Chapter V (1)

He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure, only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met him in her eyes.

He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this, strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met her in the library a month ago.

But she gave him no time for a word.

Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. "Cruel! Cruel! Cruel!"--she cried.

He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him like a frenzied torrent.

"To leave me without a word, after last night! You treat me like a dog that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no heart--I've felt it for days and days!--No heart! You hate me! You despise me! And what have I done to deserve it but love--love--love you--like the poor dog! But I know--I know--It is Sir Walter. You can't forgive me that--It has poisoned everything--that ignorant folly of mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate me. And I--I--" her voice choked, gasped into sobs;--"I have only loved you--loved you--more and more----"

"Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. "I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that well;--a desperate hope.

"It's false!" she cried. "You have! You thought at first that you would be magnanimous and save me,--you could be magnanimous because you were going to die--it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad--and to stand there and smile and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really forgive me, and then you hated me."

"Kitty--you know that you do not believe what you are saying."

"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have forgiven me?"

"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you--that day, Kitty, on the lawn,--it would have been more difficult to save you."

"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"

"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you."

His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her.

She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.

"It was, then, because it was only for a month."

He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"

"That you loved me."

Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.

"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"

The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean--you mean--" she stammered--"Oh--you don't believe that I love you--You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.

Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you; but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could. It wasn't real."

"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference--the cruel difference. You love me in that terrible way--the way that could give me up and not mind; but I am in love with you;--that's the dreadful difference. Men get over it; but women are always in love."

Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the brooding dream; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly--or fall--out of the nest; she must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the news he was to tell her; he had forgotten all but her need.

"Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; "but isn't it, in a way, that women are _merely_ in love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it is with anybody--with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love."

But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a comrade. I want a lover."

And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him.

"You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. "You talk as if we were to go on living together. What did the doctor say? I don't believe that you are going to die."

He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them; but the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was to tumble about their ears.

It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly confession, he said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die."

He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf and breathless with the crash and crumbling.

Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at him, curiously, intently. She had found herself: she had found him; and--oh yes--he saw it--he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed; she could not forgive him.

"Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?"

Her sombre gaze dwelt on him.

"Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded.

She answered him at last: "How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me whether I am sorry that you are not going to die? You must know that it is an insult."

"I mean--if I disappointed--failed you so--"

"I must wish you dead? You have a charming idea of me."

How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a great city.

"Don't be cruel," he murmured.

"I? Cruel!" she laughed.

She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul.

He was not to die; he was not her lover; and Kitty was the primitive woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust.

And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking persistently away from him and out at the garden--their garden! alas!--where a fine rain fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things--and realler things--than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again."

"Kitty! Kitty!" he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child, arming its empty heart against him. "Don't speak like that. Remember--the month has been beautiful."

The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them. "Beautiful? When it has not been real?"

"Can't we remember the beauty--make something more real?" he now almost wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations--her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and withdrawals--was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that, seeking magnanimity, found only bitterness. "You must speak for yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty."

The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her yet; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the place she meant to keep. She would own to no discomfitures deeper than those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure.

That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future life together, Holland knew, as he heard her say: "Do sit down and rest. You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."

THE WHITE PAGODA

The drama of the drawing-rooms had begun years ago, but Owen Stacpole did not come into it until the day on which his cousin Gwendolen, after examining the box of bric-a-brac, remarked, refolding the last pieces of china in their dusty newspapers, that they were rubbish, and silly rubbish, too, of just the sort that Aunt Pickthorne had always unerringly accumulated. The box had arrived that morning, a legacy from this deceased relative; it had been brought up to the drawing-room and placed upon a sheet near the fire, so that Mrs. Conyers might examine its contents in comfort, and Owen, while he wrote at the black lacquer bureau in the window, had been aware of Gwendolen's gibes and exclamations behind him. Now, when she asserted that she would send the whole futile collection down to Mr. Glazebrook and see if he would give her enough for it to buy a pair of gloves with, Owen rose and limped to join her and to look down at the wooden box into which she was thrusting, with some vindictiveness, the dingy parcels.

