his waking he could only guess, but he was aroused by a singular
sensation--singular in that, though once familiar enough, it was now
as strange to him as the sight of his dead mother's face. If his
half-recalled senses did not deceive him, if he was not still dreaming
of Joan, the warm touch of a pair of soft lips was yet lingering upon
his forehead, the rustle of a dress very near his ear yet sounded
crisply in it. And then someone glided from him, and he heard a hasty
exclamation and opened his eyes dreamily. By the screen which
concealed the door and sheltered him from its draughts was standing
Joan, a-tiptoe, poised as in expectation, something between flight and
amusement in her face, her attitude full of unconscious grace. He was
still bewildered, and hardly returned from a dreamland even less
conventional than Blore. Without as much surprise as if he had thought
the matter out--it seemed then almost a natural thing--he said:
"You shall have the gloves, Dubs, with pleasure."
The girl's expression, as he spoke, changed to startled astonishment.
She became crimson from her hair to her throat. She stepped toward
him, checked herself, then made a quick movement with her hand as if
about to say something, and finally covered her face with her hands
and fled from the room. Before he was wide awake he was alone.
At first he smiled pleasantly at the fire, and patted Roy, Joan's
terrier, who was lying beside him, curled up snugly in an angle of the
sofa. Afterward he became grave and thoughtful, and finally shook his
head very much as he had at the stuffed fox in the hall. And so he
fidgeted till Roy, who was in a restful mood, retired to the
hearthrug.
It would be hard to describe Joan's feelings that afternoon. She was
proud, and had begun by resenting for all of them the ill-concealed
contempt of Tom's London friend--this man of clubs and chit-chat. She
was quite prepared to grant that he was different from them, but not
superior. A kind of contempt for the veneer and polish which were his
pride was natural to her, and she showed this, not rudely nor
coquettishly, but with a hearty sincerity. Still, it is seldom a girl
is unaware of admiration, and rare that she does not in secret respect
self-assertion in the male creature. This man knew much too, and could
tell it well, that was strange and new and delightful to the country
maiden. If he had any heart at all--and since he was from London town
she supposed he had not, though she granted him eyes and fine
perceptions of the beautiful--she might have, almost, some day,
promised herself to like him, had he been of her world--not reflecting
that this very fact that he was out of her world formed the charm by
which he evoked her interest. As things were, she more than doubted of
his heart, and had no doubt at all that between their worlds lay a
great, impassable, unbridgeable abyss.
But this afternoon the dislike, which had been fading day by day along
with those feelings in another which had caused it, was revived in its
old strength upon the matter of the kiss. Alone in her own room the
thought made her turn crimson with vexation, and she stamped the floor
with annoyance. He had made certain overtures to her--slender and
meaningless in all probability. Still, if he could believe her capable
after such looks and words as he had used--if after these he thought
her capable of this, then indeed, were there no abyss at all, he could
be nothing to her. Oh, it was too bad, too intolerable! She would
never forgive him. How indeed could she be anything to him, if she
could do such a thing, as dreadful, as unmaidenly to her as to the
proudest beauty among his London friends. She told herself again that
he was insufferable; and determined to slap Roy well, upon the first
opportunity, if that mistaken little pearl of price would persist in
favoring the stranger's sofa.
Until this was cleared up she felt her position the very worst in the
world, and yet would not for a fortune give him an opportunity of
freeing her from it. The very fact that he addressed her with, as it
seemed, a greater show of respect, chafed her. Agnes, with a
precocious cleverness, a penetration quite her own, kept herself and
her dog, Jack o' Pack _alias_ Johnny Sprawn, out of her sister's way,
and teased her only before company.
But at last Maitland caught Miss Joan unprotected.
"I hope that these are the right size, Miss Joan--they are six and a
quarter," he said boldly, yet with, for a person of his disposition
and breeding, a strange amount of shamefacedness; producing at the
same time a pair of gloves, Courvoisier's best, many-buttoned, fit for
a goddess.
"I beg your pardon?" she said, breathing quickly. But she guessed what
he meant.
"Let me get out of your debt."
"Out of my debt, Mr. Maitland?" taking the gloves mechanically.
"Please. Did you think I had forgotten? I should find it hard to do
that," he continued, encouraged and relieved by having got rid of the
gloves, and inattentive at the moment to her face. Yet she looked long
at him searchingly.
