Some three weeks after this Ginger was occupying the whole of the
most comfortable sofa in the rooms of his father occupied by Bertie,
and was conversing to him in his usual amiable manner. The rooms
wore the look of those belonging to a man shortly to take a journey;
there were packets and parcels lying about, a bag gaped open-mouthed
on a chair, and Bertie himself was sorting and tearing up papers at
a desk, listening with half an ear to the equable flow of Ginger's
conversation. He had a good deal to say, and a good deal to ask about,
but, with the instinct of the skilled conversationalist, he did not
bring out his news in spate, nor ask a succession of questions, but
ambled easily, so to speak, up and down the lanes and byways of
intercourse, only occasionally emerging on to the highroads.
'It may appear odd,' he was just saying, 'but I never was in these
rooms before. Gallio has never asked me here. I am glad to see that he
appears to make himself fairly comfortable. I suppose he is at Monte
Carlo still. Heard from him, Bertie?'
'Yes, a letter of extreme approbation at my marriage, and a regret that
he will be unable to visit America for it. Also a cheque for £500 as a
wedding-present. Out of his hardly lost losings, he says.'
'Gallio's in funds now, or was till he went to Monte Carlo,' remarked
Ginger. 'He got two hundred thousand for the sale of Molesworth. But he
has to settle half of it on you, doesn't he? And where do I come in?'
'You don't, I'm afraid.'
'I think Gallio made a very good bargain,' said Ginger; 'but I think it
remains to be seen whether Mr. Palmer didn't make a better.'
'How's that?'
'Whether, with his American spirit of enterprise, he won't begin
digging for the fabulous coal which was supposed to exist.'
Bertie looked up.
'Turn Molesworth into a colliery? He won't find it very easy. You see,
he has settled it on Amelie, or, rather, is going to on our marriage.'
'By Gad! he does things in style,' said Ginger. 'And you think Amelie
would not allow it?'
'I think she would attach some weight to my wishes.'
'Do you feel strongly about it? I thought you were rather in favour of
its being done when it was spoken of before.'
'I know; there was an awful need of money. It is a necessity before
which sentiment must give way. But now there is not. And my sentiment
is rather strong. After all, it has been ours a good long time; and
now we can afford to keep the coal underfoot, if it is there at all.
Besides, do you know for certain that he has any thought of it?'
'No; Bilton put it into my head,' said Ginger. 'He hinted that Mr.
Palmer had made a good bargain. He seemed rather elated at something,
so I did not question him further. I don't like elated people. I
suppose he had made some good bargain, or done somebody in the eye;
that is the American idea of humour. He went off to Davos the other
day.'
Bertie again looked up.
'Hasn't he realized the fruitlessness of that yet?' he asked. 'Sybil
refused him point-blank, I know; and really, when she follows that up
by going out to Davos to coax Charlie back to life, you would have
thought that a third party was not--well, exactly of the party.'
'Sybil is an enigma,' said Ginger. 'She went to America in the autumn
with the avowed intention of getting married, with Bilton indicated.
She comes back in a scurry, refuses him, and instantly constitutes
herself life-preserver to Charlie, whom she had also refused. What is
she playing at? That's what I want to know.'
Bertie took up a quantity of waste-papers, and thrust them down into
the basket.
'She's not playing at anything just now,' he said. 'She's just being
a human woman, trying to save the life of a friend. Judy talked to me
about it. The only interest in life to Charlie was she, and she is
trying to get him to take an interest in life that isn't her!'
'That will require some delicacy of touch,' remarked Ginger.
'It will. She has it--whether enough remains to be seen. Charlie had
one foot in the grave when she came back, I'm told; she has taken that
out, anyhow.'
'But does she mean to marry him?' asked Ginger. 'I can't believe she
will succeed in getting him back to life without, anyhow, holding that
out as a prospect.'
'It's really a delicate position,' said Bertie; 'and it is made more
interesting by the fact that physically Charlie is so like Bilton. In
other respects,' he added, 'they are remarkably dissimilar.'
'Do you like him?'
'No; I have got an awful distaste for him. Why I don't quite know. That
rather accentuates it.'
Ginger sat up from his reclining attitude.
'Bertie, I'm awfully interested in one thing, and I haven't seen you
since you came back,' he said. 'Was there any--well, any difficulty
with Dorothy Emsworth?'