"Have you looked at them all?" he inquired. "I forget--was your Aunt Pickthorne a Mrs. or a Miss? And how long has it been since she died?"

"About six months, poor old thing. And these treasures have evidently never been dusted since. She was a Mrs. Her husband was old Admiral Pickthorne--don't you remember?--and they lived, after he retired, at Cheltenham. Two more guileless Philistines I've never known. It used to make me feel quite ill to go and stay with them when I was a girl. I've hardly been at all since then, and that's probably why she selected all the most hideous objects in her drawing-room to leave me. How well I remember that drawing-room! Crocheted antimacassars; and a round, mahogany centre-table on which a lamp used to stand in the evening; and the wall-paper of frosted robin's-egg-blue, with stuffed birds in cases, and terracotta plaques framed in ruby plush, hanging upon it--a perfectly horrible room. Half a dozen of the plaques are in there; the birds she spared me. She had one or two lovely old family things which I'd allowed myself to hope for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no; there's nothing worth looking at."

Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands together, and rose from her knees. She was, at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman; tall, of ample form, and attired with fashionable ease and fluency. Fashion had been a late development with Gwendolen. In her gaunt and wistful girlhood she had worn her hair in drooping Rossettian masses, and her throat had been differently bare. Now she was as accurate as she was easy. Her hair was even a little too sophisticatedly distended, and her long pearl ear-rings, though they became the tender violet of her eyes, emphasized, as her former Pre-Raphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a certain genial commonplaceness in the contours of her cheek and chin. But almost fat and decisively unpoetical as she had become, it was undeniable that this last phase of dress and, in especial, these widow's weeds, with sinuous lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became her better than any in which Owen remembered to have seen her.

Gwendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy holiday--when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. Her teas had been brought in on trays of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like opening between the front and back drawing-room had been hung with translucent curtains of beaded reeds, through which one had to plunge as though through a sheet of dropping water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and rattle and the perfume of burning Eastern pastilles that greeted one when, emerging, one found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the divans and the brasses and the palms. In those days Gwendolen had been draped rather than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of her languid arms and wrists seemed more adapted to a dulcimer than to a tea-pot. But she dispensed excellent tea, and though her eyes were appropriately yearning, her talk was quite as reassuringly commonplace as Owen had always found it.

It was only in the course of years that the reed curtains and the carved Indian screens and the divans ebbed away; but the change was complete at last, and he found Gwendolen, with undulated hair puffed over a frame, and a small waist,--large waists not having then come in,--receiving her visitors in the most clear, calm, austere of rooms, with polished floor, Sheraton furniture, and Japanese colour-prints framed in white hanging on pensive spaces of willow-leaf-green wall. Gwendolen talked of Strauss's music and of the New English Art Club, was indignant at the prohibition of "Monna Vanna," and to some no longer apt remark of an aspiring caller answered that to speak so was surely to Ruskinize. He realized on this occasion that Gwendolen had become the arbiter of taste in Chislebridge. He followed her into several drawing-rooms and observed that she had set the fashion in furniture and wall-paper; that some were pushing their way toward Japanese prints, and some were even beginning to babble faintly of Manet. Five years had passed since then, and now, on this his first visit to Chislebridge since old Mr. Conyers's death, another change had taken place. Gwendolen's hips were compressed, her waist was large once more, though of a carefully calculated largeness, and only in a fine bit of the old furniture here and there did a trace of the former green drawing-room remain. This was certainly the most interesting room that Gwendolen had yet achieved. There had been little character, if much charm, in the green drawing-room; one knew so many like it. With a slight self-discipline, its harmonies were really easy to attain. But it was not easy to attain a mingled richness and austerity; to be recondite, yet lovely; to set such cabinets of rosy old lacquer near such Chinese screens or hang subtle strips of Chinese painting on just the right shade of dim, white wall. It took money, it took time, it took knowledge to find such delicate cane-seated settees framed in black lacquer, and to pick up such engraved glass, such white Chinese porcelain and white Italian earthenware. Melting together in their dim splendour and shining softness, they had so enchantingly arrested Owen the night before that, pausing on the threshold, he had said with a whole-heartedness she had never yet heard from him, "Well, Gwen, yours is the loveliest room I've ever seen."

