Chapter XIII: The Feast of St John Baptist (5)

“Yes, I think so--I’ve never told it before. But perhaps I’ll skip a little of it.”

“At the beginning?”

“Yes. Will you imagine the sun shining by day and the moon by night?”

“Yes. And a sparkling sea? And nothing to do?”

“Yes. And a young girl--quite a young girl.”

“Yes. And beautiful hands--and the rest to match?”

“Yes--including a voice.”

“Yes. Let’s skip to the second evening, shall we, Mrs Pryce?”

“Will you be a little more imaginative and skip to the third afternoon?”

“The third afternoon be it. What’s happening when we begin the story again?”

“I’m in my mother’s state-room, getting a tremendous lecture. I’m not sure you ought to hear it.”

“Oh, I know all about it. You meant no harm, probably, but really it was time you learnt to be more careful. Attractive girls couldn’t be too careful. Men were so ready to think this and that--and say this and that--and then go and boast about it in the smoking-room. And what did you or your mother know about him? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! No doubt he was a gentleman, and very pleasant and amusing--but really you knew nothing. He was probably an adventurer. And anyhow--well, really it wasn’t quite--not _quite_--ladylike to--to----”

“Yes, that’s not a bad imagination,” interrupted Mrs Pryce. “Add mamma’s pince-nez, and it’s quite life-like.”

“And the result?”

“Great constraint in my manner towards Mr Walsh at dinner that evening.”

“And--further result--a melancholy walk by you on the deck after dinner--a walk at first solitary--subsequently shared by a puzzled and humble Mr Walsh?”

“I begin to think you have more experience than you always admit,” said Mrs Pryce. “But I think you’ll go wrong if you try to guess any more.”

“Then I won’t guess any more. Take up the thread. It’s now the third night out, and the moon is shining like that.” I pointed to the orb which was illuminating the Major’s garden--among other places where sundry of that liner’s former passengers might chance to be.

“I’ll go on,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me for a little while. There was a very light wind--you hardly felt it aft--and I was standing looking over the sea. He came up to me and began to talk about some trifle--I forget what it was, but it doesn’t matter. But I was afraid mamma would come up and look for me, so I said I was going down to read. But I waited for just a minute more--I suppose I expected him to ask me not to go. He said nothing, but took one big pull at his cigar, gave one big big puff of smoke out of his mouth and nose, and then threw the cigar overboard. ‘Good-night, Mr Walsh,’ I said. He looked at me--it was as light as it is now--and said: ‘Will you give me one minute, Miss Cochrane?’ ‘Well, only a minute,’ I said, smiling. I was really afraid about mamma. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. I wonder if I blushed--and whether he could see if I did. I expect I did, and that he saw, because he went on very quickly: ‘Something that doesn’t matter much to you, but matters a bit to me.’ ‘Go on,’ I said. I was quite calm again now, because--well, because I saw he was going to say something serious--I mean, not of the sort I--I had thought he might be going to say before.”

“You saw he wasn’t making love to you, you mean?”

“I told you not to interrupt--but I daresay that’s putting it as nearly right as you can understand.”

I murmured thanks for this rather contemptuous forgiveness.

“Then he told me,” Mrs Pryce went on, “just simply told me--and said he was going to make some excuse for asking the purser to put him at another table.”

“But you can’t leave it like that!” I expostulated. “You’re throwing away all your dramatic effect. What did he say? His words, his words, Mrs Pryce!”

“He didn’t use any--not in the sense you mean. He just told me. He didn’t even put me on my honour not to tell anybody else. He said he didn’t care a hang about anybody else on board, but that he wanted to spare me any possible shock, and that he’d been concerned in the bond robbery and would probably be arrested at Queenstown, but that he expected to get off this time. I think I repeated ‘This time!’ because I remember he said then that he was a thief by profession, and couldn’t expect good luck every time. That was like what he said yesterday, wasn’t it?”

“And what did you say? It must have been a bad quarter of an hour for you. Because you’d liked him a good deal, hadn’t you?”

“Yes, a lot. But”--she turned to me, smiling now--“it wasn’t bad at all, really.”

She gave a little laugh--a laugh with pleasant reminiscence in it.

“You were a cool hand for your age,” I ventured to observe.

“It was the way he did it,” she said. “Somehow I felt he was paying me a very high compliment.”

“Oh, I agree!” I laughed.

“And one I was glad to have. It must have been the way he did it. There are some people who abolish one’s moral scruples, aren’t there? He was very quiet generally, but he had a way of just moving those hands of his with a little waving gesture. And when he said that of course it wasn’t right----”

“Oh, he admitted that?”

“Yes, but that little wave of those hands seemed to wave right and wrong right out of the way.”

“Overboard?”

“Absolutely overboard. Then he looked at me a moment and said: ‘That’s all I had to say. Thanks for listening to me, Miss Cochrane. Good-night.’”

“And what did you say?”

She rested her chin in her hand, looking sideways at me.

“I said: ‘Good-night, Mr Walsh. We meet at breakfast to-morrow as usual?’”

“The deuce you did!”

“‘At our table?’ he asked. And I said ‘Yes.’ He gave a little laugh, and so did I, and I held out my hand. He shook hands and left me, and I went down and read with mamma.”

