Chapter V: Part I: I (4)

"Oh, rather!" rejoined Fenella. (How nicely he speaks French.) "I'm good at fencing. I was captain of the 'gym' at our school."

The man just glanced at the card and put it into his pocket absent-mindedly. He was wondering what kind the school might be that had taught this distractingly friendly child to dance and fence, but not to read French and, above all, not to be careful--with that face and figure--how she spoke to strangers.

Meantime, something in this last speech had reminded the girl of the first fine rapture of Ruritania, years ago.

"You're a novelist, aren't you?" she said.

"Of sorts," he admitted.

"I wish I was intellectual"--wistfully.

"You're better. You're cute."

"_Cute--cute--!_ What does that mean? Clever?"

"Not exactly."

"Pretty, then?"

"Well, a kind of clever prettiness."

"You mean smart!"

"Well, smart. Let us be English at all costs."

"I don't see how you can think _me_ smart," she said, with a rueful inflection in her voice.

"Why not?"

"Talking to a strange man as I've done."

At sight of the troubled young face, something that was not exactly suspicion, but which had guarded his manner till now, disappeared. He laughed quite freely, and it was wonderful how the sudden gaiety made him look at once younger and more foreign. He put his hand across and just touched the girl's arm.

"Dear child," said he, "talk to as many strange men as you like. The stranger the better. It's ordinary ones you must be careful about."

"Ordinary ones----?"

"Yes. Beware the Least Common Multiple. Therein lies danger to you. I prophesy it."

"I must go," said Nelly, rising as she spoke. "It isn't getting any drier."

He put his coat on and followed her to the door. She noticed he left threepence for the waitress. How extravagant, after just a cup of tea! He kept beside her across the street, holding his umbrella over her head.

"I should like to read your book when it comes out," she said, as her omnibus hove in sight. "Why do you laugh?"

He was laughing because he knew the book. "How are you to ask for it without knowing the talented author's name?"

She hesitated. "Well," she said, almost reluctantly, "what _is_ his name?"

He noticed the effort and his manner stiffened. "It's one I needn't be ashamed to tell you, and you needn't be ashamed to hear. My name is Paul Ingram. Here's your 'bus. Good-bye. I don't ask you yours."

Fenella turned on the step and laughed at him over her muff.

"Goosey! You've got it in your waistcoat pocket."

XI

AN INTERLUDE

All this happened on a Saturday, and Paul had a full day to think it over. He went back to his work on Monday, and, for reasons he did not stop to define, not only chose the same place, but even had the weakness to try to keep the desk next it free by depositing his hat and gloves there. It would be hard to say what he expected. He had looked at the address more carefully when he was sending back the umbrella, and it confirmed the impression he had already received from the girl's clothes and casual, assured manner. She was some daughter of a good family, he felt sure, guarded and checked, and so the more inclined to kick over the traces when away from watchful home eyes. Had he been an Englishman the very perfection of her turnout might have still further puzzled him, and he might have been inclined to speculate as to how so young a girl came by all the rings she wore; far too many, though they were only pretty baubles. But Ingram came from a country where beauty does not wait on marriage for its adornment. He was even ignorant that a set has arisen there, the most artificial and utterly contemptible, surely, in the world, which has sacrificed the healthy freedom that was its birthright, to ape the social hypocrisies and superstitions that Europe is outgrowing.

Anyway, she had made him feel very old, and for the moment out of conceit with his self-imposed tasks, just as some wild, free creature of fur or feather encountered on a holiday walk in the country might distaste any one of us with his own humdrum workaday life. And he had the same further impulse that the wayfarer may have had to arrest the busy, aimless errand, close his hand on the furry flank--prison the fluttering wings, and, having made the creature share his captivity a moment, to open his fingers and let the throbbing quarry go free. A desire so innocent--so purely intellectual, that it scarcely deserves the hard name of the lust of the eye, and has nothing whatever in common with the lusts of the flesh.

It must be remembered also, to account for his unusual and dangerous mood, that just about this time he had put his manuscript into my hands. No period is so demoralizing mentally as one during which we have relaxed our own efforts, and are indulging in the vague hope of some good to come to us through other people's.

Tuesday--Wednesday passed. Paul ceased to look for the girl. Why should he? Hadn't she said she was not coming back. And what a fool he was even to desire it. She was a pretty memory; he, a writer, should know the value of such impressions, the pity of disturbing them. Suppose he met her again, was it likely the glamour of the first encounter would survive? Apart from the _bizarrerie_ of her quaint, childish confidences, she had said really nothing that was worth remembering. On a second meeting he would be sure to find her trivial and vulgar. Even the pretty manner was probably a trick she had tried elsewhere, and found "fetching." Toward the end of the week he happened to be reading, in the course of his work, the diary of a man some of whose blood, according to family tradition, ran in his own veins: the daily journal of Cotton Mather. Skimming through the record of that dark, tortured soul, he lit upon the curious passage wherein the middle-aged widower, with the naïve self-revelation that sweetens his persecuting memory, deplores the inroads which a handsome young pupil to whom he is teaching Latin is making in his self-respect. "The Lord," groans Mather, piously, "deliver me from this ingenious child!" Paul gave such a sudden laugh that his neighbors looked at him in wonder. "Bravo, Cousin Cotton!" he said to himself. "I'm not proud of you, but I'll forgive you a lot for that." He felt immensely relieved. Who has not known such a foolish moment of light-heartedness, when something we have read or heard seems to set us right with ourselves? "_The Lord deliver me from this ingenious child!_"

