Chapter VIII: Part II: I (4)

Aunt Tessie had been very good to him when he was a little boy, and this Edgar never intended to forget. He had had a very unhappy childhood, with a mother who drank and a stepfather who beat him. Aunt Tessie, who had actually made a living for herself in those days out of painting pictures, had done everything that she could do to induce them to let little Edgar come and live with her, and when they would not agree to that, she had still sent him presents and surreptitiously given him pocket-money, and when he had been sent away to school, she had come regularly and taken him out, and invited him to her flat whenever she could. She was the only person who had ever shown him any affection when he was a child, Edgar had once told his wife.

Maude had been very much touched, and thought it noble of dear Edgar to remember so faithfully, in his great prosperity, the good old aunt who had long ceased to be able to paint even bad pictures, and who had become terribly, almost dangerously, eccentric about ten years earlier. Edgar had then immediately taken her to live with him, declaring Aunt Tessie once and for all to be his charge.

All this he had explained to his wife before they were married, and her generous and even eager acquiescence had met him more than half-way.

Maude, indeed, had been ready to accept Aunt Tessie as her charge, too. She had felt nothing but a tender compassion for the probably frail, half-childish invalid, towards whose garrulousness she would never fail of kindly semi-attention, and to whose bodily weakness every care should be extended. But Aunt Tessie had turned out not to be that sort of invalid at all.

To begin with, her physical health was robust and powerful. She was only fifty-five, and her hair was not grey, but a strong, virulent auburn.

Her complexion was sanguine, her large, harshly-lined face suffused with colour and disfigured by swelling, purplish veins.

Her voice was very loud and hoarse, and she laughed with a sound like a neigh. As for Aunt Tessie’s appetite, it was simply prodigious. Even had expense been a serious consideration at Melrose, Mrs. Lambe would never have grudged anyone a hearty meal--she had too often gone semi-hungry herself for that--but really, Aunt Tessie, with her second and third helping of beef, and her two glasses of claret, and her frank eagerness for dessert chocolates, was not decent.

She always had her meals in the dining-room, and it was really on that account that Ena and Evelyn had their midday dinner upstairs, and only came downstairs when the starched and mob-capped maids were handing round coffee. Their mother would have liked them to come to the dining-room for luncheon, at least on Sundays, but they both hated Aunt Tessie, and made faces and laughed at each other when she uttered any of her loud, inconsequent remarks, or pushed her food into her mouth with her fingers.

Maude, and even Edgar, had tried to persuade Aunt Tessie that it would be more comfortable for her to have all her meals in the large upstairs sitting-room that they had given her, but Aunt Tessie had been first angry and then hurt. They wanted her out of the way, she said angrily, they were ashamed of her, and did not like her to meet their friends.

Mrs. Lambe could not help thinking that it was rather ungrateful of Aunt Tessie to say this, after all that had been done for her. However, they would not vex and disappoint the poor old lady, and so she continued to appear downstairs, even when there was a party, and to embarrass and disconcert everybody by her ineptitudes and her uncouth manners at the dinner-table.

II

By the time the Armistice was signed, Mr. Lambe had become richer than ever.

He entertained his friends even more often to dinner, and gave them better wine, although it had always been so good before. He increased Mrs. Lambe’s allowance for the housekeeping, and frequently gave her presents of money to be spent upon herself or the little girls. He would have given Aunt Tessie money too, but she had grown even queerer in the course of the past year, and it was only too evident that what had been called her “eccentricity” was now becoming something much more serious. For the very first time, there was trouble with the maids.

They did not like waiting on Miss Lambe. It was no wonder, either, poor Mrs. Lambe was forced to admit.

Aunt Tessie was untidy, even dirty, and as the housemaid once pertly remarked, her bedroom only needed three gold balls over the door. She kept things to eat upstairs, and scattered crumbs everywhere.

The parlour-maid, speaking for herself and for the housemaid, declared that it was quite impossible to do the proper work of the house and to clear up after Miss Lambe as well.

In another moment she would have given notice.... Mrs. Lambe could see it coming.

Hastily she sent for Emma, the little between-maid, and informed her that in future she would have the sole care of Miss Lambe’s bedroom and her sitting-room, and would wait upon her, instead of the housemaid. She at the same time raised Emma’s wages by two pounds a year, for she always tried to be very just.

Emma was only seventeen, and a very childish little thing, and Mrs. Lambe had not expected her to raise any objection to the new scheme; but it was surprising, although satisfactory, to find that Emma seemed to be actually pleased by it.

She said “Yes’m,” a good many times, and smiled at her mistress as though joyfully accepting a form of promotion.

Mrs. Lambe was relieved, the parlour-maid and the housemaid did not give notice, and even Aunt Tessie--very difficult to please nowadays--appeared contented and satisfied.

But she was getting worse all the time.

It became more and more embarrassing when visitors came to Melrose.

The old lady always found out when anyone was expected, and the more people were coming the noisier and more excited she became.

One dreadful Sunday there were guests for luncheon--two of Edgar’s important clients, and little Ena’s godfather--a rich old bachelor cousin--and two unmarried ladies, friends of Mrs. Lambe’s maiden days. She was always very faithful to her friends.

