"The old lady is gone," he wrote on the third day. "You can come back with perfect safety. She never smelt a rat, but tried to talk to me very seriously about taking unto myself a wife. It was on the tip of my tongue once or twice to tell her that I was already as good as married. Don't keep on being stuffy, Joan, hurry up and come back.You can't think what a lot I miss you, little girl, or how much I want you."
"The old lady is gone," he wrote on the third day. "You can come back with perfect safety. She never smelt a rat, but tried to talk to me very seriously about taking unto myself a wife. It was on the tip of my tongue once or twice to tell her that I was already as good as married. Don't keep on being stuffy, Joan, hurry up and come back.You can't think what a lot I miss you, little girl, or how much I want you."
It was the first of his letters that she made any attempt to answer and her reply was not easy to write. She had come very suddenly to her decision as she had stood within the circle of Gilbert's arms that morning and answered his arguments about his mother. Now she was realizing that for weeks before that her allegiance had been wavering. She had no wish to go back to him. She could not understand herself, but the fact was self-evident, even though the scent of heliotrope haunted her days and crept into the land of her dreams. Her letter, when it was finished, struck her as cold and stupid, yet she let it go; she could not somehow make her meaning any clearer.
"Dear Gilbert," she wrote, "I am sorry you do not seem to be understanding that what I wrote in my first letter is really true. It is all finished between us and I am not coming back. There is not anything else to say, except that I should be happier if you did not go on writing. Nothing can change me, and it only keeps open old thoughts."
"Dear Gilbert," she wrote, "I am sorry you do not seem to be understanding that what I wrote in my first letter is really true. It is all finished between us and I am not coming back. There is not anything else to say, except that I should be happier if you did not go on writing. Nothing can change me, and it only keeps open old thoughts."
He wrote in answer to that a furiously angry, altogether unpleasant letter. Joan read it with shrinking horror, it seemed to lay bare all that she had been only half aware of before, the ugliness, the smallness of what she had atfirstthought was love.
"If you try to marry anyone else," the letter ended on a cruelly ugly note, "remember I can spoil your little game for you, Joan. There is no man who will marry you when they learn the truth."
"If you try to marry anyone else," the letter ended on a cruelly ugly note, "remember I can spoil your little game for you, Joan. There is no man who will marry you when they learn the truth."
She tore up his other letters after that; the very sight of his handwriting brought hot shame to her heart.
How much the people of the house noticed she hardlyknew. Aunt Janet had fallen into the habit of watching her covertly, pathetically; she was trying in her own way to read the secret hidden away behind a changed Joan. But she did her best to keep her curiosity out of sight; she was very gentle, very anxious to divert Joan's thoughts and keep her happy.
Uncle John, of course, noticed nothing. Joan helped him to potter about in the garden—they were building a rookery down by the woods—or sometimes she would take him for long walks and he would stump along beside her wrapped in indifferent silence, or else, carried away by some reminiscence of the old days, would start talking about the regiment and the places where he had been stationed. It was only Miss Abercrombie that Joan was really uneasy with, and the end of Miss Abercrombie's visit was in sight.
One afternoon, on a day which had seen one of Gilbert's unopened letters destroyed, Joan and Miss Abercrombie started out together soon after tea to take a basin of jelly to one of Aunt Janet's pet invalids who lived in a cottage away out at what was called the Four Cross Roads.
It was one of those very fine blue days common to September. Just a nip of cold in the air, the forerunner of winter, and overhead the leaves on the trees turning all their various reds and golds for autumn.
"The sky gives one a great sense of distance this afternoon," Miss Abercrombie said presently. "You never see a sky like this in towns; that is why you get into the habit of thinking things out of proportion."
"What makes you say that?" asked Joan; "I mean, how does the distance of the sky affect it?"
"Oh, well, it makes one feel small," the other answered, "unimportant; as if the affairs that worry our hearts out are, after all, of very little consequence in the scheme of existence."
"They are our life," Joan argued, "one has to worry and work things out for oneself."
"You are a Browningite," laughed Miss Abercrombie; she glanced up sideways at her companion.
"'As it were better youthShould strive through acts uncouthTowards making, than repose on aught found made.'
He is right in a way, though, mind you, I don't know that it pays women to do much in the struggling line."
"I do wonder why you say that," said Joan; "you have always struck me as being, above everything else, a fighter."
"Probably why my advice lies along other directions," admitted Miss Abercrombie; "it is extremely uncomfortable to be a pioneer."
"But in the end, even if you have won nothing, it brings you the courage of having stuck to your convictions."
"Yes," Miss Abercrombie answered dryly, "it certainly brings you that."
They walked in silence again for a while, turning into a short cut to their destination across the fields.
"Your aunt has got convictions too." Miss Abercrombie reopened the conversation, evidently her thoughts had been working along the same lines. "They are uncomfortable things; witness the judgment she metes out to that unfortunate girl in the village."
"You mean Bridget?" Joan's voice had suddenly a touch of fear in it; Miss Abercrombie stole a quick look at her. "I was asking Mary about her the other day."
"Immorality, your aunt calls it," sniffed Miss Abercrombie, "and for that she would quite willingly, good, kind woman as she is, make this child—Bridget is seventeen, you know—an outcast for the rest of her life. Immorality!"
"What would you call it?" questioned Joan; she spoke stiffly, for she was singularly uneasy under the discussion, yet she had always wanted to argue the matter out with Miss Abercrombie.
"I hate the word 'immoral' to begin with," the littlewoman went on; "not that I am exactly out against regulations. Laws and customs have come into being, there is little doubt about that, to protect the weak against the strong. The peculiar thing about them is that they always wreak their punishments on the weak. Poor Bridget, even without your aunt's judgment, she pays the penalty, doesn't she?"
"I suppose Aunt Janet is a little hard about these things," Joan admitted. "You see, the idea of going against laws and things has never occurred to her. She has always obeyed, she has never wanted to do anything else."
"Quite so," agreed Miss Abercrombie; "my dear, don't let us talk about it any more. I always lose my temper, and I hate losing my temper with someone whom I love as much as I do your Aunt Janet."
