All this was as pleasant a manner of passing the time as any other, for
it didn't prevent his old-world corner from closing round him more
entirely, nor stand in the way of his making out from day to day some
new source as well as some new effect of its virtue. He was really
scared at moments at some of the liberties he took in talk--at finding
himself so familiar; for the great note of the place was just that a
certain modern ease had never crossed its threshold, that quick
intimacies and quick oblivions were a stranger to its air. It had known
in all its days no rude, no loud invasion. Serenely unconscious of most
contemporary things, it had been so of nothing so much as of the
diffused social practice of running in and out. Granger held his breath
on occasions to think how Addie would run. There were moments when, more
than at others, for some reason, he heard her step on the staircase and
her cry in the hall. If he nevertheless played freely with the idea with
which we have shown him as occupied it wasn't that in all palpable ways
he didn't sacrifice so far as mortally possible to stillness. He only
hovered, ever so lightly, to take up again his thread. She wouldn't hear
of his leaving her, of his being in the least fit again, as she said, to
travel. She spoke of the journey to London--which was in fact a matter
of many hours--as an experiment fraught with lurking complications. He
added then day to day, yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving other
complications a larger chance to multiply. He kept it before her, when
there was nothing else to do, that she must consider; after which he had
his times of fear that she perhaps really would make for him this
sacrifice.
He knew she had written again to Paris, and knew he must himself again
write--a situation abounding for each in the elements of a plight. If he
stayed so long why then he wasn't better, and if he wasn't better Addie
might take it into her head--! They must make it clear that he WAS
better, so that, suspicious, alarmed at what was kept from her, she
shouldn't suddenly present herself to nurse him. If he was better,
however, why did he stay so long? If he stayed only for the attraction
the sense of the attraction might be contagious. This was what finally
grew clearest for him, so that he had for his mild disciple hours of
still sharper prophecy. It consorted with his fancy to represent to her
that their young friend had been by this time unsparingly warned; but
nothing could be plainer than that this was ineffectual so long as he
himself resisted the ordeal. To plead that he remained because he was
too weak to move was only to throw themselves back on the other horn of
their dilemma. If he was too weak to move Addie would bring him her
strength--of which, when she got there, she would give them specimens
enough. One morning he broke out at breakfast with an intimate
conviction. They'd see that she was actually starting--they'd receive a
wire by noon. They didn't receive it, but by his theory the portent was
only the stronger. It had moreover its grave as well as its gay side,
since Granger's paradox and pleasantry were only the method most open to
him of conveying what he felt. He literally heard the knell sound, and
in expressing this to Miss Wenham with the conversational freedom that
seemed best to pay his way he the more vividly faced the contingency. He
could never return, and though he announced it with a despair that did
what might be to make it pass as a joke, he saw how, whether or no she
at last understood, she quite at last believed him. On this, to his
knowledge, she wrote again to Addie, and the contents of her letter
excited his curiosity. But that sentiment, though not assuaged, quite
dropped when, the day after, in the evening, she let him know she had
had a telegram an hour before.
"She comes Thursday."
He showed not the least surprise. It was the deep calm of the fatalist.
It HAD to be. "I must leave you then to-morrow."
She looked, on this, as he had never seen her; it would have been hard
to say whether what showed in her face was the last failure to follow or
the first effort to meet. "And really not to come back?"
"Never, never, dear lady. Why should I come back? You can never be again
what you HAVE been. I shall have seen the last of you."
"Oh!" she touchingly urged.
"Yes, for I should next find you simply brought to self-consciousness.
You'll be exactly what you are, I charitably admit--nothing more or
less, nothing different. But you'll be it all in a different way. We
live in an age of prodigious machinery, all organised to a single end.
That end is publicity--a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a
cannibal. The thing therefore is not to have any illusions--fondly to
flatter yourself in a muddled moment that the cannibal will spare you.
He spares nobody. He spares nothing. It will be all right. You'll have a
lovely time. You'll be only just a public character--blown about the
world 'for all you're worth,' and proclaimed 'for all you're worth' on
the house-tops. It will be for THAT, mind, I quite recognise--because
Addie is superior--as well as for all you aren't. So good-bye."
He remained however till the next day, and noted at intervals the
different stages of their friend's journey; the hour, this time, she
would really have started, the hour she'd reach Dover, the hour she'd
get to town, where she'd alight at Mrs. Dunn's. Perhaps she'd bring Mrs.
Dunn, for Mrs. Dunn would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow,
as if in anticipation of this stillness settled between them: he became
as silent as his hostess. But before he went she brought out shyly and
anxiously, as an appeal, the question that for hours had clearly been
giving her thought. "Do you meet her then to-night in London?"
"Dear no. In what position am I, alas! to do that? When can I EVER meet
her again?" He had turned it all over. "If I could meet Addie after
this, you know, I could meet YOU. And if I do meet Addie," he lucidly
pursued, "what will happen by the same stroke is that I SHALL meet you.
And that's just what I've explained to you I dread."
"You mean she and I will be inseparable?"
He hesitated. "I mean she'll tell me all about you. I can hear her and
her ravings now."
She gave again--and it was infinitely sad--her little whinnying laugh.
"Oh but if what you say is true you'll know."
"Ah but Addie won't! Won't, I mean, know that _I_ know--or at least
won't believe it. Won't believe that any one knows. Such," he added with
a strange smothered sigh, "is Addie. Do you know," he wound up, "that
what, after all, has most definitely happened is that you've made me see
her as I've never done before?"