"I have found it hard to understand you," she said at last, with
repressed anger in voice and eye; "very hard, Mr. Maitland; but I
think I do so now. Do you believe that it was I who kissed you
when you were asleep on Wednesday afternoon? Can you think so? You
force me to presume it is so. Your estimate of my modesty and of your
own deserts must differ considerably. I had not the honor. Your
gloves"--and she dropped them upon the floor as if the touch
contaminated her, the act humiliating the young gentleman at least as
much as her words--"you had better give to Agnes, if you wish to
observe a silly custom. They are due to her, not to me. I thank you,
Mr. Maitland, for having compelled me to give this pleasant
explanation."
She turned away with a gesture of such queenly contempt that our poor
hero--now most unheroic, and dumb as Carlyle would have had his, only
with mortification and intense disgust at his stupidity--amazed that
he could ever have thought meanly of this girl, "who moved most
certainly a goddess," had not a word to express his sorrow. A hero
utterly crestfallen! But at the door she looked back, for some strange
reason known perchance to female readers. The gloves were on the
floor, just beyond his reach--poor, forlorn, sprawling objects, their
fingers and palms spread as in ridiculous appeal. As for him, he was
lying back on the sofa, in appearance so crushed and helpless that the
woman's pity ever near her eyes moved her. She went slowly back, and
picked up the gloves, and put them on the table where he could take
them.
"Miss Joan," he said, in a tone of persistence that claimed a hearing,
and, starting far from the immediate trouble, was apt to arouse
curiosity; "we are always, as Agnes says, jangling--on my side, of
course, is the false note. Can we not accord better, and be better
friends?"
"Not until we learn to know one another better," she said coldly,
looking down at him, "or become more discerning judges."
"I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile!" She nodded gravely, still
regarding him from a great height. "I was mad to believe it possible!"
"I think we may be better friends," she responded, smiling faintly,
yet with sudden good humor. "We are beginning to know--one another."
"And ourselves," almost under his breath. Then, "Miss Joan, will you
ever forgive me? I shall never err again in that direction," he
pleaded. "I am humiliated in my own eyes until you tell me it is
forgotten."
She nodded, and this time with her own frank smile.
Then she turned away and did leave the room, this time taking Roy with
her. Her joyous laughter and his wild, excited barking proclaimed
through the length and breadth of Blore that he was enjoying the rare
indulgence of a good romp on the back lawn. It was Roy's day.
And can a dog ever hope for a better day than that upon which his
mistress becomes aware that she is also another's mistress: becomes
aware that another is thinking of her and for her, nay, that she is
the very center of that other's thoughts? What a charming, pleasantly
bewildering discovery it is, this learning that for him when she is in
the room it is full, and wanting her it is empty, be it never so
crowded; that all beside, though they be witty or famous, or what they
will, or can or would, are but lay figures, _umbrae_, shadow guests in
his estimation. She learns with strange thrills, that in moments of
meditation will flash to eye and cheek, that her slightest glance and
every change of color, every tone and smile, are marked with jealous
care; that pleasure which she does not share is tasteless, and a
dinner of herbs, if she be but at a far corner, is a feast for
princes. That is her dog's day, or it may be his dog's day. It is a
pleasant discovery for a man, _mutatis mutandis_; but for a girl, a
sweet, half fearful consciousness, the brightest part of love's young
dream--even when the kindred soul is of another world, and an abyss,
wide, impassable, unbridgeable lies between.
But these things come to sudden ends sometimes. Sprains, however
severe, have an awkward knack of getting well. Swellings subside from
inanition, and doctors insist for their credit's sake that the stick
or ready arm be relinquished. Certainly a respite or a relapse--call
it which you will--is not impossible with care, but it is brief. A
singular shooting pain, not easily located with exactness, but
somewhere in the neighborhood of the calf, has been found useful; and
a strange rigidity of the tendon Achilles in certain positions may
gain a day or two. But at last not even these will avail, and the
doubly injured one must out and away from among the rose leaves. Twice
Maitland fixed his departure for the following morning, and each time
when pressed to stay gave way, after so feeble, so ludicrous a
resistance, if it deserved the name, that Agnes scarcely concealed her
grimace, and Joan looked another way. She did not add anything to the
others' hospitable entreaties. If she guessed what made Maggie's
good-night kiss so fervent and clinging, she made no sign and offered
no opening.