"But I am interested in what you think," Joan went on slowly; the red crept into her cheeks. "I don't believe in marriage myself; I think people ought to live together if and when they want to, and leave each other when they like."
Miss Abercrombie stared with dismay at the flushed face. "My dear," she said, and her tone had fallen upon far greater seriousness than the former discussion had evoked, "both of those are very rash statements. The problem of life is unfortunately not quite so easily settled."
"But marriage," Joan argued, "marriage, which tries to tie down in hard bonds something which ought only to be of the spirit—I think it is hideous, hideous! I could never marry."
"No," agreed Miss Abercrombie, "a great many of us feel like that when we are young and hot-headed. I nearly said empty-headed. Then we read fat books about the divine right of Motherhood, Free Love and State Maternity. All very well in the abstract and fine theories to argue about, but they do not work in real life. Believe me, the older you get the more and more you realize how faraway they all are from the ideal. Marriage may be sometimes a mistaken solution, but at present it is the only one we have."
"Why do you say that?" asked Joan; for the first time she turned and looked at her companion. "Do you really believe it is true?"
"Yes," nodded Miss Abercrombie. "My dear," she put a hand on Joan's arm, "we women have got to remember that our actions never stand by themselves alone. Someone else has always to foot the bill for what we do. I said just now that laws had been evolved to protect the weak; well, marriage protects the child."
"But if two people love each other," Joan tried to argue, but her words were bringing a cold chill of fear to her heart even as she spoke, "what other protection can be needed?"
"Love is something that no one can define," stated Miss Abercrombie; "but centuries have gone to prove that it is not as binding as marriage, and for the sake of the children the man and woman must be bound. That is the long and short of all the arguments."
"If there is no child?" Joan's fear prompted her to the question; she spoke it almost in a whisper.
Miss Abercrombie paused in her act of unlatching the gate, for they had arrived at the cottage by now, to look up at her. "Ah, there you open wider fields," she assented, "only childless people are and must be the exceptions. One cannot lay down laws for the exceptions."
Mrs. Starkey, the invalid old lady, was garrulous, and delighted to see them. So anxious to tell them all her ailments and scraps of gossip that by the time they got away it was quite late and already the sun was sinking behind the range of hills at the back of the village.
"We will have to hurry," Joan said. "Aunt Janet gets so fussed if one is out after dark."
Hurrying precluded any reopening of the subject they had been discussing, but Joan's mind was busy with all the thoughts it had roused as they walked. The faint hintof fear that had stirred to life in her when Miss Abercrombie had spoken of Bridget was fast waking to very definite panic. She could feel it tugging at her heart and making her breathing fast and difficult. Supposing that the vaguely-dreamed-of possibility had crystallized into fact in her case? How would Aunt Janet think of it; what changes would it bring into her life?
As they turned into the little village street they came straight into a crowd of people standing round an open cottage door. The crowd was strangely quiet, talking amongst themselves in whispers, but from within the cottage came the sound of wailing, the hysterical crying of old age.
Miss Abercrombie, with Joan following, pushed her way to the front, and with awed faces the villagers drew back to let them pass. At the open door Sam Jones, the village constable, an old man who had known Joan in her very young days, put out his hand.
"Don't you go in now, miss," he said, "it is not for the likes of you to see, and you can do no good. Besides which, your aunt is there already."
But Joan paid no attention to him and, pushing past his outstretched hand, followed Miss Abercrombie.
The inside of the cottage was dimly lit, and scattered with a profuse collection of what appeared to be kitchen utensils, dishes and clothes, all flung about in confusion. The only light in the place glinted on the long deal table and the stiff dead figure stretched out on it, still and quiet, with white, vacant face and lifeless arms that hung down on either side. Water was oozing out of the clothes and dripping from the unbound hair; it had gathered already into little pools on the floor. In the darkest corner of the room a crouched-up form sat sobbing hopelessly, and by the figure on the table Aunt Janet stood, her face in shadow, since she was above the shade of the lamp, but her hands singularly white and gentle-looking as they moved about drying the dead girl's face, pushing the wet, clogged hair from eyes and mouth.
Joan paused just within the door, the terror of that figure on the table holding her spellbound, but Miss Abercrombie moved brusquely forward so that she stood in the lamplight confronting Aunt Janet.
"So," she said, quick and sharp, yet not over loud, the people outside could not have heard, "Bridget has found this way out. A kinder way than your stern judgment, Janet. Poor little girl."
"I did not judge," Miss Rutherford answered stiffly, "'the wages of sin is death.'"
"Yet you can be kind to her now," snorted Miss Abercrombie; "it would not have been wasted had you been a little kinder before. Forgive me, Janet, I speak quickly, without thinking. You live up to your precepts; everyone has to do that."
The old woman in the corner lifted her face to look at them; perhaps she thought that in some way or other they were reviling the dead, for she staggered to her feet and crossed over to the table.
"It was fear made her do it," she wailed; "fear, and because we spoke her harsh. I hated the shame of it all. Yet, God knows, I would have stood by her in the end. My little girl, my little Bridget!" Sobs choked her, she fell to her knees, pressing her lips to one of the cold, stiff hands.
Joan saw Aunt Janet stoop and lay a gentle hand on the heaving shoulders, she heard, too, a movement of the crowd outside and saw the Vicar's good-natured, perturbed face appear in the doorway. Behind him again was a younger man, stern-faced, with quiet, very steady blue eyes and a firm-lined mouth. All this she noticed, why she could not have explained, for the man was a perfect stranger to her; then the fear and giddiness which all this time she had been fighting against gained the upper hand and, swaying a little, she moved forward with the intention of getting outside, only to fall in a dead faint across the doorway of the cottage.
