Chapter SIX: Aunt Elizabeth

I

“It’s high time I came home again,” said Lilac. “_Look_ at your hat.”

Gillian took off her hat and looked at it. It was an old one she had retrimmed herself.

“What a funny expression ‘high time’ is,” she said. “It’s like ‘now then.’ You know what it means, but it doesn’t mean anything at all when you think about it.”

Lilac made the noise that is written down as “pish” or “tush” to convey her opinion of that remark and returned to her point. Lilac had a most feminine gift for returning to the point.

“Your clothes are past praying for, and you say ‘Goodness’ twice a day instead of once a week. You _have_ been left to yourself.”

Lilac had as evidently been left to herself, for she had come back from her honeymoon travels more emphatic and more critical, more woman of the world and more beautifully dressed than she had been able to be when the combined influence of Gillian and poverty had kept her relatively easy-going and only tentatively fashionable.

“Your hat’s a marvel,” said Gillian, “so neat and yet so gaudy. It looks expensive all over even though it’s so plain. Paris, I suppose?”

“Vienna, my dear.” Lilac was infinitely up to date: almost in front of date, Gillian thought, once more reflecting on the oddness, the strong commerciality of the phrase “up to date,” but this time keeping her comments to herself while Lilac chattered on of how _no_body went to Paris now for really new ideas in clothes. All the cleverest things came from Vienna, which was more Russian than the Russian ballet, so far as colour and decoration went.

She had brought Gillian an enormous grey fox muff and stole from Vienna and a string of clear glass beads that hung down to her knee and then ended in a cerise-and-magenta tassel to bring out the green colour of the glass.

“Just like that poem in _Georgian Poetry_,” said Gillian, “and they’ll go most wonderfully with V.V.’s flat.”

“Well, I hope you’ll wear them there,” said Lilac, “and not come to my house in them or in any other string of beads, like a savage. I’d never have got them myself. It was Toby’s idea. He said they looked like you.”

“How lovely of Toby!”

“Well,” said Lilac, “he seemed to think I should want to wear them because they reminded him of you. Men _are_ the queerest creatures.”

“Oh! Poor Toby! He wanted to be able to see them every day, and now you’ve given them to me.”

“You can wear them when Toby takes you out to dinner, and I hope he’ll be calm about it when you catch your knee in them and they break and roll about on the floor at the Berkeley or get caught in the spring-seat at a theatre. Beads,” said Lilac, “should be seen but not weared.”

“Does Toby let you make nursery jokes?”

“Toby would let me do anything so long as I didn’t prevent him getting back to England in time for fox-huntin’. We’re going to Ireland next week about horses and then back to wherever it is he’s got that horrid, cold, little house you can’t get to from anywhere.”

Lilac was on the whole discontented; a little with Toby, Gillian thought, and a little with life. She had no definite, spoken grievance except one against Gillian for not preventing the house at Seaford altogether.

“Of course, neither Toby nor I will ever go near it. Never, never, never. She’s got that ridiculous clay model all over the billiard-room table at Knightsbridge, and the Bird, looking like an owl, to explain it to us. Why ever did you let her?”

“But how could I help it?”

“Well, she says you advised her. And Seaford of all inhuman wildernesses. We could have done with a house at Ascot, and there are schools there.”

“I’m sorry. But she’d bought the house before I knew and she thought you’d like one near Glynde.”

“Pish!” said Lilac again. “And, anyway, it was you who got Bird into it. Painting all over those cauliflowers and gargoyles. It’s like a lunatic’s house. It’s worse than the Phené toy in Oakley Street.”

“Well,” said Gillian, “Jane’s going to have it in her show in Grafton Street. In the middle of the room with the portrait figures all round. It’s very amusing, and awfully clever too. She’s not made a mess of it.”

“Oh, the model’s all right as a joke, and some of Bird’s figures are very good. She’s going to be a rage. She’s the best friend you’ve got. I think you ought to drop the others.”

“Really! Lilac——”

“Yes! Don’t look at me as though I had a smut on my nose. My face is perfectly clean, and I mean what I say. You have no taste in people. Larry Browne’s all right. He belongs to quite a good family. All that living in a studio and wearing a big hat is just pose. He ought to have gone into the Home Office and done a little painting in his spare time, then you could have married him.”

“But, Lilac——”

“Oh, yes, I know you never think of how you are to get out of all this nonsense about earning your living. But I think of it for you. No one but rather an odd sort of man would marry you. Unless, of course, I can _make_ you dress properly and look at things in an ordinary common-sense way.”

“Lilac darling, I’m perfectly happy as I am. And quite ordinary enough to keep myself out of an asylum.”

“For the present. But look at the lunatics you go about with.”

“Lilac!”

“Yes. I saw you yesterday in Sloane Street with something rather like an Italian organ-grinder without the organ and the monkey. Without a hat too.”

“Oh, that was Heinrich. He plays in the Queen’s Hall orchestra.”

“Look here, Gillian. You can’t be seen about with a man who plays in a band; and Bird told me yesterday that you’d got another crony, a woman hairdresser with a wild name.”

“That’s too bad of Jane. She’s always been horrid about poor V.V. I think she’s jealous because Larry has drawn and painted her so much since he came back. She’s engaged to be married to Heinrich. They are both perfect dears.”

“Well, Jane Bird does not approve of the woman, and I’ve seen the band-player myself. Let them marry one another, by all means, as soon as possible, and then you’ll be rid of both of them.”

“No, I shan’t. They can’t marry for some time. And I’m very probably going to share a small flat with V.V., so as to be able to make a home for William. Mrs. Barraclough has given me notice for him again, and, this time, he must go.”

“Nonsense, Gillian. If you must leave the Club, go and live with Aunt Elizabeth. She’s very frail and lonely. I was up there yesterday. She asked about you. Have you been to see her lately?”

