Chapter XXI

The following morning there came to "Miss H. Sorrenford" a letter from David Lee--an urgent letter because he had been so long impatient, demanding an explanation of her silence. The explanation was that each time she had re-read the note of thanks he had written before leaving town her imposture had looked to her more shameful; but after considering a great deal how to say as much in her answer, she did not say it at all. She told him instead something of her feelings in returning to the house that was called her home.

It was very sweet, very strange, to David to receive the first of her confessions breathing a familiar presence. Hilda had never seemed so close to him as she did in the hour when he pored over these pages of her sister's. He heard Hilda's voice while he welcomed Bee's thoughts; when he replied to Bee, he saw Hilda's face. And it was the face, not the thoughts, that maddened him with longing. It was the face that was dizzying him as he paltered with his conscience and offered prayers to the future. Though he did not discriminate, though he associated the soul of the woman with the form of the girl, the triumph was to the physical. The form, not the soul, tempted him to renounce his father's gospel, even while he proclaimed the soul his justification. The charm of the woman's letters lay no longer in what she said, but in his belief that the girl said it.

Hilda's fairness, not Bee's mind, held his love; and in his confidences to Bee there was a cadence that there had not been, a difference which she strove to persuade herself was imaginary, because to admit that it existed would be to realise that the photograph had wrought mischief. There was nothing tangible, no word to point to, but beneath the intimate record of his doings, and the references to his work, underlying the intuition which enabled him to respond, as always, to more than she had spelt, she felt something in her friend's letters that was new, something--she was conscious of it only in moments--something that made them now a man's letters to a woman.

When September was nearing its end, David received a few lines from Ownie. She wrote:

"I have been meaning to congratulate you oh the success of the book of poems that people are talking about. So you have made a hit? Well, I am very glad. I was always sure when you were a child you would do well at writing--you have all my poor father's talent. Well, I am very glad. Though I haven't had a chance to read it, and never seen anything of you, I am delighted to hear you have done so well. I hope you are well, and don't forget I like to see you whenever you have time to spare." She remained, on paper, his "Affectionate Mother."

His conscience pricked him, for his last visit had been paid in the spring. When he sent a copy of the book, which he knew would bore her to the verge of extinction, he promised to call on her the next Sunday.

He went in the afternoon. The latest of the Swiss lads to be described in the advertisements as "man servant" opened the door while struggling into his coat. His English was as unintelligible as his predecessors', and David had doubts whether she was at home while he waited in the hall. Dinner was over, but the smell of it lingered; she was unlikely to be out, he thought. The Swiss sped back, and delivering himself of strange syllables, led the way to the drawing-room. It was empty, and the smell of dinner was less strong here. After some minutes Ownie came in.

Her hair was yellow still, but the yellow of a "restorer," not the yellow of her youth, and under this piteous travesty of the past her aged face looked older. The years had caricatured her defects, and her business had stamped its mark upon her. Ownie was a bulky woman with a long upper lip and a fretful, vulgar mouth. In conversation she had the restless eye and mechanical smile of the boarding-house keeper, who during three meals every day makes an effort at cheerful small-talk--illustrating the advantages of the district in which her boarding-house is situated--while she listens suspensive to the servant inquiring behind a chair whether the occupant will "take any more." Of the girl who had once smiled victoriously in the mirror of a theatre vestibule nothing was left; in her stead was all the pathos of a lifetime. Only to the bulky woman it was given still to discern a likeness to the girl. Nature had yielded that; she did not see herself as she was. To her the rouge on her cheeks was not so palpable, the wrinkles were not so deep. Dyed, painted, dreary, she sank into a chair, and yawned widely, with her hands in her lap.

"I thought you were never coming again," she said.

He pleaded stress of work: "And I've been in the country since I saw you. Well, how are you, mother?"

"Oh, nothing to brag about; the heat has been killing, hasn't it? _I_ should have liked a change too.... I haven't been able to read your book yet--I can't read for long, it tries my eyes so; I must get some new glasses. Well, are you making a fortune out of it?"

"It's selling splendidly--for poetry. Yes, I shall make a good deal by it, strange to say. If you want a change, why not go to Brighton for a week or two? I"--he was embarrassed--"I can give you the money."

"Oh, it isn't that," she explained with another gape; "I can't leave the house. Who's going to look after it while I'm gone? It's an awful drag if you haven't got a house-keeper. And if you have, you can't go away and leave everything to her! Fancy you with money to spare, though! Well, you've got to thank _me_ for that, David--your cleverness comes from _my_ side. You didn't have your father's voice, you know; if you hadn't written, I don't know what you'd have done."

He did not know either; his life would have been insupportable if he hadn't written. He looked beyond her vaguely, and nodded. "Is the house full?" he asked.

"Pretty full. They're most of them new now--Americans, and people up for a few weeks; the others 'll be coming back at the end of the month.... There's another boarding-house opened round the corner; they keep the gas full up in every room all the evening."

"As an advertisement?"

"Yes; it's stupid. Not enough people pass here in the evening to make it pay. It isn't as if it were at the seaside. Would you like a cup o' tea or anything?"

"No, thanks," he said.

"You may as well. I want a cup o' tea myself; it'll wake me up--I was just going to have forty winks when the man told me you were here."

"I'm sorry." He rang the bell. "I wish I'd come at another time."

