Chapter XII: Part II: I (5)

She knelt upon a rush-seated _prie-dieu_ in the same posture of absorbed devotion as the others, but her thoughts strayed, like a child's brought to church by an elder sister. She tried to count the tapers--how many red? how many white?--wondered what the nuns' faces were like behind the flapped white caps. The scene took shape in her head in little biting phrases, just as another kind of artist would have seen it in tone and composition. She was rather restless, wanted to be gone, and even said to herself that this last move of Father Vernon's was in doubtful taste. After going through so much----!

But the silence, the stillness, the enervating loaded atmosphere gained her little by little. She had an access of devotion: tapers, flowers, prostrate fellow-worshippers were all part of some intimate rite of which there were two protagonists--that white sphere toward which, from time to time, she stole an awed glance, and she--a white host herself, with tired, folded pinions, submissive, only waiting for fire from heaven to complete the sacrifice....

... Oh, God--the pain! the pain in her head! She wanted to scream, to faint, but her horror, the refined woman's horror of any "scene," kept her dumb and almost still. She prayed, wildly and incoherently--pressed her gloved fingers into her temples; her forehead was damp with perspiration....

It was going now. Yes. In wave after wave, each less poignant than the one before, the pain left her. She lifted her head, wet her lips--wiped her forehead with the handkerchief still damp from her tears. Her eyes were tired and dim; the altar swam mistily. She looked across to Father Vernon, and he, noting her restlessness at last, rose and, with a low genuflection on both knees, beckoned her, and passed before her from the church.

In the open air she revived, and even began to doubt the reality of what she had just undergone. There is a dream-like quality about intense pain that makes it hard to estimate it truly afterward. The car was waiting, in a dark slum that had once been a walled country lane smelling of mould and verdure. Even now the warm restlessness of spring could be felt in its fetid air. The chauffeur sat sideways upon his seat, reading some strange by-product of literature in a green cover. A dozen or so of ragged children, shock-headed and sore of face, clustered round the headlights like so many poor scorched flies. She shared the coppers in her purse between them.

"Write me from Hindhead," Vernon said, at the door of the car; "and come to see me again when you get back. Be sure, my dear, God has some great mercy for you after this. And if I were you, I should see some one about the headaches. Nerves? Oh, yes! but it never does harm to have good advice. Good-bye, good-bye! God bless you, my dear. Now then, babies, why aren't the lot of you in bed?"

* * * * *

The car rolled, smoothly and swiftly, southward and westward. Through brawling, chaffering Saturday night markets; through the old "Square Mile," deserted now, its mysterious lanes coiling away to left and right in tortuous perspective; across the Circus, in whose midst the bronze archer poises himself, choosing his prey and aiming his unseen arrow day and night at the spinning wheel of pleasure; round the sweep of the Quadrant--and home. Two and two, two and two; the men leaning over the women, the women leaning toward the men. Nature, after all, was slightly vulgar. To be placed--by circumstances--out of reach of its allurement had compensations--lent dignity to the point of view. It was almost enough to make one turn to virtue to have to share vice with so many....

There she went again! Phrases, phrases! Well, it was just as well, since, after all, there wasn't much else left for her now. How tired she was of it all! And what was the great mercy that Father Vernon had predicted so confidently?... Home, at last.

* * * * *

"Three hours, probably more," the doctor said. It was Pemmer-Lloyd, the great cancer specialist from Weymouth Street, just round the corner. He was in golfing tweeds, and felt justly aggrieved that, with so many general practitioners in the neighborhood, he should have been called away from breakfast, for this. The nine forty-five to Amersham was out of the question now.

One window-blind had been drawn up, crookedly and hurriedly, and through the rhomboidal opening a sinister light fell upon the disorder of the room. Two frightened maids and a housekeeper stood at the foot of the bed, watching the doctor, with inane hope upon their faces. One of the maids was crying, but looking about her curiously at the same time.

"Done? No! of course nothing can be done. Am I not telling you she has been dead over three hours. Had any doctor been attending her lately?"

"Not to our knowledge, sir."

"There may have to be an inquest, then. In that case you must see that nothing is touched. Have the family been advised?"

"No, doctor. I thought first----"

"Wire and 'phone them immediately! _immediately!_ and the police as well. Here is my card for the inspector. I shall have to stay at home all day now. In a case like this, you should always call a general practitioner."

* * * * *

They say she must have been reading a great part of the night. Two books were on the table near her bed--"Madame Bovary," and "The Imitation of Christ." Flaubert and à Kempis! Poor Althea! It was almost your life's epitome.

XV

A LAST WISH

Many will remember the profound impression that Althea's death created. It extended far beyond the circles that her novels had reached. There was something about that last mysterious journey through London--the sudden, unheralded end, at some conjectural hour, when the great heart of the city was beating its faintest, that struck the popular imagination, always ready to be harrowed, and secretly grateful, I believe, for evidence that fate works with an even grimness under all the inequalities of rank or fortune. I attended the funeral, combining for the last time my professional duties with the privileges of an old but lately neglected friend, and saw her committed to the awakening earth. She was buried with all the pomp and circumstance that the church of her adoption gives its children as a last assurance of its own unshaken power, but through all the chants and absolutions the chill human ache of an irreparable loss persisted, as, through the perfume of incense and flowers, the raw smell of the polished elm coffin pierced to the sense. The church was crowded with her friends; wreaths and crosses, lyres with snapped strings, broken columns of rare exotic flowers, all symbols of untimely end, were banked round the catafalque, but the coffin itself was stark and bare, covered thinly by a pall of purple silk wrought at its hem with passion flowers. The girls in some refuge or another, poor soiled doves whose unwearied friend she had been, had sat up, it was said, night and day in order to complete it.