It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions. It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere. They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower. And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated in all sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his eyes, "I am _so_ glad you like it, dear Owen."

Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers, who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure and his breakfast historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and duchesses who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old town, and Owen had found himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing, cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of Gwendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished. Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for Gwendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion--the same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognised a difference. He wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Gwendolen a dwelling tenderness, a brooding touch, indeed, of reminiscent wistfulness. Was it to show an unbecoming complacency if he allowed his mind to dwell upon the possibilities that this development in Gwendolen presented to his imagination? He was delicate and poor and, despite a large visiting-list, he was lonely. He was fond of Gwendolen and of her two nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, as she had always amused him; for though her drawing-room had become interesting, though she had developed a sense of humour, or at least the intention of humorousness, though she often attempted playfulness and even irony, she was still at heart as disproportionately earnest as she had been in youth. But Gwendolen would make no romantic demands upon him, and she would not expect him to take even red lacquer as seriously as she did, or to follow with the same breathlessness the erratic movements of modern aestheticism. She was accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness, and would resent it no more in the husband than in the friend. Altogether, as he sat there writing at Gwendolen's lovely bureau, he knew that a sense of homely magic grew upon him.

Next morning, wandering about the pleasant streets of the old town, he found himself before the window of Mr. Glazebrook's curiosity-shop--a shop well known to more than Chislebridge. He paused to look at the objects disposed with a dignified reticence against a dark background, and his eye was attracted by a very delightful red lacquer box that at once made him think of Gwendolen's drawing-room. Just the thing for her, it was. But as he entered the shop, Mr. Glazebrook leaned from within and took it from its place in the window. He was showing it to another customer.

Owen now quite vehemently longed to possess the box, which, he saw, as Mr. Glazebrook displayed it, was cunningly fitted with little inner segments, beautifully patterned in gold. Feigning an indifferent survey of the shop, he lingered near, hoping that his rival would relinquish her opportunity.

"Five pounds! O dear, that is too much for me, I'm afraid," he heard her say, and, at the voice, he turned and looked at her. The voice was unusual--a rapid, rather husky voice that made him think of muffled bells or snow-bound water, gay in rhythm, yet marred in tone, almost as though the speaker had cried a great deal. She was an unusual figure, too, though he could not have said why, except that her dress seemed to recall bygone fashions quaintly, though without a hint of dowdiness or affectation. She wore a skirt and jacket of soft gray, with pleated lawn at neck and wrists, and her small gray hat was wreathed with violets. She held the lacquer box, and her face, rosy, crisp, decisive, and showing, like her voice, a marred gaiety, expressed her reluctant relinquishment and her strong desire. Owen had seen a child look at a forbidden fruit with just such an expression and he suddenly wished that he could give the box to her rather than to Gwendolen, to whom five pounds was a matter of small moment.

"I think I mustn't," she repeated, after a further hesitation, and setting the box down with cherishing care. "Not to-day. And I have so much red lacquer. It's like dram-drinking."

Mr. Glazebrook smiled affably. He was evidently on old-established terms with his customer. "Perhaps you'd like to look round a bit, Mrs. Waterlow," he suggested. "There are some nice pieces of old glass in the inner room, quite cheap, some of them--a set of old champagne glasses." Mrs. Waterlow, saying that she wanted some old champagne glasses, moved away.

"Do you think the lady has given up that box?" Owen asked. "I don't want to buy it if there's a chance of her changing her mind."

