Chapter VI: Part I: I (5)

But Chaffers, and a good many other people, had their trouble for nothing. Next morning Nicholls arose in a packed court and announced that, after consultation, his client had decided to withdraw his defence, and would take a verdict by consent; each party to pay their own costs, and neither custody of nor access to the child of the marriage to be sought. Which decision Sir William Vieille, the president, commended in a little speech that left no doubt which way his direction would have gone. And I, hearing the result at midday, sent Althea the biggest bunch of pale violets I could find in St. Swithin's Lane. The price of violets in July, was, I admit, an eye-opener.

* * * * *

You will have guessed it was not on principle alone that I took all this trouble and risk. I had interviewed Althea a year before on some shop-assistants' movement or other (she was a woman of varied activities); and something in the name upon the card I had sent in seemed to strike her. When the interview was over she asked me to wait, and, having left the room for a few moments, came back with her father. Mr. Rees was a big, old-time, orating and banqueting type of American citizen, with a clean-shaven, ivory-white face and thick silver hair. He carried a great expanse of starched shirt-front, wore a narrow black tie, and I rather fancied I detected Wellington boots under his broadcloth trousers. He had my card in his hand.

"Your name is Hyacinth Prentice?"

"Yes, sir."

"You must be some relative of Hyacinth Prentice of Prentice and Morales?"

I said I was his son.

"Give me your hand, my boy!" said the old gentleman, impulsively. It was the last time I was to be called a boy; but I suppose I seemed young to him, and, indeed, a permanent immaturity of aspect is one of my disadvantages.

"I knew your father well," goes on old Lyman Rees. "He was one of the first friends I made when I came to London in sixty--sixty----? Oh, very well, my dear," for Althea had laid her hand gently upon his mouth. "We lost sight of one another before the trouble. I wrote him, though. I said: 'Don't try to reconstruct! Don't show the bad trading! Buy off the debenture holders! Give them twice the value in ordinary shares if they insist, and raise another hundred thousand in debenture on the Chili property.' But your father was an ill man to advise. Ah, well; it's an old tale to-day. Althea, we mustn't lose sight of Hy Prentice's son. When we are dining by ourselves?"

Althea gave a date that was significantly far ahead.

"But I'm always at home on Sundays," she added, smiling a good-bye. "Come in whenever the English Sunday becomes unendurable, Mr. Prentice."

* * * * *

My floral offering must have been only one of many she received, for all manner of fine friends rallied to her in her trouble; but, perhaps, coming from a poor devil of a working journalist, the tribute struck her imagination. A few days afterward I got a little note chiding me for never having taken advantage of the old invitation, and bidding me to dinner at the end of the week.

I am not a sentimentalist, whatever Winstanley may pretend he believes, but I confess that in the course of a friendship which dated from this dinner Althea became a sort of a heroine with me. Poor woman! the veil had been so roughly snatched from all the tender privacies of her life that I think I had the same satisfaction in bringing her my sympathy and consideration as a knight-errant may have felt, covering with his own cloak the naked, shamefaced captive whom his sword had cut loose in the forest. In fact, we became so far friends that one night, more than six months after her decree had been confirmed, she bade me, in saying good-night, congratulate her on a very serious step she was taking on the morrow. I thought she was going to be married, and I admit my heart sank a little. But it was nothing of the sort, as she explained hastily. She was on the eve of reception into the Roman Catholic Church.

XV

HISTORY OF A CONVERSION

She first came into contact with Catholicism--I mean close personal contact, for, during her residence upon the Continent, such things had passed her like a painted show--during a stay she made in late autumn with the Mawhoods (pronounce "_Maud_," please!) in Norfolk. Harberhall, Sir Cuthbert Mawhood's seat, famous for its tapestries and formal gardens, is one of the great houses of England. It was also, for nigh upon two hundred years, while the Howards were tacking and trimming, the only important stronghold of the prescribed faith in East Anglia. It has been beset for weeks together by spies and pursuivants; its gray flint Tudor walls are honeycombed with secret stairways, sliding panels and "conveyances." Father Fitzsimon or Hopwell, the seventeenth-century Abelard, lay concealed there for six months during the Oates mystification, and a strip of sea-beach almost under the park walls, called Paces to-day, is said to preserve in its name the tradition of his restless night walks. Set upon a steep hill that overlooks the fowl-haunted levels of the Wash, there is everything in the position and associations of Harberhall to arouse a romantic enthusiasm, and to turn that enthusiasm toward the great central fact which has lifted a commonplace county family to the heights of heroism and self-sacrifice.

