had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in
a shop."
"Never!" she cried. "What a hateful idea!"
"A tobacconist's shop," he persisted; "and her name was Susannah
Sheepmarsh."
"Oh," she answered, "that was me." She spoke instantly and frankly, but
she blushed crimson.
"And you're ashamed of it,--Socialist?" he asked with a sneer, and his
eyes were fierce on her burning face.
"I'm not! Row home, please. Or I'll take the sculls if you're tired, or
your shoulder hurts. I don't want to talk to you any more. You tried to
trap me into telling a lie. You don't understand anything at all. And
I'll never forgive you."
"Yes, you will," he said to himself again and again through the silence
in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his
cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He
loved her. She loved, or had loved--or might have loved--or might
love--his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a
word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice;
and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.
He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting
parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and
surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart
indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a
young woman who had served in a tobacconist's shop, and who would be
some day his brother's wife?
The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time
there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and
daughter living the same dainty, dignified, charming life to which he
had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever
interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother
from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.
"Oh, fool! But you are punished!" he said; "she's angry now--angrier
even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the
name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use.
This comes of trying to act like an ass in a book."
The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She
spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her
amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely
hidden.
And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his
heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached
himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother,
had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she
would have loved him.
Then one day came the South African mail, and it brought a letter from
his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a
tobacconist's counter, and had trusted it to him.
The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was
vital.
"I say, I wonder whether you've seen anything of Susannah? What
a young fool I was ever to think I could be happy with a girl
out of a shop. I've met the real and only one now--she's a
nurse; her father was a clergyman in Northumberland. She's such
a bright little thing, and she's never cared for any one before
me. Wish me luck."
John Selborne almost tore his hair.
"Well, I can't save him across half the world! Besides----"
At thirty-seven one should have outgrown the wild impulses of youth. He
said this to himself, but all the same it was the next train to Yalding
that he took.
Fate was kind; at Yalding it had almost always been kind. The glow of
red firelight shone out over the snow through the French window among
the brown jasmine stalks.
Mrs Sheepmarsh was out, Miss Sheepmarsh was at home. Would he step this
way?
He stepped into the presence of the girl. She rose from the low chair by
the fire, and the honest eyes looked angrily at him.
"Look here," he said, as the door closed between them and the
maid-servant, "I've come to tell you things. Just this once let me talk
to you; and afterwards, if you like, I can go away and never come back."
"Sit down," she said coldly. "I don't feel friends with you at all, but
if you want to speak, I suppose you must."
So then he told her everything, beginning with his brother's letter, and
ending with his brother's letter.
"And, of course, I thought it couldn't be you, because of your being
called Celia; and when I found out it really was you, I had to go away,
because I wanted to be fair to the boy. But now I've come back."
"I think you're the meanest person I ever knew," she said; "you thought
I liked your brother, and you tried to make me like you so that you
might throw me over and show him how worthless I was. I hate you and
despise you."
"I didn't really try," he said miserably.
"And you took a false name to deceive us."
"I didn't: it really is my second name."
"And you came here pretending to be nice and a gentleman, and----" She
was lashing herself to rage, with the lash of her own voice, as women
will. John Selborne stood up suddenly.
"Be quiet," he said, and she was quiet. "I won't hear any more
reproaches, unless---- Listen, I've done wrong--I've owned it. I've
suffered for it. God knows I've suffered. You liked me in the summer:
can't you try to like me again? I want you more than anything else in
the world. Will you marry me?"
"Marry you," she cried scornfully; "you who----"
"Pardon me," he said. "I have asked a question. Give me no for an
answer, and I will go. Say yes, and then you may say anything else you
like. Yes or no. Shall I go or stay? Yes or no. No other word will do."
She looked at him, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing with
indignation. A world of scorn showed in the angle of the chin, the poise
of her head. Her lips opened. Then suddenly her eyes met his, and she
knew that he meant what he said. She covered her face with her hands.
"Don't--don't cry, dear one," he said. "What is it? You've only to
choose. Everything is for you to decide."
Still she did not speak.
"Good-bye, then," he said, and turned. But she caught at him blindly.
"Don't--don't go!" she cried. "I didn't think I cared about you in the
summer, but since you went away, oh, you don't know how I've wanted
you!"
* * * * *
"Well," he said, when her tears were dried, "aren't you going to scold
me?"
"Don't!" said she.
"At least tell me all about my brother--and why he thought you would be
so ready to marry him."
"That? Oh, that was only his conceit. You know I always do talk to
people in railway carriages and things. I suppose he thought it was only
him I talked to."
"And the name?"
"I--I thought if I said my name was Susannah he wouldn't get
sentimental."
"You 'took a false name to deceive him'?"
"Don't--oh, don't!"
"And the tobacco shop?"
"Ah--that rankles?" She raised her head to look at him.
"Not it," he answered coolly. "I simply don't believe it."