“N-no. Not since she came back from Matlock.”

“It hasn’t done her much good. And you’d far better cherish her a little and leave these fearful wildfowl you’ve collected alone. Toby and I’ll take William on if you want a home for him, There’s a conservatory in the house we saw yesterday in Norfolk Street that would suit him very well.”

“I’ll think about William, and I’ll go to see Aunt Elizabeth on Tuesday. It’s her birthday.”

“So it is. I’d almost forgotten. We shall be in Ireland. I must have some flowers sent up.”

And Lilac gathered her sable coat about her and cast a rather wistful look round the flat.

“Good-bye, Jilly dear. In some ways I envy you for being here still, in spite of the oil-lamps and the bedroom bath. You’re free, and the rooms are very peaceful, once you get up all these stairs.”

II

The air was yellow and the pavements were slimy with what might at any moment thicken into a December fog as Gillian made her way from the workshop to the Highgate omnibus, where she had spent the morning sitting to Jane. Nothing short of missing the last omnibus on a wet night ever drove her into any Tube.

She had spent a depressing morning. Jane, who never worked on the model with a sitter, had taken a few sketches and had then insisted on having lunch, in order, as she frankly confessed, to talk to Gillian. Jane was much happier since she had returned from her commissioned journey in Old Winona’s retinue. The progress from château to château had been marvellous in every aspect, whether as business and its involved and legitimate pleasures, or as the illicit delight any prolonged acquaintance with the mind and methods of that great and wonderful woman could not fail to arouse in anyone so keenly alive to the varieties of human experience as Jane Bird. But it was not only the refreshment of that change which had calmed and illuminated Jane’s spirit. There was now, as Gillian could not fail to notice, a new and a curiously peaceful understanding between her and Larry. They no longer hailed each other with torrents of esoteric abuse: indeed, they seemed to have quite wonderfully little to say to each other in public. But every now and again in general conversation it would appear that Jane or Larry possessed the answer to some question asked of one or the other, and, several times when she had been out alone or with V.V., at night, watching the moon on the river or coming home from a play on the top of an omnibus, she had seen Larry and Jane arm-in-arm strolling together deep in talk and laughter. Gillian never saw Jane at the studio when she went to fetch V.V. home from a sitting or to join her and Heinrich at supper, and Larry never came into the workshop when she was sitting herself to Jane, but it was clear that they spent a great deal of time together and that each knew every detail of the other’s work. More than once Gillian had been on the brink of asking whether Mr. Quist had taken the glove-buttoning figure home, but the question had never been spoken, and no reference to it appeared in the little descriptive catalogues of Jane’s works which they had all drawn up together in preparation for the coming exhibition of them.

But it was not of herself, nor of Larry, that Jane delivered opinions that morning.

“It’s about Heinrich, Gillian. Do you think that painted mannequin of yours is behaving properly to him?”

“V.V.? Why, yes. Why shouldn’t she?”

“Well, I don’t. Have you noticed the look in his face? His eyes get nearer together every time I see him. The bridge of his nose hardly separates them. It’s an ugly look. And he never takes his eyes off her while she’s with him.”

“I know he doesn’t. It gets on her nerves a little.”

“She shouldn’t have nerves. No woman who undertakes Heinrich has any business with nerves. He’s got more than enough for a whole family. And she won’t let him have his sparrows in, or play with mice.”

“I know. She says the cat is enough now that it has killed the canary which she _did_ like. She’s very tender-hearted.”

“Very _what_?”

“Tender-hearted, Jane. You don’t know V.V. as I do, and you are not fair to her or about her.”

“Gillian, you’re dotty about that woman. And it isn’t right. You’re too old. I know what I’m talking about. I was dotty about you two years ago. Crazy. I didn’t think of anything but how to make you look at me again. But I came through. And you were worth it. You meant something, and you never set yourself to lead me on. Do you remember the King’s daughter? You showed me the bit in that purple, locked book of yours. How did it go? ‘Let us love her or none—to choose the false in mere impatience with the true, that it is which degrades us....’ And that Vanderleyden woman won’t see you through, Gillian. There’s nothing to her, once you’ve got her colour and her bones—she’s a model, but only a model. It’s not worth it—it’s not good enough. Not for you. Larry doesn’t like it either.”

Gillian was angry.

“I wish you’d not discuss my private affairs with all sorts of people. Lilac was saying on Saturday that you’d slandered V.V. to her. She’s the only person who bothers one little bit about me, and she never says one unkind word about you.”

“Oh, all right. Lose your temper. It’s a symptom. Only when the crash comes, remember I’m like the man in the Psalms: I’ve delivered my soul.”

“Well, I always did think that was the top note of self-seeking,” said Gillian, getting up from the table and putting on her hat with emphasis, rather on one side; “and besides, it isn’t Psalms, it’s Ezekiel.”

“Pedant!” said Jane. “You are right, ‘if he turn not from his wicked way,’ which is what you’ve refused to do. And if you won’t finish your lunch you won’t. There’ll be two lemon cheese-cakes for me. Also a cream-cheese. You didn’t know that. But it’s too late now. You can’t relent and forgive me just for cream-cheese.”

“I could,” said Gillian, “but I’ve got to go and buy some chrysanthemums and get up to Highgate before it’s black dark.”

* * * * *

Outside in the raw, damp air Gillian’s temper cooled. She sat on the top of the omnibus, on the left-hand corner seat, in front, her arms full of the crisp, copper-coloured flowers, their festive winter scent filling her brain with half-remembered excitements: children’s parties; her first grown-up dance; the bouquets which came at New Year when they lived at Lausanne—mimosa and carnations or chrysanthemums always. The scented memories crowded out her resentment at Jane’s strictures as the omnibus lumbered on and the heavy air cleared and lightened with every mile. But there remained with her the half-guilty, half-puzzled sense that had beset her before.

