The stranger laughed also. "Lose it! You have no idea how honest people
are. I hadn't myself. The whole world has gone up in my estimation
within the last few weeks. People run after me for quite long distances
and force it into my hand--people on rainy days who haven't got umbrellas
of their own. It is the same with this hat." The stranger sighed as he
took it up. "I am always trying to get _off_ with something reasonably
shabby in exchange for it. I am always found out and stopped."
"Why don't you pawn them?" suggested the practicable Tommy.
The stranger regarded her with admiration.
"Do you know, I never thought of that," said the stranger. "Of course.
What a good idea! Thank you so much."
The stranger departed, evidently much relieved.
"Silly fellow," mused Tommy. "They won't give him a quarter of the
value, and he will say: 'Thank you so much,' and be quite contented." It
worried Tommy a good deal that day, the thought of that stranger's
helplessness.
The stranger's name was Richard Danvers. He lived the other side of
Holborn, in Featherstone Buildings, but much of his time came to be spent
in the offices of _Good Humour_.
Peter liked him. "Full of promise," was Peter's opinion. "His criticism
of that article of mine on 'The Education of Woman' showed both sense and
feeling. A scholar and a thinker."
Flipp, the office-boy (spelt Philip), liked him; and Flipp's attitude, in
general, was censorial. "He's all right," pronounced Flipp; "nothing
stuck-up about him. He's got plenty of sense, lying hidden away."
Miss Ramsbotham liked him. "The men--the men we think about at all,"
explained Miss Ramsbotham--"may be divided into two classes: the men we
ought to like, but don't; and the men there is no particular reason for
our liking, but that we do. Personally I could get very fond of your
friend Dick. There is nothing whatever attractive about him except
himself."
Even Tommy liked him in her way, though at times she was severe with him.
"If you mean a big street," grumbled Tommy, who was going over proofs,
"why not say a big street? Why must you always call it a 'main artery'?"
"I am sorry," apologised Danvers. "It is not my own idea. You told me
to study the higher-class journals."
"I didn't tell you to select and follow all their faults. Here it is
again. Your crowd is always a 'hydra-headed monster'; your tea 'the cup
that cheers but not inebriates.'"
"I am afraid I am a deal of trouble to you," suggested the staff.
"I am afraid you are," agreed the sub-editor.
"Don't give me up," pleaded the staff. "I misunderstood you, that is
all. I will write English for the future."
"Shall be glad if you will," growled the sub-editor.
Dick Danvers rose. "I am so anxious not to get what you call 'the sack'
from here."
The sub-editor, mollified, thought the staff need be under no
apprehension, provided it showed itself teachable.
"I have been rather a worthless fellow, Miss Hope," confessed Dick
Danvers. "I was beginning to despair of myself till I came across you
and your father. The atmosphere here--I don't mean the material
atmosphere of Crane Court--is so invigorating: its simplicity, its
sincerity. I used to have ideals. I tried to stifle them. There is a
set that sneers at all that sort of thing. Now I see that they are good.
You will help me?"
Every woman is a mother. Tommy felt for the moment that she wanted to
take this big boy on her knee and talk to him for his good. He was only
an overgrown lad. But so exceedingly overgrown! Tommy had to content
herself with holding out her hand. Dick Danvers grasped it tightly.
Clodd was the only one who did not approve of him.
"How did you get hold of him?" asked Clodd one afternoon, he and Peter
alone in the office.
"He came. He came in the usual way," explained Peter.
"What do you know about him?"
"Nothing. What is there to know? One doesn't ask for a character with a
journalist."
"No, I suppose that wouldn't work. Found out anything about him since?"
"Nothing against him. Why so suspicious of everybody?"
"Because you are just a woolly lamb and want a dog to look after you. Who
is he? On a first night he gives away his stall and sneaks into the pit.
When you send him to a picture-gallery, he dodges the private view and
goes on the first shilling day. If an invitation comes to a public
dinner, he asks me to go and eat it for him and tell him what it's all
about. That doesn't suggest the frank and honest journalist, does it?"
"It is unusual, it certainly is unusual," Peter was bound to admit.
"I distrust the man," said Clodd. "He's not our class. What is he doing
here?"
"I will ask him, Clodd; I will ask him straight out."
"And believe whatever he tells you."
"No, I shan't."
"Then what's the good of asking him?"
"Well, what am I to do?" demanded the bewildered Peter.
"Get rid of him," suggested Clodd.
"Get rid of him?"
"Get him away! Don't have him in and out of the office all day
long-looking at her with those collie-dog eyes of his, arguing art and
poetry with her in that cushat-dove voice of his. Get him clean away--if
it isn't too late already."
