Chapter XVII

On the last Saturday in March Nan went to see Mr. Cordover. He had not himself been to the City that day, but sent the car for her in good time in the morning with the promise that she should be back by dark. As her father often worked all Saturday afternoons and did not really want her until the evening, she thought she might as well go. Accordingly she went, and much enjoyed the drive out through the bare country; and, as usual, very much enjoyed her visit when she got there.

She was a welcome and familiar guest by now in Mr. Cordover’s house; the little lame old lady, the old setter, the one-eyed cat, and all the other inmates of the house looked upon her as a friend, and one they were pleased to see. They seemed to regard her as something young and bright, a sort of glimmer of gentle sunshine, and in their company she developed something of the quality, and for that reason, or perhaps by contrast with them, seemed younger here than anywhere else. Mr. Cordover himself was her chief friend, they were on excellent terms; she made fun of him sometimes and contradicted him sometimes, and though he retorted on her gruffly, he really liked it. He made a point of grumbling to her about everything, largely, one suspected, for the satisfaction of having her disagree. He grumbled to her that Saturday as he hunted about for dead flowers in the spotlessly kept conservatory. The cause of complaint was the negligence of gardeners, and, as it was obviously and entirely without foundation, Nan sympathised gravely and then concluded by saying:

“They ought to leave you something to do, it’s too bad of them; I would if I were your gardener, I’d leave a lot of dead flowers for you to cut off.”

“You’d get the sack, if you did,” he told her.

She laughed, she knew better.

“You don’t believe anything I say,” he complained, “but it’s true all the same; I’d give you notice to quit fast enough. Talking of that, has your father been able to fix up anything about his notice to quit?”

He had not; Nan said so with a clouded face, for the subject was one much on her mind just now. More still on her father’s, for he was attached to the two houses in Soho with an attachment that is rare; and it had been decided by the County Council, or the Local Government Board, or some other body concerned with the improvement of London, that they must come down. They were safe and they were sanitary, but, either to widen the street, or to bring it into uniformity with others, or to make way for some improvement, they were condemned. It was useless to appeal or protest, he had done that to the last limit; but it was of no avail. He might be compensated; he might, very likely would, have new and more commodious warehouses rebuilt on the spot; but the old houses where he had lived and worked so long must go, and he felt it with an acuteness few besides Nan could realise.

One would have expected Mr. Cordover to have regarded the attitude as ridiculous; with his reforming principles he was likely to have held that a new warehouse was infinitely preferable to an eighteenth-century house built for another purpose. Very likely he did think so; but then he also held that for any council, board, or body to compel a man to vacate or pull down a house at their orders was tyranny and bureaucracy in its worst form. This opinion modified the other, and, probably assisted by personal bias, made him as warm a sympathiser as Nan could wish. He sympathised afresh this day, abusing the authorities whole-heartedly; finally telling Nan that, if nothing could be done, and tyranny had its way, she had better make her father come and live somewhere in this neighbourhood, where he would guarantee there should be no nonsense with councils or anybody else.

“Your house is not let,” he said; “you had better make him take that.”

They had come to call the long house embowered in trees Nan’s. It was still empty, as it had been on the day of her first visit when she had seen and admired it. She had often looked at the outside, and once at the in.

“The garden’s gone to rack and ruin,” Mr. Cordover said, “and the trees shut out every bit of daylight now; still, a couple of men with axes and scythes could do something towards putting that to rights.”

“Or wrong—” Nan said. “We’re not going to cut down the trees about my house. Though,” she added, “I don’t know that we need arrange that, as it’s never likely to be mine; I am sure father could not afford such a big house, not nearly so big, I should think. Besides, he would not be happy so far from his work.”

“Bosh!” Mr. Cordover said. “A man’s better away from his work.”

“Not all men,” Nan said; “he wouldn’t be. He always wanted to live and die with it; he thought he would too—in that house.”

“We most of us don’t do what we think we will—and all the better for us.”

“It wouldn’t be the better for him,” Nan persisted; “his plans have nearly always been fulfilled, I think.”

“Then he’s luckier than most—or more moderate in what he sets out to get. Other folks aren’t so successful. Look at the Annarlys, for instance—do their plans ever come off?”

“Some,” said Nan; “at least, I should think so.”

