CONNIE DEERING was dining that Sunday evening with some friends at the Carlton, an engagement which had caused her to decline an invitation to the Hardacres'. The prospect, however, for once did not appeal to her pleasure-loving soul. She sighed as she stepped into her brougham, and wished as she drove along that she were sitting at home in the tea-gown and tranquillity harmonious with a subdued frame of mind. Problems worried her. What had passed between Norma and Jimmie? Ordinary delicacy had forbidden her questioning, and Jimmie had admitted her no further into his confidence. In that she was disappointed. When a sentimental woman asks for a kiss, she expects something more. She was also half ashamed of herself for asking him to kiss her. A waspish little voice within proclaimed that it was not so much for Jimmie's sake as for her own; that her lifelong fondness for Jimmie had unconsciously slid on to the rails that lead to absurdity. She drew her satin cloak tightly around her as if to suffocate the imp, and returned to her speculation. Something had happened—of that there was no doubt—something serious, agitating. It could be read on both their faces. Had she, who alone knew the hearts of each, done right in bringing them together? What had been her object? Even if a marriage between them had not been too ludicrous for contemplation, it would not have been fair towards her cousin Morland to encourage this intrigue. She vowed she had been a little fool to meddle with such gunpowdery matters. And yet she had acted in all innocence for Jimmie's sake. It was right for Norma to be friends with him again. It was monstrous he should suffer. If he could not marry the woman he loved, at least he could have the happiness of knowing himself no longer a blackened wretch in her eyes. But then, Norma had taken it into her head to love him too. Had she done right? Her thoughts flew round in a vicious circle of irritatingly small circumference, occasionally flying off on the tangent of the solicited kiss.
The first person she met in the vestibule of the Carlton was Theodore Weever. They exchanged greetings, discovered they belonged to the same party. She had come across him frequently of late in the houses that Norma and herself had as common ground. In a general way she liked him; since Norma had told her of his view of the scandal, he had risen high in her estimation; but to-night he seemed to be a link in the drama that perplexed her, and she shrank from him, as from something uncanny. He sat next her at table. His first words were of Jimmie.
“I was buying pictures yesterday from a friend of yours—Padgate.”
In her pleasure Connie forgot her nervousness.
“Why, he never told me.”
“He could scarcely have had time unless he telephoned or telegraphed.”
“He was at my house this afternoon,” she explained.
He carefully peppered his oysters, then turned his imperturbable face towards her.
“So was Miss Hardacre.”
“How do you know that?” she cried, startled.
“I was calling in Devonshire Place. Her mother told me. I am not necromantic.”
His swift uniting of the two names perturbed her. She swallowed her oysters unreflectingly, thus missing one of her little pleasures in life, for she adored oysters.
“Which pictures did you buy?” she asked.
“The one I coveted was not for sale. It was a portrait of Miss Hardacre. I don't think he meant me to see it, but I came upon him unawares. Have you seen it?” They discussed the portrait for a while. Connie repeated her former question. Weever replied that he had bought the picture of the faun looking at the vision of things to come, and the rejected Italian study. Connie expressed her gladness. They contained Jimmie's best work.
“Very fine,” Weever admitted, “but just failing in finish. Nothing like the portrait.”
There was an interval. Connie exchanged remarks with old Colonel Pawley, her right-hand neighbour, who expatiated on the impossibility of consuming Bortsch soup with satisfaction outside Russia. The soup removed, Weever resumed the conversation.
“Have you read your Lamartine thoroughly? I have. I was sentimental once. He says somewhere,Aimer pour être aimé, c'est de l'homme; mais aimer pour aimer, c'est presque de l'ange. I remember where it comes from. It was said of Cecco in 'Graziella.' Our friend Padgate reminds me of Cecco. Do you care much about your cousin Morland King, Mrs. Deering?”
Connie, entirely disconcerted by his manner, looked at him beseechingly.
“Why do you ask me that?”
“Because he is one of thedramatis personain a pretty little comedy on which the curtain is not yet rung down.”
She greatly dared. “Are you too in the caste?”
Theodore Weever deliberately helped himself to fish before replying. Then with equal deliberation he stared into her flushed and puzzled face.
“I hope so. A leading part, perhaps, if you are the clever and conscientious woman I take you to be.”
“What part has my cousin Morland played?” she asked.
“I must leave you the very simple task of guessing,” said Weever; and he took advantage of her consternation to converse with his left-hand neighbour.