“Nothing else said?”

“He said nothing else. I believe I whispered: ‘It’ll be rather fun--because you _will_ get off!’ But I know I didn’t say anything more than that.”

There was a pause. I lit another cigarette, snatching a mean advantage by stealing a look at my friend in the light of the match. She was not looking at me, but straight ahead of her: there was a pensive smile on her lips.

“And what happened afterwards?” I asked.

“I suppose you’ll be shocked?”

“Being shocked is an emotion hostile to art--I never have it.”

“Well, then, I never had such fun. Of course we were careful, because of mamma (mamma’s idea became funny too!), and because we knew what was going to happen. But we managed to get no end of talks in quiet places--the library’s very good in fine weather--and he told me all sorts of wonderful things. It was like reading the very best detective stories, only ever so much better--so much more vivid, you know.”

“More personal interest?”

“A thousand times! And it was fun, too, at meals, and when there was a concert, and so on. I used to find him looking at me, with his eyes all full of laughter; and I looked back at him, enjoying the secret and the way he was making fools of all the rest. We were just like two children with some game that the grown-up people know nothing about.”

“He had waved your morality overboard with a vengeance,” said I.

“It was the jolliest time I ever had in my life,” said Mrs Pryce. “He recited beautifully at the concert--‘The Ballad of Beau Brocade.’”

“Well done him!” I said approvingly. I began rather to like the fellow myself.

“And at the end he made a little speech, thanking the captain, and saying how sorry we should all be when the voyage ended. ‘And nobody sorrier than myself,’ he said, with one of his looks at me--such a twinkling look--and a tiny wave of those hands.”

“He must have been the most popular man on board?”

“Well, the men thought him rather standoffish; he snubbed some of them, I think. Well, you do meet some queer men on a liner, don’t you? And Mr Walsh said that out of business hours he claimed to choose his acquaintance. But the women all worshipped him--not that he ran after them, but his manner was always just right to them.”

“It’s really a pity his manner of life was so--well, so unconventional.”

“Yes, wasn’t it?” she said, welcoming my sympathy. “Because, of course, it meant that our acquaintance had to end with the voyage.”

I had, perhaps, been thinking of somewhat broader considerations, but I refrained from advancing them. In fact, we had somehow got away from ordinary standards and restraints; the memory of Slim-Fingered Jim had waved them away. We fell into silence for a moment or two, until I asked--

“And the manner of the end? Tell me that.”

“I didn’t believe in the end. I had got not to believe in it at all. I thought we might go on sailing for ever over that beautiful sea and having the most splendid fun. He could make you feel that everything was just splendid fun--that there was nothing else in the world. He made me feel that--I suppose he knew he could, or he’d never have told me his secret at all. But, of course, the end had to come.” She sighed and gave a little shiver--not that it was cold in the Major’s garden. Then she turned to me again. “I’ve told you a good deal,” she said, “and you’re not a chicken, are you?”

I ruefully admitted that I was no chicken.

“Then I needn’t say anything more about myself,” said she.

“And what about him?”

“I think he liked me tremendously; but he wasn’t in love.”

“Not at all?”

“I don’t think so. He was just the most perfect of good comrades to me--and in that way the finest gentleman I’ve ever met. Because, you know, I can see now that I gave him opportunities of being something else. Well, I was only nineteen, and----”

“Quite so. The hands, of course!”

“It seems possible to be good and bad in--in compartments, doesn’t it? That’s rather curious!”

“If true!”

“Oh, you know it’s true!”

“Perhaps I do; but I never contradict the preacher.”

She laughed again, but now a trifle fretfully.

“In his own business I believe he’s thoroughly bad.”

“Not even the chivalrous highwayman?”

“No. Just bad--bad--bad.”

“Ah, well, business is one thing and charity another, as somebody once observed. And now for the end, please--because ends do come, even though we don’t believe in them.”

“Yes, they do; and this one came,” she said. But for an instant or two she did not begin to tell me about it; and in the silence I heard Charlie Pryce assert loudly that he had made a good shot.

III

“At lunch on Friday,” Mrs Pryce resumed, “the steward told us that we were expected to reach Queenstown about one o’clock in the morning, and we all began discussing whether we should sit up. The old travellers scoffed at the idea, and mamma, though she wasn’t an old traveller, said she would never think of being so silly. But I and the two other girls at the table--they were Americans on their first trip over--said that we certainly should, and one of them asked Mr Walsh if he meant to. ‘I must,’ he said, smiling. ‘In fact, I expect to land there--that is, if I get the telegram I expect to get. Of course he glanced at me as he spoke, so that I knew what he meant, though the others hadn’t the least idea. What would they have said?”

“I suppose they did say they were very sorry he wasn’t going on to Liverpool?”

“Yes, and even mamma said how sorry we were to part from him. Fancy mamma saying that! It was fun! Only after lunch she was terribly aggravating; she kept me down in the writing-room all the afternoon, writing letters for her to all sorts of stupid people in America and at home, saying we’d arrived safely. Of course we’d arrived safely! But if mamma so much as crosses the Channel without sinking, she writes to all her friends as if she’d come back from the North Pole. Some people are like that, aren’t they?”

“Yes; and they’re generally considered attentive. You may get a great reputation for good manners by writing unnecessary letters.”