Bertie paused in his labours, divided in his mind as to whether he
should tell Ginger or not. He had a great opinion of his shrewdness,
but, having himself managed his crisis, paid up, and got back the
letter, he did not consider that there was any need for advice or
counsel from anybody. So he decided not to tell him.
'She was quite friendly in America,' he said; 'I saw her several times;
she even stayed down at Port Washington.'
Ginger, as has been seen, was immensely interested in other people's
affairs, having none, as he said, of his own which could possibly
interest anybody. On this occasion he could not quite stifle his
curiosity.
'I remember you telling me that you once wrote her a very--very
friendly letter,' he said.
'Certainly. It is in my possession now. I keep it as an interesting
memento.'
Ginger shuddered slightly.
'I should as soon think of keeping a corpse,' he said.
'Burn it. She's rather a brick to have given it you back, though. Sort
of wedding-present?'
'Yes, a valuable one.'
'Does she still carry on with Bilton?' asked Ginger.
'I don't know.'
'Well, I hope she didn't show it him before she returned it,' said the
other.
January in London, with few exceptions, had been a month of raw and
foggy days--days that were bitter cold, with the coldness of a damp
cloth, and stuffy with the airlessness of that which a damp cloth
covers. Far otherwise was it at Davos, where morning after morning,
after nights of still, intense cold, the sun rose over the snow-covered
hills, and flamed like a golden giant, rejoicing in his strength,
through the arc of crystalline blue. Much snow had fallen in December,
but when the fall was past, the triumphant serenity of the brilliant
climate reasserted itself. The pines above the long, one-streeted
village had long ago shaken themselves clear of their covering, and
stood out like large black holes burned in the hillside of white.
Day after day the divine windlessness of the high Alpine valley had
communicated something of its briskness to those fortunate enough to be
there, and the exhilaration of the atmosphere seemed to percolate into
minds of not more than ordinary vivacity.
The village itself lies on a gentle down gradient of road, some mile
in length, where Alpine chalets jostle with huge modern hotels. Below
lies the puffy little railway which climbs through the pinewoods above
the town, and communicates in many loops and detours with the larger
routes; and straight underneath the centre of the village is the
skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on the
elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions of
the most complicated order. Others, by the aid of the puffy railway,
mount to the top of the hills above the town, and spend enraptured days
in sliding down again on toboggans to the village of Klosters. Motion,
in fact, of any other sort than that of walking is the aim and object
of Davos life--an instinct dictated and rendered necessary by the keen
exhilaration of the air. At no other place in the world, perhaps, is
the sluggard so goaded to physical activity; at no other, perhaps, is
the active brain so lulled or intoxicated into quiescence. It lies, in
fact, basking and smiling, while the rejuvenated body, free from the
low and cramping effects of thought, goes rejoicing on its way.
Charlie, by reason of his malady, had been debarred from taking either
much or violent exercise; he had been told to be out always and to be
idle usually. This he found extremely easy, for his mother was there
to be idle with him, and Sybil was there to furnish entertainment
for both. With her usual decision and eye for fitness, she had seen
at once that for the present there was only one thing in the world
worth doing--namely, skating. She skated extremely badly, but with an
enjoyment that was almost pathetic, in consideration of the persistence
of 'frequent fall.' Thus, morning after morning, she, setting out at
earlier hours, would be followed down to the rink by Charlie and his
mother, where they would lunch together, returning to the hotel before
dark fell for the cosy brightness of the long winter evenings.
Mrs. Brancepeth was a widow, cultivated, intelligent, and gifted with
a discernment that was at times really rather awkward to herself,
though never to those to whom she applied it, since she never used
what her intuition had enabled her to see, to their discomfort. This
gift put her into very accurate possession of the state of affairs
between Charlie and Sybil; it was clear to her, that is to say, that
Sybil was wiling him back into the desire to live, waking his dormant
interests, as if by oft-repeated little electric shocks of her own
vitality, charming him back into life. She knew, of course, the
state of her son's feelings towards Sybil, and did her the justice
of allowing that, not byword or look, direct or indirect, did she
ever hold herself out as the prize for which life was worth living.