Mr. Glazebrook said that there was no such chance, the lady being one who knew her own mind; so the box was bought and Owen ordered it to be sent to Gwendolen. He said then that he would like to have a look round, too. He really wanted to have another look at the lady with the rosy face and the small gray hat trimmed with violets. He peered into cabinets ranged thickly with old glass and china, examined the Worcester tea-set disposed upon a table and the case of Chinese tear-bottles and Japanese netzukes, and presently made his way into the smaller, dimmer room at the back.

"Oh, Mr. Glazebrook," said the lady in gray. She had heard his step, but had not turned. She was kneeling before an open packing-case and holding an object that she had drawn from it. Owen suddenly recognised the case. It was the one that Gwendolen yesterday had sent down to Mr. Glazebrook. He called this person, raising his hat, and the lady looked round at him, too preoccupied to express her recognition of her mistake by more than a vague murmur of thanks. "Mr. Glazebrook," she said, holding up a whitish object, "may I have this? Is it expensive?"

"Well, really, I only glanced over the box. A customer sent it down to me to dispose of, and I didn't think there was anything in it worth much. Let me see, Mrs. Waterlow; it's a pagoda, I take it, a Chinese pagoda. We've had them from time to time, in ivory and smaller than this."

"This is in porcelain," said the lady, "and beautifully moulded."

"I see, I see," said Mr. Glazebrook, taking the fragile top segment of the disjointed pagoda in his hand, and rather at a loss; "and it's slightly damaged."

The lady in gray evidently was not a shrewd bargainer. "Only a little," she said. "One or two bits have been chipped out of the roofs, and it's lost one or two of its little crystal rings; but I think it's in quite good condition, and I have it all here." She was placing one segment upon the other. "They are all made to fit, you see, with the little openings in each story."

She had built it up beside her as she knelt on the floor, and it stood like a fragile, fantastic ghost, with the upward tilt of its tiled roofs, its embossed patterns, and the crystal rings trembling from each angle of the roofs like raindrops. "What a darling!" said Mrs. Waterlow. "How much do you ask for it, Mr. Glazebrook?"

Mr. Glazebrook, adjusting his knowledge of the limitations of Mrs. Waterlow's purse to his present appreciation of the pagoda and of her desire for it, said genially, after a moment, that from an old customer like herself he would ask only forty-five shillings.

"Well, I think it's a great bargain, Mr. Glazebrook," said Mrs. Waterlow. "And I'll have it."

"Shall I send it round?" Mr. Glazebrook asked.

"Yes, please; or, no, it isn't heavy,"--she lifted it with both hands, rising with it and looking like a Saint Barbara holding her tower,--"I can manage it to just round the corner. Wrap it up for me, and I'll carry it off myself."

When Owen saw his cousin again at lunch, the red lacquer box had not yet arrived, and, with a touch of friendly mockery, he said:

"Well, you have been unlucky, my dear Gwen. There was the most charming piece of old Chinese porcelain in that scorned Cheltenham box, and I saw Mr. Glazebrook sell it this morning to a lady who wasn't to be put off by dust and newspapers and plush-framed plaques. She carried it off in triumph, saying that it was a great bargain. And so it was; but she might have had it for half the money if she hadn't informed Mr. Glazebrook of its probable value."

Gwendolen fixed her mild, violet eyes upon him. "A piece of old Chinese porcelain? Do you mean that silly white pagoda?"

"You did see it, then?"

"See it? Haven't I seen it all my life? It stood on a purple worsted mat on a little bamboo table between the Nottingham lace curtains in one of Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room windows, and looked like some piece of childish gimcrackery bought at a bazaar, where, I'll wager, she did buy it."

"Well, Mrs. Waterlow evidently didn't think it gimcrackery, or, if she did, she didn't mind. It looked to me, I confess, an exquisite thing. But her admiration may have lent it its enchantment."

Gwendolen's eyes now fixed themselves more searchingly than before.

"Mrs. Waterlow? Did Mrs. Waterlow buy it? How did you know it was Mrs. Waterlow? I thought you'd never met her."