The Grants were sitting at breakfast in their small, red-walled dining-room. Richard, commonly called Dick, at the end of the table, Mabel at the one side and Mrs. Grant in the seat of honour at the top. Wherever Mrs. Grant sat was the seat of honour; she was that kind of old lady. Marvellously handsome still, despite her age, with a commanding presence and a nature which had sublime contempt for everyone and everything except herself, she sailed through life exacting service from all and obedience from her children. Why they obeyed her they could not have themselves explained; perhaps it was an inheritance from the dead Mr. Grant, who had worshipped his wife as if she had been some divinity. In her own way Mrs. Grant had always been gracious and kindly to her husband, but he had been altogether a nonentity in her life. Before the children were old enough to see why, they realized that Daddy was only the man who made the money in their house. Mother spent it, buying the luxuries with which they were surrounded, the magnificent toys which they disregarded, as is the way of children, the splendidly expensive clothes, which were a perfect burden to them. Then, just when Dick was beginning to understand, Mr. Grant died.
He had sent for his son—Dick was about eighteen then—and spoken to him just before the end came.
"You will have to look after your mother, Dick," he had said, clutching at the young, strong hands; "she has always been looked after. She has never had to rough things in her life. And you won't be any too well off. Promise me, promise me, you will always give her of your best."
"Of course, I promise, Dad," he had answered.
Further conversation between then had ceased because Mrs. Grant swept into the room, regal even in the face of death. Dick remembered the incident afterwards with a little twitch of his lips because it was so typical of his mother and it was just at this period that he had begun to criticize her. The sick-room had been in shadowed gloom until her entry; the lights hurt the fast-failing eyes.
"I cannot sit in the dark," stated Mrs. Grant, as she settled herself, with a delightful rustle of silk and a wave of perfume, beside the bed. "You know that, Harry. It always has depressed me, hasn't it?"
"Turn up the lights, Dick," whispered the man, his hand had closed on one of hers; happiness flooded his heart at her presence.
"But you know they hurt your eyes," Dick expostulated; he was new to death, yet he could read the signs well enough to know his father was dying.
"Harry can lie with his eyes shut," answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic a scale for her ever to be disagreeable.
And Dick had turned up the lights and gone fuming from the room, conscious for the time being of a sense of dislike for his mother's perfection!
It soon faded though; he had been trained too thoroughly in his youth. Once he said to Mabel hotly:
"Why does Mother cry for Dad? She did not really love him, and she just delighted in buying all that expensive and becoming mourning."
And Mabel had surprised him by replying: "Mother does not really love anyone but herself."
The remark sounded odd from Mabel, who spent her life slaving with apparent devotion in her mother's service. She was a tall, rather colourless girl, with big grey eyes and a quaint-shaped mouth that was always very silent. She moved through the background of their lives doing things for mother. She had always done that; Dick wondered sometimes whether the soul within her would ever flame into open rebellion, but it never did.
By the time Dick had passed his various exams, and was ready to take up a practice somewhere, Mrs. Grant and Mabel had been practically everywhere on the Continent.
"Money is running short," Mabel wrote crisply to Dick; "cannot you do anything in the way of taking a house and settling down, so as to make a home for Mother and me?"
Dick's ambitions lay in the direction of bachelor's diggings and work in London. He thrust them aside and bought what was supposed to be a very good and flourishing practice at Birmingham. Unfortunately Mrs. Grant took a violent dislike to Birmingham. Their house was gloomy and got on her nerves; the air, she said, was laden with smoke which irritated her throat. She developed a cough, quite the most annoying sound that Dick had ever imagined, and he was not easy to irritate. Mother coughed from the time she woke till the time she went to sleep—coughed and remembered old times and wept for Harry, who would at least have taken care not to expose her to such overwhelming discomfort.
At the end of six months Dick threw up the practice in despair and placed himself at her disposal. They put in a year in London, but what Dick earned was quite insufficient to cope with what Mrs. Grant spent and things went from bad to worse.
Mabel never offered any advice until she was askedbut when Dick spoke to her finally she was quite definite.
"You have got to take Mother in hand," she said. "Father never did. He spent his life making money for her to spend, but there is no reason why you should. Get a small practice somewhere in the country where there are no shops and just tell Mother you are going to settle there for five years at least."
"She will get another cough," argued Dick.
"You must let her cough, it won't hurt her," answered Mabel.
Undoubtedly Mrs. Grant did not approve of Wrotham to begin with, but it had its advantages, even for her. She settled very quickly into the role of Lady Bountiful; the villagers gazing upon her with such unmixed admiration that she was moved to remark to Mabel that it was really pleasant doing things for such grateful people. Dick provided her with a victoria and horse in place of the usual doctor's trap, and she could drive abroad to visit this or that protégé in truly regal style. It meant that Dick had to pay all his visits, and some of them very far off and at all sorts of unseasonable hours, on a bicycle, but he never grudged making sacrifices of that kind for her. No one admired his mother in the abstract more than Dick did.
Mabel perhaps resented the extra work it entailed on him, for she loved Dick with the whole force of her self-restrained heart. But, as usual, she kept silent. The villagers could see that she drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon the younger one's vitality. People like Mrs. Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You either have to live for them or away from them.
On this particular morning Dick finished his breakfast before either his mother or sister, and pushing back his chair, asked, as he had always asked since the days of his childhood, if he might rise.
"Before I am finished, Dick?" remonstrated Mrs. Grant; "it is not very polite, dear."
"I know," Dick apologized, "but the truth is I have an early call to pay this morning. The people of the Manor House have sent for me; Miss Rutherford the younger is not awfully well, or something."
"Miss Rutherford the younger?" repeated his mother; "I did not know there was a younger; I have never seen her, have I, Mabel?"
"I don't suppose so," Dick answered for his sister; "she has been away in London."
"What is the matter with her?" asked Mrs. Grant. "Why do they want you to see her?"
"I can't know that till I have seen her, can I? Last night she happened to come into the Rendle cottage just after they had brought that poor girl home, and the sight must have upset her; anyway she fainted. I expect that is what Miss Rutherford is worried about."
"It is hardly polite of her not to have brought her niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs."
"You are a dear to think of it," he said, stooping to kiss her good-bye. "If you can spare Mabel this afternoon, Mother, I thought perhaps she might come into Sevenoaks with me. I have got to attend a meeting there, and it will be an outing for her."
