For as much of the day as she could spare from the miserable formalities
and arrangements attendant on the death of a human being, Clementina
made a fool of herself over the child. It was a feminine scrap hungering
for love, kitten-like in its demand for caresses. Contentedly nestling
in Clementina’s arms, she related, piecemeal, her tiny history. Her name
was Sheila, and she loved her father who was very ill. So ill that she
had only been able to see him once since they had come off the ship.
That was yesterday, and she had been frightened, for he said that he was
going to mummy. Now mummy had gone to heaven, and when people go to
heaven you never see them again. With a pang Clementina asked her if she
remembered when her mummy went to heaven. Oh yes. It was ever so long
ago—when she was quite little. Daddy cried, cried, cried. She, too,
would cry if daddy were to go to heaven. . . . Clementina thought it
best to wait and accustom the child both to the idea of the eternal
parting and to herself, before breaking the disastrous news. But her
heart was wrung. Sometimes Sheila revolted and clamoured to see him; but
on the whole she showed herself to be reasonable and docile. She hugged
to her side a shapeless and very dirty white plush cat, her inseparable
companion. . . . They had lived in a big house in Shanghai, with lots of
servants; but her father had sold it and sold all the furniture, and
they were going to live in England for ever and ever. England was a
place all full of green trees and grass and cows and flowers. Did
Clementina know England?
“Suppose daddy goes to heaven, would you like to come and live with me?”
asked Clementina.
Sheila replied seriously that she would sooner live with her than with
Na. Na was a new Na. Her old Na was in Shanghai. Her husband wouldn’t
let her come to England. Only Clementina would have to cuddle her to
sleep every night, like her daddy. Na didn’t cuddle her to sleep. She
thought she didn’t know how. Daddy, she repeated like a young parrot,
had said that was the worst of getting a nurse who had never had
children of her own. They were so darned helpless. Clementina winced;
but she put her arm round the child again.
“You’re not afraid of my not being able to cuddle you, Sheila?”
“Oh, you—you cuddle lovely,” murmured Sheila.
Who was her mother? Clementina had no notion. Hammersley had never
announced the fact of his marriage. The last time she had seen him was
six years ago. The child gave herself out to be five and a half.
Hammersley must have married just before leaving England. He had
breathed not a word to anybody. But so had Will Hammersley acted all his
life. He was one who gave and never sought; a man who received the
confidence of all who knew him, and kept the secrets both of joy and
sorrow of his own life hidden behind his smiling eyes.
One of the secrets—the dainty secret that lay in her arms—was out now;
a fact in flesh and blood. And for the guidance of this sensitive wisp
of humanity to womanhood she, Clementina, and Ephraim Quixtus were
jointly responsible. It was a Puckish destiny that had brought their
lives to this point of convergence. With the dead man lying cold and
stark upstairs, the humour of it appeared too grim for smiles. She
wished that the quiet, capable man of wise understanding and unselfish
heart, who had missed the express train at Brindisi that would have sped
him swiftly to his longed-for Devonshire, and had come on to Marseilles
with the sick stranger, had been appointed her coadjutor. Poynter could
have helped her mightily with his kindly wisdom and his knowledge of the
hearts and the ways of men, as he was helping her that day in the
performance of the dreary duties to the dead. But Quixtus! He was as
much of a child as the one confided to his care. Anxious, however, that
Sheila should be prepossessed in his favour, she drew a flattering
picture of the new uncle that would shortly come into her life.
“Is he your husband?” asked Sheila.
“Good Lord, no!” cried Clementina, aghast at the grotesque suggestion.
“Whatever put that in your head, child?”
It appeared that Dora Smith, one of her little friends in Shanghai, had
an uncle and aunt who were married. She thought all uncles and aunts
were married.
“Do you think he’ll like my frock?” asked Sheila.
The vanity of the feminine thing! Clementina laughed for the first time
that dismal day.
“Do you think he’ll like mine?”
Sheila looked critically at the soiled, ill-fitting blouse, and the
rusty old brown skirt, and reddened. She paused for a moment.