It was half-past three before she reached the top of Highgate Hill, and there was a faint glow of sunset with a little shred of new moon dim through the watery twilight above the trees in Mrs. Mortimer’s garden, when Gillian rang the bell at the gate.

It was answered by Maggie, a devoted and entirely disrespectful retainer who had “stood up to” Aunt Elizabeth for many years and was known to be keeping a matrimonially inclined policeman at bay, until she could find another person (Maggie did not care for the word “woman,” refused to say “servant,” and considered “lady” to be an unsuitable description of the ideal she sought) fit to take charge of “the mistress.”

“I’m glad you’ve come, Miss Gillian,” said Maggie in the tone of one who could have said “and surprised,” “and I see you’ve remembered it’s the mistress’s birthday. Seventy-three she is, and looks it. She’s been far from well the last ten days and more.”

Gillian carried her flowers through the square hall where the grandfather clock, which had belonged to her own great-grandfather, ticked to the rocking of a full-rigged ship that tossed to and fro across its aged face on a painted ocean very full of waves, and opened the door of the room with the view.

Mrs. Mortimer sat in a chair by the fire, a pile of white muslin in her lap. She was hemming window-curtains for Gillian’s flat.

“Lilac told me you’d none now she’s left you,” said she, as Gillian kissed her and asked her why she tired herself with sewing in the fading light.

“How lovely of you,” said Gillian, not daring or even wishing to tell that she preferred her windows unblinded. “I believe you do it a little out of vanity because you can see without glasses.”

But when she had arranged her chrysanthemums, to which Mrs. Mortimer paid very little attention, flowers inside a house being, in her opinion, out of place and in the way, Gillian, sitting on a low stool in front of the fire, looked up at her great-aunt’s face and saw that she was very tired. And Aunt Elizabeth, looking down at the young face lifted to hers, saw a shadow there.

“Have you anything to tell me, my girl?” she said.

It was the consecrated phrase in which, ever since Gillian and Lilac could remember, she had made open confession easy for them.

“Aunt Elizabeth,” said Gillian, “did love make you unhappy?”

“The Lord,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “dealt very graciously with me and gave me the man of my choice.”

“But not for a great many years, Aunt Elizabeth.”

“He was given to me in the first moment I met him.”

“How did you know?”

The old woman was silent. Her dim eyes fixed on the glowing embers of the fire.

“By a bodily pang,” she said at last.

Gillian was startled.

“Tell me about it,” she said, taking one of the thin old hands, its blue veins dark under the transparent, silk-smooth skin, and laying her cheek in its palm. “Tell me, Aunt Elizabeth. I want so much to know.”

“I was an unbeliever in those days,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “a wicked, haughty girl, a Sabbath-breaker. I and my brothers, James and Penrhyn, would ride together twenty miles on horseback and think nothing to dance all night afterwards, and ride home again in the morning without sleep. They called us the handsome Armstrongs. James was dark like an eagle, and Penrhyn had red hair and a blue eye, piercing and terrible. Two girls pined and died when Penrhyn had looked at them only. And I was betwixt and between, cinder-colour they called my hair, and my eyes were not so grey as James’s nor so blue as Penrhyn’s; but my hair was thick and long so that I could sit in it and you could not see my hands if I put them in my lap or behind my back, and it was curly. And my eyes were well enough, even if my face was pale. Tall like a Maypole I was. ‘Long Bess Armstrong,’ they called me, and I was mad for horses and pleasure. Twice I broke my arm and once my collar-bone riding, and when I was eighteen, I dressed in Penrhyn’s breeches and stole my father’s riding-coat and won the steeplechase at Stone Crosses. My father was for sending me away to London after that, but James and Penrhyn rebelled. Neither of them would move without me to any ball or gala in the countryside; and neither of them would marry, because there was not a girl for miles around I could not put to shame in the pride of my dancing and for riding the wickedest horse anywhere in the marches. And many’s the man that would have tried for me in the face of Penrhyn’s vow that the man I married must outride him and then throw him at wrestling. But there was not one of them I would put to the test.

“But one night, as we rode home just before harvest, we came to a narrow lane that ran along a field of corn, sloping up the hillside. And the dawn was breaking and the wind ran up the cornfield in waves and shadows like hounds in full cry, and I was riding ahead because of the narrowness of the lane. And there, at the end of the lane where the hedges ended and the fields lay open, I saw a light before me, and a voice coming out of the light called me by name, ‘Elizabeth Armstrong,’ three times. And my horse heard the voice and saw the light and would not go forward. But I said nothing to the boys when they came up with me, and we rode home together laughing at the way Penrhyn spoke of what my mother had told us the day before. She had told us that she was giving the two rooms at the end of the house to a young student from Trevecca. The rooms were part of an old cottage that had been built into the main part by my grandfather when he married his third wife and had more children. My grandfather had twenty-four children, and they all lived to grow up. And this young student was coming to finish his study for a degree in theology. He was going to the Valley Farm. But smallpox had broken out there. And the pest-house was full and they had to keep three cases in the house. So my mother said she would be ashamed for a young and godly man to go there, to his death maybe, and she with more rooms in the house than we could ever fill, and the student should come to us and the payment should go just the same to Mrs. Pryce at the Farm and be towards the nursing of the sick.