Aunt Tessie actually pranced downstairs and met some of these people in the hall as they arrived, and greeted them boisterously, and so incoherently that really they might almost have been excused for thinking that she had been taking too much to drink.

Mrs. Lambe, hastening downstairs from her own room, could hear it all, although she could not see it, and it was thus that she afterwards described it to Edgar.

“So glad--so glad to see you!” shouted Aunt Tessie. “This fine house--always open, and my nephew is so generous and hospitable. They take advantage, sometimes--there are bad people about, very bad people. Sometimes they make attempts ... one’s life isn’t as safe as it looks, I can assure you....”

She had thrown out such ridiculous and yet sinister hints once or twice lately. But what _could_ the poor guests think of it all?

They were very polite, and soon saw that the best thing to do was to ignore Aunt Tessie as far as possible, and pretend not to hear when she talked, and not to see when she shuffled about the room, upsetting ornaments here and there, and every now and then whisking round suddenly to look behind her as though she expected someone or something to be following her. Once she shouted very loud, “Get out, I tell you! I can _smell_ the poison from here!...” But after the first involuntary, startled silence, everyone began simultaneously to talk again, and very soon after that, luncheon was announced.

Mrs. Lambe saw that her husband, talking to his principal guest and smiling a great deal, kept on all the time turning an anxious eye towards Aunt Tessie, and this emboldened her to do what she had never done before.

She put her hand on the old lady’s arm, and detained her whilst the others were all going into the dining-room.

“Dear auntie,” she said, speaking low and very gently, “I’m sure you’re not well. You look so flushed and tired. All these people are really too much for you. Do let Emma carry your lunch upstairs on a tray and have it comfortably in your own room.”

But it was of no use.

Aunt Tessie, her looks and her manner stranger than ever, vociferated an incoherent refusal, mixed up with something about Emma, to whom she had taken a violent fancy.

“A good girl--the only one you can trust. She never _plots against people_!” Aunt Tessie shouted, nodding her head with wild emphasis, and rolling her eyeballs round in their sockets.

Mrs. Lambe could do nothing. She dared not let Aunt Tessie sit next to any of the visitors, and of course she herself had to have one of the important clients upon either side of her, but she made Ena and Evelyn, who were lunching downstairs in honour of the godfather’s presence, take their places one on each side of their extraordinary old relative.

Evelyn, who was very little, began to whine and protest, but Mrs. Lambe pretended not to hear. She knew that Evelyn’s attention was always very easily distracted. She felt much more afraid of Ena, and her heart sank when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aunt Tessie officiously trying to put Ena’s long curls away from her shoulders.

The little girl’s fair, pretty face turned black with scowls in an instant, and she twitched herself away from the big, heavy, mottled hand fumbling clumsily at her neck, and sat with her back as nearly as possible turned to Aunt Tessie.

One couldn’t really blame the poor children for disliking her so much, but it was very bad for them ... it made them naughty and ill-mannered....

Poor Mrs. Lambe could only give half her attention to her guests, and she saw that Edgar, too, underneath his geniality and his urgent and repeated invitations that everyone should have more food and more wine, was anxious and ill at ease.

Every now and then Aunt Tessie’s strident tones rose above all the other sounds in the big, hot dining-room.

“Not any more--no. They put things into one’s food sometimes, and then they think one doesn’t notice. But the one who waits on me--Emma, her name is--she’s all right. You can trust her.”

Aunt Tessie’s words, no less than her emphasis on Emma’s trustworthiness, would of course be noticed, and bitterly resented, by the other two servants, waiting deftly and quietly at the table. But neither of them moved a muscle, even when she went on to something worse.

“Never put any confidence in upper servants,” declared Aunt Tessie, leaning across the table and almost shouting. “They may be civil enough, but they plot and plan behind people’s backs. There’s cases in the newspapers very often ... it’s ... it’s murder, really, you know. They call it accidental, but sometimes it’s poisoning. One can’t be too auspicious--suspicious, I should say.”

She paused to laugh vacantly at her own slip of the tongue, and to let her eyes rove all over the table as though in search of something.

Mr. Lambe clumsily wrenched at the conversation: “Talking about newspaper reports, that was a curious case in Staffordshire....”

The visitors seconded him gamely, and Aunt Tessie’s voice was overborne and heard again only in snatches.

Mrs. Lambe, however, was very much upset, and she ordered coffee to be brought to the drawing-room so as to make a move as soon as possible.

Things were a little better in the drawing-room. Ena and Evelyn were soon screaming and romping round Ena’s godfather, and one of Maude’s humble friends, perhaps feeling that she owed her something in return for the splendid luncheon and lavish hospitality, sat in the bow-window with Aunt Tessie and kept her away from the rest of the room. This was a great relief, although it led to an uncomfortable moment when the party was breaking up, and Aunt Tessie, vehemently taking leave of her kind companion, actually caught up a little gilt trifle from Maude’s knick-knack shelf and tried to press it upon her acceptance.

Miss Mason was very tactful, pretending with rather an embarrassed look to accept the impossible gift, and secretly slipping it on to a table near the door as she went out.

Aunt Tessie did not see, but Maude did. She was nearly crying by the time it was all over and everyone had gone away. The children had been sent upstairs again, and Aunt Tessie’s heavy footsteps had taken her to her own part of the house.