“I’m sure he’ll say that he does,” she replied sedately.
Clementina caught a whimsical gleam in Poynter’s eye.
“Oriental diplomacy!” she remarked.
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. Go deeper.”
Clementina flushed and stroked the child’s fair hair.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to learn a lot of things.”
“In the most exquisite school in the world,” said Poynter.
Quixtus came downstairs about four o’clock, pale and shaky, and found
Clementina in the dark and stuffy writing-room of the hotel. She had
petted the child to her afternoon sleep, about half an hour before, and
had left her in the joint care of the Chinese nurse and the dirty white
plush cat tightly clasped to her breast. She had just finished a letter
to Tommy. Either through the fault of the deeply encrusted hotel pen, or
by force of painting habit, a smear of violet ink ran a comet’s course
across her cheek. She had written to Tommy:
“If you don’t want to know what has happened, you ought to. I find my
poor friend dead on my arrival. Elysian fields for him, which I’m sure
are not as beautiful as the English lanes his soul longed for. To my
amazement he has left a fairy child to the joint guardianship of your
uncle and myself. Your uncle’s a sick man, and needs looking after. What
I’m going to do with all you helpless chickens, when I ought to be
painting trousers, God alone knows. I once was an artist. Now I’m a hen.
Yours, Clementina.”
She had also written to Etta in similar strain, and at the same
inordinate length, and was addressing the envelope when Quixtus entered
the room.
She wheeled round.
“Better?”
“Thank you,” said he. “Though I’m ashamed of myself for sleeping all
this time.”
“Jolly good thing you did go to sleep,” replied Clementina. “It has
probably saved you from a breakdown. You were on the verge of one.”
“Can I help you with any of the unhappy arrangements that have to be
made in these circumstances?”
“Made ’em,” said Clementina. “Sit down.”
Quixtus obeyed, meekly. He wore an air of great lassitude, like a man
who has just risen from a bed of sickness. He passed his hands over his
eyes:
“There was a sealed packet, if I remember rightly, and a child. I think
we might see now what the packet contains.”
“Are you fit to read it?” she asked. He smiled vaguely, for her tone
softened the abruptness of the question.
“I am anxious to do so,” he replied.
Clementina opened the envelope and drew out the two documents, the
letter and the will, and read them aloud. Neither added greatly to the
information given by Poynter. Hammersley charged them as his two oldest,
most loved and trusted friends, to regard themselves as the parents and
guardians of his orphaned child, to whom he bequeathed a small but
comfortable fortune, to be administered by them jointly in trust, until
she should marry or reach the age of twenty-five years. No mention being
made of the dead wife, her identity still remained a mystery. Like
Clementina, Quixtus had not heard of his marriage, could think of no
woman whom, six years ago, while he was in England, he could have
married.
But six years ago. . .! Quixtus buried his face in his hands and
shuddered. Had the man been false to every one—even to the wife of the
friend he had betrayed?
Suddenly he rose with a great cry and a passionate gesture of both arms.
“I am lost! I am lost! I am floundering in quicksands. The meaning of
the earth has gone from me. I’m in a land of grotesques—shapes that mop
and mow at me and have no reality. The things they do the human brain
can’t conceive. They have been driving me mad, mad!” he cried, beating
his head with his knuckles, “and yet I am sane now. Did you ever know
what it was to be so sane that your soul was tortured with sanity? Oh,
my God!”
He walked about the room quivering from the outburst. Clementina
regarded him with amazed interest. This was a new, undreamed of Quixtus,
a human creature that had passed through torment.
“Tell me what is on your mind,” she said quietly. “It might ease it.”
“No,” said he, halting before her. “Not to my dying day. There are
things one must keep within oneself till they eat away one’s vitals. I
wish I had never come here.”
“You came here on an errand of mercy, and as far as you were concerned
you performed it.”
“I came here with hate in my heart, I tell you. I came here on an errand
of evil. And outside the door of his room my purpose failed me—and I
sent him my love. And then I went in and saw him—dead.”