“I have painted a peculiarly successful fan, dear Mrs. Deering,” said Colonel Pawley, in his purring voice. “A wedding-present for our dear Miss Hardacre. I have never been so much pleased with anything before. I should like you to see it. When may I come and show it you?”
“The wedding is fixed for two o'clock on Wednesday,” said Connie, answering like a woman in a dream. The bright room, the crowd of diners, the music, the voice of the old man by her side, all faded from her senses, eclipsed by the ghastly light that dawned upon her. Only one meaning could be attached to Weever's insinuations. A touch on the arm brought her back to her surroundings with a start. It was Colonel Pawley.
“I hope there is nothing—” he began, in a tone of great concern.
“No, nothing. Really nothing. Do forgive me,” she interrupted in confusion. “You were telling me something. Oh, I'm dreadfully sorry.”
“It was about the fan,” said Colonel Pawley, sadly.
“A fan?”
“Yes, for dear Miss Hardacre—a wedding-present.”
She listened to a repetition of the previous remarks and to a description of the painting, and this time replied coherently. She would be delighted to see both the fan and himself to-morrow morning. The kind old man launched into a prothalamion. The happy couple were a splendidly matched pair—Norma the perfect type of aristocratic English beauty; Morland a representative specimen of the British gentleman, the safeguard of the empire, a man, a thorough good fellow, incapable of dishonour, a landed proprietor. He had sketched out a little wedding-song which he would like to present with the fan. Might he show that, too, to Mrs. Deering?
It was a dreadful dinner. On each side the distressing topic hemmed her in. In vain she tried to make her old friend talk of travel or gastronomy or the comforts of his club; perverse fate brought him always back to Norma's wedding. She was forced to listen, for to Weever she dared not address a remark. She longed for escape, for solitude wherein to envisage her dismay. No suspicion of Morland's complicity in the scandal had crossed her mind. Even now it seemed preposterous for a man of honour to have so acted towards his dearest and most loyal friend, to say nothing of the unhappy things that had gone before. Suddenly, towards the end of dinner, she revolted. She turned to Weever.
“I don't believe a word of it.”
“Of what, dear lady?”
“Of what you have told me about Morland and Jimmie Padgate.”
“I have told you nothing—absolutely nothing,” he replied in his expressionless way. “Please remember that. I don't go about libelling my acquaintances.”
“I shall go and ask Morland straight,” she said with spirit.
“Au succès,” said Weever.
Dinner over, the little party went into the lounge. The screened light fell pleasantly on palms and pretty dresses, and made the place reposeful after the glare of the dining-room, whose red and white and gold still gleamed through the door above the steps. The red-coated band played a seductive, almost digestive air. A circle of comfortable chairs reserved by the host, invited the contented diner to languorous ease and restful gossip. It was the part of a Carlton dinner that Connie usually enjoyed the most. She still took her pleasures whole-heartedly, wherein lay much of her charm. The world, as Jimmie once told her, had not rubbed the dust off her wings. But to-night the sweet after-dinner hour was filled with fears and agitations, and while the party was settling down, she begged release from her host on the score of headache, and made her escape.
She would carry out her threat to Weever. She would see Morland before she slept, and ask him to free her from this intolerable suspicion. She was a loyal, simple woman, for all her inconsequent ways and close experience of the insincerities of life; devoted to her friends, a champion of their causes; loving to believe the best, disturbed beyond due measure at being forced to believe the worst. Jimmie had most of her heart, more of it than she dared confess. But there were places in it both for Norma and for Morland. The latter was her cousin. She had known him all her life. To believe him to have played this sorry part in what it pleased Theodore Weever to call a pretty comedy was very real pain to the little lady. Her headache was no pretence. No spirit of curiosity or interference drove her to the Hardacres', where she knew she would find Morland; rather a desire to rid herself of a nightmare. Granted the possibility of baseness on Morland's part, all the dark places in the lamentable business became light. That was the maddening part of Weever's solution. And would it apply to the puzzle of the afternoon? Had Norma known? Had Jimmie told her? The pair had been agitated enough for anything to have happened. Theodore Weever, too, had calmly avowed himself an actor in the comedy. What part was he playing? She shivered at the conjecture. He looked like a pale mummy, she thought confusedly, holding in his dull eyes the inscrutable wisdom of the Sphinx. Meanwhile the horses were proceeding at a funereal pace. She pulled the checkstring and bade the coachman drive faster.
