She drew back as soon as she saw him, but Stonor had looked round. His
face darkened as he stood there an instant, silently challenging her.
Not a word spoken by either of them, no sound but the faint, muffled
sobbing of the girl, who sat with hidden face. With a look of speechless
anger, the man went out and shut the doors behind him. Not seeing, only
hearing that he had gone, Jean threw her arms out across the table in an
abandonment of grief. The other woman laid on a chair the hat and cloak
that she was carrying. Then she went slowly across the room and stood
silent a moment at Jean's side.
'What is the matter?'
The girl started. Impossible for her to speak in that first moment. But
when she had dried her eyes, she said, with a pathetic childish air--
'I--I've been seeing Geoffrey.'
'Is this the effect "seeing Geoffrey" has?' said the other, with an
attempt at lightness.
'You see, I know now,' Jean explained, with the brave directness that
was characteristic.
The more sophisticated woman presented an aspect totally unenlightened.
'I know how he'--Jean dropped her eyes--'how he spoiled some one else's
life.'
'Who tells you that?' asked Miss Levering.
'Several people have told me.'
'Well, you should be very careful how you believe what you hear.'
'You know it's true!' said the girl, passionately.
'I know that it's possible to be mistaken.'
'I see! You're trying to shield him----'
'Why should I? What is it to me?'
'Oh-h, how you must love him!' she said with tears.
'I? Listen to me,' said Vida, gravely. As she drew up a chair the girl
rose to her feet.
'What's the use--what's the use of your going on denying it?' As she saw
Vida was about to break in, she silenced her with two words, '_Geoffrey
doesn't._' And with that she fled away to the window.
Vida half rose, and then relinquished the idea of following the girl,
seemed presently to forget her, and sat as one alone with sorrow. When
Jean had mastered herself, she came slowly back. Not till she was close
to the motionless figure did the girl lift her eyes.
'Oh, don't look like that,' the girl prayed. 'I shall bring him back to
you.'
She was on her knees by Vida's chair. The fixed abstraction went out of
the older face, but it was very cold as she began--
'You would be impertinent--if--you weren't a romantic child. You can't
bring him back.'
'Yes, yes, he----'
'No. But'--Vida looked deep into the candid eyes--'there is something
you _can_ do----'
'What?'
'Bring him to a point where he recognizes that he is in our debt.'
'In _our_ debt?'
Vida nodded. 'In debt to Women. He can't repay the one he robbed.'
Jean winced at that. The young do not know that nothing but money can
ever be paid back.
'Yes,' she insisted, out of the faith she still had in him, ready to be
his surety. 'Yes, he can. He will.'
The other shook her head. 'No, he can't repay the dead. But there are
the living. There are the thousands with hope still in their hearts and
youth in their blood. Let him help _them_. Let him be a Friend to
Women.'
'I understand!' Jean rose up, wide-eyed. 'Yes, _that_ too.'
The door had opened, and Lady John was coming in with Stonor towering
beside her. When he saw the girl rising from her knees, he turned to
Lady John with a little gesture of, 'What did I tell you?'
The moment Jean caught sight of him, 'Thank you!' she said, while her
aunt was briskly advancing, filling all the room with a pleasant silken
rustling, and a something nameless, that was like clear noonday after
storm-cloud or haunted twilight.
'Well,' she said in a cheerful commonplace tone to Jean; 'you rather
gave us the slip! Vida, I believe Mr. Stonor wants to see you for a few
minutes, but'--she glanced at her watch--'I'd like a word with you
first, as I must get back. Do you think the car'--she turned to
Stonor--'your man said something about recharging----'
'Oh, did he? I'll see about it.' As he went out he brushed past the
butler.
'Mr. Trent has called, miss, to take the lady to the meeting,' said that
functionary.
'Bring Mr. Trent into my sitting-room,' said Jean hastily, and then to
Miss Levering, 'I'll tell him you can't go to-night.'
Lady John stood watching the girl with critical eyes till she had
disappeared into the adjoining room and shut the door behind her. Then--
'I know, my dear'--she spoke almost apologetically--'you're not aware of
what that impulsive child wants to insist on. I feel it an embarrassment
even to tell you.'
'I know.'
'You know?' Lady John waited for condemnation of Jean's idea. She waited
in vain. 'It isn't with your sanction, surely, that she makes this
extraordinary demand?'
'I didn't sanction it at first,' said the other slowly; 'but I've been
thinking it over.'
Lady John's suavity stiffened perceptibly. 'Then all I can say is, I am
greatly disappointed in you. You threw this man over years ago, for
reasons, whatever they were, that seemed to you good and sufficient. And
now you come in between him and a younger woman, just to play Nemesis,
so far as I can make out.'