That night after dinner he lit a cigar and strolled westward. He found Number Eleven Suffolk Square easily enough. It was a big, double-fronted house of cream-colored stucco, with wide steps and a pillared porch. It happened just then that all three floors were lit up. This illumination gave the house a festive appearance and exaggerated its opulent aspect. Against the amber colored blinds the pattern of handsome lace curtains stood out in bold silhouette. The kitchen blinds had not been lowered and Paul noted three maid-servants, two of them in black dresses and caps with long white streamers. On the other side of the area, across another lighted window, red curtains were drawn. More servants, probably--butler, coachman, and footman. He thought of his own home in far Massachusetts; the "hired help" who came to table with them; his own chapped wrists; the dying mother, rolling out pastry on the low table to which they wheeled her chair. A feeling of fierce camaraderie with the toilers, the little ones of the earth, possessed him; a hatred for luxury and the parade of wealth. He took three or four turns before the house, and went away. Before he left the square, however, he kissed his hand toward Number Eleven. "Good-bye, Fenella," he said. "You're a kind-hearted baby, but I guess the folks in that house will know how to spoil it when the time comes."

XII

RICHMOND PARK

Next morning, when he went to the reading-room, she was sitting in the old place. She still wore the long blue coat with all the buttons--the black fur, and the big plain French hat with a single parrot-green feather, but, seen a second time, custom tempered somewhat her formidable smartness. She had a big gauze veil, too, tied round her hat and falling in long ends over her shoulders. It subdued the hard childish brightness of her face, making it look both maturer and softer. She met his surprised look timidly, and, diving into her muff, held out a white card with a blue stripe down the centre. Her gesture was meekly disarming--hurriedly explanatory.

"I've joined," she said, anxiously. "I'm a member."

Ingram twirled the card between his fingers. It was early, the great room was half empty, and there was no need to whisper now.

"And what special line of research are you thinking of pursuing?" he asked, gravely.

Fenella made haste to disclaim any serious purpose. "But it's a useful place, isn't it?" she asked. "This morning I only looked in to thank you."

"To thank me----?"

"For sending my umbrella. I couldn't send a postcard; I didn't know your address."

"It was no trouble." He was still turning the little card round and round. "And so you're running away at once?"

Fenella cast her eyes down. "I can't stay," she said. "I've got a dog with me."

"A dog?"

"Tied to the rails outside near the little house. They'd only keep him 'cos I said I wouldn't be ten minutes. Do you like dogs? I'm taking him for a run."

Paul experienced a sudden zest for adventure. "Suppose we take him for a run together? It's such a glorious fall morning."

"Oh, _top-hole_!" said Nelly, joining her hands in the old baby fashion that had clung to her. "I mean, how nice! Where shall we ramble? The Gardens?"

"No. I hate the Gardens. Even the sparrows know they're a fraud. Let's go out to Richmond. We can walk across the Park, have lunch at Kingston, and be back in time for tea."

Outside the Museum lodge, a horrible old bull-terrier, chained to the railings, was keeping up a growling soliloquy, with occasional snaps at imaginary flies, suggested possibly by the late autumn sunshine. He was very thick and scarred and carried his head to one side.

"This is Rock," announced Fenella, as, with a bewildering smile at the liveried keeper, she began to drag the veteran to his feet and along the pavement. "He's an awful old dog; I don't know how old, but he was a puppy when I was a baby. Isn't it funny? Now he's all lumpy and stiff, and I'm still growing. Ma says it's because their hearts beat faster. Heckle--that's a medical boy I know--says he's the oldest bull-terrier he ever knew, and that what he's asking for when he growls is a dose of pussy's acid in a dog-biscuit. What's pussy's acid?[1] Rock is short for Roquelaure, but some of the girls say he smells, and call him Roquefort. He's not my dog: he's Lady Anne's. She's hunting somewhere, and I promised her I'd take him out regularly. Oh, I want to telephone from here. Will you hold him--please? He won't bite. No, don't shut the doors, I shall stifle.... _B-r-r-r!_ One! _B-r-r-r!_ Two. I _have_ put the pennies in; didn't you hear them? 2309 Pad. Yes, I mean Paddington. You say Pad yourself. Hello! Are you there? Is this Miss Rigby? Oh, good morning, Jas. Jas, be an angel and tell mummy I shan't be home to lunch. I'm going to have it at Richmond, with a man. What d'you say? Oh, fie! Oh, tut!... Naughty puss! Six feet one, a long tawny, silky moustache, and cold, steel-blue eyes.... What?... I don't know ... I may. Good-bye, Jas. You're an angel."

[Footnote 1: Possibly Prussic acid.--Ed.]

* * * * *

In the train Ingram took the seat opposite her, and, while she kept up an incessant chatter, watched her with a kind of ache at his heart for her beauty. It was more than prettiness: he saw that now. Those long heavy lashed eyes, whose full lids she had a trick of pulling--the plaintive, tremulous mouth, too red; the two little tufts at her temples which even the draught from the closed window blew across her cheekbone, so fine and dry was her hair; the delicate and rather salient nose that bespoke impulsiveness. Like all visionaries, crusaders and other impractical persons, he had at the same time an intense perception of bodily beauty and an intense jealousy for the coarse uses to which life puts it. To have retained one's ideals and to have lost one's illusions--is not this to be subject to all the tortures that sex can inflict?

