HOW MILLAIS' "HUGUENOT" CAME OF A WALK IN THE BACK GARDEN. AND HOW
FENWICK VERY NEARLY KISSED SALLY
In spite of Colonel Lund's having been so betimes in his forecastings
about Mrs. Nightingale and Fenwick (as we must go on calling him for
the present), still, when one day that lady came, about six weeks
after the nocturne in our last chapter, and told him she must have his
consent to a step she was contemplating before she took it, he felt a
little shock in his heart--one of those shocks one so often feels when
one hears that a thing he has anticipated without pain, even with
pleasure, is to become actual.
But he replied at once, "My dear! Of course!" without hearing any
particulars; and added: "You will be happier, I am sure. Why should
I refuse my consent to your marrying Fenwick? Because that's it, I
suppose?" That was it. The Major had guessed right.
"He asked me to marry him, last night," she said, with simple
equanimity and directness. "I told him yes, as far as my own wishes
went. But I said I wouldn't, if either you or the kitten forbade the
banns."
"I don't think we shall, either of us." It was a daughter's
marriage-warrant he was being asked to sign; a document seldom signed
without a heartache, more or less, for him who holds the pen. But his
_coeur navré_ had to be concealed, for the sake of the applicant;
no wet blanket should be cast on her new happiness. He kissed her
affectionately. To him, for all her thirty-nine or forty birthdays,
she was still the young girl he had helped and shielded in her despair,
twenty years ago, he himself being then a widower, near forty years her
senior. "No, Rosa dear," continued the Major. "As far as I can see,
there can be no objection but one--_you_ know!"
"_The_ one?"
"Yes. It is all a _terra incognita_. He _may_ have a wife elsewhere,
seeking for him. Who can tell?"
"It is a risk to be run. But I am prepared to run it"--she was going
to add "for his sake," but remembered that her real meaning for these
words would be, "for the sake of the man I wronged," and that the Major
knew nothing of Fenwick's identity. She had not been able to persuade
herself to make even her old friend her confidant. Danger lay that way.
She _knew_ silence would be safe against anything but Fenwick's own
memory.
"Yes, it is a risk, no doubt," the Major said. "But I am like him. I
cannot conceive a man forgetting that he had a wife. It seems an
impossibility. He has talked about you to me, you know."
"In connexion with his intention about me?"
"Almost. Not quite definitely, but almost. He knew I understood what he
meant. It seemed to me he was fidgeting more about his having so little
to offer in the way of worldly goods than about any possible wife in
the clouds."
"Dear fellow! Just fancy! Why, those people in the City would take him
into partnership to-morrow if he had a little capital to bring in. They
told him so themselves."
"And you would finance him? Is that the idea? Well, I suppose as I'm
your trustee, if the money was all lost, I should have to make it up,
so it wouldn't matter."
"Oh, Major dear! is _that_ what being a trustee means?"
"Of course, my dear Rosa! What did you think it meant?"
"Do you know, I don't know what I _did_ think; at least, I thought it
would be very nice if you were my trustee."
The conversation has gone off on a siding, but the Major shunts the
train back. "That was what you and little fiddle-stick's-end were
talking about till three in the morning, then?"
"Oh, Major dear, did you hear us? And we kept you awake? What a _shame_!"
* * * * *
For on the previous evening, Sally being out musicking and expected
home late, Fenwick and Mrs. Nightingale had gone out in the back-garden
to enjoy the sweet air of that rare phenomenon--a really fine spring
night in England--leaving the Major indoors because of his bronchial
tubes. The late seventies shrink from night air, even when one means to
be a healthy octogenarian. Also, they go away to bed, secretively, when
no one is looking--at least, the Major did in this case. Of course, he
was staying the night, as usual.
So, in the interim between the Major's good-night and Sally's
cab-wheels, this elderly couple of lovers (as they would have worded
their own description) had the summer night to themselves. As the Major
closed his bedroom window, he saw, before drawing down the blind, that
the two were walking slowly up and down the gravel path, talking
earnestly. No impression of mature years came to the Major from that
gravel path. A well-made, handsome man, with a bush of brown hair and
a Raleigh beard, and a graceful woman suggesting her beauty through the
clear moonlight--that was the implication of as much as he could see,
as he drew the inference a word of soliloquy hinted at, "Not Millais'
Huguenot, so far!" But he evidently expected that grouping very soon.
Only he was too sleepy to watch for it, and went to bed. Besides, would
it have been honourable?
"It's no use, Fenwick," she said to him in the garden, "trying to keep
off the forbidden subject, so I won't try."
"It's not forbidden by me. Nothing could be, that _you_ would like
to say."
Was that, she thought, only what so many men say every day to so many
women, and mean so little by? Or was it more? She could not be sure
yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her
misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face
in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that
you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the
peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely
nothing.