"Oh, it doesn't matter," she returned; "there's always something.... I suppose you haven't heard from Vivian?"

"I never hear from him. I think it's nearly a year since I saw him. What is he doing?"

"He's got a first-rate berth. He left the company at the end of the last tour; you knew he was on tour with a theatrical company, didn't you? He's settled in one place now--much nicer for him than travelling all the time, a great improvement in every way." She roused herself to boast feebly about Vivian. "Not many young men of his age get into such a thing; it's a very responsible position, to be business manager of a theatre. And there's the salary all the year round--every week he's sure of so much. That's an advantage you can't hope for, eh? You may be comfortably off one year, and have nothing the next. Writing is so precarious--you never know where you are."

"I jog along," said David amiably.

"Oh yes," she allowed, "I'm sure it's wonderful, your keeping yourself as you have. And it's nice to have your book talked about. But of course there's no certainty about your profession--you can't depend on that sort of thing." She tittered. "Fame is all very well, but I'm afraid Vivian would say 'Give _me_ a regular income.' ... He'll be up on Sunday, if you'd like to see him."

"Yes, I'll come in," he answered. "What town has he gone to?"

"Beckenhampton," she said; "the Theatre Royal."

"Beckenhampton?" He looked at her wide-eyed.

"Do you know it?"

"N-no," he said; "no, I don't know it exactly. How long has he been there?"

"Oh, two or three months. He's having great times, I believe--he's so popular wherever he goes; he gets asked out to supper parties, and all that." She hesitated, toying with the keeper on her finger, as he remembered her toying in his childhood with rings that flashed. But now the ring no longer turned. "I rather fancy there's an attraction," she went on more slowly; "I hope to goodness it isn't serious! Don't let out that I said anything when you meet him; I didn't mean to mention it."

"An attraction?"

She lifted her fat shoulders impatiently. "There may be nothing in it, but young men are so soft; any girl can catch the smartest of them. It wouldn't astonish me a bit when he comes up, to hear that he's engaged. I had a gushing letter from him a few weeks ago, telling me he'd met the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. I know what that means! He wouldn't have written about her if he hadn't lost his head. And he doesn't answer my questions. It looks as if he's making an idiot of himself."

"Who is she?" asked David, in a low voice.

"He didn't say. What's the difference who she is? You may be sure she hasn't got a sixpence to bless herself with. A nice mess he'll make of his life if he doesn't take care. It's a lucky thing for you that you haven't got that sort of risk to run. 'A young man married is a man that's marred,' as Ouida says."

"Shakespeare," he said, in the same dull tone; "not Ouida."

"Was it? It's at the beginning of one of Ouida's books, I know. If your brother gets married at his age, he might as well hang himself at once."

The tremor was in his pulses still. But Beckenhampton was not a village--the coincidence was so unlikely; he kept repeating that it couldn't be.

"If his salary is such a good one, and he's fond of her----" he demurred.

"'Such a good one'? Well"--she was a shade confused--"it's good enough for him as he is; it wouldn't go far with a wife and family to keep. Besides, a man's always better off single than married; only he's so soft as soon as a pretty face comes along. Some artful minx who wants a home makes up to him, and all of a sudden he imagines he can't go through life without her. Good Lord! if a man could see into a girl's head while she's gushing about the view and pretending she's an angel. Men are taken in by every girl they meet, the fools!" Her scorn of the fools was in no wise restrained by the fact that she had captured two husbands herself. She was thinking of her son. When a woman lives to see the arts by which she gained her husband practised to ensnare her son, candour can reveal no more. Nor in the badly constructed tragedy of life is there any other situation that comes so close to poetical justice.

David found the afternoon the most irksome that he had spent at Regent's Park. Though he told himself that his misgiving was fantastic, it continued to disturb him, and while he sipped weak tea, and made perfunctory responses, he was trying to define Hilda's feeling for him, questioning whether it was in woman's nature for Hilda to write to him as he believed she wrote, and yet to be susceptible to the courtship of another man. Vivian was handsome, debonair, "so popular wherever he went." Yes, Vivian had always been popular, he remembered bitterly. Might not the passion of a lover at her side prove a stronger force than the worship of a correspondent which had never been confessed? Could she not say--might she not be happy to say--that by never a word had her letters to himself been more than the letters of a friend? Then Vivian would take her from him. Vivian, who it seemed to him in a burst of fear and jealousy had always taken everything, would rob him of her too!... But, again, the coincidence was so improbable. Besides, his mother might be wrong; she might be exaggerating the idlest fancy; perhaps Vivian had no desire to marry anyone!

He was relieved when the clock gave him an excuse to rise.

"Well, good-bye, mother." He avoided her complexion and dropped a kiss on her dyed fringe.

"Must you go?" she said. "Er--David, if you're really sure you can spare a few pounds, I'd be very glad of the money to get a new dress with. I haven't got a decent thing to put on for dinner. This blouse is so shabby I'm ashamed to sit at the table in it."

He promised to send what she wanted, and took up his hat. When his hand was on the door-knob, she asked him if he would stay to supper; but he declined the invitation. As he made his way home, he repeated more than once that his tremor was ridiculous, and assured himself that he was much amused at his folly. He smiled stiffly, to prove his amusement.... Still he wished that the week were past and Vivian had come to town. He would feel easier when he had seen Vivian.