She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired. "Oh no, it will be
YOU. I've had nothing to do with it. Everything's all you!"
But for all it mattered now! "You'll see," he said, "that she's
charming. I shall go for to-night to Oxford. I shall almost cross her on
the way."
"Then if she's charming what am I to tell her from you in explanation of
such strange behaviour as your flying away just as she arrives?"
"Ah you needn't mind about that--you needn't tell her anything."
She fixed him as if as never again. "It's none of my business, of course
I feel; but isn't it a little cruel if you're engaged?"
Granger gave a laugh almost as odd as one of her own. "Oh you've cost me
that!"--and he put out his hand to her.
She wondered while she took it. "Cost you--?"
"We're not engaged. Good-bye."
MRS. MEDWIN
CHAPTER I
"Well, we ARE a pair!" the poor lady's visitor broke out to her at the
end of her explanation in a manner disconcerting enough. The poor lady
was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley Street, where she had an
"upper half" so concise that it had to pass boldly for convenient; and
her visitor was her half-brother, whom she hadn't seen for three years.
She was remarkable for a maturity of which every symptom might have been
observed to be admirably controlled, had not a tendency to stoutness
just affirmed its independence. Her present, no doubt, insisted too much
on her past, but with the excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must
certainly once have been prettier. She was clearly not contented with
once--she wished to be prettier again. She neglected nothing that could
produce that illusion, and, being both fair and fat, dressed almost
wholly in black. When she added a little colour it was not, at any rate,
to her drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity that everything they
contained appeared to testify with vividness to her position in society,
quite as if they had been furnished by the bounty of admiring friends.
They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with objects that nobody
buys, as had more than once been remarked by spectators of her own sex,
for herself, and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in
photographic portraits slashed across with signatures, in baskets of
flowers beribboned with the cards of passing compatriots, and in a neat
collection of red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to
London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to addresses and engagements. To
be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing-room, in short, even with Miss Cutter
alone--should you by any chance have found her so--was somehow to be in
the world and in a crowd. It was like an agency--it bristled with
particulars.
This was what the tall lean loose gentleman lounging there before her
might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene over which, while
she talked to him, his eyes moved without haste and without rest. "Oh
come, Mamie!" he occasionally threw off; and the words were evidently
connected with the impression thus absorbed. His comparative youth spoke
of waste even as her positive--her too positive--spoke of economy. There
was only one thing, that is, to make up in him for everything he had
lost, though it was distinct enough indeed that this thing might
sometimes serve. It consisted in the perfection of an indifference, an
indifference at the present moment directed to the plea--a plea of
inability, of pure destitution--with which his sister had met him. Yet
it had even now a wider embrace, took in quite sufficiently all
consequences of queerness, confessed in advance to the false note that,
in such a setting, he almost excruciatingly constituted. He cared as
little that he looked at moments all his impudence as that he looked all
his shabbiness, all his cleverness, all his history. These different
things were written in him--in his premature baldness, his seamed
strained face, the lapse from bravery of his long tawny moustache; above
all in his easy friendly universally acquainted eye, so much too
sociable for mere conversation. What possible relation with him could be
natural enough to meet it? He wore a scant rough Inverness cape and a
pair of black trousers, wanting in substance and marked with the sheen
of time, that had presumably once served for evening use. He spoke with
the slowness helplessly permitted to Americans--as something too slow to
be stopped--and he repeated that he found himself associated with Miss
Cutter in a harmony calling for wonder. She had been telling him not
only that she couldn't possibly give him ten pounds, but that his
unexpected arrival, should he insist on being much in view, might
seriously interfere with arrangements necessary to her own maintenance;
on which he had begun by replying that he of course knew she had long
ago spent her money, but that he looked to her now exactly because she
had, without the aid of that convenience, mastered the art of life.
"I'd really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you'd only tell me how you
do it. It's no use saying only, as you've always said, that 'people are
very kind to you.' What the devil are they kind to you FOR?"
"Well, one reason is precisely that no particular inconvenience has
hitherto been supposed to attach to me. I'm just what I am," said Mamie
Cutter; "nothing less and nothing more. It's awkward to have to explain
to you, which moreover I really needn't in the least. I'm clever and
amusing and charming." She was uneasy and even frightened, but she kept
her temper and met him with a grace of her own. "I don't think you ought
to ask me more questions than I ask you."
"Ah my dear," said the odd young man, "I'VE no mysteries. Why in the
world, since it was what you came out for and have devoted so much of
your time to, haven't you pulled it off? Why haven't you married?"
"Why haven't YOU?" she retorted. "Do you think that if I had it would
have been better for you?--that my husband would for a moment have put
up with you? Do you mind my asking you if you'll kindly go NOW?" she
went on after a glance at the clock. "I'm expecting a friend, whom I
must see alone, on a matter of great importance--"
"And my being seen with you may compromise your respectability or
undermine your nerve?" He sprawled imperturbably in his place, crossing
again, in another sense, his long black legs and showing, above his low
shoes, an absurd reach of parti-coloured sock. "I take your point well
enough, but mayn't you be after all quite wrong? If you can't do
anything for me couldn't you at least do something with me? If it comes
to that, I'm clever and amusing and charming too! I've been such an ass
that you don't appreciate me. But people like me--I assure you they do.