“And you forgave him,” said Clementina.
“No; I prayed that God would.”
He turned away. Clementina rose from her chair by the writing-table and
followed him.
“What was between you and Will Hammersley?”
For an instant he had an impulse to tell her, she looked so strong, so
honest. But he checked it. Confidence was impossible. The shame of the
dead must be buried with the dead. He pointed to the documents lying on
the table.
“He thought I never knew. I never knew,” said he.
“I give it up,” said Clementina.
A memory smote him. He bent his brows upon her. His eyes were sad and
clear.
“You have no inkling of the matter?”
“None in the least. Good Lord!” she broke out impatiently, “if I had, do
you suppose I’d be cross-questioning you? I’d be trying to help you, as
I want to do.”
He threw himself wearily into a chair and leant his head on his hand.
“I’ve had queer experiences of late,” he said. “I’ve learned to trust
nobody. How can I tell that you’re sincere in saying you want to help
me?”
Clementina puckered up her face.
“What’s that? Here am I, who have been abusing you all your life, now
doing violence to my traditions and saying let us kiss and be
friends—just at the very moment when you want friends more than you
ever did in your born days—and you ask me if I’m sincere! Lord in
heaven! Did you ever know me to be even decently polite to creatures I
didn’t care about?”
Clementina was indignant. The faint shadow of a smile passed across
Quixtus’s face.
“You’ve not always been polite to me, Clementina. This change to
solicitude is surprising. _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes._ Which
means——”
“Do you suppose you’re the only person who knows tags out of the Latin
grammar?” she snapped. Then she laughed in her dry way. “Don’t let us
begin to quarrel. We’ve got a child, you and I. I hope you realise that.
If we were its real father and mother we might quarrel with impunity. As
we’re not, we can’t. What are we going to do?”
Quixtus thought deeply for a long time. His sensitive nature shrank from
the duty imposed. If he accepted it he would be the dead man’s dupe to
the end of the chapter.
“You have seen the little girl?” he inquired at last.
“Yes. Been with her most of the day.”
“Do you like her?”
She regarded him with whimsical pity.
“Oh yes, I like her,” she said.
“Then why not keep her to yourself? I am not bound by Hammersley’s
wishes. All I have to do is to decline to act either as executor or
trustee.”
Clementina’s heart leaped in the most unregenerate manner. To have
Sheila all to herself, without let or hindrance from her impossible
co-trustee! She was staggered by the sudden, swift temptation which
struck at the roots of her unfulfilled womanhood. For a while she
dallied with it deliciously.
“If it’s agreeable to you, I’ll decline to act,” said Quixtus, after the
spell of silence.
Clementina strangled the serpent in a flash and cast it from her. To
purchase happiness at the price of human infirmity? No. She would play
squarely with life. Feminine instinct told her that the care of the
child was needful for this weary man’s salvation. She attacked him with
more roughness than she intended—the eddy of her own struggle.
“What right have you to shirk your responsibilities? That’s what you’ve
always done—and see where it has landed you. I’m not going to be a
party to it. It’s pure and simple cowardice, and I have no patience with
it.”
“Perhaps I deserve your reproaches,” said Quixtus mildly. “But the
present circumstances are so painful——”
“Painful!” she interrupted. “Lord above, man, what does it matter
whether they’re painful or not? Do you suppose I’ve gone through six and
thirty years without pain? I’ve had awful pain, hellish pain, as much
pain as a woman and an artist and a scarecrow can suffer. That’s new to
you, isn’t it? But you’ve never seen me making a hullabaloo about it.
We’ve got to bear pain in the world, and the more we grin, the better we
bear it, and—what is a precious sight more useful—the more we help
others to bear it. Who are you, Ephraim Quixtus, that you should be
exempt from pain?”
She turned to the yellow packet of “Maryland” on the marble mantlepiece
and rolled a cigarette. Quixtus said nothing, but sat tugging at his
scrubby moustache.