Curiously enough, she and Edgar hardly spoke to one another about the disastrous subject, but Maude Lambe knew very well that he now, as well as she, fully realised the discomfort and humiliation entailed upon the whole household by his too-generous treatment of Aunt Tessie.

III

Soon it was no longer possible to pretend that Aunt Tessie was not getting worse and worse. Her constant, irrelevant allusions to plots, and poisonings, and wicked people, had become a fixed delusion.

She really thought that everyone at Melrose was conspiring against her life, and she would allow no one, except Emma, to do anything for her.

It was a mercy, Mrs. Lambe often told herself, that Emma was such a good little thing. She was so willing, and never seemed to grudge the time and trouble that she was obliged to spend over cleaning Aunt Tessie’s apartments and tidying up after her. She would even listen, respectfully and yet compassionately, to Aunt Tessie’s long, rambling denunciations and accusations.

“Poor old lady!” Maude once overheard Emma saying to another servant. “She’s a lady just the same, for all she’s gone queer, and I behaves towards her like I would to any other lady, that’s all.”

“Funny kind of a lady that makes a face at a servant, as she did at me this morning.”

“She never done that to me, nor nothing the least like it,” said Emma stoutly.

It was only too true that Aunt Tessie was very rude to all the maids except Emma, and sometimes to Edgar and Maude as well. As she grew worse, she seemed to forget all their kindness and generosity, and to look upon them as being her enemies.

Mrs. Lambe would not let the little girls go near her any more, and the nurse had orders to keep them away from Miss Lambe “until she grew better.”

Aunt Tessie, however, did not grow better.

The doctor, an old friend of Edgar Lambe’s, advised them to have a nurse for her, if they were still determined to keep her on at Melrose, instead of sending her to one of the many excellent establishments that he could have recommended.

“Nothing in the least like an institution or--or asylum. Simply a nursing home where Miss Lambe would have entire freedom and every possible comfort, but would yet receive the constant medical supervision that her unfortunate condition renders necessary.”

But Edgar Lambe remained obstinate. Aunt Tessie had been very good to him in the past, and he had always said that she should be his special charge. He would not send her away to any nursing home, however highly recommended.

He was, however, quite willing that a professional nurse should be installed at Melrose. The expense, he said, was nothing, if it would make things easier for Maude and be of advantage to Aunt Tessie.

The presence of Nurse Alberta certainly fulfilled both these requirements.

She was an intelligent, pleasant-looking woman of five- or six-and-thirty, with none of the pretensions so often associated with her class. She had meals with Aunt Tessie, in the latter’s big, comfortable sitting-room, and slept in a little room adjoining hers. Both of them were waited upon by Emma.

Aunt Tessie nowadays made no difficulty about not coming to the dining-room. Her crazy old mind had fastened upon the idea of poison, and Emma and Nurse Alberta were the only people from whom she would accept food or drink.

The nurse told Emma, with whom she became quite friendly by dint of constant association, that the “persecution mania” was a very common symptom amongst those who were mentally deranged.

“They always think that everybody’s against them,” she declared cheerfully, “even those who do most for them. Look at this poor old lady, for instance! She thinks Mr. and Mrs. Lambe are plotting against her, and I’m sure they’re goodness itself to her, and have been for years, I should think. No expense grudged, and everything done to make her comfortable. Why, most people would have had an own mother sent away by this time and put under restraint--and Miss Lambe is only an aunt. No real relation at all, as you may say, to Mrs. Lambe. Really, I do think Mrs. Lambe’s behaved wonderfully, and I’m sure she finds it a strain.”

Nurse Alberta was quite right. Mrs. Lambe did find the presence of Aunt Tessie in the house a great strain, even now.

In her heart, she was terribly afraid that the old aunt, who had so rapidly passed from one distressing stage to another, might suddenly become a real danger to those around her.

She thought of Ena and Evelyn and shuddered. Very often, she woke in the night and crept out to the landing, trembling, to listen at the night-nursery door.

One day, when Nurse Alberta had been in the house for some time, Mrs. Lambe felt so wretched and so much unstrung by her state of now chronic nervousness, that she detained the doctor after his habitual visit to Aunt Tessie, and timidly spoke to him of her own symptoms.

He listened very attentively, asked her several questions, and finally made a suggestion which Mrs. Lambe saw at once ought to have occurred to her earlier.

She was going to have another child.

It was over five years since Evelyn’s birth, and she had somehow never expected to have any more babies, but both Mr. and Mrs. Lambe were honestly pleased.

They hoped for a son.

It was this discovery that led to the modification of Edgar Lambe’s views about Aunt Tessie. Obviously, the presence of the unfortunate old lady subjected Maude to a continual strain that might easily become more and more severe as time went on.

The doctor, privately consulted by Mr. Lambe, admitted that in his opinion it was not quite fair on Mrs. Lambe, in her condition, to keep the aggressive, turbulent invalid in the house with her. And it wasn’t as if Aunt Tessie herself really benefited by it, either. She was far past appreciating any kindness or attention shown to her now. Her _idée fixe_ was that everyone at Melrose excepting poor little Emma, the maid, was plotting against her in some way, and seeking to poison her.

