“TO LOVE”
CHAPTER I
| “Oh, but the door that waits a friend Swings open to the day. There stood no warder at my gate To bid love stand or stay.” |
“You don’t believe in marriage, and I can’t afford to marry”—Gilbert Stanning laughed, but the sound was not very mirthful and his eyes, as he glanced at his companion, were uneasy and not quite honest. “We are the right sort of people to drift together, aren’t we, Joan?” His hands as he spoke were restless, fidgeting with a piece of string which he tied and untied repeatedly.
Joan Rutherford sat very straight in her chair, her eyes looking out in front of her. His words had called just the faintest tinge of colour to her cheeks. It was not exactly a beautiful face, but it was above everything else lovable and appealing. Joan was twenty-three, yet she looked still a child; the lines of her face were all a little indefinite, except the obstinacy of her chin and the frankness of her eyes. Her one claim to beauty, indeed, lay in those eyes; wide, innocent, unfathomable, sometimes green, sometimes brown flecked with gold. They seemed to hint at tragedy, yet they were far more often laughter-filled than anything else. For the rest, Joan was an ordinary independent young lady of the twentieth century who had lived in London “on her own” for six months.
How her independence had come about is a complicated story. It had not been with the approval of her people; the only people she possessed being an old uncle and aunt who lived in the country. All Joan’s nearer relations were dead; had died when she was still a child; Uncle John and Aunt Janet had seen to her bringing up. But at twenty-two and a-half Joan had suddenly rebelled against the quiet monotony of their home life. She had broken it to them gently at first, with an obstinate resolve to get her own way at the back of her mind; in the end, as is usually the case when youth pits itself against age, she had won the day. Uncle John had agreed to a small but adequate allowance, Aunt Janet had wept a few rather bitter tears in private, and Joan had come to London to train as a secretary, according to herself. They had taken rooms for her in the house of a lady Aunt Janet had known in girlhood, and there Joan had dutifully remained. It was not very lively, but she had a sense of gratitude in her heart towards Aunt Janet which prevented her from moving. Joan was not thinking of all this as she sat there, nor was she exactly seeing the sweep of grass that spread out in front of them, nor the flowering shrubs on every side. Hyde Park was ablaze with flowers on this hot summer’s day and in addition a whole bed of heliotrope was in bloom just behind their chairs. The faint sweet scent of the flowers mixed with Joan’s thoughts and brought a quick vision of Aunt Janet. But more deeply still her mind was struggling with a desire to know what exactly it was that swayed her when Gilbert Stanning spoke to her, or when—as more often than not—he in some way or other contrived to touch her. She had met him first at a dance that she had been taken to by another girl and she had known him now about four months. It was strange and a little disturbing the tumult his eyes waked in her heart. The first time he had kissed her, one evening when they had been driving home from the theatre in a taxi, she had turned and clung to him, because suddenly it had seemed as if the whole world was [Pg 11]sweeping away from her. Gilbert had taken the action to mean that she loved him; he had never wavered from that belief since. He possessed every spare minute of her days, he kissed her whenever he could, and Joan never objected. Only oddly, at moments such as this, her mind would suddenly push forward the terse argument:
“Do you love him, or is it just the little animal in you that likes all he has to give?”
Joan was often greatly disturbed about what she called the beast side of her. During her year in London, under the guidance of another girl far older and wiser than herself, she had plunged recklessly into all sorts of knowledge, gleaned mostly from books such as Aunt Janet and even Uncle John had never heard of, far less read. So Joan knew that there is a beast side to all human nature, and she was for ever pausing to probe this or that sensation down to its root. Her books had taught her other theories too, and very young, very impetuous by nature, Joan rushed to a full acceptance of the facts over which older women were debating. The sanctity of marriage, for instance, was a myth invented by man because he wished to keep women enslaved. Free love was the only beautiful relationship that could exist between the sexes. Frankness and free speech between men and women was another rule Joan asserted, in pursuance of which she had long since threshed out the complicated question of marriage with Gilbert. It was all rather childish and silly, yet pathetic beyond the scope of tears, if you looked into Joan’s sunlit eyes and caught the play of dimples round her mouth. Rather as if you were to come suddenly upon a child playing with a live shell.
What Gilbert Stanning thought of it all is another matter; Joan with all her book-learned wisdom had not fathomed his character. He was a man about thirty-two, good-looking, indolent and selfish. He had just enough money to be intensely comfortable, provided he spent it all on himself, and Gilbert certainly succeeded in being comfortable. There had been a good many women in Gilbert’s life of one kind and another, but he had never known anyone like Joan before. At times her startling mixture of knowledge and innocence amazed him, and she had fascinated him from the first. He was a man easily fascinated by the little feminine things in a woman. The way Joan’s hair grew in curls at the nape of her neck fascinated him, the soft red of her mouth, the way the lashes lay like a spread-out fan on her cheeks and the quick changing lights and colours in those eyes themselves. With Gilbert, when he wanted a thing he generally got it, by fair means or foul; for the moment he wanted Joan passionately, almost insanely. But the way in which she made the path easy for his desire sometimes startled him; he could not make up his mind whether she was playing some very deep game at his expense or whether she really loved him to the exclusion of all caution.
It was this problem which he had been more or less trying to solve this afternoon. At Joan’s continued silence he leaned forward and put his hand over hers where they lay on her lap.
“What are you dreaming of, little girl?” he asked.
The odd flutter which his touch always caused was shaking Joan’s heart; she tried, however, to face him indifferently, summoning up a smile.
“I was thinking,” she corrected, “not dreaming.”
“Well, the thoughts, then,” asked the man, his fingers moved caressingly up and down her hand, “what were they?”
“I was thinking,” began Joan slowly; her eyes fell from his and she stirred restlessly. “What did you mean just now when you spoke about drifting together?” she asked.
“Little Miss Pretence,” he whispered, “as if you didn’t know what I meant. If I were well off,” he said suddenly (perhaps for the moment he really meant it), “I would make you marry me whether you had new ideas about it or not.”
“Being well off wouldn’t have anything to do with it,”[Pg 13] Joan answered, “it is more degrading to marry for money than anything else.”
“Sometimes I believe you think that we are degrading altogether,” the man said; he watched the colour creep into her face, “God knows we are not much to boast of, and that is the truth.”
Joan struggled with the problem in her mind. “There ought not to be anything degrading about love,” she said finally, and this time it was his eyes that fell away from hers.
For a little they sat silent, Joan, for some reason known only to herself, fighting against a strong inclination to cry. Gilbert had taken away his hands, he sat back in his chair, his feet thrust out, head down, eyes glooming at the dust. Joan stole a glance at him and felt a sudden intense admiration for the beauty of his clean-cut profile, his sleek, well-groomed head. Instinctively she put out a timid hand and touched him.
“Are you angry with me about something?” she asked.
It may have been that during that pause Gilbert had been forming a good resolution with all that was best in him to keep from spoiling this girl’s life. Her eyes perhaps had touched on some slumbering chord of conscience. Her movement though, the little whispered words, drove all thoughts except the ones which centred round his desire from his mind.
“Joan,” he said quickly, his hands caught at hers again, “let us stop playing this game of make-believe. Let us face the future one way or another. I love you, I want you. If you love me, come to me, dear, as you say there can be nothing degrading in love. Let us live our lives together in the new best way.”
It was all clap-trap nonsense and he did not believe a word of it, but the force of his passion was unmistakable. It frightened and held Joan.
“You mean——” she whispered.
“I mean that I want you to come and live at my place,”[Pg 14] he answered. “I have a decent little flat, as you know. That is not living on my money, O proud and haughty one”—he was so sure of his victory that he could afford to laugh—”you shall buy your own food if you like. And you shall be free, as free as you are now, and—I, Joan,” his voice thrilled through her, “I shall love you and love you and love you till you waken to see the world in quite a new light. Joan!”
His face was very close against hers, the scent of the heliotrope had grown on the sudden stronger and more piercingly sweet, perhaps because the sun had vanished behind the distant line of trees and a little breeze from the oncoming night was blowing across the flower-beds towards them. The quick-gathering twilight seemed to be shutting them in; people passed along the path, young sweethearting couples too happy in each other to notice anyone else. The tumult in Joan’s mind died down and grew very still, a sense of well-being and content invaded her heart.
“Yes”—she spoke the word so softly he hardly heard—”I’ll come, Gilbert.” Then she threw back her head a little and laughed, gay, confident laughter. “It will be rather fun, won’t it?” she said.
CHAPTER II
| “Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we pay for it full worth. We have it only when we are half earth, Little avails that coinage to the old.” |
George Meredith.
It was not quite so much “rather fun” as Joan had expected. It had, she discovered, its serious and unpleasant side. Serious, because of the strange undreamt-of woman that it awoke within her, and unpleasant because of the deceit and the telling of lies which Gilbert insisted it must[Pg 15] involve. Joan hated deceit, she had one of those natures that can never be really happy with an unconfessed lie on their mind.
Gilbert won her to do as he thought necessary, first by persuasion and then by using the power which he had discovered he could wield over her by his touch.
“For my sake, darling,” he argued, “it is all right for us because we understand each other, but the world would certainly describe me as a cad.”
So for his sake Joan told Mrs. Thomas, with whom she had been living, that she had accepted a residential post as private secretary; packed up her boxes and took her departure amidst a shower of good wishes and warnings as to how she was to hold her own and not be put upon. To Aunt Janet, with a painful twinge of regret, Joan wrote the same lie. She wanted to tell the truth to Aunt Janet more even than she wanted to live it out aloud to herself. The memory of Aunt Janet’s face with its kindly deep-set eyes kept her miserable and uncomfortable, and the home letters brought no more a feeling of pleasure, only a sense of shame and distaste.
How silly it was to connect shame with what she and Gilbert had chosen as life! Yet, unfortunately for her peace of mind, the word was constantly reverting to her thoughts. “It is the telling lies that I am ashamed of,” she would argue hotly to herself, and she would shut her heart to the still small voice and throw herself because of it with more zest than ever into their life together.
Gilbert’s flat was high up in one of the top stories of a block of buildings which fronts on to Knightsbridge, bright, airy and cheerful. Not too big, “Just room for the two of us and we shut the world outside,” as Gilbert took pleasure in saying. It only consisted of four rooms, their bedroom and dressing-room, the sitting-room and Gilbert’s smoking-room, a place that he talked vaguely of working in and where he could entertain his men friends, without bothering Joan, when they called to see him.[Pg 16]
The windows of their bedroom opened out over the green of the Park. Sometimes the scent of the heliotrope crept up even as far as that; whenever it did Joan would have to hold her breath and stand quite still because the fragrance brought—not Aunt Janet now—but Gilbert before her. It had blown in just like that the first night she had been in the room; the memories it could rouse were bewildering, intoxicating, and yet … Joan would have to push the disturbing thoughts from her and run to find Gilbert if he were anywhere in their tiny domain, to perch on the arm of his chair and rub her face against his coat. His presence could drive away the vague feeling of uneasiness, his hands could win her back to placid contentment or wake in her the restless passionate desire which she judged to be love.
It had been on one of these occasions that, running to find Gilbert, she had flung open the door of his smoking-room and got well inside before she discovered that he had some men with him. Gilbert lifted his head with a frown, that she noticed, while the guests struggled to their feet. There was a little silence while they all looked at her, then, with a muttered excuse, she retreated, closing the door behind her. But before it quite shut she heard one of the men laugh and say:
“Hulloa, Stanning, so that is the secret of our bachelor flat is it? thought you had been lying very low this last two months.”
She did not catch Gilbert’s reply, she only knew that the sense of shame which had been but a fleeting vision before had suddenly taken sharp, strong hold of her. She stood almost as it were battling against tears.
That evening across their small dining-table, after the waiter from the restaurant downstairs had served the coffee and left them, she spoke to Gilbert, crumbling her bread with nervous fingers, finding it difficult to meet his eyes.
“Those men,” she said, “who were here this afternoon,[Pg 17] what do they think of me? I mean,” she flushed quickly, “what do they think I am?”
“Think you are,” Gilbert repeated, “my dear girl, I suppose they could see you were a woman.”
“I mean, had you told them, did they know about us?”
“Silly kid,” he smiled at her indulgently, “the world is not so fearfully interested in our doings.”
“No, but they are your friends,” the hazel eyes meeting his held some wistful question. “Wouldn’t they wonder, doesn’t it seem funny that they shouldn’t be my friends too?”
Gilbert rose, conscious of a little impatience. The strange thing was that since the very commencement of their life together his conscience had not been as easy as he would have liked to have had it. Joan’s ideas had been so ridiculously simple and straightforward, she was almost a child, he had discovered, in her knowledge and thoughts. Not that he was a person to pay much attention to principles when they came in contact with his desires, only it annoyed and irritated him to find she could waken an undreamt of conscience in this way. He shook off the feeling, however, with a little laugh, and, rising from the table, crossed over to her, standing behind her, drawing her head back against his heart.
“Not satisfied with our solitude,” he teased; “find it dull?”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered; she had to fight against the temptation to let things go, to lift up her lips for his kiss. “It’s because—well, you didn’t introduce me, they must have thought it queer.”
“Oh, hang it all, dear,” he remonstrated, “I could not pass you off as my wife or sister, they would know it was not true. What do you want to know them for anyhow? Sclater works at the office with me and the other man is a pal of his, I have never met him before.”
“I see,” she agreed; he had not at all understood her,[Pg 18] but she doubted if she could quite explain herself. “It doesn’t matter, Gilbert.” She sat a little away from him, sweeping the crumbs together with her fingers.
Behind her back Gilbert shrugged his shoulders and allowed the frown to show for a second on his face. Then he turned aside and lit a cigarette.
“Let’s do a theatre to-night, Joan,” he suggested, “I am just in the mood for it.”
She was not just in the mood for it, but she went; and after the theatre they had supper at the Monico and Gilbert ordered a bottle of champagne to cheer them up; with the lights and music all round them and Gilbert’s face opposite her, his lips smiling at her, his eyes caressing her, Joan forgot her mood of uneasiness. In the taxi going home she crept close up against him, liking to feel the strong hold of his arms.
“You love me, and I love you, don’t I, Gilbert?” she whispered; “that is all that really counts.”
“It counts more than all the world,” he answered, and stooped to kiss her upturned lips.
She made no new friends in her life with him, the old ones naturally fell rather into the background; it was impossible to keep up girl friendships when she was never able to ask any of them home with her. Once she went back to see Mrs. Thomas, but the torrent of questions, none of which could be answered truthfully, had paralysed her. She had sat dumb and apparently sulky. Mrs. Thomas had written afterwards to Aunt Janet:
“I do not think Joan can be really happy in her new post. She is quite changed, no longer her bright, cheery self.”
And that had called forth a long letter from Aunt Janet to Joan. If she was not happy and did not feel well she was to leave at once. It had been her own wish to go to London, they had never liked the idea. “You would not[Pg 19] believe, Joan, how dull the house is with only John and me in it, we miss your singing and laughter about the place. Come back home, dear; even if it is only for a holiday, we shall be delighted.”
There was a hint behind the letter that unless she had a satisfactory reply at once she or Uncle John would come up to London to see Joan for themselves! Joan could imagine the agitation and yet firm purpose which would preface the journey. She wrote hastily. She was perfectly happy and ridiculously underworked. Everyone was so good to her, one day soon she would take a day off and run down and see them, they should see how well she was looking.
But the writing of the letter brought tears to her eyes, and when it was sealed up and pushed safely out of harm’s way she sat and cried and cried. Once or twice lately she had had these storms of tears, she was so unused to crying that she could not account for them in any way except that she hated having to tell lies. That was it, she hated having to tell lies.
It was about a fortnight later that Gilbert at breakfast one morning looked up from a letter which the early post had brought him with a frown of intense annoyance on his face. Also he said “Damn!” very clearly and distinctly.
Joan pushed aside the paper and looked at him.
“Anything wrong?” she asked; “is it business, or money, or——”
“No, it is only the mater,” he answered quickly; “she writes to say she is coming to pay me a little visit, that I am to see if I can get her a room somewhere in the building, she is going to spend two or three days shopping in town and hopes to see a lot of me.”
“Oh,” said Joan rather blankly. Gilbert never talked very much of his people; once he had shown her a photograph of his mother because she had teased him till he produced it. “Don’t you like the idea? Gilbert, was that what you said ‘damn’ about?”[Pg 20]
“Not exactly,” his eyes travelled round the room; “you’ll have to clear out, you know,” he said abruptly.
“You mean you want her to have our room and take another one in the building for yourself?” asked Joan. “I daresay Mrs. Thomas would give me a bed for a night or two.”
“Yes, that is it,” he agreed; “and you will have to hide away all traces of yourself, mustn’t leave anything suspicious lying about. The old lady might have given me a day or two’s notice;” he had returned to his letter, “hang it all, she says she will be here to-morrow.”
Joan had pushed her chair back and stood up, her breakfast unfinished. She was staring at his down-bent head, struggling with a wild desire to scream, to cry out against the curtain of shame he was so wilfully sweeping across their life together. She fought down the impulse though and moved over to the window.
“You want me to go away and hide?” she asked from there, her voice dangerously quiet.
He glanced up at her. “Keep out of the mater’s way,” he acknowledged, “she would have seven fits.”
“Why?” asked Joan.
“Why,” he repeated, “good Lord, you don’t know the mater. She——”
Joan interrupted. “You are ashamed of me,” she spoke quickly, her face had flushed. “You have always been a little ashamed of me. You have never really looked at it as I did. I thought——” she broke off and turned away from him, stupid hot tears were blinding her eyes, she did not want to cry, it was so useless and childish.
Gilbert stuffed his mother’s letter into his pocket and rose to his feet, stretching a little as he moved.
“Don’t be ridiculous, kiddie,” he said, “you must see it would not do for you to meet the mater. She is old-fashioned and—well, she would not understand.”
“We could make her understand,” Joan whispered, “if she saw we both really meant it.”[Pg 21]
“Well, I don’t want you to try,” he answered bluntly.
“Don’t you feel the same about me as if I were your wife?” She knew he was close beside her, but she did not turn to look at him.
Gilbert put an arm round her and drew her close. “Of course I do,” he said, “but mother wouldn’t. One does not exactly introduce one’s mother to one’s mistress.”
The inclination to tears had left Joan, a very set calm had taken its place. Suddenly she knew, as she stood there stiff held within the circle of his arms, that it was all ended. The dream, if it had been a dream, was finished, she could not live in it any longer.
“Very well,” she agreed listlessly. “I will see about going away, the place shall be all ready for her to-morrow.”
She moved away from him, he did not notice how purposely she shook the touch of his hands from off her.
CHAPTER III
| “Out of my dreams, I fashioned a flower; Nursed it within my heart, Thought it my dower. What wind is this that creeps within and blows Roughly away the petals of my rose?” |
M. P.
“That is the end of lying,” whispered Joan.
She threw down her cloak to keep the corner seat in the carriage and stepped out on to the platform to see if she could catch sight of a paper boy.
She had not seen Gilbert since the morning. He had had an appointment in the city, he had left it to her to get the flat ready for his mother. And she had done everything, there was nothing that she could reproach herself with. She had engaged an extra room for Gilbert on the[Pg 22] next floor, she had bought fresh flowers, she had made the place look as pretty as possible. It had not taken her long to do her own packing, there was nothing of hers left anywhere about. And all morning she had kept the window overlooking the Park tight shut. The scent of flowers should bring no disturbing memories to weaken her resolve. Then when everything had been quite settled she had sat down to write just a short note to Gilbert.
“I have tried to make you understand a little of all I felt this morning, but it was not any use. You cannot understand. It is just that we have always looked at things differently. I cannot live with you any more, Gilbert; what is the use of trying to explain. It is better just to say—as we agreed that either of us should be free to say—it is all finished, and good-bye.”
She had propped the letter up for him to find, where she knew he would look first of all, by his pipe and matches on the mantelpiece. Now she had taken her ticket to Wrotham and wired Aunt Janet to say she was coming. But as she stood waiting for the train to start it occurred to her that she was really watching to see Gilbert’s slim, well-built figure push its way through the crowd towards her. The thought made her uneasy, she hoped he would have been late getting home; she doubted her strength of will to stand against him should he appear in person to persuade her.
He did not come, however, and presently with a great deal of noise and excitement, whistles blowing and doors slamming, the train was off and she could sit back in her corner seat with a strange sense of pleasurable excitement at having so far achieved her purpose.
Uncle John was at the station to meet her. A straight-held old figure—in his young days he had been in the army and very good-looking—now the bristling moustache was white and the hair grew in little tufts either side of[Pg 23] an otherwise bald head. Ever since Joan could first remember him Uncle John had moved in a world separate from the rest of the household and entirely his own. It was not that he took no interest in them, it was just that he appeared to forget them for long intervals, talking very seldom, and when he did always about the days that were past. He had never married, but there had been one great love in his life. Aunt Janet had told Joan all about it, a girl who had died many years ago; after her death Uncle John had lived for nothing but his regiment. Then he had had to leave it because old age had called for retirement, and he had sent for Aunt Janet to come and keep house for him and together they had settled down in the old home at Wrotham—both unmarried, both very quiet and content to live in the past. Then Joan had descended on them, a riotous, long-legged, long-haired girl of eight, the child of a very much younger, little known brother.
With the coming of Joan, new life and new surprising interest had awakened in Aunt Janet’s heart, but Uncle John had remained impervious to the influence. He was very fond of Joan in his way, but he scarcely ever noticed and he certainly knew nothing about her. He had realized her less and less as she grew up; when he spoke or thought of her now it was always as still a child.
“You are a nice young lady,” he greeted her good-humouredly, stooping to kiss Joan at the station; “your Aunt Janet was sure this sudden return meant a breakdown. She is all of a twitter, so to speak, and would have been here to meet you herself only we have got a Miss Abercrombie staying with us. Where’s the luggage?”
“I have only brought my small things with me,” Joan explained, “the rest are coming on. I am sorry Aunt Janet is worried, and who is Miss Abercrombie?”
“Friend of your aunt’s,” he answered; he took her bag from her. “I have brought the trap, Janet thought you might be too delicate to walk.” He chuckled to himself at the thought and picking up the reins climbed[Pg 24] into the cart beside her. “Don’t think Sally has been out twice since you left, see how fat she has got.”
The little brown pony certainly answered to the implication. Her sides bulged against the shafts and bald patches were manifesting themselves, caused by the friction.
“What have you been doing then?” asked Joan; “why haven’t you been out?”
“Nothing to go for,” he answered, “and I have been too busy in the garden. Extended that bit down through the wood.” The garden was his one great hobby.
“And Aunt Janet,” Joan questioned, “she always used to like taking Sally out.”
“I suppose that was when you were here;” he looked down at her sideways, “she missed you, I think, but she potters about the village sometimes.” He relapsed into silence, and Joan could see that his thoughts were once more far away.
Several of the villagers came out as they passed through the little village street to bob greetings to the young lady of the manor, as they had always called Joan. Wrotham did not boast many county families; there was no squire, for instance. The Rutherfords occupied the old manor house and filled the position to a great extent, but they owned none of the land in the neighbourhood, and the villagers were not really their tenants. And beyond the Rutherfords there was no one in the village who could undertake parochial work except the vicar, a hard-working, conscientiously mild gentleman, with a small income and a large family. He could give plenty of spiritual advice and assistance, but little else; the old people and the invalids of the parish looked to Aunt Janet for soups and warm clothes and kindly interest.
Wrotham boasted a doctor too. As Joan remembered him he had been a gentleman of very rubicund complexion and rough manners. Village gossip had held that he was too fond of the bottle, but when sober he was kindly and efficient enough for their small needs. He had been un[Pg 25]married and had lived under the charge of a slovenly housekeeper. As the Rutherfords drove past his house, a square brick building with a front door that opened on to the village street, Joan noticed an unfamiliar air of spruce cleanliness about the front door and the window blinds.
“Dr. Simpson has had a spring cleaning,” she said, pointing out the transformation to Colonel Rutherford.
He came out of his reverie, whatever it was, and glanced at the house. “No,” he said, “Simpson has left. There are new people in there. Grant is their name, I think. Young chap and his sister and their old mother. Came to call the other day; nice people, but very ignorant about gardens. Your aunt has taken a great fancy to the young man.”
With that the trap turned into the wide open gates of the manor, and Joan, seeing the old house, was conscious of a quick rush of contentment. She had come home; how good it was to be home.
The house, a beautiful grey building of the Tudor days, stood snug and warm amid a perfect bower of giant trees. Ivy and creepers of all sorts clung to its stones and crept up its walls, long tendrils of vivid green. The drive swept round a beautifully kept lawn and vanished through a stone gateway leading into the stable-yard. It was only a pretence at a garden in front. Uncle John always held that the open space which lay at the back of the house and on to which the drawing-room windows opened was the real thing. There, was more green grass, which centuries of care and weeding and rolling had transformed into a veritable soft velvet carpet of exquisite colour that stretched out and down till it met the wood of tall trees that fringed the garden. Flowers were encouraged to grow wild under those trees; in spring it was a paradise of wild daffodils and tulips. That was Aunt Janet’s arrangement; Uncle John liked his gardens to be orderly. He was responsible for the straight, tidy flower-beds, for the rose gardens,[Pg 26] for the lavender clumps that grew down at the foot of the vegetable garden. For lavender is not really an ornamental flower and Uncle John only tolerated it because of Aunt Janet’s scent-sachets.
Beautiful and old and infinitely peaceful, the sight and colour of it could bring back childhood and a sense of safety to Joan, a sense that Uncle John’s figure and face—dear and familiar as they were—had been quite unable to do. London, her life with Gilbert, the rack and tumult of her thoughts during the past six months appeared almost as a dream when seen against this dear old background.
Aunt Janet was waiting their arrival in the hall, and Joan, clambering down out of the trap, ran straight into those outstretched arms.
“Oh, Aunt Janet, it is good to be back,” she gasped. Then she drew away a little to take in the tall, trim figure dressed all in black save for a touch of white at neck and wrists; the face stern and narrow, lit by a pair of very dark eyes, the firm, thin-cut mouth, the dark hair, showing grey in places, brushed back so smooth and straight and wound in little plaits round and round the neat head. “You are just the same as ever,” Joan said. “Oh, Aunt Janet, it is good to get back.”
The dark eyes, softened for the moment by something like tears, smiled at her. “Of course I am just the same, child. What did you expect? And you?”
“Oh, I am I,” Joan answered; her laughter sounded unreal even to herself.
“You have been ill,” contradicted Miss Rutherford, “it is plain to see all over your face. Thank God, I have got you back.”
She brushed aside the sentiment, since it was a thing she did not always approve of.
“Come away in and have your tea. John, leave Mary to carry up Joan’s boxes; she will get Dick to help her; they are too heavy for you. Your uncle is getting old,”[Pg 27] she went on, talking brusquely as she helped Joan off with her coat, “he feels things these days.”
“I haven’t been away more than a year, Aunt Janet,” laughed Joan; “you talk as if it had been centuries.”
“It has seemed long,” the other woman answered; her eyes were hungry on the girl’s face as if she sought for something that kept eluding her. “A year is a long time to people of our age.”
“Dear, silly, old Aunt Janet.” Joan hugged her. “You are not a second older nor the tiniest fragment different to what you used to be. I know you don’t like being hugged; it makes you untidy; but you have simply got to be just once more.”
“You always were harum-scarum,” remonstrated Aunt Janet, under this outburst. She did not, however, offer any real objection and they went into the drawing-room hand-in-hand.
A small, thin lady rose to greet them at their entrance and Joan was introduced to Miss Abercrombie. Everything about Miss Abercrombie, except her size, seemed to denote strength—strength of purpose, strength of will, strength of love and hate. She gave Joan the impression—and hers was a face that demanded study, Joan found herself looking at it again and again—of having come through great battles against fate. And if she had not won—the tell-tale lines of discontent that hung about her mouth did not betoken victory—at least she had not been absolutely defeated. She had carried the banner of her convictions through thick and thin.
Joan was roused to a sudden curiosity to know what those convictions were and a desire to have the same courage granted to herself. It gave her a thrill of pleasure to hear that Miss Abercrombie would be staying on for some time. She was a schoolmistress, it appeared, only just lately health had interfered with her duties and it was then that Aunt Janet had persuaded her, after many attempts, to take a real holiday and spend it at Wrotham.[Pg 28]
“Sheer vice on my part, agreeing,” Miss Abercrombie told Joan with a laugh; “but everyone argued with me all at once and I succumbed.”
“Just in time,” Aunt Janet reminded her; “I was going to have given up asking you; even friendship has its limits.”
They had tea in the drawing-room with the windows open on to the garden and a small, bright fire burning in the grate. Aunt Janet said she had discovered a nip in the air that morning and was sure Joan would feel cold after London. Uncle John wandered in and drank a cup of tea and wandered out again without paying much attention to anyone.
Aunt Janet sat and watched Joan, and the girl, conscious of the scrutiny and restless under those brown eyes as she had always been restless in the old days with a childish, unconfessed sin on her conscience, talked as lightly and as quickly as she could upon every topic under the sun to Miss Abercrombie. And Miss Abercrombie rose like a sportswoman to the need. She was too clever a reader of character not to feel the strain which rested between her two companions. She knew Aunt Janet through and through, the stern loyalty, the unbending precision of a nature slow to anger, full of love, but more inclined to justice than mercy where wrongdoing was concerned. And Joan—well, she had only known Joan half an hour, but Aunt Janet had been talking of nothing else for the last fortnight.
