SHE loved him. Of that there was no doubt. To her he was the man of men. The half angel, half fool of her original conception had melted into an heroic figure capable of infinite tendernesses. The lingering barbaric woman in her thrilled at the memory of him contemptuously facing death before the madman's revolver. Her higher nature was awed at the perfect heroism of his sacrifice. She knelt at his feet, recognising the loftier soul. Sex was stirred to the depths when his arms were about her and his kiss was on her lips. In lighter relations he was the perfect companion. For all her vacillation, let that be remembered: she loved him. All of her that was worth the giving he had in its plenitude.
The days which followed her initiation into domestic economy were days of alternating fear and shame and scornful resolution. She lost grip of herself. The proud beauty curving a contumelious lip at the puppet show of life was a creature of the past. Set the proudest and most self-sufficing of women naked in what assembly you please, and she will crouch, helpless, paralysed, in the furthest corner. Some such denudation of the moral woman had occurred in the case of Norma Hardacre. The old garments were stripped from her. She was bewildered, terrified, no longer endowed with personality.
Sometimes despising herself and resolved to perform her manifest duty, she sought other lessons from Aline. They ended invariably in dismay. Once she learned that Jimmie had never had a banking account. The money was kept in a drawer of which Jimmie and Aline had each a key. On occasions the drawer had been empty. Another lesson taught her that certain shops in the neighbourhood were to be avoided as being too expensive; that cream was regarded as a luxury, and asparagus as an impossible extravagance. Every new fact in the economy of a poor household caused her to shiver with apprehension. All was so trivial, so contemptibly unimportant, and yet it grew to be a sordid barrier baffling her love. She loathed the base weakness of her nature. It was degrading to feel such repulsion.
One evening Connie Deering was going to a Foreign Office reception, and came down an enchanting vision in a new gown from Paquin and exhibited herself to Norma.
“I think it's rather a success. Don't you?”
Norma assented somewhat listlessly, but to please her friend inspected the creation and listened to her chatter. She was feeling lonely and dispirited. At Aline's entreaty she had persuaded Jimmie to go with Tony Merewether to the Langham Sketch Club, thus showing himself, for the first time since the scandal, among his old associates. For her altruism she paid the penalty of a dull evening. Their visits to each other were her sole occupation now, all that was left in life to interest her. In moments of solitude she began to feel the appalling narrowness of the circle in which she was caged. Reading tired instead of refreshing her. She had been accustomed to men and women rather than to books, to the sight of many faces, to the constant change of scene. When she speculated on employment for future solitary hours, she thought ruefully of recuffing shirts.
Connie apologised for leaving her, hoped she would manage to amuse herself. Norma, who had made strenuous efforts to hide the traces of tumult, returned a smiling answer. Connie, quite deceived, put an arm round her waist and said suddenly in her bright, teasing way:
“Now don't you wish you were coming too?”
Norma, staggered at the point-blank question, was mistress enough of herself to observe the decencies of reply, but when Connie had gone, she sat down on the sofa and stared in front of her. She did wish she were going with Connie. She had been wishing vaguely, half-consciously all the evening. Now the wish was the pain of craving. It came upon her like the craving of the alcoholic subject for drink—this sudden longing for the glitter, the excitement, the whirl of the life she had renounced. Her indictment of it seemed unreal, the confused memory of a brain-sick mood. It was her world. She had not cut herself free. All the fibres of her body seemed to be rooted in it, and she was being drawn thither by irresistible desire. The many, many people, the diamonds, the brilliance, the flattery, the envy, the very atmosphere heavy with many perfumes—she saw and felt it all; panted for it, yearned for it. That never, never again would she take up her birthright was impossible. That she should stand forevermore in the humble street outside the gates of that dazzling, wonderful, kaleidoscopic world was unthinkable.
She remembered her talk with Morland at the Duchess of Wiltshire's reception at the end of the last season, her shiver at the idea of a life of poverty; was it a premonition? She remembered the blessed sense of security when she had looked round the splendid scene and felt that she and it were indissoluble parts of the same scheme of things. A crust and heel of cheese as Jimmie's wife had crossed her mind then as a grotesque fantasy; the air of that brilliant gathering was the breath of her being.