Mr. Lambe listened, nodding his head, his red, heavy-jowled face puckered with distress. It went against the grain with him to invalidate the boast of years--that Aunt Tessie should always share his home--and yet in his heart he felt that the doctor was right.

Aunt Tessie was past minding or knowing, poor soul--and Maude and their unborn son must come first.

When once he had fairly made up his mind to it, Edgar Lambe could not help feeling a certain relief. He, too, in his own way, had suffered on those dreadful occasions when Aunt Tessie had insisted upon appearing downstairs, and had made his friends and his family uncomfortable by her strange, noisy eccentricity. Even nowadays his daily visit to her room was a miserable affair. It gave her no pleasure now to see the nephew for whom she had once done so much, and who had done so much for her in return. She classed him with her imaginary enemies.

It was very difficult for Edgar Lambe, who was not at all an imaginative man, not to feel irrationally wounded by those wild accusations of enmity. He could scarcely be brought to understand that poor Aunt Tessie’s floods of foolish vituperation had, in themselves, no meaning at all.

“But she was always devoted to me,” he said, half resentfully and half piteously. “I can’t make it out at all. You’d think that even now she’d be able to--to distinguish a bit between me and the wretched cook or charwoman. But no, she abuses us all alike, and seems to think we’re all in league to do her in.”

“It’s part of her illness, Mr. Lambe,” said Nurse Alberta soothingly. “You know, she really is quite cracky, poor old lady.”

The “arrangements,” as the doctor called them, were made as speedily as possible, since they were naturally distressing to everybody, and Mr. and Mrs. Lambe went themselves to see Aunt Tessie’s new quarters, and to talk to the charming lady at the head of the establishment, and get special permission for Nurse Alberta, to whom Aunt Tessie was used, to take her there and remain with her for some time until she grew accustomed to it all.

“Fires in her room, of course, and any extras that she may fancy,” said Mr. Lambe impressively. “Expense is of no consideration at all. I shall send round a comfortable couch for the sitting-room this afternoon.”

He did so, and Mrs. Lambe added two or three fat cushions, and a decorated lampshade and waste-paper basket, such as she liked in her own drawing-room.

When Aunt Tessie was told that she was going away from Melrose for a time, she was delighted.

“Then I can relish my food again,” she said rather coarsely.

“There’s never any knowing what they’re all up to here.”

That remained her attitude up to the very last. She dumped them all together as objects of her aggrieved resentment. Edgar, Maude, the two little girls, the impassive, well-behaved servants.

But when she said good-bye to Emma the night before she was to go away, Aunt Tessie squeezed her hand hard, and gave her some money and several ornaments and little trinkets from her own possessions.

Soft-hearted Emma cried, and hurried away to the sitting-room to find Nurse Alberta. “I just can’t bear to listen to her, poor old lady, saying I’m the only one as never tried to do her a mischief,” she sobbed.

“You’re a silly girl to take on so,” said the nurse good-naturedly. “Why, she’ll be ever so well looked after where she’s going, and there’s good money being spent on her comforts, I can tell you, and Mr. Lambe won’t let that be wasted. It isn’t like some poor looneys, that get put away and not a soul of their own people ever goes near them to see how they’re getting on. She’ll be kept an eye on, you may be very sure, and it’ll be best for all parties to have her under another roof, really it will.”

“Oh yes, I know!” said Emma.

“It isn’t even as if she wanted to stay, you know, Emma. She’s turned dead against them, like cases of her sort often do. Look at the way she spoke to you about your being the only one that didn’t want to poison her, or some such rubbish.”

There was a pause.

“Nurse,” said Emma suddenly, “do mad people _know_ as they’re mad?”

“They say not,” indifferently returned Nurse Alberta, biting a thread off her piece of needlework. “Why, Emma?”

“Because--well, me and Cook got to talking last night about poor Miss Lambe, and--I can’t say it how I mean,” Emma rambled on confusedly, “but Cook would have it that people as go off their heads--well, they _are_ off their heads. They don’t look at anything like we do any more--it’s sort of all upside down to them. But I didn’t think it was like that--well, at any rate not with Miss Lambe.”

“Why not?” said Nurse Alberta.

She looked interested and Emma was encouraged.

“I thought, perhaps,” she said timidly, “that the inside of her poor mind is still like everybody’s else’s, in a way, only she can’t get the thoughts to come out right. And I thought, perhaps, that when she said all that about them wanting to poison her, it was only her--her mad sort of way of saying that she’d felt, all along, they really wanted her to go away. And that would be why she said I was the only person that she was safe with. Because I never did want her to go away. The master and mistress and the young ladies may have felt like that. Of course, it’s been ever so trying for them, I know, having her here like that--and the girls downstairs, they wanted her to go. But I never did, and I wondered if perhaps that was what she sort of felt, only she couldn’t explain it right, and so it came out that way--in all her talk about being poisoned, and that.”

Emma stopped and looked rather wistfully at the nurse.

“You’ll think I’m balmy myself, talking like that. And I can’t explain what I mean a bit well. It’s not as if I’d been educated like you----”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Alberta, smiling. “I think I understand what you mean, Emma. According to your notion, the poor old lady feels and thinks pretty much the same as we do, but she’s lost the trick of communicating her feelings and her thoughts. They--they get lost in transmission, so to say.”

“You do put it well, Nurse!” said Emma admiringly.

