'Yes, but will the vote increase their muscles? will it make them more

logical, fitter to earn their living?'

'Of course it will,' said Miss Welkin acidly.

'Then how do you explain that several millions of men earn less than

thirty shillings a week, and that at times hundreds of thousands are

unemployed?'

'The vote does not mean everything,' said the suffragist reluctantly.

'It will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit.'

'Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that, but now, tell me, if women got

the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?'

'It would raise. . . .'

'No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you

"raise" us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to

the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the

lower depths?'

The suffragist's face contracted.

'Everything takes time,' she faltered. 'Just as I couldn't promise a

charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up next day, I

can't say that . . . of course your case is more difficult than any

other, because . . . because. . . .'

'Because,' said Victoria coldly, 'I represent a social necessity. So

long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the

asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and

ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as

prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisured class who

draw luxury from the labour of other men; so long will my class endure

as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St

John's Wood to Pekin.'

There was a pause. Then Miss Welkin got up awkwardly. Victoria followed

suit.

'There,' she said, 'you don't mind my being frank, do you? May I

subscribe this sovereign to the funds of the branch? I do believe you

are right, you know, even though I'm not sure the millennium is

coming.'

Miss Welkin looked doubtfully at the coin in her palm.

'Don't refuse it,' said Victoria, smiling, 'after all, you know, in

politics there is no tainted money.'

CHAPTER XIV

VICTORIA lay back in bed, gazing at the blue silk wall. It was ten

o'clock, but still dark; not a sound disturbed dominical peace, except

the rain dripping from the trees, falling finally like the strokes of

time. Her eyes dwelt for a moment on the colour prints where the nude

beauties languished. She felt desperately tired, though she had not left

the house for thirty-six hours; her weariness was as much a consequence

as a cause of her consciousness of defeat. October was wearing; and soon

the cruel winter would come and fix its fangs into the sole remaining

joy of her life, the spectacle of life itself. She was desperately

tired, full of hatred and disgust. If the face of a man rose before her

she thrust it back savagely into limbo; her legs hurt. The time had come

when she must realise her failure. She was not, as once in the P. R. R.,

in the last stage of exhaustion, hunted, tortured; she was rather the

wounded bird crawling away to die in a thicket than the brute at bay.

As she lay, she realised that her failure had two aspects. It was

together a monetary and a physical failure. The last three months had in

themselves been easy. Her working hours did not begin before seven

o'clock in the evening; and it was open to her, being young and

beautiful, to put them off for two or three hours more; she was always

free by twelve o'clock in the morning at the very latest, and then the

day was hers to rest, to read and think. But she was still too much of

a novice to escape the excitement inherent in the chase, the strain of

making conversation, of facing the inane; nor was she able without a

mental effort to bring herself to the response of the simulator. As she

sat in the Vesuvius or stared into the showcase of a Regent Street

jeweller, a faint smile upon her face, her brain was awake, her

faculties at high pressure. Her eyes roved right and left and every

nerve seemed to dance with expectation or disappointment. When she got

up now, she found her body heavy, her legs sore and all her being dull

like a worn stone. A little more, she felt, and the degradation of her

body would spread to her sweet lucidity of mind; she would no longer see

ultimate ends but would be engulfed in the present, become a bird of

prey seeking hungrily pleasure or excitement.

Besides, and this seemed more serious still, she was not doing well. It

seemed more serious because this could not be fought as could be

intellectual brutalisation. An examination of her pass books showed that

she was a little better off than at the time of Cairns's death. She was

worth, all debts paid, about three hundred and ninety pounds. Her net

savings were therefore at the rate of about a hundred and fifty a year;

but she had been wonderfully lucky, and nothing said that age, illness

or such misadventures as she classed under professional risk, might not

nullify her efforts in a week. There was wear and tear of clothes too:

the trousseau presented her by Cairns had been good throughout but some

of the linen was beginning to show signs of wear; boots and shoes wanted

renewing; there were winter garments to buy and new furs.

'I shall have stone martin,' she reflected. Then her mind ran

complacently for a while on a picture of herself in stone martin; a pity

she couldn't run to sables. She brought herself back with a jerk to her

consideration of ways and means. The situation was really not brilliant.

Of course she was extravagant in a way. Eighty-five pounds rent; thirty

pounds in rates and taxes, without counting income tax which might be

anything, for she dared not protest; two servants--all that was too

much. It was quite impossible to run the house under five hundred a

year, and clothes must run into an extra hundred.

'I could give it up,' she thought. But the idea disappeared at once. A

flat would be cheaper, but it meant unending difficulties; it was not

for nothing that Zoe, Lissa and Duckie envied her. And the rose-covered

pergola! Besides it would mean saving a hundred a year or so; and, from

her point of view, even two hundred and fifty a year was not worth

saving. She was nearly twenty-eight, and could count on no more than

between eight and twelve years of great attractiveness. This meant that,

with the best of luck, she could not hope to amass much more than three

thousand pounds. And then? Weston-super-Mare and thirty years in a

boarding-house?

She was still full of hesitation and doubt as she greeted Betty at

lunch. This was a great Sunday treat for the gentle P. R. R. girl. When

she had taken off her coat and hat, she used to settle in an arm-chair

with an intimate feeling of peace and protection. This particular day

Betty did not settle down as usual, though the cushions looked soft and

tempting and a clear fire burned in the grate. Victoria watched her for

a moment. How exquisite and delicate this girl looked; tall, very slim

and rounded. Betty had placed one hand on the mantelpiece, a small long

hand rather coarsened at the finger tips, one foot on the fender. It was

a little foot, arched and neat in the cheap boot. She had bought new

boots for the occasion; the middle of the raised sole was still white.

Her face was a little flushed, her eyes darkened by the glow.

'Well, Betty,' said her hostess suddenly, 'when's the wedding?'

'Oh, Vic, I didn't say . . . how can you . . .' Her face had blushed a

tell-tale red.

'You didn't say,' laughed Victoria, 'of course you didn't say, shy bird!

But surely you don't think I don't know. You've met somebody in the City

and you're frightfully in love with him. Now, honest, is there anybody?'

'Yes . . . there is, but . . .'

'Of course there is. Now, Betty, tell me all about it.'

'Oh, I couldn't,' said Betty, gazing into the fire. 'You see it isn't

quite settled yet.'

'Then tell me what you're going to settle. First of all, who is it?'

'Nobody you know. I met him at . . . well he followed me in Finsbury

Circus one evening. . . .'

'Oh, naughty, naughty! You're getting on, Betty.'

'You mustn't think I encouraged him,' said Betty with a tinge of

asperity. 'I'm not that sort.' She stopped, remembering Victoria's

profession, then, inconsequently: 'You see, he wouldn't go away and

. . . now. . . .'

'And he was rather nice, wasn't he?'

'Well, rather.' A faint and very sweet smile came over Betty's face.

Victoria felt a little strangle in her throat. She too had thought her

bold partner at the regimental dance at Lympton rather nice. Poor old

Dick.

'Then he got out of me about the P. R. R.,' Betty went on more

confidently. 'And then, would you believe it, he came to lunch every

day! Not that he was accustomed to lunch at places like that,' she added

complacently.

'Oh, a swell?' said Victoria.

'No, I don't say that. He used to go to the Lethes, before they shut up.

He lives in the West End too, in Notting Hill, you know.'

'Dear, dear, you're flying high, Betty. But tell me, what is he like?

and what does he do? and is he very handsome?'

'Oh, he's awfully handsome, Vic. Tall you know and very, very dark; he's

so gentlemanly too, looks like the young man in _First Words of Love_.

It's a lovely picture, isn't it?'

'Yes, lovely,' said Victoria summarily. 'But tell me more about him.'

'He's twenty-eight. He works in the City. He's a ledger clerk at

Anderson and Dromo's. If he gets a rise this Christmas, he . . . well,

he says . . .'

'He says he'll marry you.'

'Yes.' Betty hung her head, then raised it quickly. 'Oh, Vic, I can't

believe it. It's too good to be true. I love him so dreadfully . . . I

just can't wait for one o'clock. He didn't come on Wednesday. I thought

he'd forgotten me and I was going off my head. But it was all right,

they'd kept him in over something.'

'Poor little girl,' said Victoria gently. 'It's hard isn't it, but good

too.'

'Good! Vic, when he kisses me I feel as if I were going to faint. He's

strong, you see. And when he puts his arms round me I feel like a mouse

in a trap . . . but I don't want to get away: I want it to go on for

ever, just like that.'

She paused for a moment as if listening to the first words of love. Then

her mind took a practical turn.

'Of course we shan't be able to live in Notting Hill,' she added. 'We'll

have to go further out, Shepherd's Bush way, so as to be on the Tube.

And he says I shan't go to the P. R. R. any more.'

'Happy girl,' said Victoria. 'I'm so glad, Betty; I hope . . .'

She restrained a doubt. 'And as you say you can't stay to tea I think I

know where you're going.'

'Well, yes, I am going to meet him,' said Betty laughing.

'Yes . . . and you're going to look at little houses at Shepherd's

Bush.'

Betty looked up dreamily. She could see a two-storeyed house in a row,

with a bay window, and a front garden where, winter or summer, marigolds

grew.

After lunch, as the two women sat once more in the boudoir, they said

very little. Victoria, from time to time, flicked the ash from her

cigarette. Betty did not smoke, but, her hands clasped together in her

lap, watched a handsome dark face in the coals.

'And how are you getting on, Vic?' she asked suddenly. Swamped by the

impetuous tide of her own romance she had not as yet shown any interest

in her friend's affairs.

'I? Oh, nothing special. Pretty fair.'

'But, I mean . . . you said you wanted to make a lot of money and . . .'

'Yes, I'm not badly off, but I can't go on, Betty. I shall never do any

good like this.'

Betty was silent for some minutes. Her ingrained modesty made any

discussion of her friend's profession intolerable. Vanquished in

argument, grudgingly accepting the logic of Victoria's actions, she

could not free her mind from the thought that these actions were

repulsive, that there must have been some other way.

'Oh? You want to get out of it all . . . you know . . . I have never

said you weren't quite right, but . . .'

'But I'm quite wrong?'

'No . . . I don't mean that . . . I don't like to say that . . . I'm not

clever like you, Vic, but . . .'

'We've done with all that,' said Victoria coldly. 'I do want to get out

of it because it's getting me no nearer to what I want. I don't quite

know how to do it. I'm not very well, you know.'

Betty looked up quickly with concern in her face.

'Have those veins been troubling you again?'

'Yes, a little. I can't risk much more.'

'Then what are you going to do?'