“In my heart I knew that my mother was right; but I joined with James and Penrhyn in mocking at her for taking sides with a Methody man. And, as we rode on, the sun rose higher, and Penrhyn laughed and said we should come into the village a little late for church. It was a Sunday morning, and presently we could hear the bells ringing for Morning Prayer at ten o’clock. And Penrhyn said, ‘Let us ride into church and support the parson. Maybe he is too drunk again this morning to read the prayers without aid.’ But James and I would not ride our horses into the churchyard. So we got down at the gate and gave our horses to a boy to lead home and walked into church as we were, in our riding-things. I had on a green habit, with laced frills at the neck, and a black hat with a feather in it, and I stood for a moment in the porch to smell the roses that grew over it and to wait for the General Confession to be ended and the Absolution, so that we could walk into church with less scandal—it was bad enough to be going straight from our dancing and in our riding-clothes—when the congregation stood up to say the Venite. There was no singing in church in those days, my girl, till it came to the hymn, and not then if Tom and Harry Pryce had been harvesting all week and were too tired to play the flute and the cornet at ten o’clock in the morning.

“And as I stood there I saw Evan Mortimer. And he stood up in his place when he saw me. And my heart broke within me and my tongue was stiff in my mouth, and I walked straight into the church and stood beside him. And when we knelt down I prayed to God for the first time since I was a child and my mother made me pray at her knee, and my prayer was, ‘O God, give me this man.’”

“And was he the Methody student?” said Gillian.

“He was, my girl,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and he would none of me, knowing of my ungodly life. But he had not known who I was when he saw me, and by the grace of God, the desire of my flesh inflamed my soul and I believed and was saved.”

“But did you love God because of Uncle Evan?”

“God showed me first His creature who had beauty that I might desire him and so come to know Him whom no man hath at any time seen. The love of man will lead to the love of God, or to the slavery of the Devil. I served God, through Evan, and was saved. But my brother Penrhyn, who mocked at my love and would never speak to me again after he knew that Evan and I had promised marriage to each other, he went a-whoring after women and was lost.”

“I thought he went to America,” said Gillian.

“He went to America, with the Squire’s young wife; shamefully, in open sin, and died there before I married Evan. Evan had gone to Africa away from me, and I was alone, for the grace of God to work in me, when your father was born, and James’s wife—a poor and sickly creature who thought more of the new book of poems by Robert Browning than of James or of her unborn child—died. And I took the child, for the Lord had denied children to my body. Sometimes,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “when love is as great as it was between Evan and me, there is no child according to the flesh, born of it.”

“Why didn’t you go to Africa with Uncle Evan?”

“There was a time when your uncle turned from me, fearing that he was losing God in his love for me,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and until he had purged himself of that fear we remained apart. But the Lord blessed his ministry and brought us together in it at the end.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “it gets more and more difficult. I thought love always made people want to live together for ever.”

“Love,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “divides like a sword if it is only of the flesh. But when its roots in the flesh come to their flowering in the heart and in the soul, it is from everlasting to everlasting; death and the grave have no power upon it; it cannot consume away.”

Night had blackened the uncurtained windows, and the fire had died into a dull gleam as they talked; but the room was filled with the living flame of the old woman’s passion and they needed no grosser light. Gillian sat, with her head against her aunt’s knee, and listened to the faint ticking of the austere little polished granite clock that, flanked by two bronze vases, presided, from the centre of the marble mantelpiece over the gaunt, Victorian room. The locked glass doors of the bookcase shutting in volumes of sermons and the lives of John and Charles Wesley, together with the works of other latter-day saints, reflected the firelight and cast a dim flicker on the polished wood of the walnut davenport at which Mrs. Mortimer inconveniently conducted her direct and concise correspondence. A fine steel-engraving after Rubens, _The Descent from the Cross_, hung between the two windows, and a coloured print of Turner’s _Golden Bough_ occupied the opposite wall, hanging over a Victorian sofa on which the hardiest frame could find no repose without the aid of the cushions which Mrs. Mortimer kept upstairs in a cupboard, except at such times as illness warranted their temporary release.

Gillian knew now why no vestiges of her African life appeared in Mrs. Mortimer’s parlour. The carved and woven trophies of heathen art, the pink-lipped tropic shells, the plaited mats that proclaimed the past in Mrs. Middleton’s flat, were absent from her friend’s retreat. The heathen in his blindness had been to Elizabeth Mortimer the necessary means through which God had worked to bring peace to Evan Mortimer’s soul. She had helped to clothe the negro nakedness; she had taught the African girl to read the New Testament and to substitute the name of Jesus in her automatic prayers for those of the more awful though not less blood-stained deities of her native religion, but she had not let her eyes be beguiled by the ingenuous art of her proselytes. Her pupils had taught her nothing. She went out to preach the Gospel in a strange place, and, that duty accomplished, she returned to wait the day of reunion with her husband in surroundings as removed from the wild folly of her youth as they were untouched by the missionary adventure of her middle life.

Gillian had known for many years that under the rigid performance of such duties to society at large and to the members of her own family in particular as Aunt Elizabeth felt called upon to discharge there burned a deeper, more individual flame. She was accustomed to the sight of Evan Mortimer’s portrait, a miniature, faded but still clear with the fine, grave beauty the artist had seen in the ascetic face and had transferred to the yellowing ivory. It lay, in its worn leather case, beside the Bible and the clean, lavender-scented, always folded handkerchief Mrs. Mortimer kept with a carafe of cold water on a table by her bedside. She knew that her aunt entertained a living belief that her husband, clothed in the immortalized flesh of his mortality, answering to his earthly name, speaking with his human voice, would be waiting for her when, in a glorified but still tangible shape, she, too, should ford the river of death (“cross Jordan” was Aunt Elizabeth’s phrase) and be welcomed on the farther side, knew, too that it was in the strength of this conviction that she was possessing her soul through the years of waiting. But in Gillian’s mind, relegated to the class, formed in childhood, of impertinent questions which it was not her business to ask, the actual nature of the feeling on which this expectation was founded had escaped definition. That Aunt Elizabeth should ever have been shaken by, that she should still openly admit the dominion of physical passion, was to Gillian an amazing discovery. And the most amazing part of it was that the revelation left Aunt Elizabeth herself untouched, the same emphatic Puritan as she had always been; but love, this thing of the body from which she had until now turned her timid thought, became exalted and magnified “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting one altogether.” What was it she was saying? “And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

“Aunt Elizabeth. Do you know, you’ve made me think of the Athanasian Creed?”