Nurse Alberta looked gratified. “I don’t know,” she said modestly. But she was herself rather pleased by the sound of the phrase that she had used, and could not resist repeating it.

“It’s a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but there’s certainly something in what you say, Emma,” she observed, biting off another thread. “Lost in transmission--that’s the idea--lost in transmission!”

TIME WORKS WONDERS

TIME WORKS WONDERS

I

“You funny little thing!” he said patronisingly.

Adela resented the term violently, but because he was the only man who had ever attempted to talk personalities with her, she accepted it smilingly.

“I must read some of those books of yours. Tell me what the names are.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter! Never mind about my books,” she said hurriedly.

Adela could not imagine Willoughby reading anybody’s books, unless definitely of that class which deals with a fictitious Secret Service or the intrigues of an imaginary kingdom.

Her own books were small masterpieces of psychology, subtly ironical. A shudder, half-humorous, half-despairing, came over her at the idea of Hal Willoughby, bored and mystified, ploughing his way through one of her books.

“Never mind about my books,” she repeated. “I’d rather you thought of me as a girl than as a writer.”

She felt wildly daring in so speaking, partly because she had called herself a girl, although she was thirty, and partly because it was the first time that she had ever attempted what she supposed to be a flirtation.

Her reputation for cleverness had always been so great and so terrible that young men had never dared to approach her.

She supposed that must be the reason for their aloofness, since she had always been passably pretty; and even now, by artificial light, she looked five years younger than she was.

Her hair and her colouring were charming in a subdued and unvivid way, her features straight and very clean-cut. She hardly realised how much too thin were the lips of her tiny mouth, how intense and over-prominent her large hazel eyes.

“I never can imagine how anybody can write a book,” said Willoughby.

Adela moved uneasily. She could tell what was coming.

“Do you think of a plot first, or do you just make it up as you go along?”

“It all depends.”

She made the meaningless reply that had so often served her before.

“I should never know what to make the people say next. Aren’t conversations awfully difficult?”

“Sometimes.”

“I suppose you are always on the look-out for people to put into your books--under invented names, of course.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“Oh, but I expect you are! I expect really you sit there, taking it all in, you know.”

Why did people always think it necessary to talk to her like this?

“You ought to write a play. They say it pays like fun.”

“But, you see, I’m not a dramatist.”

“Oh, rubbish! If you’re clever enough to write books, of course you could write a play. I should, if I were you--really I should.” His voice was charged with encouragement.

“No, I couldn’t. Don’t let’s talk about that.”

“Why not? I want to hear about these books of yours. I’ve never met a literary lady before.”

It was of no use. He would not talk to her as she was almost sure that he would have talked to any other woman in the room, given those distant sounds of music from the ballroom, that hazy moonlight above the bench beneath the syringa-bushes.

Adela grimly sacrificed her art, perjuring her soul away. “I expect you think it’s very funny of me to write books,” she said, desperately adapting her vocabulary to his own. “I really do it mostly--a good deal--because it brings in money.” She tried to laugh, and hated herself for the artificiality of the sound.

“I suppose girls are always glad of extra pocket-money,” he assented indifferently.

A girl--that was how he thought of her.

She was pleased at that, but she struggled for a more serious recognition of her capabilities, too. “It’s not only pocket-money. I can really get a living from my writing, though I’m always at home with my mother. But I could be independent to-morrow if I liked.”

“Oh, come now!” The words might have expressed remonstrance, incredulity, astonishment.

“The advance royalty--that’s the money the publishers give me in advance--on my last book was two hundred pounds,” she said calmly.

She had never gone away to work, never had to pay for her food or for a roof over her head, never tried her strength or the strength of her resources in the struggle for livelihood amongst unsupported women.

Two hundred pounds for her year’s work was a large sum, with no calls upon it.

Willoughby repeated after her: “Two hundred pounds! I say! You don’t expect me to believe you get that just for writing a story?”

“Yes.” She was uncertain of the reason for his disbelief, and even whether he really did disbelieve her.

“But was it a serious book, or just a novel?” He really sounded perplexed.

“Oh, ‘just a novel’!” she said bitterly.

“Good Lord! How many do you write in a year?”

“That last one took me over a year. My first one I worked at, on and off, for five years.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter to you, taking your time, but it would be quite worth scribbling them off one after the other, if you can get money like that without working for it, so to speak,” said Hal Willoughby.

He fingered his thick, fair moustache, and Adela looked up at him furtively in the moonlight.

He was very big and good-looking; and when she danced with him, and met his full, bold gaze, Adela could almost forget about such conversations between them as the present one.

Besides, he had not always talked like this. Once he had pretended not to know what colour her eyes were, and once he had told her about his life in India. She wished intensely that the conversation now would shift to some such topic.

The moonlight and the heavy scent of the syringa seemed to mock her.

“And what are your books about?” said Willoughby laboriously. “Love, I suppose?” He broke into a roar of laughter. “Does the heroine fall fainting into the hero’s arms in the last chapter, eh? That’s the style, isn’t it?”

Adela stood up, trembling. “I think I want to go in now, please. The--the dance must be finished now.”

