"I have left you behind
In the path of the past;
With the white breath of flowers,
With the best of God's hours,
I have left you at last."
DORA SIGERSON.
Mrs. Carew was in a state of discontent which amounted almost to anger.
"I knew such kind of things were bound to happen," she grumbled
fiercely, "if she joined in with a girl like that Miss Bellairs. I have
never held and I never will hold with young ladies having men to tea in
their bedrooms."
"Why don't you just tell her so?" suggested her helpmate from his
customary entrenched position in an armchair behind the newspaper. "It
would be a good deal cheaper than breaking the kitchen china, Maria."
"Tell her!" snorted Mrs. Carew. "She don't give me a chance. Cool as a
cucumber she turns to me this morning, she says: 'Oh, I've two gentlemen
to tea this afternoon, Mrs. Carew, just show them up when they come.'
Then she 'ops it out of the front door like a rabbit. 'Gentlemen,'
indeed, and she with not so much as a screen round her bed."
"Perhaps they are her brothers," ventured Mr. Carew.
Mrs. Carew came to a pause beside him and swept aside his paper.
"Brothers!" she repeated, "now, Arthur, you know better than to say
that. What I say and what I always shall say is: Let 'em do what they
like outside, poor motherless girls that they are, but in my house
things have got to be run straight. I won't have them bringing men in
here."
"Well, hang it all, Maria, what do you want me to do? Go upstairs and
turn the gents out?"
"We'll see," said Mrs. Carew darkly. She grabbed up the tea-tray and
made for the door. "To-morrow I shall tell her it is not to happen
again."
"All right, you tell her," her husband muttered behind her retreating
back. "Can't think, though, why you don't leave the girls alone. However
they start it always ends that way. You and I have seen quite a number
take to the streets, and you don't do much to prevent them short of
grumbling at them."
"They shan't do it in my house," reiterated Mrs. Carew; she stumped in
dignified protest from the room, and upstairs to the offender's attic.
The first guest had already arrived, so Mrs. Carew could not voice her
disapproval; she expressed it, however, in a glare which she directed
towards him, and the noise with which she dumped down the tea-tray. The
room was full of flowers, which did not add to her approval; she
detected in them a sure sign of immorality. Great, beautiful red roses,
nodding from every vase, filling the air with their rather heavy scent.
The visitor also inspired her with a sense of distrust. He looked what
Mrs. Carew described as "a man about town." She had been fond of Joan;
behind her anger lay a small hurt sense of pity; she was too nice a
young lady to go the way of the others.
She opened the door to Dick a little later with a sour face, and she did
not even trouble to take him upstairs.
"Miss Rutherford is high up as you can get"--she jerked her thumb
upwards--"it's the only door on the landing, you can't mistake it."
With that she left him, and Dick found his own way upstairs. He had
stayed away all day till the exact hour he had named, with some
difficulty, but with a punctilious sense of doing right. Joan had not
answered his letter and he looked upon her silence as an admission that
she loved him, but there were a great many things between them that
would have to be talked over first coldly and sensibly. He had thought
the matter out and he had decided that he would not leave it all to her,
to tell or not to tell as she thought best, which had been his first
idea. He would help her by telling her that he had always known, and
that it made no difference. He wanted to make her confession as easy as
possible.
It was not until after he had knocked that he realized with a shock of
disappointment that Joan was not alone. He could hear her talking to
somebody, then she moved across the room and pulled the door open. He
saw only her first of all, his eyes sought hers and stayed there. He
could notice that she seemed very pale, and almost frightened looking,
and that she had dressed for the afternoon in black. Some long clinging
stuff, and up near where the blouse opened at the neck she had pinned in
one red rose, its warm and velvety petals lying against the white of her
neck. The room seemed full of the scent of the roses too, and a little
oppressive. Dick held his breath as he looked at her; to him she seemed
so beautiful as to be almost amazing; then he came a little further into
the room and his eyes took in the other occupant. A man sat, or rather
lounged, on the sofa, pulled up under the window. He was watching the
meeting with curious eyes, and in his hands he held another rose, the
same sort as the one Joan wore. When Dick's eyes met his, he smiled, and
laying the rose aside, stood up.