They left the station and walked through the defaced streets of the old Royal Borough, its noble Georgian houses half hidden by plate-glass shop fronts: they climbed the long ascent to the Park, and stood for a moment on the terrace to admire the river, an isle-set loop of silver, at the bottom of a steep glen filled with rusty verdure. Once inside the wide ciphered gates, they left the gravelled path and by a soft mouldy foot-track struck into the recesses of the old hunting pleasaunce. The air was mild and balmy; not a breeze stirred the crisp, sapless trees that stood waiting to surrender their ruined pomp of summer to the first wind that required it of them. Fenella gave her escort her muff and stole. She called Rock to her in a high, clear voice and, with shrill, chirping whistles, with cracks of her dog-whip, fluttering of her skirts, with endless enticements and provocations, lured that much-tried old pensioner on to efforts he had really outlived. Paul, as he watched her, ignorant no doubt of the exquisite old Mabinogion simile, thought that her motions resembled nothing so much as the swooping flight of the swallow before rain. Her limbs seemed to have the pliancy of whalebone.

Rock wheezed and panted gallantly after his mistress, his paws drumming stiffly on the ground--his poor old scarred neck held more on one side than ever. But his heart was not in the chase. He was forever slinking back to heel. He looked up wistfully at this new, sober-paced friend. "Here are we," his dim old eyes, with their hardened cornea, seemed to be saying, "old fellows, both of us, who've taken sharp bites and hard knocks enough, and it's a bit late in the day to be asking us to show off our paces, isn't it? Can't we sneak away somewhere together? This girl will play the very devil with us both if we let her."

"Rock! Rock! Rock!" the clear voice would ring out. "Come here, sir! Come here _thissminnit_! Lazy--_lazy_ dog!"

And with a despairing throe of his knotted tail, off poor Rock must pump again.

When they had nearly crossed the Park, they sat down on a worn seat, hacked nearly away with amorous knife blades, close to a pond into which some long-legged wading birds were digging their bills. Around them and behind them the noble demesne outstretched itself, in long tree vistas and seemingly illimitable glades, with nothing to scale them to insignificance. Now and then a motor car rolled softly along the road to White Lodge, only accentuating their loneliness by its speed and detachment, or a ghostly little troop of fallow deer passed slowly and securely to some favored feeding ground. Rock sniffed the air at them, growled and wrinkled his nose. "We both remember a time we couldn't have stood this--don't we?" the decayed old sportsman was no doubt grumbling to himself.

Seeing the girl quiet at his side, Paul began to try and tell her something of his life, working back, as is the manner of men, from the things that are nearest their experience and yet are slipping from their memory, into the never forgotten far past.... The night marches across the silent desert, spellbound by the silver witchery of the moon, and through _mehallahs_, that are like a fruitful land smitten by an evil charm--its houses turned into boulders and brushwood made of its standing corn: the caravans one may meet with a grave bearded sheikh riding in front, and the bubbling dromedaries behind him, laden with great wicker "_D-raths_" full of squalling, naked children and silk-swathed women, who peep through the osiers and crook their fingers at the dusty legionaries tramping by in a cloud of their own dust: the sand pillars that march upon your flank, step and step, like jealous genii shepherding doomed strangers into their desert: the joy of the camp at the well, with the day's march done: the incredible lightness of the sweat-soaked body when the knapsack is lifted off.

... Or that other camp--so far away it is hard to believe it all one life. Crackling cedar wood and the good smell of coffee on the sharp light mountain air, and the jinglers riding in the squealing cavvy with a pother of dust about their unshod feet, all rosy and glorious like a halo in the cherry-red morning sun: and the long lariats held wedgewise, and the scamper and scurry as the bronchos are trapped: and the peering through a fog of sweat and dust for your own brand on shoulder or buttock, and the whirling ropes, and the laughter and horseplay as the ponies are blanketed and bitted for the dawn-to-dusk round-up.

I don't know whether Paul made a poor Othello, but I do know he had a very indifferent Desdemona. Fenella was forever interrupting the narrative on one frivolous pretext or another: to throw stick or stone for poor sleepy Rock to retrieve ("_Guffetchit-Rock! Guffetchit--lazy dog!_"); to gather a bunch of scarlet berries afar off, whose color had taken her eye and which were hardly redder than her lips; to run down for a minute to the pond to see what "those rummy birds" were digging for so industriously. She had all the _nil admirari_ of the modern mind: its heedlessness of anything that lies outside its own experience; its sedulous curiosity for all that lies within. It was better when they got to Ingram's early life. She could imagine a country road along which burdocks and hemlock and other green fleshy things grow as high as young trees, and little gray frame houses tucked away behind silver birches. She was genuinely and even tenderly interested in the crippled mother, and at the story of the sister who died, blew her nose and said she had caught cold in the train. She clapped her hands at the quilting bees and candy-pulls and sleigh rides and sugar boiling camps and wished plaintively that she had been born a little American girl, to have had her share in so rapturous an adolescence. But even this part of the story was checked with immaterial, trivial questions such as on children's lips weary the maternal patience. "What happened the gray mare in the end that wouldn't pass the new letter-box? How many boys went to the sugar camp? And how many girls? Did they ever flirt?"