They usually don't know what an ass I've been; they only see the
surface, which"--and he stretched himself afresh as she looked him up
and down--"you CAN imagine them, can't you, rather taken with? I'M 'what
I am' too; nothing less and nothing more. That's true of us as a family,
you see. We ARE a crew!" He delivered himself serenely. His voice was
soft and flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending to the
solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness which is, in
certain connexions, socially so known and enjoyed. "English people have
quite a weakness for me--more than any others. I get on with them
beautifully. I've always been with them abroad. They think me," the
young man explained, "diabolically American."
"You!" Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of compassion.
Her companion apparently quite understood it. "Are you homesick, Mamie?"
he asked, with wondering irrelevance.
The manner of the question made her, for some reason, in spite of her
preoccupations, break into a laugh. A shade of indulgence, a sense of
other things, came back to her. "You are funny, Scott!"
"Well," remarked Scott, "that's just what I claim. But ARE you so
homesick?" he spaciously inquired, not as to a practical end, but from
an easy play of intelligence.
"I'm just dying of it!" said Mamie Cutter.
"Why so am I!" Her visitor had a sweetness of concurrence.
"We're the only decent people," Miss Cutter declared. "And I know. You
don't--you can't; and I can't explain. Come in," she continued with a
return of her impatience and an increase of her decision, "at seven
sharp."
She had quitted her seat some time before, and now, to get him into
motion, hovered before him while, still motionless, he looked up at her.
Something intimate, in the silence, appeared to pass between them--a
community of fatigue and failure and, after all, of intelligence. There
was a final cynical humour in it. It determined him, in any case, at
last, and he slowly rose, taking in again as he stood there the
testimony of the room. He might have been counting the photographs, but
he looked at the flowers with detachment. "Who's coming?"
"Mrs. Medwin."
"American?"
"Dear no!"
"Then what are you doing for her?"
"I work for every one," she promptly returned.
"For every one who pays? So I suppose. Yet isn't it only we who do pay?"
There was a drollery, not lost on her, in the way his queer presence
lent itself to his emphasised plural.
"Do you consider that YOU do?"
At this, with his deliberation, he came back to his charming idea.
"Only try me, and see if I can't be MADE to. Work me in." On her sharply
presenting her back he stared a little at the clock. "If I come at seven
may I stay to dinner?"
It brought her round again. "Impossible. I'm dining out."
"With whom?"
She had to think. "With Lord Considine."
"Oh my eye!" Scott exclaimed.
She looked at him gloomily. "Is THAT sort of tone what makes you pay? I
think you might understand," she went on, "that if you're to sponge on
me successfully you mustn't ruin me. I must have SOME remote resemblance
to a lady."
"Yes? But why must _I_?" Her exasperated silence was full of answers, of
which however his inimitable manner took no account. "You don't
understand my real strength; I doubt if you even understand your own.
You're clever, Mamie, but you're not so clever as I supposed. However,"
he pursued, "it's out of Mrs. Medwin that you'll get it."
"Get what?"
"Why the cheque that will enable you to assist me."
On this, for a moment, she met his eyes. "If you'll come back at seven
sharp--not a minute before, and not a minute after, I'll give you two
five-pound notes."
He thought it over. "Whom are you expecting a minute after?"
It sent her to the window with a groan almost of anguish, and she
answered nothing till she had looked at the street. "If you injure me,
you know, Scott, you'll be sorry."
"I wouldn't injure you for the world. What I want to do in fact is
really to help you, and I promise you that I won't leave you--by which I
mean won't leave London--till I've effected something really pleasant
for you. I like you, Mamie, because I like pluck; I like you much more
than you like me. I like you very, VERY much." He had at last with this
reached the door and opened it, but he remained with his hand on the
latch. "What does Mrs. Medwin want of you?" he thus brought out.
She had come round to see him disappear, and in the relief of this
prospect she again just indulged him.
"The impossible."
He waited another minute. "And you're going to do it?"
"I'm going to do it," said Mamie Cutter.
"Well then that ought to be a haul. Call it THREE fivers!" he laughed.
"At seven sharp." And at last he left her alone.
CHAPTER II
Miss Cutter waited till she heard the house-door close; after which, in
a sightless mechanical way, she moved about the room readjusting various
objects he had not touched. It was as if his mere voice and accent had
spoiled her form. But she was not left too long to reckon with these
things, for Mrs. Medwin was promptly announced. This lady was not, more
than her hostess, in the first flush of her youth; her appearance--the
scattered remains of beauty manipulated by taste--resembled one of the
light repasts in which the fragments of yesterday's dinner figure with a
conscious ease that makes up for the want of presence. She was perhaps
of an effect still too immediate to be called interesting, but she was
candid, gentle and surprised--not fatiguingly surprised, only just in
the right degree; and her white face--it was too white--with the fixed
eyes, the somewhat touzled hair and the Louis Seize hat, might at the
end of the very long neck have suggested the head of a princess carried
on a pike in a revolution. She immediately took up the business that had
brought her, with the air however of drawing from the omens then
discernible less confidence than she had hoped. The complication lay in
the fact that if it was Mamie's part to present the omens, that lady yet
had so to colour them as to make her own service large. She perhaps
over-coloured; for her friend gave way to momentary despair.
"What you mean is then that it's simply impossible?"
"Oh no," said Mamie with a qualified emphasis. "It's POSSIBLE."
"But disgustingly difficult?"
"As difficult as you like."
"Then what can I do that I haven't done?"
"You can only wait a little longer."
"But that's just what I HAVE done. I've done nothing else. I'm always
waiting a little longer!"
Miss Cutter retained, in spite of this pathos, her grasp of the subject.