"If Mabel would like to go, of course she must," Mrs. Grant agreed. "I shall be a little lonely, and to-day is the day I am supposed to have my hair shampooed. Not that it really matters."
"I could not go any way," Mabel put in for herself. "Mr. Jarvis is coming to tea, Dick; he asked himself last week."
She followed her brother out to the front door.
"The day is going to be full of disagreeables for you," he said, as they stood waiting for his bicycle to be brought round. "Mother's shampoo, I know what that involves, and Mr. Jarvis. Nuisance the fellow is; why can't he see that you dislike him?"
"Oh, I don't exactly," she answered, without meeting his eyes.
She hated him like poison, Dick knew. He wondered rather vaguely why Mabel had lied to him, generally speaking they were too good friends for that to be necessary. Then he dismissed the subject, and his thoughts turned again to the girl he was on his way to see. He had been thinking a great deal of Joan since he had first seen her. The startled, child-like face, the wide frightened eyes, had impressed themselves on his mind the night before. He had lifted her in his arms and carried her outside; the poise of her thrown-back head against his arm stayed in his mind, a very warm memory. Poor little girl, it must have been horrible for her to have come in from the gay placidness of her own life and thoughts to the stark tragedy of Bridget Rendle's death.
He was very ignorant and very reverent in his thoughts about women. He could imagine Joan's sweet, well-ordered life, the fragrance of youth hung about his idea of her. Bridget Rendle had been a girl too, younger perhaps than the other one; but Bridget had dipped into the waters of life, and sorrow and sin had closed over her. The two girls were as far apart as the poles, it seemed almost irreverent to think of them in the same breath.
Aunt Janet met him in the hall when she heard of his arrival.
"I have not told my niece about sending for you," she said; "it might only make her nervous. I am veryalarmed about her, Dr. Grant. She has been home now three weeks and she is really not at all like herself. Then that faint last night. I am afraid of fainting-fits; my mother, I may as well tell you, died very suddenly from a heart-attack."
"It is not likely to be anything of that sort," he told her. "Yesterday's tragedy was quite sufficient to upset very strong nerves."
"I hope not," Aunt Janet agreed; "anyway, I shall feel happier once you have seen her. Will you come this way?"
She led him through the house to a room on the other side of the drawing-room which had been fitted up as a special sanctum for Joan since her return from London.
"I am nervous," she admitted to the doctor with her hand on the door-knob, "she will perhaps be annoyed at my having sent for you." Then she opened the door and they passed in.
Joan was sitting in the far corner near the open window, a book on her lap. But she was not pretending to read; Dick could have sworn that she had been crying as they came in. As she saw her aunt was not alone she stood up quickly and the book fell unheeded to the floor.
"This is the doctor, dear," Aunt Janet began nervously. "I asked him to call and see you. You need a tonic, I am sure you do."
"You sent for him," whispered Joan. Dick felt horribly uncomfortable; it was impossible not to sense the tragedy which hung heavy in the air. "Why, oh why, have you done that, Aunt Janet?"
"I was afraid," the other began; "last night you——" Rather waveringly she came to a full stop, staring at Joan.
The girl had drawn herself up to her full height. She faced them as someone brought suddenly to bay, her hands clenched at her sides, two flags of colour flaming in her cheeks.
"I was going to have told you," she said, addressingherself solely to Aunt Janet, "now you have brought him in he must know it too. But I do not need him to tell me what is the matter with me; I found it out for myself last night. I am not ashamed, I do not even hold that I have done anything wrong; I would have told you before only I did not know it was going to come to this, and for the rest it was like a shut book in my life that I did not want to have to open or look at again. I am like Bridget Rendle," she said, head held very high. "I am going to have a baby. Bridget was afraid and ashamed, but I am neither. I have done nothing to be ashamed of."
The telling of it sapped at her much boasted courage, and left her whiter than the white wall-paper; Dick could see that she had some ado to keep back her tears.
Aunt Janet seemed to have been paralysed; she stayed where she was, stiff, stricken, and Dick, glancing at her, thought he had never seen such anguish and terror combined on a human face. He felt himself completely forgotten in this crisis. The two women stared at each other. Twice Aunt Janet moistened her lips and tried to speak, but the words died in her throat. When she succeeded at last her voice was scarce recognizable.
"You said—like Bridget Rendle," she whispered; "did you mean what you said?"
"Yes," answered Joan.
The older woman turned towards the door. She walked as if blind, her hands groping before her. "God!" Dick heard her say under her breath, "Dear God, what have I done that this should come upon me?"
As she reached the door Joan called to her, her voice sharp with fear. "Aunt Janet, Aunt Janet, aren't you going to say anything to me?"
"I must hold my tongue," the other answered stiffly, "or I shall curse that which I have loved." Suddenly the anguish in her flamed to white beat. "I would rather have known you dead," she said, and passed swiftly from the room.
Joan took a step forward, and her foot touched on the book she had let fall. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up, then, because her knees were in reality giving way under her, she stumbled to the chair and sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten the man standing by the door, she just sat there, hands folded in her lap, with her white face and great brown eyes looking unseeingly at the garden.
Dick moved uneasily. He had not the slightest idea what he ought to do; he felt horribly like an intruder. And he was intensely sorry for the girl, even though behind this sorrow lay the shock of a half-formed ideal which she had shattered in his mind. Finally he submerged the man in the doctor and moved towards her.
"I am most awfully sorry for you," he said, "will you let me help you if I can? There may be some mistake, and anyway I could give you something to help with those fainting-fits."
Joan brought her eyes away from the garden and looked at him. "No," she said, "there is no mistake and I do not make a habit of fainting. Yesterday it was different, perhaps I realized definitely and for the first time what it would all mean. I saw Aunt Janet's face as she spoke of the dead girl, and ... I do not know why I am telling you all this," she broke off, "it cannot be very interesting, but I do not want you to think that I feel as Bridget Rendle felt."
"No," he agreed, "you are facing it with more courage than she had been taught to have."