About the time that references to Mrs. Hepworth's career were ceasing to appear even in the minor papers, rumors of a theatrical hoax began to circulate through London. The new dancer, whom the zealous friendship of a certain well-known sporting baronet had forced upon an unwilling management, would not, after all, appear in the new play that was to replace the _Motor Girl_ at the Dominion some time in May. "_Would not appear!_" Imagine what an eye trained to cheat the censor of his spoil could make of that; with what significance a tongue, thrust into a leathery cheek not quite innocent of biscuit and cheese, at the Bedford Street Bodega, could invest those three little words.

"_Will not appear_, my boy. Catch on? Why won't she? That's the joke, my boy. Because she's got to stop at home and _nurse her mother_."

Imagine it! just once, and then let us pass on into sweeter air. Even if it must be the air of a sick-room. For many weeks Fenella hardly breathed any other. During that first breathless rally which hardly gave thought to the final issue, and during which a spoonful of broth swallowed, an hour's quiet rest or a fall in temperature were triumphs repaying the sleepless night, dull eye, and hollow cheek a hundredfold, career, character, seemed very empty, shadowy words. Even if one of the vile journals in pink and blue and yellow covers addressed in a handwriting needlessly disguised, which, be sure of it, the postman did not fail to deliver at Number Eleven, had reached her, had not--as all were, in fact, been torn from its wrapper by honest Frances' grimy hand to light parlor or kitchen fire--I doubt very much whether the marked paragraph would have had power to inflict one pang upon her self-respect, or bring one drop of blood to her cheek.

How much she loved her mother, how far the wholesome, homely _fact_ of her had been the basis of all happiness in life, Nelly had not guessed until now, when the thought must be faced of its speedy change to a mere memory. A reproachful memory, alas! She looked back on her girlhood--her school-days, and saw herself heedless and heartless. How niggardly of love she had been, how chary in response! She even accused herself of a little snobbishness in her mother's regard--unjustly, since it was from the innate expansiveness of the older woman and not from the accident of station or manner that her own finer nature had shrunk. But, in circumstances like these, to be conscious of a finer nature does not administer much comfort.

Mrs. Barbour rallied a little from the first stroke, but never rose from her bed, and never spoke intelligibly again. Sometimes, by bending close to her lips and straining every sense, Fenella fancied she could construe the formless gabble into words, but into the words even her affection could read no meaning. During the day, indeed, her presence seemed to agitate the invalid to such an extent that the nurse had to be roused and the desperate effort to speak cut short by some opiate or injection. Once, driven almost mad at sight of her mother's mental suffering, Fenella took a sheet of stiff white cardboard, propped the sick woman upon a pillow, and put a pencil into the palsied hand. Slowly, with infinite pains on the one hand and infinite patience on the other, five dreadful letters took shape upon the writing-pad; five letters such as a dying man might scrawl with a finger dipped into his heart's blood:

"D--A--N--C--E."

A light broke upon the girl. "You want me to go on rehearsing? Is that it, mother?"

Oh! what joy in the poor fading eyes at being at last understood. The trembling head nodded again and again, and fell back on the pillow exhausted.

"I will then, dear!" Fenella whispered in her mother's ear. "I'll go and put my things on at once."

She came back, dressed as for the street, and kissed her mother good-bye. Ten minutes afterward, in response to a stealthy knock at the door, the little Scotch nurse whispered that the patient was fast asleep.

From now until the day on which the slowly curdling brain ceased to receive any impression at all the little loving conspiracy of lies went on. Every morning, at the usual hour of her departure for the theatre, Fenella, in hat and long coat, kissed her mother's cheek and forehead, and asked her how the night had passed--that night whose every hour she often had watched. At seven o'clock, dressed again, she came back, having first laid her cheek to the marble mantelpiece in the drawing-room, that it might be convincingly cold. (The best women have these depths in deception, this recognition of the importance of trifles.) She would sit down upon the bed and regale her duped parent with a long and elaborate history of the day's doings--what Mr. Dollfus had said, what Mr. Lavigne had said--how tiresome the chorus were, how jealous the leading lady--how set, above all, were all signs and portents toward ultimate triumph. Her achievement in this new field stirred even little Frances, now become a person of vast importance and responsibility, to involuntary admiration.

"Miss! You can't 'alf tell 'em!" that little helpmeet would say, harkening her.

Whenever a protracted illness has ended in death it is a commonplace of comfort with well-meaning but shallow folk to say, "You must all feel it a _merciful release_." Apart from its sincerity, the phrase is founded upon a misconception of human feeling. No dead are missed so much as the dead who have been long a-dying. The presence of a perilous illness brings many an evil into a house; it at least casts one out. _Ennui_ never reigns in the house that has the straw in front of its railings. A great drama is going on, and there never is a moment when one may not steal upstairs on tiptoe to measure its progress. Hence, apart altogether from sorrow, a strange emptiness in life when all is over, a bitter superadded regret for the close, shadowed room, haunted by broken murmurs, that was once the core of a whole polity of existence.