"THE thing, as I've told you, is for you first to be seen."
"But if people won't look at me?"
"They will."
"They WILL?" Mrs. Medwin was eager.
"They shall," her hostess went on. "It's their only having
heard--without having seen."'
"But if they stare straight the other way?" Mrs. Medwin continued to
object. "You can't simply go up to them and twist their heads about."
"It's just what I can," said Mamie Cutter.
But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment of this attenuation,
had found the way to put it. "It's the old story. You can't go into the
water till you swim, and you can't swim till you go into the water. I
can't be spoken to till I'm seen, but I can't be seen till I'm spoken
to."
She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an instant's lapse. "You
say I can't twist their heads about. But I HAVE twisted them."
It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a jerk. "They
say 'Yes'?"
She summed it up. "All but one. SHE says 'No.'"
Mrs. Medwin thought; then jumped. "Lady Wantridge?"
Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission. "I shall see her
either this afternoon or late to-morrow. But she has written."
Her visitor wondered again. "May I see her letter?"
"No." She spoke with decision. "But I shall square her."
"Then how?"
"Well"--and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward for inspiration, fixed her
eyes a while on the ceiling--"well, it will come to me."
Mrs. Medwin watched her--it was impressive. "And will they come to
you--the others?" This question drew out the fact that they would--so
far at least as they consisted of Lady Edward, Lady Bellhouse and Mrs.
Pouncer, who had engaged to muster, at the signal of tea, on the
14th--prepared, as it were, for the worst. There was of course always
the chance that Lady Wantridge might take the field, in such force as to
paralyse them, though that danger, at the same time, seemed inconsistent
with her being squared. It didn't perhaps all quite ideally hang
together; but what it sufficiently came to was that if she was the one
who could do most FOR a person in Mrs. Medwin's position she was also
the one who could do most against. It would therefore be distinctly what
our friend familiarly spoke of as "collar-work." The effect of these
mixed considerations was at any rate that Mamie eventually acquiesced in
the idea, handsomely thrown out by her client, that she should have an
"advance" to go on with. Miss Cutter confessed that it seemed at times
as if one scarce COULD go on; but the advance was, in spite of this
delicacy, still more delicately made--made in the form of a banknote,
several sovereigns, some loose silver, and two coppers, the whole
contents of her purse, neatly disposed by Mrs. Medwin on one of the tiny
tables. It seemed to clear the air for deeper intimacies, the fruit of
which was that Mamie, lonely after all in her crowd and always more
helpful than helped, eventually brought out that the way Scott had been
going on was what seemed momentarily to overshadow her own power to do
so.
"I've had a descent from him." But she had to explain. "My
half-brother--Scott Homer. A wretch."
"What kind of a wretch?"
"Every kind. I lose sight of him at times--he disappears abroad. But he
always turns up again, worse than ever."
"Violent?"
"No."
"Maudlin?"
"No."
"Only unpleasant?"
"No. Rather pleasant. Awfully clever--awfully travelled and easy."
"Then what's the matter with him?"
Mamie mused, hesitated--seemed to see a wide past. "I don't know."
"Something in the background?" Then as her friend was silent, "Something
queer about cards?" Mrs. Medwin threw off.
"I don't know--and I don't want to!"
"Ah well, I'm sure _I_ don't," Mrs. Medwin returned with spirit. The
note of sharpness was perhaps also a little in the observation she made
as she gathered herself to go. "Do you mind my saying something?"
Mamie took her eyes quickly from the money on the little stand. "You may
say what you like."
"I only mean that anything awkward you may have to keep out of the way
does seem to make more wonderful, doesn't it, that you should have got
just where you are? I allude, you know, to your position."
"I see." Miss Cutter somewhat coldly smiled. "To my power."
"So awfully remarkable in an American."
"Ah you like us so."
Mrs. Medwin candidly considered. "But we don't, dearest."
Her companion's smile brightened. "Then why do you come to me?"
"Oh I like YOU!" Mrs. Medwin made out.
"Then that's it. There are no 'Americans.' It's always 'you.'"
"Me?" Mrs. Medwin looked lovely, but a little muddled.
"ME!" Mamie Cutter laughed. "But if you like me, you dear thing, you can
judge if I like YOU." She gave her a kiss to dismiss her. "I'll see you
again when I've seen her."
"Lady Wantridge? I hope so, indeed. I'll turn up late to-morrow, if you
don't catch me first. Has it come to you yet?" the visitor, now at the
door, went on.
"No; but it will. There's time."
"Oh a little less every day!"
Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced again at the gold and
silver and the note, not indeed absolutely overlooking the two coppers.
"The balance," she put it, "the day after?"
"That very night if you like."
"Then count on me."
"Oh if I didn't--!" But the door closed on the dark idea. Yearningly
then, and only when it had done so, Miss Cutter took up the money.
She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her time being
many, remained out so long that at half-past six she hadn't come back.
At that hour, on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door, where
her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence of holding it firm,
ventured to announce to him, as a lesson well learnt, that he hadn't
been expected till seven. No lesson, none the less, could prevail
against his native art. He pleaded fatigue, her, the maid's, dreadful
depressing London, and the need to curl up somewhere. If she'd just
leave him quiet half an hour that old sofa upstairs would do for it; of
which he took quickly such effectual possession that when five minutes
later she peeped, nervous for her broken vow, into the drawing-room, the
faithless young woman found him extended at his length and peacefully
asleep.