Victoria was silent for a moment.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I never thought of all this when the Major

was alive.'

'Ah, there never was anybody like him,' said Betty after a pause.

Victoria sat up suddenly.

'Betty,' she cried, 'you're giving me an idea.'

'I? an idea?'

'There must be somebody like him. Why shouldn't I find him?'

Betty said nothing. She looked her stiffest, relishing but little the

fathering upon her of this expedient.

'But who?' soliloquised Victoria. 'I don't know anybody. You see Betty,

I want lots and lots of money. Otherwise it's no good. If I don't make a

lot soon it will be too late.'

Betty still said nothing. Really she couldn't be expected. . . . Then

her conscience smote her; she ought to show a little interest in dear,

kind Vic.

'Yes,' she said. 'But you must know lots of people. You never told me,

but you're a swell and all that. You must have known lots of rich men

when you came to London.'

She stopped abruptly, shocked by her own audacity. But Victoria was no

longer noticing her; she was following with lightning speed a new train

of thought.

'Betty,' she cried, 'you've done it. I've found the man.'

'Have you? Who is it,' exclaimed Betty. She was excited, unable in her

disapproval of the irregular to feel uninterested in the coming together

of women and men.

'Never mind. You don't know him. I'll tell you later.'

An extraordinary buoyancy seemed to pervade Victoria. The way out! she

had found the way out! And the two little words echoed in her brain as

if some mighty wave of sound was rebounding from side to side in her

skull. She was excited, so excited that, as she said goodbye to Betty,

she forgot to fix their next meeting. She had work to do and would do it

that very night.

As soon as Betty was gone she dressed quickly. Then she changed her hat

to make sure she was looking her best. She went out and, with hurried

steps, made for the Finchley Road. There was the house with the

evergreens, as well clipped as ever, and the drive with its clean

gravel. She ran up the steps of the porch, then hesitated for a moment.

Her heart was beating now. Then she rang. There was a very long pause

during which she heard nothing but the pumping of her heart. Then

distant shuffling footsteps coming nearer. The door opened. She saw a

slatternly woman . . . behind her the void of an empty house. She could

not speak for emotion.

'Did you want to see the house, mum,' asked the woman. She looked sour.

Sunday afternoon was hardly a time to view.

'The house?'

'Oh . . . I thought you come from Belfrey's, mum. It's to let.'

The caretaker nodded towards the right and Victoria, following the

direction, saw the house agents' board. Her excitement fell as under a

cold douche.

'Oh! I came to see . . . Do you know where Mr Holt is?'

'Mr Holt's dead, mum. Died in August, mum.'

'Dead.' Things seemed to go round. Jack was the only son . . . then?'

'Yes, mum. That's why they're letting. A fine big 'ouse, mum. Died in

August, mum. Ah, you should have seen the funeral. They say he left half

a million, mum, and there wasn't no will.'

'Where is Mrs Holt and . . . and Mr Holt's son.'

The caretaker eyed the visitor suspiciously. There was something rakish

about this young lady which frightened her respectability.

'I can't say, mum,' she answered slowly. 'I could forward a letter,

mum,' she added.

'Let me come in. I want to write a note.'

The caretaker hesitated for a moment, then stood aside to let her pass.

'You'll 'ave to come downstairs mum,' she said, 'sorry I'm all mixed up.

I was doing a bit of washing. Git away Maria,' to a small child who

stood at the top of the stairs.

In the gaslit kitchen, surrounded by steaming linen, Victoria wrote a

little feverish note in pencil. The caretaker watched her every

movement. She liked her better somehow.

'I'll forward it all right, mum,' she said. 'Thank you mum. . . . Oh,

mum, I don't want you to think--' She was looking amazedly at the half

sovereign in her palm.

'That's all right,' said Victoria, laughing loudly. She felt she must

laugh, dance, let herself go. 'Just post it before twelve.'

The woman saw her to the door. Then she looked at the letter doubtfully.

It was freshly sealed and could easily be opened. Then she had a burst

of loyalty, put on a battered bonnet, completed the address, stamped the

envelope and, walking to the pillar box round the corner, played

Victoria's trump card.

CHAPTER XV

'AND so, Jack, you haven't forgotten me?'

For a minute Holt did not answer. He seemed spellbound by the woman on

the sofa. There she lay at full length, lazy grace in every curve of her

figure, in the lines of her limbs revealed by the thin sea-green stuff

which moulded them. This new woman was a very wonderful thing.

'No,' he said at length, 'but you have changed.'

'Yes?'

'You're different. You used to be simple, almost shy. I used to think

you very like a big white lily. Now you're like--like a big white

orchid--an orchid in a vase of jade.'

'Poet! artist!' laughed Victoria. 'Ah, Jack, you'll always be the same.

Always thinking me good and the world beautiful.'

'I'll always think you good and beautiful too.'

Victoria looked at him. He had hardly changed at all. His tall thin

frame had not expanded, his hands were still beautifully white and

seemed as aristocratic as ever. Perhaps his mouth appeared weaker, his

eyes bluer, his face fairer owing to his black clothes.

'I'm glad to see you again, Kathleen Mavourneen,' she said at length.

'Why did you wait so long?' asked Holt. 'It was cruel, cruel. You know

what I said--I would--'

'No, no,' interrupted Victoria fearing an avowal. 'I couldn't. I've been

through the mill. Oh, Jack, it was awful. I've been cold, hungry, ill;

I've worked ten hours a day--I've swabbed floors.'

A hot flush rose in Holt's fair cheeks.

'Horrible,' he whispered, 'but why didn't you tell me? I'd have helped,

you know I would.'

'Yes, I know, but it wouldn't have done. No, Jack, it's no good helping

women. You can help men a bit; but women, no. You only make them more

dependent, weaker. If women are the poor, frivolous, ignorant things

they are, it's because they've been protected or told they ought to want

to be protected. Besides, I'm proud. I wasn't coming back to you until I

was--well I'm not exactly rich, but--'

She indicated the room with a nod and Holt, following it, sank deeper

into wonder at the room where everything spoke of culture and comfort.

'But how--?' he stammered at last, 'how did you--? what happened then?'

Victoria hesitated for a moment.

'Don't ask me just now, Jack,' she said, 'I'll tell you later. Tell me

about yourself. What are you doing? and where is your mother?'

Holt looked at her doubtfully. He would have liked to cross-question

her, but he was the second generation of a rising family and had learned

that questions must not be pressed.

'Mother?' he said vaguely. 'Oh, she's gone back to Rawsley. She never

was happy here. She went back as soon as pater died; she missed the tea

fights, you know, and Bethlehem and all that.'

'It must have been a shock to you when your father died.'

'Yes, I suppose it was. The old man and I didn't exactly hit it off but,

somehow--those things make you realise--'

'Yes, yes,' said Victoria sympathetically. The similarity of deaths

among the middle classes! Every woman in the regiment had told her that

'these things make you realise' when Dicky died. 'But what about you?

Are you still in--in cement?'

'In cement!' Jack's lip curled. 'The day my father died I was out of

cement. It's rather awful, you know, to think that my freedom depended

on his death.'

'Oh, no, life depends on death,' said Victoria smoothly. 'Besides, we

are members of one another; and when, like you, Jack, we are a minority,

we suffer.'

Holt looked at her doubtfully. He did not quite understand her; she had

hardened, he thought.

'No,' he went on, 'I've done with the business. They turned it into a

limited liability company a month ago. I'm a director because the others

say they must have a Holt in it; but directors never do anything, you

know.'

'And you are going to do like the charwoman, going to do nothing,

nothing for ever?'

'No, I don't say that. I've been writing--verses you know, and some

sketches.'

'Writing? You must be happy now, Jack. Of course you'll let me see them?

Are they published?'

'Yes. At least Amershams will bring out some sonnets of mine next

month.'

'And are you going to pass the rest of your life writing sonnets?'

'No, of course not. I want to travel. I'll go South this winter and get

some local colour. I might write a novel.'

His head was thrown back on the cushion, looking out upon the blue

southern sky, the bluer waters speckled as with foam by remote white

sails.

'You might give me a cigarette, Jack,' said Victoria. 'They're in that

silver box, there.'

He handed her the box and struck a match. As he held it for her his eyes

fastened upon the shapely whiteness of her hands, her pink polished

finger nails, the roundness of her forearm. Soft feminine scents rose

from her hair; he saw the dark tendrils over the nape of her neck. Oh,

to bury his lips in that warm white neck! His hand trembled as he lit

his own cigarette and Victoria marked his heightened colour.

'You'll come and see me often, Jack, won't you?'

'May I? It's so good of you. I'm not going South for a couple of

months.'

'Yes, you can always telephone. You'll find me there under Mrs Ferris.'

Holt looked at her once more.

'I don't want you to think I'm prying. But, you wrote me saying I was to

ask for Mrs Ferris. I did, of course, but, you . . . you're not. . . .?'

'Married? No, Jack. Don't ask me anything else. You shall know

everything soon.'

She got up and stood for a moment beside his chair. His eyes were fixed

on her hands.

'There,' she said, 'come along and let me shew you the house, and my

pictures, and my pack of hounds.'

He followed her obediently, giving its meed of praise to all her

possessions. He did not care for animals; he lacked the generation of

culture which leads from cement-making to a taste for dogs. The French

engravings on the stairs surprised him a little. He had a strain of

puritanism in him running straight from Bethlehem, which even the

reading of Swinburne and Baudelaire had not quite eradicated. A vague

sense of the fitness of things made him think that somehow these were

not the pictures a lady should hang; she might keep them in a portfolio.

Otherwise, there were the servants. . . .

'And what do you think of my bedroom?' asked Victoria opening the door

suddenly.

Holt stood nervously on the threshold. He took in its details one by

one, the blue paper, the polished mahogany, the flowered chintzes, the

long glass, the lace curtains; it all looked so comfortable, so

luxurious as to eclipse easily the rigidly good but ugly things he had

been used to from birth onwards. He looked at the dressing table too,

covered with its many bottles and brushes; then he started slightly and

again a hot flush rose over his cheeks. With an effort he detached his

eyes from the horrid thing he saw.

'Very pretty, very pretty,' he gasped. Without waiting for Victoria he

turned and went downstairs.