In her sad absorption Fenella forgot Sir Bryan all but completely. He wrote to her often. His letters, headed in black or blue, or embossed whitely in thick square letters--"The Turf Club"; "369 Mount Street, Tel. 9087 Mayfair"; "Coffers Castle. Parcels: Balafond Stn. N. B. R."--lay strewn about her dressing-table or stuck carelessly behind looking-glasses, for all the world, represented now by Nurse Ursula or Frances, to read if they would. (We will not suspect Nurse Ursula of such a thing for a moment, and on any that have been placed in my hands there is no such grimy finger-print as I am sure Frances would have left.) She answered rarely, and then only in little set missives, mere bulletins of her mother's health. She begged his pardon for leaving so many of his letters _unansered_. She was quite well, thank him, had had a quiet night, and felt quite _enegetic_. The doctor had been and said mother's _strenth_ was well maintained. She thanked him for the lovely grapes from Stanmore. She hoped that "Mud-Major" would win in the big race at Liverpool, and she remained sincerely his--Fenella Powys Barbour. She had decided on the full signature in letters to Lumsden. It sounded stately, and enforced respect. She would have been vastly surprised seeing the sort of respect with which the misspelt little notes were treated.

It is only part of the general injustice of life that while the man who was doing his clumsy best to lighten her sorrow hardly stayed in her mind a moment after she had cast his letters aside or scribbled an answer to them, the false lover, who had kissed her in her own home, loved and ridden away, haunted every hushed empty corner of it. Her very unhappiness brought him back to her, as a new illness weakens the smart of an old wound. She had an impulse once, which the lonely and deserted will understand, to set her thoughts on paper in the form of a letter to him.

"MY DARLING LOST LOVE" (she began),

"What years and years it [_sic_] seems to have past since I
saw your dear face----"

Then she stopped, and tore the sheet into little pieces. Anything approaching literary composition suddenly became hateful. The thought had occurred to her: How well the other woman could do this! The other woman--in her grave nearly a month.

One morning, while she lingered outside her mother's door, after perpetrating the customary deception, Frances, the begrimed, brought her Lumsden's card in a corner of her apron. He was in the small drawing-room, straight and fair and good to look upon, standing amid a dusty huddle of chairs that had not been restored to their places since the doctors consulted there a week ago.

"I came to see if you were killing yourself," he said, when they had shaken hands and he had asked after her mother.

"Oh! I'm as strong as a horse."

"That remark rather loses its force with me, because I know something about them. When did you take your feed--'horse'?"

"Sir Bryan! I eat with nurse."

"Oh! I know the sort of meals. You're dressed. Have you been out?"

"N--no."

"Just going then?"

Fenella blushed, but did not reveal the pious fraud.

"I've got the big car outside," said Lumsden. "Care to come for a run till tea?"

The suggestion had its attractions.

"I must run upstairs first. You don't mind waiting a minute?"

Nurse not only gave permission, but a little straight hygienic talk she had been saving up, too professional to be repeated here. Fenella took her seat almost with a feeling of duty done. Bryan ordered the chauffeur into the back and took the wheel himself.

"Tuck this round you. Now, where shall we go that's within reach? Richmond?"

"Oh no!" hastily--"not Richmond. Let's go to Hampstead."

"No; I don't care for Hampstead," with a sudden shadow of distaste. Two pasts met in their glance--her woman's fault of loving too well--and his.

After a while the mere physical act of breathing fully and deeply again, the rush of the spring air, pleasantly cold, past her pallid cheeks, did their work, and unsealed the springs of joy in her own young breast--a facile joy, born of health and perfect balance, for which she had often blamed herself since the summer, ignorant of how between it, as between every function of her body, and the ascetic ideal which a heart, untimely chastened, sought to impose, there was war declared, in which she was a mere battle-ground for contending forces. It had rained hard in the forenoon. Now, level with their eyes, a belated sun flooded the suburbs with temperate gold, spilled its overflow on wet slate roofs, set bright jewels in the upper windows of gray stucco houses, and wove a filagree pattern, beaded with tender green buds in railed gardens and bristling walled shrubberies. Nothing was beneath its glorifying magic. Between the flashing tram-rails the very bed of the wide road seemed flooded with alluvial dust. A wonderful sky country, all mountain and islet-strewn tarn--such a landscape as may lie at the gate of dream-cities in the Alps--closed the prospect into which they were rushing. The wheels hummed, the six cylinders purred happily. She began to sing to herself, stretching her neck and pouting her lips, a foolish little song she had caught from one of the Dominion girls:

"I like your old French bonnet
With the ribbons on it,
And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.
If you'll come to Parry
Then we two will marry
And our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."

"Feeling happier, Flash?"

She had forgotten him. Now, as she turned, self-reproachful, at the sound of his voice, the unreasonable little fit of happiness took wing. Yet she could not but admire him. How cleverly and coolly he drove! What chances he took! They were passing every one. Once, at some congestion in the traffic, a policeman touched his helmet and let him through. He seemed to feel this was a man not used to wait his turn. Paul had once said to her that most men failed in life because its detail was too much for them to tackle; at least, this was what she made out of a rather more ornate speech. Bryan didn't seem to find any difficulty. She remembered Jack Barbour's comprehensive phrase, "Bryan's first-class in anything he takes up." Was it because she was ambitious, aspiring, herself that she resisted this power, instead of succumbing to it, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have done, and being content to shine with a reflected glory? She had had her own little dream of success--the packed theatre, the thunders of applause, her name flashing and winking in letters of fire--part of the madness of a great city by night--paragraphs, interviews. All very mean and personal, no doubt, yet with an element in them that somehow dignified the ambition. For to be the favorite of the public was what she wanted--nothing else would do--the great good-hearted public, that rings its hard-earned shilling or half-crown upon the ledge of the ticket-office, shopman and clerk with honest wife and sweetheart at his side, equally ready to laugh or cheer or cry, who dip a mutual finger into a box of chocolates and believe that even a dancer can be an honest girl.

