady, clutching at her vinaigrette. "A clergyman?" she repeated. "Thank you, my dear, but I should find a clergyman in my bedroom as uncomfortable as I should find a large black retriever dog, and about as useful. I'm afraid that my wandering conversation has given you the impression that my mind is wandering. I thought I had made it perfectly plain that I considered the vision of my father an hallucination."
Mary begged her grandmother's pardon, and after a short silence the old lady inquired graciously after the children.
"What a pity," she said, "that Richard will not become Sir Richard when I die. I am sorry now that I allowed Barton to be sold. I think, had I known how much of a Flower I was going to have for a great-grandson, I should not have done so. However, regrets are useless. You are happy, are you not?"
"Why, yes, Grandmamma. What makes you ask that?"
The old lady's voice was sounding more remote every minute that she went on talking, and the furtive November dusk which had long been hiding in corners of the room now crept boldly forth andclimbed the velvet curtains of the canopy above the bed. Mary wanted to light the gas, but her grandmother waved her hand to signify that she preferred the gloom.
"I have wondered sometimes lately if you ever think of that young Frenchman whom I dissuaded you from marrying."
"Why, no, Grandmamma," said Mary. "Or if I do, only as one might think of anybody in the past."
"You are happy, really happy? Your marriage has brought you happiness?"
"Yes, yes, indeed, Grandmamma. Could anybody be unhappy with Richard and Geoffrey and Muriel?"
"You are happy because of the children?" Lady Flower persisted. "Your husband does not count?"
"But you know how fond I am of Jemmie."
"Fond, fond," the old lady murmured. "Looking back, I wonder if that means anything. Mary, you must be prepared for your children to bring you unhappiness. I do not say that they will. I hope that they will not. But you must be ready for that trial." She suddenly sat forward in the bed. "Hark! Do you hear a sound?"
"No, I hear nothing, Grandmamma."
"I hear a sound like the sea. Plainly! Yes, yes, quite plainly, the noise of the sea. Edward, forgive me if I was wrong," she cried. "I have tried to watch over your little girl. Pray do not light the gas, Mary. Give me your hand instead. Put me back among my pillows. And do not light the gas.I cannot bear the idea of your seeing me die. And this is death. I know...."
Mary laid her grandmother gently back on the pillows, felt a swift trembling through the frail body, and speaking to her received no answer.
It was the first time in her life that Mary had come into the presence of death, and she sat for some time near that silence on the bed, wondering at her own calm. Were people always as calm as this when they beheld death? But even as she was congratulating herself she was seized with a panic and ran madly from the room out on the landing, the rosy gaslight of which in response to her cries was soon populated by maids in their black dresses and white caps.
Mary supposed that the correct thing would be to send a message for her husband to come immediately to King's Gate and take charge of the house, the servants, and herself. In fact, when Adèle with tear-swollen eyes came to tell her that the carriage was at the door, she asked if Madame would not like the coachman to drive back to Madame's house and fetch Monsieur. By Adèle's manner Mary realized that since her grandmother's death she was being accorded a respect almost as great as that which had formerly been accorded to the dead woman.
But what could Jemmie do? He would be extremely bored by being dragged out before dinner. He would not know what he ought to do, and irritated by not knowing he would certainly do the wrong thing. Moreover, she did not feel that she wanted Jemmie. She was anxious to be quiet and avoid any discussion of her inheritance, any speculation upon its exact amount, any plans of Jemmie to build this house or buy that property. In fact, she should like to stay at King's Gate to-night by herself and sleep in her old room upstairs. She desired to make amends to her grandmother's memory for that unwonted display of terror in which she had indulged herself. She sent a note by Burton to say that she should not be back at Woodworth Lodge until the next morning.
Mr. Alison was displeased by his wife's message. If it would not have involved him in what might have been the unpleasantness of a houseful of hysterical servants, he would have driven back to King's Gate to protest against her action. It would have been sufficiently annoying to receive word that she might be late for dinner, or even that she might not be back at all for dinner; but to stay the night for no purpose except to gratify a whim of piety, that did strike Mr. Alison as unreasonable. He hoped that Mary was not going to turn religious, to start getting up early in the morning for Communion and all that kind of thing. One never knew what a woman might do after thirty. Or take up with spiritualism. He would soon put a stop to that.Table-turning and tambourine playing ... long-haired mediums and goggle-eyed women with skinny necks and Oriental beads ... she had the children, and they ought to be enough.
