AYOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o'clock, throwing over her evening's engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else's box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King's arrival.
This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.
She threw down her book and went on to the balcony, where, on this close summer night, she could breathe a little cool air. A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half-hour. Morland was to come at ten. She longed for, yet dreaded, his coming; regretted that she had stayed away from the opera, where, after all, she could have observed the everlasting human comedy. She had dined early; the evening had been interminable; she felt nervous, and raged at her weakness. She was tired, out of harmony with herself, fretfully conscious too of the jarring notes in a room furnished by uneducated people of sudden wealth. The Wolff-Salamons, out of the kindness of their shrewd hearts, had offered the house for the season to the Hardacres, who had accepted the free quarters with profuse expressions of gratitude; which, however, did not prevent Mr. Hardacre from railing at the distance of the house (which was in Holland Park) from his club, or his wife from deprecating to her friends her temporary residence in what she was pleased to term the Ghetto. Nor did the Wolff-Salamons' generosity mitigate the effect of their furniture on Norma's nerves. When Jimmie's phrase came into her head with the suddenness of a mosquito, she could bear the room no longer.
She sat on the balcony and waited for Morland. There at least she was free from the flaring gold and blue, and the full-length portrait of the lady of the house, on which with delicate savagery the eminent painter had catalogued all the shades of her ancestral vulgarity. Perhaps it was this portrait that had brought back the irony of Jimmie's tribute. The poem of her life! She sat with her chin on her palm, thinking bitterly of circumstance. She had never been happy, had grown to disbelieve in so absurd and animal a state. It had always been the same, as far back as she could remember. Her childhood: nurses and governesses—a swift succession of the latter till she began to regard them as remote from her inner life as the shop girl or railway guard with whom she came into casual contact. The life broken by visits abroad to fashionable watering or gambling places where she wandered lonely and proud, neglected by her parents, watching with keen eyes and imperturbable face the frivolities, the vices, the sordidnesses, taking them all in, speculating upon them, resolving some problems unaided and storing up others for future elucidation. Her year at the expensive finishing school in Paris where the smartest daughters of America babbled and chattered of money, money, till the air seemed unfit for woman to breathe unless it were saturated with gold dust. As hers was not, came discontent and overweening ambitions. Yet the purity was not all killed. She remembered her first large dinner-party. The same Lord Wyniard of the unclean scandal had taken her down. He was thirty years older than she, and an unsavoury reputation had reached even her young ears. The man regarded her with the leer of a satyr. She realised with a shudder for the first time the meaning of a phrase she had constantly met with in French novels—“il la dévêtit de ses yeux.” His manner was courtly, his air of breeding perfect; yet he managed to touch her fingers twice, and he sought to lead her on to dubious topics of conversation. She was frightened.
In the drawing-room, seeing him approach, she lost her head, took shelter with her mother, and trembling whispered to her, “Don't let that man come and talk to me again, mother, he's a beast.” She was bidden not to be a fool. The man had a title and twenty thousand a year, and she had evidently made an impression. A week afterwards her mother invited a bishop and his wife and Lord Wyniard to dinner, and Lord Wyniard took Norma down again. And that was her start in the world. She had followed the preordained course till now, with many adventures indeed by the way, but none that could justify the haunting phrase—the poem of her life!
Was the man such a fool, after all? Was it even ignorance on his part? Was it not, rather, wisdom on a lofty plane immeasurably above the commonplaces of ignorance and knowledge? The questions presented themselves to her vaguely. She was filled with a strange unrest, a craving for she knew not what. Yet she would shortly have in her grasp all—or nearly all—that she had aimed at in life. She counted the tale of her future possessions—houses, horses, diamonds, and the like. She seemed to have owned them a thousand years.
The clock in the house chimed ten in a pretentious musical way, which irritated her nerves. The silence after the last of the ten inexorable tinkles fell gratefully. Then she realised that in a minute or two Morland would arrive. Her heart began to beat, and she clasped her hands together in a nervous suspense of which she had not dreamed herself capable. A cab turned the corner of the street, approached with crescendo rattle, and stopped at the house. She saw Morland alight and reach up to pay the cabman. For a silly moment she had a wild impulse to cry to him over the balcony to go away and leave her in peace. She waited until she heard the footman open the front door and admit him, then bracing herself, she entered the drawing-room, looked instinctively in a mirror, and sat down.
She met him cordially enough, returned his glance somewhat defiantly. The sight of him, florid, sleek, faultlessly attired, brought her back within the every-day sphere of dulled sensation. He held her hand long enough for him to say, after the first greeting:
“You can guess what I've come for, can't you?”
“I suppose I do,” she admitted in an off-hand way. “You will find frankness one of my vices. Won't you sit down?”
She motioned him to a chair, and seating herself on a sofa, prepared to listen.
“I've come to ask you to marry me,” said King.
“Well?” she asked, looking at him steadily.
“I want to know how it strikes you,” he continued after a brief pause. “I think you know practically all that I can tell you about myself. I can give you what you want up to about fifteen thousand a year—it will be more when my mother dies. We're decent folk—old county family—I can offer you whatever society you like. You and I have tastes in common, care for the same things, same sort of people. I'm sound in wind and limb—never had a day's illness in my life, so you would n't have to look after a cripple. And I'd give the eyes out of my head to have you; you know that. How does it strike you?”
Norma had averted her glance from him towards the end of his speech, and leaning back was looking intently at her hands in her lap. For the moment she felt it impossible to reply. The words that had formulated themselves in her mind, “I think, Mr. King, the arrangement will be eminently advantageous to both parties,” were too ludicrous in their adequacy to the situation. So she merely sat silent and motionless, regarding her manicured finger-nails, and awaiting another opening. King changed his seat to the sofa, by her side, and leaned forward.
“If you had been a simpler, more unsophisticated girl, Norma, I should have begun differently. I thought it would please you if I put sentiment aside.”
Her head motioned acquiescence.
“But I'm not going to put it aside,” he went on. “It has got its place in the world, even when a man makes a proposal of marriage. And when I say I'm in love with you, that I have been in love with you since the first time I saw you, it's honest truth.”