XVI

AZRAEL

They stopped at a little place in a fold of the Chiltern Hills, a mere roadside inn which the neighborhood of a fashionable golf-course had galvanized into new and rather graceful life. The stone front was covered in ivy, two wings of red brick terminated in sunny bay windows, there was a bowling-green at the back, and an academician had repainted the sign. A few men in tweeds and flannels whom Lumsden appeared to know were strolling about the place, but abstained tactfully from more than a passing greeting. While tea was getting ready the baronet lit a cigar, and the girl gathered a bunch of primroses in the garden and pinned them at her waist. Now that she had taken off the heavy coat he had insisted on her wearing, he noticed for the first time the shabbiness of her black house-frock. A white thread, dropped from some needlework, clung to one sleeve.

Lumsden was a man for whom some kind of a love affair had always been a necessity. Even before he left Eton he had had friends among women of the world. His bluff, slangy manners covered a good deal of intensity of a rather un-English sort. Men of Scotch race have a subtlety denied to the obtuser Southron. They are both more steadfast and more perfidious. His early manhood had been shaken by one great passion, which had ended unhappily and which it is no part of our business to disinter. A long series of inconclusive sentimental experiments had followed it; inconclusive, because he had the grace or the vanity to think that, had it been constancy he was seeking, he might often enough have found it. The devotion, indeed, which one might strike up against in unexpected quarters was, in his opinion, a serious drawback to the game. He was a generous lover. The idol of the moment was always bravely apparelled, always had plenty of tinsel on it, and if a sense of its inadequacy oppressed him, he got rid of the feeling by putting on a little more. All he had asked latterly was that it should simper prettily and do him credit. He was deceived, of course, from time to time, but never before his own waning attention had given betrayal at once its justification and its clue. Thus it fell out that, although his favored pastime had cost him a great deal of money, it had never cost him what such a man would consider his self-respect. It will save time to admit that his intentions toward his young cousin (she was not really his cousin, we know, but he liked to speak of her, even think of her so) had not been honorable. That she was kin and of the same caste as himself had no weight with a man accustomed to divide women into two classes--those he would not marry under any circumstances and those whom he would only marry if there were no help for it. Fenella, to do him justice (and, in a way, to do her justice too), had belonged to the second class from the beginning, but her emergence from it now into a category all by itself was not due to any recognition on his part of her integrity--why should he recognize what he had not tempted?--but simply and solely to the fact that the illness of that poor lady, her mother, had upset all his early calculations. He had his own code of conduct, and one of them was that you can not call at a girl's home, inquire after the maternal health, send the invalid fruit and game, and then--well, without an entire change in perspective as regards her. Of late, indeed, she had lain in his imagination to a quite distressing extent. The impulse that had made him give up a day's hunting and come spurring to her side over ten miles of muddy ground had not failed to repeat itself again and again. His thoughts turned toward her incessantly. At every man's tale of fraud and wrong her image stirred uneasily in his imagination, and the ideal, rather deferred than quite disowned, to which his whole life had done violence, joined with his passion in pleading for a reparation that was at once so easy and so pleasant. Women are generally avenged competently by some woman. The eclipse of the individual in the species never lasts. She emerges, armed with all the old illusions, and often at the very moment when a man is weakest to do battle with her.

Smoking silently, he looked at her now, busied with the pretty feminine duties of milk-jug and sugar-tongs, marked the perceptible changes of face and figure since their first encounter. His experience projected, as it were, her maturity, even her gray hairs upon her--owned that she would always be charming, always a sweet woman.

"Dreaming, Flash?"

She had only been respecting his own silent mood, but did not deny her abstraction.

"I was thinking of the Dominion. When's the first night?"

"In about three weeks. It'll be _Hamlet_ without the prince for some of us, eh, coz?"

She did not answer.

"You must only look upon it as put off for awhile," he said reassuringly. "You'll get another chance."

She shook her head. "I don't feel I shall. Don't you ever feel there's just one time for the one thing?"

"Even if I didn't, Shakespeare has. But you're over-young, Flash, to be thinking of fortune at the ebb."

He looked down at her hand. There were no rings on it. He had a suspicion that was confirmed when she snatched it off the table and put it in her lap.

"Don't think me impertinent, but will it make much difference, I mean financial difference, to you if your mother dies?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid so. But I have a little money coming to me when I'm twenty-one. Not a lot."

"How old are you now?"

"Nearly nineteen."

"Two years! What are you going to do meanwhile?"

She shrugged her shoulders, or maybe shivered. Life _was_ gray with the dream out of it.

"Work, I suppose--at something. I can always teach dancing again."

"Flash, I'm ungodly rich. Won't you let me----"

"_Bryan!_"

It was the first time she had ever called him familiarly by his name, but her face was so shocked and white, her voice so like a real cry of pain, that he did not notice it. He flushed, and churned the gravel with his heel.