Indeed, Mrs. Brancepeth admired with all the highly-developed power
of appreciation that was in her the constant effacement of herself
which Sybil practised--effacement, that is, of the personal element,
while by all healthy and impersonal channels she tried to rekindle his
love for life. Whatever was--so Sybil's gospel appeared to run--was
worth attention. Her own falls on the ice were matters for amused
comment; the outside edge was _per se_ a thing of beauty; the stately
march of the sun was enough to turn one Parsee. Enthusiastic, vitally
active as Sybil always had been, it required less penetration than
Mrs. Brancepeth possessed to see that her amazing flood of vitality
was deliberately outpoured for the sake of Charlie. This was the more
evident to her by the fact that Sybil, when alone with her, subsided,
sank into herself, and rested from an effort. At times, indeed, when
Charlie was not there, she was almost peevish, which, in a woman of
equable temper, is a sure sign of some overtaxed function. Such an
instance occurred, so Mrs. Brancepeth thought, on an evening shortly
before Bilton arrived at Davos. In the six weeks that they had now
spent there, the elder woman had got to know the younger very well, to
like her immensely, and to respect, with almost a sense of awe, the
extreme cleverness with which she managed her affair. The 'affair' was
briefly, to her mind, to make Charlie take a normal interest in life
again, without exciting an abnormal interest in herself--to transfer
his affection, in fact, from herself to life.
They had dined together that evening at their small table at the Beau
Site, and Sybil had traced loops on the tablecloth with a wineglass,
and sketched threes and brackets to a centre with the prong of a fork.
'Yes, it sounds silly,' she said, 'but it is the most fascinating
thing in the world to try to do anything which you at present believe
yourself incapable of doing. I have no eye for colour at all, therefore
two years ago I took violently, as Charlie remembers, to painting. I
have no eye for balance, therefore now I spend my day in trying to
execute complicated movements which depend entirely on it.'
Charlie's eye lit up.
'The quest of the impossible,' he said. 'How I sympathize!'
This 'was direct enough; with returning health he had got far greater
directness. Mrs. Brancepeth waited for Sybil's reply; it came as direct
as his.
'Oh, Charlie, you always confuse things,' she said. 'You do not mean
the quest of the impossible, but the quest of the improbable. The quest
of the improbable is the secret of our striving. Anyone can grasp the
impossible; it is merely an affair of the imagination. I can amuse
myself by planning out what my life would be if I were a man. What I
cannot do is to plan out for myself a successful career as a woman.'
'Surely you have plans enough,' said Mrs. Brancepeth.
'No, no plans,' said Sybil--' desires merely. I have lots of desires.
One is control of the outside edge; that is unrealized. Dear Charlie,
you look so well this evening; that is another of my plans. It is
getting on.'
'He gained two pounds last week,' said his mother.
'How nice! I lost a hundred, because I speculated on the Stock
Exchange. It sounds rather grand to speculate, but it wasn't at all
grand. What happened was that a pleasant young gentleman here, whose
name I don't know, said two days ago to me, "Buy East Rands." I bought
a hundred. They went down a point. I sold. But I bought many emotions
with my hundred pounds. One was that one could get interested in
anything, whether one knew what it was or not, as long as one put money
into it. And if money interests you, surely anything else will.' This,
too--so Mrs. Brancepeth interpreted it--was a successful red herring
drawn across the path. Charlie appeared equally interested.
'Ah, you are wrong there, Sybil,' he said. 'Money _in excelsis_ must be
the most interesting thing in the world; there is nothing it cannot do.'
'Oh, it can do everything that is not worth doing,' interrupted Sybil;
'I grant that.'
'And most things that are,' he continued. 'For, except content, which
it will not bring you, there is nothing which is not in its sphere.'
'Toothache,' said Sybil promptly. 'I had three minutes' toothache
yesterday, and was miserable.'
'Painless extraction.'
'But not the courage for extraction,' said she. 'I always think that
extraction is at the root of it. One can get along all right with what
one has not got; what one cannot do is to part with something that one
has which gives pain.'
Mrs. Brancepeth tapped with the handle of her fork on the table.
'This is irrelevant,' she said; 'the question before the house is the
power of money.'
'Dear Mrs. Brancepeth,' said Sybil, 'please don't let us discuss; let
us babble. "In a little while our lips are dumb," as some depressing
poet says. Poets are so often depressing.'
'Sybil is the most prosaic poet I know,' said Charlie.
'She casts her thought really in the mould of poetry, and before it is
cold she hammers it to prose. She is the only person I know who has the
romantic temperament and is ashamed of it.'
'Not ashamed of it,' cried she; 'but it is not current coin. I hammer
the metal into currency. And he calls me prosaic.' The ice was thin
here, so thought Mrs. Brancepeth.
'Everyone has the same difficulty,' she said. 'One has either to
hammer one's poetry into prose before it is current or trick out one's
prose into poetry. The raw product of any of us--that is what it comes
to--does not pass.'