They had luncheon in an upper room of an old inn at Kingston, that had a curved iron balcony looking down upon the market place. The panelling was hidden by paper of an iridescent red, covered with a sprawling pattern of tarnished leaves and flowers. To right and left of the fireplace two dark pictures of bottle-necked ladies with untidy hair, brought here from God knows what household dispersion, looked disdainfully out of the canvas in opposite directions. Some fair or market was going on in the square below; the misty afternoon air was full of the bleat of sheep, the lowing of cattle, raucous cries of costermongers, and the crack of saloon rifles. They were waited on by a depressed Teuton, upon whose broad white face Paul raised a wintry smile by addressing him in his own guttural tongue. Fenella, the palms of her long kid gloves twisted round her bangles, fared delicately. She gave most of her meat to Rock--eschewed watery sprouts and fluffily mashed potatoes--and "filled up," as she would and even did express it, upon plum tart with unlimited cream and sugar. She would not drink wine or coffee, but ate all the dessert and sent out for more cob-nuts. She had all sorts of pretty, restless, bad manners: crumbled bread while she chattered--scored the cloth with a pink nail while she listened--counted her plum stones three times and made it "never"--dabbled in her tumbler for lack of a finger bowl--and upon its rim made, with one wet finger-tip, the hum of innumerable blue bottles, at which poor Rock barked and snapped under her chair.

It was late when they sat down to lunch, and they had dawdled besides. The sun was gone and twilight closing in as they recrossed the Park toward Richmond. She was so silent that Paul asked her, half peering into the veiled face, whether she had felt the afternoon dull. She said not; but her negative went no further than a little shake of the head. She had a trick of looking back every now and then and of measuring the way they had come, as if to insure a clear recollection of it, and she allowed Rock--who, rested, fed, and with his head pointed, though obliquely, for home, was in spirits that contrasted with his depressed morning mood--to roam at his will. They had just reached the avenue of trees that looks over Ham House when a furious barking made them turn their heads. The dog, bristling, and with sidelong leaps that left his nose in the one direction, was pointing at something in the long grass. Fenella cracked the whip she had been trailing along the path.

"Rock! _Rock!_ Come here, sir! Oh, Mr. Ingram, go quick and stop him!" She covered her eyes. "He's got some poor little rabbit or bird."

Paul ran and collared the animal. A brown mottled bird with a wide yellow beak was fluttering away clumsily, with wings half spread. Fenella caught it from him as his hand was closing on it.

"Give it to me! Oh, _darling_! are you hurt?" She looked on her gloves for blood. "Had he bitten it, Mr. Ingram?... There, _there_--you're quite safe now. I tink oor more f'itened dan hurt, dear! Is _he_ one of the birds that fly away in the winter, Mr. Ingram? I'm going to take him home and put him in the conservatory till spring.... Ah! you _wicked--bad--cruel--fierce_ dog! It's a good job I gave him so much meat, isn't it Mr. Ingram?--or you'd be gobbled up, dee-ar!... That's right; put him on the chain. Oh, yes he does, Mr. Ingram; he eats birds, at least he _scrunches_ them," stroking the smooth brown back with her lips. "Can we get a cage in Richmond, do you think?"

Paul looked at his watch. "I think we'd better get a train in Richmond," he said. "We've been out quite a while, and you only said 'luncheon' over the 'phone. Are you going to bring the bird along?"

"Why--_of course I am_."

"Well, put him in your muff and let us hustle."

Fenella quickened her pace resolutely, but every now and then would stop to be sure the creature was alive, breaking into a run afterward to overtake her escort.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, penitently, as she saw him waiting for her. "I tell you what I'll do. I'll put my finger in every now and then and, if he pecks, I'll know he's alive. Why does he peck me when I saved him? Birds have no brain. Cookie had a canary once that flew into a fly-paper; it took ever so long to unstick his wings. I hope this isn't one of the sort that won't sing unless its eyes are put out."

In the train the bird still absorbed her. They had a compartment to themselves, and Paul watched her curiously through his cigar smoke. He was wondering whether he had been bored or amused. A little of both he concluded. She was a good girl, but quite immature, and utterly--oh! utterly trivial. There was probably some babbling old mother at home whom she took after, for a warning and example. She was lovely, oh, yes--lovely enough to make the most careless heart ache--the rashest "gazer wipe his eye." But for a man like himself that was not an entire explanation. Wherein lay her charm? For charm there was; one, too, that survived the long day spent in her company. There was no use denying it; walks in Richmond Park, alone, would be sad affairs from now on. Alone, because, of course, this one must never be repeated. Butterflies are pretty things to watch, once in a way; but, since to clutch remains a human instinct, and since no man who thinks in his heart ever wants to see that sort of down upon his clumsy fingers, it would be better if--be better if----What were the clanging, ringing wheels saying now? Hark!

"Be its beauty its sole duty:
Be its beauty its sole duty...."

Ah! yes. That was what he has been trying to think of all day. And yet people could be found to called Browning "obscure."

"Be its beauty its sole duty!"

"Oh, Mr. Ingram! Look! It's stopped pecking and is beginning to look round."

He leaned across the carriage. He may have meant to do no more than touch the enfolding hands that lay so near his lips. But her own mouth was nearer still, and he kissed that.