"Did Burton say why your mistress had to stay?" he asked the parlormaid.
"No, sir; he said no more than give me Meddem's note."
Mr. Alison strode across the room in irritation, and nearly tripped over Mac, who squealed in alarm.
"Confound the dog! Take him downstairs, Pinkney," he called to the retreating maid. "He's getting much too old to be allowed all over the house. And what is the matter with the gas to-night?"
"It do seem to burn a bit dim, sir. I think Mac has gone and hid under your chair, sir."
"Come out of that, you brute," Mr. Alison shouted angrily.
There was a low growl in response.
"Did you hear him, Pinkney?"
The maid was stricken by awe.
"He deliberately growled at me."
Mr. Alison rocked the chair violently in order to frighten Mac into the open; when at last he had succeeded in driving him out of the room and was alone, he made up his mind to tell Mary on her return that her dog must be put away. It was not safe to have a dog like that about with children in the house. In any case it was too old. It was over a year old when he gave it to Mary nearly eleven years ago. Dogs ought not to be allowed to grow old. Mr. Alisonsmoothed his ruffled brow and patted his bald head.
"That new hair-restorer is as much of a fraud as the rest of them," he thought. "One of these days somebody will prosecute a hair-restorer for obtaining money under false pretences. Personally I don't believe that, when a man has lost his hair so completely as I have, anything in the world will bring it back. That's where I take exception to their advertisements. They're dishonest."
Pondering the inclination of humanity to grow more dishonest daily, Mr. Alison looked at his watch and saw that there was still half an hour to dinner-time.
"She might easily have come back," he complained to himself.
He had looked forward to telling her about that extremely satisfactory bit of business with Moss, Doddington & Co. What was the use of slaving all day in the City to keep a wife and family and carriage and a large house? Women were apparently incapable of grasping what a serious strain it put on a man to work for hours under a load of domestic responsibility. If Mary really appreciated what he was doing for her, she would have let nothing interfere with her being at home to-night. He was very sorry of course about her grandmother's death. But after all the old lady was getting on for eighty-one. At such an age her death was to be expected at any moment. By the way, he must go to his tailor to-morrow on the way down to Throgmorton Street. Nothing looked worse than resuscitated mourning.
"I wonder how much money the old lady will leave after all. A decent amount, I fancy. Odd that she never asked me to look after her affairs. She knew I was a good man of business. Business! It was a pity that Mary did not have to go to the City and work for a while. She would know herself then how dreary it was to come home and find the house deserted.
"Ah, nurse, are the children ready for their romp?" he asked as the door opened.
"Miss Muriel and Master Geoffrey said you promised to play tigers with them to-night, sir. I'm sure I don't know where they get hold of their wild ideas. And Master Richard went on at me till I said I would ask you if he might come down to dessert and have an extra quarter of an hour when he's done his homework."
"Not to-night, nurse. Not to-night. I'm dining out. In fact, I must go and dress at once. Tell the children I'll play with them to-morrow, and tell cook, will you, please, that there will be no dinner to-night. Mrs. Alison is staying at King's Gate. Her ladyship is dead."
"Oh dear, sir, I am sorry to hear that. My mistress will be very upset. Though I suppose with such an old lady and all it was to be expected."
"Yes, yes, quite so," said Mr. Alison. "By the way, I shouldn't tell the children to-night."
"No, sir, it might make them a bit creepy as they say."
"But I don't think I ought to play with them. I'm sure Mrs. Alison would rather they went to bed very quietly to-night. You'd better say that we've both had to go out to dinner. Oh, and, nurse, it would be as well not to let Mac go into the nursery or schoolroom. He seems to be turning savage. Poor old dog, he was my first present to your mistress before we were married."
"So I've heard my mistress say, sir. Poor old dog! Dear me, it's always one thing on top of another, as they say. And I'm sure I've passed the remark a score of times that it never rains but what it pours."
"Good night, nurse."
"Good night, sir. I'll see that the children keep very quiet. I was going to give Miss Muriel and Master Geoffrey both a dose of medicine to-morrow night, and they may jee-ust as well have it to-night."