The scene that met her eyes when the servant showed her into the Hardacres' drawing-room was unexpected. Instead of the ordinary after-dinner gathering, only Mr. and Mrs. Hardacre and Morland were in the room. The master of the house, very red, very puffy, sat in an armchair before the fire, tugging at his mean little red moustache. Mrs. Hardacre, her face haggard with anxiety, stood apart with Morland, whose heavy features wore an expression of worry, apology, and indignation curiously blended. On a clear space of carpet a couple of yards from the door lay some strings of large pearls. Connie looked from one to the other of the three people who had evidently been interrupted in the midst of an anxious discussion. Here, again, something had happened.
Mrs. Hardacre shook hands with her mechanically. Mr. Hardacre apologised for not rising. That infernal gout again, he explained, pointing to the slashed slipper of a foot resting on a hassock. Norma had made it worse. He had been infernally upset.
“Norma?” Connie turned and looked inquiringly at the other two.
“Oh, an awful scene,” said Morland, gloomily. “I wish to heaven you had been here. You might have done something.”
“Perhaps you might bring her to her senses now, though I doubt it. I think she has gone crazy,” said Mrs. Hardacre.
“But what has occurred?”
“She declares she won't marry me, that's all. There's my wedding-present on the floor. Tore it from her neck as she made her exit. I don't know what's going to happen!”
“Where is she now?”
“Up in her room smashing the rest of her wedding-presents, I suppose,” said Mrs. Hardacre.
“Eh, what? Can't do that. All locked up downstairs in the library,” came from the chair by the fire.
“Oh, don't make idiotic remarks, Benjamin,” snapped his wife, viciously.
The air was electric with irritation. Connie, a peacemaker at heart, forgot her mission in the face of the new development of affairs, and spoke soothingly. Norma could not break off the engagement three days before the wedding. Such things were not done. She would come round. It was merely an attack of nerves. They refused to be comforted.
“God knows what it is,” said Morland. “I thought things were perfectly square between us. She was n't cordial before dinner, I'll admit; but she let me put those beads round her neck. I asked her to wear them all the evening, as there were only the four of us.”
“The Spencer-Temples sent an excuse this afternoon,” Mrs. Hardacre explained.
“She agreed,” Morland continued. “She wore them through dinner. Then everything any one of us said seemed to get on her nerves. I talked about the House. She withered me up with sarcasm. We talked about the wedding. She begged us, for God's sake, to talk of something else. We tried, so as to pacify her. But of course it was hardly possible. I said I had met Lord Monzie yesterday—told me he and his wife were coming on Wednesday. She asked whether Ascherberg and the rest of Monzie's crew of money-lenders, harlots, and fools were coming too. I defended Monzie. He's a friend of mine and a very decent sort. She shrugged her shoulders. You know her way. Mrs. Hardacre changed the subject. After dinner I saw her alone for a bit in the drawing-room. She asked me to take back the pearls. Said they were throttling her. Had n't we better reconsider the whole matter? There was still time. That was the beginning of it. Mr. and Mrs. Hardacre came up. We did all we knew. Used every argument. People invited. Bishop to perform ceremony. Duchess actually coming. Society expected us. The scandal. Her infernally bad treatment of myself. No good. Whatever we said only made her worse. Ended up with a diatribe against society. She was sick of its lies and its rottenness. She was going to have no more of it. She would breathe fresh pure air.
“The Lord knows what she did n't say. All of us came in for it. Said shocking things about her mother. Said I did n't love her, had never loved her. A loveless marriage was horrible. Of course I am in love with her. You all know that. I said so. She would n't listen. Went on with her harangue. We could n't stop her. She would n't marry me for all the bishops and duchesses in the world. At last I lost my temper and said it was my intention to marry her, and marry me she should. Don't you think I was quite right? She lost hers, I suppose, tore off the pearls, made a sort of peroration, declaring she would sooner die than commit the infamy of marrying me—and that's the end of it.”
He threw out his hands in desperation and turned away. His account of events from his point of view was accurate. To him, as to Norma's parents, her final revolt appeared the arbitrary act of unreason. They still smarted resentfully under her lashes, incapable of realising the sins for which they were flagellated.
If she had remained at home that afternoon and continued to practise insensibility, she would probably have followed the line of least resistance during the evening. Or, on the other hand, if she could have been alone, a night's fevered sleeplessness would have caused dull reaction in the morning. The cold contempt for things outside her, which had served for strength, was now gone, leaving a helpless woman to be swayed by passion or led spiritless by convention. The heroic in her needed the double spur. Passion shook her; miserable bondage, claiming her, drove her to rebellion. She rose to sublime heights, undreamed of in her earth-bound philosophy.