Within the next week they met again. Jack took no notice of her for four

days, and then suddenly telephoned asking her to dine and to come to the

theatre. She was still in bed and she felt low-spirited, full of fear

that her trump would not make. She accepted with an alacrity that she

regretted a minute later, but she was drowning and could not dally with

the lifebelt. Her preparation for the dinner was as elaborate as that

which had heralded her capture of Cairns, far more elaborate than any

she made for the Vesuvius where insolent beauty is a greater asset than

beauty as such. This time she put on her mauve frock with the heavily

embroidered silver shoulder straps; she wore little jewellery, merely a

necklet of chased old silver and amethysts, and a ring figuring a silver

chimera with tiny diamond eyes. As she surveyed herself in the long

glass, the holy calm which comes over the perfectly-dressed flowed into

her soul like a river of honey. She was immaculate, and from her unlined

white forehead to her jewel-buckled shoes she was beautiful in every

detail. Subtle scent followed her like a trainbearer.

The entire evening was a tribute. From the moment when Holt set eyes

upon her and reluctantly withdrew them to direct the cabman, until they

drove back through the night, she was conscious of the wave of adulation

that broke at her feet. Men's eyes followed her every movement, drank

in every rise and fall of her breast, strove to catch sight of her

teeth, flashing white, ruby cased. Her progress through the dining hall

and the stalls was imperial in its command. As she saw men turn to look

at her again, women even grudgingly analyse her, as homage rose round

her like incense, she felt frightened; for this seemed to be her

triumphant night, the zenith of her beauty and power, and perhaps its

very intensity showed that it was her swan song. She felt a pain in her

left leg.

Jack Holt passed that evening at her feet. A fearful exultation was upon

him. The neighbourhood of Victoria was magnetic; his heart, his senses,

his aesthetic sense were equally enslaved. She realised everything he had

dreamed, beauty, culture, grace, gentle wit. It hurt him physically not

to tell that he loved her still, that he wanted her, that she was

everything. He revelled in the thought that he had found her again, that

she liked him, that he would see her whenever he wanted to, perhaps join

his life with hers; then fear gripped his uneven soul, fear that he was

only her toy, that now she was rich she would tire of him and cast him

into a world swept by the icy blasts of regret. And all through ran the

horribly suggestive memory of that which he had seen on the dressing

table.

Victoria was conscious of all this storm, though unable to interpret its

squalls and its lulls. Without effort she played upon him; alternately

encouraging the pretty youth, bending towards him to read his programme

so that he could feel her breath on his cheek, and drawing up and

becoming absorbed in the play. In the darkness she felt his hand close

over hers; gently but firmly she freed herself. As they drove back to St

John's Wood they hardly exchanged a word. Victoria felt tired; for in

the dark, away from the crowds, the music, the admiration of her

fellows, reaction had full play. Holt found he could say nothing, for

every nerve in his body was tense with excitement. A hundred words were

on his lips but he dared not breathe them for fear of breaking the

spell.

'Come in and have a whisky and soda before you go,' said Victoria in a

matter of fact tone as he opened the garden gate.

He could not resist. A wonderful feeling of intimacy overwhelmed him as

he watched her switch on the lights and bring out a decanter, a syphon

and glasses. She put them on the table and motioned him towards it,

placing one foot on the fender to warm herself before the glowing

embers. His eyes did not leave hers. There was a surge of blood in his

head. One of his hands fixed on her bare arm; with the other he drew her

towards him, crushed her against his breast; she lay unresisting in his

arms while he covered her lips, her neck, her shoulders, with hot

kisses, some quick and passionate, others lingering, full of tenderness.

Then she gently repulsed him and freed herself.

Jack,' she said softly, 'you shouldn't have done that. You don't know

. . . you don't know . . .'

He drew his hand over his forehead. His brain seemed to clear a little.

The maddening mystery of it all formed into a question.

'Victoria, why are those two razors on your dressing table?'

She looked at him a brief space. Then, very quietly, with the

deliberation of a surgeon,

'Need you ask? Do you not understand what I am?'

His eyes went up towards the ceiling; his hands clenched; a queer choked

sound escaped from his throat. Victoria saw him suffer, wounded as an

aesthete, wounded in his traditional conception of purity, prejudiced,

un-understanding. For a second she hated him as one hates a howling dog

on whose paw one has trodden.

'Oh,' he gasped, 'oh.'

Victoria watched him through her downcast eyelashes. Poor boy, it had to

come. Pandora had opened the chest. Then he looked at her again with

returning sanity.

'Why didn't you tell me before? I can't bear it. You, whom I thought. .

. . I can't bear it.'

'Poor boy.' She took his hand. It was hot and dry.

'I can't bear it,' he repeated dully.

'I had to. It was the only way.'

'There is always a way. It's awful.' His voice broke.

'Jack,' she said softly, 'the world's a hard place for women. It takes

from them either hard labour or gratification. I've done my best. For a

whole year I worked. I worked ten hours a day, I've starved almost, I've

swabbed floors. . . .'

He withdrew his hand with a jerk. He could bear that even less than her

confession.

'Then a man came,' she went on relentlessly, 'a good man who offered me

ease, peace, happiness. I was poor, I was ill. What could I do? Then he

died and I was alone. What could I do? Ah, don't believe mine is a bed

of roses, Jack!'

He had turned away, and was looking into the dying fire. His ideals, his

prejudices, all were in the melting pot. Here was the woman who had been

his earliest dream, degraded, irretrievably soiled. Whatever happened he

could not forget; not even love could break down the terrific barrier

which generations of hard and honest men of Rawsley had erected in his

soul between straight women and the others. But she was the dream still:

beautiful, all that his heart desired; such that (and he felt it like an

awful taunt) he could not give her up.

He looked at her, at her sorrowful face. No, he could not let her pass

out of his life. He thought of disjointed things. He could see his

mother's face, the black streets of Rawsley; he thought of the pastor at

Bethlehem denouncing sin. All his standards were jarred. He had nothing

to hold on to while everything seemed to slip: ideals, resolutions,

dreams; nothing remained save the horrible sweetness of the mermaid's

face.

'Let me think,' he said hoarsely, 'let me think.'

Victoria said nothing. He was in hands stronger than hers. He was

fighting his tradition, the blood of the Covenanters, for her sake.

Nothing that she could say would help him; it might impede him. He had

turned away; she could see nothing of his face. Then he looked into her

eyes.

'What was can never be again,' he said, 'what I dreamed can never be.

You were my beacon and my hope. I have only found you to lose you. If I

were to marry you there would always be that between us, the past.'

'Then do not marry me. I do not ask you to.' Her voice went down to a

whisper and she put her hands on his shoulders. 'Let me be another, a

new dream, less golden, but sweet.'

She put her face almost against his, gazing into his eyes. 'Do not leave

this house and I will be everything for you.'

She felt a shudder run through him as if he would repel her, but she did

not relax her hold or her gaze. She drew nearer to him, and inch by inch

his arms went round her. For a second they swayed close locked together.

As they fell into the deep arm chair her loose black hair uncoiled, and,

falling, buried their faces in its shadow.

CHAPTER XVI

THE months which followed emerged but slowly from blankness for these

two who had joined their lives together. Both had a difficulty in

realising, the woman that she had laid the coping stone of her career,

the man that he was happy as may be an opium eater. The first days were

electric, hectic. Victoria felt limp, for her nerves had been worn down

by the excitement and the anxiety of making sure of her conquest. The

reaction left her rather depressed than glowing with success. Jack was

beyond scruples; he felt that he had passed the Rubicon. He was false to

his theories and his ideals, in revolt against his upbringing. At the

outset he revelled in the thought that he was cutting himself adrift

from the ugly past. It was joyful to think that the pastor in his

whitewashed barn would covertly select him as a text. For the first time

in his fettered life he saw that the outlaw alone is free; both he and

Victoria were outlaws, but she had tasted the bitterness of ostracism

while he was still at the stage of welcoming it.

As the weeks wore, however, Victoria realised her position better and

splendid peace flowed in upon her. She did not love Holt; she began even

to doubt whether she could love any man if she could not love him, this

handsome youth with the delicate soul, grace, generosity. It was not his

mental weakness that repelled her, for he was virile enough; nor was it

the touch of provincialism against which his intelligence struggled. It

was rather that he did not attract her. He was clever enough, well read,

kind, but he lacked magnetism; he had nothing of the slumberous fire

which distinguished Farwell. His passion was personal, his outlook

theoretical and limited; there was nothing purposeful in his ideas. He

had no message for her. In no wise did he repel her, though. Sometimes

she would take his face between her hands, look awhile into the blue

eyes where there always lurked some wistfulness, and then kiss him just

once and quickly, without knowing why.

'Why do you do that, Vicky,' he asked once.

She had not answered but had merely kissed his cheek again. She hardly

knew how to tell him that she sighed because she could only consent to

love him instead of offering to do so. While he was sunk in his daily

growing ease she was again thinking of ultimate ends and despised

herself a little for it. She had to be alone for a while before she

could regain self-control, remember the terrible tyranny of man and her

resolve to be free. Gentle Jack was a man, one of the oppressors, and as

such he must be used as an instrument against his sex. The very ease

with which she swayed him, with which she could foresee her victory,

unnerved her a little. When she answered his hesitating question as to

how much she needed to live, she had to force herself to lie, to trade

on his enslavement by asking him for two thousand a year. She dared to

name the figure, for Whitaker told her that the only son of an intestate

takes two-thirds of the estate; the book had also put her on the track

of the registration of joint-stock companies. A visit to Somerset House

enabled her to discover that some three hundred thousand shares of

Holt's Cement Works, Ltd., stood in the name of John Holt; as they were

quoted in the paper something above par he could hardly be worth less

than fifteen thousand a year.

She had expected to have to explain her needs, to have to exaggerate her

rent, the cost of her clothes, but Holt did not say a word beyond 'all

right.' She had told him it hurt her to take money from him; and that,

so as to avoid the subject, she would like him to tell his bankers to

pay the monthly instalments into her account. He had agreed and then

talked of their trip to the South. Clearly the whole matter was

repugnant to him. As neither wanted to talk about it the subject was

soon almost forgotten.

They left England early in December after shutting up the house.

Victoria did not care to leave it in charge of Laura, so decided to give

her a three months' holiday on full pay; Augusta accompanied them. The

sandy-haired German was delighted with the change in the fortunes of her

mistress. She felt that Holt must be very rich, and doubted not that her

dowry would derive some benefit from him. Snoo and Poo were left in

Laura's charge. Victoria paid a quarter's rent in advance, also the

rates; insured against burglary, and left England as it settled into the

winter night.

The next three months were probably the most steadily happy she had ever

known. They had taken a small house known as the Villa Mehari just

outside Algiers. A French cook and a taciturn Kabyl completed their

establishment. The villa was a curious compromise between East and West.