But now the grotesque fancy was to be the reality; the other was to become the shadow of a dream. No yearning or panting could restore it. The impossible was the inevitable. The unthinkable was the commonplace. She had made her choice deliberately, irrevocably. She had lost the whole world to gain her own soul. In the despair of her mood she questioned the worth of the sacrifice. The finality of the choice oppressed her. If at this eleventh hour she could still have the opportunity of the heroic—if still the gates of the world were open to her, she would have had a stimulus to continued nobility. The world and the passionate love for the perfect man—which would she choose? Her exaltation would still have swept her to the greater choice. Of, this she was desperately aware. But the gates were shut. She had already chosen. The heroic moment had gone. The acceptance of conditions was now mere uninspired duty. She gave way to unreason.
“O God! Why cannot I have both—my own love and my own life?”
The tears she shed calmed her.
The next day she felt ill from the strain, paying the highly bred woman's penalty of nervous break-down. Connie Deering noted the circles beneath her eyes and the pinched nostrils. Norma casually mentioned a night's neuralgia. It would pass off during the day. She refused to be doctored. She would pay a visit to Jimmie before lunch. The fresh air would do her good.
“The fresh air and Jimmie,” laughed her friend. “You are the most beautifully in love young woman I have ever met.”
Norma started on her visit, walking fast. At Baker Street station it began to rain. She took the penitential omnibus; but her thoughts were too anxious to concern themselves with its discomforts. Besides, it was almost empty. The night had brought counsel. She would go to Jimmie and be her true self, frank and unsparing. With a touch of her old scorn she had resolved to confess unreservedly all the meanness and cowardice of which she had of late been guilty. She would bare to him the soon spotted soul and crave his cleansing. He would understand, pardon, and purify. Perhaps, when he knew all, he would be able to devise some new scheme of existence. At any rate, she would no longer receive his kisses with a lie in her heart. She loved him too ardently. He should know what she was, what were her needs, her limitations. The meeting would be a crisis in their lives. Out of it would come reconstruction on some unshakable basis. Up to a certain point she reasoned; beyond it, the pathetic unreason of a woman drifted rudderless.
It had stopped raining when she left the omnibus and started on the short walk from the corner to Friary Grove. At the familiar gate her heart already seemed lighter; she opened it, mounted the front steps, and rang. The middle-aged servant, minus cap and with thin untidy hair, in a soiled print dress, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow exposing red coarse arms, was the first shock to Norma when the door opened.
“Both the Master and Miss Aline are out, Miss,” said Hannah, with a good-natured smile. “He has gone into town on business, and Miss Aline, went out a little while ago with her young man. But they'll be back for lunch. Won't you come in and wait, Miss?”
Norma, vaguely resenting the familiar address of the servant and her slatternly appearance, hesitated for a moment before deciding to enter. Hannah showed her into the drawing-room and retired. It was a small dark room looking on to the back. Part of it had been cut off when the house had been altered, so as to construct the studio staircase, which contained one of the original windows. Norma felt strangely ill at ease in the room. The prim, cheap furniture, the threadbare carpet, the flimsy girlish contrivances at decoration, gave the place an air of shabby gentility. The gilt mirror was starred with spots and had a crack across the corner. Some of Jimmie's socks and underwear lay on the table for mending. They were much darned, and fresh holes could not fail to meet the eye that rested but momentarily on the pile. To mend these would in the future be her duty. She took up an undervest shrinkingly and shook it out; then folded it again and closed her eyes.... She could not wait there: the gloom depressed her. The studio would be brighter and more familiar. She went downstairs. Nothing in the room she knew so well was changed, yet it seemed to wear a different aspect. The homely charm had vanished. Here, too, shabbiness and poverty stared at her. The morning light streaming through the great high window showed pitilessly the cracks and stains and missing buttons of the old leathern suite, and the ragged holes in the squares of old carpet laid upon the boards. It was a mere bleak workshop, not a room for human habitation. The pictures on the walls and easels ceased to possess decorative or even intimate value. The large picture of the faun that had exercised so great an influence upon her had been despatched to its purchaser, and in its place was a hopeless gap.