CHAPTER III
The situation before Miss Cutter's return developed in other directions
still, and when that event took place, at a few minutes past seven,
these circumstances were, by the foot of the stair, between mistress and
maid, the subject of some interrogative gasps and scared admissions.
Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly after the interloper, and wishing, as
she said, to wait, had gone straight up in spite of being told he was
lying down.
"She distinctly understood he was there?"
"Oh yes ma'am; I thought it right to mention."
"And what did you call him?"
"Well, ma'am, I thought it unfair to YOU to call him anything but a
gentleman."
Mamie took it all in, though there might well be more of it than one
could quickly embrace. "But if she has had time," she flashed, "to find
out he isn't one?"
"Oh ma'am, she had a quarter of an hour."
"Then she isn't with him still?"
"No ma'am; she came down again at last. She rang, and I saw her here,
and she said she wouldn't wait longer."
Miss Cutter darkly mused. "Yet had already waited--?"
"Quite a quarter."
"Mercy on us!" She began to mount. Before reaching the top however she
had reflected that quite a quarter was long if Lady Wantridge had only
been shocked. On the other hand it was short if she had only been
pleased. But how COULD she have been pleased? The very essence of their
actual crisis was just that there was no pleasing her. Mamie had but to
open the drawing-room door indeed to perceive that this was not true at
least of Scott Homer, who was horribly cheerful.
Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve her sense of the
constitutional, the brutal selfishness that had determined his mistimed
return. It had taken place, in violation of their agreement, exactly at
the moment when it was most cruel to her that he should be there, and if
she must now completely wash her hands of him he had only himself to
thank. She had come in flushed with resentment and for a moment had been
voluble, but it would have been striking that, though the way he
received her might have seemed but to aggravate, it presently justified
him by causing their relation really to take a stride. He had the art of
confounding those who would quarrel with him by reducing them to the
humiliation of a stirred curiosity.
"What COULD she have made of you?" Mamie demanded.
"My dear girl, she's not a woman who's eager to make too much of
anything--anything, I mean, that will prevent her from doing as she
likes, what she takes into her head. Of course," he continued to
explain, "if it's something she doesn't want to do, she'll make as much
as Moses."
Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to her visitor, but felt
obliged to own to his acuteness. It was an exact description of Lady
Wantridge, and she was conscious of tucking it away for future use in a
corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She withheld however all
present acknowledgment, only addressing him another question. "Did you
really get on with her?"
"Have you still to learn, darling--I can't help again putting it to
you--that I get on with everybody? That's just what I don't seem able to
drive into you. Only see how I get on with YOU."
She almost stood corrected. "What I mean is of course whether--"
"Whether she made love to me? Shyly, yet--or because--shamefully? She
would certainly have liked awfully to stay."
"Then why didn't she?"
"Because, on account of some other matter--and I could see it was
true--she hadn't time. Twenty minutes--she was here less--were all she
came to give you. So don't be afraid I've frightened her away. She'll
come back."
Mamie thought it over. "Yet you didn't go with her to the door?"
"She wouldn't let me, and I know when to do what I'm told--quite as much
as what I'm not told. She wanted to find out about me. I mean from your
little creature; a pearl of fidelity, by the way."
"But what on earth did she come up for?" Mamie again found herself
appealing, and just by that fact showing her need of help.
"Because she always goes up." Then as, in the presence of this rapid
generalisation, to say nothing of that of such a relative altogether,
Miss Cutter could only show as comparatively blank: "I mean she knows
when to go up and when to come down. She has instincts; she didn't know
whom you might have up here. It's a kind of compliment to you anyway.
Why Mamie," Scott pursued, "you don't know the curiosity we any of us
inspire. You wouldn't believe what I've seen. The bigger bugs they are
the more they're on the lookout."
Mamie still followed, but at a distance. "The lookout for what?"
"Why for anything that will help them to live. You've been here all this
time without making out then, about them, what I've had to pick out as I
can? They're dead, don't you see? And WE'RE alive."
"You? Oh!"--Mamie almost laughed about it.
"Well, they're a worn-out old lot anyhow; they've used up their
resources. They do look out and I'll do them the justice to say they're
not afraid--not even of me!" he continued as his sister again showed
something of the same irony. "Lady Wantridge at any rate wasn't; that's
what I mean by her having made love to me. She does what she likes. Mind
it, you know." He was by this time fairly teaching her to read one of
her best friends, and when, after it, he had come back to the great
point of his lesson--that of her failure, through feminine inferiority,
practically to grasp the truth that their being just as they were, he
and she, was the real card for them to play--when he had renewed that
reminder he left her absolutely in a state of dependence. Her impulse to
press him on the subject of Lady Wantridge dropped; it was as if she had
felt that, whatever had taken place, something would somehow come of it.