"It is not a question of courage," Joan answered. He was not understanding her, she realized, and for some stupid reason it hurt that he should not, but she must not stoop to further explanations. She stood up, making a stern effort at absolute calmness.
"Good-bye," she said, "I am sorry you should have been troubled to come and that you should have had to go through this sort of scene."
"Good-bye," was all he could answer.
At the door he turned to look back at her. "If you should need help of any sort at any time," he said, "will you send for me? I should like to feel you were going to do that."
"I cannot promise," she answered, "you see, I shall probably be leaving here quite soon."
And with that he had to be content to leave her.
Mabel had shampooed her mother's hair, following out with unending patience the minute instructions which the process always involved. She had rinsed it in four relays of hot water, two of lukewarm and one of cold; she had dried it with the hard towel for the scalp and the soft towel for the hair. She had rubbed brilliantine in to give it the approved gloss. The whole proceeding had lasted fully two hours; now she stood and brushed out the long fine threads of grey turning to silver with just the steady gentle pressure which was necessary and which, according to Mrs. Grant, no one but Mabel was capable of producing.
Mrs. Grant liked to have her hair brushed for half an hour after a shampoo, it soothed the irritated nerves. From behind her mother's back Mabel could see her own face in the glass, the sallow cheeks flushed from her exertions, the grey, black-lashed eyes tired and a little angry. Once, long ago, during one of their journeys on the continent, there had been a young naval officer who had loved Mabel for those grey eyes of hers. He had raved about the way the lashes lay like a fringe of shadow round them. He had called them "Dream Eyes," and once he had kissedthe lids close shut over them with hard, passionate kisses. Whenever Mabel looked at her eyes in the glass she thought of Jack Donald. She had loved him and she had sent him away because of Mother. He had only been able to offer her his love and the pay of a lieutenant in the Navy; he had not even shown that he liked Mother, he had resented the way Mabel slaved for her. Of course the outlook had been absurd, and Mrs. Grant had said so very plainly. If Mabel married it would have to be someone wealthy someone elderly enough to understand that Mother must live with them. But when he went he took with him all the dreams of Mabel's life; she never looked out into the future to make plans now, she could only look back into the past that held her memories.
"I hope," said Mrs. Grant suddenly breaking in on her thoughts, "that Dick does not fall in love with this young lady at the Manor."
"Why not?" asked Mabel, "he must fall in love sooner or later."
"Well, then, it must be later and with someone who has a great deal of money. We are quite badly enough off as it is."
"You and I could go away again on our own," suggested Mabel, "you know you said the other day that Wrotham was getting on your nerves."
"Don't be ridiculous," snapped Mrs. Grant, "I should like to know what you think we should live on once Dick has a wife. You say you won't marry Mr. Jarvis or anyone else."
"No," Mabel admitted, "but because I won't marry it hardly seems fair that we should stand in the way of Dick's doing so."
"What do you intend to imply by 'standing in the way'? Really Mabel, sometimes I wonder if you have any love for me, you so habitually and wilfully misconstrue my sentences. Surely it is permissible" (Mrs. Grant's sigh was a model of motherly affection) "for a mother to wish tokeep her son, her eldest born, to herself for a little longer. One loses them so once they marry."
Mabel concealed a swift, rather bitter, smile. "I did not mean to misconstrue anything," she said, "only just the other day I was thinking that perhaps we did rather hamper Dick. He is twenty-seven, you know; it is funny he has never wanted to marry."
"He is waiting for the right girl," Mrs. Grant sighed again.
"And if he happens to find her," thought Mabel to herself, there was no use saying the words aloud, "we are to do our best to prevent him having her. Poor old Dick." Her eyes waked to sudden, vivid affection as she thought of him.
She ran downstairs presently, Mrs. Grant having retired to rest after exertions, to meet Dick just coming in. He had done a round of visits after his call at the Manor house. Visits which had included one to the Rendles' cottage, where he had seen the principal figure of last night's tragedy laid out, as her mother said, for decent burial, "even though it baint a going to be Christian."
The girl had been dressed in something white; white flowers, great beautiful-headed chrysanthemums, lay between her folded hands and against her face. She had been a handsome girl, death had robbed her of her vivid colouring, but it had given her in its stead something dignified and withdrawn, a look of suffering and yet great peace.
Mrs. Rendle was more resigned too this morning; she had cried her heart quiet through the night.
"Bridget is better so," she could confide to Dick as he stood looking down at the girl, "the shame is done away with, sir, and God will look to the sin. I hold there ain't much to fear there, even though they won't bury her in the churchyard."
"No, I don't think there is much to fear," he agreed. "I am sorry about the burial, Mrs. Rendle, I have tried to argue the matter out with the vicar."
"Oh, that is not to be helped," she answered. "God will rest her soul wherever she be. Miss Rutherford sent those flowers," she added, "she was rare set agin Bridget to begin with, but she be softened down."
That brought the other tragedy which he had witnessed this morning back to his mind. Not that he had really forgotten it. The picture of Joan, her head high, her cheeks flushed, was one that had imprinted itself very strongly upon his memory. He had given up trying to understand how such a thing could have happened, his own vague happy thoughts of her stirred wistfully behind the new knowledge. And he could not dismiss her altogether from the throne he had designed for her to occupy. There must besomeexplanation; if only he had not been such an absolute stranger perhaps she would have told him a little more, have given him a chance to understand.
"Well," asked Mabel, "is she nice, Dick, did you like her?" Her eyes were quick to notice the new shadow of trouble on his face.
"Very nice, I think," he answered, hoping his voice sounded as indifferent as he meant it to, "but I really did not see much of her and she is going back to London almost at once." He went past her on into the dining-room. "Is lunch nearly ready," he asked, "I have got to catch that 2.5, you know."
"I'll see about it," Mabel said, "Mother is having hers upstairs."
She turned away to comply, but all the time she was hurrying up the maidservant, and later, while she and Dick sat opposite each other, rather silent, through lunch, her eyes and mind were busy trying to read the secret of Dick's manner. The girl had impressed him strongly, that was evident, but why should she have occasioned this gloom in Dick who so very rarely allowed anything or anybody to ruffle his cheery good humour?