"Nonsense," said Peter, who had turned white, however. "She's not that
sort of girl."
"Not that sort of girl!" Clodd had no patience with Peter Hope, and told
him so. "Why are there never inkstains on her fingers now? There used
to be. Why does she always keep a lemon in her drawer? When did she
last have her hair cut? I'll tell you if you care to know--the week
before he came, five months ago. She used to have it cut once a
fortnight: said it tickled her neck. Why does she jump on people when
they call her Tommy and tell them that her name is Jane? It never used
to be Jane. Maybe when you're a bit older you'll begin to notice things
for yourself."
Clodd jammed his hat on his head and flung himself down the stairs.
Peter, slipping out a minute later, bought himself an ounce of snuff.
"Fiddle-de-dee!" said Peter as he helped himself to his thirteenth pinch.
"Don't believe it. I'll sound her. I shan't say a word--I'll just sound
her."
Peter stood with his back to the fire. Tommy sat at her desk, correcting
proofs of a fanciful story: _The Man Without a Past_.
"I shall miss him," said Peter; "I know I shall."
"Miss whom?" demanded Tommy.
"Danvers," sighed Peter. "It always happens so. You get friendly with a
man; then he goes away--abroad, back to America, Lord knows where. You
never see him again."
Tommy looked up. There was trouble in her face.
"How do you spell 'harassed'?" questioned Tommy! "two r's or one."
"One r," Peter informed her, "two s's."
"I thought so." The trouble passed from Tommy's face.
"You don't ask when he's going, you don't ask where he's going,"
complained Peter. "You don't seem to be interested in the least."
"I was going to ask, so soon as I had finished correcting this sheet,"
explained Tommy. "What reason does he give?"
Peter had crossed over and was standing where he could see her face
illumined by the lamplight.
"It doesn't upset you--the thought of his going away, of your never
seeing him again?"
"Why should it?" Tommy answered his searching gaze with a slightly
puzzled look. "Of course, I'm sorry. He was becoming useful. But we
couldn't expect him to stop with us always, could we?"
Peter, rubbing his hands, broke into a chuckle. "I told him 'twas all
fiddlesticks. Clodd, he would have it you were growing to care for the
fellow."
"For Dick Danvers?" Tommy laughed. "Whatever put that into his head?"
"Oh, well, there were one or two little things that we had noticed."
"We?"
"I mean that Clodd had noticed."
I'm glad it was Clodd that noticed them, not you, dad, thought Tommy to
herself. They'd have been pretty obvious if you had noticed them.
"It naturally made me anxious," confessed Peter. "You see, we know
absolutely nothing of the fellow."
"Absolutely nothing," agreed Tommy.
"He may be a man of the highest integrity. Personally, I think he is. I
like him. On the other hand, he may be a thorough-paced scoundrel. I
don't believe for a moment that he is, but he may be. Impossible to
say."
"Quite impossible," agreed Tommy.
"Considered merely as a journalist, it doesn't matter. He writes well.
He has brains. There's an end of it."
"He is very painstaking," agreed Tommy.
"Personally," added Peter, "I like the fellow." Tommy had returned to
her work.
Of what use was Peter in a crisis of this kind? Peter couldn't scold.
Peter couldn't bully. The only person to talk to Tommy as Tommy knew she
needed to be talked to was one Jane, a young woman of dignity with sense
of the proprieties.
"I do hope that at least you are feeling ashamed of yourself," remarked
Jane to Tommy that same night, as the twain sat together in their little
bedroom.
"Done nothing to be ashamed of," growled Tommy.
"Making a fool of yourself openly, for everybody to notice."
"Clodd ain't everybody. He's got eyes at the back of his head. Sees
things before they happen."
"Where's your woman's pride: falling in love with a man who has never
spoken to you, except in terms of the most ordinary courtesy."
"I'm not in love with him."
"A man about whom you know absolutely nothing."
"Not in love with him."
"Where does he come from? Who is he?"
"I don't know, don't care; nothing to do with me."
"Just because of his soft eyes, and his wheedling voice, and that half-
caressing, half-devotional manner of his. Do you imagine he keeps it
specially for you? I gave you credit for more sense."
"I'm not in love with him, I tell you. He's down on his luck, and I'm
sorry for him, that's all."
"And if he is, whose fault was it, do you think?"
"It doesn't matter. We are none of us saints. He's trying to pull
himself together, and I respect him for it. It's our duty to be
charitable and kind to one another in this world!"