She was to be in a manner disappointed, but the impression helped to
keep her over to the next morning, when, as Scott had foretold, his new
acquaintance did reappear, explaining to Miss Cutter that she had acted
the day before to gain time and that she even now sought to gain it by
not waiting longer. What, she promptly intimated she had asked herself,
could that friend be thinking of? She must show where she stood before
things had gone too far. If she had brought her answer without more
delay she wished to make it sharp. Mrs. Medwin? Never! "No, my dear--not
I. THERE I stop."
Mamie had known it would be "collar-work," but somehow now, at the
beginning she felt her heart sink. It was not that she had expected to
carry the position with a rush, but that, as always after an interval,
her visitor's defences really loomed--and quite, as it were, to the
material vision--too large. She was always planted with them,
voluminous, in the very centre of the passage; was like a person
accommodated with a chair in some unlawful place at the theatre. She
wouldn't move and you couldn't get round. Mamie's calculation indeed had
not been on getting round; she was obliged to recognise that, too
foolishly and fondly, she had dreamed of inducing a surrender. Her dream
had been the fruit of her need; but, conscious that she was even yet
unequipped for pressure, she felt, almost for the first time in her
life, superficial and crude. She was to be paid--but with what was she,
to that end, to pay? She had engaged to find an answer to this question,
but the answer had not, according to her promise, "come." And Lady
Wantridge meanwhile massed herself, and there was no view of her that
didn't show her as verily, by some process too obscure to be traced, the
hard depository of the social law. She was no younger, no fresher, no
stronger, really, than any of them; she was only, with a kind of haggard
fineness, a sharpened taste for life, and, with all sorts of things
behind and beneath her, more abysmal and more immoral, more secure and
more impertinent. The points she made were two in number. One was that
she absolutely declined; the other was that she quite doubted if Mamie
herself had measured the job. The thing couldn't be done. But say it
COULD be; was Mamie quite the person to do it? To this Miss Cutter, with
a sweet smile, replied that she quite understood how little she might
seem so. "I'm only one of the persons to whom it has appeared that YOU
are."
"Then who are the others?"
"Well, to begin with, Lady Edward, Lady Bellhouse and Mrs. Pouncer."
"Do you mean that they'll come to meet her?"
"I've seen them, and they've promised."
"To come, of course," Lady Wantridge said, "if _I_ come."
Her hostess cast about. "Oh of course you could prevent them. But I
should take it as awfully kind of you not to. WON'T you do this for me?"
Mamie pleaded.
Her friend looked over the room very much as Scott had done. "Do they
really understand what it's FOR?"
"Perfectly. So that she may call."
"And what good will that do her?"
Miss Cutter faltered, but she presently brought it out. "Naturally what
one hopes is that, you'll ask her."
"Ask her to call?"
"Ask her to dine. Ask her, if you'd be so truly sweet, for a Sunday; or
something of that sort, and even if only in one of your MOST mixed
parties, to Catchmore."
Miss Cutter felt the less hopeful after this effort in that her
companion only showed a strange good nature. And it wasn't a satiric
amiability, though it WAS amusement. "Take Mrs. Medwin into my family?"
"Some day when you're taking forty others."
"Ah but what I don't see is what it does for YOU. You're already so
welcome among us that you can scarcely improve your position even by
forming for us the most delightful relation."
"Well, I know how dear you are," Mamie Cutter replied; "but one has
after all more than one side and more than one sympathy. I like her, you
know." And even at this Lady Wantridge wasn't shocked; she showed that
ease and blandness which were her way, unfortunately, of being most
impossible. She remarked that SHE might listen to such things, because
she was clever enough for them not to matter; only Mamie should take
care how she went about saying them at large. When she became definite
however, in a minute, on the subject of the public facts, Miss Cutter
soon found herself ready to make her own concession. Of course she
didn't dispute THEM: there they were; they were unfortunately on record,
and, nothing was to be done about them but to--Mamie found it in truth
at this point a little difficult.
"Well, what? Pretend already to have forgotten them?"
"Why not, when you've done it in so many other cases?"
"There ARE no other cases so bad. One meets them at any rate as they
come. Some you can manage, others you can't. It's no use, you must give
them up. They're past patching; there's nothing to be done with them.
There's nothing accordingly to be done with Mrs. Medwin but to put her
off." And Lady Wantridge rose to her height.
"Well, you know, I DO do things," Mamie quavered with a smile so
strained that it partook of exaltation.
"You help people? Oh yes, I've known you to do wonders. But stick," said
Lady Wantridge with strong and cheerful emphasis, "to your Americans!"
Miss Cutter, gazing, got up. "You don't do justice, Lady Wantridge, to
your own compatriots. Some of them are really charming. Besides," said
Mamie, "working for mine often strikes me, so far as the interest--the
inspiration and excitement, don't you know?--go, as rather too easy. You
all, as I constantly have occasion to say, like us so!"
Her companion frankly weighed it. "Yes; it takes that to account for
your position. I've always thought of you nevertheless as keeping for
their benefit a regular working agency. They come to you, and you place
them. There remains, I confess," her ladyship went on in the same free
spirit, "the great wonder--"
"Of how I first placed my poor little self? Yes," Mamie bravely
conceded, "when _I_ began there was no agency. I just worked my passage.
I didn't even come to YOU, did I? You never noticed me till, as Mrs.
Short Stokes says, 'I was 'way, 'way up!' Mrs. Medwin," she threw in,
"can't get over it." Then, as her friend looked vague: "Over my social
situation."
"Well, it's no great flattery to you to say," Lady Wantridge
good-humouredly returned, "that she certainly can't hope for one
resembling it." Yet it really seemed to spread there before them. "You
simply MADE Mrs. Short Stokes."
"In spite of her name!" Mamie smiled.
"Oh your 'names'--! In spite of everything."
"Ah I'm something of an artist." With which, and a relapse marked by her
wistful eyes into the gravity of the matter, she supremely fixed her
friend. She felt how little she minded betraying at last the extremity
of her need, and it was out of this extremity that her appeal proceeded.
"Have I really had your last word? It means so much to me."
Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. "You mean you depend on it?"
"Awfully!"
"Is it all you have?"
