Chapter VI: Part 6

And now a madness came over the thief. So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his--his for the taking--even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift--even these were his: had he not found them--he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly--in little sips--from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief's trade to know the value of things.

He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot face in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.

In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures--no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew--and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith's work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: "No man less fortunate than I, to-night, shall ever again drink from them." But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.

Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel wrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.

"I must guard my treasures," he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.

When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find the way to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner--for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.

So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.

Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.

And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.

"I had better have been born a fool," said the thief.

Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.

Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.

It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at last a light--and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.

He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it--a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.

As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.

As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman's hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman's hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.

The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages--fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief's craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.

He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.

XI

THE GIRL AT THE TOBACCONIST'S

John Selwyn Selborne cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming; omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of his young brother when he left home for the wars.

This was why he cursed. The curse was mild--it was indeed less a curse than an invocation.

"Defend us from women," he said; "above all from the women who think they know."

The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated to the chord of agony.

"There's no fool like an old fool," said John Selwyn Selborne. He had thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when their time came would not do.

He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the Brydges woman. And to-day the boy sailed. John Selborne sighed. Twenty-two, and off to the wars, heart-whole. Whereas he had been invalided at the very beginning of things and now, when he was well and just on the point of rejoining--the motor-car and the Brydges woman! And as for heart-whole ... the Brydges woman again.

He fell asleep. When he awoke there was full sunshine and an orchestra of awakened birds in the garden outside. There was tea--there were letters. One was from Sidney--Sidney, who had left him not twelve hours before.

He tore it open, and hurt his shoulder in the movement.

"DEAR JOHN," said the letter, "I wanted to tell you last night,
but you seemed so cheap, I thought I'd better not bother you.
But it's just come into my head that perhaps I may get a bullet
in my innards, and I want you to know. So here goes. There's a
girl I mean to marry. I know she'll say Yes, but I can't ask
her till I come back, of course. I don't want to have any
humbug or concealing things from you; you've always been so
decent to me. I know you hate jaw, so I won't go on about that.
But I must tell you I met her first when she was serving in a
tobacconist's shop. And her mother lets lodgings. You'll think
this means she's beneath me. Wait till you see her. I want you
to see her, and make friends with her while I'm away."

Here followed some lover's raptures, and the address of the lady.

John Selborne lay back and groaned.

Susannah Sheepmarsh, tobacconist's assistant, lodging-house keeper's daughter, and Sidney Selborne, younger son of a house whose pride was that it had been proud enough to refuse a peerage.

John Selborne thought long and deeply.

"I suppose I must sacrifice myself," he said. "Little adventuress! 'How easy to prove to him,' I said, 'that an eagle's the game her pride prefers, though she stoops to a wren instead.' The boy'll hate me for a bit, but he'll thank me later. Yalding? That's somewhere on the Medway. Fishing? Boating? Convalescence is good enough. Fiction aid us! What would the villain in a book do to come between fond lovers? He would take the lodgings: at least he would try. And one may as well do something."

So he wrote to Mrs Sheepmarsh--she had rooms to let, he heard. Terms? And Mrs Sheepmarsh wrote back; at least her reply was typewritten, which was a bit of a shock. She had rooms. They were disengaged. And the terms were thus and such.

Behold John Selwyn Selborne then, his baggage neatly labelled with his first and second names, set down on the little platform of Yalding Station. Behold him, waggonette-borne, crossing the old stone bridge and the golden glory of the Leas, flushed with sunset.

Mrs Sheepmarsh's house was long and low and white. It had a classic porch, and at one end a French window opened through cascades of jasmine to a long lawn. There were many trees. A middle-aged lady in decent black, with a white cap, and white lace about her neck, greeted him with formal courtesy. "This way," she said, and moved for him to follow her through a green gate and down a shrubbery that led without disguise or pretence straight away from the house. It led also to a little white building embowered in trees. "Here," said the lady. She opened the door. "I'll tell the man to bring your luggage. Good evening----"

And she left him planted there. He had to bend his head to pass under the low door, and he found himself in a tiny kitchen. Beyond were a sitting-room and two bedchambers. All fitted sparsely, but with old furniture, softly-faded curtains, quiet and pleasant to look upon. There were roses in a jug of Gres de Flandre on the gate-table in the sitting-room.