She had gone into the street after her interview with Jimmie, white, palpitating, torn. Though the man had spoken tremulous words, it was the unspoken, the wave of longing and all unspeakable things in whose heaving bosom they had been caught, that mattered. The Garden of Enchantment had thrown wide its gates; she had been admitted within its infinitely reaching vistas, and flowers of the spirit had bared their hearts before her eyes. Dressing, she strove to kill the memory, to deafen her ears to the haunting music, to clear her brain of the intoxication. A thing hardly a woman, hardly a coherent entity, but half marble, half-consuming fire, stood before Morland, as he clasped the pearl necklace around her throat. The touch of it against her skin caused a shudder. Up to then sensation had blotted out thought. But now the brain worked with startling lucidity. There was yet time to escape from the thraldom. The Idea gathered strength from every word and incident during the meal. The commonness, sordidness, emptiness of the life behind and around and before her were revealed in the unpitying searchlight of an awakened soul.
She pleaded with Morland for release. The necklace choked her. She unclasped it. He refused to take it back. She was his. He loved her. Her conduct was an outrage on his affections. She dared him to an expression of passionate feeling. He failed miserably, and her anger grew. Unhappily he spoke of an outrage upon Society. She fastened on the phrase. His affection and Society! One was worth the other. Society—the Mumbo Jumbo—the grotesque false god to which women were offered up in senseless sacrifice! Her mother instanced the bishop and the duchess as avatars of the divinity. Norma poured scorn on the hierarchy. Mrs. Hardacre implored her daughter by her love for her not to humiliate her thus in the world's eyes. She struck the falsest of notes. Norma turned on her, superb, dramatic, holding the three in speechless dismay. Love! what love had been given her that she should return? She had grown honest. The gods of that house were no longer her gods. They were paltry and dishonoured, shams and hypocrisies. Once she worshipped them. To that she had been trained from her cradle. Her nurses dangled the shams before her eyes. The women who taught her bent fawning knees before the shrines of the false gods. A mother's love? what had she learned from her mother? To simper and harden her heart. That the envy of other simpering hardened women was the ultimate good. That the dazzling end of a young girl's career was to capture some man of rank and fortune—that when she was married her lofty duty was to wear smarter clothes, give smarter parties, and to inveigle to her house by any base and despicable means smarter people than her friends. What had she learned from her mother? To let men of infamous lives leer at her because they had title or fortune. To pay court to shameless women in the hope of getting to know still more shameless men who might dishonour her with their name. She had never been young—never, never, with a young girl's freshness of heart. She spoke venom and was praised for wit. She was the finished product of a vapid world. Her whole existence had been an intricate elaboration of shams—miserable, empty, despicable futilities. How dared her mother stand before her and talk of love?
Then a quick angry scene, a crisp thud of the pearls on the floor, a stormy exit—and that, as Morland said, was the end of it. The three were left staring at each other in angry bewilderment.
In the face of this disaster Connie could not find it in her heart to reproach Morland, still less to hint at Theodore Weever's insinuation. Rather did she reproach herself for being the cause of the catastrophe, and she was smitten with a sense of guilt when Mrs. Hardacre turned upon her accusingly.
“She had tea with you, did n't she? Did you notice anything wrong?”
“She didn't seem quite herself—was nervous and strange,” said Connie, diplomatically. “I think I had better go up and talk to her,” she added after an anxious pause.
“Yes, do, for God's sake, Connie,” said Morland.
She nodded, smiled the ghost of her bright smile, and, glad of escape, went upstairs. The three sat in gloomy silence, broken only by Mr. Hardacre's maledictions on his gout. It was a bitter hour for them.
In a few moments Connie burst into the room, with a letter in her hand. She looked scared.
“We can't find her. She's not in the house.”
“Not in the house!” shrieked Mrs. Hardacre.
Morland brought his hand down heavily on the piano.
“I heard the front door slam half an hour ago!”
“This is addressed to you, Mrs. Hardacre. It was stuck in her looking-glass.”
Mrs. Hardacre opened the note with shaky fingers. It ran:
“I mean what I say. I had better leave you all, at least till after Wednesday. My stopping here would be more than you or I could stand.”
Mr. Hardacre staggered with a gasp of pain to his feet, and his weak eyes glared savagely out of his puffy red face.
“Damme, she must come back! If she does n't sleep here to-night, I'll cut her off. I won't have anything more to do with her. She has got to come back.”
“All right. Go and tell her, then,” retorted his wife. “Where do you suppose you are going to find her?”