'Ah, but what is the raw product?' said Charlie. 'If one knew, one
would use it. But no one knows about himself. "Know thyself"--the first
of mottoes, and, like all mottoes, impossible to act upon.'
'If you know other people, it is a good working basis about one's
self,' said Sybil; 'one is very average--that is the important thing to
remember.'
'But if everybody is average, why does A single out B?' asked Charlie.
'Why not C or D, up to Z?'
Sybil finished her pudding.
'I don't know,' she said. 'Probably because B comes first--is next to
A. About money--of course it will not give you content. Content is a
matter of temperament. But it will give you the power to gratify any
taste; and, considering how many beautiful things there are in the
world, it is a confession of idiocy or of want of taste, which is the
same thing, not to be able to be absorbed in some one of them.'
'That is quite true,' said Mrs. Brancepeth; 'and it matters hardly at
all what one is absorbed in so long as one is absorbed.
Charlie responded to this.
'And one's power of absorption depends almost entirely on health,' said
he.
The evening post came in on this, and not long after Charlie went
upstairs to answer certain letters which had come for him, leaving the
other two together. Since the arrival of the post, Sybil had become
very silent and preoccupied; one letter, in fact, she read three times
over, with silent frownings between each perusal. At length she rose,
took a turn or two up the room, and spoke.
'I have had disquieting news,' she said; 'and I want advice.'
'Do tell me, dear,' said Mrs. Brancepeth. 'I will do my best.'
'I don't know if you know Mr. Bilton,' she said. 'I have just heard
from him; he is starting to-morrow for Davos.'
'Charlie has mentioned him,' said the other.
'You know who he is, then,' said Sybil. 'Shortly before I left England
he proposed to me. I refused him. I don't want him to come here; but
how is it possible for me to stop him?'
She faced about, and stood opposite the elder woman.
'What am I to do?' she asked. 'He is strong, masterful; I am afraid of
him, and it will take a great deal of nervous force out of me. Now, I
can't spare that.'
She paused a moment.
'Perhaps I had better say straight out what I mean,' she said. 'I
am having rather a hard time as it is; that I take on myself very
willingly. But every day leaves me more and more tired when the need
for playing up is over. But it is worth it: I should be a very feeble
creature if I did not feel that. Because he is getting better, is he
not?'
Mrs. Brancepeth laid her hand on Sybil.
'Every day I thank God for what you are doing,' she said, 'and I thank
you; but--but I suppose I have been more sanguine than I should. Is
there no chance for Charlie?'
Sybil threw her arms out with a hopeless gesture.
'I don't know--literally I don't know. I like him so much that I can't
offer him only liking; and I don't know that I have anything more to
offer him. It is all very difficult. I don't suppose there is a woman
in the world who knows herself so badly as I do. And I used to think I
was so decisive, so clear cut. What is happening to me?'
Mrs. Brancepeth looked at her with a wonderful tenderness and pity.
She had often noticed how completely she was in the clutch of her
temperament, how the mood of the moment completely blotted out all
other landmarks and guiding-posts which experience from without and
her own character from within might have been supposed to be of some
directing value in perplexities. But it was not so with her; in such
things she was a child, ruled by the impulse--not led by the reason,
nor steered by any formed character. With her the present moment so
blotted out the past that all precedents, all warnings, all points
which ninety-nine grown-up people out of a hundred have to help their
decisions, were with her simply non-existent. If the present moment was
pleasant, she abandoned herself to childish delight; if perplexing,
she was the prey of in-soluble doubts. She had a passion for analysis,
but her analysis, brilliant as it often was, was as fruitless as the
Japanese cherry. It was the process of thought which she loved to
dissect, and having dissected it, she threw it away. All this Mrs.
Brancepeth saw--saw, too, that Sybil's was a nature to which it was
no use to preach principles; the practical dealing with the concrete
instance was all that could help her.
'Tell me more about Mr. Bilton,' she said.
'He is dominating,' said Sybil. 'I was greatly attracted by him.
Then he did something disgusting, or so I thought it, and I was
disillusioned. I even began to dislike him. But he has force, and it
will need force on my part to fight him. What will the result be? I
shall have less force to fight Charlie's microbes for him.'
'Yes, that is what you are doing,' said Mrs. Brancepeth softly.