'Is that what he says?'
'He says nothing that isn't fair and considerate.'
'I can see he's changed.'
'And you're unchanged--is that it?'
'I'm changed even more than he.'
Lady John sat down, with pity and annoyance struggling for the mastery.
'You care about him still?'
'No.'
'No? And yet you--I see! There are obviously certain things he can give
his wife, and you naturally want to marry somebody.'
'Oh, Lady John,' said Vida, wearily, 'there are no men listening.'
'No'--she looked round surprised--'I didn't suppose there were.'
'Then why keep up that old pretence?'
'What pret----'
'That to marry _at all costs_ is every woman's dearest ambition till the
grave closes over her. You and I _know_ it isn't true.'
'Well, but----' Her ladyship blinked, suddenly seeing daylight. 'Oh! It
was just the unexpected sight of him bringing it all back! _That_ was
what fired you this afternoon. Of course'--she made an honest attempt at
sympathetic understanding--'the memory of a thing like that can never
die--can never even be dimmed for the woman.'
'I mean her to think so.'
'Jean?'
Vida nodded.
'But it isn't so?'
Lady John was a little bewildered.
'You don't seriously believe,' said Vida, 'that a woman, with anything
else to think about, comes to the end of ten years still absorbed in a
memory of that sort?'
Lady John stared speechless a moment. 'You've got over it, then?'
'If it weren't for the papers, I shouldn't remember twice a year there
was ever such a person as Geoffrey Stonor in the world.'
'Oh, I'm _so_ glad!' said Lady John, with unconscious rapture.
Vida smiled grimly. 'Yes, I'm glad, too.'
'And if Geoffrey Stonor offered you--er--"reparation," you'd refuse it?'
'Geoffrey Stonor! For me he's simply one of the far back links in a
chain of evidence. It's certain I think a hundred times of other women's
present unhappiness to once that I remember that old unhappiness of mine
that's past. I think of the nail and chain makers of Cradley Heath, the
sweated girls of the slums; I think,' her voice fell, 'of the army of
ill-used women, whose very existence I mustn't mention----'
Lady John interrupted her hurriedly. 'Then why in heaven's name do you
let poor Jean imagine----'
Vida suddenly bent forward. 'Look--I'll trust you, Lady John. I don't
suffer from that old wrong as Jean thinks I do, but I shall coin her
sympathy into gold for a greater cause than mine.'
'I don't understand you.'
'Jean isn't old enough to be able to care as much about a principle as
about a person. But if my old half-forgotten pain can turn her
generosity into the common treasury----'
'What do you propose she shall do, poor child?'
'Use her hold over Geoffrey Stonor to make him help us.'
'To help you?'
'The man who served one woman--God knows how many more--very ill, shall
serve hundreds of thousands well. Geoffrey Stonor shall make it harder
for his son, harder still for his grandson, to treat any woman as he
treated me.'
'How will he do that?' said the lady coldly.
'By putting an end to the helplessness of women.'
'You must think he has a great deal of power,' said her ladyship, with
some irony.
'Power? Yes,' answered the other, 'men have too much over penniless and
frightened women.'
'What nonsense! You talk as though the women hadn't their share of human
nature. _We_ aren't made of ice any more than the men.'
'No, but we have more self-control.'
'Than men?'
Vida had risen. She looked down at her friend. 'You know we have,' she
said.
'I know,' said Lady John shrewdly, 'we mustn't admit it.'
'For fear they'd call us fishes?'
Lady John had been frankly shocked at the previous plain speaking, but
she found herself stimulated to show in this moment of privacy that even
she had not travelled her sheltered way through the world altogether in
blinkers.
'They talk of our lack of self-control, but,' she admitted, 'it's the
last thing men _want_ women to have.'
'Oh, we know what they want us to have! So we make shift to have it. If
we don't, we go without hope--sometimes we go without bread.'
'Vida! Do you mean to say that you----'
'I mean to say that men's vanity won't let them see it, but the thing's
largely a question of economics.'
'You _never_ loved him, then!'
'Yes, I loved him--once. It was my helplessness that turned the best
thing life can bring into a curse for both of us.'
'I don't understand you----'
'Oh, being "understood"! that's too much to expect. I make myself no
illusions. When people come to know that I've joined the Women's
Union----'
'But you won't'
'----who is there who will resist the temptation to say "Poor Vida
Levering! What a pity she hasn't got a husband and a baby to keep her
quiet"? The few who know about me, they'll be equally sure that, not the
larger view of life I've gained, but my own poor little story, is
responsible for my new departure.' She leaned forward and looked into
Lady John's face. 'My best friend, she will be surest of all, that it's
a private sense of loss, or lower yet, a grudge, that's responsible for
my attitude. I tell you the only difference between me and thousands of
women with husbands and babies is that I am free to say what I think.