He rode off without letting her glean any explanation, and Mabel wandered into the drawing-room to get it readyfor Mrs. Grant's descent. Had Dick really fallen in love? She remembered once before when he had been about eighteen or nineteen, how there had been a girl whom he had rather shyly confessed himself enamoured of. But since the damsel had been quite five years his senior the romance, to Mabel's relief, had faded away. Yet if Dick were ever really to fall in love it would be a deep and unshakable tie; he would be as his father had been, all faithful to the one woman in his life.
It was remembering her father that suddenly brought Mabel's thoughts back to her mother whose absorbing personality had stood so like a giant shadow across all their lives. Would Dick's love be strong enough to fight against his sense of duty and mother's selfishness, for most certainly mother would not help him to achieve his desire unless it ran along the same lines as her own. And if mother prevailed what would life mean for Dick? The same dry empty dreariness that her own days contained, the restless hopes that died too hard, the unsatisfied, cruel dreams? No, no! She had not fought to save her own happiness, but she would fight to the last inch to save Dick's.
Almost as if in answer to her heart's wild outcry the front-door bell rang, and looking up she saw the short stout figure which of late had taken to haunting her thoughts on the door-step.
Mr. Jarvis was an elderly man inclined to be fat, with round, heavy face, very thick about the jaws and unpleasantly small eyes. Yet the expression of the man's face was not altogether disagreeable and a certain shrewd humour showed in the lines of his mouth. He had lived for forty-two years in Wrotham, travelling twice a year to London in connection with his business, but never venturing further afield. His house, a magnificent farm building, lay about twelve miles away on the other side of Wrotham station. It had come down to him through generations of Jarvises, he was reputed to be marvellously wealthy, and he had noshyness about admitting the fact. His favourite topics of conversation were money and horses. He had never married, village gossip could have given you lurid details as to the why and the wherefore had you been willing to listen. Mr. Jarvis himself would have put it more plainly. The only woman he had ever had the least affection for had neither expected nor desired matrimony; she had been content to live with him as his housekeeper. This woman had been dead three years when Jarvis first met Mabel. Quite apart from the fact that of late he had been feeling that it was time he got married, Jarvis had been attracted to Mabel from the first. She was such a contrast to the other women he had known; he admired enormously her slim delicacy, her faintly coloured face, her grey eyes. He liked her way of talking, too, and the long silences which held her; her quiet dignity, the way she moved. He placed her on a pedestal in his thoughts, which was a thing he had never dreamt of doing for any other woman, and before long his admiration melted into love. Then being forty-two the disease took rapid and tense possession. He was only happy when he was with her, able to talk to her now and again, to watch her always.
Dick's impression was that Mabel hated the man. He disliked him himself, which perhaps coloured his view, for hate was not quite what Mabel felt. Had Mr. Jarvis been content to just like her she would have tolerated and more or less liked him. She had thought him, to begin with, a funny, in a way rather pathetic, little man. Ugly, and Mabel had such an instinctive sympathy for anything ugly or unloved. So, to begin with, she had been kind to him; then one day Mrs. Grant had opened her eyes to the evident admiration of the man, mentioning at the same time that from the money point of view he would be a good match, and suddenly Mabel had known that she was afraid. Afraid, without exactly knowing why, very much as is the hapless sheep on his way to the slaughter-house.
As the maid ushered inMr. Jarvisa minute or two laterthis feeling of fear caught at Mabel's heart, and in answer to its summons the warm blood flushed to face and neck as she stood up to receive him.
"I am early," stammered the man, his eyes on her new-wakened beauty, for it was only in her lack of colour that Mabel's want of prettiness lay, "but I came on purpose, I wanted to catch you alone."
Mabel took what was almost a despairing look at the clock. "Mother won't be down for quite half an hour," she said, "so you have succeeded. Shall we stay here or will you come down to the garden? I want to show you my Black Prince rose, it is not doing at all well."
She moved to the window which opened doorways on to the garden, but Mr. Jarvis made no attempt to follow her.
"Let us stay here," he said, "what I have got to say won't take long and we can do the roses afterwards when Mrs. Grant is about. I guess you could help me a bit if you only chose to," he went on, his voice curiously gruff and unready, "but you won't, you won't even look at me. I suppose those great grey eyes of yours hate the sight of me, and I am a damned fool to put my heart into words. But I have got to," she heard him move close to her and how quickly he was breathing, "I love you, you pale, thin slip of a girl, I want you as a wife, will you marry me?"
The silence when he had finished speaking lay heavy between them. Mabel let him take her hand, though the moist warmth of his gave her a little shudder of aversion, but by no strength of will could she lift her eyes to look at him. She stood as immovable as a statue and the man, watching her from out of his small shrewd eyes, smiled a little bitterly.
"You hate the thought like poison," he said, "yet you don't throw off my hand or yell out your 'No.' Something is in the balance then. Well, marry me for my money, Mabel. I had rather it were love, but if there is anything about me that can win you, I am not going to give you up."
That flicked at her pride and the honesty of it appealed to her. She lifted her eyes and for the first time she became aware of the real kindness that lay in his.
"I have never hated you," she said slowly, "but I don't and can't love you. Will you take that as your answer?"
The man shook his head. "I was not fool enough to ask—'Do you love me?'" he reminded her; "what I want to know is, 'Will you marry me?'"
"Without love?"—her eyes besought him—"marriage must be hideous."
"I will risk it if you will," he answered. "Sit down, let us talk it out."
He had won back his self-possession, though his eyes were still eager in their demand. Mabel sat down on the window-seat and he pulled up a chair at a little distance from her.
"Look here," he began, "it is like this. I am not a young man, probably I am twelve to fourteen years older than you. If you have heard what the village scandal says about me you can take it from me that it is true; it is better that you should know the worst at once. But until I met you, this I can swear before God, I have never really loved. It is not a question of money this time; I would give my soul to win you. And I don't want you as I have wanted the other women in my life; I want you as my wife."
"Yet you can buy me just as you could them," Mabel whispered.