'And even here, even when I see most clearly how much better he is
getting, I ask myself whether I am doing wisely or not,' continued
Sybil. 'What will the end be? Is he filled with certain hopes which I
cannot say will ever be realized? And what if he is disappointed of
them?'
There was no reply, and after a minute she went on.
'Mr. Bilton will arrive in two days,' she said; 'he will come to this
hotel. It is impossible for me to cut him, not to recognise him. He
is quite extraordinarily like Charlie, by the way. I must speak to
him when he speaks to me. I must behave decently. And I know--oh, how
well I know it!--he will interest me again. I shall be forced to be
interested. There is that about him--some force, some relentless sort
of machinery that goes grinding on, pulverizing what gets in its way.'
Mrs. Brancepeth rose.
'Now, dear, be quiet,' she said. 'You are working yourself up about it.
Don't do that. Don't whip up your imagination on the subject. You take
things too vividly.' Sybil smiled rather hopelessly.
'That does not help matters,' she said; 'some people take them not
vividly enough. I am myself, you are yourself; the broad lines of each
of us are inexorably laid down for us. All we can do is not to make
a very shocking mess of them. We are all unsatisfactory. No, I don't
think you are; you are very nice and restful. Now, what am I to do--not
about Bilton, I mean, but now this minute. That is always so important.'
Mrs. Brancepeth laughed.
'And that is so like you,' she said. 'Go to bed, dear, and dream as
vividly as you can of the outside edge.'
Bilton arrived two days afterwards, and, as was quite natural, paid
a call on his friends before dinner in their sitting-room. As chance
would have it, neither Charlie nor his mother were in, and he found
Sybil alone. She rose and shook hands with him as he entered, but gave
him no smile.
'I was surprised to get your letter,' she said; 'I thought you were too
busy to come out to this very idle place.'
'I chose it for its idleness,' he said. 'I was very tired, and I have a
busy time ahead of me again. It is economical to spend a fortnight in
complete idleness rather than let your work suffer for a year.'
He paused a moment.
'That was my excuse,' he said; 'I had also a reason.' Sybil felt a
sudden anger with him, which flared up and died down again as he went
on.
'I am glad to find you alone,' he said, 'because I wanted to see you.
I had to see you; I was thirsty for the sight of you. But do not be
afraid; I shall not make myself importunate; I shall say nothing
to offend you; I shall not entreat you by word or look. I just
wanted--wanted to see you: that is all.'
He spoke rather low, and rather more slowly than his wont; but next
moment he resumed the ordinary tone of his speech.
'I came here a couple of years ago,' said he; 'and I carried away with
me an extraordinary sense of coolness and rest. I think one's brain
goes to sleep here. We Americans need that; we have awful insomnia of
the brain. I want to go sliding on a silly sledge down a steep place; I
want to fall about on skates, and not read the paper.'
Sybil laughed; there had been a certain modesty and good taste in his
first speech that had rather touched her, and from that he had gone
straight to ordinary converse. The assurance of the harmlessness of
his intentions seemed to her very genuine. As a matter of fact, it was
profoundly calculated, and produced just the effect he wanted; for he
particularly desired to be admitted without embarrassment or delay into
the others' party.
To Charlie's mind, this addition--for though Bilton never seemed to
intrude himself, yet he usually was there--was nothing more at first
than a slight nuisance. More than that, it could not be called, since
he knew of Sybil's complete and final rejection of Bilton as a lover,
and it was not consonant with the sweetness of his own nature to be
rendered jealous and exacting about her friends. But by degrees--so
gradual that he could not notice the growth of the feeling, but only
register the fact that it had grown--he became aware of uneasiness of
mind, which, as it increased, diminished from the great content in
which he had passed the earlier weeks of their stay at Davos. Also
he began to realize that in the shade of his mind there had grown
up unconsciously a hope--or, if not a hope, the possibility of the
hope--that he himself might find in her some day more than a friend. He
had often asked himself before whether he still cherished and watered
the tender seedling, and as often he had honestly told himself that he
did not. But Bilton's coming, and the terms he was on with Sybil, cast
a light into his own dark places, and he knew that that hops was still
not rooted up from his mind. And, realizing this, he realized how vital
such a hope was to him.
Sybil, too, during the ten days following Bilton's arrival, had
insensibly changed in her attitude towards him. Having definitely
decided that he should not be her lover, she speedily began to find in
him excellences as a friend which she had scarcely realized before.