For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is
briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her
husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had
never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her
relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was,
longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but
stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk
the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole.
_She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.
"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you,
I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"
"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."
"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further,
or die out completely?"
He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar;
then, after a moment's thought, replied:
"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I
think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His
companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and
resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all,
or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.
"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"
"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an 'A' that felt right.
Unless it was Arthur, but I'm sure my name never was Arthur!"
"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair
stress upon it. I easily might have."
"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"
"My husband's name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice
that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could
keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her
self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she
would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would
betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She
_was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself
of her own self-command: "I knew him very little by that name, though.
I always called him Gerry."
He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen
apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of
a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that
it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.
"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion
theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew
it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever
made Gerry out of Algernon. It's always Algy."
"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."
"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence,
"that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may
not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it,
and so on."
"What do you understand?"
"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress,
naturally, on your husband's name, and also on its abbreviation. It
affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."
"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry
too? It might be----"
"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental
adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each
other by chance, as yours and mine have done."
"What is 'almost knowing'? But tell me this. When I call you
Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the association or impression repeat
itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good
deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to
drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the
state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his
memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by
his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not
help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her
doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show,
if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased
from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after
speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again
freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than
his reply, after another moment of reflection:
"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name
Algernon _was_ produced by your way of saying it. It _was_ hypnotic
suggestion! I assure you that, however strange you may think it, every
time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you
said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the
diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am
quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_'s
has driven it home." He didn't seem quite in earnest over his
conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.
But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his
companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not
call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he
went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.
"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel
it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any
illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on
records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my
crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the
dark--unless, indeed----"
"Unless what?"
"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten
world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be
shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so
convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid
change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had
them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason
only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"
"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."
"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a
forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its
details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day
is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I
could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be
sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to
the unknown."
"You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see
before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There
was nettle-grasping in this.
"It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image
of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact
that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a
large _if_. I am content to go on without an hypothesis--that is really
all she is now. And my belief that, if she had ever existed, I should
not be _able_ to disbelieve in her, underlies my acceptance of her in
that character."
Mrs. Nightingale laughed. "We are mighty metaphysical," said she.
"Wouldn't it depend entirely on what she was like, when all's said
and done? I believe I'm right. We women are more practical than men,
after all."
"You make game of my metaphysics, as you call them. Well, I'll drop the
metaphysics and speak the honest truth." He stopped and faced round
towards her, standing on the garden path. "Only, you must make me one
promise."
She stopped also, and stood looking full at him.
"What promise?"
"If I tell you all I think in my heart, you will not allow it to come
between me and you, to undermine the only strong friendship I have in
the world, the only one I know of."
"It shall make no difference between us. You may trust me."
They turned and walked again slowly, once up and down. Then Fenwick's
voice, when he next spoke, had an added earnestness, a growing tension,
with an echo in it, for her, of the years gone by--a ring of his young
enthusiasm, of his passionate outburst in the lawn-tennis garden twenty
years ago. He made no more ado of what he had to say.
"I can form no image in my mind, try how I may, of any woman for whose
sake I would give up one hour of the precious privilege I now enjoy.
I have no right to--to assess it, to make a definition of it. But
I _have_ it now. I could not resume my place as the husband of a now
unknown wife--you know what I mean--and not lose the privilege of
being near _you_. It may be--it is conceivable, I mean; no more--that
a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring
me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It _may_
be so--it _may_ be! All I know is--all I can say is--that I can now
_imagine_ nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would
be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He
paused a moment, as though he thought he was going beyond his rights of
speech, then added more quietly: "No; I can imagine _no_ hypothetical
wife. And as for my hypothetical daughter, I find I am always utilising
Sally for her."
Mrs. Nightingale murmured in an undertone the word "Sallykin," as she
so often did when her daughter was mentioned, with that sort of caress
in her voice. This time it was caught by a sort of gasp, and she
remained silent. What Sally _was_ had crossed her mind--the strange
relation in which she stood to Fenwick, born in _his_ wedlock, but no
daughter of his. And there he was, as fond of the child as he could be.
Fenwick may have half misunderstood something in her manner, for when
he spoke again his words had a certain aspect of recoil from what he
had said, at least of consideration of it in some new light.
"When I speak to you as freely as this, remember the nature of the
claim I have to do so--the only apology I can make for taking an
exceptional licence."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean I do not count myself as a man--only a sort of inexplicable
waif, a kind of cancelled man. A man without a past is like a child,
or an idiot from birth, suddenly endowed with faculties."
"What nonsense, Fenwick! You have brooded and speculated over your
condition until you have become morbid. Do now, as Sally would say,
chuck the metaphysics."