The chapel of the Mawhoods is a modern Gothic building of the elder Pugin, whose windows are filled with stained glass from a French abbey demolished in the Revolution, and is connected with the hall only by a long wing of palm-houses and vineries. It is also the parish church of the village below the hill. During the last hundred years a small congregation of the faith has grown up there, dependents and old servants' children's children. The Mawhoods have married much abroad, and little trace remains of the Jansenism with which so many of the old Catholic families were once tainted. On a hunt morning, which also happened to be a feast of the Church, Sir Cuthbert and his two tall sons in pink approached the sacred altar among their servants and laborers. The Confiteor was recited by the surpliced server--the tabernacle unveiled. Above each head the chaplain, a tall, curly haired young doctor, himself a scion of an old West of England cavalier family, and predestined to the purple, bent reverently and murmured some formula that Althea could not catch. All returned to their places with downcast eyes and clasped hands, but with the easiness of long habit as well. Mass went on with many genuflections--many salutations from the altar steps, with tinkling of crystal vessels against the gold chalice rim, and one ecstatic minute in which the bowed congregation seemed to hold its breath, while a bell trilled sharply six times. During the mass the pupils of a convent school outside the village, directed by a community of French refugee nuns, many of them cousins and kinsfolk to the hall, sang English hymns in sweet quavering voices--vapid, unmetrical compositions of the veiled cloister, though not without a certain sentimental charm of their own:

"O Sacred Heart: behold thy children kneeling...."

_or_

"Oh, turn to Jesus, Mother turn!
And call Him by His tenderest names...."

This blessed _eau sucré_ brought tears to Althea's eyes. Harkening it, she seemed somehow to recover her own hapless, "ill-adventured youth." The spell of the old, wise religion, so guileless and yet so subtle, which never seeks to explain the inexplicable, and which is as tender to those who have lost their happiness as it is merciless to those who are seeking it, fell over her. The end was never in doubt.

I should like to have been near Althea while she was "under instruction." I don't mean on account of anything she would have said, for, like most original thinkers, she was capable of infinite docility; but just to have watched her face while the Catholic doctrine, say as to the relation between physical and moral evil, was explained for her benefit. For she was a child of revolt, if ever there was one; far more akin to Bruno than to Augustine, to Leopardi than to Newman. Innately sceptical, a scoffer in the grain, I suppose she discovered that beyond all negation a doubt persists, and decided to give God and the creed that speaks most confidently for Him the benefit of it. Even after her conversion she liked to play at heresy--to be _enfant terrible_--to have grave monsignori wag their fingers half reprovingly at her. Her religion remained intensely personal, and she was never impressed, as some worthy converts have been, by the spectacle of the Church as a "great going concern." Its dogma oppressed her: she was not strong enough physically or nervously to endure its elaborate ritual, and would often leave her seat in church, suffocating, in the very middle of high mass. What she liked best was to creep away at dusk, when the world is busied with shopping and tea, and, before some dimly lit side altar in Farm Street or Brompton, to set herself adrift upon an ocean of sentiment that, with a little more conviction and a little less self-consciousness, might almost have become ecstasy.

Her new interest was immediately made apparent in her books, for her characters henceforth began to talk theology in season and out of season. At an earlier stage of her career, I submit, this would have missed her her public. But her reputation was by now secure: her annual novel was eagerly awaited by the "passionate few" whose suffrage alone fine writing can win. Besides, it was noticeable her asceticism never strayed far from the purlieus and issues of Mayfair. One got up from her books feeling that one had been in very fine company indeed. She had that affinity to the highly placed which is less snobbery, I believe, than a kind of perverse idealism. And, beneath all the pomp and circumstance, sorrow always worked regardless of earthly shows, and kept the balance true.

Such, as far as the world has any right to know her, was Althea Rees at the date I tried to make her Paul Ingram's earthly providence. I pleaded his cause, not perhaps as strongly as I might, because I wanted the man and his work to complete the impression for themselves. That they might do more--that in trying to work good I might be working mischief--was a thought that, I protest, never once occurred to me.

XVI

HOA-HAKA-NANA-IA

It doesn't much matter how early in the autumn we come back to London; upon our return we always find the season has stolen a march upon us. Paul arrived in town on a dark, rainy afternoon. The impatient, scowling skies were already beginning the ruin of the short-lived English summer. Beyond the railway terminus the streets, with their stream of jostling umbrellas, their straining horses and shiny-coated drivers, were both bewildering and disheartening. Victoria was full of belated holiday makers setting an anxious face seaward. And on all sides, from the railway announcements with which the walls of the vestibule were placarded, from the covers of the summer magazines that still heaped the book-stalls, from advertisements of soap and jam and pickles and liquors, girl faces simpered and ogled. Girls in punts, dabbling their hands in lilied water: sunburnt girls in orchards, carrying baskets filled with apples: languid girls in hammocks, with shapely ankles peeping discreetly from their frilled skirts: girls smiling from carriage windows, or standing with hounds in leash on windy moors--but always girls, always women. In some of these journals there might be food for thought or fruit of experience: here and there--though rarely--an author's name seemed earnest of this; but in every case, for the written word as for bottled mineral water or patent cereal, the lure was the same--some pretty, foolish face; something to excite and feed for a moment the idle desire of the eye. Paul, as he viewed these things biliously, wondered whether it were true after all, as his French captain had declared to him once with cursing and swearing, that the Anglo-Saxon was the most woman-ridden race in the world; and, alas! remembering how he himself had been employed during the last fortnight, a spasm of self-contempt contracted and hardened his heart. He felt degraded, commonplace, banal; caught in the toils of the delusion that has deposed woman from her proper place as man's helpmeet and propounds her, tricked and adorned and set on a pedestal, as his reward.