_They aren't!_'
Lady John opened her lips and then closed them firmly. After all, why
pursue the matter? She had got the information she had come for.
'I must hurry back;' she rose, murmuring, 'my poor ill-used guests----'
Vida stood there quiet, a little cold. 'I won't ring,' she said. 'I
think you'll find Mr. Stonor downstairs waiting for you.'
'Oh--a--he will have left word about the car in any case.'
Lady John's embarrassment was not so much at seeing that her friend had
divined the gist of the arrangement that had been effected downstairs.
It was that Vida should be at no pains to throw a decent veil over the
fact of her realization that Lady John had come there in the character
of scout. With an openness not wholly free from scorn, the younger woman
had laid her own cards on the table. She made no scruple at turning her
back on Lady John's somewhat incoherent evasion. Ignoring it she crossed
the room and opened the door for her.
Jean was in the corridor saying good-bye to the chairman of the
afternoon.
'Well, Mr. Trent,' said Miss Levering in even tones, 'I didn't expect to
see you this evening.'
He came forward and stood in the doorway. 'Why not? Have I ever failed?'
'Lady John,' said Vida, turning, 'this is one of our allies. He is good
enough to squire me through the rabble from time to time.'
'Well,' said Lady John, advancing quite graciously, 'I think it's very
handsome of you after what she said to-day about men.'
'I've no great opinion of most men myself,' said the young gentleman. 'I
might add, or of most women.'
'Oh!' Lady John laughed. 'At any rate I shall go away relieved to think
that Miss Levering's plain speaking hasn't alienated _all_ masculine
regard.'
'Why should it?' he said.
'That's right.' Lady John metaphorically patted him on the back. 'Don't
believe all she says in the heat of propaganda.'
'I _do_ believe all she says. But I'm not cast down.'
'Not when she says----'
'Was there never,' he made bold to interrupt, 'a misogynist of _my_ sex
who ended by deciding to make an exception?'
'Oh!' Lady John smiled significantly; 'if _that's_ what you build on!'
'Why,' he demanded with an effort to convey 'pure logic,' 'why shouldn't
a man-hater on your side prove equally open to reason?'
'That aspect of the question has become irrelevant so far as I'm
personally concerned,' said Vida, exasperated by Lady John's look of
pleased significance. 'I've got to a place where I realize that the
first battles of this new campaign must be fought by women alone. The
only effective help men could give--amendment of the law--they refuse.
The rest is nothing.'
'Don't be ungrateful, Vida. Here is this gentleman ready to face
criticism in publicly championing you----'
'Yes, but it's an illusion that I, as an individual, need a champion. I
am quite safe in the crowd. Please don't wait for me and don't come for
me again.'
The sensitive dark face flushed. 'Of course if you'd rather----'
'And that reminds me,' she went on, unfairly punishing poor Mr. Trent
for Lady John's meaning looks, 'I was asked to thank you, and to tell
you, too, that they won't need your chairmanship any more--though that,
I beg you to believe, has nothing to do with any feeling of mine.'
He was hurt and he showed it. 'Of course I know there must be other men
ready--better known men----'
'It isn't that. It's simply that we find a man can't keep a rowdy
meeting in order as well as a woman.'
He stared.
'You aren't serious?' said Lady John.
'Haven't you noticed,' Miss Levering put it to Trent, 'that all our
worst disturbances come when men are in charge?'
'Ha! ha! Well--a--I hadn't connected the two ideas.'
Still laughing a little ruefully, he suffered himself to be taken
downstairs by kind little Miss Dunbarton, who had stood without a word
waiting there with absent face.
'That nice boy's in love with you,' said Lady John, _sotto voce_.
Vida looked at her without answering.
'Good-bye.' They shook hands. 'I _wish_ you hadn't been so unkind to
that nice boy.'
'Do you?'
'Yes; for then I would be more sure of your telling Geoffrey Stonor that
intelligent women don't nurse their wrongs indefinitely, and lie in wait
to punish them.'
'You are _not_ sure?'
Lady John went up close and looked into her face with searching anxiety.
'Are _you_?' she asked.
Vida stood there mute, with eyes on the ground. Lady John glanced
nervously at her watch, and, with a gesture of perturbation, hurriedly
left the room. The other went slowly back to her place by the table.