She sat down in her accustomed chair, and once more strove to realise the future. There would be children who would need her care. On herself would all the sordid burdens fall. She saw herself a soured woman, worn with the struggle to make ends meet, working with her hands at menial tasks. The joy of Life! She laughed mirthlessly.
She rose, walked restlessly about the studio, longing for Jimmie to come and exorcise the devils that possessed her. A little sharp cry of distress escaped her lips. The place echoed like a vault, and she felt awfully alone. In her nervous tension she could bear it no longer. She went up the stairs again into the bare hall. On the pegs hung two or three discoloured hats and an old coat. Scarce knowing whither she went, she entered the dining-room. Luncheon had been laid. A freak of destiny had reproduced the meal of which Morland had spoken at Wiltshire House and of which last night had revived the memory: a scrag end of cold boiled mutton, blackened and shapeless, with the hard suet round about it; a dried-up heel of yellow American cheese; the half of a cottage loaf. The table-cloth—it was Friday—was stained with a week's meals. It was coarse in texture, old and thin and darned. The enamel on the plates was cracked, the hundred tiny fissures showing up dark brown. The plate on the forks had worn off in places, disclosing the yellowish metal beneath. The tumblers were thick and common, of glass scarcely transparent. She stared helplessly at the table. Never in her life had she seen such preparations for a meal. To the woman always daintily fed, daintily environed, it seemed squalor unspeakable.
She shrank back into the hall, pressed her hands to her eyes, looked round, as if to search for some refuge. The stairs met her eye. She had never seen what lay above the ground floor—except once, on the memorable evening when Aline had fainted. Suddenly madness seized her—an insane craving to spy out the whole nakedness of the house. The worn stair-carpet ended at the first landing. Then bare boards. The door of the bathroom was wide open. She peeked in. The ceiling was blackened with gas; the bath cracked and stained; the appointments as bare as those in a workhouse. Her glance fell upon a battered tin dish holding an uncompromising cube of yellow soap with hard sharp edges. She withdrew her head and shut the door hurriedly. Another door stood ajar. She pushed it open and entered. It was the front bedroom—inhabited by Jimmie. The thought that it would be her own, which a fortnight before might have clothed her in delicious confusion, chilled her to the bone. Bare boards again; a strip of oil-cloth by the narrow cheap iron bedstead; a painted deal table with a little mirror and the humblest of toilette equipments laid upon it; a painted deal chest of drawers with white handles; a painted deal wash-stand; a great triangular bit broken out of the mouth of the ewer.
It was poverty—grinding, sordid, squalid poverty. From the one dishevelled, slatternly, middle-aged servant to the cheap paper peeling off the wall in the bedrooms, all she had seen was poverty. The gathering terror of it burst like a thunderstorm above her head. Her courage failed her utterly. Like a creature distracted, she rushed downstairs and fled from the house. She walked homewards with an instinctive sense of direction. Afterwards she had little memory of the portion of the road she traversed on foot. She moved in a shuddering nightmare. All the love in the world could not shed a glamour over the nakedness of the existence that had now been revealed to her in its entire crudity. She could not face it. Other women of gentle birth had forsaken all and followed the men they loved; they had loved peasants and had led great-heartedly the peasant's life. They had qualities of soul that she lacked. Hideously base, despicably cowardly she knew herself to be. It was her nature. She could not alter. The world of graceful living was her world. In the other she would die. He had warned her. The gipsy faith in Providence had made him regard as a jest what would be to her a sordid shift, an intolerable ugliness, stripping life of its beauty. The passion-flower could not thrive in the hedge with the dog-rose. It was true—mercilessly true. The craving of last night awoke afresh, imperiously insistent. She walked blindly, tripped, and nearly fell. A subconscious self hailed a passing hansom and gave the address.
What would become of her she knew not. She thought wildly of suicide as the only possible escape. From her own world she was outcast. Its gates were barred with gold and opened but to golden keys. She was penniless. In this other world she would die. Love could not prevent her starving on its diet of herbs. She clung to life, to the stalled ox, and recked little of the hatred; but at the banquet she no longer had a seat. She had said she would follow him in rags and barefoot over the earth. She had not fingered the rags when she had made the senseless vow; she had not tried her tender feet on the stones. She could have shrieked with terror at the prospect. There was no way out but death.