He put his baggage in the cloak-room, and made first of all for my lodgings in Pimlico. This was particularly unfortunate, as Mrs. McNaughten, deceived by the morning's fair promise, had driven me forth betimes, bidding me, under pain of her displeasure, which is no light threat, not to return till night, the while my room should be swept and scoured, "before the murk days comes, and a body canna tell dir-rt frae darkness." Scribbling a message in the narrow hall, while his umbrella made a pool upon its shabby oilcloth and Dulcinea, with pail and broom, ascended laboriously to her attack upon matter in the wrong place, Paul had an opportunity for contemplating the rewards of literature, the sort that does get into print. It cannot have been inspiriting.

His own rooms were in Cowley Street, Westminster. He approached them, through Broad Sanctuary, with the sense of expectancy that every one feels after even a short absence who nears the spot upon which the activities of his life converge. He had not left his French address--and so much can happen in a fortnight!

There was only one letter and a packet: the harvest of two weeks! The package contained his bank pass-book. He glanced at it hastily and tossed it aside. The letter was from America, from the lawyers who managed a slender inheritance that had devolved upon him some years ago, as a tardy act of justice, years after the foreclosure upon his mother's farm. As he read it, the blood left his cheeks under their superficial sunburn. He pocketed it, and made a hasty calculation upon his fingers--counting months perhaps--or even weeks. He looked round his sitting-room with hunted eyes. They were particularly pleasant quarters, these rooms of Ingram's, in a charming old early Georgian house behind the Abbey. Their windows had deep seats and looked across the cloistral calm of Cowley Street to similar quaint windows, curtained with art fabrics and with a hint of pottery and brass beyond. Actresses of the serious sort, journalists, an artist or two, one junior Cabinet Minister, were his neighbors. He was proud and fond of the old-world parlor--of its panelled walls, the slight list of its floor, its grotesque fire-back and grate. It had been his home now for two years; even the dust and stillness that lay on it after a fortnight's absence seemed consecrated--seemed _his_. All the books and most of the furniture was his own. It is marvellous how much wandering and uprooting the instinct of a home-making race will survive. As, give a couple of beavers in an exhibition tank a few logs, and watch the poor beasts start building!

He had a hasty lunch and went to the Museum. He read hard: he was too disturbed to write. In its untroubled atmosphere little by little his agitation left him. A pleasant sense of comradeship reached him from silent neighbors, many of whom had grown gray in the same thankless task. He felt he would always be able to breathe freely here. There was a respite after all, and projects would suggest themselves once his mind was at rest. Once it was at rest! For certain distractions must be put out of his way once and for all. He was sorry, truly sorry, for the girl who used to sit quietly beside him reading "Who's Who" or turning the leaves of some illustrated book--there, in the seat where the mad poet was mowing and scribbling this afternoon, but he was sorry for her only in the same impersonal sense that he was sorry for the woes with which the musty volume before him was filled:

"Old unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago."

After all, self-preservation was the first law, and one could not accept a real responsibility for anything that was as inevitable as this. He was quite cheerful when I met him for dinner at the _À-peu-près_, and even pleasantly ironic at the expense of a white shirt-front and black tie which I was weak enough to think an evening call upon a lady in Portland Place demanded.

* * * * *

Althea received us in her own sanctum upon the second floor: a long, beautiful Adams room with creamy white walls hung sparsely with Carpacciesque Italian drawings in red chalk, a few water-colors of the old English school, and one great painting of the mad Venetian master, all splash and impasto, which, seen close at hand, was like a lichen stain on an old red wall, but, at a little distance, teemed with form and color. A bookcase of dark carved wood ran breast-high round the walls. Along its deep shelf were ranged bronzes, old Nankin jars, fragmental majolica figures--with an occasional faded embroidery or red morocco missal clasped with hammered silver. The carpet was of thick, dead-leaf-colored pile, and a brass railed fender with a wide leather seat ran across the low marble mantelpiece. Althea's room always struck me, personally, as the last word in that austere taste which roams the world, seeking and rejecting, in its quest of the beautiful.

She rose to meet us, and Paul had the impression of a woman, still young, in a loose pale satin gown, rather clumsy of figure but graceful of movement, with chestnut hair dressed low on her forehead, gray eyes under thick dark brows, a heavy jaw and just a hint of sensuality in the mouth. Her arms and hands were white and perfectly shaped; her ears finely modelled, and set as close to the head as though they had been carved from it in low relief.

As long as I was there we only talked commonplace, and I left them early, pleading the editorial discipline. I thought I had done my part in bringing them together, and walked back to Pimlico "on eggshells." But no sooner was I gone, (so I have heard since,) than she recrossed the room and, seating herself upon the fender, gazed at Ingram in silence for a long while. Try to imagine what balm to the misunderstood, thwarted spirit that level, frankly admiring regard must have been.

"Tell me all about it!" she said at last, abruptly and impulsively.

Paul smiled back into the intense gray eyes.

"All about what?"

"How you ever came to write such a story."

She reached to the mantel-shelf, and, taking down a square silver cigarette-box, scrawled all over its top and sides with well-known women's names, handed it across to him. She lit one herself and arranged her satin draperies.