“That child,” she said—and she paused to lick the cigarette—“That
child of five is doomed to pain. Some of it all the love in the world
can’t prevent. It’s a law of life. But some it can. That’s another law
of life, thank God. By taking pain upon us, we can also save others
pain. That’s another law. I suppose we have to thank Jesus Christ for
that. And fate has put this tender thing into our hands to save it, if
possible, from the pain that both you and I have endured. To reject the
privilege is the act of a cowardly devil, not of a man.”
As she stood there in her slatternly blouse and tousled hair,
brandishing the wetted cigarette between nicotine stained fingers, yet
enunciating as she had seldom condescended to do to a fellow creature
her ruggedly tender philosophy of life, she looked almost beautiful in
the eyes of the man who had awakened from a nightmare into the sober
greyness of an actual dawn.
She lit the cigarette with fingers unwontedly trembling, and feverishly
drew in the first few puffs.
“Well? What are you going to do?”
Quixtus breathed hard, with parted lips, and stared at the future. It is
difficult, after a nightmare madness, to adjust the mind to the sane
outlook. But she had moved him to the depths—the depths that through
all his madness had remained untroubled.
“You are right, Clementina,” he said at last, in a low voice. “I will
share with you this great responsibility.”
She blew out a puff of smoke; “I don’t think it ought to turn our hair
white, anyhow,” she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa. “The child’s
past teething, so we shan’t have to sit up at nights over ‘Advice to
Mothers,’ and our common sense will tell us not to fill her up every day
with pâté de foie gras. When she’s ill we’ll send for a doctor, and when
we want to do business we’ll send for a lawyer. It strikes me, Ephraim,
that having another interest in life besides dead men’s jawbones, will
do you a thundering lot of good.”
“Would you like something to do me good?” he asked, with a touch of
wistful banter.
Clementina, as she afterwards confessed, felt herself to be on such a
sky-high plane of self-abnegation and altruism, that she thrust down,
figuratively speaking; angelic arms towards him. Really, the mothering
instinct again clamoured. She threw her half-smoked cigarette away and
came and, standing over him; clutched his shoulder.
“My good Ephraim,” she said, “I would give anything to see you a happy
human being.”
Then, in her abrupt fashion, she sent him out to take the air. That also
would do him good. She thrust his hat and stick in his hand.
“What are you going to do, Clementina?” he asked.
“A thousand things. First I must go upstairs and see whether the child’s
awake. I hate trusting her with that heathen imbecile.”
“Au revoir, then,” said Quixtus, moving away.
“Come back in good time to make the child’s acquaintance,” she shouted
after him.
He paused on the threshold and looked at her irresolutely. He had a
nervous dread of meeting the child.
He walked through the sun-filled streets, down the Cannebière, absently
watched the baking quays, and then, returning to the main thoroughfare,
sat down beneath the awning of a café. An hour passed. It was time to go
back and see his ward. He shrank morbidly from the ordeal. With a great
effort he rose at last and walked to the hotel.
Clementina, Poynter, and the child were in the vestibule, the two elders
seated in the wickerwork chairs; the little one squatting on the ground
at their feet and playing with the mongrel and somewhat supercilious dog
of the hotel. Quixtus halted in front of the group. The child lifted her
flower-like face to the new-comer.
“Is this——” he began.
“This is Sheila,” said Clementina. “Get up, dear, and say how d’ye do to
your new uncle.”
She held out her hand with shy politeness—he looked so long and gaunt,
and towered over her tiny self.
“How do you do, uncle—uncle——?” she turned to Clementina.
“Ephraim,” she prompted.
“Uncle Ephraim.”
“No wonder the poor innocent doesn’t remember such a name,” said
Clementina.
He bent and solemnly wagged the soft hand for some time; then, not
knowing what to do with it, he let it go.
“Do you know Bimbo?”
“No,” said Quixtus.
“Bimbo—_patte_.”
The mongrel lifted his paw.
“You must shake hands with him and then you will know him,” she said
seriously.
Quixtus, with a grave face, bent lower and shook hands with the dog.
“And Pinkie.”
She lifted the dirty white plush cat. In an embarrassed way he wagged a
stumpy fore-foot.