The Garden of Enchantment faded from her mind like a forgotten dream. The sweet Arcadian make-believe alone rose up in ironical mockery, a scathing memory which seemed to flay the living heart of her. She sat huddled together in a corner of the cab, tortured and desperate. On either hand hung the doom of death. In the one case it would be lingering: the soul would die first; the man she loved would be tied to a living corpse; she would be a devastating curse to him instead of a blessing. In the other she could leave him in the fulness of their unsullied love. The years that the locust hath eaten would not stretch an impassable waste between them. In his sorrow there would be the imperishable sense of beauty. And for herself the quick end were better.
She was aroused to consciousness of external things by a husky voice addressing her from somewhere above her head. The cab had stopped at Connie's house in Bryanston Square. She descended, handed to the man the first coin in her purse that her fingers happened to grasp. He looked at it, said that he was sorry he had not change for a sovereign. She waved her hand vaguely, deaf to his words. The cabman, with a clear conscience, whipped up his horse smartly and drove off.
A figure on the doorstep raised his hat.
“How delightful of you to arrive at the very moment, Miss Hardacre! I am summoned back to America. I sail to-morrow. I was calling on the chance of being able to bid you good-bye.”
Norma collected her scattered wits and recognised Theodore Weever. She looked at him full in the eyes.
Her lips were parted; her breath came fast. He stretched out his hand to press the electric button, so as to gain admittance to the house. She touched his arm, restraining his action, and still stared at him.
“Wait,” she said at last. “I have something to say to you.”
“I am honoured,” he replied in his imperturbable way.
“Have you found your decorative wife, Mr. Weever?”
A sudden light shone lambently in his pale, expressionless blue eyes.
“Am I to understand that I can find her on Mrs. Deering's doorstep?”
“If you look hard enough,” said Norma.
He took her hand and shook it with the air of a man concluding a bargain.
“I felt sure of it,” he said. “I intended from the first to marry you. I shall ever be your most devoted servant.'”
“I make one condition,” she said.
“Name it.”
“You don't enter this house, and I sail with you to-morrow.”
“Certainly.”
“What train shall I catch and from what station shall I start?”
“The ten o'clock from Waterloo.”
She rang the bell.
“May I trouble you to book my passage?”
“It will be my happiness.”
“Au revoir,” she said, holding out her hand.
He raised his hat and walked away briskly. The door opened, and Norma entered the house.
Her letter, which he opened on coming down to breakfast the next morning, filled many pages. It was a rhapsody of passionate love and self-abasement, with frantic appeals for forgiveness. In its cowardice there was something horribly piteous. Jimmie read it beneath the high north window of the studio, his back turned towards Aline, who was seated at the breakfast-table at the other end. For a long, long while he stood there, quite still, holding the letter in his hand. Aline, in wonder, stole up quietly and touched his arm. When he turned, she saw that his face was ashen-grey, like a dead man's.
The shock left its mark upon him. Physically it accomplished the work of ten years, wiping the youth from his face and setting in its stead the seal of middle age. It is common enough for grief or illness to lay its hand on the face of a woman no longer young and shrivel up her beauty like a leaf and set her free, old and withered. But with a man, who has no such beauty to be marred, the case is rare.
For a week he remained silent. The two women who loved him waited in patience until the time should come for their comforting to be of use. From the very first morning he let no change appear in his habits, but set his palette as usual and went on with the new picture that was nearing completion. In the afternoon he went for a walk. Aline, going down to the studio, happened to look at his morning's work. For a moment she was puzzled by what she saw, for she was familiar with his methods. Gradually the solution dawned upon her. He had been painting meaninglessly, incoherently, putting in splotches of colour that had no relation to the tone of the picture, crudely accentuating outlines, daubing here, there, and anywhere with an aimless brush. It was the work of a child or a drunken man. Aline cast herself on the model-platform and cried till she could cry no more. When he came back, he took a turpentine rag and obliterated the whole picture. For days he worked incessantly, trying in vain to repaint. Nothing would come right. The elementary technique of his art seemed to have left him. Aline strove to get him away. He resisted. He had to do his day's work, he said.