* * * * *
The look she bent on Stonor as he came in seemed to take no account of
those hurried glimpses at the Tunbridges' months before, and twice
to-day when other eyes were watching. It was as if now, for the first
time since they parted, he stood forth clearly. This man with the
changed face, coming in at the door and carefully shutting it--he had
once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day,
beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that
was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less
complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at
least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the
uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for
lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened
fastidiousness--mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the
woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple,
and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is
something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the
part of one who once had been so near--something that lames advance and
hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high
look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if
the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand
on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate
things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the
need of justifying their presence and defending their value.
As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching
him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the
past grew plainer.
However ludicrous the result may look in the last analysis, it is clear
that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the
individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any
mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to
dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded
on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has
governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching to
their graves.
But the shining superiority of the man seemed to be a little dimmed for
the woman sitting there. The old face and the new face, she saw them
both through a cloud of long-past memories and a mist of present tears.
'Well, have they primed you?' she said very low. 'Have you got your
lesson--by heart at last?'
He looked at her from immeasurable distance. 'I am not sure that I
understand you,' he said. He waited an instant, then, seeing no
explanation vouchsafed, 'However unpropitious your mood may be,' he went
on with a satirical edge in his tone, 'I shall discharge my errand.'
Still she waited.
Her silence seemed to irritate him. 'I have promised,' he said, with a
formality that smacked of insolence, 'to offer you what I believe is
called "amends."'
The quick change in the brooding look should have warned him.
'You have come to realize, then--after all these years--that you owed me
something?'
He checked himself on the brink of protest. 'I am not here to deny it.'
'Pay, then,' she said fiercely--'pay.'
A moment's dread flickered in his eye and then was gone. 'I have said
that, if you exact it, I will.'
'Ah! If I insist, you'll "make it all good"! Then, don't you know, you
must pay me in kind?'
He looked down upon her--a long, long way. 'What do you mean?'
'Give me back what you took from me--my old faith,' she said, with
shaking voice. 'Give me that.'
'Oh, if you mean to make phrases----' He half turned away, but the swift
words overtook him.
'Or, give me back mere kindness--or even tolerance! Oh, I don't mean
_your_ tolerance.' She was on her feet to meet his eyes as he faced her
again. 'Give me back the power to think fairly of my brothers--not as
mockers--thieves.'
'I have not mocked you. And I have asked you----'
'Something you knew I should refuse. Or'--her eyes blazed--'or did you
dare to be afraid I wouldn't?'
'Oh, I suppose'--he buttressed his good faith with bitterness--'I
suppose if we set our teeth we could----'
'I couldn't--not even if I set my teeth. And you wouldn't dream of
asking me if you thought there was the smallest chance.'
Ever so faintly he raised his heavy shoulders. 'I can do no more than
make you an offer of such reparation as is in my power. If you don't
accept it----' He turned away with an air of '_that's_ done.'
But her emotion had swept her out of her course. She found herself at
his side.
'Accept it? No! Go away and live in debt. Pay and pay and pay--and find
yourself still in debt--for a thing you'll never be able to give me
back. And when you come to die'--her voice fell--'say to yourself, "I
paid all my creditors but one."'
He stopped on his way to the door and faced her again. 'I'm rather
tired, you know, of this talk of debt. If I hear that you persist in it,
I shall have to----' Again he checked himself.
'What?'
'No. I'll keep to my resolution.'
He had nearly reached the threshold. She saw what she had lost by her
momentary lack of that boasted self-control. She forestalled him at the
door.
'What resolution?' she asked.
He looked down at her an instant, clothed from head to foot in that
indefinable armour of unapproachableness. This was a man who asked other
people questions, himself ill-accustomed to be catechised. If he replied
it was a grace.
'I came here,' he said, 'under considerable pressure, to speak of the
future. Not to reopen the past.'
'The future and the past are one,' said the woman at the door.
'You talk as if that old madness was mine alone; it is the woman's way.'
'I know,' she agreed, to his obvious surprise, 'and it's not fair. Men
suffer as well as we by the woman's starting wrong. We are taught to
think the man a sort of demi-god. If he tells her, "Go down into hell,"
down into hell she goes.'
He would not have been human had he not resented that harsh summary of
those days that lay behind.
'Make no mistake,' he said. 'Not the woman alone. _They go down
together._'
'Yes, they go down together. But the man comes up alone. As a rule. It
is more convenient so--_for him_. And even for the other woman.'
Both pairs of eyes went to Jean's door.
'My conscience is clear,' he said angrily. 'I know--and so do you--that
most men in my position wouldn't have troubled themselves. I gave myself
endless trouble.'