XIII

FIND SOUL--FIND SORROW

In the middle of the night that followed his whole holiday Paul woke and cursed himself, at length and with conviction. Years ago, in the good old days when punishment was punishment, with no nonsense talked about reformatory intent, among the toiling groups that tilled the earth, made the road or lightered the harbored vessel, here and there a man was noticed who dragged his left leg a little as he walked. He was not crippled, nor deformed; he was likely, indeed, to be strong and formidable beyond his fellows; he did his day's work and earned his day's wage with the best. But the leg dragged--always would drag. And the reason passed in whispers: this was an old galley slave--a man who had worked at the _bagnio_. His leg, from force of habit, still paused for the effort that once dragged ball and chain behind it.

I had not known Ingram long before I guessed that, at one period of his life or another, women had meant a great deal for him, but that they had never meant happiness. In what did the impression reside? I can't say. In a regard perhaps--an inflection of voice--an over quickness to catch sorrowful meanings--in what he did not say quite as much as in what he did. But I was as sure of it then when I knew nothing as now when I know everything. He could not always have loved in vain. Partings there had been, tearful, emotional, reluctant, but always partings. Letters reached him even now through changes and redirections, letters filled with bright, helpful gossip, of the new friends--the unimagined husband--the children that might so easily have been his; with only here and there between the lines, for his eye to see and no other, the tenderness that women keep for the man who could win their regard but not their persons. And if Ingram felt sure of anything, I knew he felt sure of this: that the chapter of his life from which they were a legacy was closed and dead--a great stone rolled to the door of its tomb, sealed and mortised, and guarded by a whole cohort of wise intentions. And now, in a week, he had fallen--fallen as precipitately as the greenest of "rash and inconsiderate youth." Relying on his experience and disillusionment, he had broken the covenant of the old, wise king, and, into some unsuspected vacuum of his heart, a pretty face, a plaintive regard, a few surface tricks of dress and manner had rushed and were not to be extricated without endless pain and trouble. Again and again, as he turned from side to side in the night watches, he went over the images of his fall, for so, in all seriousness, this strange man regarded it. He felt the thrill of the young throat stretched to meet him, caught the fragrance, so faint--so faint that he had not noticed it till then--of the orris root in which her clothes had lain folded; heard the little fluttering sigh as his fervor stopped her breath. It had been the first kiss of passion that had ever touched her lips; he knew because----oh! never mind how he knew. What, exactly, he wondered, and was not the first to wonder, did such a kiss signify to a good woman? Board and bed, he surmised dimly, at some future date; home and home circle, taxes and life insurance, doctor's bills, children clapping their hands round Christmas trees. And this from him! He laughed out in the darkness--so loud that the glass shade of the lamp by which he had read himself to sleep vibrated with the sound. From him, a mere embodied intelligence, driven by loneliness and mental suffering to self-expression, doomed now, while life should last, to breed and bear the calamitous offspring of the brain.

He had given her his address because that much seemed called for in decency, but he did not expect a letter for a while. Yet when, after a few more feverish and wakeful hours and the immense solace of a cold tub, he passed into the sitting-room in his bath robe, a letter lay on the breakfast tray that he knew could be from no one else; a square pale mauve envelope, with an ingenious flap, addressed in a straggling schoolgirl hand.

"DEAR MR. INGRAM,

"I hope you got home safe and had no _haresbreath_ escapes
from motors. I was nearly run over the other day, I only got on the
pavement in the _knick_ of time.

"I have put the bird in the _conservatery_ and given him a lot
of seed, he throws it about with his _beek_, but hasn't eaten
any. I haven't given him a name because I don't know yet if he is
going to live. Ma was crazy, but I _smouthed_ her down.

"No one ever kissed me before, but some one did hold my hand once
quite a long time. I couldn't _riggle_ it away.

"Rock is ill, he has eaten a _plumb_ stone I think and will
have (to) have some _caster_ oil. If it was one of mine that
makes it this year not never. How exciting!

"I shall be at 14, Hanover Place to-morrow till 4.15. _P'raps_
you would be near there if you are not writing.

"I remain,
"Your loving friend,
"FENELLA."

Paul read the strange letter over and over again, from its prim apostrophe to the shy little breath of sentiment at its close. The ink just there was a lighter color than the rest. It was evident that she had let the letter go dry while wondering how to sign herself.

"Ho! ho!" he said aloud. "So Providence has given you a loving friend, has it? Now what's a man like yourself, Paul Ingram, to do with a loving friend and a conscience at one and the same time?"

"Scrap the conscience!" said counsellor the first. "The girl's pretty and sweet."

"Pull out before any more harm's done!" said another. "She's quite innocent."

"Give time a chance," said the third--the one that outruns the hounds but never quite catches up with the hare. "You've got to hurt either her pride or her heart by making an end of it now, and there's always a chance her whim will wear out if you wait."

"That's what I'll do," said Ingram at last. "I'll tell her bit by bit what I am, and hint at what I'm likely to become. She'll see reason. There's often a lot of hard hog-sense at the bottom of these butterfly women."

And, by way of starting well, he took her out to tea that afternoon, and was so genial and natural that the last shadow of self-reproach vanished from the poor child's heart. And before he left her he had promised to call for her at her home. He knew by now that she did not belong to his natural enemies, and the knowledge made it harder to "pull out" than ever.