"What have I said? Do you know, young woman, I don't find the expression on your face very flattering."

"Bryan! If I thought you meant what you've just said, you--I--we----"

"Well, what?"

"Never, _never_ could meet again."

Lumsden swallowed his humiliation, but it didn't go down very far.

"I beg your pardon. Will that do? There was some excuse for me, you know. You let me help you once before."

"Not with money."

He wasn't in a mood to be very delicate. "Wasn't it?" he said with a short laugh. "Never mind, then."

"Why do you laugh that funny way?" said Fenella, with unexpected spirit. "You must tell me now. Did you have to pay Dollfus to take me?"

"Dear _ingénue_! Do you mean to say you've never suspected it? You don't think Dollfus is in business for hygienic reasons, do you?"

"Much money?" she persisted.

"Oh, ask Joe," said Lumsden, rather wearily. "He's on the telephone."

Fenella beat her palms against the side of the chair. "I've been a fool," she went on, in a fierce soliloquy, "a little, credulous donkey. No wonder that girl thought me a fraud! And yet--I believed you all believed in me. Do you think I'd ever have let you--unless I felt sure? Oh! you must know it."

"My dear child, be content. You carry conviction. I acquit you from this moment of everything unmaidenly, generosity included."

"Generosity!"

"Yes. It sometimes requires as much to take as to give. But you're like all women."

"Why?"

"When they're not insulted at being offered money they're insulted it isn't more."

"How dare you call me 'women'?"

"Does it hurt your dignity?"

"Never mind what it hurts. You've no right to speak that way, to class me with--with others. Oh, yes, you have, though. I'd forgotten."

"Flash, let me tell you one thing: No matter how young or charming or virtuous you may be, to keep harping on what you know hurts a man's feelings is to be a shrew."

"Your 'feelings'!" The vexation went out of her face. She leaned her chin on her hand and gave him a look so piercing, so direct and unexpected, that it went through all his worldly armor.

"Well?" he asked, grimly, through his teeth. She never guessed the restraint he was putting on himself. "Haven't I a right to any?"

She looked away without answering.

He got up abruptly. "Let's go home," he said. "We've had enough heart-to-heart talk for one afternoon."

They rode back into the London lights in a silence which the gentleman in the peaked cap who drove them probably misconstrued as perfect accord. "They don't talk much, not w'en they're 'olding 'ands," he said that night in his favored house of call. But he only held her hand once, to say good-bye at the door.

"Have I been a prig?" asked Fenella, contritely.

He seemed to be turning the matter over, but was really thinking how prettily penitence became her.

"Have I offended you?"

"I'll tell you whether you have some other time."

* * * * *

Apparently not beyond forgiveness, for he came again two days later and took her for an hour's drive--and then the next day. Good or bad, the habit formed itself. Two or three times she allowed herself to be persuaded further, and let him take her to dinner. At such an hour the big restaurants would not be very full; but it seemed Bryan could not go anywhere without meeting a man he knew, and who, while speaking, divided his attention pretty evenly between the baronet, half-turned in his chair, holding the lapel of his friend's coat, and the pretty stranger to whom he was not introduced. He was very kind and cousinly; had theories as to what people should eat (he never asked her to drink) when low-spirited and anxious, kept clear of the personal note, and always saw she got back in time. Thus, little by little, the hint she had received of a dangerous hardness in his nature was effaced. In time of trouble the heart receives more impressions than the head, and it is wonderful into what bulk tearful eyes can magnify a little kindness. Fenella was to blame herself subsequently for her conduct during the last days of her mother's life; but I think, perhaps too indulgently, that it was only the instinct to grasp at enjoyment while enjoyment was possible. The very pang of self-reproach with which she took up her nightly task might have convinced her of this. Old habits are not effaced in an instant. From babyhood she had known no surer way to make her mother happy than by seizing all opportunities for pleasure that came her way. Outsiders who suspect love because it falls from some arbitrary standard they choose to set up have no idea how often apparent heartlessness is justified by some such little secret covenant between the loving and the loved. And then, though the period of suspense was short, it passed so heavily. The days seemed counted out with pitiful slowness by a power that knew how few they were. Time, like distance, deceives when one is seeking the way. She was so fearfully alone! Her vision sometimes ached at the obscurity of her own destiny. In that still room uncertainties seemed to multiply, thicken and coil, like smoke in a tunnel. She envied every one in turn--Nurse Ursula, with her brisk professional manner and endless prospect of clearly defined duty--cases to come running into perspective like beds in a long ward; slatternly, pretty little Frances, with her brisk love-passages in the area; the woman upon the bed, nearer with every breath to a change that raises no problems but solves them all. She often whispered in her mother's ear, "Mother, mother; take me with you. Don't go without Nelly."

Foolish extravagances of an undisciplined heart. Even for death, Nelly, we have to wait until the time for enjoying it is past.

* * * * *

Early one morning, following a night in which her mother had seemed much easier, and in the very first hour of her untimely sleep, the nurse shook her by the shoulder. In the one look that the two women exchanged her news was told. Fenella huddled on her clothes and followed to the sick-room. Her mother was breathing strangely. Every inspiration was like the hiccough that follows a fit of weeping in a child. Her brows were knitted--she seemed puzzled and absorbed. Occasionally she tried to lift a hand stiffly and clumsily toward her head. By noon all was over. The doctor called twice, and, for the first time in many days, failed to write a new prescription. The lawyer was telephoned for. About three o'clock in the afternoon two decent pew-opening bodies were admitted without question, stole upstairs, and, having performed their office, stole as quietly away. The charwoman stayed for tea, and uncovered a rich vein of reminiscence suitable for the occasion. The blinds were drawn down, the windows opened. Outside, in the square, was heard the champing of bits, the rattle of the harness, that poor Mrs. Barbour had loved to listen to of an afternoon in spring or autumn.