“Yes. So I didn’t see him again till dinner. Nothing much happened then--at least I don’t remember much. The end had begun, I think, and I wasn’t feeling so jolly as I had been all the way across. But everybody else was in high spirits, and he was the gayest of all of us. I expect he saw that I was rather blue, and he followed me on deck soon after dinner, and there we had our last little talk. He told me that he thought everything would be done quite quietly; he meant to tell the purser where to find him in case of inquiry, and to be ready to go ashore at once. He was sure they’d take him ashore; but if by chance they didn’t, he would stay in his cabin, so that, anyhow, this was ‘Good-bye.’ So I said ‘Good-bye’ and wished him good luck. ‘Are you going to sit up?’ he said. I looked at him for a moment and then said ‘No.’ He smiled in an apologetic sort of way and gave that little wave of his hands. ‘It’s foolish of me to care, I suppose, but--thank you for that.’ I was a little surprised, because I really hadn’t thought he would mind me seeing; but I was pleased too. He held out both his hands, and I took them and pressed them. Then I opened my hands and looked at his as they lay there. He was smiling at me with his lips and his eyes. ‘Slim-Fingered Jim!’ he whispered. ‘Don’t quite forget him, little friend.’ ‘I suppose I shall never see you again?’ I said. ‘Better not,’ he told me. ‘But let’s remember this voyage. We’ll put a little fence round it, won’t we? and keep all the rest of life out, and just let this stand by itself--on its own merits. Shall we, dear little friend?’”

Mrs Pryce stayed her narrative for a moment. But my curiosity was merciless.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think I murmured something like ‘Oh, my dear, my dear!’ and then I let go of his hands and turned away to the sea; and when I looked round again, he was gone.”

“And that was the end?”

“No. The end was lying in the berth above mamma, who was sound asleep, and--well, snoring rather--lying there and feeling the ship slowing down and then stopping, and hearing the mail-boat come alongside, and all the noise and the shouting and the bustle. I knew I could hear nothing--there would be nothing to hear--but I couldn’t help listening. I listened very hard all the time, but of course I heard nothing; and at last--after hours and hours, as it seemed--we began to move again. That was the real end. I knew it had happened then; and so it had. He wasn’t at breakfast. But luckily nobody on the ship--none of the passengers, I mean--found out about it till we got to Liverpool; and as mamma and I weren’t going on to London, it didn’t matter.”

“And he got off?”

“Yes, he got off--that time.”

“I’m afraid this great man had one foible,” I observed. “He was proud of those hands! Well, Cæsar didn’t like getting bald, so I learnt at school.”

“I always remember them as they lay in mine,” she said. “His hands and his eyes--that’s what I remember.”

“Ever seen him again?”

“Of course not.” She sat where she was for a moment longer, then rose. “Shall we go in?”

“I think we may as well,” said I.

So we went into the billiard-room. They were still playing pool. I made for the whisky-and-soda and mixed myself a tumbler and drank thereof. When I set the tumbler down and turned round to the table Charlie Pryce was engaged in making a shot of critical importance. Everybody was looking at him. His wife was standing at the end of the table and looking at him too. She seemed as much interested in the shot as any of them. But was she? For before he played she raised her eyes and looked across at me with a queer little smile. I couldn’t help returning it. I knew what she was thinking. The billiard-table is a high trial.

When Charlie had brought off his shot--which he did triumphantly--his wife came and kissed him. This pleased him very much. He did not recognise the Kiss Penitential, which is, however, a well-ascertained variety.

I’m afraid that the magnetic current of immorality which seemed to emanate from Mr James Painter Walsh passed through the sympathetic medium of Mrs Pryce’s memory and infected, in some small degree, my more hardened intellect; for even now I can’t help hoping that Slim-Fingered Jim is being put to some light form of labour. But it’s a difficult business! Even the laundry--a most coveted department, as I am given to understand--would spoil them hopelessly.

THE GREY FROCK

The rights and wrongs of the matter are perhaps a little obscure, and it is possible to take his side as well as hers. Or perhaps there is really no question of sides at all--no need to condemn anybody; only another instance of the difficulty people have in understanding one another’s point of view. But here, with a few lines added by way of introduction, are the facts as related in her obviously candid and sincere narrative.

Miss Winifred Petheram’s father had an income from landed estate of about five thousand a year, and spent, say, six or thereabouts; his manor house was old and beautiful, the gardens delightful, the stables handsome and handsomely maintained, the housekeeping liberal, hospitable, almost lavish. Mr Petheram had three sons and four daughters; but the sons were still young, and not the cause of any great expense. Mrs Petheram was a quiet body, the two girls in the schoolroom were no serious matter; in fact, apart from the horses, Mildred and Winifred were, in a pecuniary point of view, the most serious burden on the family purse. For both were pretty girls, gay and fond of society, given to paying frequent visits in town and country, and in consequence needing many frocks and a considerable supply of downright hard cash. But everybody was very comfortable; only it was understood that at a period generally referred to as “some day” there would be very little for anybody except the eldest son. “Some day,” meant, of course, when Mr Petheram reluctantly died, and thereby brought his family into less favourable worldly circumstances.