"What a singular little place!" he said. "So these are the lodgings. I feel like a dog in a kennel. I suppose they will throw me a bone by-and-by--or, at any rate, ask me what kind of bones I prefer."

He unpacked his clothes and laid his belongings in the drawers and cupboards; it was oddly charming that each shelf or drawer should have its own little muslin bag of grey lavender. Then he took up a book and began to read. The sunset had died away, the daylight seemed to be glowing out of the low window like a tide, leaving bare breadths of darkness behind. He lighted candles. He was growing hungry--it was past eight o'clock.

"I believe the old lady has forgotten my existence," he said, and therewith opened his cottage door and went out into the lighter twilight of the garden. The shrubbery walks were winding. He took the wrong turning, and found himself entering on the narrow lawn. From the French window among the jasmine came lamplight--and voices.

"No servant, no food? My good mother, you've entertained a lunatic unawares."

"He had references."

"Man cannot live by references alone. The poor brute must be starving--unless he's drunk."

"Celia! I do wish you wouldn't----"

John Selborne hastening by, put a period to the conversation by boots crunching heavily and conscientiously on the gravel. Both voices ceased. He presented himself at the lamp-lit oblong of the window.

Within that lamplight glowed on the last remnants of a meal--dinner, by the glasses and the fruit. Also on the lady in the cap, and on a girl--the one, doubtless, who had evolved the lunatic idea. Both faces were turned towards him. Both women rose: there was nothing for it but advance. He murmured something about intrusion--"awfully sorry, the walks wind so," and turned to go.

But the girl spoke: "Oh, wait a moment. Is this Mr Selwyn, mother?"

"My daughter, Miss Sheepmarsh--Mr Selwyn," said the mother reluctantly.

"We were just talking about you," said the girl, "and wondering whether you were ill or anything, or whether your servant hasn't turned up, or something."

"Miss Sheepmarsh." He was still speechless. This the little adventuress, the tobacconist's assistant? This girl with the glorious hair severely braided, the round face, the proud chin, the most honest eyes in the world? She might be sister to the adventuress--cousin, perhaps? But the room, too--shining mahogany, old china, worn silver, and fine napery--all spoke of a luxury as temperate as refined: the luxury of delicate custom, of habit bred in the bone; no mushroom growth of gross self-indulgence, but the unconscious outcome of generations of clear self-respect.

"Can we send anything over for you?" the elder lady asked. "Of course we----"

"We didn't mean by 'entirely private' that we would let our tenant starve," the girl interrupted.

"There is some mistake." Selborne came to himself suddenly. "I thought I was engaging furnished apartments with er--attendance."

The girl drew a journal from a heap on the sofa.

"This was the advertisement, wasn't it?" she asked.

And he read:

"Four-roomed cottage, furnished, in beautiful grounds. Part of
these are fenced in for use of tenant of cottage. And in the
absence of the family the whole of the grounds are open to
tenant. When at home the family wish to be entirely private."

"I never saw this at all," said Selborne desperately. "My--I mean I was told it was furnished lodgings. I am very sorry I have no servant and no means of getting one. I will go back to London at once. I am sorry."

"The last train's gone," said Miss Sheepmarsh. "Mother, ask Mr Selborne to come in, and I'll get him something to eat."

"My dear," said the mother, "surely Mary----"

"My dear mother," said the girl, "you know Mary is having her supper."

The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this Hebe with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the mother--not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of music, art, and the life of the great world.

It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant's immediate needs.

"If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village," said she.