Mr. Alison dressed in a state of astonishment at himself. "I can't think what made me so suddenly decide to dine out," he exclaimed aloud. "Talking to myself now," he continued. "I'm thoroughly upset. That's what I am. It's a good thing Iamgoing out."
A few minutes later he was walking briskly down Campden Hill, conscious of the perfume of autumnal trees, vaguely excited by the sound of the distanttraffic in Kensington High Street that with every step became more distinct. It was a mistake to coop oneself up too much. He was falling into the habit of thinking that the day was over when he sat back in the railway carriage and opened theSt. James's Gazette. He ought to be careful. What was that he was reading the other day about keeping young by refusing to be old? How true! It was the fault of marriage. Yes, marriage was responsible. Bachelors did not grow old. Responsibility, that was what did it. How free, for instance, he felt to-night just because Mary had sent word that she was not coming home. The message had annoyed him just at first; but now he was on the whole rather glad. The street lamps were twinkling; there must be a touch of frost in the air. So much the better. Far more healthy than the muggy weather they had been having. By Jove, the crispness made one feel ten years younger. Where should he go to-night? Dinner at the Savoy? Rather late perhaps for that. Why not a few oysters with half a pint of champagne, and then a theater followed by supper? A theater? Perhaps it was hardly the thing to go to a theater to-night. No, he would dine at the Savoy.
"Hansom! Savoy!"
"Right you are, sir."
"And you can drive fairly fast. I'm in a hurry."
It was a comfortable hansom behind a good horse; and Jemmie Alison, once again the authentic Jemmie, leaning forward over the apron gazed outat the glittering life he had too long forsaken.
Mary lay awake most of the night in the strangeness of her old room. She tried to concentrate her mind piously upon her dead grandmother, but all her thoughts came back to herself. She now asked herself the question to which, when her grandmother asked it, she had returned so confident an affirmative. Would she not, if she were really happy with Jemmie, resent being away from him even for a single night? And was she not actually taking pleasure in being away from him? There was about the air of this old room of hers something delightfully fresh and invigorating. She felt much more herself. All these years of marriage she had been letting her personality be slowly submerged in her husband, in the cares of a household, and in her children. She must not forgetthem, the darlings! Should she have loved them more if their father had been somebody else? If Pierre had been their father, for instance? But then they would not be Richard, Geoffrey, and Muriel. And how could she love any other children better than those three tousle-heads? Besides, what nonsense it was to be speculating like this. She had not thought of Pierre for years, except casually to wonder sometimes where he was and if he ever thought of her. She could not deceive herself into imagining that she was still in love with Pierre, still less that she was pining for him. All the same, she wished that she had understood a little more aboutlife before she married Jemmie. Daisy Harland, who had been so full of good worldly advice, had not made much of a success with her own marriage. Daisy, who had been so confident that love was a passing malady, had thrown over everything for love, had let herself be dragged through the divorce court for a man who when it was all over had married another woman. Poor Daisy, was she happier now, somewhere on the Continent, always wondering if her friends would put up their parasols when they passed her on some sunny promenade?
And if she had not married Jemmie, she would never have had her beloved Richard. She thought of his coming back from one of his first days at school and of his news of being placed in an unusually high class for French and of his having to write out the verbporter.
"All the verb, darling?" she had asked.
"Well, that's what I couldn't ergzactly make out, Mum. Mr. Osbourne just said write outporter:to carry, and I think he only meant one of those lines of verbs like you see in the grammar book."
"It wouldn't do to make a mistake, dearest," she had said anxiously.
"No, it wouldn't, would it, Mummie? Perhaps I'd better write out everything, though it's pages and pages!"
And she had sat with him while he laboriously wrote the French and English of every tense and of every person in that tense.That I might have beencarrying. That thou mightest have been carrying.... What a sleepy little boy she had tucked up that night! And next day he had come back to lunch with a woeful face to say that it was only the single line of principal tenses which had been set and that he had not liked to expose himself to the ridicule of his classmates by showing up his toilsome pages.
"But how did you explain you had nothing to show your master?"
"I said I'd left it at home, Mum, and he told me to bring it this afternoon. It won't take me hardly a minute to do."
No, no, it was unimaginable that she should not be the mother of Richard: and, pleasant though it was to be sleeping alone in her old room, Richard belonged to Jemmie as much as to herself.