In the garden next morning, Maitland taxed her with her neutrality. It
was wonderful how his sense of humor had become developed at Blore.
"I thought that you did not need so much pressure as to necessitate
more than four people's powers of persuasion being used," she
answered, in the same playful spirit. "And besides, now you are well
enough, must you not leave?"
"Indeed, Miss Joan?"
"And go back to your own way of life? It is a month since you saw the
latest telegrams, and there is a French company at the Gaiety, I learn
from the _Standard_. We have interests and duties, though you were so
hard of belief about them, at Blore, but you have none."
"No interests?"
She shook her head. "No duties, at any rate."
"And so you think," he asked, his eyes fixed upon her changing
features, "that I should go back to my old way of life--of a century
ago?"
"Of course you must!" But she was not so rude as to tell him what a
very foolish question this was. Still it was, was it not?
"So I will, or to something like it, and yet very unlike. But not
alone. Joan, will you come with me? If I have known you but a month, I
have learned to love your truth and goodness and you, Joan, so that if
I go away alone, to return to the old life would be bitterly
impossible. You have spoiled that; you must make for me a fresh life
in its place. Do you remember you told me that when we knew one
another we might be better friends? I have come to know you better,
but we cannot be friends. We must be something more, more even than
lovers, Joan--husband and wife, if you can like me enough."
It was not an unmanly way of putting it, and he was in earnest. But so
quiet, so self-restrained was his manner that it savored of coldness.
The girl whose hand he held while he spoke had no such thought. Her
face was turned from him. She was gazing over the wall across the
paddock where Maggie's mare was peaceably and audibly feeding, and so
at the Blore Ash on its mimic hill, every bough and drooping branchlet
dark against the sunset sky; and this radiant in her eyes with a
beauty its deepest glow had never held for her before. The sweetest
joy was in her heart, and grief in her face. He had been worthy of
himself and her love. While he spoke she told herself, not that some
time she might love him, but that she had given him all her true heart
already. And yet as he was worthy, so she must be worthy and do her
part.
"You have done me a great honor," she said at last, drawing away her
hand from his grasp, though she did not turn her face, "but it cannot
be, Mr. Maitland. I am very grateful to you--I am indeed, and sorry."
"Why can it not be?" he said shortly; startled, I am bound to say, and
mortified.
"Because of--of many things. One is that I should not make you happy,
nor you me. I am not suited to your way of life. I am of the country,
and I love to be free and unconstrained, while you are of the town.
Oh, we should not get on at all! Perhaps you would not be ashamed of
me as your wife, but you might be, and I could not endure the chance
even of it. There," she added, with a laugh in which a woman's ear
might have detected the suppression of a sob, "is one sober reason
where none can be needed."
"Is that your only reason?"
She was picking the mortar out of the wall. "Oh, dear me, no! I have a
hundred, but that is a sufficient one," she answered almost
carelessly, flirting a scrap of lime from the wall with her
forefinger.
"And you have been playing with me all this time!" cried he, obtusely
enraged by her flippancy.
"Not knowingly, not knowingly, indeed!"
"Can you tell me that you were not aware that I loved you?"
"Well, I thought--the fact is, I thought that you were amusing
yourself--in West End fashion."
"Coquette!"
"Mr. Maitland!" she cried vehemently, "how dare you? There is proof,
if any were needed, that I am right. You would not have dared to say
that to any of your town acquaintances. I am no coquette. If I have
given you pain, I am very sorry. And--I beg that we may part friends."
She had begun fiercely, with all her old spirit. He turned away, and
she ended with a sudden, anxious, pitiful lameness, that yet, so angry
and dull of understanding was he, taught him nothing.
"Friends!" he cried impatiently. "I told you that it was impossible.
Oh, Joan, think again! Have I been too hasty? Have I given you no time
to weigh it? Have I just offended you in some little thing? Then let
me come to you again in three months, after I have been back among my
old friends?"
"No, don't do that, Mr. Maitland. It will be of no use and will but
give us pain."
"And yet I will come," he replied firmly, endeavoring by the very
eager longing of his own gaze to draw from her fair, downcast face
some sign of hope. "I will come, if you forbid me a hundred times. And
if you have been playing with me--true, I am in no mood for soft words
now--it shall be your punishment to say me nay, again. I shall be
here, Joan, to ask you in three months from to-day."