He stood up also. “But I say! What’s the matter? You’re not ratty, are you?” He pulled unceremoniously at the prim velvet ribbons that hung from her waist. “Sit down again. Don’t you know I’m going away to-morrow? You might be a little bit nice to me, I do think.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to be,” she said swiftly.

He laughed, and pulled her on to the bench again.

Adela’s mother, with whom she always lived, had told her very often that men never really respected a woman who let them “take liberties.” Adela, never before put to the test, recklessly determined to disregard the parental axiom.

When Willoughby caught hold of her chilly little ringless hand, she made no movement of withdrawal.

He looked down at her and laughed again. “What an odd little thing you are! I don’t believe you’ve ever been kissed, have you?”

She was silent.

“Has anybody ever made love to you, now?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly and untruly.

He laughed quite openly, and declared, “I don’t believe it!”

Still laughing, he put his hand under her chin, tilting up her face, and kissed her.

II

Hal Willoughby’s careless parting kiss remained the only one that Adela was destined to receive.

For ten years more she lived with her mother, and heard her say proudly to other mothers, coming with the news of Mollie’s engagement, or Dolly’s beautiful new baby:

“Ah, I still keep my Adela, I’m glad to say. She’s almost too fastidious, I sometimes think. She’s never made herself cheap with anyone. And then there’s her writing, too.”

Adela had slowly been making a name for herself, but her great success only came after her mother’s death. A long novel, at which she had been working for several years, made her reputation in the world of letters.

She had inherited money from her mother, and her books brought her in more.

Adela was able to indulge in artistic necessities.

It became imperative that she should retire, whenever she wanted to write, to a Yorkshire moor with an atmosphere of ruggedness and strength, and very few trees.

So many journalists, so many fellow-writers, such a number of the new-born coterie that “followed the Adela Alston method” had inquired so earnestly in what peculiar setting Adela found it necessary to enshrine her inspiration, that the need of the Yorkshire moor had suddenly sprung, full-grown, into being.

She built a two-roomed cottage, engaged a caretaker, and wrote in a small summer-house, wearing knickerbockers and sandals, and smoking violently. This was in the summer. In the winter, inspiration was obliged to content itself with Hampstead, and Adela had to wear shoes and stockings and a skirt.

At forty she had gained greatly in assurance, and knew herself for the leading spirit in a small group of intensely modern women writers, by whom she was devoutly worshipped.

Adela became accustomed to being the person who was listened to, in the society of her fellows.

They were not only interested in her work, but deeply, intensely interested in herself.

“You know almost too much of human nature, Adela. It’s not decent.”

Adela enjoyed being told that.

“I’ve seen all sorts in my time,” she said musingly.

It would no longer have pleased her to be thought younger than she was. On the contrary, she was apt to emphasise in herself the aspect of a full maturity.

“That last study of yours is simply magnificent. Dear, I don’t wonder you’ve never chosen to marry. No man’s vanity could survive your insight.”

A newcomer to the group leant forward eagerly. Her characteristic was lack of self-restraint, which she acclaimed in herself as fearlessness.

“But you’ve known the great realities--you’ve known passion,” she urged foolishly. “You could never write as you do, otherwise.”

Adela gazed at her new disciple from under drooping eyelids. “I am not ashamed of it,” she said quietly. “I am proud of it.”

The girl nodded with grotesque, unconscious vehemence.

The two other women-friends of Adela who were present, exchanged a meaning look with one another. Each had heard Adela’s story before, had shown loyal pride and understanding. There was no need of further demonstration from them. Adela was looking at the girl.

“There was one man in my life,” she said low and deeply. “There is never more than one--that counts. And a woman who has never loved, never been loved, never met her mate--has never lived.”

The room was tensely silent.

“It was more than ten years ago, and I have outlived the poignancy of it. I have never seen him since--I never shall. But I make no secret of having known fulfilment.”

Her voice was low and rich with intense enjoyment of her own effect.

“Even now, though, when all the storm and stress is long, long past--it’s odd, but the scent of a syringa in bloom can still hurt me. You see--I was swept right off my feet.”

She paused before concluding with the words that she had unconsciously learnt by heart, so significantly did they always round off her retrospect.

“I had waited for him all my life. He asked everything, and I gave--everything.”

“Ah!”

“You splendid woman!”

Adela leant back again, her large eyes gazing abstractedly into the past, full of a brooding satisfaction. Her lips exhaled a sound that was barely audible.

“Hal Willoughby!”

* * * * *

Time works wonders.

THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY

THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY

I

“I hope you are using all your influence to prevent the marriage?” said Clyde, in the impersonal tone that he always adopted when speaking to his wife of her only daughter.

“Why, Charles? They’re madly in love.”

“That is why,” said Sir Charles.

“What do you mean?”

Lady Clyde had not the slightest desire to know what her husband meant, and had already made up her mind that she disagreed with it root and branch, so she said, “What do you mean?” in a tone of indignation, and not one of enquiry, and gave him no time to answer.

“Richard is a gentleman, he’s earning a very good salary, and he adores Rita. The only possible objection is their having to live in the East, but everyone says the Malay States are quite healthy, and she’s very strong, thank heaven. If she’s plucky enough to face it, I don’t see how _we_ can object.”

“My objection has nothing to do with their living in the Malay States. It is simply concerned with the fact that they will have nothing whatever to depend upon except Richard Lambourne’s salary. He is a young man, he has saved nothing, and he has no expectations from anybody.”