Toward evening, when they were all done with the dead woman, Fenella went softly upstairs. Nurse Ursula, upon whose breast, for want of a nearer, the orphaned girl's first passion of grief had spent itself, but whose attentions harassed her now, would have accompanied her, but she would have no one. She approached the door full of awe as well as sorrow. Within it seemed some dark angel, with brimming chalice, had been waiting till she was calm enough to drink. There was something sacramental in this first visit to her dead; her passion composed itself for the encounter. Through the lowered blinds the afternoon sun filled the room with a warm amber light. The windows were opened slightly at the bottom, and the fresh spring wind puffed and sucked at the light casement curtains. She laid her head down upon the pillow and put her lips to the chill, sunken temples, upon which she felt the hair still damp from the sweat of the death-struggle. As there are depths in the sea which the hardiest diver cannot support save with constraint of breathing, so there are depths of sorrowful reverie wherein the soul abdicates for a time its faculties of memory and comparison. Fenella did not cry nor remember nor rebel. The briny flood rose quietly--encompassed her utterly--covered her insensibly at the temperature of her own forsaken heart. Sorrow so deep has many of sleep's attributes. She had been vaguely conscious for some time of a knocking at the door before she raised her head. It was turned quite dark; the charwoman, with a candle lighting up her frightened face, stood in the open door.

"Mrs. Chirk! How dare you disturb me."

"Oh, miss, I'm sorry; but I knocked and knocked. Nurse is upstairs and Frances is out, and there's two gentlemen below says they must see you. I 'aven't told them nothink, miss, not knowin' as you'd 'ave me."

Some more of the dreary business of death, she concluded. She went to her own room, bathed her eyes, dressed her hair hurriedly, and came downstairs. She started as she opened the dining-room door. Her visitors were Lumsden and the Dominion manager.

XVII

A DREAM COMES TRUE

The two men were in evening dress, standing a good way apart. Both seemed ill at ease, and each showed it in a different fashion. Bryan was pulling at his fair moustache, and Mr. Dollfus, his watch in his hand, full of suppressed excitement, had evidently just checked himself in a nervous pacing of the carpet. Before she could give her indignation words, Bryan came quickly across the room, and kept her silent with a gesture.

"Miss Barbour, just a word before you say anything, and before Dollfus tells you our errand. I've brought him here to-night because I don't want either you or him to reproach me afterward that I came between you and even a hundred-to-one chance; but I want you to know before he begins that the whole thing's against my judgment, and against my inclination, too. Now then, Joe, fire away, and remember time's valuable."

The Jew only seemed to have been waiting to burst forth.

"Mith Barbour," he exclaimed, with a nervous movement of his hands, and lisping worse than ever, "I wantcher to thave me."

"To save you?"

"Yeth. Oh, don't look at me that way. I'm thpeakin' sense. Dontcher know what's happenin' to-night?"

She shook her head.

"What!" he almost screamed; "you meanter thay you've forgotten. It's the first night of the _Dime Duchess_. They're playin' the second act now, and, by Gott, the piece is damned already!"

He wiped his dripping forehead with a big scented handkerchief, and began to pace the floor again, flinging out his arms exuberantly.

"It's a conthpiracy from beginning to end," he cried, shrilly--"a conthpiracy! I tell yer, Lumpsden, I bin in front, and I know a lot of the faces. Fifty or sixty of Costello's people if there's vun. I'll haf the law on him. But cher can't turn out sixty people, eh! They've stopped Ormiston's encore twice; Mith Carthew's so frightened she can't sing a note. Three months' work and thousants of pounds gone to h--ll in a night, by Gott!"

"Stop swearing and raving, Joe, and tell the girl what you want."

Dollfus sobered himself with a great effort and wiped his mouth.

"Scuthe my langwitch, please, Miss Barbour," he said in a lower tone. "I'm excited; I ain't meself. I wantcher ter come and dance."

Fenella stared at him. "To _dance_! to-night?"

Bryan, who had kept his back to them, turned his head now.

"That's right, Flash," he said over his shoulder, "my advice to you is 'don't you do it.' Joe's crazy, but he ain't exaggerating much. They're pretty wild over something in front."

Dollfus shook his head despairingly from side to side.

"There you go Lumpsden, there you go agen. You're all wrong. I've bin tellin' him that all the vay in the cab. He don't know the public like I do. They're jutht in the mood now when somethin' new and somethin' good'll carry 'em off their feet. Mith Barbour, I haf ter go back anyhow. It'th for you ter decide. Will you come or wontcher?"

"Bryan," she said. "Doesn't he know?" pointing to the ceiling with her head.

"Bout cher mother!" said Dollfus, who was watching her narrowly. "Courthe I know the poor lady'th ill. But I'll take yer down and I'll bring yer back. Think? Three quarters of an hour! You'll never be mithed."

"Mr. Dollfus, mamma died this morning."