“H’m, some!” Mr. Cordover said contemptuously. “Not half, nor a quarter! And a good thing too! Fool plans and fool planning; and no work, no beef, or sticking to it put into bringing them off either. Look at them. They were going to make an engineer of Master Giles (might as well have set out to make a ballet-dancer), and all they did was to think how useful his step-brother would be. Then, before he had learnt the hind end of an engine from the fore, they had changed all that and were going to make a Rothschild of him. And all they did towards that was to remind me I was his uncle; and before he had learnt to add two and two and on which side his bread was buttered, that idea was done with. As for Michael, I don’t know what he wasn’t going to do, according to their plans—set the Thames on fire, and receive a baronetcy from a grateful country for having found out a more effective—and expensive—way of annihilating other nations than anyone before him—and what’s that all come to?”

“You can’t blame them because Michael has not done what they expected,” Nan protested.

Mr. Cordover could blame them for expecting the impossible. “And what’s more,” he said, “I can blame them for being ashamed of him and what he’s doing now.”

“I don’t think they are ashamed,” Nan said; “they are bitterly disappointed; they think him such a failure.”

“Well, he’s earning an honest living, anyway,” Mr. Cordover said, “and that’s something, even if he is a foreman or works manager of one dye-vat, one man and a boy. He’s just as much use to the community dyeing wool as inventing new arms, more—I disapprove of all this rivalry of armaments.”

Nan knew that, and did not enter upon the political question; instead, she said, “I don’t think Michael a failure myself.”

Mr. Cordover turned on her at that. “Not a failure? How do you make that out? Oh, I see, you still think he’s going to pick up, make a name and secure general recognition, and all the rest of it some day?”

“I’m not at all sure,” she said. “I’m not sure, either, that it really matters.”

“What does then? If that doesn’t constitute success and doesn’t matter, I should like to know what does.”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, “I can’t exactly explain, but to me it seems the important thing is the being able to do things, not the having it known that you have done them.”

“H’m.” Mr. Cordover was rather sceptical. “To me it seems reputation is a somewhat important thing likewise. Pray, do you think it unimportant whether or not that scandal about Michael at Galhardy’s is cleared up?”

“I used to want that it should be,” Nan admitted, “but I think more from a sense of its injustice than anything else. I don’t much fancy it ever will be, anyhow, not for a long time, and if it ever is, I doubt if it will make much difference; after a time things don’t, do they? One has got used to them, or found out how to do without them, or bear them, as the case may be. Do you know, I don’t believe it is a thing itself, however evil, that really matters, it’s the way one takes it; if one has found out that and found out how to stand the strain of it, it does not really much matter if, after a long while, it is taken away. It makes very little difference; one hardly notices, for one could keep on standing it for ever.”

“Oh?” Mr. Cordover said. “That’s your opinion, is it? Well, it’s mine that a man’s reputation counts a good deal, and his loss of his good name makes a considerable difference.”

“In his work, yes,” Nan admitted—“until a new name is made; after that one would not mind about the old; in other things I’m not sure that one would mind at all.”

“You’re a bit of a girl who knows nothing of the world,” Mr. Cordover told her, “and a dreamer into the bargain.”

“Am I?” she said. “Then I believe Michael’s a dreamer too.”

“Stuff!” Mr. Cordover retorted. “He’s got brains, and he had a career, and he knows it, and knows it’s done for.”

“I suppose it is, in a way,” she said. “But somehow a career, that sort of career, doesn’t seem to be everything. It always seems to me to be a bit like ornament, I mean ornament as applied to cabinet work, furniture, the only thing I understand. Sometimes you see a piece of furniture in which the symmetry of the design has been sacrificed to the ornament—a wonderful ornament, exquisite, the work of an artist, but which has so possessed the man that he has lost the true proportion of the whole in developing it. The really great artist, having the whole design in mind, sacrifices beautiful parts of the beautiful ornament, so as to bring the whole into perfect proportion.”

“H’m,” Mr. Cordover said. “We don’t get much perfection in this world, I’m hanged if we do; and if we are to buy it at the price of the sort of cropper your friend Michael came there won’t be a rush of customers for it.”

Nan laughed. “Oh, one is not a voluntary customer,” she said, “one doesn’t choose such things, they are forced upon one; but sometimes, after a while, one may begin to a little understand how they work out, don’t you think?”

“Depends who one is,” Mr. Cordover said. “I suppose if one is Nan one does—or thinks so—and if one is Michael——”

He recalled the curious momentary resemblance he had seen between the two on the day when he first met Nan—a resemblance of expression rather than features, the look of persons who have some mutual experience or attitude in common. He glanced sharply at her, the thought coming into his mind which had crossed Robert Barmister’s some months earlier—Would she marry Michael? And he disapproved it as Barmister had.