"Did not know it was to be a tea-party, Pierrette," he said, "you ought
to have warned me."
Joan had shut the door and moved forward into the centre of the room.
She was evidently very nervous over something; Landon was more than a
little amused, though also inclined to be annoyed.
"Oh, it isn't a tea-party," she was saying. "It's just us three. Doctor
Grant, this is Mr. Landon. Will you have this chair?--it is really the
only one which is quite safe to sit on."
Dick took the proffered chair stiffly; he was conscious of a bitter
sense of disappointment, tinged with disapproval. It was, of course,
different for himself, but he loathed to see the other man so much at
home in this quaint little dust-laden attic where Joan lived. Her bed
stood against the wall, a black counterpane of sorts thrown across it;
her brush and comb, the little silver things for her dressing-table were
scattered about on the top of the chest of drawers standing near. The
place would have been sacred to him; but how did this other man look at
it? And why had Joan asked him? Was it a deliberate attempt to shield
herself from something she dreaded? or did it mean that, after all, she
had only been playing with him--that the fluttered surrender of her lips
had been but a flirt's last fling in the game of passion? If a man is
really very much in love, as was Dick, and something occurs to make him
lose his temper, it is sure to end in rapid and sometimes lasting
disaster. After the first five minutes Dick made no attempt even to be
polite to Landon. Rage, blind, merciless rage, and a sense of having
made a damned fool of himself, throbbed in his mind as he watched Joan
talking to the other man, and saw the evident familiarity which lay
between them. Yet he could not get up and go away; he would not leave
her, not till he had hurt her as much as she was now hurting him.
For Landon, the amusement of baiting the other man's evident misery soon
palled. He was a little annoyed himself that Joan should have seen fit
to drag him in as such a cat's-paw, for a very few minutes of their
threesome had shown him what his part was intended to be. It meant in
addition that the girl had fooled him, and that he had wasted his
background of red roses. It was all very annoying and a very stupid way
of spending the afternoon, for no one could imagine that there was any
amusement to be got out of a bad tea in squalid surroundings--thus
mercilessly but almost truthfully did he dismiss the atmosphere of
Joan's attic--with a girl palpably in love with someone else. Landon
rose presently with his most languid air of boredom.
"Sorry, Pierrette," he said; "must fly, but I leave my roses behind me
as a memory. They are not what I should call my lucky flower." He turned
to Dick, who stood up with a grim face and stern-set mouth. "Good-bye,
Doctor Grant; delighted to have met you: if Pierrette feels like it, get
her to tell you about our last venture into the rose world. Romantic
tale, isn't it, Pierrette?" He laughed, lifting her hand to his heart
very impressively. "But ours has always been a romance, hasn't it? That
is why we christened each other Pierrot and Pierrette." He let go her
hand and bowed gravely. Joan followed him to the door. "I'll come and
see you out," she said; she had not realized until the moment came how
horribly afraid she was of Dick. "You might lose your way."
"Oh no," Landon assured her; he shot one last slightly vindictive glance
at Dick; "I know it by heart." Then he laughed and went from the room,
shutting the door behind him.
Joan stayed where she was, a seeming weight on her lids, which prevented
her lifting her eyes to look at Dick. But she was intensely conscious of
him, and round her heart something had closed like a band of iron. At
last, since he said nothing and made no sign, she moved forward blindly
and sat down in the nearest chair.
"Aren't you ever going to speak again?" she whispered.
Her words shook Dick out of his silent self-restraint. Hot anger,
passionate reproaches, fought for speech in his throat; he drove them
back.
"Is this your answer to my question?" he said finally. "It would have
been simpler to have put it some other way. But you may at least
congratulate yourself on having succeeded. You have killed something
that I had thought to be almost eternal." He drew in his breath sharply,
but passion was shaking him now, it had to have its say. "I have loved
you," he went on hoarsely, "ever since I first saw you. Common sense has
argued against you; pride has fought to throw you out of my life; but
against everything your face has lived triumphant. I don't know why God
makes us feel like that for women of your stamp, why we should bring
such great ideals to so poor a shrine. I am talking arrant nonsense,
just raving at you, you think, and I sound rather absurd even to myself.