"But wouldn't you rather I went?" he said.

"Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn't have advertised it. I'll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the very thing, mother. And you'll like her, Mr Selwyn. She's a great dear----"

Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to "do for" Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days passed. He got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.

On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong, well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase--an afternoon of calls evidently setting in.

Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to recall the terms of that advertisement, he had passed the green fence of division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He felt, as he went, a glow of gratitude to the fate which was rewarding his care of his brother's future with an interest like this. The adventuress?--the tobacconist's assistant?--he could deal with her later.

Through the garden's green a gleam of white guided--even, it seemed, beckoned.

He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock swung between two cedars.

"Have pity on me," he said abruptly.

She raised her eyes from her book.

"Oh, it's you!" she said. "I am so glad. Get a chair from under the weeping ash, and sit down and talk."

"This turf is good enough for me," said he; "but are you sure I'm not trespassing?"

"You mean the advertisement? Oh, that was just because we had some rather awful people last year, and we couldn't get away from them, and mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you're different. We like you very much, what we've seen of you." This straightforward compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. "The other people were--well, he was a butterman. I believe he called himself an artist."

"Do you mean that you do not like persons who are in trade," he asked, thinking of the tobacconist's assistant.

"Of course I don't mean that," she said; "why, I'm a Socialist! Butterman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like working people better than shoppy people, though I know it's wrong."

"How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?" he asked.

"It's snobbish, don't you think? We ought to like people for what they are, not for what they have, or what they work at."

"If you weren't so pretty, and hadn't that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you'd be a prig," he said to himself. To her he said: "Roughly speaking, don't you think the conventional classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?"

"No," she answered roundly.

And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.

"Dearest," said the girl, "I can't help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I'm twenty-six. I've always talked to people if I liked them--even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren't wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he's a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you--that and his references. Don't worry, there's a darling. Just be nice to him yourself. He's simply a godsend in a place like this."

"He'll fall in love with you, Celia," said the mother warningly.

"Not he!" said the daughter. But the mother was right.

Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments--those days that passed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books--and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia's idea: its rent was merely for "luxuries." He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the "luxuries" were Celia's--the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.

And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin--of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist's assistant.

It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. "Have you," he asked, looking into her face, "any relation who is in a shop?"

"No," said she; "why?"

"I only wondered," said he coldly.

"But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!" she said. "Do tell me what made you think of it."

"Very well," he said, "I will. The person who told me that your mother had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in a shop."

"Never!" she cried. "What a hateful idea!"

"A tobacconist's shop," he persisted; "and her name was Susannah Sheepmarsh."

"Oh," she answered, "that was me." She spoke instantly and frankly, but she blushed crimson.

"And you're ashamed of it,--Socialist?" he asked with a sneer, and his eyes were fierce on her burning face.

"I'm not! Row home, please. Or I'll take the sculls if you're tired, or your shoulder hurts. I don't want to talk to you any more. You tried to trap me into telling a lie. You don't understand anything at all. And I'll never forgive you."

"Yes, you will," he said to himself again and again through the silence in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He loved her. She loved, or had loved--or might have loved--or might love--his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice; and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.

He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a young woman who had served in a tobacconist's shop, and who would be some day his brother's wife?

The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and daughter living the same dainty, dignified, charming life to which he had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.

"Oh, fool! But you are punished!" he said; "she's angry now--angrier even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use. This comes of trying to act like an ass in a book."

The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely hidden.

And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother, had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she would have loved him.

Then one day came the South African mail, and it brought a letter from his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a tobacconist's counter, and had trusted it to him.

The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was vital.

"I say, I wonder whether you've seen anything of Susannah? What
a young fool I was ever to think I could be happy with a girl
out of a shop. I've met the real and only one now--she's a
nurse; her father was a clergyman in Northumberland. She's such
a bright little thing, and she's never cared for any one before
me. Wish me luck."

John Selborne almost tore his hair.