"You speak as though I had 'arrived!'"

"Oh! success will come," she said confidently. "It's the beginnings that are most fascinating. I want to be taken behind the scenes. Come, wizard!" she pleaded "let me be inquisitorial and curious while I'm under your spell. To-morrow you'll be my rival. Who knows but that I may hate you then?"

Ingram considered a moment, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

"There's not much to tell," he said slowly. "You may have heard or guessed that I'm a poor man's son. We have our decayed families in Massachusetts, though I suppose we haven't quite so far back to decay. I didn't learn much more at free school than to read and write and figure, but you know with what care and reverence the first steps are guarded in our country. Nothing so trivial and hopeless as the average English taste in letters could leave even our primaries. I may say 'our country,' 'our primaries,' may I not?"

She flashed her sympathy.

"Afterward I led a very lonely life for years. I don't mean comparative loneliness, or even such loneliness as a man may achieve for himself in any big city. I mean weeks, months, with never a human face. And during that time I think"--he laughed--"I think I read every book in the world."

"No writing? No early efforts?"

"I was twenty-eight before I tried. When I wrote my first essay I'd almost forgotten how to hold a pen. Please," he urged quickly, "you must try and believe it."

"I am believing every word you say."

"I was a soldier in the French army. Oh! no glory--just drudgery. Very good society though: I still believe my corporal was an Austrian bishop. We were on detachment in the desert, and of course English books weren't to be had. Besides, some of the lads from Alsace were eager to learn, and it seemed a chance before I forgot it myself. I had met all sorts of strange characters, and began to try and set them down as I remembered them. Then it was only a step to putting them in new situations and figuring out how they'd make good. And then--and then--it seemed to me I made a discovery."

He stopped, a little agitated, filled his lungs with smoke, and emptied them before he spoke again. Althea sat quite still.

"Go on, please," she said in a low voice.

"In all the stories I had read the character seemed to start, full-fledged, on the first page. All the action of the book develops it and shows it up. Now that might be literature, but it wasn't life. What was the reason? Not a mistake; because the best men do it. No. But I think unconsciously they are following the line of least resistance. They start the first chapter under a disadvantage: with the last one in their heads. And they even get praise for preserving the unities--the _unities_!--of _life_! What a lot of guessing it would save! I ended by believing there's no such thing as a consistent character at all. There's something we hang our convictions on as we hang clothes on pegs, but all the rest is just things happening--things happening--things happening. And in the intervals"--he laughed again, "as much character as you like to indulge in: as much as you feel you can stand yourself. Am I tiring you?"

"Oh, no!"

"Take my book. You've read it through?"

"And through again."

"What's Patty Holt? Only a ranch-woman who broils, and bakes, and washes, and irons, and has wandering loves. What's her husband? An Indian trader, who holds up trains and has views on the revision of Hamilton's masterpiece, the Constitution of the United States. Neither of them know either how good or how bad they are. Conviction for him would come with the rope round his neck, and for her when the Ashplant Vigilance Committee gave her twenty-four hours to bisect the state boundary line at right angles."

"She'll be compared with Madame Bovary, you know."

"Very unfairly, then. Emma Bovary is a romantic-minded woman set amid prosaic surroundings, and Holt's wife is a commonplace woman set in romantic ones. What's wanting to romance? Her lovers ride and kill. I suppose if they rode--what's the word--_destriers_ instead of cow-ponies, and carried two-handed swords instead of thirty-thirties, they'd be legitimate subjects for the most full-blooded cap and sword romance. And there was--I mean there is--violent and horrid death at hand any time the Ute bucks lift a demijohn of fifty overproof Peach Bloom Rye going up to a mining camp. No, what weighs them both down is just the sordidness of the transplanted civilization around them, and when the crash comes all they have to turn to is the little meeting-house God of their youth, which the woman has outgrown unconsciously during her emotional experiences."

"But surely----What about Mr. Ffoulkes? You don't think that he----?"

Paul jumped to his feet and thrust his hands into his pockets with an impatient movement.

"Everard Ffoulkes! The cowboy bishop! Isn't it funny how unerringly even good criticism puts his finger on the one true thing, and declares 'That couldn't happen.' Why he's '_vécu_'--'_erlebt_,' every word and action of him. I've ridden with him, camped with him, bunked with him, and even prayed with him."

Althea regarded him awhile, through the smoke haze, with eyes narrowed to slits.

"Mr. Ingram," she said, flinging her cigarette away, "I'm going to help you publish your book, but I'm going to hurt you first. Now--are you ready?"

"Go right ahead."

"You'll have to modify it. Oh! don't bristle and scold. I know I've touched a nerve. But on your own confession you've lived away from the world a long time, and you have no conception of"--she paused for a strong enough word--"the impregnable determination of our race that certain things shall not be--I won't say discussed, but even postulated. It's too strong for the strongest of us. The Inquisition and the Index are indulgent beside it. It's begun to hurt social progress; but even social progress has to mark time and wait its pleasure. Right in the midst of our civilization, Mr. Ingram, a great, rough-hewn granite god uprears his bulk. I always imagine him something like the Easter Island deity you have to pass on your right going into the Museum--no forehead, cavernous eye-sockets, vast nostrils and mouth--HOA-HAKA-NANA-IA: the god of things as they must be supposed to be. And his thighs and stomach are simply larded with the smoke of intellectual sacrifice. There is a legend, you know, that no great literary work, once carried through, has failed to somehow or another reach the world. I fancy Hoa could throw some light on that tale. Shall we go on the balcony? It's rather warm in here."