They kept the subject of Joan’s life in London very well at bay for some time, but presently Aunt Janet, breaking a silence that had held her, leaned forward and interrupted their discussion.
“You have not told us why you left, Joan,” she said, “or what has been settled about your plans. Are you on leave, or have you come away for good?”
Miss Abercrombie watched the faint pink rise up over the girl’s face and die away again, leaving a rather unnatural pallor.[Pg 29]
“I have left,” Joan was answering. “I——” Suddenly she looked up and for a moment she and Miss Abercrombie stared at each other. It was as if Joan was asking for help and the other woman trying to give it by the very steadiness of her eyes. Then Joan turned. “Aunt Janet,” she said, hurrying a little over the words, “I want to ask you to let us not talk of my time in London. It—it was not what I meant it to be, perhaps because of my own fault, but——”
“You were not happy,” said Aunt Janet; her love rose to meet the appeal. “I never really thought you were. I am content to have you back, Joan; we will let the rest slip away into the past.”
“Thank you,” whispered Joan; the burden of lying, it seemed, had followed her, even into this safe retreat; “perhaps some day, later on, I will try and tell you about it, Aunt Janet.”
“Just as you like, dear.” Aunt Janet pressed the hand in hers and at that moment Mary, the servant-girl, appeared in the doorway with a somewhat perturbed countenance.
“Please, mum, there is that Bridget girl from the village and her mother; will you see them a minute?”
The charity and sweetness left Miss Rutherford’s face as if an artist had drawn a sponge across some painting. “I’ll come directly,” she said stiffly; “make them wait in my little room, Mary.”
“The village scandal,” Miss Abercrombie remarked, as the door closed behind the servant; “how are you working it out, Janet? Don’t be too hard on the unrighteous; it is your one little failing.”
“I hardly think it is a subject which can be discussed before Joan,” Miss Rutherford answered. She rose and moved to the door. “I have always kept her very much a child, Ann; will you remember that in talking to her.”
Miss Abercrombie waited till the door shut, then her eyes came back to Joan. The child had grown into a[Pg 30] woman, she realized; what would that knowledge cost her old friend? Then she laughed, but not unkindly.
“I know someone else who has kept herself a child,” she said, “and it makes the outlook of her mind a little narrow. Oh, well! you won’t like me to speak disrespectfully of that very dear creature, your aunt. Will you come for a stroll down to the woods or are you longing to unpack?”
Joan chose the latter, because, for a second, despite her instantaneous liking for Miss Abercrombie, she was a little afraid. She wanted to set her thoughts in order too, to try and win back to the glad joy which she had first felt at being home, and which had been dispelled by Aunt Janet’s questions and her own evasive replies.
“I will do my unpacking, I think,” she said, “and put my room straight.” She met the blue eyes again, kindly yet keen in their scrutiny. “I understand what you mean about Aunt Janet,” she added; “I have felt it too, and, Miss Abercrombie, I am not quite such a child as she thinks; I could not help growing up.”
“I know that, my dear,” the other answered, “and God gave us our eyes to see both good and evil with; that is a thing your Aunt Janet is apt to forget. Well, run away and do your unpacking; we will meet later on at dinner.”[Pg 31]
CHAPTER IV
| “I have forgotten you! Wherefore my days Run gladly, as in those white hours gone by Before I learnt to love you. Now have I Returned to that old freedom, where the rays Of your strange wonder no more shall amaze My spirit.” |
Anon.
If you see trouble in the back of a girl’s eyes look always for a man in the case. That was Miss Abercrombie’s philosophy of life. Girls do not as a rule get into trouble over money, for debts or gambling. She had spent the whole of her practical life in studying girls; she knew fairly well the ins and outs of their complicated natures. Joan was in trouble of sorts; what then had become of the man? Until the time came when the girl would be driven to speak—and Miss Abercrombie was sure the time would come sooner or later—she was content to stay silent and observant in the background of events. Often Joan felt as though the shrewd eyes were drawing the unwilling truth from behind her mask of indifference, and she was, in a way, afraid of the little, alert woman who seemed to be taking such an intense though silent interest in her.
For the first fortnight Gilbert wrote every day. To begin with, his letters were cheerful. He was inclined, indeed, to chaff her for losing her temper over his mother’s visit.
“The old lady is gone,” he wrote on the third day. “You can come back with perfect safety. She never smelt a rat, but tried to talk to me very seriously about taking unto myself a wife. It was on the tip of my tongue once or twice to tell her that I was already as good as married. Don’t keep on being stuffy, Joan, hurry up and come back.[Pg 32] You can’t think what a lot I miss you, little girl, or how much I want you.”
It was the first of his letters that she made any attempt to answer and her reply was not easy to write. She had come very suddenly to her decision as she had stood within the circle of Gilbert’s arms that morning and answered his arguments about his mother. Now she was realizing that for weeks before that her allegiance had been wavering. She had no wish to go back to him. She could not understand herself, but the fact was self-evident, even though the scent of heliotrope haunted her days and crept into the land of her dreams. Her letter, when it was finished, struck her as cold and stupid, yet she let it go; she could not somehow make her meaning any clearer.
“Dear Gilbert,” she wrote, “I am sorry you do not seem to be understanding that what I wrote in my first letter is really true. It is all finished between us and I am not coming back. There is not anything else to say, except that I should be happier if you did not go on writing. Nothing can change me, and it only keeps open old thoughts.”
He wrote in answer to that a furiously angry, altogether unpleasant letter. Joan read it with shrinking horror, it seemed to lay bare all that she had been only half aware of before, the ugliness, the smallness of what she had at first thought was love.
“If you try to marry anyone else,” the letter ended on a cruelly ugly note, “remember I can spoil your little game for you, Joan. There is no man who will marry you when they learn the truth.”
She tore up his other letters after that; the very sight of his handwriting brought hot shame to her heart.
How much the people of the house noticed she hardly[Pg 33] knew. Aunt Janet had fallen into the habit of watching her covertly, pathetically; she was trying in her own way to read the secret hidden away behind a changed Joan. But she did her best to keep her curiosity out of sight; she was very gentle, very anxious to divert Joan’s thoughts and keep her happy.
Uncle John, of course, noticed nothing. Joan helped him to potter about in the garden—they were building a rookery down by the woods—or sometimes she would take him for long walks and he would stump along beside her wrapped in indifferent silence, or else, carried away by some reminiscence of the old days, would start talking about the regiment and the places where he had been stationed. It was only Miss Abercrombie that Joan was really uneasy with, and the end of Miss Abercrombie’s visit was in sight.
One afternoon, on a day which had seen one of Gilbert’s unopened letters destroyed, Joan and Miss Abercrombie started out together soon after tea to take a basin of jelly to one of Aunt Janet’s pet invalids who lived in a cottage away out at what was called the Four Cross Roads.
It was one of those very fine blue days common to September. Just a nip of cold in the air, the forerunner of winter, and overhead the leaves on the trees turning all their various reds and golds for autumn.
“The sky gives one a great sense of distance this afternoon,” Miss Abercrombie said presently. “You never see a sky like this in towns; that is why you get into the habit of thinking things out of proportion.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Joan; “I mean, how does the distance of the sky affect it?”
“Oh, well, it makes one feel small,” the other answered, “unimportant; as if the affairs that worry our hearts out are, after all, of very little consequence in the scheme of existence.”
“They are our life,” Joan argued, “one has to worry and work things out for oneself.”[Pg 34]
“You are a Browningite,” laughed Miss Abercrombie; she glanced up sideways at her companion.
“‘As it were better youth
Should strive through acts uncouth
Towards making, than repose on aught found made.’
He is right in a way, though, mind you, I don’t know that it pays women to do much in the struggling line.”
“I do wonder why you say that,” said Joan; “you have always struck me as being, above everything else, a fighter.”
“Probably why my advice lies along other directions,” admitted Miss Abercrombie; “it is extremely uncomfortable to be a pioneer.”
“But in the end, even if you have won nothing, it brings you the courage of having stuck to your convictions.”
“Yes,” Miss Abercrombie answered dryly, “it certainly brings you that.”
They walked in silence again for a while, turning into a short cut to their destination across the fields.
“Your aunt has got convictions too.” Miss Abercrombie reopened the conversation, evidently her thoughts had been working along the same lines. “They are uncomfortable things; witness the judgment she metes out to that unfortunate girl in the village.”
“You mean Bridget?” Joan’s voice had suddenly a touch of fear in it; Miss Abercrombie stole a quick look at her. “I was asking Mary about her the other day.”
“Immorality, your aunt calls it,” sniffed Miss Abercrombie, “and for that she would quite willingly, good, kind woman as she is, make this child—Bridget is seventeen, you know—an outcast for the rest of her life. Immorality!”
“What would you call it?” questioned Joan; she spoke stiffly, for she was singularly uneasy under the discussion, yet she had always wanted to argue the matter out with Miss Abercrombie.
“I hate the word ‘immoral’ to begin with,” the little[Pg 35] woman went on; “not that I am exactly out against regulations. Laws and customs have come into being, there is little doubt about that, to protect the weak against the strong. The peculiar thing about them is that they always wreak their punishments on the weak. Poor Bridget, even without your aunt’s judgment, she pays the penalty, doesn’t she?”
“I suppose Aunt Janet is a little hard about these things,” Joan admitted. “You see, the idea of going against laws and things has never occurred to her. She has always obeyed, she has never wanted to do anything else.”
“Quite so,” agreed Miss Abercrombie; “my dear, don’t let us talk about it any more. I always lose my temper, and I hate losing my temper with someone whom I love as much as I do your Aunt Janet.”
“But I am interested in what you think,” Joan went on slowly; the red crept into her cheeks. “I don’t believe in marriage myself; I think people ought to live together if and when they want to, and leave each other when they like.”
Miss Abercrombie stared with dismay at the flushed face. “My dear,” she said, and her tone had fallen upon far greater seriousness than the former discussion had evoked, “both of those are very rash statements. The problem of life is unfortunately not quite so easily settled.”
“But marriage,” Joan argued, “marriage, which tries to tie down in hard bonds something which ought only to be of the spirit—I think it is hideous, hideous! I could never marry.”
“No,” agreed Miss Abercrombie, “a great many of us feel like that when we are young and hot-headed. I nearly said empty-headed. Then we read fat books about the divine right of Motherhood, Free Love and State Maternity. All very well in the abstract and fine theories to argue about, but they do not work in real life. Believe me, the older you get the more and more you realize how far[Pg 36] away they all are from the ideal. Marriage may be sometimes a mistaken solution, but at present it is the only one we have.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Joan; for the first time she turned and looked at her companion. “Do you really believe it is true?”
“Yes,” nodded Miss Abercrombie. “My dear,” she put a hand on Joan’s arm, “we women have got to remember that our actions never stand by themselves alone. Someone else has always to foot the bill for what we do. I said just now that laws had been evolved to protect the weak; well, marriage protects the child.”
“But if two people love each other,” Joan tried to argue, but her words were bringing a cold chill of fear to her heart even as she spoke, “what other protection can be needed?”
“Love is something that no one can define,” stated Miss Abercrombie; “but centuries have gone to prove that it is not as binding as marriage, and for the sake of the children the man and woman must be bound. That is the long and short of all the arguments.”
“If there is no child?” Joan’s fear prompted her to the question; she spoke it almost in a whisper.
Miss Abercrombie paused in her act of unlatching the gate, for they had arrived at the cottage by now, to look up at her. “Ah, there you open wider fields,” she assented, “only childless people are and must be the exceptions. One cannot lay down laws for the exceptions.”
Mrs. Starkey, the invalid old lady, was garrulous, and delighted to see them. So anxious to tell them all her ailments and scraps of gossip that by the time they got away it was quite late and already the sun was sinking behind the range of hills at the back of the village.
“We will have to hurry,” Joan said. “Aunt Janet gets so fussed if one is out after dark.”
Hurrying precluded any reopening of the subject they had been discussing, but Joan’s mind was busy with all the thoughts it had roused as they walked. The faint hint[Pg 37] of fear that had stirred to life in her when Miss Abercrombie had spoken of Bridget was fast waking to very definite panic. She could feel it tugging at her heart and making her breathing fast and difficult. Supposing that the vaguely-dreamed-of possibility had crystallized into fact in her case? How would Aunt Janet think of it; what changes would it bring into her life?
As they turned into the little village street they came straight into a crowd of people standing round an open cottage door. The crowd was strangely quiet, talking amongst themselves in whispers, but from within the cottage came the sound of wailing, the hysterical crying of old age.
Miss Abercrombie, with Joan following, pushed her way to the front, and with awed faces the villagers drew back to let them pass. At the open door Sam Jones, the village constable, an old man who had known Joan in her very young days, put out his hand.
“Don’t you go in now, miss,” he said, “it is not for the likes of you to see, and you can do no good. Besides which, your aunt is there already.”
But Joan paid no attention to him and, pushing past his outstretched hand, followed Miss Abercrombie.
The inside of the cottage was dimly lit, and scattered with a profuse collection of what appeared to be kitchen utensils, dishes and clothes, all flung about in confusion. The only light in the place glinted on the long deal table and the stiff dead figure stretched out on it, still and quiet, with white, vacant face and lifeless arms that hung down on either side. Water was oozing out of the clothes and dripping from the unbound hair; it had gathered already into little pools on the floor. In the darkest corner of the room a crouched-up form sat sobbing hopelessly, and by the figure on the table Aunt Janet stood, her face in shadow, since she was above the shade of the lamp, but her hands singularly white and gentle-looking as they moved about drying the dead girl’s face, pushing the wet, clogged hair from eyes and mouth.[Pg 38]
Joan paused just within the door, the terror of that figure on the table holding her spellbound, but Miss Abercrombie moved brusquely forward so that she stood in the lamplight confronting Aunt Janet.
“So,” she said, quick and sharp, yet not over loud, the people outside could not have heard, “Bridget has found this way out. A kinder way than your stern judgment, Janet. Poor little girl.”
“I did not judge,” Miss Rutherford answered stiffly, “‘the wages of sin is death.’”
“Yet you can be kind to her now,” snorted Miss Abercrombie; “it would not have been wasted had you been a little kinder before. Forgive me, Janet, I speak quickly, without thinking. You live up to your precepts; everyone has to do that.”
The old woman in the corner lifted her face to look at them; perhaps she thought that in some way or other they were reviling the dead, for she staggered to her feet and crossed over to the table.
“It was fear made her do it,” she wailed; “fear, and because we spoke her harsh. I hated the shame of it all. Yet, God knows, I would have stood by her in the end. My little girl, my little Bridget!” Sobs choked her, she fell to her knees, pressing her lips to one of the cold, stiff hands.
Joan saw Aunt Janet stoop and lay a gentle hand on the heaving shoulders, she heard, too, a movement of the crowd outside and saw the Vicar’s good-natured, perturbed face appear in the doorway. Behind him again was a younger man, stern-faced, with quiet, very steady blue eyes and a firm-lined mouth. All this she noticed, why she could not have explained, for the man was a perfect stranger to her; then the fear and giddiness which all this time she had been fighting against gained the upper hand and, swaying a little, she moved forward with the intention of getting outside, only to fall in a dead faint across the doorway of the cottage.[Pg 39]
CHAPTER V
| “Love wakes men, once a lifetime each They lift their heavy heads and look. |
| And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, And most forget, but either way That, and the child’s unheeded dream Is all the light of all their day.” |
The Grants were sitting at breakfast in their small, red-walled dining-room. Richard, commonly called Dick, at the end of the table, Mabel at the one side and Mrs. Grant in the seat of honour at the top. Wherever Mrs. Grant sat was the seat of honour; she was that kind of old lady. Marvellously handsome still, despite her age, with a commanding presence and a nature which had sublime contempt for everyone and everything except herself, she sailed through life exacting service from all and obedience from her children. Why they obeyed her they could not have themselves explained; perhaps it was an inheritance from the dead Mr. Grant, who had worshipped his wife as if she had been some divinity. In her own way Mrs. Grant had always been gracious and kindly to her husband, but he had been altogether a nonentity in her life. Before the children were old enough to see why, they realized that Daddy was only the man who made the money in their house. Mother spent it, buying the luxuries with which they were surrounded, the magnificent toys which they disregarded, as is the way of children, the splendidly expensive clothes, which were a perfect burden to them. Then, just when Dick was beginning to understand, Mr. Grant died.
He had sent for his son—Dick was about eighteen then—and spoken to him just before the end came.[Pg 40]
“You will have to look after your mother, Dick,” he had said, clutching at the young, strong hands; “she has always been looked after. She has never had to rough things in her life. And you won’t be any too well off. Promise me, promise me, you will always give her of your best.”
“Of course, I promise, Dad,” he had answered.
Further conversation between then had ceased because Mrs. Grant swept into the room, regal even in the face of death. Dick remembered the incident afterwards with a little twitch of his lips because it was so typical of his mother and it was just at this period that he had begun to criticize her. The sick-room had been in shadowed gloom until her entry; the lights hurt the fast-failing eyes.
“I cannot sit in the dark,” stated Mrs. Grant, as she settled herself, with a delightful rustle of silk and a wave of perfume, beside the bed. “You know that, Harry. It always has depressed me, hasn’t it?”
“Turn up the lights, Dick,” whispered the man, his hand had closed on one of hers; happiness flooded his heart at her presence.
“But you know they hurt your eyes,” Dick expostulated; he was new to death, yet he could read the signs well enough to know his father was dying.
“Harry can lie with his eyes shut,” answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic a scale for her ever to be disagreeable.
And Dick had turned up the lights and gone fuming from the room, conscious for the time being of a sense of dislike for his mother’s perfection!
It soon faded though; he had been trained too thoroughly in his youth. Once he said to Mabel hotly:
“Why does Mother cry for Dad? She did not really love him, and she just delighted in buying all that expensive and becoming mourning.”[Pg 41]
And Mabel had surprised him by replying: “Mother does not really love anyone but herself.”
The remark sounded odd from Mabel, who spent her life slaving with apparent devotion in her mother’s service. She was a tall, rather colourless girl, with big grey eyes and a quaint-shaped mouth that was always very silent. She moved through the background of their lives doing things for mother. She had always done that; Dick wondered sometimes whether the soul within her would ever flame into open rebellion, but it never did.
By the time Dick had passed his various exams, and was ready to take up a practice somewhere, Mrs. Grant and Mabel had been practically everywhere on the Continent.
“Money is running short,” Mabel wrote crisply to Dick; “cannot you do anything in the way of taking a house and settling down, so as to make a home for Mother and me?”
Dick’s ambitions lay in the direction of bachelor’s diggings and work in London. He thrust them aside and bought what was supposed to be a very good and flourishing practice at Birmingham. Unfortunately Mrs. Grant took a violent dislike to Birmingham. Their house was gloomy and got on her nerves; the air, she said, was laden with smoke which irritated her throat. She developed a cough, quite the most annoying sound that Dick had ever imagined, and he was not easy to irritate. Mother coughed from the time she woke till the time she went to sleep—coughed and remembered old times and wept for Harry, who would at least have taken care not to expose her to such overwhelming discomfort.
At the end of six months Dick threw up the practice in despair and placed himself at her disposal. They put in a year in London, but what Dick earned was quite insufficient to cope with what Mrs. Grant spent and things went from bad to worse.
Mabel never offered any advice until she was asked[Pg 42] but when Dick spoke to her finally she was quite definite.
“You have got to take Mother in hand,” she said. “Father never did. He spent his life making money for her to spend, but there is no reason why you should. Get a small practice somewhere in the country where there are no shops and just tell Mother you are going to settle there for five years at least.”
“She will get another cough,” argued Dick.
“You must let her cough, it won’t hurt her,” answered Mabel.
Undoubtedly Mrs. Grant did not approve of Wrotham to begin with, but it had its advantages, even for her. She settled very quickly into the role of Lady Bountiful; the villagers gazing upon her with such unmixed admiration that she was moved to remark to Mabel that it was really pleasant doing things for such grateful people. Dick provided her with a victoria and horse in place of the usual doctor’s trap, and she could drive abroad to visit this or that protégé in truly regal style. It meant that Dick had to pay all his visits, and some of them very far off and at all sorts of unseasonable hours, on a bicycle, but he never grudged making sacrifices of that kind for her. No one admired his mother in the abstract more than Dick did.
Mabel perhaps resented the extra work it entailed on him, for she loved Dick with the whole force of her self-restrained heart. But, as usual, she kept silent. The villagers could see that she drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other’s splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon the younger one’s vitality. People like Mrs. Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You either have to live for them or away from them.[Pg 43]
On this particular morning Dick finished his breakfast before either his mother or sister, and pushing back his chair, asked, as he had always asked since the days of his childhood, if he might rise.
“Before I am finished, Dick?” remonstrated Mrs. Grant; “it is not very polite, dear.”
“I know,” Dick apologized, “but the truth is I have an early call to pay this morning. The people of the Manor House have sent for me; Miss Rutherford the younger is not awfully well, or something.”
“Miss Rutherford the younger?” repeated his mother; “I did not know there was a younger; I have never seen her, have I, Mabel?”
“I don’t suppose so,” Dick answered for his sister; “she has been away in London.”
“What is the matter with her?” asked Mrs. Grant. “Why do they want you to see her?”
“I can’t know that till I have seen her, can I? Last night she happened to come into the Rendle cottage just after they had brought that poor girl home, and the sight must have upset her; anyway she fainted. I expect that is what Miss Rutherford is worried about.”
“It is hardly polite of her not to have brought her niece to call on me,” said Mrs. Grant. “Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn’t seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs.”
“You are a dear to think of it,” he said, stooping to kiss her good-bye. “If you can spare Mabel this afternoon, Mother, I thought perhaps she might come into Sevenoaks with me. I have got to attend a meeting there, and it will be an outing for her.”
“If Mabel would like to go, of course she must,” Mrs. Grant agreed. “I shall be a little lonely, and to-day is the day I am supposed to have my hair shampooed. Not that it really matters.”[Pg 44]
“I could not go any way,” Mabel put in for herself. “Mr. Jarvis is coming to tea, Dick; he asked himself last week.”
She followed her brother out to the front door.
“The day is going to be full of disagreeables for you,” he said, as they stood waiting for his bicycle to be brought round. “Mother’s shampoo, I know what that involves, and Mr. Jarvis. Nuisance the fellow is; why can’t he see that you dislike him?”
“Oh, I don’t exactly,” she answered, without meeting his eyes.
She hated him like poison, Dick knew. He wondered rather vaguely why Mabel had lied to him, generally speaking they were too good friends for that to be necessary. Then he dismissed the subject, and his thoughts turned again to the girl he was on his way to see. He had been thinking a great deal of Joan since he had first seen her. The startled, child-like face, the wide frightened eyes, had impressed themselves on his mind the night before. He had lifted her in his arms and carried her outside; the poise of her thrown-back head against his arm stayed in his mind, a very warm memory. Poor little girl, it must have been horrible for her to have come in from the gay placidness of her own life and thoughts to the stark tragedy of Bridget Rendle’s death.
He was very ignorant and very reverent in his thoughts about women. He could imagine Joan’s sweet, well-ordered life, the fragrance of youth hung about his idea of her. Bridget Rendle had been a girl too, younger perhaps than the other one; but Bridget had dipped into the waters of life, and sorrow and sin had closed over her. The two girls were as far apart as the poles, it seemed almost irreverent to think of them in the same breath.
Aunt Janet met him in the hall when she heard of his arrival.
“I have not told my niece about sending for you,” she said; “it might only make her nervous. I am very[Pg 45] alarmed about her, Dr. Grant. She has been home now three weeks and she is really not at all like herself. Then that faint last night. I am afraid of fainting-fits; my mother, I may as well tell you, died very suddenly from a heart-attack.”
“It is not likely to be anything of that sort,” he told her. “Yesterday’s tragedy was quite sufficient to upset very strong nerves.”
“I hope not,” Aunt Janet agreed; “anyway, I shall feel happier once you have seen her. Will you come this way?”
She led him through the house to a room on the other side of the drawing-room which had been fitted up as a special sanctum for Joan since her return from London.
“I am nervous,” she admitted to the doctor with her hand on the door-knob, “she will perhaps be annoyed at my having sent for you.” Then she opened the door and they passed in.
Joan was sitting in the far corner near the open window, a book on her lap. But she was not pretending to read; Dick could have sworn that she had been crying as they came in. As she saw her aunt was not alone she stood up quickly and the book fell unheeded to the floor.
“This is the doctor, dear,” Aunt Janet began nervously. “I asked him to call and see you. You need a tonic, I am sure you do.”
“You sent for him,” whispered Joan. Dick felt horribly uncomfortable; it was impossible not to sense the tragedy which hung heavy in the air. “Why, oh why, have you done that, Aunt Janet?”
“I was afraid,” the other began; “last night you——” Rather waveringly she came to a full stop, staring at Joan.
The girl had drawn herself up to her full height. She faced them as someone brought suddenly to bay, her hands clenched at her sides, two flags of colour flaming in her cheeks.
“I was going to have told you,” she said, addressing[Pg 46] herself solely to Aunt Janet, “now you have brought him in he must know it too. But I do not need him to tell me what is the matter with me; I found it out for myself last night. I am not ashamed, I do not even hold that I have done anything wrong; I would have told you before only I did not know it was going to come to this, and for the rest it was like a shut book in my life that I did not want to have to open or look at again. I am like Bridget Rendle,” she said, head held very high. “I am going to have a baby. Bridget was afraid and ashamed, but I am neither. I have done nothing to be ashamed of.”
The telling of it sapped at her much boasted courage, and left her whiter than the white wall-paper; Dick could see that she had some ado to keep back her tears.
Aunt Janet seemed to have been paralysed; she stayed where she was, stiff, stricken, and Dick, glancing at her, thought he had never seen such anguish and terror combined on a human face. He felt himself completely forgotten in this crisis. The two women stared at each other. Twice Aunt Janet moistened her lips and tried to speak, but the words died in her throat. When she succeeded at last her voice was scarce recognizable.
“You said—like Bridget Rendle,” she whispered; “did you mean what you said?”
“Yes,” answered Joan.
The older woman turned towards the door. She walked as if blind, her hands groping before her. “God!” Dick heard her say under her breath, “Dear God, what have I done that this should come upon me?”
As she reached the door Joan called to her, her voice sharp with fear. “Aunt Janet, Aunt Janet, aren’t you going to say anything to me?”
“I must hold my tongue,” the other answered stiffly, “or I shall curse that which I have loved.” Suddenly the anguish in her flamed to white beat. “I would rather have known you dead,” she said, and passed swiftly from the room.[Pg 47]
Joan took a step forward, and her foot touched on the book she had let fall. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up, then, because her knees were in reality giving way under her, she stumbled to the chair and sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten the man standing by the door, she just sat there, hands folded in her lap, with her white face and great brown eyes looking unseeingly at the garden.
Dick moved uneasily. He had not the slightest idea what he ought to do; he felt horribly like an intruder. And he was intensely sorry for the girl, even though behind this sorrow lay the shock of a half-formed ideal which she had shattered in his mind. Finally he submerged the man in the doctor and moved towards her.
“I am most awfully sorry for you,” he said, “will you let me help you if I can? There may be some mistake, and anyway I could give you something to help with those fainting-fits.”
Joan brought her eyes away from the garden and looked at him. “No,” she said, “there is no mistake and I do not make a habit of fainting. Yesterday it was different, perhaps I realized definitely and for the first time what it would all mean. I saw Aunt Janet’s face as she spoke of the dead girl, and … I do not know why I am telling you all this,” she broke off, “it cannot be very interesting, but I do not want you to think that I feel as Bridget Rendle felt.”
“No,” he agreed, “you are facing it with more courage than she had been taught to have.”
“It is not a question of courage,” Joan answered. He was not understanding her, she realized, and for some stupid reason it hurt that he should not, but she must not stoop to further explanations. She stood up, making a stern effort at absolute calmness.
“Good-bye,” she said, “I am sorry you should have been troubled to come and that you should have had to go through this sort of scene.”
“Good-bye,” was all he could answer.[Pg 48]
At the door he turned to look back at her. “If you should need help of any sort at any time,” he said, “will you send for me? I should like to feel you were going to do that.”
“I cannot promise,” she answered, “you see, I shall probably be leaving here quite soon.”
And with that he had to be content to leave her.
CHAPTER VI
| “And bending down beside the glowing bars Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” |
Mabel had shampooed her mother’s hair, following out with unending patience the minute instructions which the process always involved. She had rinsed it in four relays of hot water, two of lukewarm and one of cold; she had dried it with the hard towel for the scalp and the soft towel for the hair. She had rubbed brilliantine in to give it the approved gloss. The whole proceeding had lasted fully two hours; now she stood and brushed out the long fine threads of grey turning to silver with just the steady gentle pressure which was necessary and which, according to Mrs. Grant, no one but Mabel was capable of producing.
Mrs. Grant liked to have her hair brushed for half an hour after a shampoo, it soothed the irritated nerves. From behind her mother’s back Mabel could see her own face in the glass, the sallow cheeks flushed from her exertions, the grey, black-lashed eyes tired and a little angry. Once, long ago, during one of their journeys on the continent, there had been a young naval officer who had loved Mabel for those grey eyes of hers. He had raved about the way the lashes lay like a fringe of shadow round them. He had called them “Dream Eyes,” and once he had kissed[Pg 49] the lids close shut over them with hard, passionate kisses. Whenever Mabel looked at her eyes in the glass she thought of Jack Donald. She had loved him and she had sent him away because of Mother. He had only been able to offer her his love and the pay of a lieutenant in the Navy; he had not even shown that he liked Mother, he had resented the way Mabel slaved for her. Of course the outlook had been absurd, and Mrs. Grant had said so very plainly. If Mabel married it would have to be someone wealthy someone elderly enough to understand that Mother must live with them. But when he went he took with him all the dreams of Mabel’s life; she never looked out into the future to make plans now, she could only look back into the past that held her memories.