"I haven't; but I heard Mr. Glazebrook call her by her name. She'd wanted to buy a red lacquer box that I spotted in the window and had gone in to get for you, my dear Gwen. It was too expensive for her,--so that it is yours,--and she went rummaging into the back shop and found your box with the things just as you and Mr. Glazebrook had left them, and in no time she'd disinterred the pagoda."

Gwendolen apparently was so arrested by his story that she forgot for the moment to thank him for the lacquer box.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

"Know her? Know Cicely Waterlow? Why, I've known her since she first came to live here, years ago. She's a very dear friend of mine," Gwendolen said, adding: "How much did she pay for it? That wretched man gave me only fifteen shillings for the lot."

"He made her pay forty-five shillings for the pagoda. I suspect myself that it's worth ten times as much. Does she care for things, too--lacquer and engraved glass?"

Gwendolen still showed preoccupation and, he fancied, a touch of vexation.

"Care for them? Yes; who with any taste doesn't care for them? Cicely has very good taste, too, in her little way. She doesn't know anything, but she picks up ideas and puts them together very cleverly. I can't help thinking that she'd never have given the pagoda a thought if my white porcelain hadn't educated her. I really can't believe that it's good, Owen."

Owen waived the point.

"Who is Mr. Waterlow?" he asked.

"He has been dead for fifteen or sixteen years. He died only a year after their marriage. A very delightful man, so people say who knew him. And Cicely lost her little girl, to whom she was passionately devoted, five years ago; she has never really recovered from that. She used to be so pretty, poor Cicely! She's lost it all now. She cried her very eyes out. She has a little money and lives with her mother-in-law, old Mrs. Waterlow, who is very fond of her. They don't entertain except in the quietest way, or go out much, and I do what I can to give Cicely a good time. I often have her here to tea when I have interesting people staying."

"Oh, that's good. Do count me as interesting enough and ask her while I'm here."

"Interesting enough, my dear Owen! I don't suppose that Cicely often has a chance of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of course I'll ask her," said Gwendolen. Then, remembering his gift: "It _was_ nice of you to get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red lacquer, and I'm quite sure, whatever you and Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a hundred of your white pagodas."

Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, the last of Owen's stay. The drawing-room was crowded, and Owen, when she was announced, was enjoying a talk with a dismal-looking old philosopher who had plaintive, white hairs on his nose and trousers that bagged irremediably at the knees.

"Yes, indeed, I know her well," said Professor Selden, as Owen questioned him. "I play chess with her once a week. Her little girl was a great pet of mine. You never saw the little girl?"

"Never, and I've not yet met Mrs. Waterlow. She is most charming-looking."

"The little girl was so much like her," said Professor Selden, sadly. "Yes, she is a charming woman. Don't let me keep you from meeting her. I am going to sit down here while our young friend Dawkins plays. You know Dawkins? Between ourselves, Mrs. Conyers thinks too highly of him."

Mrs. Waterlow's eyes turned upon him as he limped up to her and Gwendolen, and smiling, she said, "Why, I saw you yesterday in Mr. Glazebrook's shop."

"Yes," said Owen, "and there is the red lacquer box."

"And you, Cicely, bought my pagoda," said Gwendolen.

"Your pagoda?" Mrs. Waterlow questioned, her eyes, that seemed to open with a little difficulty, resting on her hostess with some surprise. "Was the pagoda yours?"

"Yes, mine," said Gwendolen. "It came in a box of rubbish,--you saw the kind of rubbish,--a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled it off to Glazebrook. Owen says it is really good. Is it?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Mrs. Waterlow.

"I'm sure it is," said Owen, "and I liked the accuracy with which you fell in love with it at first sight."

"I did fall in love with it, good or bad," said Mrs. Waterlow. "Don't tell me that you want it back again, Gwendolen. But if it was a mistake, of course----"

He recognised in her the note of guilelessness and, with some decision, for he actually perceived an eagerness in Gwendolen's glance, interposed with, "But Gwendolen thinks it gimcrackery, and wouldn't have it at any price. Isn't it so, Gwendolen?"

Poor Gwendolen was looking a little glum; but she was the most unresentful of creatures.