She put her hand to her forehead as he followed her down the room. Outside the rain had ceased, and the September night was clear and fresh. Across the nobly planned street, the broadest and most effective prospect in London, the windows of the great stuccoed mansions were dark and shuttered, with only here and there a pale glow in fanlight or upper window, but the many storied Langham Hotel, filled with trans-Atlantic birds of passage, closed the vista cheerily, and a broad flare of light round the corner showed where Regent Street and the shops and restaurants began.

"Do you know French well?" she asked, presently.

"Only everyday French and a few curiosities I'm trying to forget."

"It is a pity. You could have turned your book into a French novel, and then translated it."

Paul shook his head. "I wouldn't do that. It's here or nowhere. The very houses, the very self-satisfied faces, are a challenge."

"Isn't it wonderful?" Althea mused, leaning on the rail and regarding the houses opposite. "And this is only one street. There are hundreds like it. House after house, wealth upon wealth, millions running to milliards till the brain reels. And in hardly one a single misgiving, a single suspicion that the same fate which measures can re-measure. Only pleasure, food, fine raiment, and the stealthy rapture of possession. But it can't go on forever." She shook her head. "No, here in the cradle of the race the racial revolution will come about. These sober, policed streets will be the theatre of the completest subversion the world has ever known. It's one of the charms of living in London, where things _will_ happen. I have my visions. Westminster Cathedral full of little beds is one--I don't know why--and nurses and doctors with their sleeves rolled up.... What made you call your book 'Sad Company,' Mr. Ingram?" she asked, with a sudden inconsequence. "Did you know it was a quotation?"

"I don't think so. I may have seen it somewhere and forgotten."

"It wasn't this, was it?--

"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.
What! has no cold wind swept your heart at all
In my sad company?...'

"--Let us go in. It's not as warm as I thought. I'll ring for coffee, and introduce you to my father. I've let him dip into your manuscript. You don't mind? He's one of the proprietors of the _Parthenon_, so be very pleasant and alert. He's been in Colorado, too, and thinks a lot of your scenery passages." She turned and, smiling, held up a finger impressively. "Mind! I say your _scenery_."

XVII

THE CONTINENTAL EXPRESS

I heard nothing from Paul for days, and was beginning to think reproachfully of his conduct, when, on the morning of the third day, a note was brought by hand to the _Panoply_ office. It was short and rather cryptic. He was evidently in some trouble, the exact nature of which he didn't disclose. He wanted me to come to him at once, and to keep the afternoon open.

I hurried down after lunch. Mrs. Gribble's face as she opened his hall door expressed relief. Paul has always been rather yearned upon by his landladies.

"Oh! I'm that glad you've come, Mr. Prentice," the good woman said, as she ushered me up the wide, shallow stair. "I don't think Mr. Ingram oughter be alone. He's bin talkin' to hisself dreadful all night. Me nor my 'usband couldn't get no sleep for harkening at 'im."

I entered the room with that air of boisterous incredulity which men keep for a stricken brother.

"On your back, Ingram? Nothing much wrong, I hope."

Paul was lying on the bed, half clad and in his dressing-gown. His pipe was in his mouth, and through the drift of tobacco smoke, with which the dark, oddly shaped little room was filled, I thought his face looked drawn. He motioned me to a chair with a wet pipe stem.

"Sit down and help yourself to tobacco," he said, and smoked on in silence.

"Prentice!" he broke out all of a sudden, so abruptly that I let the match I was striking fall; "did you ever break a woman's heart?"

I gaped at him.

"Oh, I'm not joking. I really am collecting evidence on the subject. I've been studying it hard now for two days and a night. There's not much help, is there," pointing out the open window, "in three chimney-pots and a demolition? If you hadn't come, I was prepared to take Mrs. Gribble's opinion. Come, Prentice--man to man--have you ever----?"

"No," I answered, rather shortly. "I've been too busy all my life."

"But it can be done?"

"My dear Ingram, you know 'women' is not a subject I've specialized on."

"But still, you keep your eyes open?"

"Well, then; I can't say I think it often happens: nothing like as often as the other way round; and yet----"

"And yet----I know. It may. And some people are doomed to knock their heads against exceptions all their lives."

He twisted himself to one side with the weak and peevish movement of a man seeking relief on the rack.

"Is the woman you're--er--writing about young, or only still young?"

"She's very, very young," he answered, with a curious sort of smile--bitter and yet tender at the same time.

"Good!" I commented cheerfully. "That's tremendously in her favor."

Paul smoked on. "I really didn't bring you here to talk generalities, Prentice," he said after a while. "Can you meet some people for me on the 3.45 Continental train at Charing Cross?"