“Too much alike,” was his opinion, “and not enough wholesome flesh and blood in the business.”

Aloud he said, “Come along in and get a cup of tea before you start; you’ve none too much time, if you want to get home by dark.”

They went in, and soon afterwards Nan left.

Even then, and even by going at a considerable pace, the car did not reach Soho before dusk. The streets were already lighted as it came through, though the old houses in the cul-de-sac were not as yet. Nan noticed the dark windows as she said good evening to the chauffeur; Mrs. Bidden was probably out, she often was at that hour on a Saturday, and Barmister was probably finishing some work by the lingering daylight in the upper room where the light lasted longest.

She fitted her key into the lock and let herself in. The wide hall was dim, but she knew it so well, and knew all the obstacles of old and recent importation, that that was no trouble to her, even when she had shut the outer door, and so shut out what light there was in the street. The house was very quiet; the steady but indistinct noise of London was not close enough to be more than an accompaniment, and one to which she was so used that it did not break the sense of silence. She went up the broad, uncarpeted stairs, her footfall hardly breaking the silence either. On the landing there was more light, the grey twilight of March, lingering on some point of carving above the door-frames and falling on some spot on the floor, where the dust lay thick and undisturbed. She crossed the landing, and opened the door of the living-room.

There was no one there: orderliness, silence, and the curious feeling of a just-departed presence, as of the vanishing skirts of the ghost-people, that one surprises on quietly opening some old rooms at twilight.

“Father must be downstairs, after all,” she thought, “unless he is out.”

There was a feeling about the house as if it were empty; she realised it now, and decided that her second thought must be the correct one: her father must have gone out to see some friend. She took off her hat and jacket, and went to get a light.

She went by the little masked stair by which she had first brought Michael, meaning to go to the kitchen for matches. As she opened the door, she was struck afresh with the silence and the feeling of the emptiness of the house—a feeling less unfriendly than remote, and in no way concerned with things human. Instinctively she moved more quietly and sought the most shadowed side of the stair, as if unconsciously seeking to identify herself with it and lose herself in the dusk which was in possession here.

The staircase led straight into the dolphin room. Here the light was dimmer than above, only the dolphins on the mantelpiece started out starkly from an unseen background, and across a stretch of boards that gleamed pale in the dusk the two desks loomed dark and indistinct. For a moment she paused in the stair-doorway; then her eyes, more used to the gloom, descried to her surprise a figure by one of the desks.

“Father!” she said in astonishment.

He did not answer nor turn. He was sitting in his desk-chair, a little bent forward, papers spread before him.

“Father——” she said again; and then no more, for suddenly she knew.

It was not that he did not answer, or that he sat so still, or that the house was quiet with that all-pervading quiet emptiness of something gone. It was all of these, and more than these. She knew it suddenly; she knew before she crossed the room or touched him—he was dead.

He had died there alone in the quiet old house, swiftly, painlessly, from some sudden heart attack—as he had always hoped to die, sitting at his desk in the dolphin room, busy to the last with the work he loved. One breath, an absorbed, active man with all his faculties; the next, gone elsewhere, with no one by to tell the moment or make trouble at the passing.

For a long minute Nan stood looking at him, her comprehension of the end and its perfection such that for the moment she had no other feeling. He had gone as he would have chosen, from where he would have chosen, and no one had seen him go. He had laid down his pen, and the twilight had fallen—the long, grey, twilight of spring.

* * * * *

Mrs. Bidden had been out that evening. There was no reason why she should not; she felt no guiltiness about it, nor any need to excuse herself when she met Nan on the doorstep.

Nan had a telegram-form in her hand. “Will you take this to the post office for me?” she said.

She spoke so quietly that the old servant felt no alarm; it was only when at the post office a young clerk required her to read the message that she began to be uneasy. The telegram was to Josiah requesting him to come at once, and was signed by Nan, not by her father—as it would have been in the unusual contingency of Mr. Foregood being wanted for business reasons on a Saturday evening. Mrs. Bidden puzzled over the fact uneasily as she hurried back again.

“Is anything the matter?” she asked, before she was fairly in the house.

“Yes,” Nan said. “Come in, and shut the door.”