From this brief summary of the family’s position the duty of Mildred and Winifred (and, in due course of time, of the two girls in the schoolroom also) stands forth salient and unmistakable. Mildred performed it promptly at the age of nineteen years. He was the second son of a baronet, and his elder brother was sickly and unmarried; but, like a wise young man, he took no chances, went on the Stock Exchange, and became exceedingly well-to-do in an exceedingly brief space of time--something, in fact, “came off” in South Africa, and when that happens ordinary limits of time and probability are suspended. So with Mildred all was very well; and it was odds that one of the boys would be provided for by his brother-in-law. Winifred had just as good chances--nay, better; for her sensitive face and wondering eyes had an attraction that Mildred’s self-possessed good looks could not exert. But Winifred shilly-shallied (it was her father’s confidential after-dinner word) till she was twenty-one, then refused Sir Barton Amesbury (in itself a step of doubtful sanity, as was generally observed), and engaged herself to Harold Jackson, who made two hundred a year and had no prospects except the doubtful one of maintaining his income at that level--unless, that is, he turned out a genius, when it was even betting whether a mansion or the workhouse awaited him; for that depends on the variety of genius. Having taken this amazing course, Winifred was resolute and radiantly happy; her relatives, after the necessary amount of argument, shrugged their shoulders--the very inadequate _ultima ratio_ to which a softening civilisation seems to have reduced relatives in such cases.

“I can manage two hundred a year for her while I live,” said Mr Petheram, wiping his brow and then dusting his boots; he was just back from his ride. “After that----”

“The insurance, my dear?” Mrs Petheram suggested. But her husband shook his head; that little discrepancy above noted, between five and six thousand a year, had before this caused the insurance to be a very badly broken reed.

Harold Jackson--for in him the explanation of Winifred’s action must be sought--was tall, good-looking, ready of speech, and decidedly agreeable. There was no aggressiveness about him, and his quiet manners repelled any suspicion of bumptiousness. But it cannot be denied that to him Winifred’s action did not seem extraordinary; he himself accounted for this by saying that she, like himself, was an Idealist, the boys by saying that he was “stuck-up,” Mr Petheram by a fretful exclamation that in all worldly matters he was as blind as a new-born puppy. Whatever the truth of these respective theories, he was as convinced that Winifred had chosen for her own happiness as that she had given him his. And in this she most fully agreed. Of course, then, all the shrugging of shoulders in the universe could not affect the radiant contentment of the lovers, nor could it avert the swift passage of months which soon brought the wedding-day in sight, and made preparations for it urgent and indispensable.

Married couples, even though they have only a precarious four hundred a year, must live somewhere--no idealism is independent of a roof; on the contrary, it centres round the home, so Harold said, and the word “home” seemed already sacred to Winifred as her glance answered his. It was the happiest day of her life when she put on her dainty new costume of delicate grey, took her parasol and gloves, matched to a shade with her gown, and mounted into the smart dog-cart which Jennie, the new chestnut mare, was to draw to the station. A letter had come from Harold to say that, after long search, he had found a house which would suit them, and was only just a trifle more expensive than the maximum sum they had decided to give for rent. Winifred knew that the delicate grey became her well, and that Harold would think her looking very pretty; and she was going to see her home and his. Her face was bright as she kissed her father and jumped down from the dog-cart; but he sighed when she had left him, and his brow was wrinkled as he drove Jennie back. He felt himself growing rather old; “some day” did not seem quite as remote as it used, and pretty Winnie--well, there was no use in crying over it now. Wilful girls must have their way; and it was not his fault that confounded agitators had played the deuce with the landed interest. The matter passed from his thoughts as he began to notice how satisfactorily Jennie moved.

Winifred’s lover met her in London, and found her eyes still bright from the reveries of her journey. To-day was a gala day--they drove off in a hansom to a smart restaurant in Piccadilly, joking about their extravagance. Everything was perfect to Winifred, except (a small exception, surely!) that Harold failed to praise, seemed almost not to notice, the grey costume; it must have been that he looked at her face only!

“It’s not a large house, you know,” he said at lunch, smiling at her over a glass of Graves.

“Well, I sha’n’t be wanting to get away from you,” she answered, smiling. “Not very far, Harold!”

“Are your people still abusing me?”

He put the question with a laugh.

“They never abused you, only me.” Then came the irrepressible question: “Do you like my new frock? I put it on on purpose--for the house, you know.”

“Our home!” he murmured, rather sentimentally, it must be confessed. The question about the frock he did not answer; he was thinking of the home. Winifred was momentarily grateful to a stout lady at the next table, who put up her glass, looked at the frock, and with a nod of approval called her companion’s attention to it. This was while Harold paid the bill.

Then they took another cab, and headed north--through Berkeley Square, where Winifred would have liked, but did not expect, to stop, and so up to Oxford Street. Here they bore considerably to the east, then plunged north again and drove through one or two long streets. Harold, who had made the journey before, paid no heed to the route, but talked freely of delightful hours which they were to enjoy together, of books to read and thoughts to think, and of an intimate sympathy which, near as they were already to one another, the home and the home life alone could enable them fully to realise. Winifred listened; but far down in her mind now was another question, hardly easier to stifle than that about the frock. “Where are we going to?” would have been its naked form; but she yielded no more to her impulse than to look about her and mark and wonder. At last they turned by a sharp twist from a long narrow street into a short narrower street, where a waggon by the curbstone forced the cab to a walk, and shrill boys were playing an unintelligible noisy game.