“Rita has her own small income.”

“It might keep them from starvation, certainly, but it wouldn’t be enough for a family.”

“No one expects it to be. Richard will save if he has a wife, naturally, and he hopes to become a part owner of the rubber estate, later on. After all, it’s very creditable for a man of his age to have been made general manager already.”

“Very.”

“Then what have you against him?”

“Nothing at all,” said Sir Charles mildly.

“A minute ago you were telling me how you hoped I should use my influence to prevent this marriage. If you have nothing against him, why shouldn’t they marry?”

“Perhaps I have ‘something against’ Rita, as you express it.”

“Rita is only your step-daughter, Charles, and I know very well that your own children----”

“_Our_ own children----”

“That they come first, and always have. But I have an unprejudiced eye,” said Lady Clyde warmly, “and I don’t pretend that Rita isn’t a greater deal cleverer, prettier, and more attractive than all the others put together. And as for talking of having anything against her, it’s the sheerest nonsense, as even you must know.”

Sir Charles looked at his wife with an expression which she had long ago summed up, not inaptly, as “Charles looking as though he couldn’t decide if one were worth explaining the alphabet to or not.” On this occasion, Sir Charles appeared to decide in favour of the modicum of intelligence required.

“My case is simply this, Catherine. If Richard Lambourne and Rita marry now, they are entirely dependent upon Richard’s job. Say he loses it, or loses his health--which amounts to the same thing--or falls off his horse and breaks his neck, Rita may be left with a child, or children, and nothing whatever to live on except a yearly sum which she has hitherto spent upon her clothes, largely supplemented by presents from you.”

“As though Rita wouldn’t always have a welcome from me, and as though I wouldn’t share my last crust with her!”

“On the contrary, I should expect you to divide your last crust into equal parts between Rita and your four other children,” said Sir Charles with coldness. “But apart from last crusts, which is a rhetorical way of speaking, you had better understand once and for all, my dear Catherine, that my sons and daughter are not to be sacrificed to Rita. If she marries this man, he must keep her. This house is her home, and has been so for twenty years or so, but once she is married, it ceases to be her home. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if Rita is to take the risk of marriage with a man who has nothing to depend on but what he can earn for himself, she had better understand exactly what she is doing. Personally, I consider her entirely unfitted to take such a risk.”

“She is more than ready to take any risk. You are perfectly incapable of understanding Rita, Charles, and what a generous, ardent nature she has. And she is very, very much in love, for the first time in her life. You know as well as I do that plenty of people have wanted to marry Rita, and I think it’s wonderful that she should have refused so many offers, to give herself to a man who isn’t rich, simply because she loves him.”

“You look upon it as being decided, then?”

“Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent--and I shan’t--and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.”

She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm:

“Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.”

He kept his word, as he invariably did.

The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later.

Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing.

Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match.

“A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride was making her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines.

“So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.”

II

The same phrase was repeated, and by many people, when Rita and Richard Lambourne came home again, three years later. The great rubber slump had come, and Richard had lost his job. He said that he hoped to find something to do in England.

“Professional men of all classes are hoping exactly the same thing at the present moment, all over the country,” said Sir Charles Clyde.

The Lambournes stayed with the Clydes for a little while, then they and their baby and their nurse moved into a tiny house on the outskirts of a large neighbouring town, and then it was that such a number of people took to making use of the apt descriptive phrase first employed when Rita married.

Many of them had known her in her girlhood, the spoilt and favoured child of Lady Clyde, at home in her stepfather’s house.

They could fully appreciate the contrast with her present position.

Richard could not find any work, although he answered advertisements and wrote to influential friends. He was not a strong man, and very soon showed signs of great discouragement and anxiety.

Rita, on the contrary, was always cheerful, and discussed the situation very frankly, laughing merrily at her own struggle with unaccustomed privations.

“It’s so lucky I’ve got a little money that my own father left me. By managing very, very carefully, we’re living on that. Poor Richard hadn’t a penny beyond his salary, and now of course that’s all gone--poor darling!”

She was drolly confidential with her numerous friends.

“It’s so funny to have to think before I take a second helping of pudding, even, and yet I suppose I really ought to. But I don’t think I’ve got a very large appetite, have I, Richard?”

“No, you haven’t.”

“What a good thing!” She laughed as she spoke, but Richard remained unsmiling and miserable, and gradually it became evident to Rita’s friends that one of Rita’s trials was her husband’s inability to face their position with a gallant laugh, as she did.

As time went on, and there appeared to be no hope of a salary for Richard, she sent away the little girl’s nurse.

“I think I ought to be able to manage. Lots of poor women have to, only it’s a great pity I was brought up to play the piano, and dance, and play tennis, instead of learning to cook. One somehow never thought of it’s being necessary.”

“It oughtn’t to be necessary now,” said Richard violently, “if you’d married a fellow with money, or brains enough to make some.”

“Why, I might have been a millionairess, if I’d married the first man that ever proposed to me,” she said brightly. “Doesn’t it seem odd?”

He made no answer.