After that the quietness, the solitary dignity was broken; other things crowded in, other feelings rose up, other realisations. No human incident or emotion is single celled; no matter how great or complete or overwhelming it is after the first the components of it, or the components which go to make complex humanity, will begin to separate out and give rise to separate things. In the silent, shadowy house there was now the sound of grief and surprise; the loud weeping of an old and faithful servant for a lost master and for a left mistress. One grieved for death, Nan remembered, one was left alone by him who had thus gone without farewell. Soon a doctor came, fetched in nervous haste; some conventional thing, a child of civilisation, required feverishly to be told, in spite of unerring instinct handed down through the ages, that life was really extinct. Then the dead man was moved from his favourite place in his favourite room. The dead lie upstairs on beds. How heavy they are. What a good thing the old stairs were so shallow and wide, since it was necessary to move him! There were other necessities: lighting candles and dissipating the company of shadows, putting away the papers on the desk—they might be private, or important; they would certainly be blown away in the cross-draughts from the open doors.

Josiah came as soon as it was possible to do so, and with him Miss Janet.

“I’m coming,” she announced, when she read the telegram; “there is something the matter, I know it. If there isn’t, I can go back.”

So she came, and immediately and at once took the situation under her charge. From the moment that she was admitted by Mrs. Bidden, swollen-faced and tear-stained, she assumed command, to the advantage of everyone, and to the relief of the doctor. Not that she had it all her own way; for instance, she decided that Nan had better come back with her to Bayswater, and Josiah remain here for the night. But Nan decided otherwise, and carried her point; Miss Janet had not directed as long as she had without learning when she must give way.

“Very well, dear,” she said, “just as you like; I’ll stay with you here. Josiah can do for himself to-morrow morning. It’ll do him good.”

Nan said she hoped Miss Janet would not stay, if it was inconvenient, adding an assurance that she did not mind being alone.

Miss Foregood put that aside emphatically. “It will do him good to get his own breakfast,” she said. “No, Josiah”—this to her brother, who had a vague feeling that he was the more suitable person to stay with his old master and Nan—“you must go back; the cat’s shut in the house, and the kitchen fire’s not raked out. You go back, there’s nothing more for you to do here now; you can come in good time to-morrow morning.”

She followed him to the door and gave him directions in a lower voice about sundry articles to be brought for herself. “My black alpaca,” was the end of the list; “the second peg from the window in the cupboard in my room. Don’t fold it worse than you can help. I don’t know why I came away in this blue gown; but there, we didn’t stop for anything.”

Josiah made an entry of the alpaca in his notebook, and then went away, still half feeling that he should have been the one to stay. The old master dead upstairs, the old house with the long rooms and the stored treasures that the dead man had loved, and little Nan, still little Nan to him—he would like to have stayed with them. But Janet decreed otherwise and Janet knew; no doubt Nan was better with one of her own sex, and Janet was a capable, comfortable person, who could do things, who always did do them. So he went away, and Nan and Miss Foregood spent the rest of the evening together, the latter in writing several letters.

Nan had not thought of them; she had few thoughts of the outside world. But Miss Janet, with a perception of the proper thing, proceeded to write to Mr. Annarly and to some little-known relations on the Barmister side. Nan did not see that they were more concerned with her father dead than they had been with him living, but to notify them of the event seemed customary, at least Miss Janet said so, and it was done.

“What about Michael?” she asked suddenly. “Have you telegraphed to him?”

“No,” Nan answered, then said, “I’ll write; I think it would be better. I can explain, and tell him to come, if he can and when it is convenient.”

Miss Janet did not quite approve, not yet did she quite understand the point of view; convenience was scarcely a thing to be considered on an occasion of this sort. Still, she did not say so, and Nan wrote her letter, which was posted with the others. Soon afterwards she went to bed faintly surprised to find that by the clock it was still early, although the afternoon seemed so incredibly long ago.

Early the next morning, Josiah came again, bringing the alpaca, very badly folded. He stayed all day. It was a curiously long day though, unlike the last, long in passing rather than in retrospect. Out of doors it was fine, a bright pale sunlight, which cast sharp shadows and was hot by contrast with the cutting wind which lurked at corners. The sun came but shadedly to the darkened house, and the noises of the district came but indistinctly too, never drawing very near. Few people on Sunday entered even the beginning of the street which led nowhere, unless they wanted to settle an argument or keep an assignation, and then they soon went away again.