Its architect had turned out similar ones in scores at Argenteuil and

Saint Cloud, saving the minaret and the deep verandah which faced the

balmy west. From the precipitous little garden where orange and lime

trees bent beneath their fruit among the underbrush of aloes and cactus,

they could see, far away, the estranging sea.

The Kabyl had slung a hammock for Victoria between a gate-post and a

gigantic clump of palm trees. There she passed most of her days, lazily

swinging in the breeze which tumbled her black hair; while Jack, lying

at her feet in the crisp rough grass, looked long at her sun-warmed

beauty. The days seemed to fly, for they were hardly conscious of the

recurrence of life. It was sunrise, when it was good to go into the

garden and see the blue green night blush softly into salmon pink, then

burst suddenly into tropical radiance: then, vague occupations, a short

walk over stony paths to a cafe where the East and West met; unexpected

food; sleep in the heat of the day under the nets beyond which the

crowding flies buzzed; then the waning of the day, the heat settling

more leaden; sunset, the cold snapping suddenly, the night wind carrying

little puffs of dust, and the muezzin, hands aloft, droning, his face

towards the East, praises of his God.

Holt was totally happy. He felt he had reached Capua, and not even a

thought of his past life could disturb him. He asked for nothing now but

to live without a thought, eating juicy fruit, smoking for an hour the

subtle narghile; he loved to bask in the radiance of the African sun of

Victoria's beauty, which seemed to expand, to enwrap him in perfume like

a heavy narcotic rose. In the early days he tried to work, to attune

himself to the pageant of sunlit life. His will refused to act, and he

found he could not write a line; even rhymes refused to come to him.

Without an effort almost he resigned himself into the soft hands of the

East. He even exaggerated his acceptance by clothing himself in a

burnous and turban, by trying to introduce Algerian food, couscous,

roast kid, date jam, pomegranate jelly. At times they would go into

Algiers, shop in the Rue Bab-Azoum, or search for the true East in what

the French called the high town. But Algiers is not the East; and they

quickly returned to the Villa Mehari, stupefied by the roar of the

trams, the cries of the water and chestnut vendors, all their senses

offended by the cafes on the wharf where sailors from every land drank

vodka, arrack, pale ale, among zouaves and chasseurs d'Afrique.

Sometimes Holt would go into Algiers by himself and remain away all day.

Victoria stayed at the villa careless of flying time, desultorily

reading Heine or sitting in the garden where she could play with the

golden and green beetles. Her solitude was complete, for Holt had

avoided the British consul and of course knew none of the Frenchmen. She

watched the current of her life flow away, content to know that all the

while her little fortune was increasing. England was so far as to seem

in another world. Christmas was gone; and the link of a ten pound note

to Betty, to help to furnish the house at Shepherd's Bush, had faded

away. When she was alone, those days, she could not throw her mind back

to the ugly, brutish past, so potently was the influence of the East

growing upon her being. Then in the cool of the evening Jack would

return, gay, and anxious to see her, to throw his arms round her and

hold her to him again. Those were the days when he brought her some

precious offering, aqua-marines set in hand-wrought gold, or chaplets of

strung pearls.

'Jack,' she said to him one day as he lay in the grass at her feet, 'do

you then love me very much?'

'Very much.' He took her hand and, raising himself upon his elbow,

gravely kissed it.

'Why?'

'Because you're all the poetry of the world. Because you make me dream

dreams, my Aspasia.'

She gently stroked his dark hair.

'And to think that you are one of the enemy, Jack!'

'One of the enemy? what do you mean?'

'Man is woman's enemy, Jack. Our relation is a war of sex.'

'It's not true.' Jack flushed; the idea was repulsive.

'It is true. Man dominates woman by force, by man-made law; he

restricts her occupations; he limits her chances; he judges of her

attire; he denies her the right to be ugly, to be old, to be coarse, to

be vicious.'

'But you wouldn't--'

'I'd have everything the same, Jack.'

Holt thought for a moment.

'Yes, I suppose we do keep them down. But they're different. You see,

men are men and--'

'I know the rest. But never mind, Jack dear, you're not like the others.

You'll never be a conqueror.'

Then she muzzled him with her hand, and, kissing its scented palm, he

thought no more of the stern game in which they were the shuttlecocks.

The spring was touching Europe with its wings; and here already the

summer was bursting the seed pods, the sap breaking impatiently through

the branches. All the wet warmth of the brief African blooming ran riot

in thickening leaf. The objective of Jack's life, influenced as he was

by the air, was Victoria and the ever more consuming love he bore her;

the minutes only counted when he was by her side, watching her every

movement, inhaling, touching her. All his energies seem to have been

driven into this narrow channel. He was ready to move or to remain as

Victoria might direct; he spoke little, he basked. Thus he agreed to

extending their stay for a month; he agreed to shorten it by a fortnight

when Victoria, suddenly realising that her life force was wasting away

in this enervating atmosphere, decided to go home.

Victoria's progress to London was like the march of a conqueror. She

stopped in Paris to renew her clothes. There Jack knew hours of waiting

in the hired victoria while his queen was trying on frocks. He showed

such a childish joy in it all that she indulged her fancy, her every

whim; dresses, wraps, lace veils, furs, hats massive with ostrich

feathers, aigrettes, delicate kid boots, gilt shoes, amassed in their

suite. Jack egged her on; he rioted too. Often he would stop the

victoria and rush into a shop if he saw something he liked in the

window, and in a few minutes return with it, excitedly demanding praise.

He did not seem to understand or care for money, to have any wants

except cigarettes. He followed, and in his beautiful dog-like eyes

devotion daily grew.

They entered London on a bustling April day. A biting east wind carried

rain drops and sunshine. As it stung her face and whipped her blood,

Victoria found the old fierce soul reincarnating itself in her. She

opened her mouth to take in the cold English air, to bend herself for

the finishing of her task.

CHAPTER XVII

IT was in London that the real battle began. In Algiers the scented

winds made hideous and unnatural all thoughts of gain. On arriving in

London Victoria ascertained with a thrill of pleasure that her bank had

received a thousand pounds since October. After disposing of a few small

debts and renewing some trifles in the house, she found herself a

capitalist: she had about fifteen hundred pounds of her own. The money

was lying at the bank and it only struck her then that the time had come

to invest it. Her interview with the manager of her branch was a

delightful experience; she was almost bursting with importance, and his

courteous appreciation of his increasingly wealthy client was something

more than balm. It was a foretaste of the power of money. She had known

poor men respected, but not poor women; now the bank manager was giving

her respectful attention because she had fifteen hundred pounds.

'You might buy some industrials,' he said.

'Industrials? What are they?'

'Oh, all sorts of things. Cotton mills, iron works, trading companies,

anything.'

'Cement works?' she asked with a spark of devilry.

'Yes, cement works too,' said the manager without moving a muscle.

'But do you call them safe?' she asked, returning to business.

'Oh, fairly. Of course there are bad years and good. But the debentures

are mostly all right and some of the prefs.'

Victoria thought for a moment. Reminiscences of political economy told

her that there were booms and slumps.

'Has trade been good lately?' she asked suddenly.

'No, not for the last two years or so. It's picking up though. . . .'

'Ah, then we're in for a cycle of good trade. I think I'll have some

industrials. You might pick me out the best.'

The manager seemed a little surprised at this knowledge of commercial

crises but said nothing more, and made out a list of securities

averaging six per cent net.

'And please buy me a hundred P. R. R. shares,' added Victoria.

She could have laughed at the manager's stony face because he did not

see the humour of this. He merely said that he would forward the orders

to a stockbroker.

Victoria felt that she had put her hand to the plough. She was scoring

so heavily that she never now wished to turn back. Holt was every day

growing more dreamy, more absorbed in his thoughts. He never seemed to

quicken into action except when his companion touched him. He grew more

silent too; the hobbledehoy was gone. He was at his worst when he had

received a letter bearing the Rawsley postmark. Victoria knew of these,

for Holt's need of her grew greater every day; he was now living at Elm

Tree Place. He hardly left the house. He got up late and passed the

morning in the boudoir, smoking cigarettes, desultorily reading and

nursing the Pekingese which he now liked better. But on the days when he

got letters from Rawsley, letters so bulky that they were sometimes

insufficiently stamped, he would go out early and only return at night.

Then, however, he returned as if he had been running, full of some

nameless fear; he would strain Victoria to him and hold her very close,

burying his face below the bedclothes as if he were afraid. On one of

those days Victoria accidentally saw him come out of a small dissenting

chapel near by. He did not see her, for he was walking away like a man

possessed; she said nothing of this but understood him better, having an

inkling that the fight against the Rawsley tradition was still going on.

She did not, however, allow herself to be moved by his struggle. It

behoved her to hold him, for he was her last chance and the world looked

rosy round her. As the spring turned into summer he became more utterly

hers.

'You distil poison for me,' he said one day as they sat by the rose hung

pergola.

'No, Jack, don't say that, it's the elixir of life.'

'The elixir of life. Perhaps, but poison too. To make me live is to make

me die, Victoria; we are both sickening for death and to hasten the

current of life is to hasten our doom.'

'Live quickly,' she whispered, bending towards him, 'did you live at all

a year ago?'

'No, no.' His arms were round her and his lips insistent on hers. He

frightened her a little, though. She would have to take him away. She

had already confided this new trouble to Betty when the latter came to

see her in April, but Betty, beyond suggesting cricket, had been too

full of her own affairs. Apparently these were not going very well.

Anderson & Dromo's had not granted the rise, and the marriage had been

postponed. Meanwhile she was still at the P. R. R., and very, very

happy. Betty too, her baby, her other baby, frightened Victoria a

little. She was so rosy, so pretty now, and there was something defiant

and excited about her that might presage disease. But Betty had not

come near her for the last two months.

About the middle of June she took Jack away to Broadstairs. He was

willing to go or stay, just as she liked. He seemed so neutral that

Victoria experimented upon him by presenting him with a sheaf of unpaid

bills. He looked at them languidly and said he supposed they must be

paid, asked her to add them up and wrote a cheque for the full amount.

Apparently he had forgotten all about the allowance, or did not care.

Broadstairs seemed to do him good. Except at the week end the Hotel

Sylvester was almost empty. The sea breeze blew stiffly from the north

or the east. His colour increased and once more he began to talk.

Victoria encouraged him to take long walks alone along the front. She

had some occupation, for two little girls who were there in charge of a

Swiss governess had adopted the lovely lady as their aunt. A new

sweetness had come into her life, shrill voices, the clinging of little

hands. Sometimes these four would walk together, and Holt would run with

the children, tumbling in the sand in sheer merriment.

'You seem all right again, Jack,' said Victoria on the tenth morning.