“I hope,” said Mrs. Grant suddenly breaking in on her thoughts, “that Dick does not fall in love with this young lady at the Manor.”
“Why not?” asked Mabel, “he must fall in love sooner or later.”
“Well, then, it must be later and with someone who has a great deal of money. We are quite badly enough off as it is.”
“You and I could go away again on our own,” suggested Mabel, “you know you said the other day that Wrotham was getting on your nerves.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Mrs. Grant, “I should like to know what you think we should live on once Dick has a wife. You say you won’t marry Mr. Jarvis or anyone else.”
“No,” Mabel admitted, “but because I won’t marry it hardly seems fair that we should stand in the way of Dick’s doing so.”
“What do you intend to imply by ’standing in the way’? Really Mabel, sometimes I wonder if you have any love for me, you so habitually and wilfully misconstrue my sentences. Surely it is permissible” (Mrs. Grant’s sigh was a model of motherly affection) “for a mother to wish to[Pg 50] keep her son, her eldest born, to herself for a little longer. One loses them so once they marry.”
Mabel concealed a swift, rather bitter, smile. “I did not mean to misconstrue anything,” she said, “only just the other day I was thinking that perhaps we did rather hamper Dick. He is twenty-seven, you know; it is funny he has never wanted to marry.”
“He is waiting for the right girl,” Mrs. Grant sighed again.
“And if he happens to find her,” thought Mabel to herself, there was no use saying the words aloud, “we are to do our best to prevent him having her. Poor old Dick.” Her eyes waked to sudden, vivid affection as she thought of him.
She ran downstairs presently, Mrs. Grant having retired to rest after exertions, to meet Dick just coming in. He had done a round of visits after his call at the Manor house. Visits which had included one to the Rendles’ cottage, where he had seen the principal figure of last night’s tragedy laid out, as her mother said, for decent burial, “even though it baint a going to be Christian.”
The girl had been dressed in something white; white flowers, great beautiful-headed chrysanthemums, lay between her folded hands and against her face. She had been a handsome girl, death had robbed her of her vivid colouring, but it had given her in its stead something dignified and withdrawn, a look of suffering and yet great peace.
Mrs. Rendle was more resigned too this morning; she had cried her heart quiet through the night.
“Bridget is better so,” she could confide to Dick as he stood looking down at the girl, “the shame is done away with, sir, and God will look to the sin. I hold there ain’t much to fear there, even though they won’t bury her in the churchyard.”
“No, I don’t think there is much to fear,” he agreed. “I am sorry about the burial, Mrs. Rendle, I have tried to argue the matter out with the vicar.”[Pg 51]
“Oh, that is not to be helped,” she answered. “God will rest her soul wherever she be. Miss Rutherford sent those flowers,” she added, “she was rare set agin Bridget to begin with, but she be softened down.”
That brought the other tragedy which he had witnessed this morning back to his mind. Not that he had really forgotten it. The picture of Joan, her head high, her cheeks flushed, was one that had imprinted itself very strongly upon his memory. He had given up trying to understand how such a thing could have happened, his own vague happy thoughts of her stirred wistfully behind the new knowledge. And he could not dismiss her altogether from the throne he had designed for her to occupy. There must be some explanation; if only he had not been such an absolute stranger perhaps she would have told him a little more, have given him a chance to understand.
“Well,” asked Mabel, “is she nice, Dick, did you like her?” Her eyes were quick to notice the new shadow of trouble on his face.
“Very nice, I think,” he answered, hoping his voice sounded as indifferent as he meant it to, “but I really did not see much of her and she is going back to London almost at once.” He went past her on into the dining-room. “Is lunch nearly ready,” he asked, “I have got to catch that 2.5, you know.”
“I’ll see about it,” Mabel said, “Mother is having hers upstairs.”
She turned away to comply, but all the time she was hurrying up the maidservant, and later, while she and Dick sat opposite each other, rather silent, through lunch, her eyes and mind were busy trying to read the secret of Dick’s manner. The girl had impressed him strongly, that was evident, but why should she have occasioned this gloom in Dick who so very rarely allowed anything or anybody to ruffle his cheery good humour?
He rode off without letting her glean any explanation, and Mabel wandered into the drawing-room to get it ready[Pg 52] for Mrs. Grant’s descent. Had Dick really fallen in love? She remembered once before when he had been about eighteen or nineteen, how there had been a girl whom he had rather shyly confessed himself enamoured of. But since the damsel had been quite five years his senior the romance, to Mabel’s relief, had faded away. Yet if Dick were ever really to fall in love it would be a deep and unshakable tie; he would be as his father had been, all faithful to the one woman in his life.
It was remembering her father that suddenly brought Mabel’s thoughts back to her mother whose absorbing personality had stood so like a giant shadow across all their lives. Would Dick’s love be strong enough to fight against his sense of duty and mother’s selfishness, for most certainly mother would not help him to achieve his desire unless it ran along the same lines as her own. And if mother prevailed what would life mean for Dick? The same dry empty dreariness that her own days contained, the restless hopes that died too hard, the unsatisfied, cruel dreams? No, no! She had not fought to save her own happiness, but she would fight to the last inch to save Dick’s.
Almost as if in answer to her heart’s wild outcry the front-door bell rang, and looking up she saw the short stout figure which of late had taken to haunting her thoughts on the door-step.
Mr. Jarvis was an elderly man inclined to be fat, with round, heavy face, very thick about the jaws and unpleasantly small eyes. Yet the expression of the man’s face was not altogether disagreeable and a certain shrewd humour showed in the lines of his mouth. He had lived for forty-two years in Wrotham, travelling twice a year to London in connection with his business, but never venturing further afield. His house, a magnificent farm building, lay about twelve miles away on the other side of Wrotham station. It had come down to him through generations of Jarvises, he was reputed to be marvellously wealthy, and he had no[Pg 53] shyness about admitting the fact. His favourite topics of conversation were money and horses. He had never married, village gossip could have given you lurid details as to the why and the wherefore had you been willing to listen. Mr. Jarvis himself would have put it more plainly. The only woman he had ever had the least affection for had neither expected nor desired matrimony; she had been content to live with him as his housekeeper. This woman had been dead three years when Jarvis first met Mabel. Quite apart from the fact that of late he had been feeling that it was time he got married, Jarvis had been attracted to Mabel from the first. She was such a contrast to the other women he had known; he admired enormously her slim delicacy, her faintly coloured face, her grey eyes. He liked her way of talking, too, and the long silences which held her; her quiet dignity, the way she moved. He placed her on a pedestal in his thoughts, which was a thing he had never dreamt of doing for any other woman, and before long his admiration melted into love. Then being forty-two the disease took rapid and tense possession. He was only happy when he was with her, able to talk to her now and again, to watch her always.
Dick’s impression was that Mabel hated the man. He disliked him himself, which perhaps coloured his view, for hate was not quite what Mabel felt. Had Mr. Jarvis been content to just like her she would have tolerated and more or less liked him. She had thought him, to begin with, a funny, in a way rather pathetic, little man. Ugly, and Mabel had such an instinctive sympathy for anything ugly or unloved. So, to begin with, she had been kind to him; then one day Mrs. Grant had opened her eyes to the evident admiration of the man, mentioning at the same time that from the money point of view he would be a good match, and suddenly Mabel had known that she was afraid. Afraid, without exactly knowing why, very much as is the hapless sheep on his way to the slaughter-house.
As the maid ushered in Mr. Jarvis a minute or two later [Pg 54] this feeling of fear caught at Mabel’s heart, and in answer to its summons the warm blood flushed to face and neck as she stood up to receive him.
“I am early,” stammered the man, his eyes on her new-wakened beauty, for it was only in her lack of colour that Mabel’s want of prettiness lay, “but I came on purpose, I wanted to catch you alone.”
Mabel took what was almost a despairing look at the clock. “Mother won’t be down for quite half an hour,” she said, “so you have succeeded. Shall we stay here or will you come down to the garden? I want to show you my Black Prince rose, it is not doing at all well.”
She moved to the window which opened doorways on to the garden, but Mr. Jarvis made no attempt to follow her.
“Let us stay here,” he said, “what I have got to say won’t take long and we can do the roses afterwards when Mrs. Grant is about. I guess you could help me a bit if you only chose to,” he went on, his voice curiously gruff and unready, “but you won’t, you won’t even look at me. I suppose those great grey eyes of yours hate the sight of me, and I am a damned fool to put my heart into words. But I have got to,” she heard him move close to her and how quickly he was breathing, “I love you, you pale, thin slip of a girl, I want you as a wife, will you marry me?”
The silence when he had finished speaking lay heavy between them. Mabel let him take her hand, though the moist warmth of his gave her a little shudder of aversion, but by no strength of will could she lift her eyes to look at him. She stood as immovable as a statue and the man, watching her from out of his small shrewd eyes, smiled a little bitterly.
“You hate the thought like poison,” he said, “yet you don’t throw off my hand or yell out your ‘No.’ Something is in the balance then. Well, marry me for my money, Mabel. I had rather it were love, but if there is anything about me that can win you, I am not going to give you up.”[Pg 55]
That flicked at her pride and the honesty of it appealed to her. She lifted her eyes and for the first time she became aware of the real kindness that lay in his.
“I have never hated you,” she said slowly, “but I don’t and can’t love you. Will you take that as your answer?”
The man shook his head. “I was not fool enough to ask—’Do you love me?’” he reminded her; “what I want to know is, ‘Will you marry me?’”
“Without love?”—her eyes besought him—”marriage must be hideous.”
“I will risk it if you will,” he answered. “Sit down, let us talk it out.”
He had won back his self-possession, though his eyes were still eager in their demand. Mabel sat down on the window-seat and he pulled up a chair at a little distance from her.
“Look here,” he began, “it is like this. I am not a young man, probably I am twelve to fourteen years older than you. If you have heard what the village scandal says about me you can take it from me that it is true; it is better that you should know the worst at once. But until I met you, this I can swear before God, I have never really loved. It is not a question of money this time; I would give my soul to win you. And I don’t want you as I have wanted the other women in my life; I want you as my wife.”
“Yet you can buy me just as you could them,” Mabel whispered.
“No”—again he shook his head. “I am not making that mistake either. I know just why I can buy you. Anyway, let us put that aside. This is the case as I see it. I have money, heaps of it; I have a good large house and servants eating their heads off. I will make Mrs. Grant comfortable; she will live with us, of course, and she is welcome to everything I have got; and I love you. That[Pg 56] is the one great drawback, isn’t it? The question is. Will you be able to put up with it?”
Away in the back of Mabel’s mind another voice whispered, “I love you.” She had to shut her lids over the “Dream Eyes,” to hold back the tears.
“Even if things were different,” she said, “I could not love you; I have always loved someone else.”
Mr. Jarvis sat back in his chair with a quick frown. “Any chance of his marrying you?” he asked.
“No,” she had to admit, “there has never been any chance of that.”
“I see”—he looked up at her and down again at his podgy, fat hands, clenched together. “My offer still holds good,” he said abruptly.
“Oh, I don’t know what to say or what to do.” Mabel’s calm broke, she stood up nervously. It almost seemed as if the walls of the room were closing in on her. “There are so many things to think of; Mother and Dick and——”
Perhaps he understood the softening of her voice as she spoke of Dick, for he looked up at her quickly.
“Yes, there is your brother,” he agreed. “I guess he is pretty tired having to look after you two, and he is a clever lad; there ought to be a future before him if he has his chance. Put the weight on to my shoulders, Mabel; they are better able to bear it.”
She turned to him breathlessly; it was quite true what he was saying about Dick. Dick had his own life to make. “I have told you the truth,” she said. “I don’t love you, probably there will be times when I shall hate you. If you are not afraid of that, if you are ready to take Mother and me and let us spend your money in return for that, then—I will marry you.”
Mr. Jarvis got quickly to his feet. “You mean it?” he gasped; his face was almost purple, he came to her, catching her hands in his. “You mean it? Mind you, Mabel, you have got to put up with my loving you. I[Pg 57] am not pretending that I am the kind of man who will leave you alone.”
“I mean it,” she answered, very cold and quiet, because it seemed as if all the tears in her heart had suddenly hardened into a lump of stone.
CHAPTER VII
| “I ride to a tourney with sordid things, They grant no quarter, but what care I? |
| I have bartered and begged, I have cheated and lied, But now, however the battle betide, Uncowed by the clamour, I ride ride, ride!” |
Victor Starbuck.
Joan did not see Aunt Janet again. Miss Abercrombie carried messages backwards and forwards between the two, but even Miss Abercrombie’s level-headed arguments could not move Aunt Janet from the position she had taken up. And Miss Abercrombie was quite able to realize how much her old friend was suffering.
“I never knew a broken heart could bring so much pain,” she told Joan; “but every time I look at your aunt I realize that physical suffering is as nothing compared to the torture of her thoughts.”
“Why cannot she try to understand. Let me go to her,” Joan pleaded. “If only I can speak to her I shall make her understand.”
But Miss Abercrombie shook her head. “No, child,” she said, “it would be quite useless and under the circumstances you must respect her wishes. I am fearfully sorry for both of you; I know that it is hurting you, too, but when you have wilfully or inadvertently killed a person’s belief in you the only thing you can do is to keep out of their way. Time is the one healer for such wounds.”
The tears smarted in Joan’s eyes, yet up till now she[Pg 58] had not cried once. Hurt pride, hurt love, struggled for expression, but words seemed so useless.
“I had better hurry up and get away,” she said; “I suppose Aunt Janet hates the thought of my being near her even.”
Miss Abercrombie watched her with kindly eyes. The tragedy she had suspected on the first night was worse even than she had imagined. It stared at her out of the old, fierce face upstairs, it slipped into her thoughts of what this girl’s future was going to be.
“Have you made any plans?” she asked; “do you know at all where to go?”
“Does it matter very much?” Joan answered bitterly.
“My dear,” Miss Abercrombie spoke gently, “I am making no attempt to criticize, and I certainly have no right to judge, but you have a very hard fight before you and you will not win through if you go into it in that spirit. I do not want to ask questions, you would probably resent them, but will you tell me one thing. Does the man know about what is going to happen?”
“No,” answered Joan. “It wouldn’t make any difference if he did. It is not even as if he had persuaded me to go and live with him; I want you to understand that I went of my own free will because I thought it was right.”
“You will write and tell him,” suggested Miss Abercrombie. “That is only fair to him and yourself.”
“No,” Joan said again, “it was the one thing he was most afraid of; I would not stoop to ask him to share it with me.”
Miss Abercrombie put out a quick hand. “You are forgetting that now there is someone else who is dependent on how you fight and whether you win through. You may say, ‘I stand alone in this,’ yet there is someone else who will have to share in paying the cost.”
The colour swept from Joan’s cheek; she choked back the hard lump in her throat. “We will have to pay it[Pg 59] together,” she said. “I cannot ask anyone else to help.”
The tears, long held back, came then and she turned away quickly. Miss Abercrombie watched her in silence for a minute or two. At last she spoke. “You poor thing,” she said slowly and quietly; “you poor, foolish child.”
Joan turned to her quickly. “You are thinking that I am a coward,” she said, “that I am making but a poor beginnings to my fight. But it isn’t that, not exactly. I shall have courage enough when it comes to the time. But just now it is hurting me so to hurt Aunt Janet; I had not reckoned on that, I did not know that you could kill love so quickly.”
“You can’t,” Miss Abercrombie answered. “If her love were dead all this would not be hurting her any more.”
So Joan packed up her trunks again, fighting all the time against the impulse which prompted her to do nothing but cry and cry and cry. The chill of Aunt Janet’s attitude seemed to have descended on the whole household. They could have no idea of the real trouble, but they felt the shadow and moved about limply, talking to each other in whispers. Miss Janet was reputed to be ill, anyway, she was keeping her room, and Miss Joan was packing up to go away; two facts which did not work in well together. No wonder the servants were restless and unhappy.
Uncle John met Joan on her way upstairs late that evening. His usually grave, uninterested face wore an expression of absolute amazement, it almost amounted to fear.
“Will you come into my room for a minute,” he said, holding the door open for her to pass.
Once inside, he turned and stared at her; she had never imagined his face could have worn such an expression. She saw him trying to speak, groping for words, as it were, and she stayed tongue-tied before him. Her day[Pg 60] had been so tumultuous that now she was tired out, indifferent as to what might happen next.
“Your aunt has told me,” he said at last. “I find it almost impossible to believe, and in a way I blame myself. We should never have allowed you to go away as we did.” He paused to breathe heavily. “I am an old man, but not too old to make a fight for our honour. Will you give me this man’s name and address, Joan?”
She had not paused to think that they would look on it as their honour which she had played with. His rather pitiful dignity hurt her more than anything that had gone before.
“I cannot do that,” she answered; “there is nothing exactly that you could blame him for. I did what I did out of my own free will and because I thought it was right.”
He still stared at her. “Right,” he repeated; “you use the word in a strange sense, surely; and as for blaming him”—she saw how suddenly his hands clenched, the knuckles standing out white—”if you will let me know where to find him, I will settle that between us.”
Joan moved towards the door. “I cannot,” she said; “please, Uncle John, don’t ask me any more. I have hurt your honour; it must be me that you punish. I am going away to-morrow, let me go out of your life altogether. I shall not make any attempt to come back.”
“You are going to him?” he questioned. “Before God, if you do that I will find you out and——”
“No,” she interrupted, “you need not be afraid; I am not going back to him.”
With her hand on the door she heard him order her to come back as he had not finished what he had to say, and she stayed where she was, not turning again to look at him.
“You are being stubborn in your sin.” How strange the words sounded from Uncle John, who had never said a cross word to her in his life. “Very well, then, there is nothing for us to do except, as you say, to try and forget[Pg 61] that we have ever loved you. When you go out of our house to-morrow it shall be the end. Your aunt is with me in this. But you shall have money; it shall be paid to you regularly through my solicitor, and to-night I am writing to him to tell him to render you every assistance he can. You can go there whenever you are in need of help. Miss Abercrombie has also promised your aunt, I believe, to do what she can for you.”
“I would rather not take any money from you,” whispered Joan; “I will be able to earn enough to keep myself.”
“When you are doing that,” he answered grimly, “you may communicate with the solicitor and he will put the money aside for such time as you may need it. But until then you owe it to us to use our money in preference to what could only be given to you in charity or disgrace.”
She waited in silence for some minutes after his last words. If she could have run to him then and cried out her fear and dismay and regret, perhaps some peace might have been achieved between them which would have helped to smooth out the tangle of their lives. But Joan was hopelessly dumb. She had gone into her escapade with light laughter on her lips, now she was paying the cost. One cannot take the world and readjust it to one’s own beliefs. That was the lesson she was to learn through loneliness and tears. This breaking of home ties was only the first step in the lesson.
She stole out of his presence at last and up to her own room. Her packing was all finished, she had dismantled the walls of her pictures, the tables of her books. Everything she possessed had been given to her by either Uncle John or Aunt Janet. Christmas presents, Easter presents, birthday presents, presents for no particular excuse except that she was their little girl and they loved her. It seemed to Joan as if into the black box which contained all these treasures she had laid away also their love for her. It[Pg 62] took on almost the appearance of a coffin and she hated it.
Miss Abercrombie saw her off at the station next morning. She had given Joan several addresses where she could look for rooms and was coming up to London in about a month herself, and would take Joan back with her into the country. “I want you to remember, though,” she added, “that you can always come to me any time before that if you feel inclined. You need not even write; just turn up; you have my address; I shall always be glad to have you. I want to help you through what I know is going to be a very bitter time.”
“Thank you,” Joan answered; but even at the time she had a ridiculous feeling that Miss Abercrombie was very glad to be seeing the last of her.
After the train had slid out of the station and the small, purposeful figure had vanished from sight she sat back and tried to collect her thoughts to review the situation. She was feeling tired and desperately unhappy. They had let her see, even these dear people whom of all others in the world she loved, that she had gone outside their pale. She was in their eyes an outcast, a leper. She was afraid to see in other people’s eyes the look of horror and agony which she had read in Aunt Janet’s. Of what use was her book-learned wisdom in the face of this, it vanished into thin air. Hopeless, ashamed, yet a little defiant, Joan sat and stared at the opposite wall of the railway carriage.
At Victoria Station she put her luggage into the cloak-room, deciding to see what could be done in the way of rooms, without the expense of going from place to place in a cab. The places Miss Abercrombie had recommended her to struck her as being expensive, and it seemed to her tortured nerves as if the landladies viewed her with distrustful eyes. She finally decided to take a bus down to Chelsea; she remembered having heard from someone that Chelsea was a cheap and frankly Bohemian place to live in.
London was not looking its very best on this particular[Pg 63] morning. A green-grey fog enshrouded shops and houses, the Park was an invisible blur and the atmosphere smarted in people’s eyes and irritated their throats. Despite the contrariness of the weather, Joan clambered on to the top of the bus, she felt she could not face the inside stuffiness. She was tired and, had she but owned to it, hungry. It was already late afternoon and she had only had a cup of coffee and a bun since her arrival.
As the bus jolted and bumped down Park Lane and then along Knightsbridge, she sat huddled up and miserable on the back seat, the day being well in accord with her mood. She was only dimly aware that they were passing the flat where she and Gilbert had lived, she was more acutely conscious of the couple who sat just in front of her—the man’s arm flung round the girl’s shoulders, her head very close to his.
Waves of misery closed round Joan. A memory, which had not troubled her for some time, of Gilbert’s hands about her and the scent of heliotrope, stirred across her mind. She could feel the hot tears splashing on her ungloved hands, a fit of sobbing gulped at her throat. Lest she should altogether lose control of herself she rose quickly and fumbled her way down the steps. The bus had just reached the corner of Sloane Street. She would go across the Park, she decided, and have her cry out. It was no use going to look for rooms in her present state, no landlady would dream of having her.
Half blinded by her tears and the fog combined, she turned and started to cross the road. Voices yelled at her from either side, a motor car with enormous headlights came straight at her out of the fog. Joan hesitated, if she had stayed quite still the danger would have flashed past her, but she was already too unnerved to judge of what her action should be. As if fascinated by the lights she shut her eyes and moved blindly towards them.
There were more sharp shouts, a great grinding noise of brakes and rushing wheels brought to a sudden pause,[Pg 64] then the darkness of black, absolute night surged over and beyond the pain which for a moment had held Joan. She floated out, so it seemed, on to a sea of nothingness, and a great peace settled about her heart.
CHAPTER VIII
| “With heart made empty of delight And hands that held no more fair things; I questioned her;—’What shall requite The savour of my offerings?’” |
E. Nesbit.
“You have got your back against the wall, you have got to fight, you have got to fight, to fight!”
The words pounded across Joan’s mind over and over again. She struggled in obedience to their message against the waves of sleep that lapped her round. Struggled and fought, till at last, after what seemed like centuries of darkness, she won back to light and opened her eyes.
She was lying in a long narrow bed, one of many, ranged on both sides down the hospital walls. Large windows, set very high up, opened on to grey skies and a flood of rather cold sunshine. At the foot of her bed, watching her with impartial eyes, stood a man, and beside him two nurses, their neat pink dresses and starched aprons rustling a little as they moved.
Joan’s eyes, wide and bewildered, met the doctor’s, and he leant forward and smiled.
“That’s better,” he said, “you have got to make an effort towards living yourself, young lady.” He nodded and turned to the nurse at his right hand. “How long has she been in now, Nurse?”
“Ten days to-morrow,” the woman answered, “and except for the first day, when she moaned a good deal and talked about having to fight, she has scarce seemed to be conscious.”[Pg 65]
Joan’s lips, prompted by the insistent voice within her, repeated, “I have got to fight,” stiffly.
The doctor came a little nearer and stooped to hear the words, “Yes,” he agreed, “that is right, you have got to fight. See if you can get her to talk now and again, Nurse,” he added; “she wants rousing, otherwise there is nothing radically to keep her back.”
Joan’s face, however, seemed to linger in his mind, for, as he was about to leave the ward after his tour of inspection, he turned again to the elder nurse in charge.
“Have you been able to find out anything about bed 14?” he asked.
“No, sir. We have had no inquiries and there was nothing in any of her pockets except a cloak-room ticket for Victoria Station.”
“Humph,” he commented, “yet she must have relations. She does not look the friendless waif type.”
Nurse Taylor pursed up her lips. She had her own opinion as to the patient in bed 14. “There was the unfortunate circumstance of her condition,” she mentioned; “the girl may very well have been desperate and lonely.”
“Anyway, she hasn’t any right to be left like this,” the doctor retorted. “If you can get her to talk about relations, find out where they are and send for them. That is my advice.”
Nurse Taylor owned a great many excellent qualities; tact and compassion were not among them. Long years spent in a profession which brought her daily into contact with human sin and human suffering had done nothing to soften her outlook or smooth down the hard, straight lines which she had laid down for her own and everyone else’s guidance. She disapproved of Joan, but obedience to the doctor’s orders was a religion to her; even where she disapproved she always implicitly carried them out.
Next day, therefore, she stopped for quite a long time at Joan’s bed, talking in her toneless, high voice. Had Joan any people who could be written to, what was her home[Pg 66] address, would they not be worried at hearing nothing from her?
Joan could only shake her head to all the questions. Very vaguely and in detached fragments she was beginning to remember the time that had preceded her accident. The memory of Aunt Janet’s face and Uncle John’s parting words was like an open wound, it bled at every touch and she shrank from Nurse Taylor’s pointed questions. She remembered how she had sat on the top of the bus with the black weight of misery on her heart and of how the tears had come. She had been looking for rooms; that recollection followed hard on the heels of the other.
When she was well enough to get about she would have to start looking for rooms again, for she had quite definitely made up her mind not to be a burden to Miss Abercrombie. It was her own fight; when she had gathered her strength about her, she would fight it out alone and make a success of it. Half wistfully she looked into the future and dreamt about the baby that was coming into her life. She would have to learn to live down this feeling of shame that burnt at her heart as she thought of him. He would be all hers, a small life to make of it what she pleased. Well, she would have to see that she made it fine and gay and brave. Shame should not enter into their lives, not if she fought hard enough.
Nurse Taylor described her to the junior afterwards as a most stubborn and hardened type of girl.
“The poor thing has hardly got her wits about her yet,” the other answered; “she is very little trouble in the wards, we have had worse.”
“Well, the doctor can question her himself next time,” Nurse Taylor snorted. “I am not here to be snubbed by her sort.”
She did not, however, let the matter drop entirely. At the end of her third week Joan was promoted to an armchair in the verandah and there one afternoon, after the teas had been handed round, Nurse Taylor brought her a[Pg 67] visitor. A tall, sad-faced, elderly woman, who walked with a curiously deprecating movement, seeming to apologize for every step she took. Yet kindliness and a certain strength shone at Joan from behind the large, round-rimmed glasses she wore, and her mouth was clean cut and sharp.
“This is Mrs. Westwood.” Nurse Taylor introduced them briefly. “She wants to have a little talk with you, Miss Rutherford. If I were you I should tell her about things,” she added pointedly. “I do not know if you have any plans made, but you are up for discharge next week.”
She bustled off and Mrs. Westwood drew up a chair and sat down close to Joan, staring at the girl with short-sighted, pink-lidded eyes.
“You will wonder who I am,” she said at last. “Perhaps you have never noticed me before, but I am a very frequent visitor. We run a mission in the South-West of London, with the object of helping young girls. I want you to talk to me about yourself, to be quite frank with me and to remember, if I seem to usurp on your privacy, that I am an older woman and that my only wish is to help you.”
“It is very kind of you,” began Joan, “but——”
“You may not need material help,” the woman put in hastily; “but, spiritually, who is not in need of help from God.”
Joan could think of no suitable reply for this and they sat in silence, the woman studying her face intently. Then presently, flushing with the earnestness of her purpose, she put out a cold hand and took Joan’s.
“I think they have left it to me to tell you,” she said. “The little life that was within you has been killed by your accident.”
The colour flamed to Joan’s face. A sense of awe and a feeling of intense relief surged up in her. “Oh, what a good thing!” she gasped, almost before she realized what she said.
Mrs. Westwood sat back in her chair, her eyes no longer[Pg 68] looked at Joan. “The child which God had given you even in your sin,” she said stiffly.
Joan leaned forward quickly. “I did not mean just that,” she said, “and yet I did. You do not know, you can’t guess, how afraid I was getting. Everyone’s hand against me, and even the people who had most loved me seeming to hate me because of this.”
Her voice trailed into silence before the stern disapproval of the other woman’s face. Yet once having started, she was driven on to speak all the jumble of thoughts that had lain in her mind these last two months.
“I was not ashamed or afraid, to begin with,” she hurried the words out. “It had not seemed to me wrong. I lived with him because I thought I loved him and we did not want to get married. Then one day he let me see—oh, no, I am not being quite truthful, for I had seen it before—that he was in reality ashamed of our life together. He was acting against his convictions because it amused him. I could not bear that, it seemed to drag our life together through the mud, and I left him.”
She could see that Mrs. Westwood was not making the slightest attempt to understand her; still she went wildly on:
“I went home and it seemed all right. My life with him faded away; I suppose I had never really loved him. Then, then they found out about what was going to happen and they turned against me, even Aunt Janet;” her voice broke on the words, she buried her face in her arms, crying like a child. “Aunt Janet, Aunt Janet,” she whispered again and again through her tears.