* * * * *

I have spent a good deal of time upon this idyll, without, I am afraid, leaving a very just or a very pleasant impression of Paul Ingram upon the reader's mind. But there are many excuses to be made for him. In the first place, he was very poor--poorer than any of us guessed. He had that profuse careless way with money which is quite as often a consequence of never having had it as of having had it always. The commonest, and perhaps the safest, investment of a little money is to make present life bearable with it while it lasts. But the future is quite another matter. A great golfer told me once that for days after he had won a momentous handicap he was obsessed and haunted by the stealthy patter of the feet that had followed him from hole to hole. And I have no doubt that many a night, while the child sat upon his knee and retailed her day's gossip, sweet and unsubstantial as the sugary _étrennes_ in a Paris confectioner's window, he was listening less to her than to the stealthy wolf-feet of poverty that he knew were creeping up behind him.

And then he was, both constitutionally and through circumstances, an unhappy man. There are souls so designated and set apart for sorrow that it may be said of them, almost without paradox, that they are only at ease when bearing it. They grow to recognize in mischance the environment that suits them best. In such a mind an isolated reason for happiness cannot exist. It pines away for lack of company. Nothing convinces the heart of its sorrow so surely as a sudden discrepancy in its ill-luck--a belated and unassisted piece of good fortune. Fate has these freaks with those upon whose unhappiness she has determined. It is not so much her concern that they should have nothing as that they should always have a little less than might make them happy.

I think he would have been a better lover for what, I if may be permitted a moment's plain speaking, I would call a little sane and healthy lust. But he was of the said race of literary lovers, the race of Swift, of Shelley, of Flaubert, who are as fatal to a woman's heart as they are harmless to her virtue.

Last of all, I expect the girl, in her ignorance, was exacting, and had no notion how the smoothest curb can gall. I know for a fact that she insisted on his writing to her any evening on which he was not able to see her, and I can imagine no torture more refined for such a man than to have been forced to sit down, at the end of a long day of disappointment and mental drudgery, and answer some foolish, fond letter in language she could understand, and into which no trace of the _weltschmerz_ should creep that was devouring his heart and killing hope and ambition by inches. Some of his letters which I have seen show that he took refuge in an irony and fantasy which make them something of literary curiosities. He addressed her by all sorts of strange names--"Crazy kid," "Dear Pierrette," "Maddest of March Hares." One letter is written in Quaker dialect.

"SWEET FRIEND,

"As arranged betwixt thee and me I called for thee yestereve at
the house of thy worldly acquaintance, but hearkening timely the
laughter of fools from an upper chamber, which is like to thorns
crackling under a pot, refrained, and did not venture. I pray thee
walk soberly, and so farewell."

Some, written, I fancy, in the illiterate and misspelt jargon of the cowboy of the plains, are, to me at least, unintelligible. At last it became easier to call than to write at any time, and he appeared an ardent lover for the very reasons that made him a laggard one.

He put off the first call as long as he could, but a day came when it could be put off no longer. One foggy evening he found himself outside the railings at Number Eleven, and Fenella asked him if he was not coming in to show himself.

"I can't stay out late, you know, until you have," she said, with a little reproach in her voice. It was the first time she had spoken sadly to him.

Mrs. Barbour rose, a little flustered, as he came into the room, and thrust some family mending behind the cushion of her basket chair. Paul saw at once that she was of his own caste, and you never would have guessed how his heart went out to her. The heart was under disgrace just then, and a strict embargo laid upon its impulses.

"I am so pleased to meet you at last," said Mrs. Barbour, when the first civilities were over, "and so interested to hear you are a literary man. My husband wrote a good deal during his life."

Fenella was revolving, slowly, on the hearthrug before the mirror.

"Paul doesn't want to hear about books, mother," she said; "he's been reading stodge all day."

But Mrs. Barbour was already searching the shabby book-shelves, packed tight with tattered exercise-books, coverless magazines, broken cardboard boxes, and a host of other things for which book-shelves were never intended.

"My husband had a very fine library at one time," the widow went on, as she rummaged, "but most of the best books are upstairs."

"With our lodgers," Fenella further explained. "We're very proud of our 'paying jests'; aren't we, mummy. We've had them for years--and years--and years." She let her voice die away, and stretched out her arms slowly, indicating, indeed, a considerable time vista. "What an actress!" thought Paul, watching her.

"Here's one," said her mother at last, dusting a slim volume in a brown cloth binding. "Where _can_ all your father's books have got to, Nelly?"

Ingram took the book from her hand. Its pages had never been cut, and it exhaled the forlorn odor of the presentation copy. Its strange title attracted him--

"Climatic Influences Upon the Reformation. A lecture delivered at Wells before the United Diocesan Congress, 18--. By the Honble. and Revd. Nigel Kedo Barbour, M. A."

There was a boastful engraved book-plate inside the cover--all plumes and scrolls and quarterings.

"Has my new hat come, mummy?" asked Fenella, suddenly, in the changed voice she kept for the serious affairs of life.

"I bade Druce take it up to your room," answered mother. "Have you had tea yet, dear?"

"No," said Fenella, incisively. "Ring for some while I go upstairs," and disappeared forthwith.

Paul kept his eyes upon the mottled page, but knew he was undergoing a scrutiny at once legitimate and disquieting. Mrs. Barbour spoke at last:

"I hope you don't think my little girl forward, Mr. Ingram."

Paul raised his eyes, closing the book upon his forefinger.

"I think her entirely charming."

"I know she's impulsive," the mother went on. "Yes--she is. It makes me anxious."