'Right! Rather, by jove, it's good to live, Vicky.'

'You were a bit off colour, you know.'

'I suppose I was. But now, I feel nothing can hold me. I wrote a rondeau

this morning on the pier. Want to see it?'

'Of course, silly boy. Aren't you going to be the next great poet?'

She read the rondeau, scrawled in pencil on the back of a bill. It was

delicate, a little colourless.

'Lovely,' she said, 'of course you'll send it to the _Westminster_.'

'Perhaps . . . hulloa, there are the kiddies.' He ran off down the

steps from the front. A minute after Victoria saw him helping the elder

girl to bury her little sister in the sand.

Victoria felt much reassured. He was normal again, the half wistful,

half irresponsible boy she had once known. He slept well, laughed, and

his crying need for her seemed to have abated. At the end of the

fortnight Victoria was debating whether she should take him home. She

was in the hotel garden talking to the smaller girl, telling her a

wonderful story about the fairy who lived in the telephone and said

ping-pong when the line was engaged. The little girl sat upon her knee;

when she laughed Victoria's heart bounded. The elder girl came through

the gate leading a good-looking young woman in white by the hand.

'Oh, mummie, here's auntie,' cried the child, dragging her mother up to

Victoria. The two women looked at one another.

'They tell me you have been very kind . . .' said the woman. Then she

stopped abruptly.

'Of course, mummie, she's not _really_ our auntie,' said the child

confidentially.

Victoria put the small girl down. The mother looked at her again. She

seemed so nice and refined . . . yet her husband said that the initials

on the trunks were different . . . one had to be careful.

'Come here, Celia,' she said sharply. 'Thank you,' she added to

Victoria. Then taking her little girls by the hand she took them away.

Jack willingly left Broadstairs that afternoon when Victoria explained

that she was tired and that something had made her low-spirited.

'Right oh,' he said. 'Let's go back to town. I want to see Amershams and

find out how those sonnets have sold.'

He then left her to wire to Augusta.

Their life in town resumed its former course, interrupted only by a

month in North Devon. Jack's cure was complete; he was sunburnt, fatter;

the joy of life shone in his blue eyes. Sometimes Victoria found herself

growing younger by contagion, sloughing the horrible miry coat of the

past. If her heart had not been atrophied she would have loved the boy

whom she always treated with motherly gentleness. His need of her was so

crying, so total, that he lost all his self-consciousness. He would sit

unblushing by her side in the bow of a fishing smack, holding her hand

and looking raptly into her grey eyes; he was indifferent to the red

brown fisherman with the Spanish eyes and curly black hair who smiled as

the turtle doves clustered. His need of her was as mental as it was

physical; his body was whipped by the salt air to seek in her arms

oblivion, but his mind had become equally dependent. She was his need.

Thus when they came back to town the riot continued; and Victoria,

breasting the London tide, dragged him unresisting in her rear. She

hated excitement in every form, excitement that is of the puerile kind.

Restaurant dining, horse shows, flower shows, the Academy, tea in Bond

Street, even the theatre and its most inane successes, were for her a

weariness to the flesh.

'I've had enough,' she said to Jack one day. 'I'm sick of it all. I've

got congestion of the appreciative sense. One day I shall chuck it all

up, go and live in the country, have big dogs and a saddle horse, dress

in tweeds and read the local agricultural rag.'

'Give up smoking, go to church, and play tennis with the curate, the

doctor and the squire's flapper,' added Holt. 'But Vicky, why not go

now?'

'No, oh, no, I can't do that.' She was frightened by her own suggestion.

'I must drain the cup of pleasure so as to be sure that it's all pain;

then I'll retire and drain the cup of resignation . . . unless, as I

sometimes think, it's empty.'

Jack had said nothing to this. Her wildness surprised and shocked him.

She was so savage and yet so sweet.

Victoria realised that she must hold fast to the town, for there alone

could she succeed. In the peace of the country she would not have the

opportunities she had now. Jack was in her hands. She never hesitated to

ask for money, and Jack responded without a word. Her account grew by

leaps and bounds. The cashier began to ask whether she wanted to see the

manager when she called at the bank. She could see, some way off but

clearly, the beacons on the coast of hope.

All through Jack's moods she had suffered from the defection of Betty.

On her return from Broadstairs she had written to her to come to Elm

Tree Place, but had received no answer. This happened again in

September; and fear took hold of her, for Betty had, ivy-like, twined

herself very closely round Victoria's heart of oak. She went to

Finsbury; but Betty had gone, leaving no address. She went to the P.R.R.

also. The place had become ghostly, for the familiar faces had gone. The

manageress was nowhere to be seen; nor was Nelly, probably by now a

manageress herself. Betty was not there, and the girl who wonderingly

served the beautiful lady with a tea-cake said that no girl of that name

was employed at the depot. Then Victoria saw herself sitting in the

churchyard of her past, between the two dear ghosts of Farwell and

Betty. The customers had changed, or their faces had receded so that she

knew them no more: they still played matador and fives and threes, chess

too. Alone the chains remained which the ghosts had rattled. Silently

she went away, turning over that leaf of her life for ever. Farwell was

dead, and Betty gone--married probably--and in Shepherd's Bush, not

daring to allow Victoria's foot to sully the threshold of 'First Words

of Love.'

Her conviction that Betty was false had a kind of tonic effect upon her.

She was alone and herself again; she realised that the lonely being is

the strong being. Now, at last, she could include the last woman she had

known in the category of those who threw stories. And her determination

to be free grew apace.

She invented a reason every day to extract money from Holt. He, blindly

desirous, careless of money, acceded to every fresh demand. Now it was a

faked bill from Barbezan Soeurs for two hundred pounds, now the rent in

arrear, a blue rates notice, an offhand request for a fiver to pay the

servants, the vet's bill or the price of a cab. Holt drew and overdrew.

If a suspicion ever entered his mind that he was being exploited, he

dismissed it at once, telling himself that Victoria was rather

extravagant. For a time letters from Rawsley synchronised with her fresh

demands, but repetition had dulled their effects: now Holt postponed

reading them; after a time she saw him throw one into the fire unread.

Little by little they grew rarer. Then they ceased. Holt was eaten up by

his passion, and Victoria's star rose high.

All conspired to favour her fortune. Perhaps her acumen had helped her

too, for she had seen correctly the coming boom. Trade rose by leaps and

bounds; every day new shops seemed to open; the stalks of the Central

London Railway could be seen belching clouds of smoke as they ground out

electric power; the letter-box at Elm Tree Place was clogged with

circulars denoting by the fury of their competition that trade was

flying as on a great wind. Other signs too were not wanting: the main

streets of London were blocked by lorries groaning under machinery,

vegetables, stone; immense queues formed at the railway stations waiting

for the excursion trains; above all, rose the sound of gold as it hissed

and sizzled as if molten on the pavements, flowing into the pockets of

merchants, bankers and shareholders. All the women at the Vesuvius

indulged in new clothes.

Victoria's investments were seized by the current. She had not entirely

followed the bank manager's advice. Seeing, feeling the movement, she

had realised most of her debentures and turned them into shares. One of

her ventures collapsed, but the remainder appreciated to an

extraordinary extent. At last, in the waning days of the year her

middle-class prudence reasserted itself. She knew enough of political

economy to be ready for the crash, she realised. One cold morning in

November she counted up her spoils. She had nearly five thousand pounds.

Meanwhile, while her blood was aglow, Holt sank further into the

dullness of his senses. A mania was upon him. Waking, his thought was

Victoria; and the cry for her rose everlasting from his racked body. She

was all, she was everywhere; and the desire for her, for her beauty, her

red lips, soaked into him like a philtre, narcotic and then fiery but

ever present, intimate and exacting. He was her thing, her toy, the

paltry instrument which responded to her every touch. He rejoiced in his

subjection; he swam in his passion like a pilgrim in the Ganges to find

brief oblivion; but again the thirst was on him, ravaging, ever

demanding more. More, more, ever more, in the watches of the night, when

ice seizes the world to throttle it--among all, in turmoil and in

peace--he tossed upon the passionate sea; with one thought, one hope.

CHAPTER XVIII

'I'M glad we're going away, Jack,' said Victoria leaning back in the cab

and looking at him critically. 'You look as if you wanted a change.'

'Perhaps I do,' said Jack.

Victoria looked at him again. He had not smiled as he spoke to her,

which was unusual. He seemed thinner and more delicate than ever, with

his pale face and pink cheekbones. His black hair shone as if moist; and

his eyes were bigger than they had ever been, blue like silent pools and

surrounded by a mauve zone. His mouth hung a little open. Yet, in spite

of his weariness, he held her wrist in both his hands, and she could

feel his fingers searching for the opening in her glove.

'You are becoming a responsibility,' she said smiling. 'I shall have to

be a mother to you.'

A faint smile came over his lips.

'A mother? After all, why not? Phedra. . . .' His eyes fixed on the grey

morning sky as he followed his thought.

The horse was trotting sharply. The winter air seemed to rush into their

bodies. Jack, well wrapped up as he was in a fur coat, shrank back

against the warm roundness of her shoulder. In an excess of gentleness

she put her free hand in his.

'Dear boy,' she said softly bending over him.

But there was no tenderness in Jack's blue eyes, rather lambent fire. At

once his grasp on her hand tightened and his lips mutely formed into a

request. Casting a glance right and left she kissed him quickly on the

mouth.

Up on the roof their bags jolted and bumped one another; milk carts were

rattling their empty cans as they returned from their round; far away a

drum and fife band played an acid air. They were going to Ventnor in

pursuit of the blanketed sun; and Victoria rejoiced, as they passed

through Piccadilly Circus where moisture settled black on the fountain,

to think that for three days she would see the sun radiate, not loom as

a red guinea. They passed over Waterloo Bridge at a foot pace; the

enormous morning traffic was struggling in the neck of the bottle. The

pressure was increased because the road was up between it and Waterloo

Station. On her left, over the parapet, Victoria could see the immense

desert of the Thames swathed in thin mist, whence emerged in places

masts and where massive barges loomed passive like derelicts. She

wondered for a moment whether her familiar symbol, the old vagrant,

still sat crouching against the parapet at Westminster, watching rare

puffs of smoke curling from his pipe into the cold air. The cab emerged

from the crush, and to avoid it the cabman turned into the little black

streets which line the wharf on the east side of the bridge, then

doubled back towards Waterloo through Cornwall Road. There they met

again the stream of drays and carts; the horse went at a foot pace, and

Victoria gazed at the black rows of houses with the fear of a lost one.