Mrs. Westwood waited till the storm had spent itself, there was no sign of softening upon her face. Remorse and regret she could understand and condone, but this excusing of self, as she called Joan’s explanation, struck her as being inexcusably bad.
“And do you now congratulate yourself that by this[Pg 69] accident,” she laid special stress on the word, “you are to escape the punishment of your sin?”
Joan raised tear-drowned eyes. “Haven’t I been punished enough,” she asked, “for something that I did not think was a sin?”
“We cannot make or unmake God’s laws in our thoughts,” the other answered; “you were wilfully blind to the knowledge that was in your heart.”
“Oh, no,” Joan began. Mrs. Westwood swept the remark aside and stood up.
“We will not argue about it,” she said; “I realize that you are not yet looking for the comfort or promise of pardon which I could lead you to. But, my child, do not delude yourself into the belief that thus easily have you set aside the consequences of your evil. God is not mocked, neither does He sleep. If you should ever be in any real need of help,” she ended abruptly, “help which would serve to make you strong in the face of temptation, come to us, our doors are always open.”
She dropped a card bearing the address of the mission on Joan’s lap and turned to go. Joan saw her call Nurse Taylor and say a few words to her on the way out. For herself she sat on in the dusk. Outside the lamps had been lit, they shone on wet pavements and huge, lurching omnibuses, on fast-driven taxis and a policeman standing alone in the middle of the road. To-morrow she would have to write to Miss Abercrombie and tell her there was no further need for her very kindly assistance; then she would have to make new plans and arrangements for herself in the future. She would try for a room in one of the girls’ clubs that Miss Abercrombie had given her a letter to. She had been shy of going there before, but it would be different now. She could slip back into life and take up her share, forgetting, since the fear was past, the nightmare of terror which had held her heart before. For she had been afraid, what was the use of trying to blind her eyes to the truth? She had not had the courage of her[Pg 70] convictions, she had not even wanted to carry her banner through the fight. She was glad, to the very bottom of her heart she was glad, that there was no more need for fighting.
CHAPTER IX
| “Let this be said between us here, One’s love grows green when one turns grey; This year knows nothing of last year, To-morrow has no more to say To yesterday.” |
A. Swinburne.
Dick could not bring himself to approve of his sister’s marriage. He made no attempt to conceal his real opinion on the subject. In one very heated interview with Mabel herself he labelled it as disgusting to marry a man whom you disliked for his money, or for the things his money can give you.
“But I do not dislike him,” Mabel answered, as once before. She was sitting in a low armchair by the window, a piece of sewing in her hands. She laid her work down to look up at him. “He is very fond of me and he will be very good to Mother and myself. There are worse reasons than that for marrying, surely.”
“It is Mother, then,” stormed Dick. “You are doing it because of Mother.”
Mabel shook her head. “No,” she said; “I am doing it because to me it seems right and as if it would bring most happiness to all of us. I am not even quite sure that Mother approves.”
She need not have had any misgivings on that point. Mrs. Grant was absolutely in her element arranging for the marriage. Mabel had never been quite the beautiful daughter that Mrs. Grant would have liked, that she should marry a Mr. Jarvis was to be expected; he had at[Pg 71] least got money, which was always something to be thankful for. She took over the refurnishing and redecorating of his house with eager hands.
“Mabel has always been accustomed to luxury, Tom,” she told Mr. Jarvis; “until Harry died she never wanted for a thing which money could give her.”
“And she shall not want now,” he answered gravely.
Only once he remarked to Mabel afterwards, showing perhaps the trend of his thoughts: “We appear to be furnishing our house to please your mother, Mabel; seems a pity I cannot save you the trouble of marrying me by asking her instead.”
Mabel stirred a little uneasily. “In pleasing her you are pleasing me,” she answered, and with a shrug of his shoulders he turned away from the subject.
Mrs. Grant had her own rooms papered with white satin paper and very delicately outlined in gold; she ransacked the Jarvis heirlooms to find appropriate furniture for such a setting, and succeeded very well. The bills for her various suggested improvements passed through Mr. Jarvis’ hands, and he commented on them to Mabel with a grim smile.
“She knows how to spend money,” he said. “Dick must certainly have found the responsibility heavy.”
“She has never learned how not to spend,” Mabel explained; “but you must not pass what you think unnecessary.”
“My dear, it is part of our bargain,” he answered; “I shall not shrink from my share any more than you will.”
Mrs. Grant fought very strenuously for a wedding in London, but here for once Mabel opposed her firmly, and the idea had to be abandoned.
“It means, of course, that most of my dearest friends will not be able to come, but I suppose I need not expect that to weigh against your determination,” was one of the many arguments she tried, and: “I never dreamed that[Pg 72] a daughter of mine would insist upon this hole-and-corner way of getting married” another.
“It almost looks as if you were ashamed of the man,” she said somewhat spitefully to Mabel, the day the wedding-dress was tried on. “When your father and I were married the church was simply packed. I had a lovely gown”—her thoughts wandered into kindlier channels—”and Harry was very much in love. I remember his hand shaking as he tried to slip the ring on to my finger. I suppose you love Mr. Jarvis?”
The abrupt question coming after the vague memories startled Mabel into sudden rigidness. “I suppose I do,” she answered, her white-clad figure mocked her from the glass. “One does love one’s husband, doesn’t one?”
“Mabel”—Mrs. Grant’s voice sounded righteous indignation—”you do say such extraordinary things sometimes and about such solemn subjects. But if you do really love him, then why this desire for secrecy?”
“Dear Mother, being married in the parish church instead of in St. Paul’s is not exactly secrecy or a wild desire to hide something on my part. I have always hated big fashionable weddings.”
She slipped out of the dress and laid it down on the bed. Mrs. Grant viewed her with discontented eyes.
“I cannot pretend to understand you,” she grumbled, “and I don’t know why you talk of St. Paul’s. I never suggested such a place; Harry and I were married at St. Mary’s, Kensington.”
Dick, when consulted on the matter, proved even less amenable. “I dislike the whole affair,” he answered gruffly; “please don’t ask me where it should take place.”
He ran up to London himself the week before the wedding. A vague and rather incoherent wish to meet Joan again had kept him restless ever since her abrupt departure. He did not attempt to define his thoughts in any way. The girl had interested him, and startled him out of the even tenor of his beliefs. He hated to think of[Pg 73] her turned adrift and left, as the possibility was she had been left, to fend for herself. He had not seen the elder Miss Rutherford since his visit, but rumour in the village ran that Miss Joan had got into disgrace of sorts and been sent away. The servants from the Manor spoke with bated breath of the change which had come over the household; of how Miss Joan’s rooms had been locked and her pictures taken down. The world is horribly hard to women when they leave the beaten paths of respectability; he could not bear to think of what she might be suffering, of where it might lead her.
He walked about somewhat aimlessly for his few days in town, but the chance of meeting anyone in this way is very remote, and of course he did not succeed. He could not, however, shake away the depression which the thought of her brought him.
Mabel came to sit in his smoking-room the night before her wedding, Mrs. Grant having gone early to bed.
“Did you see anyone up in town?” she asked.
Dick shook his head, puffing at his pipe. “Not a soul I knew,” he commented, “except Mathews about my job. Wish I hadn’t gone; London is a depressing place.”
“You rather hoped to meet someone, didn’t you?” asked Mabel.
Dick glanced up at her and away again quickly. “What makes you ask that?” he said.
Mabel let the curtain fall back into place; she had been peering out into the street, and turned to face him. “You have shut me outside things, Dick,” she spoke slowly, “this last month, ever since my engagement; but shutting me out can’t keep me from knowing. You only saw that girl over at the Manor once, but she has been in your thoughts ever since.” She came forward, perching herself on the arm of his chair as had been her habit in the old days, one arm thrown round his shoulders to support herself. “Little brother,” she asked, “did you think I should not know when you fell in love?”[Pg 74]
Fell in love! How completely the thought startled him. Of course Mabel was utterly mistaken in her wild conjectures. To throw aside the doubt he turned quickly, and put a hand over hers where it lay near him.
“Why do you say I have shut you out?” he parried her question. “Because I lost my temper over your engagement?”
“No.” Mabel shook her head. “It was not exactly because of that. I know you have not understood, Dick; I am not even sure that I want you to; and I know that that helped to build a wall between us, but that was not what began it. Never mind”—she bent and kissed the top of his head—”if your secret is not ready to share you shall keep it a little longer to yourself. You will go up to London, won’t you, Dick, after Tom and I have come back and Mother has settled down?”
“I suppose so,” he agreed; “but I want to get away for a bit first, if I can. Spoke to Mathews when I was in town and he has promised to keep his eyes open for a job on one of those P. and O. liners for me.”
“I see,” she said; “but when you come back you will settle in town and sometimes you will spare us week-ends from your very strenuous career, won’t you?”
“Of course,” he answered; his hand tightened on hers. “Mabel,” he said suddenly, “you are happy, aren’t you; it isn’t because of me or anyone else that you are getting married, is it?”
He was not looking at her, therefore she did not have to lie with her eyes. “I am quite happy,” she answered softly. “Dear, stupid Dick, how you have fretted your heart out about my happiness.”
“I know,” he admitted, “I could not bear to think—I mean, love somehow stands for such a lot in people’s lives, I——” he broke off, and stood up abruptly. “You will think I am a sentimental ass, but I have always wanted you to have the best of things, Mabel, and I have been[Pg 75] horribly afraid that Fate, or Mother, or perhaps even I, were shoving you into taking the second best.”
“You have wanted the best for me, Dick,” she answered, “that counts for a lot.”
Then one of those dull silences fell between them that come sometimes to two people who love with their whole hearts and who have been trying to speak some of their thoughts to each other—a silence that stood between them almost as it were with a drawn sword, while Dick puffed at his pipe and Mabel stared at her white hands, showing up against the darkness of her dress. Then finally she moved, standing up, and just for a second their eyes met.
“Good-night,” she said across the silence, “it is late, Dick, I meant to be in bed ages ago.”
“Good-night,” he answered, and she turned quickly and went from the room.
Mrs. Grant kept everyone, including herself, in a state of unexplained fuss from the moment when early morning light woke her on the day of Mabel’s marriage till the moment when, much to Dick’s embarrassment, she collapsed into his arms, sobbing bitterly, in the vestry where they had all gone to sign their names.
At the reception she slightly recovered her spirits, but broke down again when the time came for the couple to depart. They were going to Paris for a fortnight’s honey-moon; Mabel had stipulated that they should not be away for longer than that. Jarvis Hall was ready for their return; already Mrs. Grant was using one of the motors and ordering crested paper with the address on it for her own letters. But Dick, Mabel knew, was simply aching to be quit of it all, and away on his own. He had arranged to hand over the practice and proposed to take a two years’ trip abroad. It was only in the complete freedom of Dick that she would know that part of her plan was being fulfilled.
When she drew back her head after the final farewells had been waved and the house was out of sight it was to[Pg 76] meet Jarvis’ intent, short-sighted stare. His glasses magnified the pupils of his eyes to an unusual extent when he was looking straight at anyone.
“Well,” he said, “that’s done. Till the last moment, Mabel, I rather wondered if you would go through with it. But I might have known,” he went on quickly, “you are not the sort to shrink from a bargain once it is made.”
Her hand lay passive in his, she did not even stir when he leaned forward to kiss her. What he had said was perfectly true, the bargain had been made, she was not one of those who shirk payment.
CHAPTER X
| “And you shall learn how salt his food who fares Upon another’s bread; how steep his path, Who treadeth up and down another’s stairs.” |
D. G. Rossetti.
There are some natures which cannot live with any happiness in drab surroundings. Atmosphere affects everyone more or less; but whereas there are a few fortunate ones who can rise triumphant to a certain contentment through squalor and ugliness, there are a great many more who find even cheerfulness very hard to attain to under like circumstances.
The shut-in dinginess of Digby Street, the gloomy aspect of Shamrock House, cast such a chill across Joan’s spirits that, as she stood hesitating with her hand on the bell, the instinct came to her to scramble back into the cab and tell the man to drive her anywhere away from such a neighbourhood. Of course it was absurd, and the cabman did not look as if he would be in the least willing to comply. He had treated her with a supercilious disbelief in there being any tip for him as soon as he had heard of her destination. Joan had gone to Victoria Station to collect her luggage, and it had been both late and dark before the need[Pg 77] for a cab had arisen. She had elected not to leave the hospital till after tea; somehow, when it had come near to going, her courage, which she had been bolstering up with hope and promises of what she should do in her new life, had vanished into thin air. Perhaps more than anything else she lacked the physical strength which would have enabled her to look cheerfully into the future. The hospital had been a place of refuge, she hated to leave it.
This feeling grew upon her more and more as she sat back in a corner of the cab while it rumbled along the Vauxhall Bridge Road. There seemed always to be a tram passing, huge giant vehicles that shook the earth and made a great deal of noise in their going. The houses on either side were dingy, singularly unattractive-looking buildings, and the further the cab crawled away from Victoria Street the deeper the shade of poverty and dirt that descended on the surroundings. Digby Street and Shamrock House were the culminating stroke to Joan’s depression.
Miss Abercrombie had written recommending it to her as a Girls’ Club where she would probably get companionship and advice on the question of work. “You won’t like it,” she had added, “but it is very conveniently situated and ridiculously cheap.” So Joan had described her destination to the cabman as a ladies’ club, somewhere in Digby Street. He had answered with a sniff, for it was here that he had lost sight of his tip, that he supposed she meant the Home for Working Girls that lay in those parts. Looking up at the large, red-fronted building, with its countless uncurtained windows, Joan realized that the man’s description was probably nearer the truth than her own.
She was to learn later that on this particular occasion she saw Digby Street at its very worst, for it was Saturday night, and barrows of fish, meat and vegetables stood along the pavements, illuminated by flares of light so that all the ugliness was only too apparent. Little children played in and out, under the barrows and along the gutters; a public-house stood at the corner near Shamrock House, and exactly[Pg 78] opposite the Salvation Army added its brass band and shrill voices to the general tumult.
Joan’s first timid attempt at the bell produced no answer, nor her second. By this time the cabman had dismounted her box and stood staring at her in sullen disapproval, while a couple of very drunk but cheerful costers argued with each other as to whether they ought not to help the young lady to get in. Her third effort was perhaps more violent, for, to her relief, she could see the dim light in the hall being turned up and the door was opened on the chain and very slightly ajar. A couple of bright eyes peered at her through this opening, then, having apparently satisfied their owner that Joan was neither dangerous nor drunk, the door was further opened, and Joan could see into the red-tiled hall and passage with its numbered, white-painted doors.
“What do you want?” asked the lady of the eyes; a small, plump person with grey hair brushed back very straight from an apple-red face.
“I want a room,” Joan explained. “I have been recommended to come here. I do hope you have one to spare.”
The little lady moved aside and beckoned to the cabman. “You can come in,” she said, “and the man had better fetch in your box. I thought it was one of those troublesome children when you first rang, it was so very violent, and they make a point of trying to break the bells.”
“I am so sorry,” Joan murmured meekly, an apology she realized was expected from her. “I was so dreadfully tired and no one seemed to be going to answer.”
“We do not keep a staff of servants to answer the bell day and night,” the woman answered. “Still, I am sorry you were kept waiting. Will you come in here”—she opened a door a little way down the passage—”this is my office. I must see your letter of recommendation before I let you talk about the rooms, that is one of our rules.”
Joan paid the cabman and followed her inquisitor into[Pg 79] the office. Miss Nigel let down the front of the desk, opened a large ledger and donned a pair of spectacles. “Now,” she said, “who are you, what are your references, and who recommended you?”
Fortunately Miss Abercrombie had remembered to send a letter of introduction. Joan produced it and handed it to Miss Nigel. “My name is Joan Rutherford,” she added; “I did not know about having to have references.”
Miss Nigel peered at her over the tops of her glasses; she only used them for reading and could not see out of them for other purposes. “We have to make a point of it in most cases,” she answered, “but also I judge by appearances. In your case this letter from Miss Abercrombie—her name is in our books although I do not know her personally—will be quite sufficient. Now, how much do you want to pay?”
“As little as possible,” Joan confessed, “only I would like to have a room to myself.”
“Quite so,” the other agreed, “and in any case, all our cubicles are taken. They are, of course, cheaper than anything else.” She ran her finger down the lines of the ledger. “I can let you have a room on the top floor which will work out to fifteen and six a week. That includes breakfast, late dinner, lights and baths. There is a certain amount of attendance, but we expect the girls to make their own beds and keep the rooms tidy.”
Fifteen and six a week. Joan attempted to make a rapid calculation in her head, but gave up the idea. It sounded at least quite absurdly cheap, she would not have to spend very much of Uncle John’s allowance before she got some work to do for herself. The future seemed suddenly to shut her in to a life enclosed by the brick walls of Shamrock House with its attendant neighbourhood of Digby Street.
“That will do,” she answered, “it sounds very nice.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Nigel; she closed the desk and stood up, “for the price, we offer exceptional advantages. If you[Pg 80] will carry up what you need for to-night, I will show you to your rooms.”
It occurred to Joan as she followed her guide up flights of carpetless stone stairs that her new abode resembled a prison more than anything else. The long bare passages were broken up by countless doors all numbered and painted white in contrast to the brick-coloured walls. The sound of their footsteps echoed mournfully through the bareness and seeming desolation of the place. From one of the landing windows she caught a blurred picture of the streets outside, the lit-up barrows, the crowd just emerging from the public-house. She was to get very used and very hardened to the life in Digby Street, but on this, her first evening, it caught at her senses with a cold touch of fear.
On the top floor of all Miss Nigel opened the first door along the passage and ushered Joan into the room that was to be hers. It was so small that its one window occupied practically the whole space of the front wall. A narrow bed stood along one side, and between this and the opposite wall there was scarce room for a chair. At the foot of the bed stood the wash-stand and the chest of drawers facing each other, with a very narrow space in between them. But it was all scrupulously clean, with white-washed walls and well-scrubbed furniture, and the windows opened over the roofs of the neighbouring houses. Very far up in the darkness of the sky outside a star twinkled and danced.
Miss Nigel looked round at the room with evident satisfaction. “You will be comfortable here, I think,” she said; “we do our best to make the girls happy. We expect them, however, to conform to our rules; you will find them explained in this book.” She placed a little blue pamphlet on the dressing-table. “Lights are put out at ten, and if you are later than that, you have to pay a small fine for being let in, a threepenny door fee, we call it. Everyone is requested to make as little noise as possible in their rooms or along the passages, and to be punctual for dinner.”
With one more look round she turned to go. Half-way [Pg 81] out, however, a kindly thought struck her, and she looked back at Joan.
“Dinner is at seven-thirty,” she said. “I expect you will be glad to have it and get to bed. You look very tired.”
Joan would have liked to ask if she could have dinner upstairs, but one glance at the book of rules and regulations decided her against the idea. Shamrock House evidently admitted of no such luxury, and on second thoughts, how ridiculous it was to suppose that dinner could be carried up five flights of stairs for the benefit of someone paying fifteen and six a week all told. She was too tired and too depressed to face the prospect of a meal downstairs, she would just have to go to bed without dinner, she concluded.
The House woke to life as she lay there, evidently the inhabitants returned about this time. Joan remembered the cabman’s somewhat blunt description and smiled at the memory. A Home for Working Girls. That was why it had seemed so silent and deserted before, shops and offices do not shut till after six. But now the workers were coming home, she could hear their feet along the passages, the slamming of doors, voices and laughter from the room next hers. Home! This narrow, cold room, those endless stairs and passages outside, they were to be home for the future. The hot tears pricked in her eyes, but she fought against tears. After all, she had been very lucky to find it, it was cheap, it was clean; other girls lived here and were happy, someone had laughed next door.
“I have got to take you firmly in hand,” Joan argued with her depression. “It is no use making a fuss about things that are all my own fault. I tried to play with life and I did not succeed. It is too big and hard. If I had wanted to work it out differently I ought to have been very strong. But I am not strong, I am only just ordinary. This is my chance again, and in the plain, straight way I must win through.” She spoke the words almost aloud, as if challenging fate: “I will win through.”[Pg 82]
CHAPTER XI
| “Will my strength last me? Did not someone say The way was ever easier all the way?” |
H. C. Beeching.
Youth can nearly always rely upon sleep to build up new strength, new hope, new courage. If you have got to a stage in your life when sleep fails you, if night means merely a long tortured pause from the noises of the world, in which the beating of your heart seems unbearably loud, then indeed you have reached to the uttermost edge of despair. Joan slept, heavily and dreamlessly, save that there was some vague hint of happiness in her mind, till she was wakened in the morning by a most violent bell ringing. The dressing-bell at Shamrock House, which went at seven o’clock, was carried by a maid up and down every passage, so that there was not the slightest chance of anyone oversleeping themselves.
Joan dressed quickly; the faint aroma of happiness which her sleep had brought her, and which amounted to cheerfulness, stayed with her. She remembered how Miss Abercrombie had once said to her: “Oh, you are a Browningite,” and smiled at the phrase, repeating to herself another verse of the same poem:
“And I shall thereupon
Take rest ere I be gone,
Once more on my adventure brave and new.”
She felt almost confident of success this morning; her mind was busy with plans of the work she would find. She was glad to feel herself one in a giant hive of workers, all girls like herself, cutting out their lives for themselves, earning their own living.
Breakfast brought with it a slight disillusionment. The[Pg 83] dining-room in Shamrock House is in the basement; chill and dreary of aspect, its windows always dirty and unopenable, because at the slightest excuse of an open window the small boys of the neighbourhood will make it their target for all kinds of filth. Rotting vegetables, apple-cores, scrapings of mud; there is quite sufficient of all that outside the windows without encouraging it to come in. Six long deal tables occupy the space of the room, and it is one of the few amusements which the children of Digby Street possess to gather at the railings and watch the inhabitants of Shamrock House being fed.
It was the last flight of stairs into the basement which damped Joan’s enthusiasm for her new home. As she stood hesitating in the doorway, for there were a great many people in the room, and the tables seemed crowded, she caught Miss Nigel’s eye.
“You will find a seat over there,” the lady called out to her, waving a hand in the direction of the furthest table. “Help yourself to bacon, which is on the hot case near the fire, and come here for your tea or coffee. By the way, which do you like?”
Joan asked for tea, and having secured her cup and a small piece of unappetizing bacon, she found her way over to the indicated table. A girl sat at the head of it, and since she was ensconced behind a newspaper and apparently paying no attention to anybody, Joan chose the chair next her. She felt on the sudden shy and unwilling to make friends with anyone, the chill of the room was striking into her heart.
She had presently to rouse her neighbour, however, to ask her to pass the salt, and at that the girl lifted a pair of penetrating eyes and fixed Joan with an intent stare.
“New arrival?” she asked.
“Yes,” Joan admitted. “I came last night.”
“Humph!” the girl commented. “Well, don’t touch the jam this morning. It is peculiar to Shamrock House[Pg 84]—plum-stones, raspberry-pips and glue.” She swept the information at Joan and returned to her paper.
She was a big girl with rather a heavy face and strong, capable-looking hands. Despite her manners, which were undeniably bad, Joan would almost have described her as distinguished but for the fact that the word sounded ridiculous amid such surroundings.
“Looking for work?” the girl asked presently.
“Yes,” Joan answered again, “only I am not sure what sort of work to look for, or what I should like to do.”
The girl lifted her eyes to stare at her once again. “It isn’t generally a case of ‘like,’” she said, “more often it is necessity. In that case”—she reached out a long arm for the bread—”Fate does not as a rule give you much time in which to make up your mind; she pushes you into something which you hate like hell for the rest of your life.”
“You aren’t very cheerful,” remonstrated Joan.
“Oh, well, I never am that,” agreed the other, “nor polite. You ask Miss Nigel if you want a true estimate of my manners. But I have lived here ten years now and I have seen girls like you drift in and out by the score. The feeding or the general atmosphere doesn’t agree with them, and our ranks are maintained by beings of a coarser make, as you may see for yourself.”
She rose, crumpling her paper into a ball and throwing it under the table.
“My name is Rose Brent,” she said. “What is yours?”
“Rutherford,” Joan answered, “Joan Rutherford. I hope I shan’t drift quite as quickly as you foretell,” she added.
Secretarial work was what she had really made up her mind to try for, though she had not had the courage to confess as much to her breakfast companion. She had, after all, had a certain amount of training in that and hoped not to find it so very impossible to get a post as a beginner somewhere. Her first visit to the nearest registry[Pg 85] office, however, served to show her that her very slight experience was going to be of little use to her. The registry lady was kind, sufficiently interested to appear amiable, but not at all reassuring in her views as to Joan’s prospects.
“I am afraid I cannot hold out very much hope,” she said, after five minutes’ crisp questioning of Joan. “You have, you see, so very few qualifications, and the market is rather over-stocked with girls who can do just a little. My strong advice to you is to continue your shorthand; when you are a little more experienced in that we ought to have no difficulty in placing you. Good morning; please see that the hall door shuts properly, the latch is very weak.”
Her business-like manner, the absolute efficiency which shone around her, and the crowded aspect of the waiting-room—all girls who could do just a little, Joan presumed—caused her heart to sink. Finding work was not going to be as easy as she had first supposed.
She roamed from office to office after that for several days, to be met everywhere with the same slight encouragement and frail promises to help. Finally, thoroughly discouraged, she bought papers instead, and turned to a strict perusal of their various advertisements.
One in particular caught her eye.
“Wanted a pupil shorthand typist. Tuition in return for services.—Apply Miss Bacon, 2, Baker Street, W.”
It was late in the afternoon of the day before Joan found her way to Baker Street, for she had had several other places to call at and she was in addition very tired. Going from place to place in search of work had reduced her to a painful knowledge of her own absolute incompetency and the general uselessness of life. A brass plate on the door of No. 2 conveyed the information: “Miss Bacon. Fourth floor. Shorthand and Typing. Please ring and walk up.”
Joan rang and followed the instructions. On the very[Pg 86] top landing a girl stood, holding a candle in her hand, for up here there was no light of any sort. The grease dripped down her skirt and on to the floor.
“Do you want Miss Bacon?” she asked.
Joan nodded, too breathless to say anything.
The girl turned into the dim interior and threw open a door, snuffing the candle at the same time.
“If you will wait here,” she said, “Miss Bacon will be with you in a minute.”
Joan looked round on a moderately large, dust-smothered room. Dust, that is to say, was the first thing to strike the eye of the beholder. The windows were thick in dust, it lay on tables and chairs and on the two typewriters standing unused in a corner of the room. The room gave one the impression of being singularly uninhabited. Then the door opened and shut again, and Joan turned to face the owner.
Miss Bacon’s figure, like her furniture, seemed to have taken on a coating of dust. Timid eyes looked out at Joan from behind pince-nez set rather crookedly on a thin nose. One side of her face, from eye to chin, was disfigured by an unsightly bruise. Miss Bacon dabbed a handkerchief to it continually and started explaining its presence at once.
“You may be surprised at my face”—her voice, like her eyes, was timid—”but I am short-sighted and last night stumbled on the stairs, hitting my face against the top step. It was exceedingly painful, but it is better now. What can I do for you?”
Joan murmured something sympathetic about the top step, and explained that she had come in answer to the advertisement. Miss Bacon’s face fell. “I had hoped you were a client,” she owned. Then she pulled forward a chair for herself and asked Joan to be seated.
It appeared that Joan would receive excellent tuition in shorthand and free use of the typewriters. If any typing work came in she would be expected to help with it,[Pg 87] but for the rest she could devote the whole of her time to studying and practising on the machines. Miss Bacon was a little vague as to the other pupils, but Joan gathered that there was a shorthand class and two other typewriters in another room.
“My other pupils are, of course, on a different footing,” Miss Bacon told her. “Generally I require a fee of at least ten guineas, but in your case, as I shall require you to do a little work for me, I shall be content to take less. That is to say, four guineas, everything included.”
“There is nothing about paying in the advertisement,” Joan ventured. “I am afraid it is quite impossible for me to pay that.”
Miss Bacon took off her glasses and polished them with nervous hands. “I do not want to seem unreasonable,” she said; “after you have worked for me you will certainly be able to obtain a well-paid post elsewhere; my pupils invariably move on in that way. I guarantee, of course, to find situations. If I could meet you in any way—supposing you paid me two guineas now and two guineas when you moved on?”
“It is awfully kind of you”—Joan hesitated on the words—”but I am afraid I can’t really afford it, not even that.”
Miss Bacon relinquished the idea with a heartfelt sigh. “My dear,” she confided suddenly, “I know what poverty is. Shall we say one pound to begin with?—you must remember that these are very exceptional terms.”
Joan thought a moment. It seemed almost certain, from what she had gleaned from the various agencies, that getting a post without training was an impossibility, and most of the training centres asked for at least twenty-five guineas. Perhaps in refusing this offer she was letting a good chance slip by her, and, though she hated to make free use of it, there was always Uncle John’s money, to fall back on.
“I think I will come if you will let me do it in that way,”[Pg 88] she decided finally; “when would you like me to start?—to-morrow?”
“The sooner the better.” Miss Bacon rose with a smile of almost intense relief. “I have had no one for the last fortnight and the place is getting very untidy. You will pay the first pound in advance,” she added; “I hope you will bring it with you to-morrow.”