"No"—again he shook his head. "I am not making that mistake either. I know just why I can buy you. Anyway, let us put that aside. This is the case as I see it. I have money, heaps of it; I have a good large house and servants eating their heads off. I will make Mrs. Grant comfortable; she will live with us, of course, and she is welcome to everything I have got; and I love you. Thatis the one great drawback, isn't it? The question is. Will you be able to put up with it?"
Away in the back of Mabel's mind another voice whispered, "I love you." She had to shut her lids over the "Dream Eyes," to hold back the tears.
"Even if things were different," she said, "I could not love you; I have always loved someone else."
Mr. Jarvis sat back in his chair with a quick frown. "Any chance of his marrying you?" he asked.
"No," she had to admit, "there has never been any chance of that."
"I see"—he looked up at her and down again at his podgy, fat hands, clenched together. "My offer still holds good," he said abruptly.
"Oh, I don't know what to say or what to do." Mabel's calm broke, she stood up nervously. It almost seemed as if the walls of the room were closing in on her. "There are so many things to think of; Mother and Dick and——"
Perhaps he understood the softening of her voice as she spoke of Dick, for he looked up at her quickly.
"Yes, there is your brother," he agreed. "I guess he is pretty tired having to look after you two, and he is a clever lad; there ought to be a future before him if he has his chance. Put the weight on to my shoulders, Mabel; they are better able to bear it."
She turned to him breathlessly; it was quite true what he was saying about Dick. Dick had his own life to make. "I have told you the truth," she said. "I don't love you, probably there will be times when I shall hate you. If you are not afraid of that, if you are ready to take Mother and me and let us spend your money in return for that, then—I will marry you."
Mr. Jarvis got quickly to his feet. "You mean it?" he gasped; his face was almost purple, he came to her, catching her hands in his. "You mean it? Mind you, Mabel, you have got to put up with my loving you. Iam not pretending that I am the kind of man who will leave you alone."
"I mean it," she answered, very cold and quiet, because it seemed as if all the tears in her heart had suddenly hardened into a lump of stone.
Victor Starbuck.
Joan did not see Aunt Janet again. Miss Abercrombie carried messages backwards and forwards between the two, but even Miss Abercrombie's level-headed arguments could not move Aunt Janet from the position she had taken up. And Miss Abercrombie was quite able to realize how much her old friend was suffering.
"I never knew a broken heart could bring so much pain," she told Joan; "but every time I look at your aunt I realize that physical suffering is as nothing compared to the torture of her thoughts."
"Why cannot she try to understand. Let me go to her," Joan pleaded. "If only I can speak to her I shall make her understand."
But Miss Abercrombie shook her head. "No, child," she said, "it would be quite useless and under the circumstances you must respect her wishes. I am fearfully sorry for both of you; I know that it is hurting you, too, but when you have wilfully or inadvertently killed a person's belief in you the only thing you can do is to keep out of their way. Time is the one healer for such wounds."
The tears smarted in Joan's eyes, yet up till now shehad not cried once. Hurt pride, hurt love, struggled for expression, but words seemed so useless.
"I had better hurry up and get away," she said; "I suppose Aunt Janet hates the thought of my being near her even."
Miss Abercrombie watched her with kindly eyes. The tragedy she had suspected on the first night was worse even than she had imagined. It stared at her out of the old, fierce face upstairs, it slipped into her thoughts of what this girl's future was going to be.
"Have you made any plans?" she asked; "do you know at all where to go?"
"Does it matter very much?" Joan answered bitterly.
"My dear," Miss Abercrombie spoke gently, "I am making no attempt to criticize, and I certainly have no right to judge, but you have a very hard fight before you and you will not win through if you go into it in that spirit. I do not want to ask questions, you would probably resent them, but will you tell me one thing. Does the man know about what is going to happen?"
"No," answered Joan. "It wouldn't make any difference if he did. It is not even as if he had persuaded me to go and live with him; I want you to understand that I went of my own free will because I thought it was right."
"You will write and tell him," suggested Miss Abercrombie. "That is only fair to him and yourself."
"No," Joan said again, "it was the one thing he was most afraid of; I would not stoop to ask him to share it with me."
Miss Abercrombie put out a quick hand. "You are forgetting that now there is someone else who is dependent on how you fight and whether you win through. You may say, 'I stand alone in this,' yet there is someone else who will have to share in paying the cost."
The colour swept from Joan's cheek; she choked back the hard lump in her throat. "We will have to pay ittogether," she said. "I cannot ask anyone else to help."
The tears, long held back, came then and she turned away quickly. Miss Abercrombie watched her in silence for a minute or two. At last she spoke. "You poor thing," she said slowly and quietly; "you poor, foolish child."
Joan turned to her quickly. "You are thinking that I am a coward," she said, "that I am making but a poor beginnings to my fight. But it isn't that, not exactly. I shall have courage enough when it comes to the time. But just now it is hurting me so to hurt Aunt Janet; I had not reckoned on that, I did not know that you could kill love so quickly."
"You can't," Miss Abercrombie answered. "If her love were dead all this would not be hurting her any more."
So Joan packed up her trunks again, fighting all the time against the impulse which prompted her to do nothing but cry and cry and cry. The chill of Aunt Janet's attitude seemed to have descended on the whole household. They could have no idea of the real trouble, but they felt the shadow and moved about limply, talking to each other inwhispers. Miss Janet was reputed to be ill, anyway, she was keeping her room, and Miss Joan was packing up to go away; two facts which did not work in well together. No wonder the servants were restless and unhappy.
Uncle John met Joan on her way upstairs late that evening. His usually grave, uninterested face wore an expression of absolute amazement, it almost amounted to fear.
"Will you come into my room for a minute," he said, holding the door open for her to pass.
Once inside, he turned and stared at her; she had never imagined his face could have worn such an expression. She saw him trying to speak, groping for words, as it were, and she stayed tongue-tied before him. Her dayhad been so tumultuous that now she was tired out, indifferent as to what might happen next.