Only--my God! you don't know what you have done--you have broken my
faith in you; it was the strongest, the best thing in my life."
Joan crouched down in the chair; she seemed to be trying to get as far
away from his voice as possible; she sat with her head buried in her
arms.
"I built up a dream about you two years ago," Dick went on. "You don't
remember anything about me; but our meeting, your face as you stood that
day with your back to the wall, were stamped on my heart as with a
branding-iron. Of all the foolish things that a man could do perhaps I
chose the worst; for ever as I stood and watched you the shadow of shame
grew up beside you, and other people turned away from you. But I thought
I saw further than the rest; I imagined that I had seen through your
eyes, because already I loved them, into your soul. There is some
mistake here, I argued, some mystery which she herself shall one day
make clear to me." Joan had lifted her head and was staring at him.
"From that day I started building my dream. I went abroad, but the
memory of your face went with me; I used to make love to other women,
but it was because I looked for you in their eyes. Then I came home and
I saw you again. Suddenly my dream crystallized into clear, unshakable
fact; I loved, I had always loved you; nothing that other people could
say against you would have any effect. It lay just with you, and to-day
you have given me your answer and broken with your own hand the dream."
He turned towards the door; Joan staggered to her feet and ran to him.
The vague memory in her mind had leapt to life; his eyes had often
reminded her of someone. She remembered now that he was the young doctor
that Aunt Janet had sent for. She remembered her own defiance as she had
faced him and the pity in his eyes.
"Dick," she whispered, "Dick, I didn't know, I didn't understand. I
thought--oh, don't go away and leave me just like this, I might
explain." Her torrent of words broke down before the look on his face;
she fell to her knees, clutching at his hands. "Won't you listen? It was
because I was afraid to tell you; I was afraid, afraid."
Her position, the paroxysm of tears which, once they came, she could in
no way stop, disquieted him. He shook her hands from him. "And because
you were afraid," he said stiffly, "I suppose you had the other man here
to protect you." Then his mood changed.
"Whatever you have done," he said, "it isn't any business of mine.
Please forgive me for ranting like a schoolmaster, and please don't cry
like that. While I sat there watching that other man and feeling that
everything my heart had been set on was falling to pieces all round me,
I wanted to hurt you back again. It's a pugnacious sensation that one
gets sometimes, but it's gone now; I don't want you to be hurt. It was
not your fault that I lifted you up in my heart like that; it is not
altogether your fault that you have fallen. Perhaps you did not know how
cruel you were being when you had that other man here to make clear to
me something you did not wish to put into words yourself. I have said
some beastly things to you, and I am sorry for them. Please don't let
them worry you for long."
Then he had gone, before she had time to speak or lift her hands to hold
him. Gone, and as she crouched against the door the sound of his feet
trod into her heart, each step a throb of agony.
Mrs. Carew was holding forth to Fanny in the hall as Dick swung past
them. He did not glance at them even, and Fanny did not have a chance to
call out to him, he went so rapidly, slamming the door behind him.
"Not as how they haven't left at seasonable hours," Mrs. Carew went
rambling on; "but I 'as always said and always will say, I don't hold
with such doings in my house."
"What doings?" Fanny expostulated. "For goodness, old Carew, do try and
make yourself more clear; who has been carrying on and how?"
"Miss Rutherford," Mrs. Carew announced. She was viewing Fanny with
unfriendly suspicion. "Only came back from this 'ere theatrical show
yesterday, and to-day she has two men to tea with her in her bedroom."
"Two men?" repeated Fanny. "Did you know they were coming?"
"Ask them," snorted Mrs. Carew. "And what I said is----"
"Oh, run away, Carew," Fanny broke in, "with your nasty suspicion. It's
all my bad example, you'll be saying next. Bring up some tea for me,
there's an old dear; I'm fairly parched for a drink."
But before she went into her own room Fanny ran upstairs and knocked
softly oh Joan's door. There was no answer and no sound from within the
room; yet when she tried turning the handle, and pushing her foot
against the door, it was to find it locked. What did it all mean? Two
men to tea, Dick's face as he had passed through the hall, and Joan's
locked door? That was a problem which Fanny set herself to disentangle
in her own particular way.