So uniformly ugly these apartment houses, with their dirty curtains,

their unspeakable flowerpots in the parlour windows. Here and there

cards announcing that they did pinking within; further, the board of a

sweep; then a good corner house, the doctor's probably, with four steps

and a brass knocker and a tall slim girl on her hands and knees washing

the steps.

The cab came to an abrupt stop. Some distance ahead a horse was down on

the slippery road; shouts came from the crowd around it. Victoria idly

watched the girl, swinging the wet rag from right to left. Poor thing.

Everything in her seemed to cry out against the torture of womanhood.

She was a picture of dumb resignation as she knelt with her back to the

road. Victoria could see her long thin arms, her hands red and rigid

with cold, her broken-down shoes with the punctured soles emerging from

the ragged black petticoat.

There was a little surge in the crowd. The girl got up, and with an air

of infinite weariness stretched her arms. Then she picked up the pail

and bucket and turned towards the street. For the space of a second the

two women looked into one another's faces. Then Victoria gave a muffled

cry and jumped out of the cab. She seized with both hands the girl's

bare arms.

'Betty! Betty!' she faltered.

A burning blush covered the girl's face and her features twitched. She

made as if to turn away from the detaining hands.

'Vicky, what are you doing . . . what does this mean?' came Jack's voice

from the cab.

'Wait a minute, Jack. Betty, my poor little Betty. Why are you here? Why

haven't you written to me?'

'Leave me alone,' said Betty hoarsely.

'I won't leave you alone. Betty, tell me, what's this? Are you married?'

A look of pain came over the girl's face, but she said nothing.

'Look here, Betty, we can't talk here. Leave the bucket, come with me.

I'll see it's all right.'

'Oh, I can't do that. Oh, let me alone; it's too late.'

'I don't understand you. It's never too late. Now just get into the cab

and come with me.'

'I can't. I must give notice . . .' She looked about to weep.

'Come along.' Victoria increased the pressure on the girl's arms. Jack

stood up in the cab. He seemed as frightened as he was surprised.

'I say, Vicky . . .' he began.

'Sit down, Jack, she's coming with us. You don't mind if we don't go to

Ventnor?'

Jack's eyes opened in astonishment but he made no reply. Victoria pulled

Betty sharply down the steps.

'Oh, let me get my things,' she said weakly.

'No. They'd stop you. There, get in. Drive back to Elm Tree Place,

cabman.'

Half an hour later, lying at full length on the boudoir sofa, Betty was

slowly sipping some hot cocoa. There was a smile on her tear-stained

face. Victoria was analysing with horror the ravages that sorrow had

wrought on her. She was pretty still, with her china blue eyes and her

hair like pale filigree gold; but the bones seemed to start from her red

wrists, so thin had she become. Even the smile of exhausted content on

her lips did not redeem her emaciated cheeks.

'Betty, my poor Betty,' said Victoria, taking her hand. 'What have they

done to you?'

The girl looked up at the ceiling as if in a dream.

'Tell me all about it,' her friend went on, 'what has happened to you

since April?'

'Oh, lots of things, lots of things. I've had a hard time.'

'Yes, I see. But what happened actually? Why did you leave the P.R.R.?'

'I had to. You see, Edward . . .' The flush returned.

'Yes?'

'Oh, Vic, I've been a bad girl and I'm so, so unhappy.' Betty seized her

friend's hand to raise herself and buried her face on her breast. There

Victoria let her sob, gently stroking the golden hair. She understood

already, but Betty must not be questioned yet. Little by little, Betty's

weeping grew less violent and confidence burst from her pent up soul.

'He didn't get a rise at Christmas, so he said we'd have to wait . . . I

couldn't bear it . . . it wasn't his fault. I couldn't let him come down

in the world, a gentleman . . . he had only thirty shillings a week.'

'Yes, yes, poor little girl.'

'We never meant to do wrong . . . when baby was coming he said he'd

marry me . . . I couldn't drag him down . . . I ran away.'

'Betty, Betty, why didn't you write to me?'

The girl looked at her. She was beautiful in her reminiscence of

sacrifice.

'I was ashamed . . . I didn't dare . . . I only wanted to go where they

didn't know what I was. . . . I was mad. The baby came too early and it

died almost at once.'

'My poor little girl.' Victoria softly stroked the rough back of her

hand.

'Oh, I wasn't sorry . . . it was a little girl . . . they don't want any

more in the world. Besides I didn't care for anything; I'd lost him

. . . and my job. I couldn't go back. My landlady wrote me a character

to go to Cornwall Road.'

'And there I found you.'

'I wonder what we are going to do for you,' she went on. 'Where is

Edward now?'

'Oh, I couldn't go back; I'm ashamed. . . .'

'Nonsense, you haven't done anything wrong. He shall marry you.'

'He would have,' said Betty a little coldly, 'he's square.'

'Yes, I know. He didn't beg you very hard, did he? However, never mind.

I'm not going to let you go until I've made you happy. Now I'll tuck you

up with a rug, and you're going to sleep before the fire.'

Betty lay limp and unresisting in the ministering hands. The unwonted

sensations of comfort, warmth and peace soothed her to sleepiness.

Besides, she felt as if she had wept every tear in her racked body. Soon

her features relaxed, and she sank into profound, almost deathlike

slumber.

Victoria meanwhile told her story to Jack, who sat in the dining room

reading a novel and smoking cigarettes. He came out of his coma as

Victoria unfolded the tale of Betty's upbringing, her struggle to live,

then love the meteor flashing through her horizon. His cheeks flushed

and his mouth quivered as Victoria painted for him the picture of the

girl half distraught, bearing the burden of her shame, unable to reason

or to forsee, to think of anything except the saving of a gentleman from

life on thirty bob a week.

'Something ought to be done,' he said at length, closing his book with

novel vivacity.

'Yes, but what?'

'I don't know.' His eyes questioned the wall; they grew vaguer and

vaguer as his excitement decreased, as a ship in docks sinks further and

further on her side while the water ebbs away.

'You think of something,' he said at length, picking up his book again.

'I don't care what it costs.'

Victoria left him and went for a walk through the misty streets seeking

a solution. There were not many. She could not keep Betty with her, for

she was pure though betrayed; contact with the irregular would degrade

her because habit would induce her to condone that which she morally

condemned. It would spoil her and would ultimately throw her into a life

for which she was not fitted because gentle and unspoiled.

'No,' mused Victoria as she walked, 'like most women, she cannot rule: a

man must rule her. She is a reed, not an oak. All must come from man,

both good and evil. What man has done man must undo.'

By the time she returned to Elm Tree Place she had made up her mind.

There was no hope for Betty except in marriage. She must have her own

fireside; and, from what she had said, her lover was no villain. He was

weak, probably; and, while he strove to determine his line of conduct,

events had slipped beyond his control. Perhaps, though, it was not fair

to deliver Betty into his hands bound and defenceless, bearing the

burden of their common imprudence. She was not fit to be free, but she

should not be a slave. It might be well to be the slave of the strong,

but not of the weak.

Therefore Victoria arrived at a definite solution. She would see the

young man; and, if it was not altogether out of the question, he should

marry Betty. They should have the little house at Shepherd's Bush, and

Betty should be made a free woman with a fortune of five hundred pounds

in her own right, enough to place her for ever beyond sheer want. It

only struck Victoria later that she need not, out of quixotic

generosity, deplete her own store, for Holt would gladly give whatever

sum she named.

'Now, Betty,' she said as the girl drained the glass of claret which

accompanied the piece of fowl, that composed her lunch, 'tell me your

young man's name and Anderson & Dromo's address. I'm going to see him.'

'Oh, no, no, don't do that.' The look of fear returned to the blue eyes.

'No use, Betty, I've decided you're going to be happy. I shall see him

to-day at six, bring him here to-morrow at half past two, as it happens

to be Saturday. You will be married about the thirtieth of this month.'

'Oh, Vic, don't make me think of it. I can't do it . . . it's no good

now. Perhaps he's forgotten me, and it's better for him.'

'I don't think he's forgotten you,' said Victoria. 'He'll marry you this

month, and you'll eat your Christmas dinner at Shepherd's Bush. Don't be

shy, dear--you're not going empty handed; you're going to have a dowry

of five hundred pounds.'

'Vic! I can't take it; it isn't right . . . you need all you've got

. . . you're so good, but I don't want him to marry me if . . . if. . . .'

'Oh, don't worry, I shan't tell him about the money until he says yes.

Now, no thanks; you're my baby, besides it's going to be a present from

Mr Holt. Silence,' she repeated as Betty opened her mouth, 'or rather

give me his name and address and not another word.'

'Edward Smith, Salisbury House, but. . . .'

'Enough. Now, dear, don't get up.'

The events of that Friday and Saturday formed in later days one of the

sunbathed memories in Victoria's dreary life. It was all so gentle, so

full of sweetness and irresolute generosity. She remembered everything,

the wait in the little dark room into which she was ushered by an amazed

commissionaire who professed himself willing to break regulations for

her sake and hand Mr Smith a note, the banging of her heart as she

realised her responsibility and resolved to break her word if necessary

and to buy a husband for Betty rather than lose him, then the quick

interview, the light upon the young man's face.

'Where is she,' he asked excitedly. 'Oh, why did she run away? You can't

think what I've been going through.'

'You should have married her,' said Victoria coldly, though she was

moved by his sincerity. He was handsome, this young man, with his

bronzed face, dark eyes, regular features and long dark hair.

'Oh, I would have at once if I'd known. But I couldn't make up my mind;

only thirty bob a week. . . .'

'Yes, I know,' said Victoria softly, 'I used to be at the P. R. R.'

'You?' The young man looked at her incredulously.

'Yes, but never mind me. It's Betty I've come for. The baby is dead. I

found her cleaning the steps of a house near Waterloo.'

'My God,' said the young man in low tones. He clenched his hands

together; one of his paper cuff protectors fell to the floor.

'Will you marry her now?'

'Yes . . . at once.'

'Good. She's had a hard time, Mr Smith, and I don't say it's entirely

your fault. Now it's all going to be put square. I'm going to see she

has some money of her own, five hundred pounds. That will help won't

it?'

'Oh, it's too good to be true. Why are you doing all this for us?

You're. . . .'

'Please, please, no thanks. I'm Betty's friend. Let that be enough. Will

you come and see her to-morrow at my house? Here's my card.'

On the last day of November these two were married at a registry office

in the presence of Victoria and the registrar's clerk. A new joy had

settled upon Betty, whose shy prettiness was turning into beauty.