"Indeed, it is," she said. "I did think it gimcrackery; but, to tell the truth, I never really saw it at all. I can't believe you'd have seen it, Cicely, standing on its worsted mat in my Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room. But I wouldn't dream, of course, of taking it back; and if it's really good, I'm more glad than I can say that my loss should be your gain. Now, won't you and Owen sit down here and listen to my wonderful Perceval Dawkins? Oh, he is going to astonish the world some day."

Mrs. Waterlow and Owen, in the intervals of the ensuing music, talked together. Seen more closely, he found that her face, though not beautiful, was even more singularly delightful than he had thought it. She had eyes merry, yet tired, like those of a sleepy child, and sweet, small, firm lips and a glance and smile at once very frank and very remote. There was about her none of that aroma of sorrow that some women distil from the tragedies of their lives, and wear, even if unconsciously, like an allurement. He felt that in Mrs. Waterlow sorrow had been an isolating, a bewildering, a devastating experience, making her at once more ready to take refuge in the trivialities of life and more unable to admit an intimacy into the essentials. Yet the spring of vitality and mirth was so strong in her that in all she said he felt a quality restorative, aromatic, fragrant, as if he were walking in spring woods and smelt everywhere the rising sap and the breath of violets. She was remote, blighted, yet buoyant. When she rose to go, he realised with sudden dismay that to-day was his last in Chislebridge and that he should not see her again for who knew how long.

"Is the pagoda placed?" he asked her. "Does it fulfil your expectations?"

"Yes, indeed," she said. "I spent two hours yesterday in washing and mending it. It is immaculate now, as lovely as a pearl."

"I wish I could see it," said Owen.

"Why, pray, then, come and see it. Can you come to tea with me and my mother-in-law to-morrow?"

"I'm going away to-morrow," said Owen, dismally. And then he bethought him. "Can't I walk back with you now? Is it too late? Only five-thirty."

"Not in the least too late. Mamma will still be having tea, and she loves people to drop in. But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Waterlow glanced round the crowded room.

"I'll not be missed," he assured her with some conscious speciousness.

Gwendolen, indeed, had time only for a little stare of surprise when he told her that he was going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Waterlow. She was receiving new guests, richly furred and motor-veiled ladies who had come in from the country and were expatiating over the beauties of the red lacquer cabinets, Gwendolen's latest acquisitions.

"That will be delightful," she said; "and now Owen will see that sweet drawing-room of yours, dearest. You have made it so pretty!"

Owen observed that Mrs. Waterlow, while maintaining all the suavities of intercourse, did not address Gwendolen as dearest.

It was not far to Mrs. Waterlow's, and he said, in reply to her question, that he liked walking, if she didn't mind going slowly on his account. He found himself telling her, then, about his lameness. A bad fall while skating in boyhood had handicapped him for life. The lamps had just been lighted and the evening of early spring was blurred with mist. Catkins hung against a faintly rosy sky, and in the gardens that they passed the crocuses stood thickly. Owen had a sense of adventure poignant in its reminiscent magic. Not for years had he so felt the savour of youth. He realised, with a deep happiness, that Mrs. Waterlow liked him; sometimes she laughed at things he said, and once or twice when her eyes turned on him he fancied in them the same expression of happy discovery with which she had looked at the pagoda. Well, he reflected, if she thought him delightful, too, she had had to get through a great many dusty newspapers to find him.

Mrs. Waterlow lived, away from the gardened houses of Chislebridge, in a small but rather stately house with a Georgian facade which stood on one of the narrower, older streets. They went up two or three stone steps from the pavement and knocked at a very bright and massive knocker, and the door was opened by a middle-aged Quakerish maid. The drawing-room was on the ground floor, and Mrs. Waterlow led him in.

Owen's astonishment, when he entered, prompted him to stand still and to gaze about him; but luckily he could not yield to the impulse, for he had to cross to the fire, near which, behind her tea-table, old Mrs. Waterlow sat, and had to be presented to her and to the middle-aged, academic-looking lady who was having tea with her. He was glad of the respite, for he had received a shock.