"I cannot prevent you," she said. "Believe me, I shall only have the
same answer for you."
"I shall come," he said doggedly, and looked at her with eyes
reluctant to quit her drooping lashes lest they should miss some
glance bidding his heart take courage. But none came, only the color
fluttered uncertainly in her face. So he slowly turned away from her
at last and walked across the garden, and out of sight by the gate
into the road. He saw nothing of the long, dusty track, and straggling
hedges bathed in the last glows of sunset. Those big gray eyes, so
frank and true, came again and again between him and the prospect, and
blinded his own with a hot mist of sorrow and anger. Ah, Blore, thou
wast mightily avenged!
* * * * *
It is a hot afternoon in August, laden with the hum of dozing life.
The sun has driven the less energetic members of the Quaritch family
into the cool gloom of the drawing room, where the open windows are
shaded by the great cedar. Mrs. Quaritch, upon the sofa, is nodding
over a book. Joan, in a low wicker seat, may be doing the same; while
Agnes, pursuing a favorite employment upon the hearthrug, is now and
again betrayed by a half stifled growl from one or other of the dogs
as they rise and turn themselves reproachfully, and flop down again
with a sigh in a cool place.
"Agnes," cries her mother, upon some more distinct demonstration of
misery being made, "for goodness' sake leave the dogs alone. They have
not had a moment's peace since lunch."
"A dog's life isn't peace, mamma," she answers, with the simple air of
a discoverer of truth. But, nevertheless, she looks about for fresh
worlds to conquer.
"Even Mr. Maitland was better than this," she announces, after a long
yawn of discontent, "though he was dull enough, I wonder why he did
not come in July. Do you know, Joan?"
"Oh, Agnes, do let us have a moment's peace for once! We are not
dogs," cried Joan fretfully.
Wonder! she was always wondering. This very minute, while her eyes
were on the page, it was in her mind. Through all those three months
passing hour by hour and day by day, she could assure herself that
when he had come and gone, she would be at rest again; things would be
as before with her. Let him come and go! But when July arrived, and he
did not, a sharper pain made itself felt. Bravely as she strove to
beat it down, well as she might hide it from others, the certainty
that it had needed no second repulse to balk his love sorely hurt her
pride. Just her pride, she told herself; nothing else. That he had not
stood the test he had himself proposed; that any unacknowledged
faintest hope she might have cherished, deep down in her heart, that
he might master her by noble persistence, must now be utterly
quenched; these things of course had no bitterness for her through the
hot August days; had nothing to do with the wearied look that
sometimes dulled the gray eyes, nor with the sudden indifference or as
sudden enthusiasms for lawn tennis and dogs and pigeons, that marked
her daily moods.
Agnes' teasing, by putting her meditations into words, has disturbed
her. She gets up and moves restlessly about, touching this thing and
that, and at last leaves the room and stands in the hall, thinking.
Here, too, it is dark and cool, and made to seem more so--the door
into the garden being open--by the hot glare of sunshine falling upon
the spotless doorstep. She glances at this listlessly. The house is
still, the servants are at the back; the dogs all worn out by the
heat. Then, as she hesitates, a slight crunching of footsteps upon the
gravel comes to her ear, breaking the silence. A sudden black shadow
falls upon the sunny step and tells of a visitor. Someone chases away
his shadow, and steps upon the stone, and raises his gloved hand to
the bell. Charles Maitland at last!
Coming straight in from the sunshine he cannot see the swift welcome
that springs to eye and cheek, a flash of light and color, quick to
come and go. He is too much moved himself to mark how her hand shakes.
He sees no difference in her. But she sees a change in him. She
detects some subtle difference that eludes her attempt to define its
nature and only fills her with a vague sense that this is not the
Charles Maitland from whom she parted.
It is a meeting she has pictured often, but not at all like this. He
signs to her to take him into the dining room, the door of which
stands open.
"I have come back, Miss Joan."
"Yes?" she answers, sitting down with an attempt to still the tumult
within, with such success that she brings herself for the moment
nearly to the frame of mind in which they parted, and there is the
same weary sufferance in her tone.