Victoria's heart was heavy as she looked at the couple, both so young

and rapt, setting out upon the sea with a cargo of glowing dreams. It

was heavy still as the cab drove off carrying them away for a brief

week-end, which was all Anderson and Dromo would allow. She tasted a new

delight in this making of happiness.

Holt had not attended the ceremony, for he felt too weak. His interest

in the affair had been dim, for he looked upon it as one of Victoria's

whims. He was ceasing to judge as he ceased to appreciate, so much was

his physical weakness gaining upon him; all his faculty of action was

concentrated in the desire which gnawed at his very being. Victoria

reminded him of his promise, and, finding his cheque book for him, laid

it on the table.

'Five hundred pounds,' she said. 'Better make it out to me. It's very

good of you, Jack.'

'Yes, yes,' he said dully, writing the date and the words 'Mrs Ferris.'

Then he stopped. Concentrating with an effort he wrote the word 'five.'

'Five . . . five . . .' he murmured. Then he looked up at Victoria with

something like vacuousness.

A wild idea flashed through her brain. She must act. Oh, no, dreadful.

Yet freedom, freedom. . . . He could not understand . . . she must do

it.

'Thousand,' she prompted in a low voice.

'Thousand pounds,' went Jack's voice as he wrote obediently. Then,

mechanically, reciting the formula his father had taught him. 'Five,

comma, 0, 0, 0, dash, 0, dash, 0. John Holt.'

Victoria put her hands down on the table to take the cheque he had just

torn out. All her fingers were trembling with the terrible excitement of

a slave watching his fetters being struck off. As she took it up and

looked at it, while the figures danced, Holt's eyes grew more insistent

on her other hand. Slowly his fingers closed over it, raised it to his

lips. With his eyes closed, breathing a little deeper, he covered her

palm with lingering kisses.

CHAPTER XIX

THE endowment of Betty was soon completed. Advised by the bank manager

to whom she confided something of the young couple's improvident

tendencies, Victoria vested the money in a trust administered by an

insurance company. The deed was so drafted that it could not be charged;

the capital could not be touched, excepting the case of male offspring

who, after their mother's death, would divide it on their respective

twenty-fifth birthdays; as she distrusted her own sex and perhaps still

more the stock from which the girls might spring, she bound their

proportion in perpetuity; failing offspring she provided that, following

on his wife's decease, Mr Edward Smith should receive one fifth of the

capital, four fifths reverting to herself.

Victoria revelled somewhat in the technicalities of the deed; every

clause she framed was a pleasure in itself; she turned the

'hereinbefores' and the 'predecease as aforesaids' round in her mouth as

if they were luscious sweets. The pleasure of it was not that of Lady

Bountiful showering blessings and feeling the holy glow of charity

penetrate her being. Victoria's satisfaction was more vixenish; she, the

outlaw, the outcast, had wrested from Society enough money to indulge in

the luxury of promoting a marriage, converting the illegal into the

legal, creating respectability. The gains that Society term infamous

were being turned towards the support of that Society; still more,

failing her infamous help, Betty and Edward Smith would not have

achieved their coming together with the approval of the Law, their

spiritual regeneration and a house at Shepherd's Bush.

She was now the mistress of a fortune of over ten thousand pounds, a

good half of which was due to her final stratagem. The time had now come

for her to retire to the house in the country when she could resume her

own name, piece together for the sake of the county her career since she

left India for Alabama, and read the local agricultural rag. Her plans

were postponed, however, owing to Holt's state of health, which

compelled her, out of sheer humanity, to take him to a sunnier clime.

She dismissed Algiers as being too far; she asked Holt where he would

like to go to, but he merely replied 'East Coast,' which in December

struck her as being absurd. Finally she decided to take him to

Folkestone, as it was very near and he would doubtless like to sit with

the dogs on the Leas.

Folkestone was bright and sunny. The sting in the glowing air brought

fresh colour to Victoria's cheeks, a deeper brilliancy to her grey eyes;

she felt well; her back was straighter; when a lock of dark hair strayed

into her mouth driven by the high wind it tasted salt on her lips.

Sometimes she could have leaped, shouted, for life was rushing in upon

her like a tide. Most days, however, she was quiet, for Holt was not

affected by the sea. His listlessness was now such that he hardly spoke.

He would walk by her side vacuously, looking at his surroundings as if

he did not see them. At times he stopped, concentrated with an effort

and bought a bun from a hawker to break up for the dogs.

Victoria noticed that he was slipping, with ununderstanding fear. The

phenomenon was beyond her. Though the guests at the hotel surrounded her

with an atmosphere of admiration, Holt's condition began to occupy all

her thoughts. He was thin now to the point of showing bone under his

coat, pale and hectic, generally listless, sometimes wild-eyed. He never

read, played no games, talked to nobody. Indeed nothing remained of him

save the half physical, half emotional power of his passion. Victoria

called in a doctor, but found him vague and shy; beyond cutting down

Holt's cigarettes he prescribed nothing.

Victoria resigned herself to the role of a nurse. At the beginning of

January she noticed that Holt was using a stick to walk. The sight

filled her with dread. She watched him on the Leas, walking slowly,

resting the weight of his body on the staff, stopping now and then to

look at the sea, or worse, at a blank wall. A terrible impression of

weakness emanated from him. He was going down the hill. One morning in

the middle of January, Holt did not get up. When questioned he hardly

answered. She dressed feverishly without his moving, and went out to

find the doctor herself, for she was unconsciously afraid of the

servants' eyes. When she returned with the doctor Holt had not moved;

his head was thrown back, his mouth a little open, his face more waxen

than usual.

'Oh, oh. . . .' Victoria nearly screamed, when Holt opened his eyes. The

doctor threw back the bedclothes and examined his patient. As Victoria

watched him inspecting Holt's mouth, the inside of his eyelids, then his

finger nails, a terror came upon her at these strange rites. She went to

the window and looked out over the sea; it was choppy, grey and foamy

like a river in spate. She strove to concentrate on her freedom, but she

could feel the figure on the bed.

'Got any sal volatile?' said the doctor's voice.

'No, shall I. . . .?'

'No, no time for that, he's fainting; get me some salts, ammonia,

anything.'

Victoria watched him forcing Holt to breathe the ammonia she used to

clean ribbons. Holt opened his eyes, coughed, struggled; tears ran down

his face as he inhaled the acrid fumes. Still he did not speak. The

doctor pulled him out of bed, crossed his legs, and then struck him

sharply across the shin, just under the knee, with the side of his hand.

Holt's leg hardly moved. The doctor hesitated for a moment, then pushed

him back into the bed.

'I . . . Mrs. . . .?'

'Holt.'

'Well, Mrs Holt, I'm afraid your husband is in a serious condition. Of

course I don't say that with careful feeding, tonics, we can't get him

round, but it'll be a long business, and . . . and . . . you see . . .

How long have you been married?'

'Over a year,' said Victoria with an effort.

'Ah. Well Mrs Holt, it will be part of the cure that you leave him for

six months.'

Victoria gasped. Why? Why? Could it be . . .? The thought appalled her.

Dimly she could hear the doctor talking.

'His mother . . . if he has one . . . to-day . . . phosphate of . . .'

Then the doctor was gone. A telegram had somehow been sent to Rawsley

Cement Works. Then the long day, food produced on the initiative of the

hotel servants, the room growing darker, night.

It was ten o'clock, and two women stood face to face by the bed. One was

Victoria, beautiful like a marble statue, with raven black hair, pale

lips. The other a short stout figure with tight hair, a black bonnet, a

red face stained with tears.

'You've killed him,' said the harsh voice.

Victoria looked up at Mrs Holt.

'No, no.'

'My boy, my poor boy!' Mrs Holt was on her knees by the side of the

motionless figure.

Victoria began to weep, silently at first, then noisily. Mrs Holt

started at the sound, then jumped to her feet with a cry of rage.

'Stop that crying,' she commanded. 'How dare you? How dare you?'

Victoria went on crying, the sobs choking her.

'A murderess,' Mrs Holt went on. 'You took my boy away; you corrupted

him, ruined him, killed him. You're a vile thing; nobody should touch

you, you. . . .'

Victoria pulled herself together.

'It's not my fault,' she stumbled. 'I didn't know.'

'Didn't know,' sneered Mrs Holt, 'as if a woman of your class didn't

know.'

'That's enough,' snarled Victoria. 'I've had enough. Understand? I

didn't want your son. He wanted me. That's all over. He bought me, and

now you think the price too heavy. I've been heaven to him who only knew

misery. He's not to be pitied, unless it be because his mistress hands

him over to his mother.'

'How dare you?' cried Mrs Holt again, a break in her voice as she pitied

her outraged motherhood.

'It's you who've killed him; you, the family, Rawsley, Bethlehem, your

moral laws, your religion. It's you who starved him, ground him down

until he lost all sense of measure, desired nothing but love and life.'

'You killed him, though,' said the mother.

'Perhaps. I didn't want to. I was . . . fond of him. But how can I help

it? And supposing I did? What of it? Yes, what of it? Who was your son

but a man?'

'My son?'

'Your son. A distinction, not a title. Your son bears part of the

responsibility of making me what I am. He came last but he might have

come first, and I tell you that the worker of the eleventh hour is

guilty equally with the worker of the first. Your son was nothing and I

nothing but pawns in the game, little figures which the Society you're

so proud of shifts and breaks. He bought my womanhood; he contributed to

my degradation. What else but degradation did you offer me?'

Mrs Holt was weeping now.

'I am a woman, and the world has no use for me. Your Society taught me

nothing. Or rather it taught me to dance, to speak a foreign language

badly, to make myself an ornament, a pleasure to man. Then it threw me

down from my pedestal, knowing nothing, without a profession, a trade, a

friend, or a penny. And then your Society waved before my eyes the

lily-white banner of purity, while it fed me and treated me like a dog.

When I gave it what it wanted, for there's only one thing it wants from

a woman whom nothing has been taught but that which every woman knows,

then it covered me with gifts. A curse on your Society. A Society of

men, crushing, grinding down women, sweating their labour, starving

their brains, urging them on to the surrender of what makes a woman

worth while. Ah . . . ah. . . .'

Breath failed her. Mrs Holt was weeping silently in her hands in utter

abandonment.

'I'm going,' said Victoria hoarsely. She picked up a handkerchief and

dabbed her eyes.

As she opened the door the figure moved on the bed, opened its eyes.

Their last lingering look was for the woman at the door.