"You don't expect me to quarrel with her latest impulse," Ingram said, with one of his rare smiles.

Mrs. Barbour shook her head, secure in her own worldly wisdom and code of conduct.

"But men make mistakes. Don't they? You know they do."

"Of course they do. I've made hundreds, but never the sort I think you mean."

"You see," explained the clergyman's relict, "Fenella leads a strange life. Yes"--she repeated the phrase, as though she found it vaguely comforting--"a strange life. She's very bright and talented, and receives a great deal of attention; but for reasons that--well, for _reasons_, she can't see much of her friends here. I assure you, you are the first gentleman acquaintance she has ever asked in. You ought to feel very much flattered, Mr. Ingram."

"To an extent that verges on embarrassment, Mrs. Barbour."

"And then," the mother went on, in the heedless fashion that recalled her daughter, "she has a great number of fine relations who would be glad to show her attention if she'd make the first move. But Nelly won't be 'taken up'--that's what she calls it--_taken up_, by any one."

"Bravo!" said Paul. "Let us be fellow-conspirators, Mrs. Barbour, and confine her bounty to the laborious and deserving class."

"Oh my!" exclaimed Mrs. Barbour, with sudden helplessness. "You do talk like my husband! It's quite uncanny."

Fenella interrupted them, entering with noisy suddenness. The new hat, very large, very smart, was on her head. She looked quickly from one to the other.

"What've you two been yapping about?" she asked. "Mother"--in an aggrieved voice--"this beastly hat is an inch too big all round. I told Clarice so, but you and she would talk me down. You never take my part with dressmakers and people. It'll have to be altered. Hats are getting smaller. Have you rung for tea?"

"The maids are upstairs, dear. I'll go and get it myself."

As soon as she had left the room the girl seated herself on Ingram's knee and kissed him.

"What were you and mummy talking about?" she said, rubbing her lips after the kiss. "The hat's a bit in the way isn't it? I hate things in the way, don't you?"

"Not when I perceive them in time."

"Oh, but we aren't going to have any, are we, Paul? No difficulties--no quarrels--nothing horrid."

Ingram didn't answer her. Perhaps he was listening to those feet creeping, creeping up behind his shoulder.

* * * * *

So the months passed. When it was too late, Ingram tried to tell her what he should have told her at first. But Nelly would admit nothing--listen to nothing. She turned all the clouds inside out and bade him confine his attention to the silver lining. Upon the subject of her dancing ambitions she entered an unaccountable and fatal reserve, but there was nothing else in her life she did not share with him. Through whatever fringe of whatever society she happened to be adorning at the moment she dragged her lover gallantly. Fenella led captive was Fenella less dangerous, and the old popularity revived at the news of her attachment. Men liked Ingram, and he was thought "distinguished," "unusual," even in circles that called him "Crabbed Age" and "The Satyr" behind his back. (Besides, when were satyrs ever unpopular?) A few mothers held up shuddering hands, but the daughters, being of the new generation, only seized the occasion to preach the new evangel, and, generally, to cleanse and sterilize the imagination of eld. Speculation, in fact, having spent itself, accepted the situation; and by the time the long-planned foreign holiday arrived, her mother thought her "improved," "more thoughtful, and more womanly."

XIV

ALTHEA REES

One airless July morning, a good many years ago, now, old Winstanley came bustling into the sporting editor's room, where I sat on a desk, swinging my legs and talking "bulldog" with Stedall. He had a typewritten slip of paper in his hand.

"Probate and Admiralty for you this morning, my boy!" he said, addressing me. "Here's the cause list. There's two cases down. M--m--m! '_Vacuum Recovery Co. v. Owners of Dacia. Assessment for Salvage._' That's a friendly case; it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. Here's something spicier: '_Hepworth v. Hepworth: no parties named_.' It's a defended case. Special jury. Hepworth is old Lord Hallamshire's grandson, younger son of a younger son, but that's good enough for a 'Society Divorce,' lead and about a column and a half. If the turtle doves come on to-day, keep your eyes and ears open, Prentice! There's some dashed mystery about the case; secret marriage and that sort of thing. Mrs. Hep's a Yankee. There appears to have been a separation three years ago, and now the respondent wants the kid. Blackmail, no doubt."

And off bustled Winstanley, fretting and bawling.

If secret there were, no one seemed to have winded it but Winstanley. There were not more than the average knot of idlers in the public gallery. But the body of the court was filled with a bevy of smartly dressed women, and the five seniors who were briefed were all well-known leaders. The Salvage case was called first, but the Trinity Masters were not ready, and so the conjugal knot was attacked forthwith.

Hart-Milner, the well-known silk and wit, opened with an appeal to the press. The case, said he, raised no point of any public importance, but its detail was of the most painful nature with which that court could be called upon to deal. How far such evidence as they were about to hear should ever be reported in the public sheets was, he thought, a vexed question. The entire position of the press in such matters might, at some future date, have to be revised, and he believed that the final decision would depend a great deal upon the restraint and decency with which the privilege had previously been handled. The position of the parties, moreover--at least of the party to whom his interest was confined--made a further and personal claim for indulgence upon a body whose association with literature was growing closer each year. The name which appeared upon the cause list--the name which he could well believe had grown to be to his client the intolerable symbol of all she sought relief from to-day--was, it is true, as obscure as it was besmirched. But it was far different with the petitioner's maiden name. That name, a name which, in accordance with a line of defence he left his friend on the other side to justify if he could, it seemed was to be imported into this sordid case, it would be only necessary to mention, in order at once to strike a responsive chord in the breasts of all who had the interest of literature at heart. (A pause, and "Oh! you are _strong_," from Nicholls, leading for respondent.) In her capacity of authoress, petitioner was well known to the reading public as "Althea Rees."