“Say you have a regard, a high regard, even,” said Norma, still not looking at him, “and I'll believe you.”
“I'm hanged if I will,” said Morland. “I say I'm in love with you.”
Norma suddenly softened. The phrase tickled her ears again—this time pleasantly. The previous half-hour's groping in the dark of herself seemed to have resulted in discovery. She gave him a fleeting smile of mockery.
“Listen,” she said. “If you will be contented with regard, a high regard, on my side, I will marry you. I really like you very much. Will that do?”
“It is all I ask now. The rest will come by and by.”
“I'm not so sure. We had better be perfectly frank with each other from the start, for we shall respect each other far more. Anyhow, if you treat me decently, as I am sure you will, you may be satisfied that I shall carry out my part of the bargain. My bosom friends tell one another that I am worldly and heartless and all that—but I've never lied seriously or broken a promise in my life.”
“Very well. Let us leave it at that,” said Morland. “I suppose your people will have no objection?”
“None whatever,” replied Norma, drily.
“When can I announce our engagement?”
“Whenever you like.”
He took two or three reflective steps about the room and reseated himself on the sofa.
“Norma,” he said softly, bending towards her, “I believe on such occasions there is a sort of privilege accorded to a fellow—may I?”
She glanced at him, hesitated, then proffered her cheek. He touched it with his lips.
The ceremony over, there ensued a few minutes of anticlimax. Norma breathed more freely. There had been no difficulties, no hypocrisies. The mild approach to rapture on Morland's part was perhaps, after all, only a matter of common decency, to be accepted by her as a convention of thescène à faire. So was the kiss. She broke the spell of awkwardness by rising, crossing the room, and turning off an electric pendant that illuminated the full-length portrait on the wall.
“We can't stand Mrs. Wolff-Salamon's congratulations so soon,” she said with a laugh.
Conversation again became possible. They discussed arrangements. King suggested a marriage in the autumn. Norma, with a view to the prolongation of what appealed to her as a novel and desirable phase of existence—maidenhood relieved of the hateful duty of husband-hunting and unclouded by parental disapprobation—pleaded for delay till Christmas. She argued that in all human probability the Parliamentary vacancy at Cosford, the safe seat on which Morland reckoned, would occur in the autumn, and he could not fix the date of an election at his own good pleasure. He must, besides, devote his entire energy to the business; time enough when it was over to think of such secondary matters as weddings, bridal tours, and the setting up of establishments.
“But you have to be considered, Norma,” he said, half convinced.
“My dear Morland,” she replied with a derisive lip, “I should never dream of coming between you and your public career.”
He reflected a moment. “Why should we not get married at once?”
Norma laughed. “You are positively pastoral! No, my dear Morland, that's what the passionate young lover always says to the coy maiden in the play, but if you will remember, it does n't seem to work even there. Besides, you must let me gratify my ambitions. When I was very young, I vowed I would marry an emperor. Then I toned him down into a prince. Later, becoming more practical, I dreamed of a peer. Finally I descended to a Member of Parliament. I can't marry you before you are a Member.”
“You could have had dozens of 'em for the asking, I'm sure,” returned the prospective legislator with a grin. “Take them all round, they're a shoddy lot.”
He yielded eventually to Norma's proposal, alluding, however, with an air of ruefulness, to the infinite months of waiting he would have to endure. Tactfully she switched him off the line of sentiment to that of soberer politics. She put forward the platitude that a Parliamentary life was one of great interest. Morland did not rise even to this level of enthusiasm.
“'Pon my soul, I really don't know why I'm going in for it. I promised old Potter years ago that I would come in when he gave up, and the people down there more or less took it for granted, the duchess included, and so without having thought much of it one way or the other, I find myself caught in a net. It will be a horrible bore. The whole of the session will be one dismal yawn. Never to be certain of sitting down to one's dinner in peace and comfort. Never to know when one will have to rush off at a moment's notice to take part in a confounded division. To have shoals of correspondence on subjects one knows nothing of and cares less for. It will be the life of a sweated tailor. And I, of all people, who like to take things easy! I'm not quite sure whether I'm an idiot or a hero.”
He ended in a short laugh and leaned against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets.
“It would be the sweet and pretty thing for me to say,” remarked Norma, “that in my eyes you will always be heroic.”
“Well, 'pon my soul, I shall be. We 'll see precious little of one another.”
“We 'll have all the more chance of prolonging our illusions,” she replied.
On the whole, however, her conduct towards him was irreproachable. The thaw from her usual iciness to this comparatively harmless raillery flattered the lover's self-esteem. Woman-wise, as every man in the profundity of his vain heart believes himself to be, he not only attributed the change to his own powers of seduction, but interpreted as significant of a yet greater transformation. A man of Morland's type is seldom afflicted with a morbid subtlety of perception; and when he has gained for his own personal use and adornment a woman of singular distinction, he may be readily pardoned for a slight attack of fatuity.
The idyllic hour was brought to a close by the return of Norma's parents. As Norma, shrinking from the vulgarity of the prearranged scene and intolerable maternal coaching in her part, had not informed them of her appointment with Morland, alleging as an excuse for not going to the opera a disinclination to be bored to tears byAida, they were mildly surprised by his presence in the house at so late an hour. In a few words he acquainted them with what had taken place. He formally asked their consent. Mr. Hardacre wrung his hand fervently. Mrs. Hardacre's steel-grey eyes glittered welcome into her family. She turned to her dear child and expressed her heartfelt joy. Norma, submissive to conventional decencies, suffered herself to be kissed. Mother and daughter had given up kissing as a habit for some years past, though they practised it occasionally before strangers. Mr. Hardacre put his arm around her in a diffident way and patted her back, murmuring incoherent wishes for her happiness. Everything to be said and done was effected in a perfectly well-bred manner. Norma spoke very little, regarding the proceedings with an impersonal air of satiric interest. At last Mr. Hardacre suggested to Morland a chat over whisky and soda and a cigar in the library. In unsophisticated circles it is not unusual at such a conjuncture for a girl's friends and relations to afford the lovers some unblushing opportunity of bidding each other a private farewell. Norma, anticipating any such possible though improbable departure from sanity on the part of her parents, made good her escape after shaking hands in an ordinary way with Morland. Mrs. Hardacre followed her upstairs, eager to learn details, which were eventually given with some acidity by her daughter, and the two men retired below.