The Dominion manager took up his hat without a word and walked on tiptoe to the door. Bryan followed and, if looks could have killed, Mr. Dollfus's troubles would have been over then and there. In the hall the little man turned.

"Mith Barbour, pleathe, _pleathe_ belief me. Not for a thousant pounds, not for ten thousant, I vouldn't er had this happen. I couldn't know, could I--ah? I gotter heart--eh? You von't t'ink the vorse of me?"

"Oh, come on!" said the baronet, taking hold of his sleeve. "Haven't you done enough mischief already?"

"_Stop!_" cried Fenella, so loudly that both men obeyed. She stood rigid for a moment, pressing her hands over her eyes. Across her brain in letters like fire the last message from the beloved dead was throbbing and glowing. "_Dance! Dance!_"

"I'll come, Joe!" she cried. "Just two minutes to put on my cloak, that's all. Don't stop me, Bryan! I know what I'm doing. Let me pass! Oh, I've had enough of its being made smooth and easy for me. I'm one of the crowd to-night, and I'm going to help 'em pull the fat out of the fire. I can do it, too. I never was afraid, and I've got a bit up my sleeve you haven't seen."

She was gone and back in a moment, cloaked and with a little box under her arm.

"My make-up box," she said, tapping it. "I just thought of it in time. Have you got the car outside? How long'll it take? Mrs. Chirk!" she called down the kitchen stairs. "Tell nurse I've been called away on business and not to sit up."

"You're a herrowen, a herrowen," said Joe, dabbing at his eyes this time, as they took their seats in the cab.

"Oh, no, I'm not, Joe. No more than any of the other girls. Do you think I'm the only woman that's got to grin to-night when she'd rather cry? I never was stage-struck, like other girls. I always knew it was 'work! work!' once you were over the floats. Don't look so glum, Bryan. That's 'cos he only knows half our business, isn't it, Joe? He's only a dabbler. It's bread and butter and a bed to lie on, and perhaps medicine for somebody's mother, isn't it, Joe? Some of those girls told me they'd been eighteen months out and three months rehearsing! Think of it! Oh, why doesn't he get through the traffic?"

The front of the Dominion flashed past, festooned with boards announcing that stalls and dress circle and amphitheatre were full. The vestibule round the box office was crowded with men in dress clothes.

"They're just t'rough the second act," said Dollfus. "Now you know what you've gotter do." And he repeated his instructions. At the stage door he took her hand and pulled her after him, past the wicket and down the whitewashed corridor, full of girls in spangled finery, who gazed at her in amazement and drew aside to let them pass. Near the wings the manager was pounced on by various subalterns, but he waved them aside furiously.

"Go 'way! ask some vun else! Do somethin'! Getter hustle on! What is it, Mr. Lavigne? Oh! the band parts for the cymbal dance. Take 'em rount to Steiner. I ain't the orchestra! Run up to your old dressin'-room," he said, and let go of her hand; "I'll send up your own dresser. Mr. Lavigne--have the old cue put back. You know. What's it--'muffins'?"

Jack Ormiston was just finishing his third song as she came down dressed, made up in vivid white and carmine, and with the little silver cymbals on her hands. He tumbled off, breathless, perspiring through his grease paint, and stood for a moment, his knees trembling, trying to catch some encouragement amid the babel of cheers, counter--cheers, whistles, cat-calls, and cries of "Order!" that followed him through. And she had to face _that_ presently--unknown, untested, her name not even on the programme.

"Do you think you can do it, Flash?" Bryan asks, nervously, chewing his moustache. In defiance of the "well-known Dominion rule" he has followed her behind.

"Wait and see!" she says, without looking at him, and next moment has taken her cue and is on the stage.

In front the vast concavity of the auditorium sweeps away from her feet, outward and upward. It is dark, confused and populous, full of faces, like pebbles, she fancies, dragged seaward by a retreating wave--flecked white with shirt fronts and fluttering programmes--a hungry monster, ready to engulf her at a tremor or hint of fear. Its hot breath mingles with the cold down-draught of the stage like the flush and chill of an ague. Beyond the blurred footlights her eyes, misty with emotion, watch the leader of the orchestra lifting the first languid bars of the score. His head is turned toward her. In a moment he will give her her signal. Yet, though not a single stroke of his baton but is counted by her, as she waits, poised and tense, for the note upon which, with a clash of cymbals and a tremor of her whole body, the dance must begin, her thoughts, strangely detached and visionary, stray far away from the present moment with its personal crisis of success or failure, to brood, with a perverse preference, over the two great sorrows of her life--the lover who forsook her at the cross-roads of his own ambition because she had not wealth or wit to hold him--the mother, deserted now in her turn, whose waxen fingers, stitch by stitch, had sewn the very dress she is wearing, and who lies at home unwatched or watched only by strangers on the first night of her pitiful state. Life! life! this is life. Something beautiful yet horrible, too. Something that in its demand for service--for distraction--takes as little heed of the woman's breaking heart as it took of the man's thwarted ambition.

"_B-r-r-r!_" The note is reached. As she clashes her cymbals together all visions take flight. The music rises like a flood, pours over the footlights, enters into her and possesses her utterly. She has sold herself to it, and, true to the bargain, her bangled feet beat--beat out the rhythm upon the boards as they once, upon the sand, had beaten out a tune that one man and the eternal sea sang together. Not a movement of her body above the waist but is poised upon them, governed by their shifts and changes, and nothing is stranger than, having watched them awhile at their work, quick and calculated as the shuttle of a machine into which a brain of steel has been built, to look upward to where arms and breast and head thrown back are all partners in some dream of an unattained desire, that hovers just out of reach of the inviting arms, swoops wilfully for a moment to touch the pursed lips, and, just as it is clasped convulsively to the heaving breast, escapes, to leave her gazing after it with set, expressionless face and limbs, suddenly grown rigid again.