"Oh, well, I'll tell you how you can be kind to him: by pointing out to
him that he is wasting his time. With his talents, now that he knows his
business, he could be on the staff of some big paper, earning a good
income. Put it nicely to him, but be firm. Insist on his going. That
will be showing true kindness to him--and to yourself, too, I'm thinking,
my dear."
And Tommy understood and appreciated the sound good sense underlying
Jane's advice, and the very next day but one, seizing the first
opportunity, acted upon it; and all would have gone as contemplated if
only Dick Danvers had sat still and listened, as it had been arranged in
Tommy's programme that he should.
"But I don't want to go," said Dick.
"But you ought to want to go. Staying here with us you are doing
yourself no good."
He rose and came to where she stood with one foot upon the fender,
looking down into the fire. His doing this disconcerted her. So long as
he remained seated at the other end of the room, she was the sub-editor,
counselling the staff for its own good. Now that she could not raise her
eyes without encountering his, she felt painfully conscious of being
nothing more important than a little woman who was trembling.
"It is doing me all the good in the world," he told her, "being near to
you."
"Oh, please do sit down again," she urged him. "I can talk to you so
much better when you're sitting down."
But he would not do anything he should have done that day. Instead he
took her hands in his, and would not let them go; and the reason and the
will went out of her, leaving her helpless.
"Let me be with you always," he pleaded. "It means the difference
between light and darkness to me. You have done so much for me. Will
you not finish your work? Will you not trust me? It is no hot passion
that can pass away, my love for you. It springs from all that is best in
me--from the part of me that is wholesome and joyous and strong, the part
of me that belongs to you."
Releasing her, he turned away.
"The other part of me--the blackguard--it is dead, dear,--dead and
buried. I did not know I was a blackguard, I thought myself a fine
fellow, till one day it came home to me. Suddenly I saw myself as I
really was. And the sight of the thing frightened me and I ran away from
it. I said to myself I would begin life afresh, in a new country, free
of every tie that could bind me to the past. It would mean
poverty--privation, maybe, in the beginning. What of that? The struggle
would brace me. It would be good sport. Ah, well, you can guess the
result: the awakening to the cold facts, the reaction of feeling. In
what way was I worse than other men? Who was I, to play the prig in a
world where others were laughing and dining? I had tramped your city
till my boots were worn into holes. I had but to abandon my quixotic
ideals--return to where shame lay waiting for me, to be welcomed with the
fatted calf. It would have ended so had I not chanced to pass by your
door that afternoon and hear you strumming on the piano."
So Billy was right, after all, thought Tommy to herself, the piano does
help.
"It was so incongruous--a piano in Crane Court--I looked to see where the
noise came from. I read the name of the paper on the doorpost. 'It will
be my last chance,' I said to myself. 'This shall decide it.'"
He came back to her. She had not moved. "I am not afraid to tell you
all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will understand, you can
forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a man that he has done with
evil. Will you not trust me?"
She put her hands in his. "I am trusting you," she said, "with all my
life. Don't make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it."
It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to
think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.
What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with Peter,
so that Peter had to defend her against herself.
"I attacked you so suddenly," explained Peter, "you had not time to
think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even
from herself."
"I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy," feared Tommy: "I
seem to have so many womanish failings."
Peter took himself into quite places and trained himself to face the fact
that another would be more to her than he had ever been, and Clodd went
about his work like a bear with a sore head; but they neither of them
need have troubled themselves so much. The marriage did not take place
till nearly fifteen years had passed away, and much water had to flow
beneath old London Bridge before that day.
The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a woman
who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later stole back
in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a child's hand
calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet again; but always
that white baby hand called upwards through the earth, trample it down as
she would. Tommy read the story one evening in an old miscellany, and
sat long before the dead fire, the book open on her lap, and shivered;
for now she knew the fear that had been haunting her.
Tommy lived expecting her. She came one night when Tommy was alone,
working late in the office. Tommy knew her the moment she entered the
door, a handsome woman, with snake-like, rustling skirts. She closed the
door behind her, and drawing forward a chair, seated herself the other
side of the desk, and the two looked long and anxiously at one another.
"They told me I should find you here alone," said the woman. "It is
better, is it not?"
"Yes," said Tommy, "it is better."
"Tell me," said the woman, "are you very much in love with him?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Because, if not--if you have merely accepted him thinking him a good
catch--which he isn't, my dear; hasn't a penny to bless himself with, and
never will if he marries you--why, then the matter is soon settled. They
tell me you are a business-like young lady, and I am prepared to make a
business-like proposition."
There was no answer. The woman shrugged her shoulders.
"If, on the other hand, you are that absurd creature, a young girl in
love--why, then, I suppose we shall have to fight for him."