“Oh, she is sure to have gone to my house,” said Connie. “But suppose she has n't,” said Morland, anxiously. “She was in such a state that anything is possible.”
“Come with me if you like. The brougham is here.”
“And you go too, Eliza, and bring her home with you, d' ye hear?” cried Mr. Hardacre. “If you don't, she'll never set foot in my house again. I'm damned if she shall!”
His wife looked at him queerly for a moment; then she meekly answered:
“Very well, Benjamin.”
Once only during their long married life had she flouted him when he had spoken to her like that. Then in ungovernable fury he had thrown a boot at her head.
Mr. Hardacre glared at Morland and Connie, and scrambled cursing into his chair.
SOMETHING had happened—something mysterious, quickening; a pulsation of the inmost harmonies of life. Its tremendous significance Jimmie dared not conjecture. It was to be interpreted by the wisdom of the simplest, yet that interpretation he put aside. It staggered reason. It was enough for them to have met together in an unimagined intimacy of emotion, to have shared the throb of this spiritual happening.
She was to be married in three days. He set the fact as a block to further investigation of the mystery. On this side his loyalty suffered no taint; their relations had but received, in some sense, sanctification. Beyond the barrier lay shame and dishonour. The two were to be married; therefore they loved. He disciplined a disordered mind with a logic of his own invention. It was a logic that entirely begged the question. Remembered words of Norma, “Do you think much love has come my way? Yours are the only lips I have ever heard speak of it,” fell outside his premises. They clamoured for explanation. So did the rich tremor of her voice. So did the lamentable lack of conviction in his reply. To these things he closed his intelligence. They belonged to the interpretation that staggered reason, that threatened to turn his fundamental conceptions into chaos. And past incidents came before him. During those last days in Wiltshire he had seen that her life lacked completion. That memory, too, disturbed his discipline. Fanatically he practised it, proving to himself that ice was hot and that the sun shone at midnight. She was happy in her love for Morland. She was happy in Morland's love for her. She had not identified with herself the imaginary woman of his adoration. She had not drunk in the outpouring of his passion. Her breath had not fallen warm upon his cheek. And the quickening of a wonderful birth had no reference to emotions and cravings quite different, intangible, inexpressible, existent in a far-away spirit land.
He was strangely silent during their homeward journey in the omnibus and the simple evening meal, and Aline, sensitive to his mood, choked down the eager questions that rose to her lips. It was only after supper in the studio, when she lit the spill for Jimmie's pipe—her economical soul deprecating waste in matches—that she ventured to say softly:
“I am afraid you'll miss the picture, Jimmie dear.”
He waited until the pipe was alight, and breathed out a puff of smoke with a sigh.
“Our happiness is made up of the things we miss,” he said.
“That's a paradox, and I don't believe it,” said Aline.
“Everything in life is a paradox,” he remarked, thinking of his logic. He relapsed into his perplexed silence. Aline settled herself in her usual chair with her workbasket and her eternal sewing. This evening she was recuffing his shirts. Presently she held up a cuff.
“See. I'm determined to make you smart and fashionable. I don't care what you say. These are square.”
“Are n't you putting a round man into a square cuff, my dear?” he asked.
She laughed. “Why should you be round? You are smart and rectangular. When you're tidied up—don't you know you are exceedingly good-looking, almost military?”
She was delighted to get him back to foolish talk. His preoccupation had disturbed her. Like Connie Deering, she was femininely conscious that something out of the ordinary had passed between Norma and Jimmie, and apprehension as to her dear one's peace of mind had filled her with many imaginings. He returned a smiling answer. She bestirred herself to amuse. Had he remarked the man in the omnibus? His nose cut it into two compartments. What would he do if he had such a nose? Jimmie felt that he had been selfish and fell into the child's humour. He said that he would blow it. They discussed the subject of noses. He quoted Tristram Shandy. Did she remember him reading to her “Slawkenbergius's Tale”?
“The silliest story I ever heard in my life!” cried Aline. “It had neither head nor tail.”
“That is the beauty of it,” said Jimmie. “It is all nose.”
“No. The only story about a nose that is worth anything,” Aline declared with conviction of her age and sex, “is 'Cyrano de Bergerac.'” She paused as a thought passed swiftly through her mind. “Do you know, if you had a nose like that, you would remind me of Cyrano?”
“Why, I don't go about blustering and carving my fellow-citizens into mincemeat.”
“No. But you—” She began unreflectingly, then she stopped short in confusion. Cyrano, Roxana, Christian; Jimmie, Norma, Morland—the parallel was of an embarrassing nicety. She lost her head, reddened, saw that Jimmie had filled the gap.