“But you're not well, dear,” she urged. “You will kill yourself if you go on like this.”
“I've never heard of work killing a man,” he answered. Then after a pause, “No. It's not work that kills.”
At last the sleep that had failed him returned, and he awoke one morning free from the daze in the brain against which he had been obstinately struggling. He rose and faced the world again with clear eyes. When Aline entered the studio to summon him to lunch, she found him painting at the unhappy picture with his accustomed sureness of touch. He leaned back and surveyed his handiwork.
“It's going to be magnificent, is n't it? What a blessing I wiped out the first attempt!”
“Yes, this is ever so much better, Jimmie,” the girl replied, with tears very near her eyes. But her heart swelled with happy relief. The aching strain of the past week was over. She had dreaded break-down, illness, and permanent paralysis of his faculties. The man she knew and loved had seemed to be dead and his place taken by a vacant-eyed simulacrum. Now he had come to life again, and his first words sounded the eternal chord of hope and faith.
From that day onwards he gave no sign of pain or preoccupation. Only the stamp of middle age upon his face betrayed the suffering through which he had passed. He concerned himself about Aline's marriage. Arrangements had been made for it to take place on the same day as that of their elders—a day, however, that Norma had never fixed. The recent catastrophe had caused its indefinite postponement. Aline declared herself to be in the same position as before, the responsibility of the beloved's welfare being again thrust upon her shoulders. She pleaded with her lover for delay, and young Merewether, disappointed though he was, acquiesced with good grace. At last Jimmie called them before him, and waving his old briar-root pipe, as he spoke, delivered his ultimatum.
“My dear children,” said he, standing up before them, as they sat together on the rusty sofa, “you have the two greatest and most glorious things in a great and glorious world, youth and love. Don't despise the one and waste the other. Get all the beauty you can out of life and you'll shed it on other people. You'll shed it on me. That's why I want you to marry as soon as ever you are ready. You'll let me come and look at you sometimes, and if you are happy together, as God grant you will be, that will be my great happiness—the greatest I think that earth has in store for me. I have stood between you long enough—all that is over. I shall miss my little girl, Tony. I should be an inhuman monster if I didn't. But I should be a monster never before imagined by a disordered brain if I found any pleasure in having her here to look after me when she ought to be living her life in fulness. And that's the very end of the matter. I speak selfishly. I can't help it. I have a great longing for joy around me once more. Go upstairs and settle everything finally between you.”
When they had gone, he sighed. “Yes,” he said to himself, “a great longing for joy—and the sound of the steps of little children.” Then he laughed, calling himself a fool, and went on with his painting.
A day or two afterwards Connie Deering, who had been a frequent visitor since Norma's flight, walked into the studio while Jimmie was working.
“Don't let me disturb you. Please go on,” she cried in her bright, airy way. “If you don't, I'll disappear. I've only come for a gossip.”
Jimmie drew a chair near the easel and resumed his brush. She congratulated him on the picture. It was shaping beautifully. She had been talking about it last night to Lord Hyston, who had promised to call at the studio to inspect it. Lord Hyston was a well-known buyer of modern work.
“He is stocking a castle in Wales, which he never goes near, with acres of paint,” she said encouragingly. “So I don't see why you should n't have a look in.”
“Is there a family ghost in the castle?”
“I believe there are two!”
“That's a blessing,” said Jimmie. “Some one, at any rate, will look at the pictures.”
She watched him in silence for a minute or two. Then she came to the important topic.
“So the two children have made up their minds at last.”
“Yes, they are to be married on the twenty-eighth of May.”
“Poor young things,” said Connie.
“Why poor?”
“I don't know,” she said 'with a sigh. “The subject of marriage always makes me sad nowadays. I am growing old and pessimistic.”
“You are bewilderingly youthful,” replied Jimmie.
“Do you know how old I am?”
“I have forgotten how to do subtraction,” he said, thinking of his own age.
“Yes. Of course you know. It's awful. And Aline is—what—seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
“You'll be dreadfully lonely without her.”