"All. Now."
"But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others--'rolling,' aren't they? Don't
they pay up?"
"Ah," sighed Mamie, "if it wasn't for THEM--!"
Lady Wantridge perceived. "You've had so much?"
"I couldn't have gone on."
"Then what do you do with it all?"
"Oh most of it goes back to them. There are all sorts, and it's all
help. Some of them have nothing."
"Oh if you feed the hungry," Lady Wantridge laughed, "you're indeed in a
great way of business. Is Mrs. Medwin"--her transition was
immediate--"really rich?"
"Really. He left her everything."
"So that if I do say 'yes'--"
"It will quite set me up."
"I see--and how much more responsible it makes one! But I'd rather
myself give you the money."
"Oh!" Mamie coldly murmured.
"You mean I mayn't suspect your prices? Well, I daresay I don't! But I'd
rather give you ten pounds."
"Oh!" Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently covered her prices. The
question was in every way larger. "Do you never forgive?" she
reproachfully inquired. The door opened however at the moment she spoke
and Scott Homer presented himself.
CHAPTER IV
Scott Homer wore exactly, to his sister's eyes, the aspect he had worn
the day before, and it also formed to her sense the great feature of his
impartial greeting.
"How d'ye do, Mamie? How d'ye do, Lady Wantridge?"
"How d'ye do again?" Lady Wantridge replied with an equanimity striking
to her hostess. It was as if Scott's own had been contagious; it was
almost indeed as if she had seen him before. Had she ever so seen
him--before the previous day? While Miss Cutter put to herself this
question her visitor at all events met the one she had previously
uttered. "Ever 'forgive'?" this personage echoed in a tone that made as
little account as possible of the interruption. "Dear yes! The people I
HAVE forgiven!" She laughed--perhaps a little nervously; and she was now
looking at Scott. The way she looked at him was precisely what had
already had its effect for his sister. "The people I can!"
"Can you forgive me?" asked Scott Homer.
She took it so easily. "But--what?"
Mamie interposed; she turned directly to her brother. "Don't try her.
Leave it so." She had had an inspiration, it was the most extraordinary
thing in the world. "Don't try HIM"--she had turned to their companion.
She looked grave, sad, strange. "Leave it so." Yes, it was a distinct
inspiration, which she couldn't have explained, but which had come,
prompted by something she had caught--the extent of the recognition
expressed--in Lady Wantridge's face. It had come absolutely of a sudden,
straight out of the opposition of the two figures before her--quite as
if a concussion had struck a light. The light was helped by her
quickened sense that her friend's silence on the incident of the day
before showed some sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. "Do you
know my brother?"
"DO I know you?" Lady Wantridge asked of him.
"No, Lady Wantridge," Scott pleasantly confessed, "not one little mite!"
"Well then if you MUST go--" and Mamie offered her a hand. "But I'll go
down with you. NOT YOU!" she launched at her brother, who immediately
effaced himself. His way of doing so--and he had already done so, as for
Lady Wantridge, in respect to their previous encounter--struck her even
at the moment as an instinctive if slightly blind tribute to her
possession of an idea; and as such, in its celerity, made her so admire
him, and their common wit, that she on the spot more than forgave him
his queerness. He was right. He could be as queer as he liked! The
queerer the better! It was at the foot of the stairs, when she had got
her guest down, that what she had assured Mrs. Medwin would come did
indeed come. "DID you meet him here yesterday?"
"Dear yes. Isn't he too funny?"
"Yes," said Mamie gloomily. "He IS funny. But had you ever met him
before?"
"Dear no!"
"Oh!"--and Mamie's tone might have meant many things.
Lady Wantridge however, after all, easily overlooked it. "I only knew he
was one of your odd Americans. That's why, when I heard yesterday here
that he was up there awaiting your return, I didn't let that prevent me.
I thought he might be. He certainly," her ladyship laughed, "IS."
"Yes, he's very American," Mamie went on in the same way.
"As you say, we ARE fond of you! Good-bye," said Lady Wantridge.
But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and more--or she
hoped at least--that she looked strange. She WAS, no doubt, if it came
to that, strange. "Lady Wantridge," she almost convulsively broke out,
"I don't know whether you'll understand me, but I seem to feel that I
must act with you--I don't know what to call it!--responsibly. He IS my
brother."
"Surely--and why not?" Lady Wantridge stared. "He's the image of you!"
"Thank you!"--and Mamie was stranger than ever.
"Oh he's good-looking. He's handsome, my dear. Oddly--but distinctly!"
Her ladyship was for treating it much as a joke.
But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this. She boldly gave him up.
"I think he's awful."
"He is indeed--delightfully. And where DO you get your ways of saying
things? It isn't anything--and the things aren't anything. But it's so
droll."
"Don't let yourself, all the same," Mamie consistently pursued, "be
carried away by it. The thing can't be done--simply."
Lady Wantridge wondered. "'Done simply'?"
"Done at all."
"But what can't be?"
"Why, what you might think--from his pleasantness. What he spoke of your
doing for him."
Lady Wantridge recalled. "Forgiving him?"
"He asked you if you couldn't. But you can't. It's too dreadful for me,
as so near a relation, to have, loyally--loyally to YOU--to say it. But
he's impossible."
It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had somehow to meet
it. "What's the matter with him?"
"I don't know."
"Then what's the matter with YOU?" Lady Wantridge inquired.
"It's because I WON'T know," Mamie--not without dignity--explained.
"Then _I_ won't either."