“My boy,” said Mr. Hardacre, as they parted an hour afterwards, “you will find that Norma has had the training that will make her a damned fine woman.”
JIMMIE PADGATE was the son of a retired commander in the Navy, of irreproachable birth and breeding, of a breezy impulsive disposition, and with a pretty talent as an amateur actor. Finding idleness the root of all boredom, he took to the stage, and during the first week of his first provincial tour fell in love with the leading lady, a fragile waif of a woman of vague upbringing. That so delicate a creature should have to face the miseries of a touring life—the comfortless lodgings, the ill-cooked food, the damp death-traps of dressing-rooms, the long circuitous Sunday train-journeys—roused him to furious indignation. He married her right away, took her incontinently from things theatrical, and found congenial occupation in adoring her. But the hapless lady survived her marriage only long enough to see Jimmie safe into short frocks, and then fell sick and died. The impulsive sailor educated the boy in his own fashion for a dozen years or so, and then he, in his turn, died, leaving his son a small inheritance to be administered by his only brother, an easy-going bachelor in a Government office. This inheritance sufficed to send Jimmie to Harrow, where he began his life-long friendship with Morland King, and to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he learned many useful things beside the method of painting pictures. When he returned to London, his uncle handed him over the hundred or two that remained, and, his duty being accomplished, fell over a precipice in the Alps, and concerned himself no more about his nephew. Then Jimmie set to work to earn his living.
When he snatched the child Aline from the embraces of her tipsy aunt and carried her out into the street, wondering what in the world he should do with her, he was just under thirty years of age. How he had earned a livelihood till then and kept himself free from debt he scarcely knew. When he obtained a fair price for a picture, he deposited a lump sum with his landlord in respect of rent in advance, another sum with the keeper of the little restaurant where he ate his meals, and frittered the rest away among his necessitous friends. In the long intervals between sales, he either went about penniless or provided himself with pocket money by black and white or other odd work that comes in the young artist's way. His residence at that time consisted in a studio and a bedroom in Camden Town. His wants were few, his hopes were many. He loved his art, he loved the world. His optimistic temperament brought him smiles from all those with whom he came in contact—even from dealers, when he wasted their time in expounding to them the commercial value of an unmarketable picture. He was quite happy, quite irresponsible. When soberer friends reproached him for his hand-to-mouth way of living, he argued that if he scraped to-day he would probably spread the butter thick tomorrow, thus securing the average, the golden mean, which was the ideal of their respectability. As for success, that elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the man who did not enjoy the humour of failure never deserved to succeed.
But when he had rescued Aline from the limbo over the small apothecary's shop, as thoughtlessly and as gallantly as his father before him had rescued the delicate lady from the trials of theatrical vagabondage, he found himself face to face with a perplexing problem. That first night he had risen from an amorphous bed he had arranged for himself on the studio floor, and entered his own bedroom on tiptoe, and looked with pathetic helplessness on the tiny child asleep beneath his bedclothes. If it had been a boy, he would have had no particular puzzle. A boy could have been stowed in a corner of the studio, where he could have learned manners and the fear of God and the way of smiling at adversity. He would have profited enormously, as Jimmie felt assured, by his education. But with a girl it was vastly different. An endless vista of shadowy, dreamy, delicate possibilities perplexed him. He conceived women as beings ethereal, with a range of exquisite emotions denied to masculine coarseness. Even the Rue Bonaparte had not destroyed his illusion, and he still attributed to the fair Maenads of the Bal des Quatre-z' Arts the lingering fragrance of the original Psyche. Of course Jimmie was a fool, as ten years afterwards Norma had decided; but this view of himself not occurring to him, he had to manage according to his lights. Here was this mysterious embryo goddess entirely dependent on him. No corner of the studio and rough-and-tumble discipline for her. She must sleep on down and be covered with silk; the airs of heaven must not visit her cheek too roughly; the clatter of the brazen world must not be allowed to deafen her to her own sweet inner harmonies. Jimmie was sorely perplexed.
His charwoman next morning could throw no light on the riddle. She had seven children of her own, four of them girls, and they had to get along the best way they could. She was of opinion that if let alone and just physicked when she had any complaint, Aline would grow up of her own accord. Jimmie said that this possibility had not struck him, but doubtless the lady was right. Could she tell him how many times a day a little girl ought to be fed and what she was to eat? The charwoman's draft upon her own family experiences enlightened Jimmie so far that he put a sovereign into her hand to provide a dinner for her children. After that he consulted her no more. It was an expensive process.
Meanwhile it was obvious that a studio and one bedroom would not be sufficient accommodation, and Jimmie, greatly daring, took a house. He also engaged a resident housekeeper for himself and a respectable cat for Aline, and when he had settled down, after having spent every penny he could scrape together on furniture, began to wonder how he could pay the rent. A month or two before he would have as soon thought of buying a palace in Park Lane as renting a house in St. John's Wood—a cheap, shabby little house, it is true; but still a house, with drawing-room, dining-room, bedrooms, and a studio built over the space where once the garden tried to smile. He wandered through it with a wonderment quite as childish as that of Aline, who had helped him to buy the furniture. But how was he ever going to pay the rent?