“Lonely? Oh, no. I have my thoughts—and my memories.”
She looked at him fleetingly.
“I should have thought you would wish to escape from memories, Jimmie.”
“Why should I?”
“'The sorrow's crown of sorrows.'”
“I don't believe in it,” he said, turning towards her. “What has been has been. A joy that once has been is imperishable. Remembering happier things is a sorrow's crown of consolation. Thank God! I have had them to remember.”
“Do you think she is finding consolation in memories?” She spoke with sudden heat, for Norma's conduct had filled her heart with blazing indignation.
“I hope so,” said Jimmie dreamily, after a pause. “But she has not so many as I. She loved me deeply. She had her hour—but I had my day.”
“If I were you, I should want never to think of her again.”
“Not if you were I, my dear Connie,” he said gently. “If either of us was in the wrong, it was not she.”
“Rubbish,” said Mrs. Deering.
“No. It is the truth. She was made for kings' palaces and not for this sort of thing. I knew it was impossible from the first—but the joy and wonder of it all blinded my eyes. She gave me the immortal part of herself. It is mine for all eternity. I wrote to her a day or two ago—I was not able at first. I could not sleep, you know; something seemed to have gone wrong with my head.”
“You wrote to her?”
“To tell her not to be unhappy for my sake.”
“And you have forgiven her entirely?”
“Since our love is unchanged, how could I do otherwise?”
“But she has gone and thrown herself into the arms of another man—and such a man!” said Connie, brusquely. A quiver of pain passed over his face.
“Those are things of the flesh that the discipline of life teaches a man to subdue. I think I am man enough for that. The others are things of the spirit. If ever woman loved a man, she loved me. I thank God,” he added in a low voice, “that she realised the impossibility before we were married.”
“So do I; devoutly,” said Connie.
“It would have made all the difference.”
“Precisely,” said Connie.
“She would have been chained hand and foot to an intolerable existence. She would have fretted and pined. Her life would have been an infinite burden. Heaven's mercy saved her.”
“I was n't looking at it from her point of view at all,” exclaimed Connie.
“Hers is the only one from which one can look at it,” he answered gravely.
When she bade him good-bye some ten minutes later, she did not withdraw the hand which he held. Her forget-me-not eyes grew pleading, and her voice trembled a little.
“I wish I could comfort you, Jimmie—not only now, but in the lonely years to come. But remember, dear, there is nothing on earth I would n't give you or do for you—nothing on earth.”
It was not till long afterwards that he fully comprehended the meaning of her words; and then she herself prettily vouchsafed the interpretation. For immediate answer he kissed her on the cheek in the brotherly fashion in which he had kissed her twice before.
“What greater comfort,” said he, “can I have than to hear you say that? I am a truly enviable man, Connie. Love and affection are showered upon me in full measure. Life is very, very sweet.”
The next two or three weeks brought pleasant surprises which strengthened his conviction. One by one old friends sought him out, and, some heartily, others shamefacedly, extended to him the hand of brotherhood. His evening at the Langham Sketch Club had inaugurated the new order of things. The Frewen-Smiths, whose New Year party had marked the epoch between child and woman in Aline's life, invited the two outcasts to dinner, and pointedly signified that they were the honoured guests. Brother artists looked in casually on Sunday evenings. Their wives called upon Aline, offering congratulations and wedding-gifts. A lady whose portrait he had painted, and at whose house he had visited, commissioned him to paint the portraits of her two children. The ostracism had been removed. How this had been effected Jimmie could not conjecture; and Tony Merewether and Connie Deering, who were the persons primarily and independently responsible, did not enlighten him. By Aline's wedding-day all the old circle had gathered round him, and a whisper of the true story had been heard in Wiltshire House.
Thus the world began to smile upon him, as if to make amends for the anguish it could not remedy. He took the smile as a proof of the world's essential goodness. The great glory that for a day had made his life a blaze of splendour had faded; the sun in his heaven had been eternally eclipsed. But the lesser glory of the moon and stars remained undimmed; the tenderness of twilight lost no tone of its beauty. He stood unshaken in his faith, unchanged in himself—the strong, wise man looking upon the earth and the fulness thereof with the unclouded eyes of a child.