She seemed painfully anxious for the money; if Joan had not been so tired she might have thought the fact suspicious. As it was she went back to Shamrock House with a lightened heart. It was not a very attractive or promising post; if she were to judge by outside appearances and by Miss Bacon’s last remark her chief duties were to include those of general cleaning up and dusting. But that would be all in the day’s work. Some little confidence and hope were beginning to creep back into her heart. She had secured her first post; Miss Bacon held out vague visions of the triumphs to which it might lead. Surely in time she would get away from the nightmare of the last two months; in time even Aunt Janet would forgive her, and meanwhile her foot was on the lowest rung of the ladder; work should be her world in future. She would work and fight and win. There was still, as Miss Abercrombie would have said, a banner to be carried. She would carry it now to the end.
CHAPTER XII
| “Our life is spent in little things, In little cares our hearts are drowned; We move with heavy laden wings In the same narrow round.” |
For the first week in her new post Joan was kept very busy putting things—as Miss Bacon described it—to rights. She had also, she discovered, to run errands for Miss Bacon several times during the course of a day; to buy paper for[Pg 89] the typewriters, to fetch Miss Bacon’s lunch, on one occasion to buy some cooling lotion for Miss Bacon’s bruise. Of the other pupils she saw no sign, and even the girl who had admitted her on the first night did not put in an appearance, but this Miss Bacon explained by saying that Edith was delicate and often forced to stay away through ill health.
Joan refrained from asking questions; she realized herself that she had stumbled on to something that was nearly a tragedy. The hunted look in Miss Bacon’s face, the signs of poverty, the absolute lack of work told their own tale. As a running business 2, Baker Street, was an evident failure, but there was no reason why, with a little application, she should not make it serve her purpose as a school. The lack of tuition was its one great drawback; there seemed no signs whatsoever of the promised shorthand lessons. Finally Joan plucked up her courage one morning in the second week, and invaded Miss Bacon’s private office.
“What about my shorthand?” she inquired from just within the doorway; “when shall I begin?”
Miss Bacon had changed her shoes for a pair of bedroom slippers and was occupying the arm-chair, immersed in the newspaper. She started at Joan’s abrupt question, the movement jerking the glasses from off her nose. She picked them up nervously and blinked at Joan.
“What did you say?—shorthand? Oh, yes, of course! It is really Edith’s duty to take you in that; still, as she is not here, I propose to dictate to you myself after lunch. My first duty in the mornings is to master the newspaper; there might be some openings advertised.” She turned again to her news-sheet. “Why not employ yourself practising on the typewriter?” she suggested.
Joan would have liked to reply that she was tired of practising sentences on the typewriter and hungry for some real work to do, but she had not the heart to be unkind to the poor little woman. She spent a disconsolate[Pg 90] morning and stayed out for lunch longer than usual. On her return Miss Bacon was waiting for her on the top of the stairs.
“My dear,” she said in an excited voice, “some work has come in. A man has just brought it, and he must have it by to-morrow morning. I hope you will be able to get it done, for I have promised, and a lot may depend on it.”
So much depended on it that she herself decided to help Joan with the work. She was not, it appeared, even as experienced as Joan, and by 6.30 the two of them had only completed about half the typing. Joan’s back ached and her fingers tingled, but Miss Bacon’s eyes behind the glasses were strained to the verge of tears, two hectic spots of colour burned in her cheeks and her fingers stumbled and faltered over the keys.
As the clock struck seven Joan straightened herself with a sigh of relief.
“It is no use,” she said, “we cannot get it done; he will have to wait for his silly old papers.”
The blood died suddenly out of Miss Bacon’s face, her mouth trembled. “It must be done,” she answered; “you do not understand. It is the first work that has been brought to us for weeks. The man is a stranger; if it is well done and up to time he will give us some more; besides he will pay”—for a second she lifted her eyes and looked at Joan—”I must have the money,” she said.
Her face, working under the stress of some strong emotion, was painful to see. She was so weak, so useless, so driven. Joan looked away hastily and went on with her work. From time to time, though, she stole a glance at Miss Bacon. It was dreadful to know that the poor old woman was crying; quietly, hopelessly, great drops that splashed on to her fingers as they stumbled over the keys.
At last Joan could bear it no longer, she rose quickly and crossed over to Miss Bacon, putting her hands over the useless fingers.[Pg 91]
“Don’t you bother with it any more, Miss Bacon,” she said. “I am nearly through with my share now and I can come early to-morrow and get it all done before breakfast. It is silly to work away at it now when we are both tired out.”
Miss Bacon gulped down her tears and looked up nervously. “You think you can,” she asked; “you have realized how important it is?”
“Yes,” Joan told her, “and I know I can. I won’t disappoint you, really I won’t. Let us go across the road and get some tea before we go home,” she suggested.
Miss Bacon looked away again hastily. “You go,” she muttered, “I don’t need tea, I——”
“You are going to come and have tea with me,” Joan interrupted. It had flashed on her that Miss Bacon had not even the money for that.
Over the hot buttered toast and the tea Miss Bacon poured out her troubles to Joan. They came, once she had started, in an unquenchable flood of reminiscences. The little woman had reached the last inch of endurance; the kindly sympathy, the touch of Joan’s hands broke down all barriers of reserve or caution. She had been a governess, it appeared, and during all her years of service she had laid by enough money to buy the business at Baker Street.
“I got it cheap,” she owned. “I can see now that the other people must have failed too, and I have no head for business. I am absolutely at the end of things now; if I died to-morrow it would be a pauper’s funeral. I often think of that when I see a gorgeous hearse and procession passing through the street.”
Her words were ridiculous, but real tragedy looked out of her eyes. “Ruin stares me in the face,” she went on, “from every paper I read, from every person I meet. I have no money, not even enough to buy food, as you have guessed. Ruin! and I have not the courage to get out of it all. I have never been very brave.”
“But I think you have been brave,” Joan tried to re[Pg 92]assure her. “You have held on for so long alone. And I expect we have turned a corner now, things will be better to-morrow.”
Miss Bacon stared at her teacup with hopeless eyes. “That is what I used to think at first,” she said, “to-morrow will be better than to-day—it never has been yet.”
She rose to go, and Joan, prompted by a sudden quick desire to help, leant forward and caught hold of her coat. The tragedy of the withered figure, the stupid, aimless face, struck her as the cruellest thing she had yet seen in life. What were her own troubles compared to this other’s dull facing of loneliness, failure and death.
“You must cheer up, you really must,” she begged; “and as for the money part, let me pay down the rest of my fee now. I have got three pounds out with me; do take it, please do, you see it really is yours.”
Taking the money seemed to add an extra gloom to Miss Bacon’s outlook; none the less she did not require very much persuading, and Joan, pressing it into her hand, piloted her across the road and saw her into the Underground station.
It was the last glimpse she was to have of the quaint figure which had crossed her life for so short a time, but that she did not realize. She only knew that her heart ached because she had been able to do so little to help, and because Miss Bacon’s story had brought suddenly to her mind a knowledge of how terribly hard life can be to those who are not strong enough to stand against it.
True to her word, she arrived at Baker Street very early the next morning and the momentous piece of typewriting was finished before Miss Bacon’s usual hour of arrival. Joan put it on the table with the old lady’s paper and went out to get some breakfast, as she had had to leave Shamrock House before seven.
She was greeted on her return by the girl who had let her in on the first night. There was a man with her who[Pg 93] had taken possession of Miss Bacon’s chair and who was reading the paper morosely, both elbows on the table.
He glanced up at Joan as she entered. “Is this Miss Bacon, by any chance?” he asked, bringing out the words with a certain grim defiance.
Edith interrupted Joan’s disclaimer by a shrill laugh. “Lor’ bless you, no, she is one of the pupils, same as me.” She turned to Joan. “Did you pay anything to join?” she asked. Joan resented the familiarity of her tone. “Would have liked to have warned you the other night, but Bacon was too nippy.”
Joan flushed slightly. Disregarding the interruption she spoke quickly, answering the man’s question:
“Miss Bacon must be ill, I am afraid,” she said; “it is so very late for her, she is nearly always here by ten. She will probably be here to-morrow if you care to come again.”
Again Edith giggled and the man frowned heavily.
“Well, she probably won’t,” he answered. “She has done a bunk, that’s the long and short of it, and there is not a blasted penny of what she owes me paid. Damn the woman with her whining, wheezing letters, ‘Do give me time—I’ll pay in time.’ Might have known it would end in her bunking.”
“I don’t think you ought to speak of her like that,” Joan attempted; “after all, it is only that she does not happen to be here this morning. She would have let me know if she had not been coming back.”
“Oh, would she?” growled the man; “well, I don’t care a blasted hell what you think. I don’t need to be taught my business by the likes of you.”
From the passage to which she had retired Edith attracted Joan’s attention by violent signs. “There is no use arguing with him,” she announced in an audible whisper, “he’s fair mad; this is about the tenth time he’s missed her. Come out here a minute, I want to talk to you.”
Joan went reluctantly. She disliked the girl instinc[Pg 94]tively, she disliked the dirty white blouse from which the red neck rose, ornamented by a string of cheap pearls, and the greasy black ribbon which bound up Edith’s head of curls.
“Are you being a fool?” the girl asked, “or are you trying to kid that man? Haven’t you cottoned to old Bacon’s game yet?”
“I am sorry for Miss Bacon, if that is what you mean,” Joan answered stiffly.
“Sorry!” Edith’s face was expressive of vast contempt. “That won’t save you from much in this world. I tell you one thing, if you lent the old hag any money yesterday you won’t see her again this side of the grave, so there isn’t any use your hanging about here waiting for that.”
Joan favoured her with a little collected stare. “Thank you,” she said, “it is very thoughtful of you to think of warning me.” She left her and walked back deliberately into the room where the man was sitting. “There were some typed sheets lying on the top of the paper,” she said; “do you mind letting me have them back.”
“Yes I do,” he answered briefly; “man called in for them a little while back and that is five shillings towards what the old hag owes me, anyhow.”
It was in its way rather humorous that she should have worked so hard to put five shillings into such an objectionable pocket. Joan felt strongly tempted to argue the matter with him, but discretion proving wiser than valour, she left him to his spoils and retired into the other room. She would not leave the place, she decided, in case Miss Bacon did turn up; it would be very disagreeable for her to have to face such a man by herself.
By lunch time the man stalked away full of threats as to what he would do, and Edith went with him. Joan stayed on till six, and there was still no sign of Miss Bacon. It was strange that she should neither have telephoned nor written.
Over dinner at Shamrock House that night she told[Pg 95] Rose Brent the story of her fortnight’s adventure, ending up with the rash impulse which had led her to pay up the four guineas because Miss Bacon had seemed in such bitter need. The girl met her tale with abrupt laughter.
“I am afraid what your unpleasant acquaintance of this morning told you is probably true,” she said. “After all, if you went and handed out four guineas it was a direct temptation to the poor old woman to get away on.”
“I don’t believe she would take it just for that,” Joan tried to argue. “I know she wanted it awfully badly, but it was to help her pull through and things were going to run better afterwards. I don’t believe she would just take it and slip away without saying a word to me.”
“Faith in human nature is all very well,” the other answered, “but it is awfully apt to let you down, especially in the working world.”
“I shall go on believing for a bit,” Joan said; “she was looking so awfully ill yesterday, it may just be that she could not come up to office to-day.”
“May be,” Rose agreed. “When you are tired of waiting for the return of the prodigal let me know and I will see if I cannot get you in somewhere. I ought to be able to help. And look here, my child, never you pay another penny for tuition on those lines; you could get all the learning you need at the County Council Night Schools, and it is a good deal cheaper.”
Joan put in two days at No. 2, Baker Street, waiting for the return of Miss Bacon or for some message which might explain her absence, but nothing and no one came. On the morning of the third day she found that the stout and bad-tempered man had carried out his vague threats. The place had been taken possession of, already they were removing the typewriters and tables under the direction of a bailiff. Even the plate bearing Miss Bacon’s name had vanished, and boards announcing the top flat to let flaunted themselves from the area railings.
After that Joan gave up the hope. Sometimes she[Pg 96] wondered if after all Miss Bacon had found the necessary courage to be done with it all, and if her silence betokened death. It was more likely though that the poor old lady had merely sunk one rung lower on the ladder of self-esteem and was dragging out a miserable existence somewhere in the outside purlieus of London.
CHAPTER XIII
| “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?“ |
R. Browning.
Following Rose’s suggestion, and because for the time being there really seemed nothing for her to do, unless she could show herself a little better trained, Joan joined the County Council Night Schools in the neighbourhood. She would go there five evenings in the week; three for shorthand and two for typing. Her fellow scholars were drawn from all ages and all ranks—clerks, office boys, and grey-headed men; girls with their hair still in pig-tails, and elderly women with patient, strained faces, who would sit at their desks plodding through the intricacies of shorthand and paying very little attention to what went on all round them.
The boy and girl section of the community indulged in a little rough and tumble love-making. Even long office hours and the deadly monotony of standing behind desk or counter all day could not quite do away with the riotous spirit of youth. They giggled and chattered among themselves, and passed surreptitious notes from one form to the other when Mr. Phillips was not looking.
Mr. Phillips, the shorthand master, was a red-faced, extremely irascible little man. He came to these classes from some other school in the city where he had been teaching all day, and naturally, by the time evening arrived, his none too placid temper had been stretched to breaking-[Pg 97]point. He was extremely impatient with any non-comprehension of his complicated method of instruction; and he would pass from row to row, after his dictation had been finished, snatching away the papers from his paralysed pupils and tearing them into fragments had the exercise been badly done.
Joan noticed the man who sat next her on the first and every night. He was quite the worst person she had ever seen at learning anything. He was not by any means young, grey already showed in the hair above his ears, and his forehead wrinkled with innumerable lines. He had, she thought, the most pathetic eyes, large and honest, but quite irredeemably stupid.
“I can’t make head or tale of it,” he confessed to her on the second night. “And Mr. Phillips gets so annoyed with me, it only muddles me more.”
“Why do you bother to learn?” she asked. It seemed rather strange that a man of his age should have to struggle with so elementary a subject.
“I have worked in an office for the last ten years,” he explained. “The new boss has suddenly decided that shorthand is necessary. I don’t know,” he spoke rather vaguely, his eyes wandering round the room, “but it is just possible he might ask me to go if I did not master it. I have been there so long I hardly like to have to look for another place.”
“It seems such a shame,” Joan told Rose afterwards, “that these people can never get a place where they feel really safe. They live always expecting to be turned off at a moment’s notice, or to have somebody put in on top of them. Everybody seems to be fighting against everybody else; doesn’t anyone ever stop to help?”
The older girl laughed. “Why, yes,” she said. “The world, or at least the people in it, are not so bad as all that. Only life is a case of push and struggle, and it is only natural that people should want to get the best they can for their money. Also it wouldn’t be fair if the ones who worked best were not preferred to the others.”[Pg 98]
Mr. Simpson, Joan’s perplexed friend of the shorthand class, was certainly one of the stupidest people she had ever met, yet she was terribly sorry for him. He was the butt of the class, which did not add to the hilarity of his position, because of the torrent of abuse which he always drew from Mr. Phillips at some stage in the evening.
“Now,” Mr. Phillips would call out, starting the lesson by a blackboard demonstration, “silence and attention, please.”
He would draw a series of strokes and dashes on the blackboard, calling out their various meanings, and the class would set itself to copy them. The lesson would proceed for some time in silence, save for Mr. Phillips’ voice, but presently the bewilderment caused by so many new outlines would terrify Mr. Simpson and he would lean forward to interrupt, stammering, as he always did when nervous.
“Why is ‘M’ made like that?” he would say. “Wouldn’t it be much better if it were made the other way?”
“Why, why?” Mr. Phillips would thunder. “If you would just learn what you are taught, sir, and not try to think, it would be a great deal pleasanter for the rest of us.”
Mr. Simpson would get a little red under the onslaught, but his eyes always retained their patient, perplexed expression. He seemed impervious to the impression he created in the back row. “Laughing-stock of the whole class,” Mr. Phillips called him in a moment of extreme irritation, and the expression caught on.
“I am so silly,” he said to Joan. “I really am not surprised that they think me funny.”
She was the one person who was ever nice to him or who did attempt to explain things to him. Sometimes they would get there a little early and she would go over his exercises with him. He might be thick-skinned to the want of tolerance which the rest of the class meted out to him; he was undoubtedly grateful to Joan for the kindness she showed him.[Pg 99]
One evening on his way to class he plucked up courage to purchase a small buttonhole for her, and blushed a very warm red when Joan took his offering with a smile and pinned it into her coat.
“How nice of you,” she said. “I love violets, and these smell so sweet.”
“They are not half sweet enough for you,” he managed to say, stuttering furiously.
Joan had a moment’s uneasiness. Surely the wretched little man was not going to fall in love with her? She glanced sideways at him during the class and what she saw reassured her. His clothes, his dirty hands, his whole appearance, put him in a different world to herself. However kind she might be to him, he surely could not fail to recognize that it was only the same kindness which would prompt her to cross the road to give a penny to a beggar?
Unfortunately Mr. Simpson belonged to a class which is very slow to recognize any difference in rank save that of wealth. He was a humble little man before Joan, but that was because he was by nature humble, and also because he was in love. He thought her very wonderful and beautiful beyond his range of words, but he imagined her as coming from much the same kind of home as his own, and she seemed to exist in the same strata of life.
A night or two after the flower episode he fixed adoring eyes on her and asked if he might be allowed to see her home.
“Well, it is rather out of your way,” Joan remonstrated, she had so often seen him trudge off in the opposite direction.
“That is of no consequence,” he replied, with his usual stutter.
The streets were dark, quiet, and deserted. Now and then as they hurried along, for Joan walked as fast as she could to ward off conversation, they passed a solitary policeman doing his beat, and dim, scarce seen lovers emerged out of the shadows holding each other’s hands.[Pg 100]
“Will you not take my arm?” Mr. Simpson ventured presently. He was slightly out of breath in his effort to keep up with her.
“No, thank you,” Joan answered. The whole occurrence was too ridiculous, yet for once in her life her sense of humour was failing her. “And I wish you would not bother to come any further, it is quite unnecessary.”
Her tone was more than chilly. Mr. Simpson, however remained undaunted. His slow and ponderous mind had settled on a certain course; it would need more than a little chilliness to turn it from its purpose.
“I was going to ask you,” he went on, “whether you would do me the honour of coming to the theatre one evening? If you have a mind that turns that way sometimes.”
“No, thank you,” answered Joan once more. “I never go to theatres, and I shouldn’t go with you in any case,” she added desperately, as a final resource.
“I meant no offence,” the man answered, humble as ever. “I should always act straight by a girl, and for you——”
“Oh, don’t, please don’t,” Joan interrupted. She stopped in her walk and faced round on him. “Can’t you see how impossible it would be for me——” she broke off abruptly, rather ashamed of her outburst. “I am going to be a snob in a minute, if I am not careful,” she finished to herself.
“I know I am not amusing, or anything,” the man went on; “but you have always seemed so kind and considerate. If I have offended in any way, I am more than sorry.”
Joan felt that he was frowning as he always frowned in hopeless perplexity over his shorthand.
“I am not offended,” she tried to explain more gently. “Only, please do not ask me to go out with you again, or offer to walk home with me. Here we are anyway, this is where I live.” She turned at the bottom of Shamrock House steps and held out her hand to him. “Good-night,” she said.[Pg 101]
Simpson did not take her hand, instead he stared up at her; she could see how shiny and red his face was under the lamp.
“You are not angry with me?” he stuttered.
“Why, no, of course not,” Joan prevaricated. Then she ran up the steps and let herself into the hall without looking back at him.
For two or three days she attempted to ignore the man’s presence in class next her, and Simpson himself in no way intruded. He had taken her snubbing like a man; from the height of his dreams he had fallen into an apathetic despair; the only effect it had on him was to make him stupider than ever at his work. Then one evening, with a face working rather painfully, he told her that he did not intend to come any more.
“I am going to another centre,” he said, gathering his books together and not looking at her.
“Has Mr. Phillips been too much for you?” she asked, wilfully ignoring the deeper meaning behind his words.
“No,” he answered, “it is not that. It may seem quite absurd,” he went on laboriously, “but I want to ask you to let me have your note-book. I have got a new one to give you in its place.” He produced a packet from his pocket and held it out to her.
Later on, when she thought over the thing, she smiled. A note-book seemed so singularly unromantic, but at the time she felt nearer tears. The look in his eyes haunted her for many days. She had been the one glimpse of romance in his dreary existence, and she had had to kill the dream so ruthlessly.[Pg 102]
CHAPTER XIV
| “It seems her heart was not washed clean Of tinted dreams of ‘Might have been.’” |
Ruth Young.
There followed a weary time for Joan. The poem she had repeated on her first morning at Shamrock House had to be recalled again and again and fell away finally from its glad meaning in the bitter disillusionment which looking for work entailed. Wherein lay the value of cheerfulness when day after day saw her weary and dispirited from a fruitless search, from hope-chilling visits to registry offices, from unsuccessful applications in answer to the advertisements which thronged the morning papers? She went at it at first eagerly, hopefully. “To-day I shall succeed,” was her waking motto. But every evening brought its tale of disappointment.
“There is no one in the world as useless as I am,” she thought finally.
“It is only just a bad season,” Rose Brent tried to cheer her up; “there is lots of unemployment about; we will find something for you soon.”
But to Joan it seemed as if the iron of being absolutely unwanted was entering into her soul.
There was only one shred of comfort in all this dreariness. Life at Shamrock House was so cheap that she was eating up but very little of Uncle John’s allowance. She wondered sometimes if the old people at home ever asked at the Bank as to how her money matters stood, or had they shut her so completely out of their lives that even that was of no interest to them? Miss Abercrombie wrote fairly regularly, but though she could give Joan news of the home people she had to admit that Aunt Janet never mentioned or alluded to her niece in any way.[Pg 103]
“She is harder than I thought she could be,” wrote Miss Abercrombie; “or is it perhaps that you have killed her heart?”
Once Joan’s pride fell so low that she found herself writing Aunt Janet a pathetic, vague appeal to be allowed to creep back into the shelter of the old life. But she tore the letter up in the morning and scattered its little pieces along the gutter of Digby Street. Digby Street was sucking into its undercurrents her youth, her cheerfulness, her hope; only pride was left, she must make a little struggle to hold on to pride, and then news came from Miss Abercrombie that Aunt Janet had been ill and that the Rutherfords had gone abroad. Apart from her fruitless journeys in search of work, her days held nothing. She so dreaded the atmosphere of Shamrock House that very often she would have to walk herself tired out of all feeling before she could go back there; sometimes she cried night after night, weak, stupid tears, shut up in the dreariness of her little room, and very often her thoughts turned back to Gilbert—the comfort of their little flat, the theatres, the suppers, the dances and the passion-held nights when he had loved her. More and more she thought of Gilbert as the dreariness of Digby Street closed round her days.
If her baby had lived, would life have been easier for her, or would it only have meant—as she had first believed in her days of panic that it would mean—an added hardship, a haunting shame? It was the lack of love in her life that left so aching a void, the fact that apparently no one cared or heeded what became of her. The baby would at least have brought love to her, in its little hands, in its weak strength that looked to her for shelter.
“I should be happier,” she said once stormily to Rose, “if I could have a cat to keep. I think I shall buy a kitten.”
The other girl had looked at her, smiling dryly. “Pets are strictly against the rules in Shamrock House,” she reminded her.[Pg 104]
It was in one of her very despondent moods that Joan first met the young man with blue eyes. She never knew him by any name, and their acquaintance, or whatever it could be called, came to an abrupt end on the first occasion when he ventured to speak to her. Womanlike, she had been longing for him to do so for some time, but resented it bitterly when he did. Perhaps something faintly contemptuous, a shadowed hint that he had noticed her interest in him, flamed up the desire to snub him in her heart, or perhaps it was a feeling of self-shame to find herself so poor a beggar at friendship’s gate.
For a week he had met her at the same place and followed her on her way down Victoria Street. Then one night, just as they came under the lights of Vauxhall Clock tower, he spoke to her.
“Doing anything to-night?” he said. “Shall we dine together?”
She turned from him in a white heat of anger, more with herself than with him, though that, of course, it was not given him to know. But he caught a glimpse of her face and read his answer, and since he was in reality a nice boy, and insult had been the last thought in his mind, he took off his hat quickly and apologized.
“I am sure I beg your pardon,” he said; “I can see that I have made a mistake.”
Joan did not answer him, she had moved quickly away in the direction of Digby Street, but as she passed by the dingy houses she knew that he was not following any more, and she felt the hot, hard lump in her throat which is so difficult to swallow. She had wanted to go to dinner with him, she had wanted to, that was the thought that mocked at her all night.
It was one evening about a fortnight after that episode that Rose called Joan into her room on their way upstairs.
“I want to talk to you,” she said, closing the door behind them. “Has Miss Nigel spoken yet?”[Pg 105]
“To me?” asked Joan; “what about?”
“I see, then, she hasn’t,” Rose answered, “but she will soon. Did you notice that the night before last Miss Wembly, who sits at the next table to ours, had a guest to dinner?”
“No,” Joan admitted; “but why? What has it got to do with me?”
“I am coming to that,” the other answered; she stood with her head averted, looking for a cigarette. “I am always a damned silent person myself,” she went on, “and I do not think anyone can accuse me of being curious about their pasts. I do not want to know a blessed thing about yours, for instance, but that guest of Miss Wembly’s was a nurse from St. George’s Hospital.”
“Oh,” said Joan blankly; she was standing just within the door, her back against the clothes that hung on it.
“Well,” Rose hurried on, “it has gone all round the place like lightning. They aren’t fond of you because they hate me and we are friends. Yesterday one of them took the story to Miss Nigel and she is going to ask you to leave.”
“What story?” asked Joan; she had not followed the other’s swift deduction.
Rose lit a cigarette and held out the case to Joan. “Have one,” she said, “and come and sit down. As I said before, I am not asking for personal history, I am telling you the facts as they affect this place. They say you were to have had a baby, and you are not married.”
She shrugged her shoulders and sank into a chair.
“You mean,” whispered Joan, “that the nurse told them that?”
“I suppose so,” Rose admitted; “anyway, Miss Nigel spoke of it to me to-day. She is not a bad sort, Miss Nigel, she was very kind to me once, but she is going to tell you to go.”
“What have you thought of it?” asked Joan.[Pg 106]
“I don’t think about other people’s affairs,” Rose answered. “Come and sit down, I have got some jam for you after the powder, for I believe I have found a job for you. But first you must move into diggings, these clubs are all in a league, every one of them will be shut to you.”
“You are not bothering to ask if it is true,” said Joan. She moved forward and sat down, her hands clenched on her lap. “I suppose——”
Rose interrupted, putting a swift hand on hers. “Don’t,” she said, “don’t deny it or tell me the truth, whichever you were thinking of doing. It does not matter to me. Because I like you I have interfered as much as I have so that you may be prepared for Miss Nigel’s attack.” She smiled. “It will be an attack too—having a baby and no husband to people like Miss Nigel is worse than any criminal offence.”
“Yes,” Joan admitted. A vision of Aunt Janet’s horror-stricken face came across her mind. “When I heard that it had been killed in the accident, I was glad, glad. I had not got the courage to go on and brave it out. I was glad to think that I could start life again, that no one would know or look at me like the people at home had looked at me when they knew. And now——”
“And now?” Rose repeated; she was studying Joan’s face with her eyes half closed, a peculiar trick she had when her thoughts were unpleasant.
“And now it doesn’t seem worth while going on any longer,” Joan burst forth. “There must be other lives that are better worth living than this. Do you know that for the last ten days I have made fifteen shillings addressing envelopes from nine till six. It would be better, surely it would be better, to be what people call bad!”
Rose watched the flushed face. “If a life of that sort would give you any pleasure,” she spoke slowly, “I should say live it by all means. The trouble is, it would not please you. If you care to listen, I will tell you a bit of[Pg 107] my own story. It is not altogether pleasant, but in your present frame of mind it will not do you any harm to hear it.”
She paused a moment, head thrown back, blowing smoke-rings to the ceiling.
“I came to London ten years ago,” she began presently, “and I was twenty-one at the time. I had been keeping house for a brother in India, and I had had a good time, but a spirit of restlessness had come upon me and I would not leave him alone till he let me come home and start on my own. I had, of course, no people. Poor brother, he gave way after many arguments, knowing as little as I did about the life here, and I came. He died the year afterwards of enteric. I had been on an allowance from him before, but when he died that stopped and I was left absolutely penniless. You have had a bad time in that way, but I had a worse one. Still I was young and strong, and, above all, I was a fighter, so I won through. I got a post as typist in a city office and I drifted to Shamrock House. My working hours were lengthy, sometimes it was after half-past seven before I came out of office. Then I would hurry through the crowded streets, as you do now, and always that walk, through gaily lighted pleasure-seeking crowds, would end for me in the dark dreariness where Great Smith Street turns away from Victoria Street, a ten-minute walk through one of London’s poorest neighbourhoods, and—Shamrock House! Those were the days in which I did my hardest kicking against fate; it was so unjust, so unfair, and all the while youth and power to enjoy, which is the heritage of youth, were slipping past me. That is how you feel, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes,” Joan said.
“I know,” Rose answered softly; “well, wait and hear. I was in this mood, and feeling more than usually desperate, when I met the woman. I need not give her a name, not even to you; I doubt if I ever knew her real one. I had seen her several times, perhaps she had noticed me, though[Pg 108] she had quaint, unseeing eyes that appeared to gaze through you blankly. She was a beautiful woman with an arresting beauty hard to define, and she used, as far as I could see, neither paint nor powder. One evening, just as I was turning into Great Smith Street, I found her at my elbow.
“‘You live down there,’ she asked in a curious, expressionless way as if she hardly expected an answer.