"Well, I can't save him across half the world! Besides----"

At thirty-seven one should have outgrown the wild impulses of youth. He said this to himself, but all the same it was the next train to Yalding that he took.

Fate was kind; at Yalding it had almost always been kind. The glow of red firelight shone out over the snow through the French window among the brown jasmine stalks.

Mrs Sheepmarsh was out, Miss Sheepmarsh was at home. Would he step this way?

He stepped into the presence of the girl. She rose from the low chair by the fire, and the honest eyes looked angrily at him.

"Look here," he said, as the door closed between them and the maid-servant, "I've come to tell you things. Just this once let me talk to you; and afterwards, if you like, I can go away and never come back."

"Sit down," she said coldly. "I don't feel friends with you at all, but if you want to speak, I suppose you must."

So then he told her everything, beginning with his brother's letter, and ending with his brother's letter.

"And, of course, I thought it couldn't be you, because of your being called Celia; and when I found out it really was you, I had to go away, because I wanted to be fair to the boy. But now I've come back."

"I think you're the meanest person I ever knew," she said; "you thought I liked your brother, and you tried to make me like you so that you might throw me over and show him how worthless I was. I hate you and despise you."

"I didn't really try," he said miserably.

"And you took a false name to deceive us."

"I didn't: it really is my second name."

"And you came here pretending to be nice and a gentleman, and----" She was lashing herself to rage, with the lash of her own voice, as women will. John Selborne stood up suddenly.

"Be quiet," he said, and she was quiet. "I won't hear any more reproaches, unless---- Listen, I've done wrong--I've owned it. I've suffered for it. God knows I've suffered. You liked me in the summer: can't you try to like me again? I want you more than anything else in the world. Will you marry me?"

"Marry you," she cried scornfully; "you who----"

"Pardon me," he said. "I have asked a question. Give me no for an answer, and I will go. Say yes, and then you may say anything else you like. Yes or no. Shall I go or stay? Yes or no. No other word will do."

She looked at him, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing with indignation. A world of scorn showed in the angle of the chin, the poise of her head. Her lips opened. Then suddenly her eyes met his, and she knew that he meant what he said. She covered her face with her hands.

"Don't--don't cry, dear one," he said. "What is it? You've only to choose. Everything is for you to decide."

Still she did not speak.

"Good-bye, then," he said, and turned. But she caught at him blindly.

"Don't--don't go!" she cried. "I didn't think I cared about you in the summer, but since you went away, oh, you don't know how I've wanted you!"

* * * * *

"Well," he said, when her tears were dried, "aren't you going to scold me?"

"Don't!" said she.

"At least tell me all about my brother--and why he thought you would be so ready to marry him."

"That? Oh, that was only his conceit. You know I always do talk to people in railway carriages and things. I suppose he thought it was only him I talked to."

"And the name?"

"I--I thought if I said my name was Susannah he wouldn't get sentimental."

"You 'took a false name to deceive him'?"

"Don't--oh, don't!"

"And the tobacco shop?"

"Ah--that rankles?" She raised her head to look at him.

"Not it," he answered coolly. "I simply don't believe it."

"Why? But you're quite right. It was a woman in my district in London, and I took the shop for her for three days, because her husband was dying, and she couldn't get any one else to help her. It was--it was rather fun--and--and----"

"And you wouldn't tell me about it, because you didn't want me to know how proud you were of it."

"Proud? Ah, you do understand things! The man died, and I had given her those three days with him. I wasn't proud, was I?--only glad that I could. So glad--so glad!"

"But you let my brother think----"

"Oh yes, I let him think it was my trade; I thought it might make him not be silly. You see, I always knew he couldn't understand things."

"Celia?"

"Yes?"

"And have you really forgiven me?"

"Yes, yes, I forgive you! But I never should have if---- There's mother at the front door. Let me go. I want to let her in myself."

"If?"

"Let me go. If----"

"If?"