Sheila turned to Clementina. “Now he knows everybody.”
Clementina kissed her and rose from her seat; Poynter rising also.
“You’ll be a good girl if I leave you with Uncle Ephraim for a while?”
“My dear Clementina!” cried Quixtus aghast. “What do you mean?”
A gleam of kind malice flickered in her eyes.
“I find I must have some air, in my turn—and some absinthe which Mr.
Poynter has promised to give me. Au revoir! I shan’t be long, Sheila
dear.”
She moved with Poynter towards the door.
“But, Clementina——”
“If she bites you’ve only to call that lump of Celestial idiocy over
there,” pointing to the fat Chinese nurse who sat smiling in her dark
corner. “You’re protected. And, by the way,” she added in a whisper,
“She doesn’t know her father’s dead yet. Leave it to me to break the
news.”
She was gone. Quixtus sank; a perspiring embarrassment, into one of the
wicker chairs. A scurvy trick; he thought, of Clementina to leave him in
this appalling situation. Yet shame prevented flight. He sat there
bending his mild, china-blue eyes on Sheila, who had returned
unconcernedly to Bimbo; putting him through his tricks. He gave his paw
and sat up on end, and while doing so yawned in a bored fashion. During
this latter posture Sheila sat up on her little haunches and held her
hands in front of her and yawned in imitation. Then she set Pinkie on
end facing the dog. Lastly she looked up at her new uncle.
“You do that too. Then we’ll all be doing it.”
“God bless my soul,” said the startled man. “I—I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too old.”
She seemed, for the moment, satisfied with the reason and resumed her
game with Bimbo. After the yawn he grinned with doggy fatuity, and his
red long tongue lolled from the corner of his mouth. Sheila stuck out
her little red tongue; in droll mimicry.
“Don’t wag your tail, Bimbo. It isn’t fair, because I’ve got no tail.
Why haven’t I a tail, Uncle Eph—Eph—Uncle Ephim?”
“Because you’re a little girl and not a dog.”
At that moment the plush cat, insecurely balanced; toppled over.
“God bless my soul,” cried the little parrot, “you’re too old, Pinkie.”
“Sheila,” said Quixtus, realising in a frightened way his
responsibility. “Come here.”
With perfect docility she rose, and laid a hand on his knee. Bimbo,
perceiving himself liberated from the boredom of mountebank duty,
twisted himself up and snarled comfortably at fleas in the middle of his
back.
“You mustn’t say ‘God bless my soul,’ my dear.”
“Why not? You said it.”
There are instinctive answers in grown-ups, just as instinctive
questions in children.
“Old people can say things that little girls mustn’t—just as old people
can sit up later than little girls.”
She regarded him with frank seriousness.
“I know. Daddy says ‘damn,’ but I mustn’t. I never say it. Pinkie said
it once, and I put her in a dark, dark hole for twenty million years. It
wasn’t _really_ twenty million years, you know—it was only ten
minutes—but Pinkie thought it was.”
“She must have been very frightened,” said Quixtus, involuntarily—and
the echo of the words after passing his lips sounded strange in his
ears.
“She got quite white,” said Sheila. She picked up the shapeless animal.
“She never recovered. Look!”
“She also lost one side of her whiskers,” said Quixtus, inspecting the
beast held within two inches of his nose.
“Oh no,” she replied, getting in the most entangling way between his
legs. “Pinkie’s a fairy princess, and one day she’ll have a crown and a
pink dress and a gold sword. It’s a wicked fairy that keeps her like a
cat. And it was the wicked fairy in the shape of a big rat, bigger than
twenty million, billion, _hillion_ houses, that bit off her whiskers.
Daddy told me.”