"Why? But you're quite right. It was a woman in my district in London,
and I took the shop for her for three days, because her husband was
dying, and she couldn't get any one else to help her. It was--it was
rather fun--and--and----"
"And you wouldn't tell me about it, because you didn't want me to know
how proud you were of it."
"Proud? Ah, you do understand things! The man died, and I had given her
those three days with him. I wasn't proud, was I?--only glad that I
could. So glad--so glad!"
"But you let my brother think----"
"Oh yes, I let him think it was my trade; I thought it might make him
not be silly. You see, I always knew he couldn't understand things."
"Celia?"
"Yes?"
"And have you really forgiven me?"
"Yes, yes, I forgive you! But I never should have if---- There's mother
at the front door. Let me go. I want to let her in myself."
"If?"
"Let me go. If----"
"If?"
"If you hadn't understood and----"
"Yes?"
"If you hadn't come back to me!"
XII
WHILE IT IS YET DAY
"And is it really true? Are you going to govern the Fortunate Islands?"
"I am, indeed--or rather, to be accurate, I am going to deputy-govern
them--I mean, father is--for a year."
"A whole year!" he said, looking down at her fan. "What will London do
without you?"
"London will do excellently," she answered--"and that's my pet fan, and
it's not used to being tied into knots." She took it from him.
"And what shall I do without you?"
"Oh! laugh and rhyme and dance and dine. You'll go out to the proper
number of dinners and dances, and make the proper measure of pretty
little speeches and nice little phrases; and you'll do your reviews, and
try to make them as like your editor's as you can; and you'll turn out
your charming little rondeaux and triolets, and the year will simply
fly. Heigho! I'm glad I'm going to see something big, if it's only the
Atlantic."
"You are very cruel," he said.
"Am I? But it's not cruel to be cruel if nobody's hurt, is it? And I am
so tired of nice little verses and pretty little dances and dainty
little dinners. Oh, if I were only a man!"
"Thank God you're not!" said he.
"If I were a man, I would do just one big thing in my life, even if I
had to settle down to a life of snippets and trifles afterwards."
Her eyes were shining. They always glittered, but now they were starry.
The drifted white folds across her breast stirred to her quickened
breath.
"If you loved me, Sybil, I could do something great!" said he.
"But I _don't_," she said--"at any rate, not now; and I've told you so a
dozen times. My dear Rupert, the man who needs a woman to save him isn't
worth the saving."
"What would you call a big thing?" he asked. "Must I conquer an empire
for you, or start a new religion? Or shall I merely get the Victoria
Cross, or become Prime Minister?"
"Don't sneer," said she; "it doesn't become you at all. You've no idea
how horrid you look when you're sneering. Why don't you----? Oh! but
it's no good! By the way, what a charming cover Housman has designed for
your _Veils and Violets_! It's a dear little book. Some of the verses
are quite pretty."
"Go on," said he, "rub it in. I know I haven't done much yet; but
there's plenty of time. And how can one do any good work when one is for
ever sticking up one's heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at?
If you'd only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!"
"May I refer you to my speech--not the last one, but the one before
that."
He laughed; then he sighed.
"Ah, my Pretty," he said, "it was all very well, and pleasant enough to
be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now----"
"How often," she asked calmly, "have I told you that you must not call
me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now----"
"Look here," he said, leaning towards her, "there's not a soul about;
they're in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once--it can't
matter to you--and it will mean so very much to me."
"That's just it," she said; "if it didn't mean----"
"Then it shan't mean anything but good-bye. It's only about eight years
since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion."
She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she
looked at him.
"Very well," she said suddenly.
"No," he said; "I won't have it unless it _does_ mean something."
There was a silence. "Our dance, I think?" said the voice of one bending
before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom
she had been hiding.
Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with
her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed
more than once. "I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,"
she said; "and I wish--yes, I do wish he had. I don't suppose he'll care
a bit for me when I come back."
So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses
on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with
her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to
have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his
life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father's
park from her father's rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a
wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured
him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way
the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday
had seen his own jovial return.
"Do you all the good in the world, my boy. 'Pon my soul, you have a
tired sort of look, as if you'd got some of these jolly new diseases
people have taken to dying of lately--appendi-what's-its-name, you know,
and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So
long! You take my tip."
What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little
horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill--tired,
bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who
punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back,
looked grave, and said: "Go to Strongitharm--he's absolutely at _the_
top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it's better to know where we are. You go to
Strongitharm."
Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice
that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with
brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.
Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends--disappeared
suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near
enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no
address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he
should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should
have gone on imitating.
The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his
advice.
"He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: 'Go
round the world; there's nothing like it,' and, by Jove! he went. Now,
that's the kind of man I like--knows good advice when he gets it, and
acts on it right off."
So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and
had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil's
questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she
asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her.