“I daresay, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth. But she was sunk in a dream, and Gillian was not sure that she had heard her.

And presently Maggie came in and lit the incandescent gas-burners, one on each side of the fireplace, and drew, the long, red, repp curtains across the windows and stirred the fire and said tea was ready in the dining-room, and she hoped Miss Gillian wouldn’t go making her auntie talk too much or she’d have another of her bad nights again.

III

When she got back to the Club, Gillian crept up to her flat very softly so as not to be heard of William, whose cage stood in the outer of the double-rooms on the courtyard side, and let herself into the single-room on the street side of the building which she still kept as a bedroom, though, strictly speaking, she should have given it up when Lilac left. She did not want William’s possible song of welcome or the light in one of the courtyard windows to announce her return. She wanted, for this one evening, to be alone, free from V.V.’s kindness and cherishing, free from her interminable chatter, and from the necessity of responding to the ardour of her impulsive embraces. She might, of course, find one of V.V.’s notes—“Darling, put a light in the window when you come in and I’ll come across”—but this she would—she must, for once, ignore. If only she did not meet V.V., or find her waiting on the landing.

But there was no eager shadow waiting on the darkened staircase when she let herself in after closing-time, no three-cornered note fell out from the letters in her letter-box when she unlocked it, almost furtively, outside her bedroom door. And, perverse as she felt it to be, Gillian was surprised, disappointed, hurt at this failure of the very importunity she had tried to avoid.

She had not seen V.V. before going out in the morning: it was quite possible that she had gone to Queen’s Hall and that Heinrich had taken her back to supper at the studio after the Symphony Concert that evening. She hoped so. She hoped so much that Jane was wrong about V.V. making Heinrich unhappy. It was strange to think that V.V. and Aunt Elizabeth were both women, and that both of them used the same word and meant such different things when they spoke of loving. “But, then,” said Gillian as she drew the blankets up above her ears, “I suppose Uncle Evan must have been extremely unlike Heinrich.”

Yesterday’s threat of fog had established itself in suffocating fulfilment when Gillian woke next morning.

By three o’clock it had so blinded the eyes and irritated the throat of everybody in the school in Buckingham Palace Road that Miss de Stormont declared the last lecture suspended and sent her students home an hour and a half before the usual time. Gillian groped her way back to Chelsea on foot, all the omnibuses having given up attempting to run at noon. She had not had time to see V.V. that morning, but as she came out of the fog to the railings by the gateway to the Club she knew that she wanted nothing so much as to find V.V. with a huge fire and tea waiting for her when she got upstairs. “And if she’s not in my flat, I shall go over to Thirty-Six,” said Gillian to herself.

But she was so sure that V.V. would be waiting for her in her own rooms that she tried the door on the top landing without unlocking it. It was locked. V.V. had not come over. Gillian propped her dispatch-case against the wall on her lifted knees as she groped in it for her latch-key. A small movement behind the curtain which shut off the scullery corridor from the landing made her pause before she could find the key in the darkness on which the single gas-jet in its wire cage only threw more obscuring shadows.

“Who’s there?” she called, and was a little frightened at the note of fear in her own voice.

A shadow detached itself from the gloom.

“It is I,” said a reedy voice.

“Heinrich. What are you doing without an overcoat in this weather?”

“I come for V.V.,” said the thin voice sternly. “You will please give her up to me now.”

“Oh, I thought she must be with you,” said Gillian.

“You know she is here,” said Heinrich.

But when the door was unlocked Gillian’s two rooms were dark and untenanted. No fire had been lit in either, though fires were laid in both.

Gillian lit two candles and put a match to the fire in the outer sitting-room.

“Will you stay and have tea here,” she asked, “or will you go over to V.V.’s flat? You see she is not in mine.”

“V.V. is somewhere wiz you. She is not in her flat. She has not been zere since before yesterday. She is wiz you.”

“Don’t be silly, Heinrich. I haven’t seen V.V. since Sunday. Why—what _have_ you got?”

“A pistol—wiz bullets in him.”

“Goodness! Is it yours? Can you work it?”

“No. I do not know how to work it. But I can pull somesing till it works himself. It belongs to Larry. I bring it here to frighten you. I am,” said Heinrich, “frightened of it myself.”

“Well,” said Gillian, “I’m not exactly frightened. But you’d better put it down on the table and have some tea. If it’s Larry’s it won’t be loaded. Larry knows better than to let you have loaded pistols to play with.”

“Larry does not know I play wiz it. He has gone wiz Jane up the hill out of ze fog. And I come here for V.V.”

“I’ve told you V.V. isn’t here. I’ve not seen her since Sunday. What makes you think she’s here?”

“She tell me so herself. She said to me ‘whenever you cannot find me I shall be wiz Gillian.’”

“Oh, she just meant I might know where she was or she might be here. Are you sure she is not in her own flat?”

“I know she is not. She tell me she is wiz you.”

Gillian was cross. It was cold and foggy and she wanted her tea and Heinrich was being very obstinate and trying.

“Look here, Heinrich,” she began, and then, in the light of the candles which were burning higher now, she saw his face. Jane had been right. He had a curious look. His eyes _were_ odd, almost squinting, with deep, dark hollows on each side of the nose so that they seemed to have grown nearer together.

“Let’s go over to the other house and look for her,” she said.

“I will look first for her in the books-room please,” said Heinrich.

So Gillian let him look, and carried a candle into the inner room to show him that V.V. was not there. But all it showed them was the empty, red chesterfield and the Great Fortuna who danced on her tight-rope in the flickering light.

“Come,” said Gillian, “we shall find her in her own room.”