"If you hadn't understood and----"

"Yes?"

"If you hadn't come back to me!"

XII

WHILE IT IS YET DAY

"And is it really true? Are you going to govern the Fortunate Islands?"

"I am, indeed--or rather, to be accurate, I am going to deputy-govern them--I mean, father is--for a year."

"A whole year!" he said, looking down at her fan. "What will London do without you?"

"London will do excellently," she answered--"and that's my pet fan, and it's not used to being tied into knots." She took it from him.

"And what shall I do without you?"

"Oh! laugh and rhyme and dance and dine. You'll go out to the proper number of dinners and dances, and make the proper measure of pretty little speeches and nice little phrases; and you'll do your reviews, and try to make them as like your editor's as you can; and you'll turn out your charming little rondeaux and triolets, and the year will simply fly. Heigho! I'm glad I'm going to see something big, if it's only the Atlantic."

"You are very cruel," he said.

"Am I? But it's not cruel to be cruel if nobody's hurt, is it? And I am so tired of nice little verses and pretty little dances and dainty little dinners. Oh, if I were only a man!"

"Thank God you're not!" said he.

"If I were a man, I would do just one big thing in my life, even if I had to settle down to a life of snippets and trifles afterwards."

Her eyes were shining. They always glittered, but now they were starry. The drifted white folds across her breast stirred to her quickened breath.

"If you loved me, Sybil, I could do something great!" said he.

"But I _don't_," she said--"at any rate, not now; and I've told you so a dozen times. My dear Rupert, the man who needs a woman to save him isn't worth the saving."

"What would you call a big thing?" he asked. "Must I conquer an empire for you, or start a new religion? Or shall I merely get the Victoria Cross, or become Prime Minister?"

"Don't sneer," said she; "it doesn't become you at all. You've no idea how horrid you look when you're sneering. Why don't you----? Oh! but it's no good! By the way, what a charming cover Housman has designed for your _Veils and Violets_! It's a dear little book. Some of the verses are quite pretty."

"Go on," said he, "rub it in. I know I haven't done much yet; but there's plenty of time. And how can one do any good work when one is for ever sticking up one's heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at? If you'd only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!"

"May I refer you to my speech--not the last one, but the one before that."

He laughed; then he sighed.

"Ah, my Pretty," he said, "it was all very well, and pleasant enough to be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now----"

"How often," she asked calmly, "have I told you that you must not call me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now----"

"Look here," he said, leaning towards her, "there's not a soul about; they're in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once--it can't matter to you--and it will mean so very much to me."

"That's just it," she said; "if it didn't mean----"

"Then it shan't mean anything but good-bye. It's only about eight years since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion."

She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she looked at him.

"Very well," she said suddenly.

"No," he said; "I won't have it unless it _does_ mean something."

There was a silence. "Our dance, I think?" said the voice of one bending before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom she had been hiding.

Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed more than once. "I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more," she said; "and I wish--yes, I do wish he had. I don't suppose he'll care a bit for me when I come back."

So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father's park from her father's rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday had seen his own jovial return.

"Do you all the good in the world, my boy. 'Pon my soul, you have a tired sort of look, as if you'd got some of these jolly new diseases people have taken to dying of lately--appendi-what's-its-name, you know, and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So long! You take my tip."

What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill--tired, bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back, looked grave, and said: "Go to Strongitharm--he's absolutely at _the_ top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it's better to know where we are. You go to Strongitharm."

Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.

Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends--disappeared suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should have gone on imitating.

The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his advice.

"He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: 'Go round the world; there's nothing like it,' and, by Jove! he went. Now, that's the kind of man I like--knows good advice when he gets it, and acts on it right off."

So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil's questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think--there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me--and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory--and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie's, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found _him_. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it--all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig--and--she turned the pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this _for her_--because of what she had said.

Arrived at the publisher's, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of "Work While it is Yet Day," nor the name of him; and it was abundantly evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.