“I don't care,” she cried. “Youarelike him. It's splendid, but it's senseless. You are worth a million of the other man, and she knows it as well as I do.”
She vindictively stitched at the cuff. Jimmie made no reply, but lay back smoking his pipe. Aline recovered and grew remorseful. She had destroyed with an idiotic word the little atmosphere of gaiety she had succeeded in creating. She pricked her finger several times At last she rose and knelt by his side.
“I'm sorry, Jimmie. Don't be vexed with me.”
He looked at her, wrinkling his forehead half humorously, half sadly, and patted her cheek.
“No, dear,” he said. “But I think Slawkenbergius's the better tale. Shall I read it you again?”
“Oh, no, Jimmie,” cried the girl, half crying, half laughing. “Please don't, for heaven's sake. I've not been as naughty as that!”
She resumed her sewing. They talked of daily things. Theodore Weever's purchases. The faun—he was sorry to lose it after its companionship for all these years. He would paint a replica—but it would not be the same thing. Other times, other feelings. Gradually the conversation grew spasmodic, dwindled. Jimmie brooded over his mystery, and Aline stitched in silence.
The whirr of the front door-bell aroused them. Aline put down her work.
“It's Renshaw,” said Jimmie.
Renshaw, a broken-down, out-at-heels, drunken black-and-white artist, once of amazing talent, was almost the only member of a large Bohemian coterie who continued to regard Jimmie as at home to his friends on Sunday evenings. Jimmie bore with the decayed man, and helped him on his way, and was pained when Aline insisted upon opening the windows after his departure. Renshaw had been a subject of contention between them for years.
“He has only come to drink whisky and borrow money. Luckily we have n't any whisky in the house,” said Aline.
“We can give him beer, my child. And if the man is in need of half a crown, God forbid we should deny it him. Has Hannah come home yet?”
“I don't think so. It is n't ten o'clock.”
“Then let him in, dear,” said Jimmie, finally.
Aline went upstairs with some unwillingness. She disapproved entirely of Renshaw. She devoutly hoped the man was sober. As she opened the front door, the sharp sound of a turning cab met her ears, and the cloaked tall figure of a woman met her astonished eyes.
“Miss Hardacre!”
“Yes, dear. Won't you let me in?”
The girl drew aside quickly, and Norma passed into the hall.
“You?” cried Aline. “I don't understand.”
“Never mind. Is Mr.—is Jimmie at home?”
“Jimmie!” The girl's heart leaped at the name. She stared wide-eyed at Norma, whose features she could scarcely discern by the pin-point of gas in the hall-lamp. “Yes. He is in the studio.”
“Can I see him? Alone? Do you mind?”
In dumb astonishment Aline took the visitor to the head of the stairs, half lit by the streak of light from the open studio door. Norma paused, bent forward, and kissed her on the cheek.
“I know my way,” she whispered.
Jimmie heard the rustle of skirts that were not Aline's, and springing to his feet, hurried towards the door. But before he could reach it Norma entered and stood before him. Her long dark silk evening cloak was open at the throat, showing glimpses of white bare neck. Its high standing collar set off the stately poise of her head. She wore the diamond star in her hair. To the wondering man who gazed at her she was a vision of radiant beauty. They held each other's eyes for a second or two; and the first dazzling glory in which she seemed to stand having faded, Jimmie read in her face that desperate things had come to pass. He caught her hands as she came swiftly forward. “Why are you here? My God, why are you here?”
“I could stand it no longer,” she said breathlessly. “I am not going to marry Morland. I have cut myself adrift. They all know it. I told them so this evening. The horror of it was unbearable. I have done with it forever and ever.”
“The horror of it?” echoed Jimmie.
“Don't you think it a horror for two people to marry who have never even pretended to love each other? You said so this afternoon.”
He released her hands and turned aside. Even the deep exulting sense of what her presence there must mean could not mitigate a terrible dismay. The interpretation that staggered reason was the true and only one. He had been living in a dream, among shadow-shapes which he himself had cast upon the wall. Even now he could not grasp completely the extent of his heroical self-deception.
“There has never been any love between you and Morland? It has been a cold-blooded question of a marriage of convenience? I thought so differently.”
“Since when?” she asked. “Since this afternoon?”
“No—not since this afternoon.”