The doors of the large and of the smaller rooms in the house across the courtyard were locked and there were several letters visible through the glass of V.V.’s uncleared letter-box.

“We’ll ask Mrs. Gordon if she knows where V.V. is,” Gillian decided as they came downstairs together. Heinrich shivered a little. He was wearing neither overcoat nor hat. “You must put that weapon in your pocket though,” Gillian admonished him. “Mrs. Gordon would be scared past speech if she were to see such a thing.”

But Mrs. Gordon had seen nothing of V.V. for some days.

“I see her on Saturday wen she paid her book,” said Mrs. Gordon, “and yet again at middle-day Monday wen she went out with that ’at with the red feather in it, if you take me, miss, the oxydized one like the ’at Miss Gordon wears of an afternoon. But since then I’ve seen nothing of her and she’s not been having any meals from the kitching.”

“Did she leave her keys with you?”

“’Arry!” screamed Mrs. Gordon suddenly down the kitchen stairs to the top of which she had mounted in reply to Gillian’s ring. “Wot abart Number Thirty-Six?”

Mr. and Mrs. Gordon always spoke of the tenants as warders are said to speak of the convicts in their charge.

“Bin away since Chewsdy,” boomed a voice from below, “left no key downstairs neither.”

“There now.” Mrs. Gordon was satisfied that her statements had corroboration. “Wot did I say. She’s off after that dog of hers again, I suppose. Makes as much trouble as if ’e was a Christian.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Gordon. I dare say that’s what has happened,” and Gillian closed the door although Mrs. Gordon betrayed symptoms of her being able to continue the conversation further. Gillian did not wish Heinrich to be drawn into it, hoped he had escaped Mrs. Gordon’s notice altogether, above all did not wish his pistol to be remarked. She didn’t for one moment think the pistol was loaded or feel that Heinrich himself was dangerous; but he was so agitated and unhappy that she knew he couldn’t bear such a fuss and clamour as the discovery that he bore firearms would arouse in the Gordons’ domain. “Suppose they set Crack on him,” thought Gillian, “as they would have done on that poor little cat. He’d break.” Heinrich did indeed look strained and taut; Gillian had never before realized what the expression “reaching the breaking-point” really meant.

Out in the courtyard, in the angles of lamplight that came down from above the doors of the two houses, he was almost invisible, a faint shade in the fog which was moving and lifting as the tide set down-stream in the river.

“Heinrich dear,” said Gillian, “she’s not here. She’s probably been held up in the fog in Essex. Hadn’t you better go back to the studio? Perhaps she’s waiting for you there.”

“She told me she will always be wiz you,” persisted Heinrich in the thin, high voice.

“I’ll come and tell you or I’ll send her if she’s not too tired, the minute she comes, if she does come to me, to-night. But I don’t think she will. There’ll be a letter from her in the morning. Perhaps even to-night. Perhaps there’s one waiting for you at the studio this very minute.”

“I shall find a letter if I go back?” asked the voice anxiously.

“Yes, I think so. Anyway, go and see. And get an overcoat and a muffler if you come out again. And a hat, Heinrich.”

Gillian went with him to the gateway of the Club and watched him drift away and vanish into the dim mists by the river. Then she went up to her own flat again.

The fire she had kindled hastily was out, quenched by the heavy air, and the candles burnt sullenly in the yellow stillness. It was getting late; a clattering of dishes on the lower landings announced the serving of dinner. Gillian decided to leave the fire alone and to eat her dinner as quickly as possible without taking off her outdoor clothes. It was a lonely, dismal thing to do, but she intended to make up for it by having the largest fire her bedroom grate would hold, and a double quantity of hot water for her bath and to devote an hour to washing the fog out of herself before she went to bed. She would read _Emma_ till the last post came. _Emma_ was just the right book for a foggy night. She would enjoy getting too hot eating Mr. Knightley’s strawberries, she would avoid the long cold drive with the proposing Mr. Elton, and she would look up all Mr. Woodhouse’s gruels. She would put on her old, padded, silk dressing-gown, shabby but faded into such a satisfying, dim, rose-colour, and sit in the big basket-chair which would go on giving out companionable creaks all night afterwards, and there would be no Lilac to grumble at the noise it made, saying that each creak woke her out of a dream it sounded so like a pistol-shot at night. Poor Heinrich and his borrowed pistol. She hoped he was all right and that V.V. had either gone to the studio or written to him. Anyhow it was warm at the studio with that white porcelain stove that Larry had brought home with him, each tile painted with a different bird on a flowering branch; and the little cat would be there to keep him company. Gillian was glad to think he had the little cat.

Mabel, clearing away the dinner-dishes, agreed to bring up two large cans of bath-water and volunteered the news that the fog had blowed off to Battersea. She also offered to light the bedroom fire seeing that she must have laid the sitting-room one badly that morning for it to have gone out as it had done. This was kind of Mabel, for it was not her duty to light, only to lay the fires in the various rooms she waited on. But, ever since the day when Gillian had gone unexpectedly into her scullery and had found the postman kissing Mabel behind the curtains and had told neither Mrs. Barraclough nor Mrs. Gordon, Mabel had done a great many little services of that kind for Number Seven.

So Gillian settled down in the big basket-chair with _Emma_ and _Songs before Sunrise_ in the new Pineapple Edition; shrugged her shoulders luxuriously up and down in the soft silk of her dressing-gown; toasted her feet at the big fire and waited for the last post and for the two cans of boiling water that would come up just before the house was closed for the night.

But there was no letter from V.V. by the last post and when Mabel staggered into the room, wreathed in clouds of steam from the two huge cans she had carried upstairs at ten o’clock, she said that Miss Vanderleyden’s flat was still empty.

“Maybe,” said Mabel hopefully, “she’s met with a haxident. Lots of people is run over in these ere fogs you know, miss.”