Should she when at last she lay dying, for though the attempt to realize the inevitableness of death caught the breath and eluded the mind's grasp, the ultimate death of herself was a fact that must be believed, should she in that solemn hour ask a granddaughter—Richard's or dear fat Geoffrey's child—such questions as her own grandmother had asked her? Should she when an old woman look back at her life with doubt and forward to the grave with apprehension? And where now was the spirit of that cold body downstairs?
Pleasant to be lying like this by oneself. Pleasant ... very pleasant ... the sheets cool and pleasant... a delicious privacy. Yes, it was wrong not to tell girls more about the actualities of existence. Would she tell Muriel one day? That dear dumpling! But, almost before she knew it, Muriel would be thinking about marriage. In another ten years, only as long as she had been married, Muriel would be fifteen. Ten years went by quickly enough, especially when three of them were spent in having babies. And she might have another baby. Jemmie did not seem to mind. "The more the merrier," he would say, as he had so often said before. How insensitive men were. And gross. Men? What did she know about men? Jemmie looked so much like other men that he was probably representative of the sex. Pierre had been different. But would he have been different if she had married him? When she kissed him that afternoon, when she gave him that one swift kiss, she had not known to what such a kiss might not be the prelude. Would not the knowledge have destroyed all its fairy quality? Was it possible to experience romance unless one was innocent? Oh, that sweet illusion of first love! Even Grandmamma once upon a time must have known that. While she was lying there in that dusky room, did she feel faintly upon her withered lips some blushful kiss of sixty years ago? Did she, ah, did she, and was it for that she doubted her wisdom in persuading her granddaughter to marry Jemmie Alison? Anyway, the marriage was accomplished. There was no use now to repent. Yet people who had enjoyed grand passions did exist.
"Love, my dear, was invented by the poets to excuse their own weaknesses."
Something like that Grandmamma had once observed. Were she alive now and should she make the same remark now, Mary would reply that marriage without love was invented by ... but she was unable to think of a suitable mordant retort before she fell asleep in her own room.
It seemed as if the death of Lady Flower had acted upon husband and wife like an Horatian maxim that would remind humanity of time's swift flight. In the case of Alison the money they inherited made him feel more keenly how much of his life was being wasted in the pursuit of wealth. There was now no need for him to devote so much of his attention to business, and by taking a partner younger than himself he was able to spend less time in the office. Having once dined out away from home, he began to make a habit of dining out; and Mary in her turn began to wonder what she should do with her life. Occasional dinner-parties and occasional visits to the opera or the theater did not seem enough to fill existence at thirty. There were the children of course, as Jemmie was always reminding her when she seemed inclined to ask unanswerable questions about the end and meaning of human existence. But children, when there were nurses and nurse-maids and governesses and schoolmasters all easily obtainable, did not occupy awoman's life fully. Besides, well-brought-up children went to bed early, and was there nothing better to do with life than sit at home reading novels that were only the least bit less dull than life itself? Jemmie often looked at his reflection in the glass and exclaimed upon the approach of age. But Jemmie was forty-five with a man's life behind him, even if he had been cooped up, as sometimes now in moments of irritation he implied that he had been cooped up by marriage. If Jemmie was concerned about the vanishing years, it was because he looked back with regret to the joys and freedom of his youth. But she, on what could she look back? One kiss briefer than a shooting-star, swifter than a swallow's flight, yet in remembrance, ah, how sweet!
So passed the winter of that year; and, when in February the white and purple crocuses pied the lawns of Woodworth Lodge, husband and wife both resolved that the year should pay them with what it brought forth.
"One must do something," Mary agreed with Mrs. Wryford, who considered herself Mary's most intimate friend, because she always stayed longer than any of the other visitors that haunted Mary's Friday afternoons.
"Of course! It's our duty. Now why don't you have a club like me? My dear, until I started my club for waitresses I was at a loose end. And it's so interesting. Why, I've been brought into close contact with people I should never have seen otherwise except across a crumby table. I assure you, it's been quite a revelation to me. You'd be surprised to find how different my girls are, one from another. Oh yes, indeed, quite distinguishable, I assure you; and I think I can really claim to know each one individually. And many of them have learned to confide in me quite a lot."
"Now that must be fascinating," said Mary.