“If it had n't been for you, I should have married him. You made it impossible. You taught me things. You made me hate myself and my mean ambitions. That was why I hesitated—put it off till Easter. If I had n't seen you this afternoon I should have gone through with it on Wednesday. When I got home I could n't face it. He put some pearls—a wedding-present—round my neck. They seemed like dead fingers choking out my soul. At last it grew horrible. I said things I don't remember now. I could n't stay in the house. It suffocated me. It would have sent me mad. I think a cab whirled me through the streets. I don't know. I have burnt my ships.”
She stopped, panting, with her hands on her bosom. His exultation grew, and fear with it. He was like a child trembling before a joy too great to be realised, frightened lest it should vanish. He said without looking at her:
“Why have you come here?”
“Where else should I go? Unless—” She halted on the word.
“Unless what?”
She broke into an impatient cry.
“Oh, can't you speak? Do you want me to say everything? There is no need for you to be silent any longer.” She faced him. “Who was the woman—the picture woman we spoke of this afternoon?”
“You,” he said. “You. Who else?” There was a quiver of silence. Then he caught her to him. He spoke foolish words. Their lips met, and passion held them.
“Had I anywhere else to go?” she whispered; and he said, “No.”
She released herself, somewhat pale and shaken. Jimmie, scarcely knowing what he did, took off her cloak and threw it on the long deal table. The sudden fresh chill on arms and neck made her realise that they were bare. It was his doing. She blushed. A delicious sense of shyness crept over her. It soon passed. But evanescent though it was, it remained long in her memory.
Jimmie took her in his arms again. He said:
“You madden me. I have loved you so long. I am like a parched soul by a pool of Paradise.”
He took her by the hand, led her to his chair near the stove, and knelt by her side. She looked at him, the edges of her white teeth together, her lips parted. She was living the moment that counts for years in a woman's life. She can only live it once. Great joy or endless shame may come afterwards, but this moment shall ever be to her comfort or her despair.
He asked her how she had known.
“You told me so.”
“When?”
“At Heddon. Do you think I shall ever forget your words?” She laughed divinely at the puzzledom on his face. “No. You were too loyal to tell me—but you told Connie Deering. Hush! Don't start. Connie did not betray you. She is the staunchest soul breathing. You and she were on the slope by the croquet lawn—do you remember? There was a hedge of clipped yew above—”
“And you overheard?”
She laughed again, happily, at his look of distress. “I should be rather pleased—now—if I were you,” she said in the softer and deeper tones of her voice.
A few moments later he said, “You must give me back the portrait. I shall burn it.”
“Why?”
“You are a million times more beautiful, more adorable.” He asked her when she had begun to think of him—the eternal, childlike question. She met his lover's gaze steadily. Frankness was her great virtue.
“It seems now that I have cared for you since the first day. You soon came into my life, but I did n't know how much you represented. Then I heard you speaking to Connie. That mattered a great deal. When that man shot you, I knew that I loved you. I thought you were dead. I rushed down the slope and propped you up against my knees—and I thought I should go mad with agony.”
“I never heard of that,” said Jimmie in a low voice.
He became suddenly thoughtful, rose to his feet and regarded her with a changed expression, like that of a man awakened from a dream.
“What is going to be the end of this?” he asked.
Norma, for once unperceptive and replying to a small preoccupation of her own, flushed to her hair.
“I know Connie well enough to look her up and ask her for hospitality.”
“I wasn't thinking of that,” said Jimmie. “We have been like children and had our hour of joy, without thinking of anything else. Now we must be grown-up people. After what has passed between us, I could only ask you to be my wife.”
“I came here for you to ask me,” she said.
“I have no right to do so, dear. I bear a dishonoured name. The wonder and wild desire of you made me forget.”
She looked at him strangely, her lips working in the shadow of her old smile of mockery.
“That proves to me that it is your name and not yourself that is dishonoured. If it had been yourself, you would not have forgotten.”
Jimmie drew himself up, and there was a touch of haughtiness in his manner that Norma in her woman's way noted swiftly. In spite of his homeliness there was the undefinable spirit of the great gentleman in Jimmie.
“I am dishonoured. The matter was public property. I discuss it with no one, least of all with you.”
“Very well,” she said. “Let it never be mentioned again between us. I range myself with Aline. I shall believe what I like. You can't prevent my doing that, can you? I choose to believe you are the one thing God made in which I can find happiness. That's enough for me, and it ought to be enough for you.”
Jimmie put his hand on her shoulder, deeply moved.
“My dearest, you must n't say things like that.” He repeated the words, “You mustn't say things like that.” Then he was conscious of the warm softness on which his hand rested. She raised her arm and touched his fingers. It was a moment of deep temptation. He resisted, drew his hand away gently.