“What queer places we pass through!” she cried with a laugh, as she laid her hand on his arm and turned her face to his.

“Pass through! We’re at home,” he answered, returning her laugh. “At home, Winnie!” He pointed at a house on the right-hand side, and, immediately after, the cab stopped. Winifred got out, holding her skirt back from contact with the wheel. Harold, in his eagerness to ring the door bell, had forgotten to render her this service. She stood on the pavement for a moment looking about her. One of the boys cried: “Crikey, there’s a swell!” and she liked the boy for it. Then she turned to the house.

“It wants a lick of paint,” said Harold cheerfully, as he rang the bell again.

“It certainly does,” she admitted, looking up at the dirty walls.

An old woman opened the door; she might be said, by way of metaphor, to need the same process as the walls; a very narrow passage was disclosed behind her.

“Welcome!” said Harold, giving Winifred his hand and then presenting her to the old woman. “This is my future wife,” he explained. “We’ve come to look at the house. But we won’t bother you, Mrs Blidgett, we’d rather run over it by ourselves. We shall enjoy that, sha’n’t we, Winnie?”

Winnie’s answer was a little scream and a hasty clutch at her gown; a pail of dirty water, standing in the passage, had threatened ruin; she recoiled violently from this peril against the opposite wall and drew away again, silently exhibiting a long trail of dark dust on her new grey frock. Harold laughed as he led the way into a small square room that opened from the passage.

“That’s the parlour,” said the old woman, wiping her arms with her apron. “You can find your way upstairs; nothing’s locked.” And with this remark she withdrew by a steep staircase leading underground.

“She’s the caretaker,” Harold explained.

“She doesn’t seem to have taken much care,” observed Winifred, still indignant about her gown and holding it round her as closely as drapery clings to an antique statue.

Miss Petheram’s account of the house, its actual dimensions, accommodation, and characteristics, has always been very vague, and since she refused information as to its number in the street, verification of these details has remained impossible. Perhaps it was a reasonably capacious, although doubtless not extensive, dwelling; perhaps, again, it was a confined and well-nigh stifling den. She remembered two things--first, its all-pervading dirt; secondly, the remarkable quality which (as she alleged) distinguished its atmosphere. She thought there were seven “enclosures,” this term being arrived at (after discussion) as a compromise between “rooms” and “pens”; and she knew that the windows of each of these enclosures were commanded by the windows of several other apparently similar and very neighbouring enclosures. Beyond this she could give no account of her first half-hour in the house; her exact recollection began when she was left alone in the enclosure on the first floor, which Harold asserted to be the drawing-room, Harold himself having gone downstairs to seek the old woman and elicit from her some information as to what were and what were not tenant’s fixtures in the said enclosure. “You can look about you,” he remarked cheerfully, as he left her, “and make up your mind where you’re going to have your favourite seat. Then you shall tell me, and I shall have the picture of you sitting there in my mind.” He pointed to a wooden chair, the only one then in the room. “Experiment with that chair,” he added, laughing. “I won’t be long, darling.”

Mechanically, without considering things which she obviously ought to have considered, Winifred sank into the designated seat, laid her parasol on a small table, and leant her elbows on the same piece of furniture as she held her face between her gloved hands. The atmosphere again asserted its peculiar quality; she rose for a moment and opened the window; fresh air was gained at the expense of spoilt gloves, and was weighted with the drawbacks of a baby’s cries and an inquisitive woman’s stare from over the way. Shutting the window again, she returned to her chair--the symbol of what was to be her favourite seat in days to come, her chosen corner in the house which had been the subject of so many talks and so many dreams. There were a great many flies in the room; the noise of adjacent humanity in street and houses was miscellaneous and penetrating; the air was very close. And this house was rather more expensive than their calculations had allowed. They had immensely enjoyed making those calculations down there in the country, under the old yew hedge and in sight of the flower beds beneath the library window. She remembered the day they did it. There was a cricket match in the meadow. Mildred and her husband brought the drag over, and Sir Barton came in his tandem. It was almost too hot in the sun, but simply delightful in the shade. She and Harold had had great fun over mapping out their four hundred a year and proving how much might be done with it--at least compared with anything they could want when once they had the great thing that they wanted.

The vision vanished; she was back in the dirty little room again; she caught up her parasol; a streak across the dust marked where it had lain on the table; she sprang up and twisted her frock round, craning her neck back; ah, that she had reconnoitred that chair! She looked at her gloves; then with a cry of horror she dived for her handkerchief, put it to her lips, and scrubbed her cheeks; the handkerchief came away soiled, dingy, almost black. This last outrage overcame her; the parasol dropped on the floor, she rested her arms on the table and laid her face on them, and she burst into sobs, just as she used to in childhood when her brothers crumpled a clean frock or somebody spoke to her roughly. And between her sobs she cried, almost loudly, very bitterly: “Oh, it’s too mean and dirty and horrid!”

Harold had stolen softly upstairs, meaning to surprise the girl he loved, perhaps to let a snatched kiss be her first knowledge of his return. He flushed red, and his lips set sternly; he walked across the room to her with a heavy tread. She looked up, saw him, and knew that her exclamation had been overheard.