"Yet it's hardly surprising when you think of their homes. Of course I never go to their homes. Oh no, I make a point of never doing that. I say to myself, 'Two nights a week, Ella, you are pledged to your girls.' And I can assure you, Mary, that I never fail to be with them unless I have a dinner-party or some social engagement. Do, my dear, take my advice and start a club. You speak French well, don't you? Why not found a club for French seamstresses in Soho? And now I simply must run. Good-by, you dear attractive creature," Mrs. Wryford exclaimed, kissing Mary warmly on each cheek. In the door she stopped a moment. "I always say and I always shall say that I enjoy the few minutes we have together every Friday more than anything in the week. Good-by, you dear thing. It's still quite light. I always think it's a sign of spring when the days really begin to draw out. Good-by! Good-by!"
How Grandmamma used to dislike women of the type of Mrs. Wryford, Mary thought.
"And I expect in another thirty years I shall dislike them just as much as she did."
At dinner that night Mary broached the subject of a club for girls to her husband.
"French seamstresses!" he exclaimed. "What on earth next will you be wanting to do? Aren't the children enough of a responsibility?"
"They're no responsibility at all," Mary argued. "You won't allow them to be. Don't you remember what a fuss you made when you discovered I was taking out Geoffrey and Muriel every afternoon?"
"I didn't make a fuss. I never do make a fuss. I don't suppose that a less fussy man than myself exists. I merely observed that for you to wear yourself out looking after children while a mob of nurses and nurse-maids were eating off their heads doing nothing at home was ridiculous. Surely there's a happy medium between dragging a perambulator round Kensington Gardens and founding clubs for French seamstresses?"
Mary sat silent for a while pondering her tactics, while Jemmie, with what she felt was unnecessary gusto, ate a large slice of turbot.
"I don't think there's any need to sulk ..." he began: but at the moment one of the parlormaids came within range of the conversation, and, as Mary thought cynically, her husband had not yet reached such a pitch of married boredom as would let him be rude to her in front of the servants.
When they were left alone with the dessert, Mary returned to the attack.
"You see, lately, Jemmie, you've left me so much alone in the evening that I suppose it's natural for me to sit here and make plans for myself."
The husband glanced up sharply: never until now had his wife thrown out a hint that she had noticed his increasingly frequent withdrawals from the fire-side. Could she be jealous? Had any rumor of that phaeton he bought last week reached Mary? Gossip sprung up no one knew how. It might be that one of her friends, one of those confounded women that seemed to spend their lives visiting other women, had warned her to keep an eye on her husband. It would be awkward if Mary seriously intended to press him on the subject of dining out, and, more than dining out, of staying away from home for a couple of nights often enough. Mary herself would never suspect him of infidelity. Infidelity? Bosh! There was nothing serious to it. Maudie did not expect him to face a scandal on her account. He should be middle-aged almost immediately. This was his last love-affair; and dash it, the little girl was fond of him. Who could say why? Women were strange creatures. But it certainly was not for his money. Poor little Maudie! The walnut he was cracking suddenly burst in fragments upon his plate. He looked up guiltily.
"What were you saying, dear? I beg your pardon for not answering. I couldn't crack this nut."
"I said that it was natural for me to make plans for myself," Mary answered. She perceived that Jemmie was embarrassed and went on more boldly. "I don't in the least expect you to stay at home because I am in the house. But surely you can have no objection to my occupying myself somehow, and this club would be the very thing."
"I daresay you're right," said the husband. After all, it was politic to give his wife some latitude. "Yes, I daresay you're right. I was a little taken aback for the moment, and I didn't want you to overtire yourself slaving for people who have no gratitude. You know, the more you do for people, the less they give you in return. Did I tell you about Jackson, our head clerk? We raised his salary last month, and yesterday he calmly tells me that he has accepted another place at a larger salary. What do you think of that? That's gratitude! In my opinion the world's going downhill. Now my father's head clerk stayed with him till he died and never had a rise of salary all the time. Didn't want it. Content. But you don't get that type of man nowadays."
Husband and wife rose from their dessert. Husband and wife sat down in the drawing-room. Wife sang "Three Roses" with an obligato of kettle-drums from husband's manipulation ofThe Times.
Just when the red June Roses blowShe gave me one,—a year ago,A Rose whose crimson breath revealedThe secret that its heart concealed,And whose half-shy, half-tender graceBlushed back upon the giver's face.To hope was not to know.
Tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle!
"Poor little Maudie," thought an infatuated man of forty-five. "Poor little girl, she'll miss me to-night."