She looked at him with wondering eyes. 'So you've gone about all these
years feeling that you'd discharged every obligation?'
'Not only that. I stood by you with a fidelity that was nothing short of
Quixotic. If, woman-like, you _must_ recall the past, I insist on your
recalling it correctly.'
'You think I don't recall it correctly?' she said very low.
'Not when you make--other people believe that I deserted you!' The
gathering volume of his righteous wrath swept the cool precision out of
his voice. 'It's a curious enough charge,' he said, 'when you stop to
consider----' Again he checked himself, and, with a gesture of
impatience, was for sweeping the whole thing out of his way, including
that figure at the door.
But she stood there. 'Well, when we do just for five minutes out of ten
years--when we do stop to consider----'
'We remember it was _you_ who did the deserting. And since you had to
rake the story up, you might have had the fairness to tell the facts.'
'You think "the facts" would have excused you?'
It was a new view. She left the door, and sat down in the nearest chair.
'No doubt you've forgotten the facts, since Lady John tells me you
wouldn't remember my existence once a year, if the papers didn't----'
'Ah!' she interrupted, with a sorry little smile, 'you minded that!'
'I mind your giving false impressions,' he said with spirit. As she was
about to speak he advanced upon her. 'Do you deny'--he bent over her,
and told off those three words by striking one clenched fist into the
palm of the other hand--'do you deny that you returned my letters
unopened?'
'No,' she said.
'Do you deny that you refused to see me, and that when I persisted you
vanished?'
'I don't deny any of those things.'
'Why'--he stood up straight again, and his shoulders grew more square
with justification--'why I had no trace of you for years.'
'I suppose not.'
'Very well, then.' He walked away. 'What could I do?'
'Nothing. It was too late to do anything.'
'It wasn't too late! You knew, since you "read the papers," that my
father died that same year. There was no longer any barrier between us.'
'Oh, yes, there was a barrier.'
'Of your own making, then.'
'I had my guilty share in it, but the barrier'--her voice trembled on
the word--'the barrier was your invention.'
'The only barrier I knew of was no "invention." If you had ever known my
father----'
'Oh, the echoes! the echoes!' She lay back in the chair. 'How often you
used to say, if I "knew your father." But you said, too'--her voice
sank--'you called the greatest "barrier" by another name.'
'What name?'
So low that even he could hardly hear she answered, 'The child that was
to come.'
'That was before my father died,' Stonor returned hastily, 'while I
still hoped to get his consent.'
She nodded, and her eyes were set like wide doors for memory to enter
in.
'How the thought of that all-powerful personage used to terrorize me!
What chance had a little unborn child against "the last of the great
feudal lords," as you called him?'
'You _know_ the child would have stood between you and me.'
'I know the child did stand between you and me.'
He stared at her. With vague uneasiness he repeated, '_Did_ stand----'
She seemed not to hear. The tears were running down her rigid face.
'Happy mothers teach their children. Mine had to teach me----'
'You talk as if----'
'----teach me that a woman may do that for love's sake that shall kill
love.'
Neither spoke for some seconds. Fearing and putting from him fuller
comprehension, he broke the silence, saying with an air of finality--
'You certainly made it plain you had no love left for me.'
'I had need of it all for the child.' Her voice had a curious crooning
note in it.
He came closer. He bent down to put the low question, 'Do you mean,
then, that after all--it lived?'
'No. I mean that it was sacrificed. But it showed me no barrier is so
impassable as the one a little child can raise.'
It was as if lightning had flashed across the old picture. He drew back
from the fierce illumination.
'Was _that_ why you----' he began, in a voice that was almost a whisper.
'Was that why?'
She nodded, speechless a moment for tears. 'Day and night there it was
between my thought of you and me.'
He sat down, staring at her.
'When I was most unhappy,' she went on, in that low voice, 'I would wake
thinking I heard it cry. It was my own crying I heard, but I seemed to
have it in my arms. I suppose I was mad. I used to lie there in that
lonely farmhouse pretending to hush it. It was so I hushed myself.'
'I never knew----'
'I didn't blame you. You couldn't risk being with me.'
'You agreed that, for both our sakes----'
'Yes, you had to be very circumspect. You were so well known. Your
autocratic father, your brilliant political future----'
'Be fair. Our future--as I saw it then.'
'Yes, everything hung on concealment. It must have looked quite simple
to you. You didn't know the ghost of a child that had never seen the
light, the frail thing you meant to sweep aside and forget'--she was on
her feet--'_have_ swept aside and forgotten!--you didn't know it was
strong enough to push you out of my life.' With an added intensity, 'It
can do more!' she said. She leaned over his bowed figure and whispered,
'It can push that girl out!' As again she stood erect, half to herself
she added, 'It can do more still.'