As a lover, she had found him wanting; a certain coarseness of nature
in him prevented her from receiving him on that footing. But once
off that ground, this coarseness almost ceased to offend her; at any
rate, transferred on to the less intimate plane, it ranked a 'minus'
of the same calibre as one of his numerous 'pluses.' Among these, his
practical qualities greatly appealed to her--his quickness at grasping
the salient points of any question; his very firm hold on concrete
affairs, from the quickest and securest way of tying a bootlace to his
lucid exposition of American finance, as typified in that Napoleon,
Lewis Palmer, or his knowledge in his own business of what constituted
a play that would draw. On a hundred occasions every day she had some
exhibition of this brought to her notice; in whatever he did or said
he showed efficiency. That quality, as she had settled, was not one to
be loved, but socially she delighted in it. Moreover, the force she
had feared seemed to be in abeyance. He made no demands on her nervous
energies that she recognised as demands.
Now, love, though proverbially blind, is often very prone to see
something which has no existence whatever, and before long Charlie
began to conjure up a very complete phantom, which would have done
credit to a much finer imagination than he really possessed, had not he
viewed the situation through the eyes of a lover, to whose vision all
is intensified. He saw, what was true, that Sybil listened with very
genuine interest to what Bilton had to say; he saw her an eager pupil
of that excellent skater; he saw, if some expedition was projected,
that she left all the arrangements of sleighs and food in his hands.
To the unbiassed observer nothing could have been more natural, for
he talked well on subjects that interested her, he gave her valuable
aid towards accomplishing the elusive outside back edge, and his
arrangements in expeditions were admirable; for sleighs were punctual,
and nothing was forgotten out of the luncheon-basket. But Charlie was
not unbiassed, and the conclusions that slowly and silently formed
themselves in his mind were both untrue in the abstract and in the
concrete unjust to her. He was still sufficiently young to have an
attack of childishness, and he was quite sufficiently in love with her
to be a prey to jealousy.
The second week of Bilton's stay had passed, and still he dropped no
hint about his imminent return, and on this particular morning, after a
rather worried week, rendered not more easy because he kept his worries
strictly to himself, Charlie had just returned rather gloomily from a
visit to his doctor.
During the last ten days he had gone down a little in weight, and,
though the doctor would have preferred it otherwise, he reminded him
that he must have ups and downs; no cure was uninterrupted progress.
But this, piled on the top of his other cares, which were rendered
harder to bear by a couple of days of south wind, instead of the cold
purity of windlessness, unduly depressed him, and Sybil, coming out
of the hotel to the sheltered corner of the veranda which he usually
occupied in the morning, found him somewhat listless and dejected. But,
with tact which had often succeeded before, she affected not to notice
it, and discoursed on indifferent subjects.
'Such a bore!' she said. 'The road down the valley is too soft for
sleighing, and the rink is too sloppy for skating.'
Charlie brightened up a little; he seemed to have seen much less of her
lately.
'So you're going to have an idle day,' he said. 'Sit and talk to me.'
'Well, we are going out almost immediately,' she said, 'just to go
down the Schwester toboggan-run, which they say is still possible. I
wish you could come, Charlie, but there's no way of getting up except
walking.'
Charlie instantly froze into himself.
'I'm afraid that's quite impossible,' he said. 'You're going with
Bilton, I suppose.'
'Yes; I rather think he's waiting for me.'
Charlie registered to himself the fact that she had not asked for the
doctor's report of him, though Monday was his regular day for being
overhauled.
'Never keep people waiting,' he said, and opened a book. Then his
better disposition came to his aid.
'I hope it will be possible for you to get a good run,' he said
cordially. 'It is horrid, this weather, is it not?'
'Horrid--quite horrid!' she said. 'Well, good-bye; your mother will be
out directly.'
He sat there after she had left him, with book open, but not reading. A
pale, watery sun, instead of the golden monarch enthroned in cloudless
blue, peered like a white plate through the clouds blown up by the
south wind, and, instead of a dry and vivifying air, the atmosphere
was loaded with moisture, the eaves dripped with the melting snow, and
every now and then, with a whisper and a thud, some sheet would detach
itself form a house-roof and plunge into the roadway below. Instead of
presenting an expanse of crystalline whiteness, the snow-fields were
stained and yellowish to the eye; hideous corners of corrugated roofs
showed where the coverlet of white had slipped; all the raw discomfort
of a thaw was in the air. To Charlie, both owing to his physical
condition and his unspoken trouble, the heavy chilliness of the day was
peculiarly oppressive; his mother also was detained indoors, and for
an hour he was prey to the gloomiest reflections. It was all no use,
so lie told himself; since October he had heartily tried with all his
power both to get better and to recapture the normal joy of living.