Just when the Red June Roses blowI plucked her one a month ago.Its half-blown crimson to eclipse,I laid it on her smiling lips:The balmy fragrance of the southDrew sweetness from her sweeter mouth,Swiftly do golden hours creep,To hold is not to keep.Tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle!
"I mustn't neglect Maudie," thought a sentimental man of forty-five. "Poor little lonely Maudie! It's a wonderful thing for a man to be loved as she loves me."
Tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle!The red June Roses now are past,This very day I broke the last—And now its perfumed breath is hid,With her, with her, beneath a coffin lid:Ah—h—h—h—h—h,There will its petals fall apart,And wither on her icy heart:—At three red Roses' Roses' costMy world was gained, my world was gainedAnd lost!Tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—tinkle—-tinkle-tink!
"That's a very pretty song, you know," said Jemmie. "I enjoyed that. I wish you'd sing oftener of an evening."
Mary looked round in perplexity.
"I haven't sung after dinner for five years," she reminded him coldly.
"As long as that? Surely not as long ago as that?"
"Five years ago, Jemmie, you asked me if it was necessary every evening to sit down immediately after dinner at the piano."
"I must have had a headache or something," he protested.
"Yet you never noticed that I no longer sang."
"I suppose I took it for granted that you didn't want to sing. But I thoroughly enjoyed it this evening. I don't know, I suppose I was in the mood for singing. Why don't you sing another?"
She lifted the seat of the music-stool, and after rummaging among a pile of tattered songs she found the one she wanted:
I had a message to send her,To her whom my heart loved best.
When the last tinkle had died away, Jemmie, who had stopped cracklingThe Timesbecause there was nothing more to read that interested him, asked his wife if he had not heard the song before somewhere. She smiled ironically.
"I expect I've heard you sing it," he hastened to add apologetically.
"No. Not me."
Good heavens, could it be that he had heard Maudie sing that song? Maudie did sometimes sing sentimental songs on wet afternoons. Nonsense! If Maudie had sung it, Mary could not know that. Gossip could effect a good deal, but gossip could not discuss Maudie's choice of music.
"Well, I don't know where I heard it," he declared.
"And I certainly shall never reveal where or when it was," she murmured.
While that night Mary was brushing her chestnut hair before the big oval mirror of her dressing-table her husband came and, bending over, kissed the tip of her ear.
"Please! please!" she exclaimed, drawing away. "I did not sing to attract you, but to amuse myself."
"Well, really you know, dash it, Mary, you do say the most cutting things sometimes. What have I done to deserve that?"
"Now, Jemmie, don't pretend you mind whether I say cutting things or not. What do you care nowadays?"
Jemmie sighed to himself and, deliberately omitting his good night kiss, turned over and buried his head ostentatiously in the pillow.
"I'm not at all sure that she isn't jealous," he confided to himself, as he set out to keep an appointment with Maudie in dreamland.
Mary lay for some time watching with a weary regard that amorphous back, like a wayfarer who sees another hill before him and the end of the journey not yet in sight.
Mrs. Wryford's prophecy that Mary would derive much pleasure from getting to know individually the various girls in whom she avowed a general interest by the act of founding for them a club was fulfilled. Indeed it was more than fulfilled, for Mrs. Wryford certainly never expected that her friend would find romance for herself in the lives of French seamstresses, a vicarious romance it might be, but its effect was to mitigate for Mary much of the dreariness that she was beginning to think life ended in after one was thirty. Thirty! At this period the woman of thirty was not considered a romantic subject; indeed, if any woman of thirty had pretended to romance she would have been considered a reader of French novels, and as such faintly tinged with impropriety.
However, it was not enough for Mary's philanthropic zeal to sit listening to the tale of Henri and Jeanne, or of Armand and Virginie. She must educate her girls. She must provide them with an outlook. She must widen their horizon. She must teach them that the world was not bounded by Oxford Street on the north and Shaftesbury Avenue on the south. With this purpose in view she took them on one Saturday afternoon to the Zoological Gardens, on another to the Egyptian Hall, and once again to hear Moore and Burgess Minstrels. Then Mrs. Wryford brought news of a series of lectures at which various distinguished travelers with the aid of a magic-lantern would personally conduct whosoever would fare with them to the uttermost parts of the earth.