* * * * *

"_B-r-r-r!_" The cymbals bray their harsh discord anew. The music begins, more faintly at first; slowly, slowly it woos the coy vision back to her arms. Her face softens. Out of despair intenser desire is born. Nearer and nearer still. But a new note of warning has crept into the score. A muffled drum-tap, hardly heard at first, grows louder--falls faster. And her face changes with it. To bewilderment, horror succeeds rapidly. Either this is not the dream that fled her arms before, or else some new significance in what she sees terrifies her, now when it is too late. Straight and level as a blow it reaches her. She covers her eyes, tries to strike it down, holds it from her with outstretched hands, folds her arms across her breast to deny it entrance. The music tears through crescendo to climax, and all the time she is dancing as well as acting--dancing with all her strength and skill. She cannot feel the tension of the audience, does not know what a tribute is in its breathless attention. She only knows that her dance is nearing its end and that they are silent. Why does no one cheer or clap their hands? Is it possible that, amid those hundreds, not one knows how well the thing is being done? Furore or failure: this had been prophesied of her, and she had given no thought to the alternative. It is to be failure then. All her work is to go for nothing--her dishonor, the violence done her own feelings to-night--for nothing. With success she might even have forgiven herself. A great terror seizes her of the pitiless many-headed monster whom she has wooed in vain and whose churlish silence has power to change all she had thought inspiration into the dross of a crazy, heady folly. It is beginning to murmur--to move restlessly. As she holds her arms out to it in a sort of last abject appeal, the murmuring grows louder. It is the wave, the wave again, of her first fancy, that has hung suspended while she danced, and that now, gathering volume, rears its head to finally overwhelm her with shame and confusion. She was mad to have ventured! Nothing living can face it! She stifles a scream, dances out the last furious finale of the orchestra, and falls prostrate, her arms stretched out before her, the silver cymbals held upward.

Everything turns dark and thunderous. She feels the chorus sweep past her with a glitter of gold legs and a stiff rustle of skirts; fancies that the orchestra is playing again, but that something louder and stormier is drowning it; gets shakily to her feet, takes one frightened glance at the tumult before her, and, with a half curtsey, totters through the wings. Mr. Dollfus rushes to meet her; he is shaking her hands again and again, some one else is holding her round the waist and whispering in her ear.

"Pull yourself together, Flash! It's all right. You must go on--once, anyhow. Damn it, Joe, give the girl a few moments. Can't you see it's got over her?"

"Did I--do--all right?" says Fenella, between gasps.

"All right?" Dollfus repeats, excitedly. "Cantcher hear 'em? Listen to the noise! Wotcher think they mean? Come--surely to gootness, you're ready now?"

She is calmer, and draws herself out of the baronet's arms.

"Go on, kid," he says, as he lets her go. "Go on, and taste popularity. Take a good long drink of it, Flash."

As she came through the wings the dropping fire of applause exploded into a roar again. It was nearly three minutes--I mean three real minutes--before she was done kissing her hands to us all, and the play was allowed to proceed to its triumphant finale. I happen to know, because I was in front, and a good deal of what you have been reading is my own impression, on record in the columns of the _Panoply_, of the night Fenella Barbour came into her kingdom.

XVIII

ICE TO THE MOON

And yet an hour later, when the theatre was empty, the cheering and the speeches done, and the linotypes were pecking various people's impressions of a wonderful night into place, she was crying as though her heart would break. She was sitting in Lumsden's study in a big chintz-covered arm-chair. She had taken off her hat but not her cloak, and her hair fell in some disorder over tear-stained cheeks. The baronet sat on the edge of a table opposite her, his long shapely black legs stretched out before him. He had changed his coat for a silk dressing-jacket and was smoking a cigarette. In spite of his air of being at home, something in his face, harassed and unquiet, checked the inference that he was also at his ease. His thin hair was ruffled and his eyes were a little bloodshot. Quite frequently he reached across to a tray on which a syphon, a cut-glass bottle, and a long thin tumbler kept cheerful company.

"Don't you think you've cried about enough, Flash?" he suggested, presently.

She pressed a handkerchief, already wet through, against her eyes, but made no attempt to check the flow. There was something disquieting in this steady drain upon her emotions. It seemed to tell of a mortal wound to affection or self-respect.

"I t-told you I should. You should have let me go home."

"My dear child, it's natural you should cry after what you've been through. But there's a point where every one ought to stop. You'll make yourself ill."

"I shall never forgive myself--_never, never_!"

This was a point of view that the baronet had evidently tried to combat already, and unsuccessfully. He sighed, and took another drink.

"I'm bad--wicked--heartless and disgraced." She jumped up and began to button her coat.

"I must go--at once!" she cried. "Where did you put my hat?"

"_Flash!_"

She was so near him that without rising he could put out his hand and catch her arm. She looked at his face and sat down, weakly and as if fascinated. He held her so for a few moments, and then turned his eyes away.

"Don't be a little muff!" he said.

His words seemed to relieve a tension. She giggled hysterically.