'Are you threatening me?' he said dully.
'No, I am preparing you.'
'For what?'
'For the work that must be done. Either with your help or that girl's.'
The man's eyes lifted a moment.
'One of two things,' she said--'either her life, and all she has, given
to this new Service; or a ransom if I give her up to you.'
'I see. A price. Well----?'
She looked searchingly at him for an instant, and then slowly shook her
head.
'Even if I could trust you to pay the price,' she said, 'I'm not sure
but what a young and ardent soul as faithful and as pure as hers--I'm
not sure but I should make a poor bargain for my sex to give that up for
anything you could do.'
He found his feet like a man roused out of an evil dream to some reality
darker than the dream. 'In spite of your assumption, she may not be your
tool,' he said.
'You are horribly afraid she is! But you are wrong. She's an instrument
in stronger hands than mine. Soon my little personal influence over her
will be merged in something infinitely greater. Oh, don't think it's
merely I that have got hold of Jean Dunbarton.'
'Who else?'
'The New Spirit that's abroad.'
With an exclamation he turned away. And though his look branded the idea
for a wild absurdity, sentinel-like he began to pace up and down a few
yards from Jean's door.
'How else,' said the woman, 'should that inexperienced girl have felt
the new loyalty and responded as she did?'
'"New," indeed!' he said under his breath, 'however little "loyal."'
'Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit
up the world. It had been there since the world began--waiting to do
away with the dark. _So has the thing you're fighting._'
'The thing I'm fighting'--and the violence with which he spoke was only
in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register--'the
thing I'm fighting is nothing more than one person's hold upon a highly
sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope'--he
made a gesture of impotence.
'It only remains for me to show her that your true motive is revenge.'
'Once say that to her, and you are lost.'
He stole an uneasy look at the woman out of a face that had grown
haggard.
'If you were fighting for that girl only against me, you'd win,' she
said. 'It isn't so--and you will fail. The influence that has hold of
her is in the very air. No soul knows where it comes from, except that
it comes from the higher sources of civilization.'
'I see the origin of it before my eyes!'
'As little as you see the beginnings of life. This is like the other
mysterious forces of Mother Earth. No warning given--no sign. A night
wind passes over the brown land, and in the morning the fields are
green.'
His look was the look of one who sees happiness slipping away. 'Or it
passes over gardens like a frost,' he said, 'and the flowers die.'
'I know that is what men fear. It even seems as if it must be through
fear that your enlightenment will come. The strangest things make you
men afraid! That's why I see a value in Jean Dunbarton far beyond her
fortune.'
He looked at her dully.
'More than any other girl I know--if I keep her from you, that gentle,
inflexible creature could rouse in men the old half-superstitious
fear----'
'Fear! Are you mad?'
'Mad!' she echoed. 'Unsexed'--those are the words to-day. In the Middle
Ages men cried out 'Witch!' and burnt her--the woman who served no man's
bed or board.
'You want to make the poor child believe----'
'She sees for herself we've come to a place where we find there's a
value in women apart from the value men see in them. You teach us not to
look to you for some of the things we need most. If women must be freed
by women, we have need of such as----' Her eyes went to the door that
Stonor still had an air of guarding. 'Who knows--she may be the new Joan
of Arc.'
He paused, and for that moment he seemed as bankrupt in denunciation as
he was in hope. This personal application of the new heresy found him
merely aghast, with no words but 'That _she_ should be the sacrifice!'
'You have taught us to look very calmly on the sacrifice of women,' was
the ruthless answer. 'Men tell us in every tongue, it's "a necessary
evil."'
He stood still a moment, staring at the ground.
'One girl's happiness--against a thing nobler than happiness for
thousands--who can hesitate? _Not Jean._'
'Good God! can't you see that this crazed campaign you'd start her
on--even if it's successful, it can only be so through the help of men?
What excuse shall you make your own soul for not going straight to the
goal?'
'You think we wouldn't be glad,' she said, 'to go straight to the goal?'
'I do. I see you'd much rather punish me and see her revel in a morbid
self-sacrifice.'
'You say I want to punish you only because, like other men, you won't
take the trouble to understand what we do want--or how determined we are
to have it. You can't kill this New Spirit among women.' She went
nearer. 'And you couldn't make a greater mistake than to think it finds
a home only in the exceptional or the unhappy. It is so strange to see a
man like you as much deluded as the Hyde Park loafers, who say to
Ernestine Blunt, "Who's hurt _your_ feelings?" Why not realize'--she
came still closer, if she had put out her hand she would have touched
him--'this is a thing that goes deeper than personal experience? And
yet,' she said in a voice so hushed that it was full of a sense of the
girl on the other side of the door, 'if you take only the narrowest
personal view, a good deal depends on what you and I agree upon in the
next five minutes.'
'You recommend my realizing the larger issues. But in your ambition to
attach that poor girl to the chariot-wheels of Progress'--his voice put
the drag of ironic pomposity upon the phrase--'you quite ignore the fact
that people fitter for such work, the men you look to enlist in the end,
are ready waiting'--he pulled himself up in time for an anti-climax--'to
give the thing a chance.'
'Men are ready! What men?'
His eyes evaded hers. He picked his words. 'Women have themselves to
blame that the question has grown so delicate that responsible people
shrink for the moment from being implicated in it.'
'We have seen the shrinking.'
'Without quoting any one else, I might point out that the New Antagonism
seems to have blinded you to the small fact that I for one am not an
opponent.'
'The phrase has a familiar ring. We have heard it four hundred and
twenty times.'
His eyes were shining with anger. 'I spoke, if I may say so, of some one
who would count. Some one who can carry his party along with him--or
risk a seat in the cabinet over the issue.'
'Did you mean you are "ready" to do that?' she exclaimed.
'An hour ago I was.'
'Ah! an hour ago!'
'Exactly! You don't understand men. They can be led; they can't be
driven. Ten minutes before you came into the room I was ready to say I
would throw in my political lot with this Reform.'
'And now?'
'Now you block my way by an attempt at coercion. By forcing my hand you
give my adherence an air of bargain-driving for a personal end. Exactly
the mistake of the ignorant agitators in Trafalgar Square. You have a
great deal to learn. This movement will go forward, not because of the
agitation outside, but in spite of it. There are men in Parliament who
would have been actively serving the Reform to-day--as actively as so
vast a constitutional change----'
She smiled faintly. 'And they haven't done it because----'
'Because it would have put a premium on breaches of decent behaviour and
defiance of the law!'
She looked at him with an attempt to appear to accept this version. What
did it matter what reasons were given for past failure, if only the
future might be assured? He had taken a piece of crumpled paper from his
pocket and smoothed it out.
'Look here!' He held the telegram before her.
She flushed with excitement as she read. 'This is very good. I see only
one objection.'
'Objection!'
'You haven't sent it.'
'That is your fault.' And he looked as if he thought he spoke the truth.
'When did you write this?'
'Just before you came in--when she began to talk about----'
'Ah, Jean!' Vida gave him back the paper. 'That must have pleased Jean.'
It was a master stroke, the casual giving back, and the invocation of a
pleasure that had been strangled at the birth along with something
greater. Did he see before him again the girl's tear-filled, hopeless
eyes, that had not so much as read the wonderful message, too intent
upon the death-warrant of their common happiness? He threw himself
heavily into a chair, staring at the closed door. Behind it, in a prison
of which this woman held the key, Jean waited for her life sentence.
Stonor's look, his attitude, seemed to say that he too only waited now
to hear it. He dropped his head in his hand.
When Vida spoke, it was without raising her eyes from the ground.
'I could drive a hard-and-fast bargain with you; but I think I won't. If
love and ambition both urge you on, perhaps----' She looked up a little
defiantly, seeming to expect to meet triumph in his face. Instead, her
eye took in the profound hopelessness of the bent head, the slackness of
the big frame, that so suddenly had assumed a look of age. She went over
to him silently, and stood by his side. 'After all,' she said, 'life
hasn't been quite fair to you.' At the new thing in her voice he raised
his heavy eyes. 'You fall out of one ardent woman's dreams into
another's,' she said.
'Then you don't--after all, you don't mean to----'
'To keep you and her apart? No.'
For the first time tears came into his eyes.
After a little silence he held out his hand. 'What can I do for you?'
She seemed not to see the hand he offered. Or did she only see that it
was empty? She was looking at the other. Mere instinct made him close
his left hand more firmly on the message.
It was as if something finer than her slim fingers, the woman's
invisible antennae, felt the force that would need be overcome if trial
of strength should be precipitated then. Upon his 'What can I do?' she
shook her head.
'For the real you,' he said. 'Not the Reformer, or the would-be
politician--for the woman I so unwillingly hurt.' As she only turned
away, he stood up, detaining her with a hold upon her arm. 'You may not
believe it, but now that I understand, there is almost nothing I
wouldn't do to right that old wrong.'
'There's nothing to be done,' she said; and then, shrinking under that
look of almost cheerful benevolence, 'You can never give me back my
child.'
More than at the words, at the anguish in her face, his own had changed.