“What in the world is the matter?” he asked in a tone of cold surprise.

It was very absurd--she couldn’t stop crying; and from amid her weeping nothing more reasonable, nothing more adequate, nothing less trivial would come than confused murmurs of “My frock, Harold!” “My parasol!” “Oh, my face, my gloves!” He smiled contemptuously. “Don’t you see?” she exclaimed, exhibiting the gloves and parasol.

“See what? Are you crying because the room’s dirty?” He paused and then added, “I’m sorry you think it mean and horrid. Very sorry, Winifred.”

Offence was deep and bitter in his voice; he looked at her with a sort of disgust; she stopped sobbing and regarded him with a gaze in which fright and expectation seemed mingled, as though there were a great peril, and just one thing that might narrowly avert it. But his eyes were very hard. She dried her tears, and then forlornly scrubbed her cheeks again. He watched her with hostile curiosity, appearing to think her a very strange spectacle. Presently he spoke. “I thought you loved me. Oh, I daresay you thought so too till I came into competition with your new frock. I beg pardon--I must add your gloves and your parasol. As for the house, it’s no doubt mean and horrid; we were going to be poor, you see.” He laughed scornfully, as he added, “You might even have had to do a little dusting yourself now and then! Horrible!”

“I just sat there and looked at him.” That was Winifred’s own account of her behaviour. It is not very explicit and leaves room for much conjecture as to what her look said or tried to say. But whatever the message was he did not read it. He was engrossed in his own indignation, readier to hurt than to understand, full of his own wrong, of the mistake he had made, of her extraordinary want of love, of courage, of the high soul. Very likely all this was a natural enough state of mind for him to be in. Justice admits his provocation; the triviality of her spoken excuses gave his anger only too fine an opportunity. He easily persuaded himself that here was a revelation of the real woman, a flash of light that showed her true nature, showing, too, the folly of his delusion about her. Against all this her look and what it asked for had very little chance, and she could find no words that did not aggravate her offence.

“This is really rather a ludicrous scene,” he went on. “Is there any use in prolonging it?” He waited for her to speak, but she was still tongue-tied. “The caretaker needn’t be distressed by seeing the awful effects of her omission to dust the room; but, if you’re composed enough, we might as well go.” He looked round the room. “You’ll be glad to be out of this,” he ended.

“I know what you must think of me,” she burst out, “but--but you don’t understand--you don’t see----”

“No doubt I’m stupid, but I confess I don’t. At least there’s only one thing I see.” He bowed and waved his hand towards the door. “Shall we go?” he asked.

She led the way downstairs, her skirt again held close and raised clear of her ankles; her care for it was not lost on Harold as he followed her, for she heard him laugh again with an obtrusive bitterness that made his mirth a taunt. The old caretaker waited for them in the passage.

“When’ll you be coming, sir?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not certain we shall come,” said he. “The lady is not much taken with the house.”

“Ah, well!” sighed the old woman resignedly.

For an account of their drive back to the station materials are, again, sadly wanting. “He hardly said a word, and I did nothing but try to get my face clean and my gloves presentable,” was Winifred’s history of their journey. But she remembered--or chose to relate--a little more of what passed while they waited for the train on the platform at Euston. He left her for a few minutes on pretext of smoking a cigarette, and she saw him walking up and down, apparently in thought. Then he came back and sat down beside her. His manner was grave now; to judge by his recorded words, perhaps it was even a little pompous; but when may young men be pompous, if not at such crises as these?

“It’s no use pretending that nothing has happened, Winifred,” he said. “That would be the hollowest pretence, not worthy, I think, of either of us. Perhaps we had better take time to consider our course and--er--our relations to one another.”

“You don’t want to marry me now?” she asked simply.

“I want to do what is best for our happiness,” he replied. “We cannot forget what has happened to-day.”

“I know you would never forget it,” she said.

He did not contradict her; he looked first at his watch, then along the platform for the approach of her train. To admit that he might forget it was impossible to him; in such a case forgetfulness would be a negation of his principles and a slur on his perception. It would also be such a triumph over his vanity and his pride as it did not lie in him to achieve, such a forgiveness as his faults and virtues combined to put beyond the power of his nature. She looked at him; and “I smiled,” she said, not seeming herself to know why she had smiled, but conscious that, in the midst of her woe, some subtly amusing thought about him had come into her mind. She had never been amused at him before; so she, too, was getting some glimmer of a revelation out of the day’s experience--not the awful blaze of light that had flashed on Harold’s eyes, but a dim ray, just enough to give cause to that puzzled smile for which she could not explicitly account.

So they parted, and for persons who have followed the affair at all closely it is hardly necessary to add that they never came together again. This issue was obvious, and Winifred seems to have made up her mind to it that very same evening, for she called her mother into her room (as the good lady passed on the way to bed) and looked up from the task of brushing the grey frock which she had spread out on the sofa.

“I don’t think I shall marry Mr Jackson now, mother,” she said.

Mrs Petheram looked at her daughter and at her daughter’s gown.

“You’d better tell me more about it to-morrow. You look tired to-night, dear,” she replied.