“D’you know, darling, I saw a really lovely jumper in Colson’s window to-day. It was real old rose, the colour that suits me. It was one of the sale things and marked down to half a guinea. I had a frightful struggle--it is such ages since I had anything new. I wouldn’t even let myself go into the shop, though I had to get some things for baby. I went somewhere else. I felt I couldn’t bear to come out of Colson’s without that jumper. It was so lovely--and really marvellously cheap. It’s been haunting me ever since.”

“Surely we can find half a guinea,” said Richard, his face flushing.

“Richard!” She gave a little laughing scream. “Why, I work out every penny of my income on paper before I spend it, and do you know what’s left over for my clothes, when I’ve paid the wages and the rent, and rates and taxes, and the housekeeping books? Just--exactly--five pounds a year!”

She held up five fingers, laughing.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe that I once spent five pounds a year, or thereabouts, on gloves, but I suppose I did. I don’t really know how I could manage now, if mummie didn’t still give me so many presents.”

She looked at him with her head on one side, rather like a very pretty squirrel.

“I do manage rather well, don’t I, dear? I have to work pretty hard, you know.”

“Of course you manage well,” he said ungraciously. He hardly ever encouraged her with praise nowadays, although she was doing wonders. He only gave way to violent outbreaks of despair and self-reproach, when she assured him that she could do without things that she had had all her life, and that she wasn’t really so _very_ tired after two bad nights with the baby.

“Isn’t it lucky I’m so strong?” she sometimes asked her friends. “I do a lot of the housework myself, you know, because we can only afford one servant, of course, and she’s a rough sort of girl. It was so funny at first, I couldn’t understand that class of servant at all. At home, of course, the maids were all quite different. Ellen means very well, really, though I’ve had to learn cooking, so as to do a certain amount myself. Will you forgive me now, if I run to see that Richard’s supper is all right--not burning?”

She tripped away, still laughing, in spite of the tired lines that were beginning to show beneath her sparkling dark eyes.

“Rita is too wonderful, poor darling!” said Lady Clyde. “As she says herself, she’s never in her life been used to poverty. And look at the way she makes the best of things! You know they’re living on her tiny little income, that she manages too wonderfully for words. You can’t say _now_, Charles, as I remember you once did, that Rita, of all people, wasn’t fitted to take the risk of poverty.”

Whether Sir Charles could, or could not, have repeated his axiom, was not destined to be made clear, for he said nothing at all.

He did, however, make many attempts to find a job for Richard, and went to see the originator of the phrase that described Richard’s wife so well--“a gallant little lady”--who was connected with some highly-remunerative business.

The old man shook his head.

“I’m on the point of retiring, Sir Charles. Times are bad, though I’ve made my pile, but it was done by hard work at one job all my life. I’ll see if there’s anything for your--stepson, is it?”

“He is no relation of mine,” said Sir Charles very distinctly. “He married my wife’s only daughter by her first husband. He is now obliged to live upon her--very small--fortune.”

“I’ve heard something of that. Poor little lady--she’s doing wonders, I hear. Well, well, I’ll see if they’ve anything to offer the lad, but we don’t want men without experience these days, you know. But I’d like to do something, for the sake of that gallant little lady.”

III

“Richard dear, I _would_ like to ask mummie and Sir Charles to dinner--supper, I mean--one night. I’ve got a little cash in hand, so I shouldn’t feel too extravagant. You know I got rather more than I expected, for the sale of that old bracelet of mine.”

Richard did know, because Rita had told him this already, quite gleefully, although admitting that the bracelet had been a legacy from a specially beloved grandmother, and that it cost her a pang to let it go.

“I loathe your selling your jewellery. It makes me feel such a cad for having got you into this mess, though God knows I never foresaw anything like this. Rita, _must_ you do these things?”

She looked at him with a face of piteous, childlike surprise. “Oh, aren’t you _at all_ pleased that we’ve got an extra pound or two, Richard? I’m sure you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”

He groaned impatiently.

“Of course, if you think I’ve no right to suggest entertaining _any_body, even on a tiny scale, now we’re so poor, I won’t do it. It was silly of me, I daresay, but I haven’t really properly got used not to having an occasional little party, I suppose. It’s all right, Richard darling. Never mind.”

She smiled bravely.

“Rita, I shall go mad if I can’t find a job, and take you out of this sort of thing,” said Richard, and he began to pace up and down the little room.

When Lady Clyde and her husband did come to dinner, Rita told her mother privately that poor darling Richard was becoming almost hysterical sometimes. It did make things so much, much harder when one was doing all one could to keep up under the strain, and be always bright and ready to make the best of it.

“No one can say you’re not doing that, my dearest child,” said her mother.

Tears of mingled admiration and compassion rose to her eyes when Rita apologised gaily for the poverty of the fare, when she corrected herself every time that she mentioned the word dinner instead of supper, and when she laughingly excused herself for having to run away and help with the washing-up, because the servant now was only a daily one, and went home early.

“It seemed so funny at first, mummy, and I was always ringing the bell and expecting it to be answered, like when I used to ring for Cooper or Ellis or Mary, at home. I really can’t believe that I had a maid all for myself, just to do my hair and keep my clothes tidy, not so very long ago.”

“What a plucky little thing she is!” said her mother in a choked voice.

She glanced resentfully at Richard, who sat silent, moody and haggard, without endorsing her tribute to his wife in any way.

He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty.