"I did not call yesterday," Iglesias said, "in consequence of your
prohibitory telegram. But to-day I have come early and without
permission, first because I was anxious to assure myself you were
really unhurt, and secondly because something has occurred regarding
which I wish to consult you. I must have your sanction before taking
action in respect of it."
Entering from the blustering wind and keen, fitful sunshine without,
the little drawing-room struck Iglesias as both stuffy and dingy. And
Poppy, standing in the centre of it, huddled in a black brocade
tea-gown, a sparse pattern of bluey mauve rosebuds upon it, which hung
in limp folds from her bosom to her feet, concealing all the outline of
her figure, came perilously near looking dingy likewise. The garment,
cut square at the neck, had long seen its first youth. The big
outstanding black ribbon bow between her shoulders and that upon her
breast was creased and crumpled. Beneath the masses of her dark hair
her face looked almost unnaturally small, sallow and bloodless, while
her eyes were enormous--dusky dwelling-places, as it seemed to her
visitor, of some world-old sorrow. Her face did not light up, neither
did she make any demonstration of gladness or greeting, but stood, one
toy spaniel tucked under either arm, their forelegs lying along her
wrists, their fringed paws resting upon her palms. Dominic had a
conviction she had snatched up the little dogs on hearing his voice,
and held them so as to render it impossible for him to take her hand.
Less than ever, looking upon her, had he any mercy for Alaric Barking.
Less than ever did the prospect of spending weeks, perhaps months, in
shoring up the imperilled fortunes of that young gentleman's family
prove alluring to him.
"You were hurt," he broke out, almost fiercely. "You are suffering,
and, worse, you are unhappy. It makes me very angry to see you thus. I
wish I could reach those who are guilty of having distressed and
injured you."
Poppy's face went a shade paler, and alarm mingled with the sorrow in
her eyes, but she made a courageous effort to patter as usual.
"You'd give them the what for, dear man, wouldn't you?" she said. "But
you would have to go way back in the ages for that, and get behind the
seed-sowing of which this gay hour is the harvest. Still, I love to see
you ferocious. It is very flattering to me, and it's mightily becoming
to you. Don't snore, Cappadocia. Manners, my good child, manners. All
the same, I wasn't hurt slipping on those gorgeous white steps of
yours. Upon my honour, I wasn't. But I had to go out yesterday
afternoon, and I got caught in one of those infernal hailstorms. It was
altogether too cold for comfort, and I feel a bit cheap this morning in
consequence. That's why I put on this odious gown. I always try to
dress for the part, and the part just now is dismality. From the start
this gown has been a disappointment. I counted on the roses fading
pink, but the beasts faded blue instead. I feel as if I was dressed in
a bruise, and that's appropriate--for I also feel as if I had been
beaten all over. Merely the hail--I give you my word. Nothing more than
that. I'm never ill." Poppy paused, dropped the little dogs on the
floor. They cowered against her, looking up woefully at her. "No, I
don't want you," she said. "You're heavy. I'm tired of you."
Then she blew her nose, and, over the top of her hand-kerchief, looked
full at Iglesias for the first time.
"Well, what is it? What do you want my sanction for?"
Without waiting for his answer she swept aside, knelt down, crouching
over the fire, extending both hands to the heat of it, while her open
sleeves falling back showed her arms bare to the elbow.
"Tell me, and, if you don't mind, shove along. I own I am a trifle
jumpy--only the weather--but I need humouring, so shove along, there's
a good dear," she said.
Whereupon, in as few words as possible, Dominic unfolded to her the
contents of Sir Abel Barking's letter. As she listened, Poppy raised
herself, turned round, stood upright, her hands clasped behind her.
"Oh! that's it, is it?" she said. She looked less bloodless, more
animated, more natural. "I'm not altogether surprised. The poor old
lads have found out the cuckoo in their nest at last, have they? Alaric
had a notion Reginald Barking--not a nice person Reginald--I saw him
once and he looked a cross between a pair of forceps and a bag of
shavings--I didn't trust him--you don't, do you? Alaric had a notion
this precious cousin was making hay of the whole show. But it was
utterly useless for him to intervene. In the eyes of the elder
generation he is the original dog with a bad name, only fit for
hanging."
Poppy paused, took a long breath, smiled a little.
"What do you think? Is it a very bad business?"
"I cannot tell till I have gone into details," Iglesias replied. He was
slightly put about by the lady's change of demeanour, by the interest
she displayed, by the alteration in her expression and bearing.
"And they howl to you to save the sinking ship?" Poppy continued
lightly. "Shall you go?"
"That is the question I have come to ask you."
"To ask me?" she said. "But, heart alive, dear man, where do I come in?"
"My duty to you stands before every other duty," Iglesias answered
gravely. "Those who have caused you sorrow and injured you, are my
enemies. How can it be otherwise? A member of this family--I do not
choose to name him--has, in my opinion, played a detestable part by
you; therefore only with your sanction, freely given, can I consent to
be helpful to his relatives."
The colour leaped into Poppy's cheeks, the light into her eyes, her
lips parted in pretty laughter; yet she still kept her hands clasped
behind her back.
"Ah! I see--I see," she cried. "But how did you contrive to get left
behind, most beloved lunatic, and be born five or six centuries out of
your time into this shouting, pushing, modern world which knows not
chivalry? Do you imagine this is the fashion most men treat women? Here
I am laughing, yet I could cry that you should come to me--me, of all
people--on such a lovely, fine, fanciful errand."
"My conduct appears to me perfectly obvious and simple," Iglesias
replied rather coldly.
"I know it does, my dear, and there's the pathetic splendour of it,"
Poppy declared, soft mothering tones in her voice. "All the same we
must keep our heads screwed on the right way. So, tell me, will it be
of any personal advantage to you to help pull these elderly plungers
out of the quagmire?"
"None whatever."
"At least they will make it worth your while by paying up handsomely?"
"No doubt they will make me some offer, but I shall decline it,"
Iglesias said. "I draw a pension. I will continue to do so. That is
just. I have a right to it in virtue of my past work. But I shall
refuse to accept any salary over and above that. I shall make it a
condition that I give my services. And that which I give I give,
whether it be to king or to beggar. To make profit out of my giving
would be intolerable to me."
Poppy mused, her head bent, pushing away the tiny dogs with her foot as
they fawned upon her.
"Don't bother! you little miseries," she said, "don't bother! I'm busy
now. I've no use for you." Presently she glanced up at Mr. Iglesias,
who held himself proudly, as he stood waiting before her. "Do you care
for these barking people? Is it a question of affection between any of
them and you?"
"I am afraid not," he answered. "Ours has been a purely business
connection throughout. How should it be otherwise? The social interval
between employers and employed is not easily bridged."
"Stuff-a-nonsense!" Poppy put in scornfully. "They might feel honoured
to tie your shoe."
"Any attempt to ignore differences of wealth and station, which others
are pleased to remember, would be unbecoming," he continued. "Nor do I
relish condescension on the part of my social betters. It does not suit
me. I prefer to remain within my own borders. Still, there is the tie
of long association with these merchant princes and their undertakings,
and this, I own, influences me strongly. It would be shocking to me to
witness the failure or ruin of those with whom I have been in daily
intercourse. Then, too, there is a certain challenge in the present
position which appeals to the fighting instinct in me. If not
altogether by nature, still by habit I am a business man. Affairs
interest me, and consequently the more embarrassed and apparently
hopeless the existing state of things is, the greater would be my
satisfaction in mastering the intricacies of it and reducing them to
order. These practical matters are not without very real excitement and
drama to those who have the habit of handling them." Iglesias paused,
and then added quietly, "But I am contented enough as I am, and should
not voluntarily have touched business again had there not been another
consideration over and above those I have enumerated--namely, the plain
obligation of right doing, whether the said doing be congenial to one
or not. This obligation is supreme, or should be so, in the case of one
who, like myself, has bound himself by definite acts of obedience and
self-dedication."
His expression had changed, taking on something of exaltation. He no
longer looked at Poppy, but away to the far horizon and the light
thereon resident.
And the Lady of the Windswept Dust was quick to realise this, though
upon what fair unseen object the eyes of his spirit did, in fact, rest
she was ignorant. Against it the vanity inherent in her womanhood
rebelled. She was piqued and jealous of the unnamed, unknown object
which absorbed his attention more than she herself and her friendship
did. From the first Iglesias had appealed to her very various nature in
a threefold manner. To the artist in her he appealed by the clearness
of his individuality, his finish of person and of feature, his gravity
and poise--these last taking their rise not in insensibility, but in
reasoned will, in passionate emotion held, as she had learned,
austerely in check. He appealed to the motherhood in her by his
unworldliness, by his ignorance of base motives, thus making her
attitude towards him protective; she instinctively trying to stand
between him and a naughty world, to stand, too, between him and her own
too often naughty self. He appealed to the child in her by the exotic
and foreign elements in him, which captivated her fancy, endowing him
with an effect of mystery, making him seem to hail from some region of
legend and high romance. But the events of the last few days had been
far from beneficial to Poppy St. John. They had demoralised her, so
that the artistic, maternal, and childlike aspects of her nature were
alike overlaid by the bitterness, the cynicism, the recklessness
engendered by her unhappy childless marriage and the irregular life she
had led. Poppy's feet were held captive in the quicksands of the things
of sense; her outlook was concrete and gross. Finer instincts lit up
but momentary flickering fires in her, speedily dying out into the
gloom begotten by the deplorable scene of yesterday with her husband,
and shame at the conspiracy of silence into which, as the lesser of the
two evils presented to her, she had entered, remembrances of which, on
his first arrival, had made her feel unworthy and a traitor in the
presence of Iglesias. This demoralisation worked in her to rebellion
against just all that which, in her happier moods, rendered Iglesias
delightful to her. His exaltation, his calm, the mystery which so
delicately surrounded him, the very distinction of his appearance
irritated her, so soon as she became conscious that she was no longer
the sole object of his thoughts. She was pushed by a bad desire to
force from him a more complete self-revelation, to cheapen him in some
way and break him up.
"Dominic Iglesias," she cried suddenly and imperatively, "you are a
trifle too empyrean. I don't quite believe in you. Be more ordinary,
more vulgarly human. For who are you, after all? What are you?" she
said.
And he, his thoughts recalled from a great distance, regarded her
questioningly and as without immediate recognition. Her voice was
harsh, and the transition was so abrupt from the radiant land of the
spirit to the dingy realities of Poppy's drawing-room, her tired,
black, bluey-mauve patterned tea-gown, and her absurdly artificial
little dogs. It took him some few seconds to adjust himself. Then he
smiled in apology, and spoke very courteously and gently.
"Who am I, what am I, dear friend? Why this, I think--a commonplace,
very ordinary person who, long ago, in early childhood, by mournful
accident, for which it would be an impiety to hold those on whom he was
dependent responsible, lost his sight. Through all the years which men
count, and rightly, the best of life--when courage is high and the hand
strong, and opportunity fertile, circumstance as a block of precious
many-coloured marble out of which to carve fine fortune for ourselves
and those we love--he wandered in darkness, insecure of footing,
missing the very end and object for which earthly existence has been
bestowed upon us mortals. He was sad and homesick for that which he had
not; yet ignorant of the nature of his own loss, disposed to blame the
constitution of things, rather than his own incapacity, for that which
he suffered."