“I was startled at her talking to me and at the same time interested.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘It is dark and very dreary,’ she went on, talking almost to herself, ‘why do you choose such a life?’
“I think the bitterness of my mood must have sounded in my answer, for suddenly she turned to me and laid a hand on my arm.
“‘Leave it then,’ she whispered, her face close up against mine, ‘leave it, come home with me.’
“‘Home with you,’ I repeated, thoroughly astonished, and at that moment a policeman, tall and stolid, strolled across the road towards us.
“‘Don’t let him hear what we are saying,’ whispered the extraordinary woman; ‘just turn back with me a little way and I will explain to you.’
“Well, I went. Perhaps you can realize why, and I saw for a little into the outside edge of life as lived by these women. I wonder how I can best convey to you the horror and pity of it, for we—despite the greyness of our lives—have something within ourselves to which we can turn, but they have weighed even hopes and dreams with the weights of shame, and found their poor value in pounds, shillings and pence. That is why their eyes as they pass you in the streets are so blank and expressionless. Each new day brings them nothing, they have learnt all things, and the groundwork of their knowledge is—sin.”
She rose abruptly and moved across to the window,[Pg 109] pulling aside the blue-tinted curtains, staring out over miles and miles of roof-covered London. From far in the distance Big Ben shone down on her, a round, dim face in the darkness.
“You are wondering why I stayed with the woman,” she went on presently. “The answer is easy and may make you smile. I met a man, one of the many she brought to the house, and fell in love with him. I was stupid enough to forget my surroundings and the circumstances under which he had met me, or I dreamt that to him also they were only the outside wrappers of fate, easy to fling aside. Does it sound like a thrilling romance, and am I making myself out to be the heroine of one crowded hour of glorious life? Because my hour was never glorious.”
She repeated the last word with a wry laugh and turned to face Joan. “I don’t know why I have raked up all this,” she said. “I thought it had lost its power to hurt; but I was mistaken. I have liked you, perhaps that is the reason, and I have wanted to save you from making the same mistake as myself. For before you plunge out of monotony you must see that there is nothing in your heart that can be hurt, as these women have to be hurt every hour of their lives.”
Joan could find nothing to say; the other girl’s confidence had been so overpowering, it left her tongue-tied and stupid. Rose came back after a little silence and sat down opposite her again.
“I am sorry,” she said, “I have talked you into a mood of black depression; never mind, perhaps you will have learnt something from it none the less. And meanwhile, things are going to be better for you; it is no loss having to leave Shamrock House, otherwise you might grow into the house as I have. You will have to see about getting a room to-morrow, and then if you can meet me in the afternoon, I will take you and introduce you to your job. It is quite a nice one, I hope you will like it.”[Pg 110]
Joan stood up. “I don’t know what to say,” she began; “you—oh, if only we could wipe out the past,” she flamed into sudden rebellion, “and start afresh.”
Rose laughed. “I don’t know about that,” she said—the inevitable cigarette was in her mouth again—”I for one would be very unwilling to lose a wisdom which has been so dearly bought.”
CHAPTER XV
| “No one has any more right to go about unhappy than he has to go about ill bred.” |
R. L. Stevenson.
Joan was not to start her new work till the following Monday. She was to be typist—her first real post filled her with some degree of self-conscious pride—to the Editor of the Evening Herald. Rose had herself worked on the paper some years ago and was a friend of the Editor’s.
“I want you to give a girl I know a chance, Mr. Strangman,” she had pleaded; “she is clever and well-educated, but she needs experience. Take her, there is a good man, while your slack time is on, and she will be game for anything when you get busy again.”
Mr. Strangman twisted long nervous fingers into strange positions.
“I don’t know about this girl,” he said; “we are never slack at the office.”
It was a pet fallacy of his that he was the hardest-worked man in London. Rose smiled. “But her typing is quite good,” she argued, “and you are such an easy dictator, I am sure she will get on all right.”
She had been exceptionally pleased when Mr. Strangman reluctantly gave way. Joan would, she hoped, take kindly to newspaper work, and it might open up new roads to her.[Pg 111]
Meanwhile Joan had been out on her own and taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King’s Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so terribly common-place as had been that of the other rooms which Joan had seen that morning. The sloping roofs, the small pane of glass which looked out higher than the neighbouring chimney-tops, were in their way attractive. She would take it, she told a somewhat surprised landlady, and would pay—everything included—ten shillings a week for the noble apartment. The “everything included” swept in breakfast—”Such as a young lady like yourself would eat, Miss”—the woman told her, and attendance. Suppers and fires she would have to provide for herself, though Mrs. Carew was prepared to cook for her; lunch, of course, fell in office hours.
On Saturday, therefore, and having forestalled Miss Nigel’s request by announcing that she was leaving for good, Joan moved her luggage over to her new home and took possession.
“I am going to like it better than I liked being at Shamrock House,” she told Rose, who had come to assist in the moving. “It is more my own, I can do just as I like here.”
Rose was craning her neck to see out of the window’s limited compass. “Just as you like,” she repeated, laughing as she spoke, “on twenty-five shillings a week and an attic. You are not ambitious, my child.”
She turned round to face the room; even in mid afternoon, with the sun shining outside, it was dim—the corners in positive darkness. “I don’t think I should have chosen it,” she said; “there is no sun, and”—she[Pg 112] shook the thought off—”who else is in the house, did you ask?”
“There was not any need to,” Joan answered. “Mrs. Carew, that is my landlady, you know, told me all their family histories while I was making up my mind whether I would come or not. Wait a minute,” she paused in her unpacking to tick them off on her fingers. “There is the ground floor lady, who is an artist’s model. No need to work just now though, for the last gentleman that painted her took a fancy to her and is paying for her at present. Drawing-room floor, old foreign lady who never seems to get out of bed. Second floor, retired army officer, ‘fond of drink, more’s the pity,’” she mimicked Mrs. Carew’s voice, “and second floor back, young lady actress, who is not perhaps as good as she might be, ‘but there, you can’t always be blaming people’; and third floor, me! Doesn’t sound respectable does it? But after Miss Nigel I am afraid of respectability.”
Rose watched her with narrowed eyes. “It sounds anything but respectable,” she agreed; “do not make a fool of yourself, kid, it won’t be worth it, it never is.”
“I am not likely to,” Joan answered her. “My one real regret in leaving Shamrock House is that I shall not have you to talk to, oh, and the baths. Mrs. Carew does not hold with carrying too much water up these stairs.”
“I am glad I rank before the baths,” Rose laughed. She extricated herself from behind the luggage. “I will come and look you up sometimes,” she announced, “though it probably won’t be often; I am a bad hand at stirring myself out to see anyone in the evenings. Good-night, and I hope you will get on all right with Strangman, he is a kind little man really.”
She went. Joan sat listening to her feet echoing down the stairs; a mouse could set the whole house creaking. She felt very much alone; Shamrock House, full as it had been of uncongenial companions, had yet been able to offer some distraction from one’s own society.[Pg 113]
The new office, to which she wended her way on the Monday morning, lay in a side alley opening off Fleet Street, a rickety old building, busy as a hive of bees in swarming time. The steep, wooden stairs, after she had been asked her business by the janitor in the box office and put in charge of a very small, very dirty boy, led her up and up into the heart of the building—past wide-open doors where numerous men sat at desks, the floor round them strewn with papers; up again, past rooms where the engines throbbed and panted, shaking the building with their noisy vibrations; up still further, till they landed her at that withdrawn and sacred sanctum, the Editor’s room. Here worked Mr. Strangman and his satellites; spiders, in fact, in the centre of their cleverly-constructed web, throwing out feelers in search of news to all quarters of the globe.
Anything less like a spider than Mr. Strangman it would have been difficult to imagine. He was an alert, nervous man, with bright, kind eyes, a flexible mouth and very restless hands. His whole nature hung on wires, as if—which was indeed the case—his mental capacity was too big and overpowering for his physical strength. His manners under the strain of work were jerky and abrupt, but otherwise he was a very kindly and genial man. To Joan he was excessively polite, and so afraid that her capabilities might not come up to his expectations that for the first few days he left her practically with no work to do. She sat in a large, well-lit—if draughty—room, opposite Mr. Strangman at his table.
It was one of her duties, she discovered, to keep the aforesaid table tidy, and in time she learned that here more than anywhere else she could be of service to the man. He had an awe-inspiring way of piling up his desk with scraps of paper, cuttings, and slips, and stray manuscripts, and it was always under the most appalling muddle that the one small, indispensable news-slip would hide itself.
The Magazine Page-faker and the News-gleaner sat in[Pg 114] the same room, the latter at a table next Joan. He was a stout man with a beaming smile and an inexhaustible supply of good temper. He would sit over his work, which as far as she could see consisted solely of running his eye over the day’s papers and cutting out what appeared to be workable news, making a great deal of noise with his feet on the floor, a gigantic cutting-out scissors in his hand and a whistle which never varied its tune from early morning till late in the evening—a soft, subdued, under-his-breath whistle, Joan never even discovered what the tune was. He was, despite this disadvantage, an indefatigable worker and an ever-ready helper, always willing to do other people’s work for them if necessary.
Of the other people on the staff Joan saw very little; the reporters came early in the morning to take their orders for the day, and threw in their copy downstairs in the evening. Sometimes they would come upstairs to discuss some feature of their day’s work with Mr. Strangman, or to put in an article to the Literary Editor, but, as a whole, she hardly learned to know them, even by name. Then there were the office boys, a moving, fluctuating crowd; always in mischief, always dirty, always irrepressibly cheerful. For the rest, her work—one might almost say her life—lay between the four walls of the office room, with the shaking vibrations of the engines under her feet and the musty, curious smell of papers in the making and pile upon pile of papers that had been made all round her.
She arrived at 9.30 and left about 6 p.m., and by then she was too numbed—for the working of a typewriter is monotonous work—to do anything save walk with the hurrying crowds as far as Charing Cross and take a bus from there to Montague Square. But since work filled her days she had less time for discontent or depression. Sometimes she would be tempted to wander off the direct route on her way home and she would walk up to Piccadilly and past the region of brightly-lighted shops, watching the faces in the crowd round her, envying those who met friends and[Pg 115] stopped to talk to them, following with rather wistful eyes the couples who passed, hand clasped in hand; but generally speaking she was too tired in the evenings to do anything save go straight home, eat a hasty supper and tumble into bed.
Of Rose she saw, as the other had prophesied, very little. Joan realized that friendship, if their brief companionship could have been called such, counted for very little in Rose’s life. The girl seemed entirely to ignore her once she was from constant sight, and since Joan could not herself call at Shamrock House and Rose habitually forgot to pay her promised visits, the friendship, such as it had been, faded away into the past.
The other inhabitants of 6, Montague Square, she saw very rarely. Occasionally she would encounter Miss Drummond, the downstairs tenant, paying off her taxi at the door—a tall, handsome girl, rather overblown in her beauty, who invariably stared at Joan with haughty defiance and stalked into her own room, calling loudly for Mrs. Carew. Once Joan had stumbled over the retired military gentleman from the second floor, sound asleep, in a very undignified position, half way up her own little stairs. The incident had brought with it a shudder of fear, and from that day onwards Joan was always careful to lock her door at night.
Miss Fanny Bellairs, the erring damsel on the second floor back, kept such strange hours that she was never visible; but Mrs. Carew had a large stock of not very savoury anecdotes about her which she would recount to Joan during the process of laying supper. As not even an earthquake would have stopped Mrs. Carew’s desire to impart information, Joan gave up the attempt to silence her. Indeed, she sometimes listened with a certain amount of curiosity, and Fanny Bellairs assumed a marvellous personality and appearance in her mind’s eye.
That the original did not in the least come up to her expectations was something of a surprise. About three[Pg 116] months after her first arrival at Montague Square Joan reached home rather late one evening to find her room already occupied. A girl sat, her feet tucked underneath her, on the principal chair under the lamplight; she had been crying, for a tight, damp ball of a handkerchief lay on the floor, and at the sound of Joan’s entry she turned a tear-stained face to greet her.
“I thought you were never coming”—the voice held a plaintive sob in it—”and I am that down-hearted and miserable.”
Joan put down her things hastily and came across. “I am so sorry,” she said, groping through her mind to discover who her visitor might be; “did Mrs. Carew tell you I was in?—how stupid of her.”
The girl in the chair gulped back her tears and laughed. “No, she didn’t,” she contradicted; “she told me that you wouldn’t want to see me if you were in; that the likes of you did not know the likes of me, and that I was not to come up. But I came”—she held out impulsive hands. “I guess you aren’t angry,” she said; “when I get the silly hump, which isn’t often, I go mad if I have to stay by myself. I’ll be as good as”—she glanced round the room—”as good as you,” she finished, “if you will let me stay.”
“Why, of course,” said Joan. “I don’t know what Mrs. Carew can have been talking about. I don’t know you, so I can’t see how she can have thought I would not want to see you.”
“I can though.” The girl shook forward a sudden halo of curls and laughed in a way which it was impossible to resist. “I am Fanny, from downstairs, and Mrs. Carew is a silly old woman who talks a lot, but she is not stupid enough not to know the difference between a girl like you and a fly-by-night like me. Now I have shocked you,” she went on breathlessly, seeing Joan’s flush, “just when I was setting out to be good. I’ll bite my tongue out and start again.”
She coughed once with alarming intensity. Joan moved[Pg 117] slowly away and took off her hat and coat. So this was Fanny Bellairs, the girl whose doings provided such a purple background for her own dull existence. She looked again at the little figure, lying back now, eyes closed, lips tremulous from the struggle for breath which her fit of coughing had brought her. It was a perfectly-fashioned face, though when Joan had time to study it, she could see that the colouring was just a little crudely put on and that it had smudged in the shadows under her eyes where the tears had lain. She was such a thin, small slip of a girl, too, little dimpled hands and a baby face under the gold curls. Fanny opened her eyes at that moment, wide and innocent, and answered Joan’s glance with a wistful smile.
“Thinking of all Mrs. Carew ever said about me?” she asked. “I am not as bad as she sometimes paints me. Still”—she stood up—”I’ll go, if you would rather I did. Hate to make a nuisance of myself.”
She moved slowly—it was, in reality, reluctantly—towards the door, and Joan came out of her reverie with a start.
“Please don’t go,” she said quickly. “You must think I am awfully rude, but really I was not thinking about Mrs. Carew or anything so disagreeable. I was thinking how pretty you were, and wondering how old you could be.”
The girl at the door stopped and turned back. Laughter filled her eyes, yet there was a little hint of mockery behind the mirth.
“Go on!” she said, “you and your thoughts! I know just what they were, my dear; but it doesn’t matter to me, I am used to it. Twenty-two, at your service, mum”—she came a little away from the door and swept Joan a curtsey—”and everything my own, even my hair, though you mayn’t believe it.”[Pg 118]
CHAPTER XVI
| “Pale dreams arise, swift heart-beats yearn, Up, up, some ecstasy to learn! The spirit dares not speak, afar Youth lures its fellow, like a star.” |
Anon.
Fanny was a real daughter of joy. The name is given to many who in no sense of the word near its meaning. To Fanny, to be alive was to laugh; she had a nature which shook aside the degradation of her profession much as a small London sparrow will shake the filthy water of the gutters from off his sky-plumed wings. She brought such an atmosphere of sunshine and laughter into Joan’s life that the other girl grew to lean on it. The friendship between them ripened very quickly; on Fanny’s side it amounted almost to love. Who knows what starvation of the heart side of her went to build up all that she felt for Joan? Through the dreary days that followed, and they sapped in passing at Joan’s health and courage, Fanny was nearly always at hand, with fresh flowers for the attic, with tempting fruit for Joan to eat in place of the supper which night after night she rejected. Fanny would sometimes be away for weeks at a time. She still followed her profession as an actress, Mrs. Carew would tell Joan, and on those occasions Joan missed her intolerably. But Fanny herself never spoke about her life, and Joan never questioned her.
Autumn faded into winter; winter blew itself out in a cold and boisterous March, and spring crept back to London. Nowhere else in the world does she come so suddenly, or catch at your heart with the same sense of soft joy. You meet her, she catches you unawares, so to say, with your winter clothes on.
“What is this?” she whispers, blowing against your[Pg 119] cheeks. “Surely you have forgotten my birthday, or you would never have come out in those drab old clothes.”
Then with a little shake of her skirts she is gone, and your eyes are opened to the fact that the trees have put forth brave green buds, and that yellow crocuses and white snowdrops are dancing and curtseying to you from odd corners of the Park.
Joan’s life at the Evening Herald Office, once the first novelty had worn off, and because it was spring outside, became very monotonous and very tiring. She nearly always ended the days conscious of a ridiculous desire to cry at everything. Because the buses were crowded, because the supper was greasy and unappetizing, or because Fanny was not at home to welcome her.
There was one afternoon in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman’s most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had indulged in a wordy argument with Chester, the Literary Page editor, on the question of whether or not the telephone was to be used by the office boys to ‘phone telegrams through to the post office. It was a custom just founded by Strangman and it saved a certain amount of time, but Chester—a thin, over-worked, intellectual-ridden gentleman, was driven nearly mad by occult messages, such as the following:
“Hulloa, hulloa, is that telegrams? Take a message please for the Evening Herald. What, can’t hear? That’s your fault, I am shouting and my mouth is near the tube. Look alive, miss. Listening? Well: to Davids. D for daddy, a for apples, v for varnish, i for I. I said I for i! Got it now? D for daddy again,” and so on.
“The truth of it is,” said Mr. Chester, during a pause in one of these wordy tussles, “I, or that telephone, will have to go, Strangman. I cannot work with it going on.”
“My dear fellow”—Strangman was all agitation at once—”what is to be done? The messages must go and[Pg 120] I must hear them sent or the boys would put in wrong words. I am sure it is not any pleasanter for me than it is for you; I have also got to work.”
“T for Tommy, I keep telling you—Tommy, Tommy,” the lad at the ‘phone shrieked triumphantly.
Mr. Chester threw down his papers, pushed back his chair, and rose, tragic purpose on his face.
“It is not to be borne,” he ejaculated.
“Oh, very well,” stuttered Mr. Strangman, “that means, I suppose, that I shall have to do the ‘phoning myself. Here, boy, get out, give me that.”
And thereupon the message started over again, but this time breathed in Mr. Strangman’s powerful whisper.
He certainly seemed to be able to manipulate it with less noise, only he soon wearied of the effort, and future wires were deputed to Joan. So, in addition to her other tasks, she had had the peculiarly irritating one of trying to induce attention into post office telephone girls.
Then, too, Mr. Strangman had not felt in the mood to dictate letters, with the result that at a quarter to six seven of them had to be altered and retyped. Joan was still sitting at her machine in a corner of the hot, noisy office, beating out: “Dear Sir, In answer to yours, etc.,” when the clock struck six. Her back ached, her eyes throbbed, she was conscious of a feeling of intense hatred against mild, inoffensive Mr. Strangman.
That gentleman, having discovered the lateness of the hour by chance, kept her another quarter of an hour apologizing before he signed the letters.
Then he looked up at her suddenly.
“Do you think,” he said, “that you could report on the dresses for us to-morrow night at the Artists’ Ball?”
“I report?” Joan looked at him in astonishment; women reporters were disapproved of on the Evening Herald.
“I know it is unusual,” Mr. Strangman admitted. “But Jones is ill, and our other men will all be busy on[Pg 121] important turns. I just thought of you in passing; it is a pity to waste the ticket.”
“I could try.” Joan made an effort to keep the eagerness out of her voice.
“Yes, that is it, you could try. We should not want much,” he added; “and it is not part of your duties as a secretary; still, you might enjoy it, eh?”
“Why, I should love it,” she assented; hate was fast merging back into liking.
Strangman cackled his customary nervous laugh. “Then that is settled,” he said, “and here is the ticket. You will have to have a fancy dress, hire it, I suppose, since the time is so short. That, and a taxi there and back, will come out of the paper. Hope it is a good show, for your sake.”
Afterwards, when she looked back at that evening, at the Artists’ Ball, Joan was ashamed to remember the eager heat of excitement which took possession of her from the moment when she stepped out of the Evening Herald taxi and ran along the passage to the ladies’ cloak-room. She had, it seemed to her, no excuse; she was not young enough to have made it pardonable and she had long ago decided that the intoxication of life could be no longer hers. Its loss was to be part of the bitter lesson fate had taught her. Yet as she saw herself in the glass, a ridiculous figure in black flounces with just one scarlet rose pinned at her waist and another nodding on the brim of her hat, she could not keep the excitement from sparkling in her eyes and the colour of youth was certainly flaming in her cheeks. Fanny had fitted her out with clever fingers as a black Pierrette. A Pierrette, taken from the leaves of some old French book, with her hair done in little dropping curls just faintly powdered, as if a mist of snow lay over the brown.
She was young, after all, and the music called to her with insistent voice. “I am looking nice,” Joan confided to her reflection, “and I will have a good time just for to-night.”[Pg 122]
Then she turned and went quickly, walking with light feet and eager eyes that sought for adventure into the crowded room.
It gave her first of all an immense sense of space. The whole opera house had been converted into a ballroom. There were hundreds of people present, and every imaginable fancy dress under the sun. Brilliant colours, bright lights and the constant movement of the crowd made up a scene of kaleidoscopic splendour.
There was a waltz in progress and Joan stood for a little with her back to a pillar of one of the boxes, bewildered by the noise and moving colours. Standing opposite her, in the shadow of the other looped-up curtain, was a man. A Pierrot to her Pierrette, only his costume was carried out in white, and on his head, instead of the orthodox hat, he wore a tight-bound black handkerchief. His eyes, for some reason, made her restless. It was not that he stared exactly, the man’s whole figure was too blatantly bored for that, but there was something in their expression which made her look and look again. At their sixth exchange of glances the man smiled, or so it seemed to Joan, but the next moment his face was sombre again. None the less there had been something in her idea, for before the next couple of dancers swung past her the man had moved from the shadow of his curtain and was standing near her.
“Don’t think it is awful impudence on my part,” he said, “but are you here all alone?”
Now there was just something in his voice that, as far as most women were concerned would sweep away all barriers. He spoke, in short, like a gentleman. Joan looked up at him.
“Yes,” she admitted; she caught her breath on a little laugh. “I am here as a reporter, you know; it is business and pleasure combined.”
Once more his eyes made her uncomfortable and she dropped hers quickly.[Pg 123]
“That is strange,” said the man gravely, “for I am a reporter too.”
He was certainly not speaking the truth. Joan was not inclined to believe that Fleet Street had ever produced reporters the least like her companion. Still, what did it matter? just for this evening she would throw aside convention and have a good time.
“How awfully fortunate,” she answered, “because you will be able to help me. I am new to the game.”
“Well then,” he suggested, “let us dance to the finish of this waltz and I will point out a few of the celebrities as we pass them.”
Just for a second Joan hesitated, but her feet were tingling to be dancing.
“Couldn’t we do it better standing here?” she parried.
“No,” he assured her, “we could not do it at all unless we dance; movement helps my memory.”
He was a most perfect dancer. No one, so numberless women would have told Joan, could hold you just as Robert Landon did, steer you untouched through the most crowded ballroom as he did, make himself and you, for the time being, seem part and parcel of the swaying tune, the strange enchantment of a waltz.
Joan was flushed and a little breathless at the close; they had danced until the last notes died on the air, and she had forgotten her mission, the celebrities, everything, indeed, except the dance and its bewildering melody. The man looked down at her as she stood beside him, an eager light awake in his eyes. His voice, however, was cool and friendly.
“You dance much too well to be a reporter,” he said.
“What a ridiculous remark!” Joan retorted; “one cannot dance all day, can one? Besides, I am not even a real reporter. I am only a typist.”
“That is worse, to think of you as that is impossible,” he said. “Let us go outside and find somewhere to sit.”[Pg 124]
“But what about our reporting,” Joan remonstrated; “I thought you were going to point out celebrities?”
“Time enough for that,” he answered. “I am going to take you out on to a balcony meanwhile. There will only be the stars to look at us, and I am going to pretend you are a fairy and that you live in the heart of a rose, not a typist or any such awful thing.”
Joan laughed. “I wish you could see my attic,” she said. “It is such a funny rose for any fairy to live in.”
They sat out four dances, or was it more? Joan lost count. Out here on the balcony, with only the stars as chaperon and a pulse of music calling to them from the ballroom, time sped past on silver wings. For Joan the evening was a dream; to-morrow morning she would wake, put on her old blue coat and skirt, catch her bus at the corner of the square and spend the day in sorting and arranging Mr. Strangman’s papers. To-night she was content to watch the bubble held before her by this man’s soft words, his strange, intent eyes; she made no attempt to investigate it too closely. But for Landon the evening was one step along an impulse he intended to follow to the end. He was busy laying sure foundations, learning all there was to know of Joan’s life and surroundings, of the difficulties that might lie in the way of his desire, of the barriers he might have to pull down.
“Things are not going to end here,” he told Joan, as, the last dance finished, they stood among the crowd waiting for a taxi. He had helped her on with her cloak and the feel of his strong warm hands on her shoulder had sent the blood rushing to Joan’s heart.
“I don’t see how it is not going to end,” she answered; “you must remember I am not even a reporter.”
“No, and I am,” he smiled; “I had forgotten.”
He moved to face her, and putting his hands over hers, fastened up her cloak for her. It seemed his hands lingered over the task, and finally stayed just holding hers lightly.
“I am going to see it does not end, none the less,” he[Pg 125] said. “I shall come and fetch you at your office this day next week and you shall dine with me somewhere and go on to a theatre. What time do you get out of office?”
“At about six,” Joan answered; “but how can you? Why, we do not even know each other’s names!”
“No more we do, and I don’t want to, do you?” He smiled down at her undecided eyes. “I would rather think of you as Pierrette than Miss anything, and I shall be Pierrot. It is a romance, Pierrette; will you play it?”
“Yes,” she answered slowly, but her eyes fell away from his.
CHAPTER XVII
| “Aye, thought and brain were there, some kind Of faculty that men mistake For talent, when their wits are blind,— An aptitude to mar and break What others diligently make.” |
A. L. Gordon.
Impulse had always been a guiding factor in Robert Landon’s life. If he saw a thing and wanted it, impulse would prompt him to reach out his hand and snatch it; if the thing were beyond his reach, he would climb—if necessary—over the heart of his best friend to obtain it; should it prove of very fragile substance and break in his hands, he would throw it away, but its loss, or the possible harm he had inflicted in his efforts to obtain it, brought no regrets. He made love deliriously, on fire himself for the moment, but never once had he so far forgot himself as to come from the flame in any way singed. Many tragedies lay behind the man, for impulse is hardly a safe guide through life; but he himself was essentially too level-headed, too selfish, to be the one who suffered.
He had spoken and danced and made love to Joan on[Pg 126] an impulse. Beyond that, he set himself down seriously and painstakingly to win her. Most women, he knew, like to be carried forward on the wings of a swift-rushing desire, but there was some strange force of reserve behind this girl’s constant disregard of his real meaning in the game they played. She was willing, almost anxious to be friends; it did not take him long to find out how lonely and dreary had been the life she was leading. She went out with him daily; it became a recognized thing for him to fetch her in his small car every evening at office. Sometimes they would dine together at one of the many little French restaurants in Soho, and go to a theatre afterwards; sometimes they would just drive about the crowded lighted streets, or slip into the Park for a stroll, leaving the car in charge of some urchin for a couple of pennies. Since he was out on the trail, as his friends would have said, every other interest in his life was given up to his impulse to beat down this girl’s reserve, but all his attempts at passionate love-making left her unresponsive. She would draw back, as it were, into her shell, and for days she would avoid meeting him. Going out some back way at the office and never being at home when he called at Montague Square. Then he would write little notes to her and bribe the office-boy to deliver them, begging her pardon most humbly—he played his cards, it may be noticed, very seriously—imploring her to be friends again. And Joan would forgive him and for a little they would be the best of companions.
But through it all, and though she shut her eyes more or less to the trend of events, Joan’s mind refused to be satisfied. She was restless and at times unhappy; she had her hours of wondering where it would all end, her spells of imagination when she saw Landon asking her to marry him. When she thought about it at all it always ended like that, for she could not blind her eyes to the fact of the man’s love for her. Then she would shun his society, and endeavour to build up a wall of reserve between[Pg 127] them, for it was her answer to his question that she could not bring herself to face.
It was on one of these occasions that she made up her mind definitely to break with him altogether. She wrote him a short note, saying that she was going to be dreadfully busy at office and that as she had another girl coming to stay with her—both statements equally untrue—she was afraid it would be no use his calling to fetch her.
Landon accepted this attitude in silence, though one may believe it did something to fan the flame of his passion, and for ten whole days he left her entirely alone. Then he wrote.
Joan found the letter waiting for her on the hall table when she came home one evening after a peculiarly dull and colourless day. It had been delivered by hand and was addressed simply to “Pierrette, In the Attic.” Mrs. Carew must have been a little surprised at such a designation. Joan took it upstairs to read, lingering over the opening of it with a pleasurable thrill. The days had been very grey lacking his companionship.
“Dear Pierrette,” Landon had written, “is our romance finished, and why? The only thing I have left to comfort me is a crushed red rose. You wore it the first evening we ever met. Pierrette, you are forgetting that it is summer. How can you wake each morning to blue skies and be conventional? Summer is nearly over, and you do not know what you are missing. Come out and play with me, Pierrette; I will not kiss even your hands if you object. I can take you down next Sunday to a garden that I know of on the river, and you shall pick red roses. Will you not come, Pierrette?”