But Winifred never told her any more--in the first place, because the family was too delighted with the fact to care one straw about how it had come to pass, and, in the second place, on the more important ground that the thing was really too small, too trivial, and too absurd to bear telling--at least to the family. To me, for some reason or other, Winifred did tell it, or some of it--enough, anyhow, to enable me, with the help of a few touches of imagination, to conjecture how it occurred.

“Don’t you think it was very absurd?” she asked at the end of her story. We were sitting by the yew hedge, near the library windows, looking across the flower beds to the meadow; it was a beautiful day, and the old place was charming. “Because,” she added, “I did love him, you know; and it seems a small thing to separate about, doesn’t it?”

“If he had behaved differently----” I began.

“I don’t see how he could be expected to,” she murmured.

“You expected him to,” I said firmly. She turned to me with an appearance of interest, as though I might be able to interpret to her something that had been causing her puzzle. “Or you wouldn’t have looked at him as you say you did--or smiled at him, as you admit you did. But you were wrong to expect him to, because he’s not that kind of man.”

“What kind of man?”

“The kind of man to catch you in his arms, smother you in kisses (allow me the old phrase), tell you that he understood all you felt, knew all you were giving up, realised the great thing you were doing for him.”

Winifred was listening. I went on with my imaginary scene of romantic fervour.

“That when he contrasted that mean little place with the beauties you were accustomed to, with the beauties which were right and proper for you, when he saw your daintiness soiled by that dust, that gown whose hem he would willingly----”

“He needn’t say quite as much as that,” interrupted Winifred, smiling a little.

“Well, or words to that effect,” said I. “That when he did all this and saw all this, you know, he loved you more, and knew that you loved him more than he had dared to dream, with a deeper love, a love that gave up for him all that you loved next best and second only to him; that after seeing your tears he would never doubt again that you would face all trials and all troubles with him at your side--Don’t you think, if he’d said something of that kind, accompanying his words with the appropriate actions----” I paused.

“Well?” asked Winifred.

“Don’t you think you might have been living in that horrid little house now, instead of being about to contract an alliance with Sir Barton Amesbury?”

“How do you know I shall do that?” she cried.

“It needs,” I observed modestly, “little skill to discern the approach of the inevitable.” I looked at her thoughtful face and at her eyes; they had their old look of wondering in them. “Don’t you think that if he’d treated the situation in that way----?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” she said softly. “But he wouldn’t think of all that. He was such an Idealist.”

I really do not know why she applied that term to him at that moment, except that he used to apply it to himself at many moments. But since it seemed to her to explain his conduct, there is no need to quarrel with the epithet.

“And I hope,” said I, “that the grey frock wasn’t irretrievably ruined?”

“I’ve never worn it again,” she murmured.

So I suppose it was ruined--unless she has some other reason. But she would be right to treat it differently from other frocks; it must mean a good deal to her, although it failed to mean anything except its own pretty self to Mr Jackson.

FOREORDAINED

“I don’t say,” observed the Colonel, “that limited liability companies haven’t great advantages. In fact, I’m a director myself--it’s a big grocery--and draw three hundred a year--a very welcome addition to my half-pay--and, for all I know, I may supply some of you fellows with your morning bacon. If I do, it just exemplifies the point I was about to make; which is this--When it comes to limited companies, you never know who anybody is. I could tell you a little story to illustrate that; it’s rather a sad one, though.”

The club smoking-room was cheerfully lighted, the fire burned brightly, we each had a cigar and a drink. We intimated to the Colonel that we felt in a position to endure a touch of tragedy.

“It’s some years ago now,” he said, “but it affected me considerably at the time. Do any of you go to Stretchley’s for your clothes?”

Three of us shook our heads wistfully. The fourth--a young man, and a new member, whom none of us knew, but who had a legal look about him and wore admirable trousers of a delicate grey--answered the Colonel’s question in the affirmative.

“If I may say so, you and Stretchley do one another credit, sir,” said the Colonel, with an approving glance at the new member’s trousers. “And I needn’t tell you that Stretchley’s have few equals--and no superiors. When you say Stretchley’s, you say everything. I have never gone to them myself: partly because I couldn’t afford it, more perhaps from motives of delicacy--from consideration for poor George Langhorn’s feelings. He has always preferred not to act professionally for his personal friends, even though he lost money in consequence.”

“How does George Langhorn come in?” I ventured to ask.

“He is Stretchley’s, to all intents and purposes. It’s a small family company. The business was founded by George’s maternal grandfather, and carried to greatness by his mother’s brother, Fred Stretchley, whom I used to see at Brighton years ago. Fred made it into a company, but of course kept the bulk of the shares to himself, besides the entire control; and when he died he left all he had to George, on condition--mark you, on condition--that George remained in the business, and in active control of it. He did that because he knew that George hated it, and, at the same time, had a wonderful turn for it.”