"Last week we went to Greenland, Labrador, and Alaska. I can assure you, my dear Mary, the tints upon the ice were exquisite. I rarely enjoyed an evening more. Why don't you take your girls next week? Madagascar is the subject. I hear that the lecturer, who is a Frenchman, speaks English with quite remarkable fluency."
"What's his name?"
"Now, my dear Mary, do you expect me to remember the name of a Frenchman?"
Thus it was that Pierre Menard, lean, tropically brown, his hair about the temples white and everywhere streaked with gray, his mustache and imperial still black, entered Mary's life again. Mary was glad that the auditorium was darkened when she saw him first, not so much because she feared that anybody would notice her agitation, but because she wanted to stare hard at Pierre without being oppressed by the consciousness of her surroundings. It seemed to her that he must be aware of her regard and that presently over a hundred heads he would glance back his recognition.
"Dis, Madeleine, n'est-ce pas qu'il est beau?" one of the girls whispered to her neighbor.
It was that nice and pretty creature Yvonne who had spoken. She had always been one of Mary's favorites.
Driving back to Campden Hill, while street-lamp after street-lamp tossed its bouquet of golden light into the brougham, Mary pondered the course of her behavior in the near future. It might be that Pierre would scornfully reject the proffer of renewed friendship. If he had remembered her at all, she might be now a bitter memory; if he had forgotten her so completely that a letter from her would bring a puzzled frown to his brow.... Oh, it was difficult to decide what she ought to do. Mary did not consider the effect upon herself of bringing Pierre back into her life. It was of nothing except her effect upon him that she thought during that black and golden drive to Campden Hill.
At home she found Adèle, who was her maid these days, waiting up. Madame must prepare herself for a shock; Madame must have courage; Madame must not give way to grief at the news she must break to Madame.
"Nothing has happened to the children?" Mary exclaimed in terror.
"Ah, mais non, grâce à Dieu.Nothing to them. It is the poor little Mac who is dead. He was run over, Madame, and must be shot, Monsieur said."
"Where is Monsieur?"
"Monsieur has been called away on business and will not be here until Monday evening. Monsieur told me to tell Madame."
"And where is Mac?"
"He is buried in the garden. I will show Madame where is his grave in the morning."
"No, no, show me now."
Adèle looked for a moment as often in Mary's childhood she had been wont to look when her charge had expressed a desire to do something that Adèle considered unreasonable. However, nowadays it was she who must obey, and by the light of a foggy London moon she led the way across the lawn to where in the shadow of a grimy aucuba the mound was heaped above Mac's grave.
Mary gazed at it for a minute or two in silence, and without a word turned and walked back to the house.
"You can go to bed, Adèle. I shall not want you any more to-night."
While Mary brushed her hair before the oval mirror, the scenes of the life she had spent with Mac moved across her brain like the slides of a magic-lantern. She saw Jemmie arrive with him in a hansom-cab, saw him trying to coax him upstairs to the drawing-room at King's Gate.
"I've bought you a little dawg, Mary."
How hard she had tried to express her thanks by addressing him as Jemmie without letting him see what an effort it was, for she had known that nothing could please him more. Somehow she gulped out the Christian name. How happy he had been. And with what grateful affection he had patted Mac good-by.
The picture faded, and now there behind her stood Daisy Harland examining Mac critically in the manner of one who knew all that there was to be known about dogs.
"Not a bad little pup. Come here, boy, and say how-do to your Aunt Daisy."
But Mac simply would not go and say "how-do" to his Aunt Daisy, and from the first had attached himself exclusively to his mistress.
There he was now growling in Pierre's arms on the day of the dog-fight in Kensington Gardens.
Pierre?
Strange that to-night Mac should die, to-night when he who had entered her life with Mac's help should now stand once more upon its threshold. Pierre? Why should she not write to Pierre? No harm would come from that. If he refused to answer her letter, nobody would be any the wiser.
"Mac! Mac! Mac!"
Silence. No pitter-pat of dear bandy legs. He was lying out there in the cold garden.
"Mac, you clumsy old darling, you must not keep lying on my train."
How restless and unhappy he had been on that wedding morning! How he had hated it! And when he was left behind to stay at home in charge of Adèle during the honeymoon, what a howling he had set up! She had heard him above the noisy guests bidding her good-by on the steps of the house in King's Gate.