Joan sat on in the dark of her little attic (for if the lamp was not required before supper Mrs. Carew had a way of not bringing it up until it was quite dark) with the letter on her lap. She was making up her mind to tell Landon about Gilbert, about her principles which had been rather roughly shaken, about her ideas, which still held obstinate[Pg 128] root in her mind. If he loved her enough not to mind what was past, why should she not marry him? She had proved once how bitter it was to stand against the convictions of the world alone. His fortnight’s absence had shown her how unbearable the dullness of her days had become; she could not struggle on much longer. Her mind played with the prospect of consenting, of how it would open up new worlds to her, of what a change it would bring into her life.
It was with a conviction anyway that great things might be in the balance that she stepped into Landon’s car on Sunday afternoon and settled herself back against the cushions. They disregarded the fortnight’s lapse in their friendship; neither referred to it in any way, and Landon was exceptionally cheerful and full of conversation on the drive out. Joan was content to sit quiet and listen and to let her eyes, tired of dusty files and hours of typewriting, feast on the country as they flashed past.
The garden that he had promised her proved all that his descriptions had claimed. It lay at the back of an old stone house, off the high road and away from the haunts of the ordinary holiday makers. Landon had chanced on it once and the place had taken a great hold on his imagination. One could be so alone at the foot of the garden, where it sloped down to the water’s edge, that one could fancy oneself in a world of one’s own.
The house itself was a quaint, old-fashioned building with small rooms and tiny windows, but the walled-in garden where the roses grew, and the river garden, which stretched right down to the brim of the river with its fruit trees and tall scented grasses, were both beautiful. They had tea out there, and they picnicked on the grass, watching the sun’s reflections playing hide and seek in the river.
After tea, Landon insisted on strolling round and collecting all the roses he could lay his hands on for Joan. He threw them finally, a heavy heap of scented blossoms, on[Pg 129] to her lap. He said their colour was reflected in her cheeks, their beauty in her eyes.
“It is a shame to have picked them so early,” Joan remonstrated; “they will die now before we get home.”
“Let them,” he answered, “at least they have had their day and done well in it.” He threw himself down on the grass beside her. “Aren’t they glorious, Pierrette?” he said; but his eyes were not on the flowers.
Joan stirred uneasily. The great moment was drawing closer and closer, she was growing afraid, as are all women when the sound of Love’s wings comes too near them.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me by that name any more,” she said, “because——”
“Well, why because?” Landon asked as she hesitated. “One of the things that do not seem quite right to you, like kissing, or holding hands?” He took up one of the roses from her lap and pulled it to pieces with ruthless hands. “What a puritan you are!” he went on abruptly. “Do you know we can only love once, isn’t your heart hungry for life, Pierrette? Sometimes your eyes are.”
“Don’t!” said Joan quickly, “that is another thing I wish you would not do, make personal remarks; it makes me feel uncomfortable.”
“Why don’t you tell the truth?” he asked fiercely. “Why don’t you say afraid?”
“Because it does not,” she answered; her eyes, however, would not meet his. “I think uncomfortable describes it better.”
Landon stared at her with sombre eyes. He was beginning to tire of their pretty game of make believe; perhaps impulse was waning within him. Anyway he felt he had wasted enough time on the chase. But to-day Joan seemed very charming, and her fear, for he could see plainly enough that she was afraid, was fanning the flame of his desire into a new spurt of life.
“I am going to make love to you, Pierrette,” he said; “I am going to wake up that cold heart of yours. Does[Pg 130] the thought frighten you, Pierrette? because even that won’t prevent me doing it.”
He had drawn her close to him, she could feel his arms round her like strong bands of iron. Joan lifted a face from which all the colour had fled to his.
“Don’t, please don’t!” Her bewildered mind struggled with all the carefully thought-out things she was going to have said to him. But the crisis was too overwhelming for her; she could only remember the one final thought that had been with her. “You may not want to marry me when you know about me,” she whispered, and ended her words with a sob.
The man laughed triumphantly. “I don’t want to marry you,” he answered, “I want to love you and make you for a little love me, and this is how I begin the lesson.” He bent his face to hers quickly, kissing her passionately, fiercely, on the lips.
For a second such a tumult of passionate amazement shook Joan that she stayed quiet in his arms. Then everything that was strong, all the inherited purity in her nature, came to her aid and summoned her fighting forces to resist. She struggled in his arms furiously, she had not known she held such stores of strength; then she wrenched herself free and stood up. Fear, if fear had been the cause of her early discomfort, had certainly left her; it was blind, passionate rage that held her silent before him.
The man rose to his feet and essayed a laugh, but it was rather a strained effort. “That was a most undignified proceeding, Pierrette,” he said; “what on earth made you do it?”
“How dared you?” flamed Joan. “How dared you speak to me, touch me like that?”
“Dared?” the man answered; he was watching her with mocking eyes and something evil had come to life on his face. Cold anger that she should have made a fool of him and a baulked passion which could very easily turn to hate. “This outburst is surely a little ridiculous.[Pg 131] What did you think I wanted out of the game? Did it really occur to you that I was going to ask you to marry me? My dear girl!” He shrugged his shoulders, conveying by that movement a vast amount of contempt for her dreams. “And as for the rest, I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed, though some of them may pretend they do.”
Joan stared at him; he had stooped and was gathering up the roses that lay between them. Rage was creeping away from her and leaving her with a dull sense of undignified defeat. Once again she had pitted the ideal of a dream against a man’s harsh reality, and lost. Love! She had dreamed that this man loved her, she had held herself unworthy of the honour he paid her. This was what his honour amounted to—”I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed.”
She turned away and walked blindly towards the house.
Landon caught her up before she reached the gate of the garden. His arms were full of the roses and apparently he had won back to his usual good nature.
“Having made ourselves thoroughly disagreeable to each other,” he said, “let us make it up again for the time being. It is all rather absurd, and you have got to get back to town somehow or other.”
He helped her into the car with just his usual solicitude, tucking the rug round her and laying the pile of roses on her lap; but on the way home he was very silent and from the moment they started till the time came for saying good-bye he did not speak a word to her.
As they stood together, while Joan was opening the door with her latch key, he put his hand for a moment over hers.
“Good-bye, Pierrette,” he said, “I am sorry you won’t have anything to do with me. I should have made you happy and given you a good time. Sometimes it is a pity to aim too high; you are apt to miss things altogether.”
Fanny was waiting in Joan’s room when she got back,[Pg 132] tucked up in her favourite position in the arm-chair. She had been away for the last ten days on one of her periodical trips. “My!” she gasped, disentangling herself to greet the other; “what roses, honey! Straight from the country, aren’t they, and a car—I can hear it buzzing outside. Is it your young man?” She paused on the thought tip-toe with excitement, her eyes studying Joan across the flowers she had seized. “And is he straight? the other sort won’t do for you; you would hate yourself in a week.”
Joan subsided on to the bed, taking off her hat with hands that shook over the task.
“No,” she answered, “he is not straight, Fanny; but it doesn’t matter, because I have finished with him. Take away the flowers with you, will you? they seem to have given me a headache.”
Fanny dropped the roses in a shower and trod them under foot as she ran to Joan. “He has hurt you;” she spoke fiercely, flinging her arms round the other girl. “God, how I hate men at times! He has hurt you, honey.”
“Only my pride,” Joan admitted; but the tears so long held back came in a flood now; she laid her head down on Fanny’s shoulder and sobbed and sobbed.
The other girl waited till the storm had passed; then she rose to her feet and bundling the roses together with an aggressive movement opened the door and flung them out into the passage.
“I have got an idea,” she said; “you have been about fed up with office for months past. Well, why not chuck it? Come with me. I have got a job in a show that is going on tour next week. There is room in the chorus, I know; come with me, won’t you?”
Her earnestness made Joan laugh. “What shall I come as, Fanny? I cannot sing, and I have never acted in my life.”
“That is nothing,” Fanny went on impatiently. “You[Pg 133] are young, you are pretty; you can dance, I suppose, and look nice. I can get you taken on to-morrow, for old Daddy Brown, that is the manager, is a friend of mine, and while he is a friend he will do anything for me. Oh, come, do come.” She caught hold of Joan’s hands. “It will be great, we shall be together, and I will show you that there is fun in life; fun, and love, and laughter.”
She was laughing herself hysterically, her figure seemed poised as if for an instant outbreak into the dance she spoke of. Joan watched her with envious eyes. Fanny’s philosophy in life was so plain to see. She took things that came her way with eager hands; she seemed to pass unscathed, unsullied, through the dregs of life and find mirth in the dreariest surroundings. And to-day Landon had broken down one more barrier of the pride which kept Joan’s feet upon the pathway of self-respect. Of what use were her ideals since they could not bring her even one half hour’s happiness? The road stretched out in front of her empty and sunless.
These thoughts swept through her mind almost in the space of a second. Then she rose quickly to her feet.
“I’ll come, Fanny,” she said; “it really amounts to turning my back on a battle; still I will come.”
CHAPTER XVIII
| “To fill the hour—that is happiness: to fill The hour and leave no crevice for repentance.” |
Anon.
“Daddy Brown, this is the girl I spoke to you about; will she do?”
That had been Joan’s introduction to the manager of the Brown travelling company. He was a large man, with his neck set in such rolls of fat that quick movement was an impossibility. His eyes, small and surrounded by[Pg 134] a multitude of wrinkles, were bloodshot, but for all that excessively keen. Joan felt as they swept over her that she was being appraised, classed, and put aside under her correct value in the man’s brain. His hair, which in youth must have grown thick and curly, had fallen off almost entirely from the top of his head, leaving a small island sprouting alone in the midst of the baldness. This was known among the company as “The Danger Mark,” for when the skin round it flushed red a fearful storm was brewing for somebody.
He sat in front of a table littered with papers, in a small, rather dirty office, the windows of which opened on to Bedford Street. With the window open, as he kept it, the noise of the Strand traffic was plainly audible.
He eyed Joan slowly and methodically; then his glance turned back to Fanny. “What can she do?” he asked heavily.
“Oh, everything,” Fanny answered with a little gasp; “and she can share my dressing-room and all that.”
“Humph!” grunted the man; once more his small, shrewd eyes travelled all over Joan.
“Well, perhaps, she will do.” He agreed finally, “Mind you are in time at the station to-morrow. Cut along now, girls, I am busy.”
Fanny was jubilant all the way home. “I thought I should be able to work it,” she bubbled; “it will be fun, honey, to-morrow we are due at Tonbridge and the tour ends at Sevenoaks. All little places this time. But mind you, it is the first rung of the ladder for you. Brown’s is a good company to start with. Country Girl, Merry Widow, Waltz Dream.” She ticked them all off on her fingers one by one. “You are glad about it, aren’t you?” she broke off suddenly to ask.
“Of course I am glad,” Joan answered quickly, “and it is sweet of you to have got it for me. Perhaps I am a little nervous; it strikes me one might get very frightened of Mr. Brown.”[Pg 135]
“What, Daddy? He is all right if you know how to manage him, and he won’t bother you.” Fanny took a quick look at her. “You aren’t his sort.”
Was she really glad? Joan pondered the matter over when Fanny had at last betaken herself to her own room. At any rate she had, as it were, burnt her boats. She had left the Evening Herald, she had told Mrs. Carew to sublet her rooms. At least it would be good to get away from London for a bit.
Mrs. Carew had been quite frank and decided in her views on the subject.
“For a young lady like you to go off with the likes of ‘er,” this referred to Fanny, “it hardly seems seemly to me, Miss. Not that Miss Bellairs ain’t all right in her own way, but it is not your way. Mark my words, Miss, you will regret it.”
“And if I do,” Joan had answered, “I can always leave and come back here, can’t I, Mrs. Carew? I am sure you will always do your best to put me up even if this room is let.”
“If I have a corner; Miss, you shall ‘ave it and welcome. Nice and quiet young lady you have always been, and I know something of young ladies, I do.”
It was evident, even in her efforts to be polite, that she considered Joan’s present line of action to be one of deterioration. Was it, after all, a wise move, Joan wondered rather vaguely, as she packed away her few possessions. There was a great deal in Fanny’s nature that she disapproved of, that could at times even fill her with disgust. In itself, that would merely hold her from ever coming to look at life from Fanny’s standpoint. And perhaps she would find in the existence, which Fanny claimed to be full of love and laughter, something to satisfy the dull aching discontent which had wrenched at her heart all this last summer. Aunt Janet, Uncle John, the old home-life, the atmosphere of love and admiration, these had been torn from her, she needed something to take their place.[Pg 136]
They met the rest of the company next day at the station. Fanny introduced them all to Joan, rather breathlessly.
“Mr. Strachan, who plays our hero, and who is the idol of the stalls. Mr. O’Malley, our comic man. Mr. Whistler, who does heavy father parts, wig and all. Mr. Jimmy Rolls, who dances on light toes and who prompts when nothing else is doing. The ladies, honey, take their names on trust, you will find them out sooner or later.”
There were, Joan discovered, eight other ladies in the company. She never knew more than four of them. Mrs. O’Malley, Grace Binning, a small soft-voiced girl, Rhoda Tompkins, and Rose Weyland—a very golden-haired, dark-eyebrowed lady, who had been in some far back period, so Fanny contrived to whisper, a flame of Brown’s.
Of the men, Joan liked Mr. Strachan best; he was an ugly man with very pleasant eyes and a rare smile that lit up the whole of his face. He seemed quiet, she thought, and rather apart from the others.
The journey down to Tonbridge proved slightly disastrous. To begin with, thanks to Daddy Brown himself, the company missed the best train of the day and had to travel by one that meant two changes. On arrival at Tonbridge at four o’clock in the afternoon they found that one of the stage property boxes had gone astray. Considering that they were billed to appear that evening at eight and the next train did not arrive till ten-thirty, the prospect was not a promising one.
“Always merry and bright,” as Jimmie, the stage prompter, remarked in an aside to Strachan. “By the way, is it the Arcadians that we are doing to-night?”
“How the hell can we do anything,” growled Daddy Brown, the patch of skin round his danger-mark showed alarmingly red, “if that box does not appear. Who was the blasted idiot who was supposed to be looking after it?”
“Well, it was and it was not me, Sir,” Jimmie acknowledged; “the truth is that I saw it labelled all right and[Pg 137] left it with the rest of the luggage to look after itself. I suppose——”
“Oh, what is the use of talking,” Brown broke in impatiently; he had thrust his hat back on his fiery head, the lines of fat above his collar shone with perspiration. “You had better go on, all of you, and see about getting rooms; the first rehearsal is in an hour, box or no box, and don’t you forget it.”
“I don’t see,” wailed Mrs. O’Malley, almost as soon as his back was turned, “how we are to live through this sort of thing. What is the use of a rehearsal if none of our things are going to turn up?”
“I guess there will be a performance whether or no,” Fanny told her. “Come along, honey,” this to Joan, “seize up your bag and follow me; we have got to find diggings of sorts before the hour is up.”
Joan found, as they trudged from lodging-house to lodging-house, that the theatrical profession was apparently very unpopular in Tonbridge. As Fanny remarked, it was always as well to tell the old ladies what to expect, but the very mention of the word theatre caused a chill to descend on the prospective landladies’ faces. They found rooms finally in one of the smaller side streets; a fair-sized double bedroom, and a tiny little sitting-room. The house had the added advantage of being very near the theatre, which was just as well, for they had barely time to settle with the woman before they had to hurry off for the rehearsal.
“It won’t do to be late,” Fanny confided to Joan. “Daddy is in an awful temper; we shan’t get any champagne to-night unless some of us soothe him down.”
At the small tin-roofed theatre supreme chaos reigned upon the stage and behind it. Daddy Brown, his hat thrown off, his coat discarded, stormed and raged at everyone within hearing. The Country Girl had replaced The Arcadians on the bill; it was an old favourite and less troublesome to stage. Fanny was to play Molly; it was a[Pg 138] part that she might have been born for. Daddy Brown won back to his good humour as he watched her; her voice, clear and sweet, carried with it a certain untouched charm of youth, for Fanny put her whole heart into her work.
Joan felt herself infected by the other’s spirit, she joined in the singing, laughing with real merriment at her chorus partner. The stage boards cracked and creaked, the man at the piano watched the performers with admiring eyes—the music was so familiar that it was quite unnecessary for him to follow the notes. Daddy Brown and the box office man, sole occupants of the stalls, saw fit to applaud as the chorus swung to a breathless pause.
“That’s good, that’s good,” Brown shouted. “Just once more again please, ladies, then we’ll call a rest. Don’t want to tire you out before to-night.”
The dance flourished to its second end and Fanny flung herself exhausted against the wings. Her cough was troubling her again, shaking her thin body, fighting its way through her tightened throat.
“It’s worth it though,” she laughed in answer to Joan’s remonstrance; “it is the only time I really live when I am dancing, you see.”
The rehearsal dragged out its weary length, but not until Brown had reduced all the company to such a state of exhaustion that they could raise no quiver of protest to any of his orders. A man of iron himself, he extracted and expected from the people under him the same powers of endurance which he himself possessed. Since Fanny and Joan could not go home to their lodgings, the time being too short, Strachan escorted them out to obtain a meal of sorts before the evening’s performance. Short of Daddy Brown’s hotel, which stood close to the theatre and which they were all reluctant to try, there did not appear to be any restaurants in the neighbourhood and they ended up by having a kind of high tea at a little baker’s. “Eggs are splendid things to act on,” Strachan told Joan.
The girls, however, on their return found a bottle of[Pg 139] champagne and two glasses waiting for them in Fanny’s dressing-room. It had been sent with Mr. Brown’s compliments to Miss Bellairs. The sight of it sent up Fanny’s spirits with a bound.
“I did not know how I was going to get through the evening,” she confessed, “but this will put new life into us.”
She insisted upon Joan having a glass, and the latter, conscious that in her present state of tiredness she could hardly stand, far less dance, sipped a little of the clear, bubbling liquid—sipped till the small room grew large, till her feet seemed to tread on air, and her eyes shone and sparkled like the brightest of stars on a dark night.
The theatre after that, the crowded rows of faces, the music and the thunder of applause—the audience were good-tempered and inclined to be amused at anything—passed before her like some gorgeous light-flecked dream. When the soldiers in the back row took up the words of Fanny’s song and shouted the refrain she felt swept along on the wings of success.
At the fall of the curtain Daddy Brown patted her on the back. He was by this time radiant with cheerfulness once more.
“You will do, young lady,” he said. “We’ll have to see if we can’t work in a special dance for you;” and Fanny flung her arms round Joan in wild joy. “You’re made, honey,” she whispered, “if Brown has noticed you, you’re made. I always said you could dance.”
It was very thrilling and exciting, but the champagne was beginning to lose its effect. The world was growing grey again. Joan’s head throbbed, and she felt self-consciously inclined to make a fool of herself. She sat very silent through the supper to which Brown treated the company at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. Fanny was making a great deal of noise, and [Pg 140] how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone—Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown—pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, since there were not enough ladies to go around, with each other.
Fanny, wilder, gayer than ever, skirts held very high, showed off a new cake-walk in the centre of the room. Her companion, a young, weak-looking youth, was evidently far from sober, and the more intricate the step, the more hopelessly did he become entangled with his own feet, amidst shouts of amusement from the onlookers.
Joan turned presently—she had narrowly escaped being dragged into the dance by a noisily cheerful gentleman—to find Strachan standing beside her. He was watching her with some shade of curiosity.
“Why don’t you go home?” he suggested; “it isn’t amusing you and I can see you are tired. We get used to these kind of shows after a time.”
“I think I will,” Joan agreed; “no one will mind if I do, will they?”
“Not they, most of them are incapable of noticing anything.” A cynical smile stirred on his face. “It is no wonder,” he commented, “that we are known as a danger to provincial towns. You see the state of confusion we reduce the young bloods to.” His eyes passed round the room and came back to Joan with a shade of apology in them. “A bad night, for your first experience,” he said; “we are not always as noisy as this. Come along though, I’ll see you home, if I may, my rooms are somewhere down your street.”
Joan lay awake long after she had got into bed, and when she did at last drop off to sleep it was to dream strange, noise-haunted dreams, that brought her little rest. It was morning, for a faint golden light was invading the room, when she woke to find Fanny standing at the foot of the bed. A different Fanny to any Joan had ever seen[Pg 141] before, tired and blowsy-looking, her hair pulled about her face, the colour rubbed in patches from her cheeks and lips.
“My word, it has been a night;” she stood swaying and peering at Joan. “It’s life though, isn’t it, honey?”
Then a wild fit of coughing seized her and Joan had to scramble out of bed and give what help she could. There was no hope of sleep after that, and when Fanny had been helped to bed Joan took up a chair to the window and drew aside the curtain.
Her mind was a tumult of angry thoughts, but her heart ached miserably. If this was what Fanny called life and laughter, she had no wish to live it.
CHAPTER XIX
| “I did not choose thee, dearest. It was Love That made the choice, not I.” |
W. S. Blunt.
All the way up the river from the Nore after they had picked up the pilot the ship moved through a dense fog. A huge P. & O. liner, heavily laden with passengers and mails, she had to proceed cautiously, like some blind giant, emitting every two minutes a dolorous wail from her foghorns.
“Clear the way, I am coming,” was the substance of the weird sound, and in answer to it shrill whistles sounded on all sides, from small fleets of fishing-boats, coal hulks, and cargo boats bound from far-off lands.
“We are here too,” they panted in answer; “don’t run us down, please.”
It was eerie work, even for the passengers, who remained in blissful ignorance of the danger of their situation. By rights the ship should have been in dock before breakfast; they had planned the night before that an early dawn should see them awake and preparing to land; yet here was eleven o’clock, and from what the more hardy of them could[Pg 142] learn by direct questioning of those in authority, they had not as yet passed Canvey Island. Dick Grant, ship’s doctor and therefore free of access to inquirers, underwent a searching examination from all and sundry. The P. & O. regulations are, that the officers shall not talk or in any way become friendly with any of the passengers; the ship’s doctor and the purser share the responsibility of looking after their clients’ comfort, well-being, and amusement. On occasions such as a fog, when the hearts of passengers are naturally full of questions as to where they are, how long will the fog last, is there any danger, and ought we to have on our life-belts, these two afore-mentioned officials have a busy time. Dick felt that Barton, the purser in question, had played him rather a shabby trick, for Barton had asserted that the work of sorting out passengers’ luggage and seeing to their valuables would confine him to his office till the ship docked, which excuse left Dick alone to cope with the fog-produced situation.
Dick had been at sea now for close on two years. He had shifted from ship to ship, had visited most of the ports in the near and far East. This was his last voyage; he was going to go back and take up life in London. From Marseilles he had written to Mabel telling her to expect him the week-end after they got in.
His journeyings had given him many and varied experiences. The blue eyes had taken unto themselves some of that unwavering facing of life which seems to come almost always into the eyes of people who spend their lives upon the sea. He had learned to be patient and long-suffering with the oddities of his patients, passengers who passed through his hands on their brief journeyings; he had seen the pathos of the sick who were shipped with the full knowledge that they would die ere the first port was reached, simply because the wistful ache of home-sickness would not allow them to rest. Home-sickness! Dick had known it keep a man alive till the grey cliffs of Dover grew out of the sea and he could fall back dead and satisfied.[Pg 143]
Board ship throws people together into appalling intimacy; Love springs full-winged into being in the course of an afternoon; passion burns at red-heat through drowsy, moon-filled nights. Almost wilfully, to begin with, Dick had flung himself into romance after romance; perhaps unknown to himself, he sought to satisfy the hunger of heart which could throb in answer to a dream, but which all reality left untouched. He played at love lightly; he had an ingrained reverence for women that even intercourse with Anglo-Indian grass-widows and the girl who revels in a board-ship flirtation was unable altogether to eradicate. He made love, that is to say, only to those women who first and openly made love to him; but it is to be doubted whether even the most ardent of them could boast that Dicky Grant had ever been in love with them. They slipped out of his ken when they disembarked at their various ports, and the photographs with which they dowered him hardly served to keep him in mind of their names. And a certain weariness had grown up in his heart; he felt glad that this was to be his last voyage. He had put in two good crowded years, but he was no nearer realizing his dream than he had been on the day when Mabel had said to him: “Did you think I should not know when you fell in love?”
Dick was thinking of this remark of Mabel’s as he stood by himself for the time being, right up by the front of the ship peering into the fog, and with the thought came a memory of the girl with the brown eyes who had stood to face him, her hands clenched at her sides, as she told her piteous tale. Piteous, because of its very bravado. “I am not afraid or ashamed,” she had claimed, while fear stared out of her eyes and shame flung the colour to her face. What had the past two years brought her? Had she stood with her back to the wall of public opinion and fought her fight, or had the forces of contempt and blame been too strong for her?
A very light hand on his arm brought him out of his[Pg 144] thoughts with a start, and he turned to find a small, daintily-clad lady standing beside him.
“How much longer shall we be?” she asked; “and when am I going to see you again, Dicky, once we land?”
She had called him Dicky from the second day of their acquaintance. Mrs. Hayter always called men by their Christian names, or by nicknames invented by herself.
Dick let his eyes linger over her before he answered—immaculately dressed as ever—the wildest storm saw Mrs. Hayter with her hair waved, the other ladies claimed—small, piquante face, blue eyes and a marvellous complexion despite her many seasons spent in the East. She was the wife of an Indian Civilian, a tall, grey-headed man, who had come on board to see her off at Bombay. Dick had been rather struck with the tragedy of the man’s face, that once he had seen it; he connected it always for some unexplainable reason with Mrs. Hayter’s small, soft hands and the slumberous fire in her blue eyes. Not that Dick was not friendly with Mrs. Hayter; he had had on the contrary rather a fierce-tempered flirtation with her. Once, under the spell of a night all purple sea and sky and dim set stars, he had caught her to him and kissed her. Kissed the eager, laughing mouth, the warm, soft neck, just where the little pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. She had practically asked him to kiss her, yet that, he reflected in his cooler mood the next morning, was no excuse for his conduct, and, rather ashamed of himself, he had succeeded in avoiding her fairly well until this moment. He had not the slightest desire to kiss her again; that was always the sad end to all his venturings into the kingdom of romance.
“Where are you going to?” he answered her last question first; “if it is anywhere near London, I shall hope to look you up.”
Mrs. Hayter laughed, a little caught-in laugh. “Look me up, Dicky, between you and me! Never mind, you funny, shy, big boy, you shall put it that way if you like.[Pg 145] As a matter of fact, I am going to stay at the Knightsbridge Hotel for a week or so on my way through to my husband’s people. Why don’t you come there too?”
The invitation in her voice was unmistakable and set his teeth on edge. “It’s too expensive for me,” he answered shortly; “but I will come and call one day if I may.”
“Of course,” she agreed, “let’s make it dinner the day after to-morrow. Dicky,” she moved a little closer to him, “is it me or yourself you are angry with about the other night?”
“Myself,” Dick said dryly, and had no time for more, for on the second a shiver shook the ship, throwing Mrs. Hayter forcibly against him, and the air was suddenly clamorous with shrill whistles, cries, and the quick throb of engines reversed.
Through the fog, which with a seeming malignity was lifting, veil upon thick veil, now that the mischief was accomplished, Dick could see the faint outlines of land; gaunt trees and a house, quite near at hand, certainly within call. Mrs. Hayter was in a paroxysm of terror, murmuring her fright and strange endearing terms all jumbled together, and the deck had waked to life; they seemed in the centre of a curious, nerve-ridden crowd. It was all very embarrassing; Dick had to hold on to Mrs. Hayter because he knew she would fall if he let her go, and she clung to him, arms thrown round his neck, golden hair brushing against his chin.
“There’s not a particle of danger,” a strong voice shouted from somewhere in the crowd. Dick could recognize it as the captain’s. “Please don’t get alarmed, ladies, it is quite unnecessary, with any luck we will be off almost immediately.”
In that he proved incorrect, for, heavily weighted as the India was, she stayed firmly fixed in Thames mud. By slow degrees the fog lifted and showed the long lines of the shore, and the solitary house standing out like a sentinel in the surrounding flatness.[Pg 146]
Dick had succeeded in disentangling Mrs. Hayter’s arms and had escorted her to a seat.
“I am afraid I have given myself away hopelessly,” she whispered, clutching him with rather a shaky hand. “Did anybody see us?”
“Everybody, I should think,” he told her gravely, “But, after all, most things are excusable in a possible wreck.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “only Mrs. Sandeman is all eyes to my doings, and on one occasion she even wrote Robert. Cat!”
The last expression was full of vindictiveness. Dick was seized with a disgust for his own share in the proceedings; he hoped devoutly that Mrs. Sandeman, a rather austere-faced, tight-lipped woman, would not write and disturb Robert’s peace of mind for any doings of his. Also he took a mental resolve to see no more of Mrs. Hayter.
By four o’clock all the passengers, with a mild proportion of their luggage, had been transferred to small tugs for transport to Tilbury; for on a further examination into the state of affairs it had been found that the India would probably remain where she was until a certain lightening of her freight should make it easier for her to refloat.
It was three days later, in fact, before Dick reached London. He found two letters waiting for him at his club; one from Mabel, telling him how glad they would be to see him, could he not make it earlier than the week-end; and one from Mrs. Hayter. Would he come and dine with her that evening? He need not trouble to answer, she was dining all alone and would not wait for him after half-past seven.
“If you can’t come to dinner,” she had added, “look in afterwards; there is something I rather particularly want to say to you.”