“Rather odd, that!” the new member observed.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the Colonel. “He had a knack for it, because it was in his blood; and he hated it, because he’d had it crammed down his throat all his life. He’d been right through the mill from a boy; the only holiday he’d ever had from it was a year at Bonn--and that was to learn German, with a view to business. It was at Bonn that I became acquainted with him, and a very nice fellow he was--quite a gentleman, and extremely well-informed. We became great friends. His only fault was his exaggerated dislike of his own occupation. On that subject he was morbid--and, I’m afraid I must add, a trifle snobbish. All the same, he was unmistakably proud of Stretchley’s. He was quite alive to the fact that, if he had to be a tailor, it was a fine thing to be Stretchley’s, and in moments of confidence he would thank Heaven that he hadn’t been born in the ready-made line--‘reach-me-downs,’ he called it. ‘It might have been worse,’ he would say manfully. At those times I felt a great respect for him.”

“They do know how to make a pair of breeches,” murmured the new member, regarding his own legs with pensive satisfaction.

“Nobody better, nobody better,” the Colonel agreed, with a solemn cordiality--and we all looked at the new member’s legs for some moments. “Well, as I was saying,” the Colonel then resumed, “George Langhorn and I became real friends; but I was abroad on service for two or three years after he came back from Bonn and got into harness in Savile Row, and so I lost sight of him for a bit. But after I’d been home a few months, I was passing through town on my way to the Riviera, on six weeks’ leave, and I dropped in at his place and saw him. I found him in a sad way--very depressed and down in the mouth, railing against the business, utterly sick of it. He told me he couldn’t endure the sight of a frock-coat, and spent all his time at home in pyjamas and a dressing-gown--just because those were portions of apparel not supplied by Stretchley’s. Morbid, of course, but sad, very sad! It looked to me as if he was on the verge of a breakdown, and I took a strong line with him. I told him that he owed it to himself to take a complete holiday--to get right away from the shop for a bit, to forget all about it, to put plenty of money in his pocket, and give himself a real holiday--he told me he hadn’t taken more than a week here and there for two years. I said: ‘I’m just off to Monte Carlo. You come with me. Sink the shop--dismiss it from your mind--and come along.’ Well, he saw how wise I was, made his arrangements, and joined me at Charing Cross three days later. Off we went, and a very good time we had of it. George was a handsome young fellow of four or five and twenty, with lots to say for himself, and a very taking way with women. Nobody knew who he was, but I and my friends gave him a good start, and he could take care of the rest for himself. In point of fact I received a great many compliments on the good taste I showed in choosing my travelling companion. Ah, yes, we had very good fun!” The Colonel leant back in his chair for a moment, with a smile of pleasant--possibly of roguish--reminiscence.

“No signs of the tragedy yet, Colonel,” said I.

“Wait a bit; I’m just coming to it. When we’d been there about a fortnight, a young lady appeared on the scene. She was one of the prettiest creatures I ever saw--and I’ve seen some in my day--and as merry as she was pretty. Besides that, she was evidently uncommonly well off; she travelled with a companion, a maid, and a toy-poodle, and threw away her money at the tables as if she were made of it. I needn’t tell you that such a girl didn’t want for attentions at Monte Carlo, of all places in the world. The fortune-hunters were hot on her track, besides all the young fellows who were genuinely smitten with her. If I’d been ten years younger, I’d have had a shot myself. But it wouldn’t have been any use. From the very first George was the favourite, just as from the first George had been drawn to her. There seemed really to be what they call an affinity between them. I never saw an affair go so quickly or so prosperously. Yes, there seemed to be an affinity. George was carried right off his feet, and I was intensely pleased to see it. He wasn’t thinking of Stretchley’s now, and he was putting on weight every day! My treatment was being a brilliant success, and I didn’t mind admitting that more than half the credit was due to pretty Miss Minnie Welford--that was her name.

“I was only waiting to hear the happy news when one morning George came down looking decidedly pale and with a face as long as your arm. I made sure he’d received a telegram calling him back to Savile Row. But it wasn’t that. This was it. In conversation, in the garden of the Casino the evening before, somebody had begun talking about _mésalliances_ and that sort of thing. One took one side, and one another--the people who had nothing in particular to boast about in the family way being the loudest in declaring they’d never make a low marriage, as they generally are. Minnie, who was sitting next George, took the high romantic line. She said that if she loved a man (George told me she blushed adorably as she said this--you can believe that or not, as you like) neither family nor fortune would weigh for a minute with her. That made George happy, as you can imagine. Then some fellow said: ‘You’d marry the chimney-sweep, would you, Miss Welford?’ ‘Yes, if I loved him,’ says she. ‘Absolutely nobody barred?’ the man asked, laughing. She blushed again (or so George said) and laughed a little and said: ‘Well, just one--just one class of man; but I won’t tell you which it is.’ And no more she would, though they all tried to guess, and chaffed her, and worried her to tell. When the talk had drifted off to something else, George seized his opportunity--he told me he had a horrid sort of presentiment--and whispered in her ear: ‘Tell me!’ She looked at him with eyes full of fun and said: ‘Well, I’ll tell you; but it’s a secret. Swear to keep it!’ George swore to keep it, and then she leant over to him, put her lips close to his ear, and whispered---- Well, of course, you’ve guessed what she whispered?”

“Tailors!” said the new member in a reflective tone.

“Yes, ‘tailors,’” said the Colonel mournfully. “She just whispered ‘Tailors!’ and ran off with a merry glance (so George said)--a merry glance. And he hadn’t had a wink of sleep all night, and came to tell me the first thing in the morning. I never saw a man so broken up.”

“Had she found out about him?” I asked.