After a time he ceased asking the question. The ravens that fed Elijah provided him with the twenty quarterly pieces of gold. Picture-dealers of every hue and grade supplied him with the wherewithal to live. In those early days he penetrated most of the murky byways of his art—alleys he would have passed by with pinched nose a year before, when an empty pocket and an empty stomach concerned himself alone. Now, when the money for the last picture had gone, and no more was forthcoming by way of advance on royalties on plates, and the black and white market was congested, he did amazing things. He copied old Masters for a red-faced, beery print-seller in Frith Street, who found some mysterious market for them. The price can be gauged by the fact that years afterwards Jimmie recognised one of his own copies in an auction room, and heard it knocked down as a genuine Velasquez for eleven shillings and sixpence. He also painted oil landscapes for a dealer who did an immense trade in this line, selling them to drapers and fancy-warehousemen, who in their turn retailed them to an art-loving public, framed in gold, at one and eleven pence three farthings; and the artist's rate of payment was five shillings a dozen—panels supplied, but not the paint. To see Jimmie attack these was the child Aline's delight. In after years she wept in a foolish way over the memory. He would do half a dozen at a time: first dash in the foregrounds, either meadows or stretches of shore, then wash in bold, stormy skies, then a bit of water, smooth or rugged according as it was meant to represent pool or sea; then a few vigorous strokes would put in a ship and a lighthouse on one panel, a tree and a cow on a second, a woman and a cottage on a third. And all the time, as he worked at lightning speed, he would laugh and joke with the child, who sat fascinated by the magic with which each mysterious mass of daubs and smudges grew into a living picture under his hand. When his invention was at a loss, he would call upon her to suggest accessories; and if she cried out “windmill,” suddenly there would spring from under the darting brush-point a mill with flapping sails against the sky. Now and again in his hurry Jimmie would make a mistake, and Aline would shriek with delight:
“Why, Jimmie, that's a cow!”
And sure enough, horned and uddered, and with casual tail, a cow was wandering over the ocean, mildly speculating on the lighthouse. Then Jimmie would roar with laughter, and he would tether the cow to a buoy and put in a milkmaid in a boat coming to milk the cow, and at Aline's breathless suggestion, a robber with a bow and arrow shooting the unnatural animal from the lighthouse top. Thus he would waste an hour elaborating the absurdity, finishing it off beautifully so that it should be worthy of a place on Aline's bedroom wall.
The months and years passed, and Jimmie found himself, if not on the highroad to fortune, at least relieved of the necessity of frequenting the murky byways aforesaid. He even acquired a little reputation as a portrait painter, much to his conscientious, but comical despair. “I am taking people's money under false pretences,” he would say. “I am an imaginative painter. I can't do portraits. Your real portrait painter can jerk the very soul out of a man and splash it on to his face. I can't. Why do they come to me to be photographed, when Brown, Jones, or Robinson would give them a portrait? Why can't they buy my subject-pictures which are good? In taking their money I am a mercenary, unscrupulous villain!” Indeed, if Aline had not been there to keep him within the bounds of sanity, his Quixotism might have led him to send his clients to Brown or Jones, where they could get better value for their money. But Aline was there, rising gradually from the little child into girlhood, and growing in grace day by day. After all, the charwoman seemed to be right. The tender plant, left to itself, thrived, shot up apparently of its own accord, much to Jimmie's mystification. It never occurred to him that he was the all in all of her training—her mother, father, nurse, teacher, counsellor, example. Everything she was susceptible of being taught by a human being, he taught her—from the common rudiments when she was a little child to the deeper things of literature and history when she was a ripening maiden. Her life was bound up with his. Her mind took the prevailing colour of his mind as inevitably as the grasshopper takes the green of grass or the locust the grey-brown of the sand. But Jimmie in his simple way regarded the girl's sweet development as a miracle of spontaneous growth.
Yet Aline on her part instinctively appreciated the child in Jimmie, and from very early years assumed a quaint attitude of protection in common every-day matters. From the age of twelve she knew the exact state of his financial affairs, and gravely deliberated with him over items of special expenditure; and when she was fourteen she profited by a change in housekeepers to take upon herself the charge of the household. Her unlimited knowledge of domestic science was another thing that astounded Jimmie, who to the end of his days would have cheerfully given two shillings a pound for potatoes. And thus, while adoring Jimmie and conscious that she owed him the quickening of the soul within her, she became undisputed mistress of her small material domain, and regarded him as a kind of godlike baby.
At last there came a memorable day. According to a custom five or six years old, Jimmie and Aline were to spend New Year's Eve with some friends, the Frewen-Smiths.
He was a rising architect who had lately won two or three important competitions and had gradually been extending his scale of living. The New Year's Eve party was to be a much more elaborate affair than usual. Aline had received a beautifully printed card of invitation, with “Dancing” in the corner. She looked through her slender wardrobe. Not a frock could she find equal to such a festival. And as she gazed wistfully at the simple child's finery laid out upon her bed, a desire that had dawned vaguely some time before and had week by week broadened into craving, burst into the full blaze of a necessity. She sat down on her bed and puckered her young brows, considering the matter in all its aspects. Then, with her sex's guilelessness, she went down to the studio, where Jimmie was painting, and put her arms round his neck. Did he think she could get a new frock for Mrs. Frewen-Smith's party?
“My dear child,” said Jimmie in astonishment, “what an idiotic question!”
“But I want really a nice one,” said Aline, coaxingly.
“Then get one, dear,” said Jimmie, swinging round on his stool, so as to look at her.
“But I'd like you to give me this one as a present. I don't want it to be like the others that I help myself to and you know nothing about—although they all are presents, if it comes to that—I want you to give me this one specially.”
Jimmie laid down palette and mahl-stick and brush, and from a letter-case in his pocket drew out three five-pound notes.
“Will this buy one?”
The girl's eyes filled with tears. “Oh, you are silly, Jimmie,” she cried. “A quarter of it will do.”
She took one of the notes, kissed him, and ran out of the studio, leaving Jimmie wondering why the female sex were so prone to weeping. The next day he saw a strange woman established at the dining-room table. He learned that it was a dressmaker. For the next week an air of mystery hung over the place. The girl, in her neat short frock and with her soft brown hair tied with a ribbon, went about her household duties as usual; but there was a subdued light in her eyes that Jimmie noticed, but could not understand. Occasionally he enquired about the new frock. It was progressing famously, said Aline. It was going to be a most beautiful frock. He would have seen nothing like it since he was born.
“Vanity, thy name is little girls,” he laughed, pinching her chin.