But now, as so often happened, he had begun to slip back again; next
week no doubt would tell a further tale of hardly-earned ground lost,
and week would follow week, and he would slip back and back. Even if
he pulled through, even if he became strong again, what was there in
life for him worth recovering for? He had thought--deluded himself
into thinking--that perhaps Sybil might come to care for him, but
with sudden bitter intuition he guessed that he was really no nearer
winning her love than he had been before he had been taken ill. Great
compassion, the divine womanly instinct to help a man, had brought
her out here; the improvement in his health, the successful combating
of his disease, was due to that. But it was but a bitter gift she had
brought him; it was as if she had brought him through some illness only
to give him over to the hangman at the last. And she had not asked
about the doctor's report. That seemed to him in his dis-ordered frame
of mind to clinch the matter. Instead she had gone off tobogganing with
Bilton. True, she had refused him in the autumn, but how many marriages
have been prefaced by that?
Charlie shivered slightly, and looked about him for a rug, for the damp
of the day made a man chilly, where the dryness of far greater cold
would have been but warming and invigorating. But he had not brought
one out, and, saying to himself that he would go in to fetch one in
a minute, he still sat on, looking for a break in the clouds that
encompassed him. But he could not find one; the taste had gone out of
the world again.
The Schwester run had been in unexpectedly good order, and Sybil did
not get back to the hotel till late in the afternoon. The weather had
cleared since noon, and about twilight the curtain of clouds had been
dispersed, the south wind had ceased, and the splendid frosty stars
again hung embroidered on the velvet of the night. Instead of plunging
through the snow, before they reached the hotel their footsteps went
crisply on the crackly crust, and the steel runners of their trailing
toboggans sang like tea-kettles as they slid over the re-frozen
surface. Already her spirits had been high, and, with the increased
exhilaration of the air, they rose to nonsense point.
'Climate, climate,' she was saying--'how is it that people worship
money and brains and beauty, and never worship climate, which is the
one thing in the world that matters? Of course, you don't think that,
because you live in New York, which is unbearable three-quarters of
the year and intolerable the rest--isn't that it?--and get accustomed
to doing without climate, just as you train oysters to live out of
water until you are ready to eat them. But to me nothing but climate is
really of any importance. I am so much better than when I came here;
and I was quite well when I came,' she added.
'It seems to have suited Charlie Brancepeth very well,' said Bilton.
'Yes, he's much better; soon he'll be quite well. He gets more like
you, Mr. Bilton, as he regains his health, every day. It really is
very odd, because I don't suppose two people were ever so unlike in
character. But the climate here has been good for your character as
well as Charlie's lungs.'
'Have I improved? I'm delighted to hear it. I thought I was a hopeless
case.'
'Not at all--no more hopeless than Charlie. You have developed a
side your character which I hardly suspected you of having, and are
beginning to take perfectly frivolous pursuits with great seriousness.
You were much more annoyed at losing ten seconds to-day in that spill
than you were at losing your cigarette-case.'
'I have been a pupil, that's all,' he said; 'I have been well taught
since I have been here.'
'_Tanti complimenti_,' said she. 'Really, when you came I was afraid
you would be absorbed in telegrams and bargains and bulls and bears.
But you have not; you have played very nicely. How much longer do you
stop?'
They had come to the hotel, and were passing the big squares of light
cast by the hall windows. He dropped the rope of his toboggan as she
asked this, and stopped to pick it up, looking her full in the face.
'I shall go when I am told,' he said--' not a day before.' She looked
at him, and understood. It was the first personal word he had said to
her since the little interview on her arrival, but it was so modest
again, so self-obliterating, that it did not offend her with a sense
that he had broken his word when he promised not to speak to her again
on intimate subjects. It was sufficient to remind him of it very
gently, just to cool him off, so to speak.
'We should all miss you, I am sure,' she said.
Charlie did not appear at dinner that evening. He had caught a little
chill, it appeared, in the morning, and had gone to bed in a good deal
of discomfort, with a somewhat high temperature. Mrs. Brancepeth,
though she would not confess to any anxiety, yet felt anxious, and
as soon as dinner was over went off to see how he was. She came back
before many minutes were over, and signalled to Sybil across the salon,
who got up at once and followed her.
'Is there anything wrong?' she asked.