"Perhaps I was getting too sententious over it. I'm sorry, and please
I won't do so any more."
"Don't then. And now you'll see what will happen. You will remember
everything quite suddenly. It will all come back in a flash, and oh,
how glad you will be! And think of the joy of your wife and children!"
"Yes, and suppose all the while I am hating them for dragging me away
from you----"
"From me and Sally?"
"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You
and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to
bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine--because I cannot imagine
_them_--it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would
drive me _mad_. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself--as I say
now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am--that to be here with
you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable."
"All that would change if you recovered them."
"Yes--yes--maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from _them_! They are
strangers--nonentities. You are--you are--oh, it's no use----" He
stopped suddenly.
"What am I?"
"It's no use beating about the bush. You are the centre of my life as
it is, you are what I--all that is left of me--love best in the world!
I cannot _now_ conceive the possibility of anything but hatred for what
might come between us, for what might sever the existing link, whatever
it may be--I care little what it is called, so long as I may keep it
unbroken...."
"And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He
could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken.
Then he replied in a voice less firm than before:
"Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour
of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in
Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the
consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It
was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of
her feelings toward himself.
"What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite
calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure
and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance,
no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not
waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe,
or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her
husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what
there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in
her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be
said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul
is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not
overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the
cup to his lips.
The Huguenot arrangement might have gone on in the undisturbed
moonlight till the chill of the morning came to break it up if a
cab-wheel _crescendo_ and a _strepitoso_ peal at the bell had not
announced Sally, who burst into the house and rushed into the
drawing-room tumultuously, to be corrected back by a serious word from
Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in
the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was _en règle_,
when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree.
Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more
self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally
saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove
Road--the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What
_do_ you think, N or M? And then develop the engagement of O to P, or
the jilting of Q by R.
There was just time for a dozen words between the components of the
Millais group in the moonlight.
"Shall we tell Sally?" It was the Huguenot that asked the question.
"Not just this minute. Wait till I can think. Perhaps I'll tell her
upstairs. Now say good-bye before the chick comes, and go." And the
chick came on the scene just too late to criticise the _pose_.
"I say, mother!" this with the greatest _empressement_ of which
humanity and youth are capable. "I've got something I _must_ tell you!"
"What is it, kitten?"
"Tishy's head-over-ears in love with the shop-boy!"
"Sh-sh-sh-shish! You noisy little monkey, do consider! The neighbours
will hear every word you say." So they will, probably, as Miss Sally's
voice is very penetrating, and rings musically clear in the summer
night. Her attitude is that she doesn't care if they do.
"Besides they're only cats! And _nobody_ knows who Tishy is, or the
shop-boy. I'll come down and tell you all about it."
"We're coming up, darling!" You see, Sally had manifestoed down into
the garden from the landing of the stair, which was made of iron
openwork you knocked flower-pots down and broke, and you have had to
have a new one--that, at least, is how Ann put it. On the stair-top
Mrs. Nightingale stems the torrent of her daughter's revelation
because it's so late and Mr. Fenwick must get away.
"You must tell him all about it another time."
"I don't know whether it's any concern of his."
"Taken scrupulous, are we, all of a sudden?" says Fenwick, laughing.
"That cock won't fight, Miss Pussy! You'll have to tell me all about
it when I come to-morrow. Good-night, Mrs. Nightingale." A sort of
humorous formality in his voice makes Sally look from one to the
other, but it leads to nothing. Sally goes to see Fenwick depart,
and her mother goes upstairs with a candle. In a minute or so
Sally pelts up the stairs, leaving Ann and the cook to thumbscrew
on the shutter-panels of the street door, and make sure that
housebreaker-baffling bells are susceptible.
"Do you know, mamma, I really _did_ think--what do you think I thought?"
"What, darling?"
"I thought Mr. Fenwick was going to kiss me!" In fact, Fenwick had only
just remembered in time that family privileges must stand over till
after the revelation.
"Should you have minded if he had?"
"_Not a bit!_ Why should _anybody_ mind Mr. Fenwick kissing them? You
wouldn't yourself--you know you wouldn't! Come now, mother!"
"I shouldn't distress myself, poppet!" But words are mere wind; the
manner of them is everything, and the foreground of her mother's manner
suggests a background to Sally. She has smelt a rat, and suddenly fixes
her eyes on a tell-tale countenance fraught with mysterious reserves.
"Mother, you _are_ going to marry Mr. Fenwick!" No change of type could
do justice to the emphasis with which Sally goes straight to the point.
Italics throughout would be weak. Her mother smiles as she fondles her
daughter's excited face.
"I am, darling. So you may kiss him yourself when he comes to-morrow
evening."
And Tishy's passion for the shop-boy had to stand over. But, as the
Major had said, the mother and daughter talked till three in the
morning--well, past two, anyhow!