The man whom he had most loved, the woman he had most worshipped, had each failed him, had each brought upon him bitter and abiding sorrow. They had passed like dead folks out of his daily life. Yet each retained in his heart the once inhabited chambers. They were dear ghosts. His incurable optimism in this wise brought about its consolation. For optimism involves courage of a serene quality. Aline, with her swift perception of him, had the opportunity of flashing this into an epigram. There was a little gathering in the studio, and the talk ran on personal bravery. Some one started the question: What would the perfectly brave man do if attacked unarmed by a man-eating tiger?
“I know what Jimmie would do,” she cried. “He would try to pat the beast on the head.”
There was laughter over the girl's unchallenged championship, but those who had ears to hear found the saying true.
The night before the wedding the two sat up very late, spending their last hours together, and Aline sat like a child on Jimmie's knee and sobbed on his breast. The lover seemed a far-away abstraction, a malevolent force rather than a personality, that was tearing her away from the soil in which her life was rooted. Jimmie stroked her hair and spoke brave words. But he had not realised till then the wrench of parting. Till then, perhaps, neither had realised the strength of the bond between them. They were both fervent natures, who felt intensely, and their mutual affection had been a vital part of their lives. If bright and gallant youth had not flashed across the girl's path and, after the human way, had not caught her wondering maidenhood in strong young arms; if deeper and more tragic passion had not swept away the mature man, it is probable that this rare, pure love of theirs might have insensibly changed into the greater need one of the other, and the morrow's bells might have rung for these two. But as it was, no such impulse stirred their exquisite relationship. They were father and daughter without the barrier of paternity; brother and sister without the ties of consanguinity; lovers without the lovers' throb; intimate, passionate friends with the sweet and subtle magic of the sex's difference.
“I can't bear leaving you,” she moaned. “I can't bear leaving the dear beautiful life. I'll think of you every second of every minute of every hour sitting here all alone, alone. I don't want to go. If you say the word now, I'll remain and it shall be as it has been for ever and ever.”
“I shall miss you—terribly, my dear,” said he. “But I'll be the gainer in the end. You'll give me Tony as a sort of younger brother. I am getting to be an old man, darling—and soon I shall find the need ofles jeunesin my painting life. You can't understand that yet. Tony will bring around me the younger generation with new enthusiasms and fresh impulses. It is to my very great good, dear. And if God gives you children, I'll be the only grandfather they'll ever have, poor things, and I'd like to have a child about me again. I have experience. I have washed your chubby face and hands,moi qui vous parle, and undressed you and put you to bed, my young lady who is about to be married.”
“Oh, Jimmie, I remember it—and I had to tell you how to do everything.”
“It seems the day before yesterday,” said Jimmie. “Eheu fugaces!”
The next day when she in her wedding-dress (a present from Connie Deering) walked down the aisle on her husband's arm and stole a shy glance at him, radiant, full of the promise and the pride of manhood, and met the glad love in his eyes, she forgot all else in the throbbing joy of her young life's completion. It was only afterwards when she was changing her dress, with Connie Deering's assistance, in her own little room, that she became again conscience-stricken.
“Youwilllook after Jimmie while I am away,won'tyou?” she asked tragically—they were going to the Isle of Wight for their honeymoon.
“I would look after him altogether if he would let me,” said Connie, in an abrupt, emotional little outburst.
Aline drew a quick breath.
“What do you mean?”
Connie threw the simple travelling-hat, whose feathers she was daintily touching, upon the bed.
“What do you think I mean?” she laughed nervously. “I'm not an old woman. I'm as lonely as Jimmie will be—and—”
“What?”
“Oh!—-only I've found out that I love Jimmie as much as a silly woman can love anybody, if it's any satisfaction to you to know it—and you may be quite sure I'll see that no harm comes to him during your honeymoon, dear.”
The ensuing conversation nearly caused the bride to miss her train. But no bride ever left her girlhood's room more luminously happy. On the threshold she turned and threw her arms round Connie Deering's neck.
“I'll arrange it all when I come back,” she whispered.
And Aline kept her word.