“There is another reason why it cannot be,” he said. “You belong to a world of wealth and luxury, I have been in poverty all my life. God forbid I should complain. I have never done so. But it is a life of struggle for daily bread. Aline and I are used to it. We laugh. We often dine with Duke Humphrey. We make believe like the marchioness. What the discipline of life and a sort of gipsy faith in Providence have made us regard as a jest, would be to you a sordid shift, an intolerable ugliness stripping life of its beauty—”
“Oh, hush!” she pleaded.
“No, I must talk and you must listen,” he said with a certain masterful dignity. “Look at you now, in the exquisite loveliness of your dress, with that diamond star in your hair, with that queenly presence of yours. Do you fit in with all this? Your place is in great houses, among historic pictures, rare carpets, furniture that is invested with the charm of an artist's touch. The chair you are sitting in—the leather is split and the springs are broken.” He was walking now backwards and forwards across the studio, fulfilling his task bravely, scarcely trusting himself to look at her. “Your place,” he continued, “is among the great ones of the earth—princes, ambassadors, men of genius. Here are but the little folk: even should they come, as they used to do: homely men with rough ways and their wives—sweet simple women with a baby and a frock a year, God help them! I can't ask you to share this life with me, my dear. I should be a scoundrel if I did. As it is, I have fallen below myself in letting you know that I love you. You must forgive me. A man is, after all, a man, whether he be beggar or prince. You must go back into your world and forget it all. The passion-flower cannot thrive in the hedge with the dog-rose, my dearest. It will pine and fade. We must end it all. Don't you see? You don't know what poverty means. Even decent poverty like ours. Look—the men you know have valets to dress them—when you came Aline was sewing new cuffs on my shirts. I don't suppose you ever knew that such things were done. Mere existence is a matter of ever anxious detail. I am a careless fellow, I am a selfish brute, like most men, and give over to the women folk around me the thousand harassing considerations of ways and means for every day in every year. But I see more than they think. Aline can tell you. I dare n't, my dear, ask you to share this life with me. I dare n't, I dare n't.”
He came to a stop in front of her; saw her leaning over the arm of the chair away from him, her face covered by her hands. Her white shoulders twitched in little convulsive movements.
“Why, my dear—my dear—” he said in a bewilderment of distress; and kneeling by her, he took her wrists and drew them to him. The palms of her hands and her cheeks were wet with miserable tears.
“What must you think of me? What futile, feeble creature must you think me? Heaven knows I'm degraded enough—but not to that level. Do you suppose I ever thought you a rich man? Oh, you have hurt me—flayed me alive. I did n't deserve it! I would follow you in rags barefoot through the world. What does it matter so long as it is you that I follow?”
What could mortal man do but take the wounded woman of his idolatry into his arms? The single-hearted creature, aghast at the havoc he had wrought, bitterly reproached himself for want of faith in the perfect being. He had committed a horrible crime, plunged daggers, stab after stab, into that radiant bosom. She sobbed in his embrace—a little longer than was strictly necessary. Tears and sobs were a wonder to her, who since early childhood had never known the woman's relief of weeping. It came upon her first as a wondrous new-found emotion; when his strong arms were about her, as an unutterably sweet solace. And the man's voice in her ears was all that has nearly been said but never been quite said in music.
Presently she drew herself away from him.
“Do you think I am such a fool that I can't sew?”
He sank back on his heels. She rose, helping herself to rise by a hand on his arm, an action wonderfully sweet in its intimacy, and crossed over to Aline's cane-bottomed, armless easy-chair. She plucked the shirt from the basket on the top of which Aline had thrust it, groped among the wilderness of spools, tape, bits of ribbon, scissors, needle-cases, patterns and year-old draper's bills for a thimble, found the needle sticking in the work, and began to sew with a little air of defiance. Jimmie looked on, ravished. He drew nearer.
“God bless my soul,” he said. “Do you mean to say you can do that?”
There was nothing she could not do in this hour of exaltation. She had found herself—simple woman with simple man. It was her hour. Her feet trod the roots of life; her head touched the stars.
“Sit in your chair and smoke, and let us see what it will be like,” she commanded.
He obeyed. But whether it was tobacco or gunpowder in his old briarwood pipe he could not have told. The poor wretch was mazed with happiness.
“Poor little Aline is all by herself upstairs,” said Norma, after a while.
“Heaven forgive me,” cried Jimmie, starting up. “I had n't thought about her!”