I told him my afternoon was at his disposal.

"You're a sure good friend," he said simply, and I took the little phrase in full payment. Paul was seldom American in idiom but when he was touched or excited. "There's a mother and daughter--Mrs. and Miss Barbour. Let's see now; how will you spot them?"

"Did the daughter by any chance come with you to the _À-peu-près_, three weeks ago?"

"That's so, Prentice; I had forgotten."

"I think I shall know her again," I said, smiling a little behind my cigarette. Poor, unworldly Paul! "What am I to tell them?"

"I'm just figuring it out."

"What is really the matter, old man?"

"Mental vertigo, from thinking too long in a circle, really."

"I think I understand. A sort of moral fatigue."

"That's a splendid name for it."

"But will she--will they, be satisfied with that? Shall I be asked questions?"

"Say I'm run down."

"Run down and no visitors. Have I got it right?"

"And that I'm writing. Don't forget that part. How's time?"

I went to the window and looked at my watch. "Just time to do it comfortably."

"Good-bye, then, and thank you, Prentice, from my heart. You're doing me a big favor. Oh! by the way," calling me back from the door. "About Mrs. Hepworth."

"Yes?"

"She's written, making an appointment for to-night. The book, you know. More mutilation. I can't go as I am."

"Very well--I'll 'phone her."

I paused with my finger on the doorknob. "I can say 'moral fatigue' to her, I suppose."

Ingram seemed to think a moment. I wondered whether I had sounded impertinent.

"Yes," he said, slowly. "I think you can say it to her."

I reached Charing Cross with nearly ten minutes in hand. The 3.45 Continental, having probably thrown every local and slow train on the line half an hour out of its reckoning, was signalled "on time." A long line of porters was strung out along the curved platform. Motor-cars and carriages awaited the great ones of the earth, and a score of people paced the flagstones. Among them a couple of press men nodded absently to me. Punctually to time and quietly, as the expected always happens, the Folkestone express pushed its smoky old nose into the station. Porters shouted and jumped on the step, doors flew open, and the platform was covered in a trice with a jostling crowd of veiled women and ulstered men, the awkwardness of the long journey still in their cramped limbs. My trained eye searched the crowd rapidly but thoroughly for the girl I was to meet, and presently I saw her, beautiful, happily anxious, becomingly disordered from travel, and with perhaps a warmer pallor in her cheeks than when I had seen her last. She did not know me, of course, and it was the strangest, saddest thing in the world to feel myself scanned unconcernedly and passed over by the expectant eyes I had come to cloud, and maybe fill with tears. I reached her side and lifted my hat.

"Miss Barbour, I think."

She looked at me with a slight stiffening of the figure.

"My name is Prentice. I am a friend of Paul Ingram's."

"Of Paul's? Is he here?"

"Miss Barbour, pray do not be alarmed or anxious. Ingram is not quite well enough to meet the train and has asked me----"

Her eyes filled with terror. "Where is he? At his rooms? Oh! we will go at once, mother!"

I had never thought it would be easy; I saw now that it was not going to be as easy even as I had thought.

"Miss Barbour," I said, venturing to lay a hand on her coat-sleeve. "Pray attend to me for one moment. Ingram is to see no one to-night. There is no need for alarm, but----"

"----Mother, mother!"

A stout, comely old lady was making her way toward us. By her side a gnarled and grizzled railway servant walked, soothing her agitation with a patiently reassuring manner that, had he been a doctor and not a porter, concerned with chests, in fact, instead of with trunks, might have won him riches and a title.

"Yes, marm, I understand you puffeckly. Two gladstings, you said--large tin trunk, and a 'at-box. No, marm, I aint a-leavin' you. I'm agoin' to git you a four-w'eeler. You stand 'ere until I comes back. Your two gladstings, your large tin trunk, and your 'at-box is all numbered the same, and will be put together on this 'ere counter. 'Ave your keys in your 'and in case they wants one opened. As soon as that there man 'as marked them with chork I shall come back and put 'em on my barrer; then I shall take 'em to your four-w'eeler. No marm; I'm your porter, and no one else sha'n't 'ire me. No marm; nor no one else sha'n't take your four-w'eeler."

"Mother, Paul is ill, and I'm not to see him. This is Mr. Prentice, a friend of his."

"There," said Mrs. Barbour, jingling her keys sharply. "What did I say, Nelly. Those drains at Palèze. Is it something infectious, mister--mister----? Is there any temperature yet?"

I caught at the "infection" and lied, as I had foreseen I would. People were jostling and bumping against us. The girl had to catch my arm once.

"Please, _please_ set your minds at rest," I said. "I am confident it is nothing but a little overwork and worry that will be all right to-morrow. But, in the meantime, Paul is, as no doubt you know, rather nervous and scrupulous. To-morrow we shall know for certain what it is. He is writing, and you may take my word for it, it will be good news. And now, madam, please let me pass your luggage through the customs, see you safely into a cab, and take a good report back before Paul settles for the night." I had not been asked to do this, but nothing fits so easily and naturally into one lie as another lie.