On the evening of the 31st of December Jimmie, in his well-worn evening suit, came down to the dining-room, and for the first time in his life waited for Aline. He sat down by the fire with a book. The cab that had been ordered drew up outside. It was a remarkable thing for Aline to be late. After a while the door opened, and a voice said, “I am ready.” Jimmie rose, turned round, and for a moment stared stupidly at the sight that met his eyes. It was Aline certainly, but a new Aline, quite a different Aline from the little girl he had known hitherto. Her brown hair was done up in a mysterious manner on the top of her head, and the tip of a silver-mounted tortoise-shell comb (a present, she afterwards confessed, from Constance Deering, who was in her secret) peeped coquettishly from the coils. The fashionably-cut white evening dress showed her neck and shoulders and pretty round arms, and displayed in a manner that was a revelation the delicate curves of her young figure. A little gold locket that Jimmie had given her rose and fell on her bosom. She met his stare in laughing, blushing defiance, and whisked round so as to present a side view of the costume. The astonishing thing had a train.
“God bless my soul!” cried Jimmie. “It never entered my head!”
“What?”
“That you're a young woman, that you're grown up, that we'll have all the young men in the place falling in love with you, that you'll be getting married, and that I'm becoming a decrepit old fogey. Well, God bless my soul!”
She came up and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.
“You think it becoming, don't you, Jimmie?”
“Becoming! Why, it's ravishing! It's irresistible! Do you mean to say that you got all that, gloves and shoes and everything, out of a five-pound note?”
She nodded.
“Good Lord!” said Jimmie in astonishment.
In this manner came realisation of the fact that the tiny child he had undressed and put to sleep in his own bed ten years before had grown into a woman. The shock brought back some of the old perplexities, and created for a short while an odd shyness in his dealings with her. He treated her deferentially, regarded apologetically the mean viands on which he forced this fresh-winged goddess to dine, went out and wasted his money on adornments befitting her rank, and behaved with such pathetic foolishness that Aline, crying and laughing, threatened to run away and earn her living as a nursery-maid if he did not amend his conduct. Whereupon there was a very touching scene, and Jimmie's undertaking to revert to his previous brutality put their relations once more on a sound basis; but all the same there stole into Jimmie's environment a subtle grace which the sensitive in him was quick to perceive. Its fragrance revived the tender grace of a departed day, before he had taken Aline—a day that had ended in a woeful flight to Paris, where he had arrived just in time to follow through the streets a poor little funeral procession to a poor little grave-side in the cemetery of Bagneux. Her name was Sidonie Bourdain, and she was a good girl and had loved Jimmie with all her heart.
The tender grace was that of March violets. The essence of a maid's springtide diffused itself through the house, and springtide began to bud again in the man's breast. It was a strange hyperphysical transfusion of quickening sap. His jesting pictured himself as of a sudden grown hoary, the potential father of a full-blown woman, two or three years short of grandfatherdom. But these were words thrown off from the very lightness of a mood, and vanishing like bubbles in the air. Deep down worked the craving of the man still young for love and romance and the sweet message in a woman's eyes. It was a gentle madness—utterly unsuspected by its victim—but a madness such as the god first inflicts upon him whom he desires to drive to love's destruction. In the middle of it all, while Aline and himself were finding a tentative footing on the newly established basis of their relationship, the ironical deity took him by the hand and led him into the cold and queenly presence of Norma Hardacre. .
After that Jimmie fell back into his old ways with Aline, and the Great Frock Episode was closed.
ALINE sat in the studio, the picture of housewifely concern, mending Jimmie's socks. It was not the unoffending garments that brought the expression into her face, but her glance at the old Dutch clock—so old and crotchety that unless it were tilted to one side it would not consent to go—whose hands had come with an asthmatic whir to the hour of eleven. And Jimmie had not yet come down to breakfast. She had called him an hour ago. His cheery response had been her sanction for putting the meal into preparation, and now the bacon would be uneatable. She sighed. Taking care of Jimmie was no light responsibility. Not that he would complain; far from it. He would eat the bacon raw or calcined if she set it before him. But that would not be for his good, and hence the responsibility. In slipping from her grasp and doing the things he ought not to do, he was an eel or a twelve-year-old schoolboy. Last night, for instance, instead of finishing off some urgent work for an art periodical, he had assured her in his superlative manner that it was of no consequence, and had wasted his evening with her at the Earl's Court Exhibition. It had been warm and lovely, and the band and the bright crowd had set her young pulses throbbing, and they had sat at a little table, and Jimmie had given her some celestial liquid which she had sucked through a straw, and altogether, to use her own unsophisticated dialect, it had been perfectly heavenly. But it was wrong of Jimmie to have sacrificed himself for her pleasure, and to have deceived her into accepting it. For at three or four o'clock she had heard him tiptoeing softly past her door on his way to bed, and the finished work she had found on his table this morning betrayed his occupation. Even the consolation of scolding him for oversleep and a spoiled breakfast was thus denied. She spread out her hand in the sock so as to gauge the extent of a hole, and, contemplating it, sighed again.
The studio was a vast room distempered in bluish grey, and Aline, sitting solitary at the far end, in the line of a broad quivering beam of light that streamed through a lofty window running the whole width of the north-east side, looked like a little brown saint in a bare conventual hall. For an ascetic simplicity was the studio's key-note. No curtains, draperies, screens, Japaneseries, no artistic scheme of decoration, no rare toys of furniture filled the place with luxurious inspiration. Here and there about the walls hung a sketch by a brother artist; of his own unsold pictures and studies some were hung, others stacked together on the floor. An old, rusty, leather drawing-room suite distributed about the studio afforded sitting accommodation. There was the big easel bearing the subject-picture on which he now was at work, with a smaller easel carrying the study by its side. On the model-stand a draped lay figure sprawled grotesquely. A long deal table was the untidy home of piles of papers, books, colours, brushes, artistic properties. A smaller table at the end where Aline sat was laid for breakfast. It was one of Jimmie's eccentricities to breakfast in the studio. The dining-room for dinner—he yielded to the convention; for lunch, perhaps; for breakfast, no. All his intimate life had been passed in the studio; the prim little drawing-room he scarcely entered half-a-dozen times in the year.