And William, from under the baize cover which kept him warm and silent in his corner for the night, roused by Mabel’s familiar voice, stirred on his perch and gave his only too realistic imitation of Mabel’s loud, persistent sniff.

IV

It was eleven o’clock. Gillian had had her bath and the round shallow tin which V.V. had only just re-enamelled pink inside and bright blue out, was still full of fragrant soapsuds iridescent in the firelight and whispering to themselves with a little, soft, hissing noise of tiny bubbles as they coalesced and broke. She had put the lamp on a table by the window so that her shadow should not fall on the blind, and she stood in front of the fire, her feet rosy on the blue bath-mat, her arms raised to take the pins out of her hair.

A few small flames, blue and transparent, moved softly, flowing together like liquid mercury across the blackened surface of the still unburnt coal that arched the ruddy caverns of the fire from which an even glow enveloped her as she stood, supple and tingling from the water. Her bath-towel hung drying over a chair on one side of the fireplace, her nightgown threaded with two coloured ribbons, mauve and blue this time, lay warming on another. She hunched one shoulder and rubbed her chin against its rounded smoothness and she saw her shadow cast by the firelight on the white wall behind her. She shook her head to free the coils of her hair. They slid down her back, two thick ropes warm and faintly scented with camomile-flower tea blended with an imprisoned memory of the day’s fog. Taking an end in each hand she turned her back to the fire and, holding out her arms to their full length, she shook out her hair so that it fell slowly and made a great fan-shaped shadow on the wall. She ran to the dressing-table to take a comb, stilting along on the top of each great-toe like a ballet-dancer, and then, returning to the zone of warmth and firelight, she combed and disentangled and pulled away the knots until her hair hung straight and smooth hiding her breast and shoulders in a moving veil. Her face peered at her, laughing at its own reflection in a little mirror framed in black, carved ivy-leaves which hung above the fireplace between a white, china rabbit and an old, green, glass door-stop, all three cherished relics of her childhood. The tick of the falling ash in the grate; the creaking of the wicker-chair on the cushions of which _Emma_ still lay, open in the middle of the Box Hill party; the swish of a passing taxi in the street below muffled by the closed window and drawn curtains, seemed like little desultory tunes played to the accompaniment of a silence that was, like a ray of light that twists together all the colour of a rainbow, only the gathering together of distant, undistinguishable clamour of many sounds. Gillian, alone in her closed room, its white walls gilded and rosy with lamp- and firelight, its warm air laden with the clean scent of soap and water and violet-powder and loosened hair which in five minutes would be chased away by the cold night-air when she opened her window and got into bed, felt herself caught into a bliss of solitude, safe, anonymous, ignored. She was alone, alone. No claims, no duty, no criticism could touch her. The disfiguring humiliation of the clothes she could never quite wear as other people wore the same, or slightly better chosen raiment, was no longer about her. She was free, and fine and lovely. She cupped her chin in her hands and saw in the mirror how the point of each shoulder broke through the cloud of hair hanging over it, like a young moon in an outcast sky. She shook back her hair and, with a hand on each hip, bent her body backwards till she felt her hair touch her ankles. She stretched up her arms till the shadow of her hands on the ceiling almost met the shadow of the chair on which her bath-towel hung. She made a rabbit of her hands, as children do, and it scampered round the walls; she played tricks with her shadows, the tall one on the wall opposite the fire, and the wavering one by the door, cast by the lamp which was flickering and dying down because its oil was nearly spent. She tried to make them meet and become one shadow. She stood on one leg with the palm of her foot over her straightened knee and let the light shine through the arch; she tried to look through the arch and almost slipped and fell. As she straightened herself again she remembered that it was Lilac who did that, and that, even when she was twelve, she had never succeeded in doing it three times running, herself. “I’m getting too old to do it at all,” she said and put out her hand to take her nightgown.

* * * * *

There was a sudden rush of cold air into the room as the door opened and closed quickly again shutting V.V. in.

Gillian clutched at her nightgown and tried to slip it on.

“Don’t, don’t,” laughed V.V., “I love you as you are, you witch,” and she slipped across the room and pulled the thin cambric till it tore across.

“V.V.! how dare you!” said Gillian, and she wrapped herself from chin to toe in the warm bath-towel, folding her hair in with it in her haste and indignation.

V.V. sat down in the basket-chair, throwing _Emma_ on the floor beside her with no concern for the crumpling pages.

“Have you missed me?” she said.

“Of course I have,” said Gillian, surprised to feel herself trembling as she stood holding the bath-towel round her like a shawl. “Have you been with Heinrich?”

“No. Not since Monday. I had a quarrel with him on Monday. I’ve kept away from both of you on purpose since.”

V.V. was pale and tired. She had evidently been out in the fog all day for her hair hung damp and heavy under the brim of her hat and there were black smudges on her imperfectly powdered face.

“Poor Heinrich has been here in a dreadful state of anxiety this evening,” said Gillian.

“Has he? The little fool.”

“Oh, V.V.! He was really distressed about you. He thought you were with me.”

“So I am.”

“Yes, now, but this was between five and six.”

“Well, he knows I’m with you now.”

“Oh, then you have seen him.”

“No, not yet. But I’m going to.”

V.V. got up out of the creaking chair and in two swift strides had crossed the narrow room and was at the window. She pulled aside the curtains and threw up the sash. “Come here,” she said to Gillian as she leaned out over the sill.

Gillian stumbled in her heavy swathing to V.V.’s side.

“Look there. Did you ever see such an idiot,” said V.V.

Gillian leaned out beside her and looked. The fog had cleared off and a fine, chill rain was falling. Down on the pavement on the opposite side of the street, standing under a lamp-post Heinrich waited looking up at the lighted window. He was still without hat or overcoat and even from the fifth story Gillian could see how sharp and white his face was.