The mother was tractable and not greatly concerned. I could see she was one of those ministering women upon whom sickness acts as a challenge, and who can look forward to a long spell of nursing, untroubled by misgivings as to the ultimate result. But the girl's white face and questioning eyes tortured me. I could feel the question in them even when my back was turned to her. I would not judge Paul hardly: would not judge him at all. I knew enough of life to know that a man may without a moment's warning find himself faced by some terrifying, insoluble problem, out of which there is no gentle, no easy, no honorable way. But his strange manner--his phrase, stranger still, about the "exceptions" it had been his lot to encounter, filled me with misgiving. I even wondered if mayhap I was the last man that should ever see perfect happiness in that perfect face.

I had put them into their cab, and was leaving the terminus, when, passing before a telephone box, I remembered my other message. I rang through to Portland Place, and, for the first time since I had known her, heard Althea's level voice along the wire, not only without pleasurable emotion, but even with a sudden inexplicable distaste. I was surprised, too, at the concern in it when I had delivered my message. She pressed me for a true account, and, tired of mystification, I gave her Paul's own words. At her next sentence I nearly dropped the receiver.

"My dear lady--think! Oh! you _can't_."

"I'll risk it," Althea said, with a stubborn little laugh that I could fancy a flushed cheek accompanied. "I'm not conventional, as you know. Besides, you say the creature isn't in bed. Oh! you clever male duffers, with your insight and analysis, and not enough wit to know after months what a woman sees in the first five minutes--that a fellow-creature is perishing before your eyes of sheer intellectual starvation."

What could I do? Ring off. Sigh and make a further mental note as to the insane quality in a woman's courage. For what Althea proposed was nothing more nor less than to call at Ingram's rooms the next day in her car, if fine, and discuss alterations and revisions with him in the course of a long motor ride. As for me, with that child's white face and panic-stricken eyes before me, and a pleasant sense of being responsible for more than I could control, it was only left to pray for foul weather. Which, believe me or not, I heartily did.

XVIII

AMENDE HONORABLE

Meantime, with many jolts and halts, and to the accompaniment of a good deal of mercifully muffled blasphemy from the box, the cab drew out of the station yard and rolled heavily toward Suffolk Square. The blighting autumn rain drummed pitilessly on its roof and lashed the closed window-panes. So dark had the afternoon turned that Mrs. Barbour could only see her daughter's face as a white blur against the black velvet cushion, and was forced to guess at its expression. A good deal of new-born hope mingled with her own concern. I am a poor actor, and know now that after the first Mrs. Barbour had been undeceived by my message. She had suspected a "quarrel" on the last day at La Palèze, and though she had not been a witness to any further manifestations of it, did not believe, perhaps because she did not wish to believe, that it had even been made up. She had never approved her daughter's choice in her heart--had thought it but a poor fulfilment of so many fond imaginings. She had the relish for change often to be found in easy-going, hospitable natures. She was not callous nor indifferent to the girl's probable suffering, but she had lived through a good deal herself and had the robust scepticism of middle age in affairs of the heart. Beyond inevitable storms and fevers, beyond a few tearful days and sleepless nights, what rosy vistas might not be opening! With Ingram out of the way, she became seized again of all her old air-castles. It is a strange fact that the dark homeward drive, which was one long torture for the daughter, should have been invested for the being who loved her best with the subdued cheerfulness of an executor returning from a funeral.

A year ago she would have been profuse of tenderness and sympathy; but during that year her child's heart had grown away from her, exhausted by a passion it was too immature to bear, and shrank too perceptibly from the ministrations of any other love. For the present she judged an elaborate heedlessness to be at once the easiest and the safest course.

The promise of better days, of a clearer horizon, persisted in the clean, stately house that welcomed the wanderers home, in its high-ceiled rooms, so strangely wide and light after the dark, cramped little cottage in which she had been living under protest, and in the open kindly English faces of Druce and Kendal, who had not so much grown gray as they had toughened and flattened in faithful service. Her lodgers would not be back for a couple of weeks, and she could roam from room to room and indulge her sense of proprietorship undisturbed, finding everything brighter, fresher, better for her absence. One would have said that Number Eleven, too, had taken a trip to the seaside for change of air. She unpacked her trunk, found her knitting, and was humming a little brisk air when she returned to the sitting-room.

What she saw struck the song from her lips and the happiness from her heart. Fenella sat forward in an armchair over the cold, empty grate. Her poor face seemed tense, strangely unyouthful and set like a stone. She returned her mother's startled gaze with stricken, inexpressive eyes. Mrs. Barbour was on her knees at her side in a moment.

"Nelly, darling! Are you ill, child?"

The girl shook her head slowly, and looked away again at the black-leaded grate.

"Have you been sitting here ever since we came in? Oh, my pet! And I roaming over the house and never thinking." She drew the gloves off her daughter's limp hands. "Dear! your poor hands are like ice. Shall I have a fire lit while tea's making ready?"

Nelly shivered. "I'm chilled," she said, "and--and a little dizzy. It's the crossing, perhaps. And the house does seem cold and strange, doesn't it, mummy, after our little _chalêt_?"

Mrs. Barbour rang for tea and ordered a fire to be lit. Her fingers trembled as she cut thin bread and butter.