"Your aunt has told me," he said at last. "I find it almost impossible to believe, and in a way I blame myself. We should never have allowed you to go away as we did." He paused to breathe heavily. "I am an old man, but not too old to make a fight for our honour. Will you give me this man's name and address, Joan?"
She had not paused to think that they would look on it as their honour which she had played with. His rather pitiful dignity hurt her more than anything that had gone before.
"I cannot do that," she answered; "there is nothing exactly that you could blame him for. I did what I did out of my own free will and because I thought it was right."
He still stared at her. "Right," he repeated; "you use the word in a strange sense, surely; and as for blaming him"—she saw how suddenly his hands clenched, the knuckles standing out white—"if you will let me know where to find him, I will settle that between us."
Joan moved towards the door. "I cannot," she said; "please, Uncle John, don't ask me any more. I have hurt your honour; it must be me that you punish. I am going away to-morrow, let me go out of your life altogether. I shall not make any attempt to come back."
"You are going to him?" he questioned. "Before God, if you do that I will find you out and——"
"No," she interrupted, "you need not be afraid; I am not going back to him."
With her hand on the door she heard him order her to come back as he had not finished what he had to say, and she stayed where she was, not turning again to look at him.
"You are being stubborn in your sin." How strange the words sounded from Uncle John, who had never said a cross word to her in his life. "Very well, then, there is nothing for us to do except, as you say, to try and forgetthat we have ever loved you. When you go out of our house to-morrow it shall be the end. Your aunt is with me in this. But you shall have money; it shall be paid to you regularly through my solicitor, and to-night I am writing to him to tell him to render you every assistance he can. You can go there whenever you are in need of help. Miss Abercrombie has also promised your aunt, I believe, to do what she can for you."
"I would rather not take any money from you," whispered Joan; "I will be able to earn enough to keep myself."
"When you are doing that," he answered grimly, "you may communicate with the solicitor and he will put the money aside for such time as you may need it. But until then you owe it to us to use our money in preference to what could only be given to you in charity or disgrace."
She waited in silence for some minutes after his last words. If she could have run to him then and cried out her fear and dismay and regret, perhaps some peace might have been achieved between them which would have helped to smooth out the tangle of their lives. But Joan was hopelessly dumb. She had gone into her escapade with light laughter on her lips, now she was paying the cost. One cannot take the world and readjust it to one's own beliefs. That was the lesson she was to learn through loneliness and tears. This breaking of home ties was only the first step in the lesson.
She stole out of his presence at last and up to her own room. Her packing was all finished, she had dismantled the walls of her pictures, the tables of her books. Everything she possessed had been given to her by either Uncle John or Aunt Janet. Christmas presents, Easter presents, birthday presents, presents for no particular excuse except that she was their little girl and they loved her. It seemed to Joan as if into the black box which contained all these treasures she had laid away also their love for her. Ittook on almost the appearance of a coffin and she hated it.
Miss Abercrombie saw her off at the station next morning. She had given Joan several addresses where she could look for rooms and was coming up to London in about a month herself, and would take Joan back with her into the country. "I want you to remember, though," she added, "that you can always come to me any time before that if you feel inclined. You need not even write; just turn up; you have my address; I shall always be glad to have you. I want to help you through what I know is going to be a very bitter time."
"Thank you," Joan answered; but even at the time she had a ridiculous feeling that Miss Abercrombie was very glad to be seeing the last of her.
After the train had slid out of the station and the small, purposeful figure had vanished from sight she sat back and tried to collect her thoughts to review the situation. She was feeling tired and desperately unhappy. They had let her see, even these dear people whom of all others in the world she loved, that she had gone outside their pale. She was in their eyes an outcast, a leper. She was afraid to see in other people's eyes the look of horror and agony which she had read in Aunt Janet's. Of what use was her book-learned wisdom in the face of this, it vanished into thin air. Hopeless, ashamed, yet a little defiant, Joan sat and stared at the opposite wall of the railway carriage.
At Victoria Station she put her luggage into the cloak-room, deciding to see what could be done in the way of rooms, without the expense of going from place to place in a cab. The places Miss Abercrombie had recommended her to struck her as being expensive, and it seemed to her tortured nerves as if the landladies viewed her with distrustful eyes. She finally decided to take a bus down to Chelsea; she remembered having heard from someone that Chelsea was a cheap and frankly Bohemian place to live in.
London was not looking its very best on this particularmorning. A green-grey fog enshrouded shops and houses, the Park was an invisible blur and the atmosphere smarted in people's eyes and irritated their throats. Despite the contrariness of the weather, Joan clambered on to the top of the bus, she felt she could not face the inside stuffiness. She was tired and, had she but owned to it, hungry. It was already late afternoon and she had only had a cup of coffee and a bun since her arrival.
As the bus jolted and bumped down Park Lane and then along Knightsbridge, she sat huddled up and miserable on the back seat, the day being well in accord with her mood. She was only dimly aware that they were passing the flat where she and Gilbert had lived, she was more acutely conscious of the couple who sat just in front of her—the man's arm flung round the girl's shoulders, her head very close to his.
Waves of misery closed round Joan. A memory, which had not troubled her for some time, of Gilbert's hands about her and the scent of heliotrope, stirred across her mind. She could feel the hot tears splashing on her ungloved hands, a fit of sobbing gulped at her throat. Lest she should altogether lose control of herself she rose quickly and fumbled her way down the steps. The bus had just reached the corner of Sloane Street. She would go across the Park, she decided, and have her cry out. It was no use going to look for rooms in her present state, no landlady would dream of having her.
Half blinded by her tears and the fog combined, she turned and started to cross the road. Voices yelled at her from either side, a motor car with enormous headlights came straight at her out of the fog. Joan hesitated, if she had stayed quite still the danger would have flashed past her, but she was already too unnerved to judge of what her action should be. As if fascinated by the lights she shut her eyes and moved blindly towards them.
There were more sharp shouts, a great grinding noise of brakes and rushing wheels brought to a sudden pause,then the darkness of black, absolute night surged over and beyond the pain which for a moment had held Joan. She floated out, so it seemed, on to a sea of nothingness, and a great peace settled about her heart.