Quixtus could not follow these transcendental flights of faërie. But he
had to make some reply, as she was looking with straight challenge into
his eyes. To his astonishment, he found himself expressing the hope
that, when Pinkie came into her own again, the loss of one set of
whiskers would not impair her beauty. Sheila explained that princesses
didn’t have whiskers, so no harm was done. The bad fairy in the form of
a rat wanted to bite off Pinkie’s nose, in which case her beauty would
have been ruined; but Pinkie was protected by a good fairy, and just
when the bad fairy was going to bite off her nose, the good fairy shook
a pepper pot and the bad fairy sneezed and was only able to bite off the
whiskers.
“That was very fortunate for Pinkie,” said Quixtus.
“Very,” said Sheila. She stood against him on one leg, swinging the
other. Conversation came to a standstill. The man found himself
tongue-tied. All kinds of idiotic remarks came into his head. He
dismissed them as not being suitable to the comprehension of a child of
five. His fingers mechanically twisted themselves in her soft hair.
Presently came the eternal command of childhood.
“Tell me a story.”
“Good gracious!” said he, “I’m afraid I don’t know any.”
“You _must_ know little Red Riding-Hood,” she said, with a touch of
scorn.
“Perhaps I do. I wonder,” said Quixtus. He clutched eagerly at a straw.
“But what’s the use of my telling it to you if you know it already?”
She ran and picked up the sprawling cat and calmly established herself
on his knees. Bimbo, neglected, uttered a whining growl, and curling
himself up with his chin by his tail, dropped into a morose slumber.
“Tell it to Pinkie. She’s stupid and always forgets the stories. Now
begin.”
Quixtus hummed and ha’d and at last plunged desperately. “There was once
a wolf who ate up Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother.”
“That’s not it,” cried Sheila. “There was once a sweet little girl who
lived with her grandmother. That’s the proper way.”
Quixtus floundered. Let any one who has never told a tale to a child and
has never heard of Red Riding-Hood for at least five-and-thirty years,
try to recount her tragical history. Quixtus had to tell it to an expert
in the legend, a fearsome undertaking. At last, with her aid he stumbled
through. Pinkie, staring at him through her bead eyes, evidently
couldn’t make head or tail of it. Being punched in the midriff by her
young protectress, she emitted a wheezy squeak.
“Pinkie says ‘thank you,’” Sheila remarked politely.
“And what do you say?” asked the blundering elder.
Now what had been good enough to merit Pinkie’s thanks had not been good
enough to merit hers. Besides, such as it was, she had told half the
story. With delicate diplomacy she had handled a difficult situation.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Good God!” murmured Quixtus in terror. “She is going to cry. What on
earth can I do?”
His wits worked quickly. He remembered a recent sitting in the Folk-lore
section of the Anthropological Congress.
“I suppose, my dear, a story current among the aborigines of Papua
wouldn’t interest you?”
Her eyes dried magically. She snuggled up against him.
“Tell me.”
So Quixtus began a story about serpents and tigers and shiny
copper-coloured children, and knowing the facts of the folk tale,
gradually grew interested and unconsciously discovered a new talent for
picturesque narration. One story led to another. He forgot himself and
his wrongs, and pathetically strove to interest his audience and explain
to her childish mind the significance of tribal mysteries which were
woven into the texture of the tales. The explanation left her
comparatively cold; but so long as there were tigers whose
blood-curdling ferocity she adored, she found the story entrancing.
“There!” said he, laughing, when he had come to an end. “What do you
think of that?”
“It’s booful,” she cried, and clambering on to both knees on his lap,
she put both hands on his shoulders and held up her mouth for a kiss.
In this touching attitude Clementina and Poynter discovered them. The
new-comers exchanged a whimsical glance of intelligence.
“Wise woman,” Poynter murmured.
“Obvious to any fool,” she retorted—and advanced further into the
vestibule. “Feeling decidedly better?”
Quixtus blushed in confusion. Sheila climbed down from her perch and ran
to Clementina.
“Oh, Auntie, Uncle Ephim has been telling me such lovely stories.”
“Lord save us!”—she turned on him—“What do you know about stories?”
“They were tribal legends of Papua,” he confessed; modestly.
“And what else have you been doing?”
Quixtus made one of his old-world bows.
“I’ve been falling in love.”
“You’re getting on,” said Clementina.