"And then?" Poppy put in sharply. Listening, she had started to mock,
the cynic and worldling being hot in her, but, looking at the speaker,
somehow, she dared not mock.
"And then--recently--since I have known you in short, it has pleased
Almighty God by degrees to restore my sight."
Poppy regarded him intently, her singular eyes wide with question and
with doubt, her lips pressed together.
"I see--you have got religion," she said. "But do you seriously mean to
tell me that I--I--have had anything to do with that?"
"Yes," Iglesias answered. "You have had much to do with it. First by
love--for your friendship woke up my heart. Then by sorrow"--he paused,
divided by the desire to spare her and to tell her the whole of his
thought--"sorrow, when I came to know you better and value your
character and gifts at their true worth, because I saw noble things put
to ignoble uses, which of all pitiful sights is perhaps the most
profoundly pitiful."
Silence followed, broken only by minute and reproachful snorings on the
part of Cappadocia and her spouse. The little dogs, sensible of
neglect, had become the victims of wounded self-love, that most
primitive, as it is the most universal, of passions throughout all
grades of living things. Poppy meanwhile turned her head aside, unable
or unwilling to speak. Again she blew her nose with complete disregard
of the unromantic quality of that action, then said huskily:
"I have cleaned the slate. I shall keep it clean." Her voice grew
steadier. A touch of malice came into her expression. "I like
compliments, and you have paid me about the biggest I ever had. It will
take a little time to digest. So I think--I think, dear man, I will not
stand in the way of your going back to the City, and saving the sinking
ship--that is, if the work won't be too hard for you?"
"No," he answered, touched by her more gracious aspect, yet slightly
confused. "I have had nearly a year's holiday and rest; I am quite
equal to work. But I am afraid the hours must necessarily be long, and
that my opportunities of coming to see you will not be very frequent."
"Perhaps that's just as well," she said, "while I am still in process
of digesting the big compliment."
Then impulsively she swept up to him and laid her hands on his
shoulders, looking him full in the face.
"See here, you thrice dear innocent, since you have mentioned that
terrible word 'love,' the complexion of our relation has changed
somewhat. Don't you understand, made as I am, I must fight seven devils
within me if I'm to continue to play fair with you, as I swore I would?
And so, just because you are so very much to me, I had best not see you
too often until I have settled down into my new scheme of life. In a
sense Alaric was a safeguard. That safeguard's gone."
She moved a step back, letting her hands fall at her sides, while her
eye grew hard and dark.
"And there are other reasons, brutal, unworthy, sordid reasons, why it
is wiser that you should not come here often at present. They did not
exist--at least I had not the faintest conception that they did--when
we last met. They have rushed into hateful prominence since. Don't ask
me--I cannot tell you. You must trust me, and you must not let my
silence alienate you. I can't be explicit, but I give you my word I am
perfectly straight. And you must not let your religion alienate you
either. By the way, what form of faith is it?"
"The faith of my own people," Dominic answered. "The faith of the
Catholic Church."
Poppy smiled.
"Then I am not so afraid I shall lose you," she said, "for that's the
only brand of religion I've ever come across which isn't too nice to
reckon with human nature as it really is. It can save sinners, just
because it knows how to make saints--and it has made them out of jolly
unpromising material at times, there's the comfort of it."
She held out her hand in farewell.
"Good-bye till next time. You've done me good, as you always do. Now, I
am going to re-study some of my old parts, just to get the hang of the
whole show again."
But the door once shut, she flung herself down on the broad settee,
while the tiny dogs, whimpering, crowded upon her lap.
"Poppy St. John, you're not such a bad lot after all," she cried. "But
oh! oh! oh! it's beastly rough to be so young, and have gone so far,
and know so much. There, Willie Onions, don't snivel. It's both
superfluous and unpleasant." She sat up and wiped her eyes. "Upon my
honour, I think it was just as well I gave Phillimore the little
revolver last night, to lock up in the plate chest," she said.