'Will that ghost give you no rest?' he said.
'Yes, oh, yes.' She was calm again. 'I see life is nobler than I knew.
There is work to do.'
On her way to the great folding doors, once again he stopped her.
'Why should you think that it's only you these ten years have taught
something to? Why not give even a man credit for a willingness to learn
something of life, and for being sorry--profoundly sorry--for the pain
his instruction has cost others? You seem to think I've taken it all
quite lightly. That's not fair. All my life, ever since you disappeared,
the thought of you has hurt. I would give anything I possess to know
you--were happy again.'
'Oh, happiness!'
'Why shouldn't you find it still?'
He said it with a significance that made her stare, and then?--
'I see! she couldn't help telling you about Allen Trent--Lady John
couldn't!'
He ignored the interpretation.
'You're one of the people the years have not taken from, but given more
to. You are more than ever----You haven't lost your beauty.'
'The gods saw it was so little effectual, it wasn't worth taking away.'
She stood staring out into the void. 'One woman's mishap--what is that?
A thing as trivial to the great world as it's sordid in most eyes. But
the time has come when a woman may look about her and say, What general
significance has my secret pain? Does it "join on" to anything? And I
find it _does_. I'm no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the
way.' With difficulty she controlled the shake in her voice. 'I'm one
who has got up bruised and bleeding, wiped the dust from her hands and
the tears from her face--and said to herself not merely: Here's one
luckless woman! but--here is a stone of stumbling to many. Let's see if
it can't be moved out of other women's way. And she calls people to come
and help. No mortal man, let alone a woman, _by herself_, can move that
rock of offence. But,' she ended with a sudden sombre flare of
enthusiasm, 'if _many_ help, Geoffrey, the thing can be done.'
He looked down on her from his height with a wondering pity.
'Lord! how you care!' he said, while the mist deepened before his eyes.
'Don't be so sad,' she said--not seeming to see his sadness was not for
himself. It was as if she could not turn her back on him this last time
without leaving him comforted. 'Shall I tell you a secret? Jean's ardent
dreams needn't frighten you, if she has a child. _That_--from the
beginning it was not the strong arm--it was the weakest, the little,
little arms that subdued the fiercest of us.'
He held out a shaking hand, so uncertain, that it might have been
begging pity, or it might have been bestowing it. Even then she did not
take it, but a great gentleness was in her face as she said--
'You will have other children, Geoffrey; for me there was to be only
one. Well, well,' she brushed the tears away, 'since men have tried, and
failed to make a decent world for the little children to live in, it's
as well some of us are childless. Yes,' she said quietly, taking up the
hat and cloak, '_we_ are the ones who have no excuse for standing aloof
from the fight!'
Her hand was on the door.
'Vida!'
'What?'
'You forgot something.'
She looked back.
He was signing the message. '_This_,' he said.
She went out with the paper in her hand.
* * * * *
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Transcriber's note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Obvious
typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the
like) have been corrected. Corrections [in brackets] in the
text are noted below:
page 7: hyphen removed
about that long'--he measured less than an inch on his minute
fore-finger[hyphen removed]--'with long holes through so they
page 9: typographical error corrected
refusal to let attenion[attention] go was mitigated by something
in the quietness,
page 17: hyphen removed
'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eye-glass.[hyphen removed]
page 36: hyphen added
kept watching with a kind of half-absent-[hyphen added]minded scorn
page 102: quotation typographical error corrected
Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading."[']
page 105: quotation typographical error corrected
next monster petition to Parliament asking for Woman's Suffrage."[']
page 110: typographical error corrected
the vivid scarlet lips; almost spleepy[sleepy] the heavy-lidded eyes.
page 125: quotation typographical error corrected
Those of you who want to see women free, hold up your hands."[']
page 248: typographical error corrected
'We got a gryte deal to do with our wgyes[wyges], we women has.
page 250: quotation typographical error corrected
'Why didn't you stay where I left you?"['] he answered, without
page 252: added single quotation mark
a rich chuckle. 'She's a educatin' of us![']
page 258: added double quotation mark
"Look at this big crowd. W'y, we're all _men_! If the
women want the vote, w'y ain't they here to s'y so?["] Well,
I'll tell you w'y. It's because they've 'ad to get
page 260: typographical error corrected
in a turtle-esque fashion highty[highly] provocative,
page 265: quotation typographical error corrected
whose crime is, they ask for the vote?'["] But try as I would,
page 292: typographical error corrected
Stonor as he came in seemed to take no acccount[account] of those
page 299: typographical error corrected
for that moment he semed[seemed] as bankrupt in denunciation