He dressed for the evening meal in a vague state of discontent. He had not the slightest intention of going to Mrs. Hayter’s, still the thought of her, waiting for him and[Pg 147] expecting him, made him uneasy. At one moment he meditated telephoning to her to tell her he was unavoidably prevented from coming, but dismissed the excuse as being too palpably a lie. He was restless, too, and at a loss as to how to spend his evening, the loneliness of being by himself in London after a two years’ absence was beginning to oppress him. None of his old pals seemed to be in town—anyway they did not turn up at the club. Finally he decided to look in at the Empire, or one of the neighbouring music-halls, and strolled forth in that direction.
London certainly seemed no emptier than usual. Streams of motor-cars, taxis, and buses hurried along Piccadilly, the streets were busy with people coming and going. Out of the shadows just by the Burlington Arcade a woman spoke to him—little whispered words that he could pass on without noticing; but she had brushed against him as she spoke, the heavy scent she used seemed to cling to him, and he had been conscious in the one brief glance he had given her, that she was young, pretty, brown-eyed. The incident touched on his mind like the flick of a whip. He stared at the other women as they passed him, meeting always the same bold yet weary invitation of their eyes, the smile which betokened nothing of mirth. And as he stared and passed and stared again it grew on him that he was in reality searching for someone, searching those street faces in the same way as once before he had sought among the passers-by for one girl’s face. The thought was no sooner matured than he hated it—and now he tried to keep his eyes off these women passing by, loathing the thought of their nightly pilgrimage, of their shame-haunted trade.
The Empire performance hardly served to distract his thoughts. He was out in the streets again before the ballet turn came on even. It had started to rain, a slight, indefinite drizzle; Leicester Square presented a drab and dingy appearance. The blaze of lights from the surround[Pg 148]ing theatres shone on wet streets and slippery pavements. A drunken woman who had been ejected from the public-house at the corner stood leaning against a neighbouring lamp-post; her hat had fallen askew, stray, ragged wisps of hair hung about her face, from time to time she lifted up her voice and shouted at the children who had gathered in a ring to watch her antics. Life was horribly, hurtfully ugly at times. Dick would have liked to have shaken his shoulders free of it all and known himself back once more on the wind-swept deck of an outgoing steamer.
He strode off in the direction of Trafalgar Square, and still dim, draggled shapes haunted his footsteps, leered at him from the shadows, brushed against him as he passed. As he turned into the lighted purlieus of the Strand he paused for a moment, undecided which course to take next, and it was then that he saw Joan again.
She was standing a little in front of him on the edge of the pavement, evidently waiting for a bus. Another girl stood near her, talking in quick, childish excitement, recounting some conversation, for she acted the parts as she spoke. Joan seemed to pay very little attention to her companion, though occasionally she smiled in answer to the other’s laughter.
He had recognized her at once! Now he stood with his eyes glued on her, taking in every detail of her appearance—the wide-brimmed hat, the little lace collar showing outside her jacket, the neat shoes.
Even as she talked Fanny’s bird-like eyes darted here and there among the crowd and lit presently on the young man, so palpably staring at her companion. She edged nearer to Joan and nudged her.
“You have got off, honey,” she whispered. “Turn your eyes slowly and you will catch such a look of devotion as will keep you in comfort for the rest of your life.”
Joan flushed: Fanny could always succeed in bringing the hot blush to her face, even though she had been on tour with the company now for two months. Also she still[Pg 149] resented being stared at, though Fanny was doing her best to break her in to that most necessary adjunct of their profession. Rather haughtily, therefore, she turned, and for a second his eyes met hers, bringing a quick, disturbing memory which she could in no way place.
At any other time Dick would have taken off his hat and claimed acquaintance; just for the present moment, though, something held him spellbound, staring. Fanny giggled, and Joan, having had time to raise her feelings to a proper pitch of anger, let her eyes pass very coldly and calmly from the top of the young man’s hat to the tip of his boots and back again. Contempt and dislike were in the glance, what Fanny called her “Kill the worm” expression. Then No. 11 motor-bus plunged alongside, and “Here we are at last!” called Fanny, dragging at Joan’s arm.
With a sense of victory in her heart, since the young man had obviously been quelled by her anger, Joan climbed up to the top of the bus and sat down in a seat out of sight. Fanny, however, turned to have a final look at the enemy from the top step. As the bus moved, she saw him shake himself out of his trance and start forward.
“Good-night,” she called in cheerfully affectionate tones; the conductor turned to stare up at her. “Some other day; can’t be done to-night, sonny.”
Then she subsided, almost weak with laughter at her own joke, beside a righteously irritated Joan.
“Nearly had the cheek to follow us, mind you,” she told her, amid gasps; “properly smitten, he was.”
“I wish you had not called out to him,” said Joan stiffly. “It is so—so undignified.”
Fanny quelled her laughter and looked up at Joan. “Undignified,” she repeated; “it stopped him from coming, anyway. You don’t look at things the right way, honey. One must not be disagreeable or rude to men in our trade, but one can often choke them off by laughing at them.”[Pg 150]
CHAPTER XX
| “Love lent is mortal, lavished, is divine. Not by its intake is love’s fount supplied, But by the ceaseless outrush of its tide.” |
“And there is little Dickie,” Mabel said; she stood, one hand on the cot, her grey eyes lowered—”he has brought such happiness into my life that sometimes I am afraid.”
The baby. Some women were like that, Dick knew. A child could build anew their world for them and make it radiant with a heaven-sent wonder. He had never thought of Mabel as a mother. He had been almost afraid to meet her after two years away—her letters had given him no clue to her feelings; but then she rarely wrote of herself and she had never been the sort of person to complain. So he had come down to Sevenoaks rather wondering what he would find, remembering their last talk together the day before her wedding. Mabel had met him at the station and driven him back to the house in their car. She had talked chiefly about himself; was he glad to be back?—had he enjoyed the years away?—what plans had he made for the future? But her face, her quiet grey eyes had spoken for her. He knew she was happy, only the reason, the foundation of this happiness, had been a mystery to him until this moment.
“Little Dickie,” he repeated, leaning forward to peer at the small atom of humanity who lay fast asleep. “You have called it after me, then?”
Mabel nodded. “Of course; and don’t call him ‘it,’ Dick; he is a boy.”
A sudden intuition came to her, she lifted her eyes to Dick’s. “Tom wanted him called that, too,” she said, speaking a little quickly; “but that is not wonderful,[Pg 151] because Tom always wants just exactly what he thinks I do. We will go downstairs now, shall we, Dick? You know Mother insisted upon a dinner-party in your honour this evening, and we are going on to some awful theatre in Sevenoaks afterwards.”
“Good Lord!” groaned Dick; “why did you let her?”
“I thought you wouldn’t be too pleased,” Mabel admitted; “but surely you must remember that it is no use arguing with mother about what she calls—amusing us. She took the tickets as a pleasant surprise yesterday when she was in Sevenoaks. As Tom says, ‘Let’s be amused with a good grace.’ Dick”—she paused on the lowest step to look up at him—”you haven’t the slightest idea of how good Tom is; he spoils mother almost as much as father did, and yet he manages her.”
“And you,” said Dick, “are absolutely and entirely happy, Mabel?”
“Absolutely and entirely,” she answered; he could see the truth of her words shining in her eyes.
Mrs. Grant loved dinner-parties and going-on to the theatre. It is to be believed that she imagined that the younger people enjoyed them too, because, for herself, she invariably went to sleep half-way through the most brilliant performance—earlier, were the show not quite so good. Dick remembered many unpleasant entertainments in his youth which could be traced to this passion of Mrs. Grant’s. She would drill them into amusement, becoming excessively annoyed with them did they not show immediate appreciation, and pleasure is too fragile a dream for such treatment; it can be very easily destroyed.
Dick and Mabel found her downstairs, giving the final orders as to the setting out of the table to a harassed and sulky-looking maid. Everything had always to be done in Mrs. Grant’s own particular way, even down to the placing of the salt-spoons. She was the bane of the[Pg 152] servants’ lives when they were new-comers; if they lived through the persecution they learned how best to avoid her gimlet eyes and could get a certain amount of amusement out of hoodwinking her. Dick contrived to display the correct amount of pleasure at the festivity in prospect for him. He wondered at the back of his mind how glad his mother really was to see him, and strolled away upstairs presently to his own room to unpack and change.
The first had already been accomplished for him by Tom’s valet, and the man apparently proposed to stay and help him change, murmuring something about a hot bath being ready.
“Thanks,” answered Dick, “then I will manage for myself; you need not wait.”
He stood for some time, the man having slipped discreetly away, staring out of the wide-open window. It was still late summer, and the days stayed very hot. Beyond the well-kept lawn at the back of the house the fields stretched away till they reached the fringe of the forest, and above the trees again rose the chalk hills that lay, he knew, just behind Wrotham. He was thinking vaguely of many things as he stood there; first of Mabel and the new happiness shining in her eyes. Mabel and her small son; thank heaven, she had won through to such content, for if anyone deserved to be happy it was Mabel. Then little moments from the past two years strayed into his mind. Hot, sun-blazing ports, with their crowds of noisy, gesticulating natives; the very brazen blue of an Indian sky over an Indian sea; the moonlit night that had made him kiss Mrs. Hayter; he could almost feel for one second the throb of her heart against his. Then, like a flash, as if all his other thoughts had been but a shifting background for this, the principal one, Joan’s face swung up before him. Where had she been going to that night? Who had her companion been? Why had not he had the courage to speak to her, to follow her at least, and find out where she lived? She was in[Pg 153] London, anyway; he would have, even at the risk of hurting Mabel’s feelings, to get back to London as soon as possible. It was a huge place, certainly, to look for just one person in, but Fate would bring them together again; he had learned to be a believer in Fate. There was truth, then, behind all the strange stories one heard about Love. A girl’s voice, some face in the crowd, and a man’s heart was all on flame. The waters of common-sense could do nothing to quench that fire. He would search, ridiculous and absurd as it seemed, till he found her—and then…. His thoughts broke off abruptly; there was a sound from downstairs which might be the dinner-bell, and he had not even had his bath yet.
The dinner-party, specially arranged by Mrs. Grant for Dick’s benefit, consisted of a Mr. and Mrs. Bevis, who lived in a large new house on the other side of the park, their two daughters, Dr. English, who had taken Dick’s place at Wrotham, and a young man from Sevenoaks itself. “Someone in a bank,” as Mrs. Grant described him.
Dick’s health was drunk and his mother insisted on “Just a little speech, dear boy,” which thoroughly upset his temper for the rest of the evening, so that he found it difficult to be even decently polite to the eldest Miss Bevis, whom he had taken in to dinner. The talk turned, after the speech-making episode, to the theatre they were bound for, Mr. Jarvis asking young Swetenham if he knew anything of the company and what it was like.
“Rather,” the youth answered, “been twice myself this time already. They are real good for travellers. Some jolly pretty girls among them.”
“Musical comedy, isn’t it?” Mrs. Bevis asked. “Dorothy has always so wanted to see The Merry Widow.”
“Well, that is what they are playing to-night,” Swetenham assured her, “and I hear it is Miss Bellairs’ best part. She is good, mind you, in most things, and there is a girl who dances top-hole.”
“I don’t know why we have never heard of it before,”[Pg 154] Mrs. Bevis meandered gently on; “it is so clever of you, Mrs. Grant, to have found that there was a theatre in Sevenoaks at all. I am sure we never dreamed of there being one.”
“They use the town hall,” Dr. English put in. “If we can guarantee a large enough audience, I expect they will favour us at Wrotham.”
“Oh, what a splendid idea,” cried the youngest Miss Bevis; “fancy a real live theatrical company in Wrotham.”
“I hope it will stay at ‘fancy,’” grunted Mr. Bevis. “From what I remember of travelling companies, Wrotham is better without them.”
Despite all Swetenham’s praise and the Miss Bevis’ enthusiastic anticipation Dick settled into his seat in the fourth row of the so-called stalls with the firm conviction that he was going to be thoroughly bored.
“The one consolation,” he whispered to Mabel on their way in, “is that mother will not be able to sleep comfortably. I don’t want to appear vicious, but really that is a consolation.”
Mrs. Grant had apparently come to the same conclusion herself, for she was expressing great dissatisfaction in a queenly manner to the timid programme seller.
“Are these the best seats in the house?” they could hear her say. “It is quite absurd to expect anyone to sit in them for a whole evening.”
Mabel had to laugh at Dick’s remark, then she went forward to soothe her troubled parent as much as possible. “It isn’t like a London theatre, mother, and Tom has ordered one of the cars to stay just outside. The minute you get tired he will take you straight home. He says he does not mind, as he has so often seen The Merry Widow before.”
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Grant sighed, and settled her weighty body into one of the creaking, straight-backed wooden chairs of which the stalls were composed. “So long as you young people enjoy yourselves I do not really mind.”[Pg 155]
Swetenham had purchased a stack of programmes and was pointing out the stars on the list to the youngest Miss Bevis. The back of the hall was rapidly filling, and one or two other parties strolled into the stalls. The orchestra had already commenced to play the overture rather shakily.
“Music, and bad music at that,” groaned Dick inwardly. He took a despairing glance round him and wondered if it would be possible to go and lose himself after the first act. Then the lights went out abruptly and the curtain went up.
The beginning chorus dragged distinctly; Dick heard Swetenham whispering to his companions that it would be better when the principals came on. In this he proved correct, for the Merry Widow girl could sing, and she could also act. Fanny’s prettiness, her quick, light way of moving, shone out in contrast to her surroundings. High and sweet above the uncertain accompaniment her voice rose triumphant. The back of the house thundered with applause at the end of her song.
“Now wait,” announced Swetenham, “the girl who dances comes on here. She hasn’t any business to, it is not in the play, but old Brown finds it a good draw.”
Mechanically the stage had been cleared, the characters sitting rather stiffly round the ball-room scene while the orchestra was making quite a good effort at “The Merry Widow Waltz.” There was a second’s pause, then down from the steps at the back of the stage came a girl; slim, straight-held, her eyes looking out over the audience as if they saw some vision beyond. It had taken Daddy Brown three very heated lessons to teach Joan this exact entrance. She was to move forward to the centre of the stage as if in a dream, almost sleep-walking, Fanny had suggested, the music was calling her. She was to begin her dance languidly, unwillingly, till note by note the melody crept into her veins and set all her blood tingling. “Now for abandon,” Daddy Brown would exclaim, thumping the top of the piano with his baton. “That is right,[Pg 156] my girl, fling yourself into it.” And Joan had learned her lesson well, Daddy Brown and Fanny between them had wakened a talent to life in her which she had not known she possessed. Dance, yes, she could dance. The music seemed to give her wings. If she had seen her own performance she would probably have been a little shocked; she did not in the least realize how vividly she answered the call.
When she had finished she stood, flushed and breathless, listening to the shouted and clapped applause.
“Do it again, miss,” a man’s voice sounded from back in the hall. She tried to find him, to smile at him—that was more of Fanny’s teaching. But Daddy Brown allowed no encores, it was only for a minute that she stood there, bowing and smiling, in her ridiculously short, flounced skirt and baby bodice, then the rest of the chorus moved out to take their places, and she vanished into the side wings again.
From the moment of her entry till the last flutter of her skirts as she ran off, Dick sat as if mesmerized, leaning slightly forward, his hands clenched. Every movement of her body had stabbed, as it were, at his heart. He had not heard the call of the music, he could not guess at the spirit that was awake in her, he only saw the abandon—of which Daddy Brown was so proud—the painted face, the smiles which came and went so gaily at the shouted applause. Common-sense might not kill love, but this! The knowledge that even this could not kill love was what clenched his hands.
At the end of the first act Swetenham leant across and asked if he was coming out for a drink. It may have been that the younger man had noticed Dick’s intense interest in the dancer, or perhaps it was merely because he wished to air a familiarity which struck him as delightfully bold, anyway, as they strolled about outside he put a suggestion to Dick.
“If you can arrange to stay on after the show,” he said,[Pg 157] “and would care to, I could take you round and introduce you to those two girls, the one who dances and Miss Bellairs.”
“Miss Bellairs,” Dick repeated stupidly, his mind was grappling with a far bigger problem than young Swetenham could guess at.
“Yes,” the other answered, “I met her last time she was down here, and the other is a great pal of hers.”
He looked sideways at his companion as they went in under the lights; it occurred to him that Grant was either in a bad temper or had a headache, he looked anyway not in the least jovial. Swetenham almost regretted his rash invitation.
“Thank you,” Dick was saying, speaking almost mechanically, “I should like to come very much. It doesn’t in the least matter about getting home.”
Swetenham glanced at him again. “If it comes to that,” he said, “I have a motor-bike I could run you in on.”
The fellow, it suddenly dawned on him, had gone clean off his head about one of the girls. Swetenham could understand and sympathize with him in that.
Dick managed to convey the information that he was staying on to Mabel during the third act. She looked a little astonished; Dick, in the old days, had been so scornful about young men’s stage amusements. Anyway, it did not affect the party very much, for Mrs. Grant and Mr. Jarvis had already gone home, and Mabel was giving Dr. English a lift.
“Shall I send the motor back for you?” she asked, just as they moved away.
Dick shook his head. “Swetenham is going to give me a lift out,” he answered her, and Dr. English chuckled an explanation as they rolled away.
“What it is to be young, eh, Mrs. Jarvis? One can find beauty even in the chorus of a travelling company.”
But was that the explanation? Mabel wondered.[Pg 158] Dick’s face had not looked as if he had found anything beautiful in the performance.
Swetenham and Dick made their way round to the side entrance of the town hall which acted as stage door on these occasions, after they had seen the rest of the party off, and Swetenham found someone to take his card up to Miss Bellairs.
“We might take them out to supper at the ‘Grand,’” he suggested, as they waited about for the answer. “I don’t know about the new girl, but Miss Bellairs is always good fun.”
“Yes,” agreed Dick half-heartedly. He was already regretting the impulse which had made him come. What should he do, or how feel or act, when he really met Joan face to face? His throat seemed ridiculously dry, and he was conscious of a hot sense of nervousness all over him which made the atmosphere of the night very oppressive. The boy who had run up with Swetenham’s card came back presently with a message.
“Would the gentlemen come upstairs, Miss Bellairs was just taking off her make-up.”
“Come on,” Swetenham whispered to Dick; “Fanny is a caution, she doesn’t mind a bit what sort of state you see her in.”
The boy led them up the stairs, through a small door and across what was evidently the back of the stage. At the foot of some steps on the further side he came to pause outside a door on which he knocked violently.
“Come in,” Fanny’s voice shrilled from inside; “don’t mind us.”
The boy with a grin threw the door open and indicated with his thumb that Swetenham and Dick might advance. He winked at them as they passed him, a fund of malignant impudence in his eyes. The room inside was small and scattered with a profusion of clothes. Fanny, attired in a long silk dressing wrap, sat on a low chair by the only table, very busy with a grease-pot and a soft rag removing the[Pg 159] paint from her face. She turned to smile at Swetenham and held out her hand to Dick when he was introduced with a disarming air of absolute frankness.
“You catch me not looking my best,” she acknowledged; “just take a seat, dears; I’ll be as beautiful as ever in a jiffy.”
Joan—Dick’s eyes found her at once—was standing in a corner of the room behind the door. She had changed into a blouse and skirt, but the change had evidently only just been completed. The fluffy flounces of her dancing skirt lay on the ground beside her and the make-up was still on her face. At this close range it gave her eyes a curiously beautiful appearance—the heavy lashes, the dark-smudged shadows, adding to their size and brilliancy. She did not come forward to greet the two men, but she lifted those strange eyes and returned Dick’s glance with a stare in which defiance and a rather hurt self-consciousness were oddly mixed.
The tumult of anger and regret which had surged up in his heart as he had watched her dance died away as he looked at her; pity, and an intense desire to shield her, took its place. He moved forward impulsively, and Fanny, noticing the movement, turned with a little laugh.
“I had forgotten,” she said; “my manners are perfectly scandalous. Joan, come out of your corner and be introduced. Mr. Swetenham is going to take us to supper at the ‘Grand,’ so he has just confided into my shell-like ear. I can do with a bit of supper, can’t you?”
Joan dragged her eyes away from Dick. The painted lashes lay like stiff threads of black against her cheeks. “I don’t think I will come,” she answered. “I am tired to-night, Fanny, and I shan’t be amusing.”
She turned away and reached up for her hat, which hung on a peg just above her head. “I think I would rather go straight home,” she added.
Fanny sprang to her feet and caught at her companion[Pg 160] with impulsive hands, dragging her into the centre of the room.
“Nonsense,” she said, “you want cheering up far more than I do. Here, gentlemen,” she went on, “you perceive a young lady suffering from an attack of the blues. If you will wait two minutes I’ll make her face respectable—doesn’t do to shock Sevenoaks—and we will all go to supper. Meanwhile let me introduce you—Miss Rutherford, known in the company as Sylvia Leicester, the some dancer of the Brown show.”
“If Miss Rutherford does not feel up to supper,” Dick suggested—he wanted, if possible, to help the girl out of her difficulty; he realized that she did not want to come—”let us make it another night, or perhaps you could all come to lunch with me to-morrow?”
Again Joan had lifted her eyes and was watching him, but now the defiance was uppermost in her mind. His face, to begin with, had worried her; the faint hint of having seen him somewhere before had been perplexing. She always disliked the way Fanny would welcome the most promiscuous acquaintances in their joint dressing-room at all times. She thought now that it must have been contempt which she had read in this man’s eyes, and apart from their attraction—for in an indefinite way they had attracted her—the idea spurred her to instant rebellion.
“No, let’s go to supper,” she exclaimed; “Fanny is quite right, I do want to be cheered up. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry.”
She turned rather feverishly and started rubbing the make-up off her face with Fanny’s rag. The other girl, meanwhile, slipped behind a curtain which hung across one side of the room and finished her dressing, carrying on an animated conversation with Swetenham all the time.
Dick drew a little closer to Joan. “Why do you come?” he asked. “You know you hate it and us.”
Under the vanishing paint the colour flamed to Joan’s face and died away-again. “Because I want to,” she said;[Pg 161] “and as for hating—you are wrong there; I don’t hate anything or anyone, except, perhaps, myself.” The last words were so low he hardly heard them.
They strolled across to the Grand Hotel; it was Fanny’s suggestion that they should not bother with a cab. She walked between the two men, a hand on each of them. Joan walked the further side of Swetenham, and Dick had no chance of seeing her even, but he knew that she was very silent, and, he could gather, depressed. At supper, which they had served in a little private room, and over the champagne, she won back to a certain hilarity of spirit. Swetenham was entirely immersed in amusing and being amused by Fanny, and Joan set herself—Dick fancied it was deliberately—to talk and laugh. It was almost as if she were afraid of any silence that might fall between them. He did not help her very much; he was content to watch her. Absurd as it may seem, he knew himself to be almost happy because she was so near him, because the fancied dream of the last two years had come to sudden reality. The other feelings, the disgust and disappointment which had lain behind their first meeting, were for the time being forgotten. Now and again he met her eyes and felt, from the odd pulse of happiness that leapt in his heart, that his long search was over. So triumphantly does love rise over the obstacles of common sense and worldly knowledge—love, which takes no count of time, degrees, or place.
He had her to himself on the way home, for Fanny had elected to go for a spin in Swetenham’s side-car, suggesting that Dick and Joan should go home and wait up for them.
“We shan’t be long,” Swetenham assured Dick, remembering too late his promise to take the other man home, “and it is all right waiting there, they have got a sitting-room.”
So Joan and Dick walked home through the silent streets and all pretence of gaiety fell away from Joan. She walked without speaking, head held very high, moving beside him, her face scarce discernible under the shadow of her hat. It[Pg 162] was not to be believed that she was quite conscious of all she meant to this man; but she could not fail to know that he was attracted to her, she could not help feeling the warmth with which his thoughts surrounded her. And how does Love come to a woman? Not on the same quick-rushing wings which carry men’s desires forward. Love creeps in more assiduously to a woman’s thoughts. He brings with him first a sense of shyness, a rather wistful longing to be more worthy of his homage. Unconsciously Joan struggled with this intrusion into her life. The man had nice eyes, but she resented the tumult they roused in her. Why was he not content to find in her just a momentary amusement, why did his eyes wake this vague, uncomfortable feeling of shame in her heart; shame against herself and her surroundings?
At the door of the lodgings she turned to him; for the first time he could see her face, lit up by a neighbouring lamp.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked, her voice hesitated on the words. “I do not want to ask you,” her eyes said as plainly as possible.
“No,” he answered, “I would much rather you did not ask me to.” Then suddenly he smiled at her. “We are going to be friends,” he said. “I have a feeling that I have been looking for you for years; I am not going to let you go, once found.”
He said the words so very earnestly, there was no hint of mockery in them, it could not seem that he was laughing at her. She put her hand into the one he held out.
“Well, friends,” she said; an odd note of hesitation sounded in her voice.[Pg 163]
CHAPTER XXI
| “Love can tell, and Love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn; Why each atom knows its own; How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath.” |
R. Bridges.
Dick walked home. It was a good long tramp, but he was glad of the exercise and the opportunity it gave him to arrange his thoughts into some sort of order. He had spoken to Joan, carried away by the moment, as they stood to say good-night, impelled to frankness by the appeal of her eyes. Now, slowly, reason gathered all its forces together to argue against his inclination. It would be wiser to break his half-made promise to the girl, and stay out of her life altogether. Immeasurable difficulties lay in the way of his marrying her. There was the child, her present position, his people’s feelings and his own dismay as he had watched her dancing on the stage and seen her smiling and radiant from the applause it awoke. He had built his dreams on a five minutes’ memory and for two years the girl’s eyes had haunted him, but none the less it was surely rather absurd. Even love, strong, mysterious power as it is, can be suppressed and killed if a man really puts his mind to it.
At this moment, though of course Dick was not aware of the psychological happening, Love raised a defiant head amid the whirl of his thoughts and laughed at him—laughed deliberately, the sound echoing with all the old joy of the world, and Dick fell to thinking about Joan again. Her eyes, the way she walked, the undercurrent of sadness that had lain behind her gaiety. How good it would be to take her away from all the drabness of her present life and[Pg 164] to bring real laughter, real happiness to her lips and eyes!
“I will marry her,” he decided stormily, as he turned in to the drive of the house. “Why have I been arguing about it all this time? It is what I had made up my mind to do two years ago. I will marry her.”
And again Love laughed, filling his heart with an indefinable glow of gladness.
His night mood stayed with him the next morning and started him singing most riotously in his bath. Mabel heard him and smiled to herself. It was good to listen, to him and know him so cheerful; whatever it was that had disturbed him the night before had evidently vanished this morning.
After breakfast, as was always her custom in summer, she took little Dickie out on to the lawn to sit under the big wide trees that threw so grateful a shade across the green. Big Dick joined them there with his pipe and he sat beside them in silence. It was very pleasant in the garden with the bluest of blue skies overhead and the baby chuckling and crowing in the very first rapture of life on the grass at their feet. Presently, however, a stern nurse descended on the scene and laughter was changed to tears for one short minute before the young gentleman, protesting but half-heartedly, was removed. Then Dick turned to Mabel.
“I am going in to Sevenoaks again,” he announced, “and shall probably spend the day there. Would you like me to explain myself, Mabel?”
“Why, yes, if you care to,” she answered, “and if there is anything to explain.”
Dick nodded in apparent triumph. “Yes,” he said, “there is something to explain all right, Mabel.” He smiled at her with his eyes. “I have got a secret, I’ll give you three guesses to reach it.”
“No,” Mabel spoke quickly, “I would rather you told me, Dick. Do you remember how once before I tried to[Pg 165] dash in on your secret and how you shut me out. When it is ready to tell, I thought then, he will tell it me.”
“Well, it is ready now,” Dick said. “In a way it is the same old secret. I was shy of it in those days, Mabel, but last night it dawned on me that it was the only thing worth having in the world. I am in love, insanely and ridiculously. Do you know, if you asked me, I should tell you with the most prompt conceit that to-day is a beautiful, gorgeously fine day just because I woke up to it knowing that I was in love.”
A spasm of half-formed jealousy snatched at Mabel’s heart. She had always wanted Dick to fall in love and marry some nice girl, yet the reality was a little disturbing.
“Dick,” she exclaimed, “and you never told me, you never said a word about it in your letters.”
“I could not,” he answered, “because in a way it only happened last night. Wait,” he put his hand on her knee because she seemed to be going to say something. “Let me explain it first and then do your bit of arguing, for I know you are going to argue. You spoke just now about that other talk we once had before your marriage; do you remember what you said to me then? ‘Did you think I should not know when you fell in love?’ You had guessed the secret in my heart, Mabel, almost before I knew it myself.” He leant forward, she noticed that suddenly his face flushed a very warm red. “Last night I saw her again; she was the dancer, you may have noticed her yourself. That was why I stayed behind. I wanted to put myself to the test, I wanted to meet her again.”
He sat up straight and looked at her; she could see that some strong emotion was making it very difficult for him to speak.
“It is not any use trying to explain love, is it?” he asked. “I only know that I have always loved her, that I shall love her to the end.”
Mabel sat stiffly silent. She could not meet his eyes.[Pg 166] She was thinking of all the scandal which had leapt to life round Joan’s name once the Rutherfords had left the village. She was remembering how last night Tom had said: “That little dancer girl is hot stuff.”
“Dick,” she forced herself to speak presently, “I have got to tell you, though it hurts and you will hate me for doing it, but this girl is not the kind of person you can ever marry, Dick. It is a kind of infatuation”—she struggled to make her meaning clear without using cruel words—”if you knew the truth about her, if——”
He stopped her quickly. “I know,” he answered, %2