"It would be more sporting, would it not?" suggested Tommy.
"Let me explain before you decide," continued the woman. "Dick Danvers
left me six months ago, and has kept from me ever since, because he loved
me."
"It sounds a curious reason."
"I was a married woman when Dick Danvers and I first met. Since he left
me--for my sake and his own--I have received information of my husband's
death."
"And does Dick--does he know?" asked the girl.
"Not yet. I have only lately learnt the news myself."
"Then if it is as you say, when he knows he will go back to you."
"There are difficulties in the way."
"What difficulties?"
"My dear, this. To try and forget me, he has been making love to you.
Men do these things. I merely ask you to convince yourself of the truth.
Go away for six months--disappear entirely. Leave him free--uninfluenced.
If he loves you--if it be not merely a sense of honour that binds him--you
will find him here on your return. If not--if in the interval I have
succeeded in running off with him, well, is not the two or three thousand
pounds I am prepared to put into this paper of yours a fair price for
such a lover?"
Tommy rose with a laugh of genuine amusement. She could never altogether
put aside her sense of humour, let Fate come with what terrifying face it
would.
"You may have him for nothing--if he is that man," the girl told her; "he
shall be free to choose between us."
"You mean you will release him from his engagement?"
"That is what I mean."
"Why not take my offer? You know the money is needed. It will save your
father years of anxiety and struggle. Go away--travel, for a couple of
months, if you're afraid of the six. Write him that you must be alone,
to think things over."
The girl turned upon her.
"And leave you a free field to lie and trick?"
The woman, too, had risen. "Do you think he really cares for you? At
the moment you interest him. At nineteen every woman is a mystery. When
the mood is past--and do you know how long a man's mood lasts, you poor
chit? Till he has caught what he is running after, and has tasted
it--then he will think not of what he has won, but of what he has lost:
of the society from which he has cut himself adrift; of all the old
pleasures and pursuits he can no longer enjoy; of the
luxuries--necessities to a man of his stamp--that marriage with you has
deprived him of. Then your face will be a perpetual reminder to him of
what he has paid for it, and he will curse it every time he sees it."
"You don't know him," the girl cried. "You know just a part of him--the
part you would know. All the rest of him is a good man, that would
rather his self-respect than all the luxuries you mention--you included."
"It seems to resolve itself into what manner of man he is," laughed the
woman.
The girl looked at her watch. "He will be here shortly; he shall tell us
himself."
"How do you mean?"
"That here, between the two of us, he shall decide--this very night." She
showed her white face to the woman. "Do you think I could live through a
second day like to this?"
"The scene would be ridiculous."
"There will be none here to enjoy the humour of it."
"He will not understand."
"Oh, yes, he will," the girl laughed. "Come, you have all the
advantages; you are rich, you are clever; you belong to his class. If he
elects to stop with me, it will be because he is my man--mine. Are you
afraid?"
The woman shivered. She wrapped her fur cloak about her closer and sat
down again, and Tommy returned to her proofs. It was press-night, and
there was much to be done.
He came a little later, though how long the time may have seemed to the
two women one cannot say. They heard his footstep on the stair. The
woman rose and went forward, so that when he opened the door she was the
first he saw. But he made no sign. Possibly he had been schooling
himself for this moment, knowing that sooner or later it must come. The
woman held out her hand to him with a smile.
"I have not the honour," he said.
The smile died from her face. "I do not understand," she said.
"I have not the honour," he repeated. "I do not know you."
The girl was leaning with her back against the desk in a somewhat mannish
attitude. He stood between them. It will always remain Life's chief
comic success: the man between two women. The situation has amused the
world for so many years. Yet, somehow, he contrived to maintain a
certain dignity.
"Maybe," he continued, "you are confounding me with a Dick Danvers who
lived in New York up to a few months ago. I knew him well--a worthless
scamp you had done better never to have met."
"You bear a wonderful resemblance to him," laughed the woman.
"The poor fool is dead," he answered. "And he left for you, my dear
lady, this dying message: that, from the bottom of his soul, he was sorry
for the wrong he had done you. He asked you to forgive him--and forget
him."
"The year appears to be opening unfortunately for me," said the woman.
"First my lover, then my husband."
He had nerved himself to fight the living. This was a blow from the
dead. The man had been his friend.
"Dead?"
"He was killed, it appears, in that last expedition in July," answered
the woman. "I received the news from the Foreign Office only a fortnight
ago."
An ugly look came into his eyes--the look of a cornered creature fighting
for its life. "Why have you followed me here? Why do I find you here
alone with her? What have you told her?"