Old Mrs. Waterlow had dark, authoritative eyes and white hair much dressed under black lace, and the finest of hands, decorated with old seals and old diamonds. She must, he felt, be a companion at once inspiriting and disquieting, for she had the demeanour of a naughty, haughty child, and, as she held Owen in talk for some moments, he perceived that her conversation was of a sort to cause alarm and amusement in her listeners. Poor old Professor Selden, who was mentioned, offered her an opportunity for the frankest witticisms, and,--when her daughter-in-law protested,--"Yes, dear, I know you are fond of him," the old lady replied, "and so am I; but he is, all the same, very like a damp potato that has begun to sprout."

"Now look at my pagoda, Mr. Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she had been standing with her foot on the fender.

"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-a-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the pagoda because it means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home in triumph and always doing without hats; and I sit here without an atom of taste, and get the credit for hers. Frankly, Sybilla, my dear," she addressed the academic lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cosy with apple-blossoms painted on it. I had such a cosy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely wouldn't let me use it."

Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. Waterlow, he had seen it in the first astonished glance, had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, been imitating Gwendolen, and his whole conception of her was undergoing a reconstruction. He followed her to the table on which the white pagoda stood, glancing about him and taking in deep drafts of disillusion. Red lacquer and Japanese prints, white porcelain and dimly shining jars of old Venetian glass--it was a replica, even to its white walls, of Gwendolen's drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it were, humbly smiling, with folded hands and no attempt at emulation. And in the midst, beautifully in place on its little black lacquer table, was the pagoda, offering him not a hint of help, but seeming rather, to smile at him with a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was aware, as from the pagoda he brought his eyes back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would not have given the naive derivativeness a thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full of savour and independence? One thing only helped him, beside the effortless atmosphere of the room, and that was the fact--he clung to it--that the glasses set everywhere among the red and black and white were filled not, thank goodness! with pink roses, but with poppy anemones, white and purple and rose. And the first thing he found to say of the pagoda to Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in here," and then, turning to the nearest bowl of delicate colour, he added, "and how beautifully these flowers go with your room!"

He wondered, as their eyes met over the anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow guessed his discomfiture.

When he saw Gwendolen that evening she asked him at once whether he liked old Mrs. Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked young Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room, and he reflected that this was really very magnanimous of her.

"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be dull with her."

"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said Gwendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."

* * * * *

He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences, feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be adjourned--adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was able to meet it more impartially.

He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical advantages and even, if it came to that, all the aesthetic ones; yet, ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her, tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could not be combined.

Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours' wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.

He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow. This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led for a second time into the drawing-room.

He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically, incredibly different, except--his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of wonder--the white pagoda; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the white pagoda stood, and under it an old bead mat,--a mat of faded, old blue beads,--his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,--of white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the table--small, sober books bound in calf.

So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them, the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were having together?

For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of black satin--sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lustres ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble, ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Between the clock and the lustres, on either side, was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labour could make them.

No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful dream; for, with it all, above it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it, laughing at and with it. For it all laughed--surely yes; and the elfish chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing like a Chinese Pierrot, at the centre of the revels.

Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay, precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.

"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of astonishment had spoken from his face.

He stared round him again, smiling.

"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says, 'If I be I.'"

"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."

"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"

Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.

"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it. Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.

"Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a month."

"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness. "And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"

"It's genius," said Owen, "What made her think of it?" And then, with a pang, he wondered whether Gwendolen had thought of it first. Was it imaginable that Gwendolen could have turned away from beauty and plunged herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?

"Well, things are in the air, you know," said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out the tea,--"that's what Cicely always says, at all events,--reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."

"Things in the air": had Gwendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.

"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us. How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to buttoned black satin and old flower-pieces? It's as an exception that it has its charm and its meaning. But if it became a commonplace?"

"Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "Will it? It has very much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains. And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said--downright ugliness, she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."