"I have come back as I said I would. I have overstepped the three
months, but I had a good reason for my delay. Indeed I have been in
doubt whether I ought to see you again at all, only I could not bear
you to think what you naturally would. I felt that I must see you,
even if it cost us both pain." There is a new awkwardness in his tone
and pose.
"I told you that it was--quite unnecessary--and useless," she answers,
with a strange tightening in her throat.
"Then it can do you no harm," he assents quietly. "I have come back
not to repeat my petition, but to tell you why I do not and cannot."
"I think," she puts in coldly, "that upon the whole you had better
spare yourself the unpleasantness of explaining anything to me. Don't
you think so? I asked you for no proof, and held out no hope. Why do
you trouble me? Why have you come back?"
"You have not changed!"
For the first time a ring of contempt in her voice takes the place of
cold indifference. "I do not change in three months, Mr. Maitland. But
there! my mother will wish to see you, and so will Agnes, who is
hankering after something to happen. They are in the drawing room."
"But, Miss Joan, grant me one moment! You have not heard my reasons."
"Your reasons! Is it absolutely necessary?" she asks, half fretfully,
half scornfully; her uppermost thought an intense desire to be by
herself in her own room, with the door safely locked.
"I think so, at any rate. Why, I see! By Jove! of course you must
be thinking the worst of me now! Oh, no! if you could not love me,
Joan--pray pardon me, I had no right to call you by your name--you
need not despise me. I cannot again ask you to be my wife, because,"
he laughs uneasily, "fortune has put it out of my power to take a
wife. My trustee has made ducks and drakes of my property, or rather
bulls and bears. I have but a trifle left to begin the world upon, and
far too little to marry upon."
"I read of it in the papers. I saw that a Mr. Maitland was the chief
sufferer, but I did not connect him with you," she says, in a low
voice.
"No, of course not. How should you?" he answers lightly. But
nevertheless her coldness is dreadful to him. He had thought she would
express some sympathy. And gayly as he talks of it, he feels something
of the importance of a ruined man and something of his claim to pity.
"And what are you going to do?"
"Do? We've arranged all that. They say there is a living to be made at
the Bar in New Zealand, if one does not object to riding boots and
spurs as part of the professional costume. Of course it will be a
different sort of life, and Agnes' favorite patent leathers will
be left behind in every sense. This would have been a bad blow to
me"--there is a slight catch in his voice, and he gets up, and looks
out of one of the windows with his back to her--"now I have learned
from you that life should not be all lounging round the table and
looking over other people's cards. It has been a sharp lesson, but
very opportune as things have turned out. I am ready to take a hand
myself now--even without a partner."
He does not at once turn round. He had not fancied she would take it
like this, and he listens for a word to tell him that at any rate she
is sorry--is grieved as for a stranger. Then he feels a sudden light,
timid touch upon his arm. Joan is standing quite close to him, and
does not move or take away her hand as he turns. Only she looks down
at the floor when she speaks:
"I think I should be better than--than dummy--if you will take me to
New Zealand."
Half laughing, half crying, and wholly confused, she looks up into his
astonished face with eyes so brimful of love and tenderness that they
tell all her story. For just an instant his eyes meet hers. Then, with
a smothered exclamation, he draws her to him--and--in fact smothers
the exclamation.
"I am so glad you've lost your money," she sobs, hiding her face,
as soon as she can, upon his shoulder. "I should not have done at
all--for you--in London, Charley."
There let us leave her. But no, another is less merciful. Neither of
them hears the door open or sees Agnes' face appear at it. But she
both sees and hears, and says very distinctly and clearly:
"Well!"
But even Agnes is happy and satisfied. Something _has_ happened.
THE FATAL LETTER.
I have friends who tell me that they seldom walk the streets of London
without wondering what is passing behind the house-fronts; without
picturing a comedy here, a love-scene there, and behind the dingy cane
blinds a something ill-defined, a something odd and _bizarre_. They
experience--if you believe them--a sense of loneliness out in the
street, an impatience of the sameness of all these many houses, their
dull bricks and discreet windows, and a longing that someone would
step out and ask them to enter and see the play.
Well, I have never felt any of these things; but as I was passing
through Fitzhardinge Square about half-past ten o'clock one evening in
last July, after dining, if I remember rightly, in Baker Street,
something happened to me which I fancy may be of interest to such
people.