It was not exactly an unhappy day, though strange. The Foregoods talked a good deal of the past early struggling times, the long-dead young mother, the business of then and of to-day. Nan listened, and asked them questions now and then, feeling, as they talked, her father curiously close, and yet at the same time curiously removed. Towards evening a restlessness came upon her. The bells of a neighbouring church beginning to ring for evening service suggested to her to go to church. Miss Janet did not at first quite approve in her heart, though she raised no audible objection; afterwards she thought better of it, and took herself to task. “After all,” as she said to Josiah, “why not go to church, if she wants to? Why stick fast within doors because custom says you should—in a neighbourhood where you are totally unknown—or any other neighbourhood either?”

So Nan went to church, and went alone since she wished it. Not to the one the bells of which she had heard, but to one further in the City to which she had before been with Michael. A church with a very small congregation, and light so obscured by stained glass and encircling buildings that nothing within was plain: carving and gilding and stonework all indistinct as the purpose and meaning of life—though perhaps not less beautiful for that.

Monday was another long day. Josiah again arrived early and stayed late. Other people came during the day: Mr. Annarly came to offer condolences and his services, if they were required. He brought kind messages from the family and a little note from Mrs. Annarly asking if there was anything they could do. He delivered these to Nan, and then was at a loss as to what to say to her. He was very solemn and a little awkward, anxious to say the right thing in the sad circumstances of bereavement, but rather embarrassed as to what it was. He made the same inquiries two or three times over, and found his chief relief in talking across Nan of her and her loss to Miss Foregood, in a voice lowered, as if in the presence of serious illness. He did not stay long, and his going was almost as much relief to Nan as it was to him. No one else inquired for her during the day; the Barmister relations did not live in London, so they did not come; one or two trade friends did and the dead man’s lawyer. They saw Josiah and merely asked after her, if they knew her.

She spent a quiet time indoors. Miss Janet was there all day, except when she went out to buy mourning; she was a good and economical buyer, and the purchases she made were not extensive. She carried some of them back with her, and she and Nan spent a long, undisturbed time altering the ready-made clothes to fit more or less. Towards twilight Nan wearied of the work; she did not say so, however, but kept on quietly stitching as regularly as ever. After a time Miss Janet sent her to her room to fetch an old skirt. She went at once and meant to come back at once. She found the skirt in the cupboard where it hung, and, unhooking it, threw it over her arm. But as she turned to fasten the door her eye fell on her tulip-wood secretaire—her father’s first birthday present to her, the beginning of that unspoken, undemonstrative, yet curiously close understanding there had been between them. She and her father together through so many years in the old house, in the dim rooms among the dusty treasures, in quiet companionship. And he was gone, and she was alone!

For a moment she stood quite still, the skirt slipping unheeded from her arm; then she turned and fled. She ran up the dusty stairs to the long warehouse-room where her father had surprised her before the secretaire long ago. There she crouched down among the cabinets and chairs, and, pressing her head back against some one of them, sat so, with hands clasped hard and wide dry eyes.

* * * * *

There was a sound without, a step on the stairs. She did not hear it, she had heard nothing for a long time; she was not aware of any approach until someone came between her and what light there was. Then she looked up.

“Michael!” she exclaimed, and without warning broke down into tears.

He put an arm about her. “Nan,” he said, and held her comfortingly.

For a little neither said more, there was no need; she sobbed unrestrainedly, and he did not attempt to stop her, only let her feel his sympathy by the touch of his hand.

But in a while she recovered herself. “I am so sorry,” she said unsteadily; “I don’t know why I gave way like that, I haven’t done it before. I didn’t mean to bother you; and there’s nothing to cry about—it’s all as he would have wished it, as he would have chosen.”

“As he would, perhaps,” Michael said, “but what about you? May one not think of you?”

Her breath caught a little. “I’m all right,” she said; “I don’t know why I cried. It’s—it’s only the twilight, I think—the long, haunting twilight—and being lonely.”

“You’re not lonely now I have come.”

“No,” she said, and the arm he had put about her tightened almost as if he were protecting her from something.

For a little they sat so, they two alone, among the shadows in the darkening, dusty room. “Nan,” he said at last, “what are we going to do? I have nothing much, and you have nothing either, I suppose—but there’s only you and I. Neither of us has anyone else in the world who counts, and we seem to need each other pretty badly. Dare you risk it? Will you, Nan?”

She drew a long breath, a hesitating breath, while one might count twenty; and while she felt anew the warmth of his protecting arm—“Yes,” she said softly, “I think so.”