"Poor little dawg," Jemmie had exclaimed. "We really ought to have taken him with us. I owe a lot to that little dawg. I owe you to him," he had murmured with a sound in his voice that had frightened her rather. But she must let him kiss her now. She had no right to refuse. She was married. How glad Mac was to see her when she came back, and how he had enjoyed his first scamper in the garden of Woodworth Lodge. For him the lawn here must have seemed as large as the Park. Dear old dog, with what zest he used to chase the sparrows and how good he was with cats! He hated cats really; but he knew that his mistress loved them, and he would deny himself the most tempting pursuits to oblige her.
Jemmie had always liked the old dog until the night Richard was born, when Mac lying outside her bedroom door had growled at Jemmie, who had come up to see how she was. No, after that Jemmie had never liked him, had always talked about its being a mistake to have a dog in a house wherethere were children. As if he would ever have hurt the children! It was only Jemmie he disliked. Yes, it was strange how much he disliked Jemmie. And now Jemmie had had him shot. Had it really been necessary ... no, that was unfair. She ought not even in thought to accuse Jemmie of anything like that. How sad the children would be to-morrow! Their beloved Mac. That was the kind of irritating thing Jemmie did. Fancy his telling nurse that the dear little dog was not to be allowed in the nursery! And nurse had given herself airs of such importance, because Jemmie had told her this himself. Ridiculous woman!
"Mac! Mac!"
Could it really be true that she should never again see that grizzled head and those faithful eyes?
If Pierre did come to see her, would he ask after Mac, would he remember him?
Pierre?
Eleven years. Not quite eleven years since she saw him last. It was not a very long time really. So distinguished as he had looked! How had he come to find himself in Madagascar? He must have gone there after she had told him that everything was over.
Pierre?
It might seem less than eleven years to him. She tossed her hair back over her shoulders and rose from the dressing-table.
In the benign gaslight her bureau stood invitingly open.
"Yes, I will," she declared, and sitting down she wrote this note:
Woodworth Lodge,Campden Hill, W.May 3rd, 1891.Dear Pierre,I was at your lecture to-night. If you remember who I am after eleven years and feel inclined to renew an old acquaintance, won't you come and have tea with us on Wednesday next any time after four? I should so much enjoy to hear more about your adventure.Yours sincerely,Mary Alison.
Woodworth Lodge,Campden Hill, W.May 3rd, 1891.Dear Pierre,
I was at your lecture to-night. If you remember who I am after eleven years and feel inclined to renew an old acquaintance, won't you come and have tea with us on Wednesday next any time after four? I should so much enjoy to hear more about your adventure.
Yours sincerely,Mary Alison.
There was no answer by post, but on Wednesday afternoon when she was sitting in the drawing-room, counting over to herself the woolen spiders and butterflies crawling up and down her curtains, he came.
Once in the early days of marriage Mary had taken part with her husband in some amateur theatricals, in the course of which she had been attacked by stage fright and stood speechless on the stage for what seemed an age of agony before she regained her voice. It was the first time Jemmie was angry with her, and she had resolved never to act again. Now when Pierre was shown into the room she felt just as she felt then. Fortunately he was more atease than she was, and under his guidance of the conversation Mary slowly recovered her self-possession.
All the time that Pierre was talking Mary became more and more conscious of him as a man. She had never regarded Jemmie except as an institution. These eyes that looked so eagerly into hers and at the same time beyond hers to remote shores and distant mountain-peaks made her heart beat faster, her breath come and go. Yet, he was only talking to her as he had talked to an audience the other night. There was nothing personal, still less intimate, in his words.
"I was very lucky to arrive in Madagascar just before we went to war with Queen Ranavalona—a very remarkable woman. So was her niece who succeeded her. I was also lucky to know English so well, because you English were always there behind the scenes with your officers in the Malagasy army; besides, there were always negotiations with your consular officials. We shall have war again in Madagascar soon."
"Again?" Mary echoed in alarm.
Pierre made a gesture of contempt.
"It will not be a very dangerous war for us," he laughed.
At this moment Jemmie, to his wife's regret, came in unexpectedly early.
"This is Monsieur Menard," she said, introducing the stranger with an air of faint embarrassment asif she were explaining the presence of some odd new decorative addition to the drawing-room of Woodworth Lodge. "Monsieur Menard visited us in King's Gate before we were married. He has been abroad for ten years."