She had had time to think--there was plenty of time to think in those
Islands whose real name escapes me--and she knew very much more than she
had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked
for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently
disbelieving in the grand tour theory--and the disbelief was so strong
that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil
took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink.
She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she
lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie's, a book that
every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a
breathless joy that was agony too, she found _him_. This was his book.
No one but Rupert could have written it--all that description of the
park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig--and--she
turned the pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the
book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she
went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on
the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and
how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after
thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this _for her_--because of
what she had said.
Arrived at the publisher's, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner
was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of
"Work While it is Yet Day," nor the name of him; and it was abundantly
evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.
Sybil's prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust
person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent
through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first
floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was
very nice and kind, but he could not give his client's name without his
client's permission.
The disappointment was bitter.
"But I'll send a letter for you," he tried to soften it with.
Sybil's self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.
"I do want to see him most awfully," she said, "and I know he wants to
see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know----"
She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent
did.
"Look here," he said smartly, "I'll wire to him at once; and if he says
I may, I'll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?"
Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went
back.
The literary agent smiled victory.
"The answer is 'Yes,'" he said, and handed her a slip of paper--
"THREE CHIMNEYS,
NEAR PADDOCK WOOD,
KENT."
"Have you a time-table?" asked she.
* * * * *
The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in
it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every one was
talking about--the great book--and her heart was full to overflowing of
joy and pride and other things.
The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from
the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself
at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and
a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.
She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the
station with _him_. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged
path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in
empty houses.
Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice
biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She
was not unconscious of these facts.
Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an
empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil's lips were
half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must
shine on his face when he saw her--Her--the unattainable, the
unapproachable, at his very door. But her smile died away, for his face
was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and
like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.
"You!" he said.
And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: "Yes, me." There
was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house,
the tangle of the untidy garden. "Mayn't I come in?" she asked.
"Yes; oh yes, come in!"
She crossed the threshold--the doorstep was dank with green mould--and
followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no
carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a
fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was
a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one
saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the
hills.
He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back
to the fireless grate.
"You are very, very pretty," he said suddenly. And the explanation of
his disappearance suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But
she was not afraid. When all a woman's thoughts, day and night for a
year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even
if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the
fear in her eyes.
"No, I'm not mad," he said. "Sybil, I'm very glad you came. Come to
think of it, I'm very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was
just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I
should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I
did for any one."
Sybil's hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really--was
it through her that he was----
"Come out," she said. "I hate this place; it stifles me. And you've
lived here--worked here!"
"I've lived here for eleven months and three days," he said. "Yes, come
out."
So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a
sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.
"Now," she said, throwing off her hat and curling her green, soft
draperies among the long grass. "Come and sit down and tell me----"
He threw himself on the grass.
"Sure it won't bore you?" he asked.
She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not
hold hers.
"I seem to remember," he said, "the last time I saw you--you were going
away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I
told you--or, anyway, I thought to myself--that there was plenty of time
for that. I'd always had a sort of feeling that I _could_ do something
great whenever I chose to try. Well--yes, you did go away, of course; I
remember perfectly--and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I
looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and
_he_ said I'd only got about a year to live. So then I began to think."
Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.
"And I thought: Here I've been thirty years in this world. I've the
experience of twenty-eight and a half--I suppose the first little bit
doesn't count. If I'd had time, I meant to write another book, just to
show exactly what a man feels when he knows he's only got a year to
live, and nothing done--nothing done."
"I won't believe it," she said. "You don't _look_ ill; you're as lean as
a greyhound, but----"
"It may come any day now," he went on quietly; "but I've done something.
The book--it _is_ great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at
first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the
things you had seen and known and felt were wasted--lost--going out with
you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking
everything you might have done with you."
"The book _is_ great," she said; "you _have_ done something."
"Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James's Street,
and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care
where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she
was little, and she had gone away and wasn't fond of me any more. Oh,
Sybil--I feel like a lunatic--I mean you, of course; but you never
cared. And I went to a house agent's and got the house unfurnished, and
I bought the furniture--there's nothing much except what you've seen,
and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I've lived alone in
that house, and I've written that book, with Death sitting beside me,
jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, 'Hurry up;
I'm waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you'll
have done nothing, nothing, nothing.'"
"But you've done the book," said Sybil again. The larch and the garden
beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted.
Her own agony--that could be dealt with later.
"I've ridden myself with the curb," he said. "I thought it all
out--proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn't play the
fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four
months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I
should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used
to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I've done it. The book
will live--every one says it will. I shan't have lived for nothing."
"Rupert," she said, "dear Rupert!"
"Thank you," he said forlornly; "you're very kind." And he drew his
limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on
his hands.
"Oh, Rupert, why didn't you write and tell me?"
"What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed
things--even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade."
She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to
burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved
her--that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that--have borne
anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he
was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself
instinctively.
"I don't believe it," she said.
"Don't believe what?"
"That you're going to die."
He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet
garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not
believe.