Aline was contemplating the hole in the sock when the door opened. She sprang to her feet, advanced a step, and then halted with a little exclamation.
“Oh, it's you!”
“Yes. Are you disappointed?” asked the smiling youth who had appeared instead of the expected Jimmie.
“I can get over it. How are you, Tony?”
Mr. Anthony Merewether gave her the superfluous assurance that he was in good health. He had the pleasant boyish face and clean-limbed figure of the young Englishman upon whom cares sit lightly. Aline resumed her work demurely. The young man seated himself near by.
“How is Jimmie?”
“Whom are you calling 'Jimmie'?” asked Aline. “Mr. Padgate, if you please.”
“You call him Jimmie.”
“I've called him so ever since I could speak. I think it was one of the first three words I learned. When you can say the same, you can call him Jimmie.”
“Well, how is Mr. Padgate?” the snubbed youth asked with due humility.
“You can never tell how a man is before breakfast. Why are n't you at work?”
He bowed to her sagacity, and in answer to her question explained the purport of his visit. He was going to spend the day sketching up the river. Would she put on her hat and come with him?
“A fine lot of sketching you'd do, if I did,” said Aline.
The young man vowed with fervour that as soon as he had settled down to a view he would work furiously and would not exchange a remark with her.
“Which would be very amusing for me,” retorted Aline. “No, I can't come. I'm far too busy. I've got to hunt up a model for the new picture.”
Tony leant back in his chair, dispirited, and began to protest. She laughed at his woeful face, and half yielding, questioned him about trains. He overwhelmed her with a rush of figures, then paused to give her time to recover. His eyes wandered to the breakfast-table, where lay Jimmie's unopened correspondence. One letter lay apart from the others. Tony took it up idly.
“Here's a letter come to the wrong house.”
“No; it is quite right,” said Aline.
“Who is David Rendell, Esquire?”
“Mr. Rendell is a friend of Jimmie's, I believe.”
“I have never heard of him. What's he like?”
“I don't know. Jimmie never speaks of him,” replied Aline.
“That's odd.”
The young man threw the letter on the table and returned to the subject of the outing. She must accompany him. He felt a perfect watercolour working itself up within him. One of those dreamy bits of backwater. He had a title for it already, “The Heart of Summer.” The difference her presence in the punt would make to the picture would be that between life and deadness.
The girl fluttered a shy, pleased glance at him. But she loved to tease; besides, had she not but lately awakened to the sweet novelty of her young womanhood?
“Perhaps Jimmie won't let me go.”
Tony sprang to his feet. “Jimmie won't let you go!” he exclaimed in indignant echo. “Did he ever deny you a pleasure since you were born?”
Her eyes sparkled at his tribute to the adored one's excellences. “That's just where it is, you see, Tony. His very goodness to me won't let me do things sometimes.”
The servant hurried in with the breakfast-tray and the news that the master was coming down. Aline anxiously inspected the bacon. To her relief it was freshly cooked. In a minute or two a voice humming an air was heard outside, and Jimmie entered, smilingly content with existence.
“Hallo, Tony, what are you doing here, wasting the morning light? Have some breakfast? Why haven't you laid a place for him?”
Tony declined the invitation, and explained his presence. Jimmie rubbed his hands.
“A day on the river! The very thing for Aline. It will do her good.”
“I did n't say I was going, Jimmie.”
“Not going? Rubbish. Put on your things and be off at once.”
“How can I until I have given you your breakfast? And then there's the model—you would never be able to engage her by yourself. And you must have her to-morrow.”
“I know I'm helpless, dear, but I can engage a model.”
“And waste your time. Besides, you won't be able to find the address.”
“There are cab-horses, dear, with unerring instinct.”
“Your breakfast is getting cold, Jimmie,” said Aline, not condescending to notice the outrage of her economic principles.
Eventually Jimmie had his way. Tony Merewether was summarily dismissed, but bidden to return in an hour's time, when Aline would be graciously pleased to be ready. She poured out Jimmie's coffee, and sat at the side of the table, watching him eat. He turned to his letters, picked up the one addressed to “David Rendell.” Aline noticed a shade of displeasure cross his face.
“Who is Mr. Rendell, Jimmie?” asked Aline.
“A man I know, dear,” he replied, putting the envelope in his pocket. He went on with his breakfast meditatively for a few moments, then opened his other letters. He threw a couple of bills across the table. His face had regained its serenity.
“See that these ill-mannered people are paid, Aline.”
“What with, dear?”
“Money, my child, money. What!” he exclaimed, noting a familiar expression on her face. “Are we running short? Send them telegrams to say we'll pay next week. Something is bound to come in by then.”
“Mrs. Bullingdon ought to send the cheque for her portrait,” said Aline.
“Of course she will. And there's something due from Hyam. What a thing it is to have great expectations! Here's one from Renshaw,” he said, opening another letter. “'Dear Padgate'—Dear Padgate!” He put his hands on the table and looked across at Aline. “Now, what on earth can I have done to offend him? I've been 'Dear Jimmie' for the last twelve years.”
Aline shook her young head pityingly. “Don't you know yet that it is always 'Dear Padgate' when they want to borrow money of you?”
Jimmie glanced at the letter and then across the table again.
“Dear me,” he said thoughtfully. “Your knowledge of the world at your tender age is surprising. He does want money. Poor old chap! It is really quite touching. 'For the love of God lend me four pounds ten to carry me on to the end of the quarter.'”
“That's two months off. Mr. Renshaw will have to be more economical than usual,” said Aline, drily. “I am afraid he drinks dreadfully, Jimmie.”
“Hush, dear!” he said, becoming grave. “A man's infirmities are his infirmities, and we are not called upon to be his judges. How much have we in the house altogether?” he asked with a sudden return to his bright manner.
“Ten pounds three and sixpence.”
“Why, that's a fortune. Of course we can help Renshaw. Wire him his four pounds ten when you go out.”
“But, Jimmie——” expostulated this royal person's minister of finance.
“Do what I say, my dear,” said Jimmie, quietly.