“Go home, Hinerik,” called V.V. “I told you I’d be here,” and dragging Gillian back with her she slammed the window down again and drew the curtains.

“V.V., what are you doing?” said Gillian, her teeth chattering with the sudden cold.

“Teaching him his place,” said V.V. sullenly. “I told him on Monday that you and I were going to live together in a flat of our own——”

“But, V.V.——”

“Yes, we are. You know we are. Well, he didn’t like it.”

“But of course he didn’t——”

“You be quiet. I told him, like it or not, that’s what I was going to do. So then he said I thought more of you than I did of him and I said, yes, and had done from the beginning——”

“Oh, V.V., how could you?”

“Well, it’s true—and it’s time Master Hinerik made up his mind to it. And I said you knew it.”

“That was a lie, V.V.”

“Oh, was it? Of course you knew it. Haven’t I been with you day after day and night after night when he was alone or hanging about in the courtyard till old Gordon turned him out——”

“V.V.! V.V.!”

“Well, I said if he couldn’t see what was as plain as the nose on his silly face I’d tell him. And I did tell him. I told him I’d always gone with girls and that you were worth ten of any boy, let alone a little Dago like him. What are you crying about, Gillian? It’s the plain truth.”

“It don’t know what you _mean_, V.V. You can’t feel the same about me as you did about Heinrich when you were going to marry him.”

“Oh, well, not the same, but I’d sooner live with any girl than with him. And I said we were going to Ostend together for Christmas.”

“You know we’re not. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

“Well, it won’t be the last. I’ve been down to Epping and paid off the rent of that flat so’s I can go back there all right—not to the flat, we’ll go to an hotel. And I stayed on to make you worry, darling. Did you worry about your V.V.?”

It was amazing, it was sickening, but V.V. was clearly unable to realize how what she had told was affecting Gillian.

“V.V., what brought Heinrich up here again to-night? How did you know he’d be there?”

“He’s there most nights,” said V.V., “and I wrote to him from Epping this morning to make sure. I told him I’d be coming home to give you your bath. He’d get it by the last post.”

Gillian felt herself turning giddy. She put out one hand to steady herself on the back of a chair, and the bath-towel slipped from her shoulder loosening a strand of hair with it.

“Oh, you darling,” said V.V., “take off the horrid ugly towel and let V.V. brush out your hair and make you all nice and comfy.”

“If you dare to come near me,” said Gillian, and she choked between each word. “If you dare to touch me I’ll ring the night-bell and have the Gordons and Mrs. Barraclough up to take you out of my room. I’m going to dress and go to Heinrich now, myself. He’s ill, he’s nearly mad.”

“Oh, spitfire!” said V.V., still cheerful but a little uneasy, “and you can’t go to a man’s studio in the middle of the night, you naughty one. Shocking!”

“You shall come too,” said Gillian. “Sit down in the basket-chair and wait for me.”

Trembling and sick she dressed hastily, twisting her hair up anyhow and pulling a knitted cap over it to keep it together.

“Now,” she said, when she had found the keys of the outside door and gate, “are you ready?”

“I’m cold and hungry and tired,” whimpered V.V., “and Hinerik will only be cross.”

But Gillian had no pity for V.V.’s weariness.

* * * * *

It was some minutes before they could get the high barred gate under the archway open. The lock was often hard to deal with when two or three people had locked and unlocked it on one evening and V.V., at any rate, had come in since it had been closed at ten by Gordon. But Gillian was not to be hindered by a lock. Finally the key turned and the gate swung open.

“I’ll leave it unlocked in case we can’t get in again,” she said, pulling it to gently.

They set off over the bridge, but Gillian could not make V.V. hurry. She protested that she was dog-tired and once or twice she stopped and leaned against the parapet and really did seem to be exhausted. The night-rain on her already rain-soaked clothing was cold and heavy. But still Gillian had no pity. There was no room in her aching mind for any trouble but Heinrich’s. She had turned him out dazed with misery, had let him go wavering off into the fog to find V.V.’s letter. And he had stood there under the street-lamp while she was sleeking her skin and playing silly games with her shadow, staring up at her window, so numb with despair that he had not even seen V.V. herself as she crept into the Club an hour ago.

The ragged wooden gate of the studio gardens was unlatched and flapping feebly on its hinges in the wind. But there was no light in any of the studio windows. Some of them were uninhabited except in the daytime, and the occupants of the others were either in bed or abroad on their private occasions. The blue door Larry had painted was locked and no gleam from within came through any crack over the fanlight.

“He’s gone to bed,” said V.V. “I told you so.”

“He’s not asleep if he is in bed,” said Gillian, and she knocked at the door. She knocked first with her knuckles, then hammered with a stone she found in the gravel of the path. She called him by name. “Heinrich, Heinrich. It’s Gillian. V.V.’s come to you.” She rattled at the door-handle; she tried to climb on the ledge of the small high window, but it was too narrow to hold her foot. A window was opened by some disturbed sleeper in one of the houses that backed on to the studio gardens, but the only sound that came from behind the locked and bolted door was the faint, melancholy mewing of the little tortoiseshell cat.

“He’s not there,” said V.V. “I knew it was no good coming. He’s prob’ly gone off to some other studio where there’s a party. Oh, do come home. You’ll catch your death of cold and so shall I.”

“I shall come down again first thing in the morning,” said Gillian. “I believe he’s in there all the time.”

“With that screaming cat,” said V.V., “just like him.”

* * * * *

But the next morning there was a telegram from Maggie.

“Please come at once. The Mistress has been taken seriously ill.”

* * * * *

When Gillian got to Highgate, Aunt Elizabeth was lying dead in her chair, her hands stiffening round the leather case in which the miniature of Evan Mortimer was closed. And the luminous, still smile that the living never wear raised the corners of her mouth and lifted her shadowed eyelids into an angel’s beauty.