My! what a buzz and hum and craning of necks! And how the people who were _in_ congratulated themselves on being in, and of having refused to be frightened away by the possible technicalities of Vacuum Salvage, and how they determined that no luncheon interval should tempt them away from the precincts of the court.

"I say, 'imported into the case,'" goes on Hart-Milner, when order had been restored, "because I believe I am divulging no secret when I say that the other side intend to plead condonation, and to take the unprecedented course of deducing it, not only from letters that passed between the parties subsequent to the alleged offences, but from passages in the published work of the petitioner bearing upon the position of the sexes--passages which, I make no doubt, my learned friend will know not only how to select, but----"

Nicholls was on his feet. "M'lud! I protest most strongly against the line my learned friend is seeing fit to take. My learned friend can have no knowledge whatever of what is in my brief."

"I think, Sir Frederick, I should let it alone at the present stage," the president suggests pacifically. "If it's there, we'll come to it in time."

"Very well, m'lud! Then I'll open my case. The petitioner--Althea Clara Hepworth, born Althea Clara Rees--only daughter of Mr. Lyman Rees, president of the Anglo-Occidental Bank, an American gentleman resident in London, and who has been for years a prominent figure ..." and so on, and so on, and so on.

* * * * *

I think I see the scene now. The dim court, packed with its restless, seated occupants; the long shafts of light from the Gothic window over the judge's seat, all alive with dust motes; the bearded president, with chin on hand; the intent, puzzled faces of the special jurymen; and Hart-Milner on his feet, relating, in a voice low but distinct, and vibrating with the multiplex humanity that made him the darling of Bar and Commons, the devilish tale of physical and spiritual brutality in which a man had sought revenge for the inferiority that daily self-comparison with a woman high-spirited, witty, and admired enforced upon his own base soul.

At the close of the opening speech the petitioner went into the box. She was a pathetic figure; all the more so, I thought, because she was so beautifully gowned. I remember her dress well. It was of brown silk, with the wide velvet sleeves that no one thought hideous in eighteen hundred and--never mind. She had a flower hat covered with pale blue violets, and a bunch of the same flowers at her breast. She kept her veil down as much as possible, and answered in low monosyllables, or in little, faltering sentences that one could hardly catch, and that often had to be repeated for the benefit of the jury. The questions were frightful. Even Hart-Milner could not do much with them.

Nicholls, with his long, mottled face, and jaw as of a dishonest horse-chaunter, jumped up to cross-examine--loathing his task, but all the more truculent for that.

"Look at these letters, please!"

A bundle of letters, on a woman's fanciful note-paper, sewn into a stiff paper cover, was taken across by the gowned usher.

"They are yours?"

"Yes."

"Some are dated, some aren't. May we take it the undated ones were written within two or three months of those that are?"

"Yes, I think so."

"During your husband's absence in Norway?"

"Yes."

"Written two years after the court has been told that your happiness and peace of mind and health had been wrecked, your faith in human nature destroyed, and written to the man who was responsible for all these things?"

No answer.

"Come! Let's read one or two."

He read them one by one. Foolish, flippant, loving letters. The letters of a poor little girl-wife, hungering for love and kisses, and--yes, why not?--for cuddling (the very word was in one of them); and, in her longing, turning for it to the dishonored, tainted source whence alone she could ask it now. The poor soul broke down and cried as the merciless, rasping voice read on and on.

"Now I ask you, and I ask the jury, is this condonation? And if it isn't, what is?"

Althea threw her arms out with a little stiff, appealing gesture that she checked immediately.

"Oh!" she sobbed, "what could I do? I was only a girl. I believed what he told me. He said all men were the same."

The case had not concluded when the court rose. I sprinted back to the office. The compositor was waiting for me, but I pushed by him and opened the door of Winstanley's sanctum.

"Hello!" said he, scarcely turning round; "you're late. What have you brought?"

"Half a column."

"Was it a dry case?"

"It's one that shouldn't be reported at all."

He spun round in his chair and regarded me savagely.

"That means it's d----d good! What's your game, Prentice?"

"Look here, Winstanley," I said nervously, "there _are_ things, you know----"

"I don't know it at all. People who go into the courts are public property. If they don't like it, they can stay outside."

"And besides----"

"Besides what?"

"She's my Mrs. Hepworth."

"_Your_ Mrs. Hepworth?"

"Althea Rees, the authoress."

He jumped up, and began to pace the floor savagely. "That's so like you. I suspect something; I send you down because you can gush, and, instead of sending your stuff out early and getting the scoop, you turn up late, with ten lines for the public and a lot of tripe about 'a woman's heart' for me."

Well, like Fenella, I '_smouthed_' him down. He wasn't a bad little beast, when you knew him--Winstanley. It wasn't his fault if his veins were full of printer's ink. I told him the _Herald_ and the _Courier_ were doing the same as me. He sat grumbling.

"Turn in your stuff, then, and come back here. I'll send down Chaffers to-morrow, and you can do old Astbury at the City Carlton. You don't deserve anything better."