That note in his voice always brought about instant submission, fetched her down from heights of pitying protection to the prostrate humility of a little girl saying “Yes, Jimmie,” as to a directing providence. She did not know from which of the two positions, the height or the depth, she loved him the more. As a matter of fact, the two ranges of emotion were perfect complements one of the other, the sex in her finding satisfaction of its two imperious cravings, to shelter and to worship.
The Renshaw incident was closed, locked up as it were in her heart by the little snap of the “Yes, Jimmie.” One or two other letters were discussed gaily. The last to be opened was a note from Mrs. Deering. “Come to lunch on Sunday and bring Aline. I am asking your friend Norma Hardacre.” Aline clapped her hands. She had been longing to see that beautiful Miss Hardacre again. Of course Jimmie would go? He smiled.
“Another unconscious sitting for the portrait,” he said. His glance wandered to a strainer that stood with its face to the wall, at a further end of the room, and he became absent-minded. Lately he had been dreaming a boy's shadowy dreams, too sweet as yet for him to seek to give them form in his waking hours. A warm touch on his hand brought him back to diurnal things. It was the coffee-pot held by Aline.
“I have asked you twice if you would have more coffee,” she laughed.
“I suppose I'm the happiest being in existence,” he said irrelevantly.
Aline poured out the coffee. “You have n't got much to make you happy, poor dear!” she remarked, when the operation was concluded.
His retort was checked by a violent peal at the front door-bell and a thundering knock.
“That's Morland,” cried Jimmie. “He is like the day of doom—always heralds his approach by an earthquake.”
Morland it was, in riding tweeds, a whip in his hand. He pointed an upbraiding finger at the half-eaten breakfast. The sloth of these painters! Aline flew to the loved one's protection. Jimmie had not gone to bed till four. The poor dear had to sleep.
“I did n't get to bed till four, either,” said Morland, with the healthy, sport-loving man's contempt for people who require sleep, “but I was up at eight and was riding in the Park at nine. Then I thought I'd come up here. I've got some news for you.”
Aline escaped. Morland's air of health and prosperity overpowered her. She did not dare whisper detraction of him to Jimmie, in whose eyes he was incomparable, but to Tony Merewether she had made known her wish that he did not look always so provokingly clean, so eternally satisfied with himself. All the colour of his mind had gone into his face, was her uncharitable epigram. Aline, it will be observed, saw no advantage in a tongue perpetually tipped with honey.
“What is your news?” asked Jimmie, as soon as they were alone.
“I have done it at last,” said Morland.
“What?”
“Proposed. I'm engaged. I'm going to be married.”
Jimmie's honest face beamed pleasure. He wrung Morland's hand. The best news he had heard for a long time. When had he taken the plunge into the pool of happiness?
“Last night.”
“And you have come straight to tell me? It is like you. I am touched, it is good to know you carry me in your heart like that.”
Morland laughed. “My dear old Jimmie—”
“I am so glad. I never suspected anything of the kind. Well, she's an amazingly lucky young woman whoever she is. When can I have a timid peep at the divinity?”
“Whenever you like—why, don't you know who it is?”
“Lord, no, man; how should I?”
“It's Norma Hardacre.”
“Norma Hardacre!” The echo came from Jimmie as from a hollow cave, and was followed by a silence no less cavernous. The world was suddenly reduced to an empty shell, black, meaningless.
“Yes,” said Morland, with a short laugh. He carefully selected, cut, and lit a cigar, then turned his back and examined the half-finished picture. He felt the Briton's shamefacedness in the novelty of the position of affianced lover. The echo that in Jimmie's ears had sounded so forlorn was to him a mere exclamation of surprise. His solicitude as to the cigar and his inspection of the picture saved him by lucky chance from seeing Jimmie's face, which wore the blank, piteous look of a child that has had its most cherished possession snatched out of its hand and thrown into the fire. Such episodes in life cannot be measured by time as it is reckoned in the physical universe. To Jimmie, standing amid the chaos of his dreams, indefinite hours seemed to have passed since he had spoken. For indefinite hours he seemed to grope towards reconstruction. He lived intensely in the soul's realm, where time is not, was swept through infinite phases of emotion; finally awoke to a consciousness of renunciation, full and generous. Perhaps a minute and a half had elapsed. He crossed swiftly to Morland and clapped him on the shoulder.
“The woman among all women I could have wished for you.”
His voice quavered a little; but Morland, turning round, saw nothing in Jimmie's eyes but the honest gladness he had taken for granted he should find there. The earnest scrutiny he missed. He laughed again.
“There are not many in London to touch her,” he said in his self-satisfied way.
“Is there one?”
“You seem more royalist than—well, than Morland King,” said the happy lover, chuckling at his joke. “I wish I had the artist's command of superlatives as you have, Jimmie. It would come in deuced handy sometimes. Now if, for instance, you wanted to describe the reddest thing that ever was, you would find some hyperbolic image for it, whereas I could only say it was damned red. See what I mean?”
“It does n't matter what you say, but what you feel,” said Jimmie. “Perhaps we hyperbolic people fritter away emotions in the mere frenzy of expressing them. The mute man often has deeper feelings.”
“Oh, I'm not going to set up as an unerupted volcano,” laughed Morland. “I'm only the average man that has got the girl he has set his heart on—and of course I think her in many ways a paragon, otherwise I should n't have set my heart on her. There are plenty to pick from, God knows. And they let you know it too, by Jove. You're lucky enough to live out of what is called Society, so you can't realise how they shy themselves at you. Sometimes one has to be simply a brute and dump 'em down hard. That's what I liked about Norma Hardacre. She required no dumping.”
“I should think not,” said Jimmie.
“There's one thing that pleases me immensely,” Morland remarked, “and that is the fancy she has taken for you. It's genuine. I've never heard her talk of any one else as she does of you. She is not given to gush, as you may have observed.”
“It's a very deep pleasure to me to hear it,” said Jimmie, looking bravely in the eyes of the happy man. “My opinion of Miss Hardacre I have told you already.”
Morland waved his cigar as a sign of acceptance of the tribute to the lady.