'Yes; I have asked Dr. Thaxter to come and see him. His temperature has
risen again. But he asked me if he could see you for a moment; I wish
you would go. He is very restless, and I think you might quiet him; for
you know,' she said, looking at her, 'I think you can do more for him
than any doctor.'
Sybil stood there a minute, biting her lip. She had a physical
repulsion to illness, which, though it shocked her that she should feel
it, yet dominated her. Since she had taken Charlie in hand, she had had
daily to wrestle with it, and though, owing to his very satisfactory
progress, it had become easier to overcome, yet it was always there.
But she decided almost immediately.
'Yes, I will go,' she said, then paused. 'Does he look terrible? Will
it shock me?' she asked.
Mrs. Brancepeth's eyes lit up with a momentary indignation.
'Ah, what does that matter?' she exclaimed involuntarily. 'No, dear, I
did not mean to say that. I know your horror of illness. But go to him;
it will not shock you. He is looking rather flushed; his eyes are very
bright.'
She took Sybil's hands in hers.
'Oh, make him better, make him better!' she said; 'make him want to
live!'
Entreaty vibrated in her voice, and her hands trembled. Sybil felt
immensely sorry for her, and her sorrow overcame her repugnance at what
lay before her. Her horror for illness was of the same character as a
child's fear of the dark--unreasonable, but overmastering. But in the
presence of this mother's anxiety it was conquered for the moment.
'I will do what I can,' she said--' I will do what I honestly can. Are
you coming with me?'
'No; he wants to see you alone.' And, as she spoke, a sudden pang of
jealousy and rebellion struck her. Why should she who would give her
life for him with thankful willingness be powerless to help him, while
half that love from another woman might prove so efficacious, could she
but exert its strength? But next moment that was gone; no other thought
but the mother's yearning for her son was there.
Sybil went from her up the passage to Charlie's room, and entered
softly. At that moment, hearing perhaps the rustle of her dress, he
turned his head on his pillow, and looked towards the door, and in
dead silence for a moment their eyes met. His face was very much
flushed; his eyes, as his mother had said, were very bright, but
bright with the burning of fever; and the indescribable sharpness
and hardness of feature that comes with illness was there. But as
Sybil looked, no horror was hers, and no shrinking. All she knew was
that a man, suffering and ill, lay there--a man to whom she was the
reason of living and the sun of life; a man whom she had known long,
liked always, loved never. In his eyes there burned not only fever,
but, as he saw her, the unquenchable light of love in all its dumb
faithfulness. She had seen it often before, and had rejected it, but
now it smote upon her heart. Something within her melted; and as a
butterfly cracks its chrysalis, and emerges weak, hardly yet conscious
of the new life, of the iridescence of its own wings, of the sunlight
which till now has been hidden from it by that sheath of its shell, so
something new trembled on the threshold of her heart--pity--which knew
not yet that with which it was entwined. And with the waking of herself
within her came the knowledge of what to do and say intuitively,
because she was at last a woman.
She came quickly across the room, smiling at him.
'Charlie, Charlie, this will never do,' she said. 'I leave you alone
for one day, and you instantly behave naughtily like this. I am ashamed
of you.'
'Sybil, it is good of you to come and see me,' he said; 'I wanted to
see you so much.'
Then the inevitable querulousness of illness mastered him.
'Oh, I am so uncomfortable,' he said--' so hot and feverish.' And he
flung-his arm outside the bedclothes.
'Poor old Charlie!' she said; 'poor old fellow! It is a bore. Now, put
that arm back at once. There. Now, you are not going to talk to me
now, but I am going to make you ever so much more comfortable, put the
pillow for you so, and you are going to see the doctor, and then you
are going to sleep. Headache? Poor old boy! And I shall sit here and
talk to you till the doctor comes.'
She drew a chair to the bedside, and he turned more over in bed so that
he looked directly at her.
'Oh, I'm ill, I'm ill,' he said; 'and it was quite my own fault. I sat
outside this morning without a rug, and I knew I was catching a chill.
And I didn't care. You see, you didn't care. You never asked me what
the doctor's report was this morning, and I--I determined not to care
either. I am sorry; I shouldn't have said that.'
Sybil's hand trembled as she arranged the bedclothes, which he had
thrown off.
'I was a brute,' said she, 'and----' She paused. 'Charlie, you must get
well,' she cried suddenly.
He lay quite still a moment, with breath coming quickly.
'You said that as if you cared,' he said.