“If Winter come, can Spring be far behind!”
IT was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a
black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England
longs for the south of France, and every one who has been out of England
compares it unfavorably with other climates.
Cynthia had left Muriel with a frightful cold and the club accounts, and
had gone out to buy her some violets. They had heard that morning from
Mary Huntly that Jack was recovering, though the fever resulting from
the accident had necessitated sick leave. He would probably have got
Muriel’s letter by now. Cynthia looked longingly at some impossibly
expensive roses, when she heard a man’s voice behind her.
“By Jove! Cynthia!” Her heart leaped from January to June. She turned
her head slightly to face the obtruder—a delicate, fine-looking man
with the eyes of a poet, and a chin which it would do some poets good to
have. It took a moment for them to get over the memory of the last time
they had met. It had begun to rain a little, and people had put up their
umbrellas and pushed on more rapidly than ever.
“What do you want?” he asked, looking from the girl to the window.
“What can you afford?” said Cynthia, laughing. She was wondering what
people wanted to hurry for on such a lovely day.
“I am very rich,” he responded. “Honor bright! I could buy over the
business. I sold my last picture for—I can’t tell you how much, it
might stir up your demon of independence. I’m going to get you the
roses.” In two minutes he came back with them in his hand. “By the way,
you might as well put up your umbrella, mightn’t you, it seems to be
raining?” he said.
“Oh, so it is,” said Cynthia absently. They stood together
uncomfortably, knowing that if no good excuse arose they would have to
part.
“Don’t you think a cup of tea would be nice?” he suggested. Cynthia
nodded her head decisively.
“Yes,” she said, “and muffins.”
“Do you remember,” said her companion, as they turned towards a possible
restaurant “those dear little French cakes and——”
“I don’t remember anything,” said Cynthia sternly, “and I’m not going
to.” Leslie Damores laughed.
“You even forgot,” he said teasingly, “just now that it was raining!”
“I thought you were in France. I didn’t know you were ever coming back
to England again,” said Cynthia a little doubtfully. She noticed that he
had not asked her what she was doing, and it hurt her. She would
volunteer no information. They sat down by a clean table in a warm inner
room; neat-capped maids fluttered here and there; it was very restful
and very English. To the artist who had not been in England for eight
years it was home, and the girl who held the roses in her lap filled in
the picture. He studied her face carefully.
“You’re awfully changed,” he said at last. Cynthia laughed.
“I was twenty-two when I saw you last, and now I am thirty. I was never
one of the dimpling kind that stay young either; as for you—you’re a
man, so it’s different. But”—her voice grew strangely gentle—“you’re
not quite the same, you know, Leslie; fame has come to you, and you look
more of a fighter, and yet not quite so hard.”
“Strange, isn’t it, that youth should be so exacting—with its
impossible whites and blacks—and that the more one roughs it, and the
harder knocks one gets, the more generously shaded it all becomes,” he
said, watching her with keen, eager eyes. She turned her head away and
played restlessly with the flowers in her lap. “It could never change as
much as that,” she thought.
The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid
the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly
soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two
schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia
had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too
afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left
the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped
maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American.
The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the
hour.
“I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before
he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips.
“He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow,
and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I
am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here
is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare
the time—good-bye.”
He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets,
wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding
himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in
London.
Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind,
and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange,
lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise.
This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden
smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a
transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost
repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened,
glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child.
The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself
brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more
by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But
to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice
grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of
health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how
to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of
themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall,
slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of
thirty, pushed her way to the front.
“Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?”
Cynthia nodded shortly.
“Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she
said.
The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door.
It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and
bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages
and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women,
each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to
one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect,
commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She
stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and
recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no
safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary,
purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this
rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew
the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There,
under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of
Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the
veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help.
Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The
stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it
all.
After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back
to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again
carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table.
“’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the
blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy
of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great
blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her.
The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “’E’s all I
’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for
father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother
did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?”
Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the
cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it
was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to
the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an
answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly
Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the
invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for
all who love the little ones.
“Does he suffer much?” she asked.
“’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink,
miss?”
“Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very
bad case.”
“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?”
“I’m afraid not, Carrie.”
“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the
question.
“He may live some time yet.” The girl wrapped the child up in the
blanket; the fierceness in her eyes did not prevent the gentle touches
of her hands.
“I ’ate God, so there! an’ I ’ate the club! an’ I ’ate you and the other
lidy! I ’ate you all!” she cried hoarsely. Then suddenly the anger died
out of her face; she turned hopelessly to the door, pausing irresolutely
she asked again in dull despair, “Then there isn’t hanythink as you can
do?”
“Very little, I’m afraid.” She drew the blanket closer round the child
and passed out into the night.
It was late and Muriel had gone to bed. Cynthia came in and sat down by
her.
“Do you think a man would ever trust a girl a second time?” she asked.
“That would depend, wouldn’t it,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “upon the
girl’s character, and the attitude towards the broken trust, and how
long ago it had happened, and what she had done in the meantime?”
“Do you think it possible if she was different that he would love her
again?” Muriel sighed.
“I would have married Jack,” she said, “if he had been different, but he
was the same. I suppose it all depends on whether one’s power of
detachment is strong enough.”
“You’re very tired, dearest,” said Cynthia, “and I shouldn’t bother you;
but—but I suppose you pray, don’t you?” Muriel smiled; she did not say
she had done nothing else since she had forfeited her life’s happiness.
“Yes, I try to,” she said.
“Then,” said Cynthia, “perhaps you might as well pray for me.
Good-night!”