Sybil's prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was very nice and kind, but he could not give his client's name without his client's permission.

The disappointment was bitter.

"But I'll send a letter for you," he tried to soften it with.

Sybil's self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.

"I do want to see him most awfully," she said, "and I know he wants to see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know----"

She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent did.

"Look here," he said smartly, "I'll wire to him at once; and if he says I may, I'll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?"

Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went back.

The literary agent smiled victory.

"The answer is 'Yes,'" he said, and handed her a slip of paper--

"THREE CHIMNEYS,
NEAR PADDOCK WOOD,
KENT."

"Have you a time-table?" asked she.

* * * * *

The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every one was talking about--the great book--and her heart was full to overflowing of joy and pride and other things.

The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.

She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the station with _him_. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in empty houses.

Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She was not unconscious of these facts.

Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil's lips were half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must shine on his face when he saw her--Her--the unattainable, the unapproachable, at his very door. But her smile died away, for his face was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.

"You!" he said.

And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: "Yes, me." There was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house, the tangle of the untidy garden. "Mayn't I come in?" she asked.

"Yes; oh yes, come in!"

She crossed the threshold--the doorstep was dank with green mould--and followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the hills.

He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back to the fireless grate.

"You are very, very pretty," he said suddenly. And the explanation of his disappearance suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But she was not afraid. When all a woman's thoughts, day and night for a year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the fear in her eyes.

"No, I'm not mad," he said. "Sybil, I'm very glad you came. Come to think of it, I'm very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I did for any one."

Sybil's hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really--was it through her that he was----

"Come out," she said. "I hate this place; it stifles me. And you've lived here--worked here!"

"I've lived here for eleven months and three days," he said. "Yes, come out."

So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.

"Now," she said, throwing off her hat and curling her green, soft draperies among the long grass. "Come and sit down and tell me----"

He threw himself on the grass.

"Sure it won't bore you?" he asked.

She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not hold hers.

"I seem to remember," he said, "the last time I saw you--you were going away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I told you--or, anyway, I thought to myself--that there was plenty of time for that. I'd always had a sort of feeling that I _could_ do something great whenever I chose to try. Well--yes, you did go away, of course; I remember perfectly--and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and _he_ said I'd only got about a year to live. So then I began to think."

Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.

"And I thought: Here I've been thirty years in this world. I've the experience of twenty-eight and a half--I suppose the first little bit doesn't count. If I'd had time, I meant to write another book, just to show exactly what a man feels when he knows he's only got a year to live, and nothing done--nothing done."

"I won't believe it," she said. "You don't _look_ ill; you're as lean as a greyhound, but----"

"It may come any day now," he went on quietly; "but I've done something. The book--it _is_ great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the things you had seen and known and felt were wasted--lost--going out with you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking everything you might have done with you."

"The book _is_ great," she said; "you _have_ done something."

"Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James's Street, and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she was little, and she had gone away and wasn't fond of me any more. Oh, Sybil--I feel like a lunatic--I mean you, of course; but you never cared. And I went to a house agent's and got the house unfurnished, and I bought the furniture--there's nothing much except what you've seen, and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I've lived alone in that house, and I've written that book, with Death sitting beside me, jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, 'Hurry up; I'm waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you'll have done nothing, nothing, nothing.'"

"But you've done the book," said Sybil again. The larch and the garden beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted. Her own agony--that could be dealt with later.

"I've ridden myself with the curb," he said. "I thought it all out--proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn't play the fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I've done it. The book will live--every one says it will. I shan't have lived for nothing."

"Rupert," she said, "dear Rupert!"

"Thank you," he said forlornly; "you're very kind." And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.

"Oh, Rupert, why didn't you write and tell me?"

"What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things--even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade."

She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her--that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that--have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.

"I don't believe it," she said.

"Don't believe what?"

"That you're going to die."

He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.

Then he said: "I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven't buried my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn't love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!"