"It's her eyes," she kept saying to herself, in that frightened soliloquy we use to temper a vague dread. "It's her eyes that frighten me. If I could only get them to look natural, I shouldn't mind so greatly. She knows something I don't. What did that devil say to her before he left?"

She wheeled the sofa before the fire--that was an inspiriting thing in itself on this rainy September evening--tucked a shawl over the child's shoulders and put furred slippers on the numbed, slender feet. Nelly sipped her tea, nibbled her toast with the docility of the broken in spirit. Later she pretended to read, but, happily ignorant how much of real sorrow may be entombed in the printed page, found no comfort there in time of present trouble. She was one of those for whom reading is a last resource, literature the thinnest of veils that can be interposed between them and the withering breath of reality. The book is yet to write that will not be laid down at a postman's knock or an infant's cry.

It was at a postman's knock now that the novel whose pages she had been listlessly turning slipped from her lap and fell, face downward, on the hearth-rug. She could not rise, so great was her agitation, and the fulness of time seemed to gather in every second that _tick-tocked_ from the clock in the corner before her mother was in the room again. She was holding a letter before her spectacles, a letter with a deep black border, at whose superscription her brows were knitted. Back from failing limbs and reeling brain the blood flowed to Fenella's heart. But she did not faint. There is always enough life left us to learn the extent of our sorrow.

"The letter's for you, dear!"

"Read it, mummy," she said, simply. "I can't."

Mrs. Barbour ripped open the envelope. As she glanced over the unfamiliar writing, her faced glowed with pleased excitement.

"What is it? Oh! _what_ is it?" the puzzled and tortured girl asked her, seeing her lips move.

Mrs. Barbour looked up. "Darling, what's the matter? It's good news. I mean--God forgive me!--not very bad. Only your Aunt Hortense dead. You never knew her."

Fenella, as she took her suspense back into her breast, knew its name was Hope. Her eyes filled as from some inward sweat of anguish--some wound felt only when the sword is withdrawn.

"Why do they write to me?"

"It's from your cousin Leslie. Listen! Shall I read to you?" She did not wait for an answer, but read on breathlessly:

"DEAR COUSIN FENELLA,

"Do you remember--have you ever been told, of the girl who came to
see you fifteen years ago, and whom you would not kiss? Fifteen
years ago! and now she is bringing herself to your notice again. Do
you feel it an insult after so long? You should not, dear cousin.
For there are things that are so hard to write, but that sound so
natural when they are spoken. And even though you resent it, be
patient for the sake of the sad reason that occasions her writing
now. Poor mother was buried on Friday. One can remain loyal and
still admit that she was a woman hard to understand--impossible to
divert from a prejudice once conceived. Even now, although I have
thought of you unnumbered times, sought news of you, even kissed
the picture we have of you as a child, that seemed to me to hold
the promise of a sweet friendship to come in its baby face, I could
not write to you as I am doing did I think that my impulse still
crossed the will of the dead. You will not understand this until
you have seen one you love die by inches under your eyes, while you
stood by, powerless to save, and all but powerless to soothe. But
toward the end of her illness mother spoke of you. Her heart was
changed, and in what I am doing now I am carrying out the wishes
of the dead no less than gratifying what has always been a secret
desire."

Mrs. Barbour paused for breath. "Doesn't she write beautifully, dear?"

"I think it's gush," said Fenella. "Is there much more?"

"Oh! fie, dear. Listen!"

"Dear Cousin, we are to come to town for the autumn. May I call
upon you--see you often--make amends for all the wasted years that
might have made us friends? You are our kin, and, in trouble, blood
calls to blood. We will return to Freres Lulford for Christmas, and
we want you to spend it with us, among your own people. It will
be a sad and quiet one for all, but by then I trust you will have
grown so near to us that we need not grudge you a share in our
grief. Write me when you get this. The earlier your answer reaches
me the easier I shall forgive myself for what, by one cold word,
you can turn to the deepest humiliation I have ever suffered. Think
me impulsive, think me indiscreet, think me even impertinent; but,
believe me, oh! so ready to write myself

"Your loving cousin,
"LESLIE BARBOUR."

Mrs. Barbour wiped her spectacles. They were so dim that she did not notice her daughter's vacant gaze.

"Mother, are people often taken ill so suddenly?"

"My dear, your cousin says it was a long illness."

Fenella gave the low moan of the misunderstood. "Mother! I don't mean--that. I mean Paul."

The woman could not check a movement of almost passionate impatience.

"Mr. Ingram? I don't believe he's ill at all. Men who write are always up or down. They're worse than women. It's the unhealthy life they lead."

"I wonder--I wonder!" said Nelly under her breath. She was realizing, with a sick dismay, that this was the last evening delivery and that to-morrow would be Sunday, a day during which, for those at least who live in London and wait upon the post for comfort, the operations of Providence are entirely suspended. Two nights and a day to be lived through--somehow!

Her mother took out the letter again, and fingered it caressingly.

"It's what I've been longing for all my life," she said. "When are you going to answer it, dear?"

"To-morrow, mummy, to-morrow," wailed poor Fenella, and fled from the room.