“I was thinking of myself,” he said. “There are a good many men I shall have to drop more or less when I'm married. Norma would n't have 'em in the house. There are others that will have to be on probation. Now I shouldn't have liked you to be on probation—to run the risk of my wife not approving of you—caring to see you—you know what I mean. But you're different from anybody else, Jimmie. I'm not given to talking sentiment—but we've grown up together—and somehow, in spite of our being thrown in different worlds, you have got to be a part of my life. There!” he concluded with a sigh of relief, putting on his hat and holding out his hand, “I've said it!”
The brightening of Jimmie's eyes gave token of a heart keenly touched. Deeply rooted indeed must be the affection that could have impelled Morland to so unusual a demonstration of feeling. His nature was as responsive as a harp set in the wind. His counterpart in woman would have felt the tears well into her eyes. A man is allowed but a breath, a moisture, that makes the eyes bright. Morland had said the final word of sentiment; equally, utterly true of himself. Morland was equally a part of his life. It were folly to discuss the reasons. Loyal friendships between men are often the divinest of paradoxes.
The touch upon Jimmie's heart was magnetic. It soothed pain. It set free a flood of generous emotion, even thanksgiving that he was thus allowed vicarious joy in infinite perfections. It was vouchsafed him to be happy in the happiness of two dear to him. This much he said to Morland, with what intensity of meaning the fortunate lover was a myriad leagues from suspecting.
“I'll see you safely mounted,” said Jimmie, opening the studio door. Then suddenly like a cold wind a memory buffeted him. He shut the door again.
“I forgot. I have a letter for you. It came this morning.”
Morland took the letter addressed to “David Rendell” which Jimmie drew from his pocket, and uttered an angry exclamation.
“I thought this infernal business was over and done with.”
He tore open the envelope, read the contents, then tilted his hat to the back of his head, and sitting down on one of the dilapidated straight-backed chairs of the leather suite, looked at Jimmie in great perplexity. In justice to the man it must be said that anger had vanished.
“I suppose you know what these letters mean that you have been taking in for me?”
“I have never permitted myself to speculate,” said Jimmie. “You asked me to do you a very great service. It was a little one. You are not a man to do anything dishonourable. I concluded you had your reasons, which it would have been impertinent of me to inquire into.”
“It's the usual thing,” said Morland, with a self-incriminatory shrug. “A girl.”
“A love affair was obvious.”
Morland spat out an exclamation of impatient disgust for himself and rose to his feet.
“Heaven knows how it began—she was poor and lonely—almost a lady—and she had beauty and manners and that sort of thing above her class.”
“They always have,” said Jimmie, with a pained expression. “You need n't tell me the story. It's about the miserablest on God's earth, is n't it now?”
“I suppose so. Upon my soul, I'm not a beast, Jimmie!”
The unwonted rarefied air of sentiment that he had been breathing for the last twelve hours had, as it were, intoxicated him. Had the letter reached him the day before, he would have left the story connected with it in the cold-storage depository where men are wont to keep such things. No one would have dreamed of its existence. But now he felt an exaggerated remorse, a craving for confession, and yet he made the naked remorseful human's instinctive clutch at palliatives.
“Upon my soul, I'm not a beast, Jimmie. I swear I loved her at first. You know what it is. You yourself loved a little girl in Paris—you told me about it—did n't you?”
Jimmie set his teeth, and said, “Yes.”
Morland went on.
“Some women have ways with them, you know. They turn you into one of those toy thermometers—you hold the bulb, and the spirit in it rises and bubbles. She got hold of me that way—I bubbled, I suppose—it was n't her fault, she was sweet and innocent. It was her nature. You artistic people call the damned thing a temperament, I believe. Anyhow I was in earnest at the beginning. Then—one always does—I found it was only a passing fancy.”
“And like a passing cab it has splashed you with mud. How does the matter stand now?”
“Read this,” said Morland, handing him the letter.
“Dearest,” it ran, “the time is coming when you can be very good to me. Jenny.” That was all. Jimmie, holding the paper in front of him, looked up distressfully at Morland.
“'The time is coming when you can be very good to me.' How confoundedly pathetic! Poor little girl! Oh, damn it, Morland, you are going to be good to her, are n't you?”
“I'll do all I can. Of course I'll do all I can. I tell you I'm not a beast. Heaps of other men would n't care a hang about it. They would tell her to go to the devil. I'm not that sort.”
“I know you're not,” said Jimmie.
Morland lit another cigar with the air of a man whose virtues deserve some reward.
“The letter can only have one interpretation. Have you known of it?”
“Never dreamed of it.”
“Was there any question of marriage?”
“None whatever. Difference of position and all the rest of it. She quite understood. In fact, it was like your Quartier Latin affair.”
Jimmie winced. “It was n't the Quartier Latin—and I was going to marry her—only she died before—oh, don't mind me, Morland. What's going to be done now?” Morland shrugged his shoulders again, having palliated himself into a more normal condition. His conscience, to speak by the book, was clothed and in its right mind.
“It's infernally hard lines it should come just at this time. You see, I've heaps of things to think about. My position—Parliament—I'm going to contest Cosford in the autumn. If the constituency gets hold of any scandal, I'm ruined. You know the Alpine heights of morality of a British constituency—and there's always some moral scavenger about. And then there's Norma—”
“Yes, there's Norma,” said Jimmie, seriously.
“It's unpleasant, you see. If she should know—”
“It would break her heart,” said Jimmie.
Morland started and looked at Jimmie stupidly, his mental faculties for the second paralysed, incapable of grappling with the idea. Was it scathing sarcasm or sheer idiocy? Recovering his wits, he realised that Jimmie was whole-heartedly, childishly sincere. With an effort he controlled a rebellious risible muscle at the corner of his lip.
“It would give her great pain,” he said in grave acquiescence.
“It's a miserable business,” said Jimmie.
Morland paced the studio. Suddenly he stopped.
“Should there be any unpleasantness over this, can I rely on your help to pull me through?”
“You know you can,” said Jimmie.
Morland looked relieved.
“May I write a note?”
Jimmie pointed to a corner of the long deal table.
“You'll find over there all the materials for mending a broken butterfly,” he said sadly.