"Precisely. Don't. It's something," Mamie pursued, with some
inconsequence, "that--somewhere or other, at some time or other--he
appears to have done. Something that has made a difference in his life."
"'Something'?" Lady Wantridge echoed again. "What kind of thing?"
Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through which the London
sky was doubly dim. "I haven't the least idea."
"Then what kind of difference?"
Mamie's gaze was still at the light. "The difference you see."
Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask herself what she saw.
"But I don't see any! It seems, at least," she added, "such an amusing
one! And he has such nice eyes."
"Oh DEAR eyes!" Mamie conceded; but with too much sadness, for the
moment, about the connexions of the subject, to say more.
It almost forced her companion after an instant to proceed. "Do you mean
he can't go home?"
She weighed her responsibility. "I only make out--more's the pity!--that
he doesn't."
"Is it then something too terrible--?"
She thought again. "I don't know what--for men--IS too terrible."
"Well then as you don't know what 'is' for women either--good-bye!" her
visitor laughed.
It practically wound up the interview; which, however, terminating thus
on a considerable stir of the air, was to give Miss Cutter for several
days the sense of being much blown about. The degree to which, to begin
with, she had been drawn--or perhaps rather pushed--closer to Scott was
marked in the brief colloquy that she on her friend's departure had with
him. He had immediately said it. "You'll see if she doesn't ask me
down!"
"So soon?"
"Oh I've known them at places--at Cannes, at Pau, at Shanghai--do it
sooner still. I always know when they will. You CAN'T make out they
don't love me!" He spoke almost plaintively, as if he wished she could.
"Then I don't see why it hasn't done you more good."
"Why Mamie," he patiently reasoned, "what more good COULD it? As I tell
you," he explained, "it has just been my life."
"Then why do you come to me for money?"
"Oh they don't give me THAT!" Scott returned.
"So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must keep
you up?"
He fixed on her the nice eyes Lady Wantridge admired. "Do you mean to
tell me that already--at this very moment--I'm not distinctly keeping
you?"
She gave him back his look. "Wait till she HAS asked you, and then,"
Mamie added, "decline."
Scott, not too grossly, wondered. "As acting for YOU?"
Mamie's next injunction was answer enough. "But BEFORE--yes--call."
He took it in. "Call--but decline. Good!"
"The rest," she said, "I leave to you." And she left it in fact with
such confidence that for a couple of days she was not only conscious of
no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of the screw, but positively
evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance of that lady. It was not till
the fourth day that she waited upon her, finding her, as she had
expected, tense.
"Lady Wantridge WILL--?"
"Yes, though she says she won't."
"She says she won't? O-oh!" Mrs. Medwin moaned.
"Sit tight all the same. I HAVE her!"
"But how?"
"Through Scott--whom she wants."
"Your bad brother!" Mrs. Medwin stared. "What does she want of him?"
"To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that. And he WOULD. But he
shan't!" Mamie declared. "He shan't go unless she comes. She must meet
you first--you're my condition."
"O-o-oh!" Mrs. Medwin's tone was a wonder of hope and fear. "But doesn't
he want to go?"
"He wants what I want. She draws the line at YOU. I draw the line at
HIM."
"But SHE--doesn't she mind that he's bad?"
It was so artless that Mamie laughed. "No--it doesn't touch her.
Besides, perhaps he isn't. It isn't as for you--people seem not to know.
He has settled everything, at all events, by going to see her. It's
before her that he's the thing she'll have to have."
"Have to?"
"For Sundays in the country. A feature--THE feature."
"So she has asked him?"
"Yes--and he has declined."
"For ME?" Mrs. Medwin panted.
"For me," said Mamie on the door-step. "But I don't leave him for long."
Her hansom had waited. "She'll come."
Lady Wantridge did come. She met in South Audley Street, on the
fourteenth, at tea, the ladies whom Mamie had named to her, together
with three or four others, and it was rather a master-stroke for Miss
Cutter that if Mrs. Medwin was modestly present Scott Homer was as
markedly not. This occasion, however, is a medal that would take rare
casting, as would also, for that matter, even the minor light and shade,
the lower relief, of the pecuniary transaction that Mrs. Medwin's
flushed gratitude scarce awaited the dispersal of the company
munificently to complete. A new understanding indeed on the spot
rebounded from it, the conception of which, in Mamie's mind, had
promptly bloomed. "He shan't go now unless he takes you." Then, as her
fancy always moved quicker for her client than her client's own--"Down
with him to Catchmore! When he goes to amuse them YOU," she serenely
developed, "shall amuse them too." Mrs. Medwin's response was again
rather oddly divided, but she was sufficiently intelligible when it came
to meeting the hint that this latter provision would represent success
to the tune of a separate fee. "Say," Mamie had suggested, "the same."
"Very well; the same."
The knowledge that it was to be the same had perhaps something to do
also with the obliging spirit in which Scott eventually went. It was all
at the last rather hurried--a party rapidly got together for the Grand
Duke, who was in England but for the hour, who had good-naturedly
proposed himself, and who liked his parties small, intimate and funny.
This one was of the smallest and was finally judged to conform neither
too little nor too much to the other conditions--after a brief whirlwind
of wires and counterwires, and an iterated waiting of hansoms at various
doors--to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catchmore itself that,
snatching, a moment--on the wondrous Sunday afternoon, this lady had the
harmonious thought of sending the new cheque. She was in bliss enough,
but her scribble none the less intimated that it was Scott who amused
them most. He WAS the feature.