CHAPTER XX

THE squire of Cumberleigh was not sorry that 'The Retreat' had found a

tenant at last. The house belonged to him, and he might have let it many

times over; but so conservative and aristocratic was his disposition

that he preferred to sacrifice his rent rather than have anyone who was

undesirable in the neighbourhood. Yet, in the case of the lady who had

now occupied the house for some three weeks, though the strictest

enquiries had been made concerning her, both in Cumberleigh and the

surrounding district, nothing could be ascertained beyond the scanty

facts that she was a widow, well-to-do and had been abroad a good deal.

The squire had seen her on two separate occasions himself and could not

but admit that she was far from unprepossessing; she was obviously a

lady, well-bred and educated, and, if her frock and hat had been a

trifle smarter than those usually seen in a country village, she had

owned up to having recently been to Paris to replenish her wardrobe. It

was curious, when he came to reflect upon it, how little she had told

him about herself, and yet, what was more curious, she had no sooner

left him after the second visit than he had betaken himself to his

solicitor to get him to make out the lease. She had received and signed

it the following day, showing herself remarkably business-like, but not

ungenerous when it came to the buying of the fixtures and to the vexed

question of outdoor and indoor repairs.

As the squire climbed the hill that gave upon the village from the

marshes, one cold March evening, he did not regret his decision; for,

standing in front of 'The Retreat,' he felt bound to admit that there

was something cheering and enlivening in the fact that the four front

windows now flaunted red curtains and holland blinds, where they had

been so dark and forbidding. In the lower one on the left, where the

lamps had not yet been lighted or the blinds drawn down, in the light of

the dancing fire, he could see distinctly a woman's workbox on a small

inlaid table, a volume of songs on the cottage piano, and, at the back

of the room, a hint of china tea cups, glistening silver and white

napery. Presently a trim maid came out to bolt the front door, followed

by two snuffling yellow dogs who took the air for a few moments in

tempestuous spirits, biting each other about the neck and ears and

rushing round in giddy circles on the tiny grass plot until, in response

to a call from the maid, they returned with her to the house. They were

foreigners evidently, these dogs! The squire could not remember the name

of the breed, but he thought he had seen one of the kind before in

London. He was not quite sure he approved of foreign dogs; they were not

so sporting or reliable as those of the English breeds; still, these

were handsome fellows, well kept and (from the green ribbons that

adorned their fluffy necks) evidently made much of. He was still looking

after the dogs when he was joined by the curate coming out of the

blacksmith's cottage opposite and stopping to light a match in the

shelter of the high wall of 'The Retreat.'

'First pipe I have had to-day,' said the newcomer as he puffed at it

luxuriously. 'It's more than you can say, squire, I'll be bound.'

'Twenty-first, that's more like it,' said the squire with a laugh. 'How

is Mrs Johnson?' This in allusion to the curate's call at the smithy.

'Dying. Won't last the night out, I think. She is quite unconscious.

Still I am glad I went. Johnson and his daughters seemed to like to have

me there, though of course there was nothing for me to do.'

'Quite so, quite so,' said the squire approvingly, for the village was

so small that he took a paternal interest in all its inhabitants. 'Any

more news?'

'Mrs Golightly has had twins, and young Shaw has enlisted. That's about

all, I think. Oh, by the by, I paid a call here to-day.' And he

indicate. 'The Retreat.' 'It seemed about time you know, and one mustn't

neglect the new-comers.'

'Of course not,' the squire assented with conviction. 'Was she . . . did

she in any way indicate that she was pleased to see you?'

'She was very gracious, but she seemed to take my call quite as a matter

of course. A nice woman I should think, though a little reserved.

However she is going to rent one seat in church if not more, and she

said I might put her name down for one or two little things I am

interested in at present.'

'In fact you made hay while the sun shone. Well, after all, why not? She

didn't tell you anything about herself I suppose, or her connections?'

'No, she never mentioned them. I understood or she implied she had been

abroad a good deal and that her husband had died some years ago. Still I

really don't think we need worry about her; the whole thing, if I may

say so, was so obviously all right, the house I mean and all its

appointments. She is a quiet woman, a little shy and retiring perhaps,

belongs to the old-fashioned school.'

'Well she is none the worse for that,' said the squire with a grunt. 'We

don't meet many of that kind nowadays. Even the farmers' daughters are

quite ready to set you right whenever they get a chance. This modern

education is a curse, I have said so from the very beginning. Still they

haven't robbed us of our Church schools yet, if that is any

consolation. Coming back to dine with me to-night, Seaton?'

The young man shook his head. 'Very sorry, squire, it's quite impossible

to-night. It is Friday night, choir practice you know, and there is a

lantern lecture in the mission hall. I ought to be there already,

helping Griffin with the slides.'

'All right, Sunday evening then, at the usual time,' said the squire

cordially as the curate left him, and, as he looked after him, he

criticised him as a busy fellow, not likely to set the Thames on fire

perhaps, but essentially the right man in the right place.

His own progress was a good deal slower; not that he found the hill too

steep, for, in spite of his fifty years, he was still perfectly sound of

wind and limb, as was shown by his athletic movements, the fresh healthy

colour on his cheeks, and the clear blue of his eyes, but rather because

he seemed loth to tear himself away from 'The Retreat' and his new

tenant. Even when he had reached the little post office that crowned the

summit, he did not turn off towards his own place till he had spent

another five minutes contemplating the stack of chimney-pots sending out

thick puffs of white smoke into the quiet evening sky, and listening

attentively to the cheerful sound of a tinkling piano blended with the

gentle lowing of the cattle on the marsh below. After all, he told

himself, he was very glad Seaton had called, for apart from his duty as

a clergyman it was only a kind and neighbourly thing to do.

It was a pity that there were not more of his kind in the neighbourhood,

for in spite of his own preference for the country, he could imagine

that a woman coming to it fresh from London at such a season might find

it dull and a little depressing. He wondered if Mrs Menzies, of Hither

Hall, would call if he asked her to do so. Of course she would in a

moment if he put it on personal grounds, but that was not the point. All

he wished was to be kind and hospitable to a stranger; and Mrs Menzies,

much as he respected and admired her, had never been known to err on the

side of tolerance, nor did one meet in her drawing-room anyone whose

pedigree would not bear a thorough investigation. Yes, there was no

doubt about it, though the laws that governed social intercourse were on

the whole excellent and had to be kept, there were here, as everywhere

else in life, exceptions to the rule, occasions when anyone of a kindly

disposition must feel tempted to break them. And Mrs Menzies was

certainly a little stiff: witness her behaviour in the case of Captain

Clinton's widow and the fuss she had made because the unfortunate lady

had forgotten to tell her of her relationship to the Eglinton Clintons

and had only vouchsafed the fact that her father's people had been in

trade. Why, it had taken weeks if not months to clear the matter up; and

it had been very awkward for everybody, the Eglinton Clintons included

when the truth had transpired. No, on second thoughts he would not ask

Mrs Menzies to call; he would far rather make the first venture himself

than risk a snub for this lonely defenceless stranger.

He turned into the gates of Redland Hall with a half-formed intention of

doing so immediately. He dined alone as usual; it was very rare that the

dining-room of Redland Hall extended its hospitality to anybody

nowadays; for the squire, like most men over forty, had lost the habit

of entertaining and did not know how to recover it. A bachelor friend

spent a night with him from time to time; the curate supped with him

every Sunday; and his sister came for a week or two during the summer,

when she invariably told him that the house was too uncomfortable to

live in, and he ought to have it thoroughly done up and modernised. He

invariably promised to set about it immediately, with the full

intention of doing so; but his resolution began to weaken the day on

which he saw her off at the station, and degenerated steadily for the

remainder of the year. That night, however, for the first time for many

months he made a voyage of discovery into his own drawing-room. Yes,

there was no doubt about it, Selina was quite right in calling it

draughty and uncomfortable; the gilt French furniture was shabby and

tarnished, the Aubusson carpet worn, the wall paper faded, the whole

room desolate in its suggestion of past glory. He crossed over to the

enormous grand piano, opened it and struck a yellow key gently with one

finger. Was he wrong, he wondered, in thinking its tone was lamentably

thin and poor? A rat scampered and squeaked in the wainscoting, the

windows rattled in their loose sashes; he shut the piano abruptly and

left the room. It would cost a good deal to have it thoroughly done up,

of course; but that was not the point. Who would superintend the

decorations? He did not trust his own taste and had no faith in that of

any upholsterer. Selina would come and help him if he asked her, though

she would think it strange, for she had paid her annual visit in August,

and it was now only March; besides, if she brought her delicate little

girls with her at such a time the whole house would be upset in

arranging for their comfort. Still, Selina or no, he had quite made up

his mind to have the room done up and to buy a new piano immediately; it

was ridiculous to harbour an instrument which was merely a nesting place

for mice. He returned to the dining-room, poured himself out a stiff

whiskey and soda, and dozed over his _Spectator_ for the rest of the

evening. Yet, next morning, even in the unromantic light of day, he was

surprised to find that his plan of doing up the drawing-room still held

good.

He had intended to ride into Wetherton that day to try his new mare

across country, for the gates were high in that direction and good

enough to test her powers as a jumper. A glance at the glistening frost

on the grass soon sufficed, however, to tell him that his scheme could

not be carried out; nor was he sorry until, having spent the morning on

his farms and inspected everything and everybody at his leisure, it

occurred to him with a desperate sense of conviction that there was

still the afternoon to be filled in somehow. About three he set off in

the direction of the village, looked in at the church and had a brief

colloquy with Seaton regarding the new pews which were being put up,

interviewed the postmaster, condoled with the blacksmith upon the death

of his wife, and even ventured down as far as the marsh to see if the

new carrier who had taken the place of old Dick Tomlinson was likely to

fulfil his duties properly. About four o'clock he found himself once

more opposite 'The Retreat.' It was on the main road certainly, but it

was only recently that he had become aware of its importance in the

landscape. One could not get to the marsh or come back from it without

passing it. The windows looked as trim as ever--trimmer perhaps, for

short muslin curtains interspaced with embroidery seemed to have sprung

up in the night. They were very decorative in their way; at the same

time they quite shut out all prospect of the interior, and there was no

workbox, piano, or suggestion of tea things to be seen to-day. The

foreign dogs were snuffling in the garden as he passed the second time,

and one of them nosed its way through the iron gate and ventured a few

yards down the road, but just as the squire had made up his mind it was

his duty to take it back, it returned of its own accord. He watched the

trim maid come out and call them as she had done the day before, and saw

them rush after her frolicking round her skirt.

Suddenly he crossed the road, looked up and down to make sure there was

no acquaintance within sight, opened the iron gate of 'The Retreat,' and

passed up the gravel pathway into the porch.

'Mrs Fulton is at home,' said the trim maid demurely, in answer to his

question.

MERCAT PRESS, EDINBURGH