CYNICUS. And Letitia's coffee and roll in bed at nine, her _dejeuner a
la Fourchette_ at eleven, your lunch at one, her snack at four, your tea
at five----
ARDILAUN. Come, you're overdrawing it. We should at least have dinner
together.
CYNICUS. Yes; Letitia is what you call a flesh-eater and wine-bibber
like myself. We'd have a good square meal, finishing up with some fine
"fruity." I forgot; in the ideal household the "pug's" noted port would
be conspicuous by its absence.
ARDILAUN. Poets don't gamble to fill their cellars.
CYNICUS. So they go empty. Poor Letitia!
ARDILAUN. Letitia would prefer love to the rarest vintage that was ever
pressed.
CYNICUS. How about the machinery? The nectar of the gods won't drive a
cog-wheel.
ARDILAUN. I suppose I have machinery, as you call it?
CYNICUS. Greased on special principles, too. Drop your principles and
bang goes everything.
ARDILAUN. Puns won't silver your moral bolus. You can't convince me.
CYNICUS. Morally? I don't attempt to, but practically I can show you it
is one thing to love flowers, rave over their colour and scent, and
another to crack your spine in digging and hoeing, watering,
slug-catching, and all the rest of it.
ARDILAUN. You've shifted your premises.
CYNICUS. Pardon me; instead of preaching I used the Kodak. Tableau: Two
precious exotics; to right, the "pug," armed with spade and
watering-pot; to left, your wife, darning-needle in hand, impaling
slugs.
ARDILAUN. Bosh! You're too irritating for words; I'm off. (_Exit in a
rage._)
CYNICUS. To develop the negative, eh?
Pain's Pensioners.
"Love's wings are over-fleet,
And like the panther's feet
The feet of love."
The little travelling clock on his mantel struck with soft, gong-like
chime; it seemed to speak from a great way off, like a person facing
you, who answers your questions with an absent eye. Half-past six, and
he was due from the Continent every moment. His lamp--green-shaded
because his vision was weak from over-work--some soda water and a spirit
stand were awaiting him on the table, and a small mass of letters and
papers was congregated in front of his chair. All these were tones in
the gamut of expectation that found its keynote in myself.
We had been "inseparables" before his going, and we would be so never
again I felt convinced. She had absorbed him: mind, desire, future were
packed in the little palm of her hand. Yet I was not vulgarly jealous. I
loved Aubrey Yeldham better than I could have loved a brother, but I had
seen her and had caught the reflection of his sentiment, though in a
tempered degree. I had met her but once, for on the day after our chance
encounter--in a verdurous Devon lane where she had lost her bearings and
we had come to her assistance--I had been summoned to the bedside of a
sick relative in town. Returning to the old haunts, I naturally expected
to resume our fishing expeditions in the picturesque valley of the Exe,
but I soon discovered Yeldham to have found other pellucid purple depths
that interested him superlatively. I had watched the drama from a
distance, and administered cautions with the cool pulse of an umpire.
But he was past redemption. I suspected the truth when I made an
impressionist sketch of her--milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and
pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer--and saw his greedy eyes fixed on
the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a
charitable dole. I learnt more from the attitude of reverence, almost of
awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried
it to his own sanctum, hid it from me, the maker of it, as though to
veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared
many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. But here I
was of no use, and decided we had come to the supreme moment of
life--there is always one--when we must let things slide.
Her name was Ruth Lascelles, and she was a widow; that was the sum total
of our knowledge of her. She might have been twenty, but we estimated
her age at twenty-five, deducing our theory from a certain fatigued
languor of voice and expression that accorded ill with the girlish satin
of her skin. This was arrived at on the first day of our meeting--we had
not discussed her since. I had not been Yeldham's friend, his disciple,
a mental sitter at his feet, without learning to walk warily where the
fuse of his passions flickered. For some time there was a tacit
agreement to ignore the impending danger, to talk of trivialities,
wheeling round the central idea without ever settling there. But one
morning when he had called at the little farm cottage where she lived
and had found her flown without a word or a regret, his despair had been
too much for him. The whole story rolled from his lips: his love for
her, her seeming reciprocity, their wanderings in the woods, her
reliant, trusting attitude--which had taught him to wish himself some
knight of the Round Table and not a mere besmirched man of many
passions--her flutterings of childish gaiety and sombre philosophy that
had tinted her speech garishly as rainbows on thunder-clouds: he gave
forth all, and asked, with an expression jejune as Sahara, what the
sudden flight could mean.
I was so out of it, as the phrase is, that I could volunteer small
elucidation: that she was a coquette of the first order seemed the most
feasible solution, and I offered it. He derided the notion--it was
apparently so frivolous a venture that it failed to anger him--he never
set hands on the cudgels for defence. "She is not shallow," he had
merely said, and his poor brain had tackled the enigma so often and to
so little purpose that its purport had become an unmeaning and vacuous
reiteration. But one day, after we had returned to town and were working
well in harness, he with his book, I with my illustrations for it, he
burst out afresh.
"She unintentionally let out where she lived: it is a little village on
the coast of France. She must have returned."
"Well?" I said, suspending my work and pretending to extract a hair from
the fine point of my drawing-pen.
"Well," he burst out, "the world is our oyster, and if we shirk opening
it we can't hope to filch pearls!"
"That means?" I hinged expectantly.
"That means, in plain words, that I don't intend to give up the biggest
pearl that God ever sent to make a man rich."
"You intend to follow her?" I questioned--needlessly, indeed, for his
kindling eye contained a fire of decision and energy that for fourteen
days, since the sorry one of her disappearance, had smouldered.
"Yes, follow her, make her love me by every art, divine or devilish--I
don't care which, so long as she loves me--and keep her till the same
grave closes over us."
And he went.
He had been absent but a week when I received the telegram announcing
his intended return. I stood--with my back against the mantel, and hands
warming themselves behind my sheltering coat-tails--eager to recognise
his rampant mount of the stairs, to feel the clasp of his hand or its
thump on my shoulder-blade, and hear his cheery "Congratulate me, old
fellow!" that I knew must come. A cab stopped outside, and a key turned
in the lock. Then a slow, heavy tread ascended. We met in the passage.
There was no need for more than a glance at him to abridge the
exuberance of welcome that had bubbled to my lips. I settled with the
cabman, and in a cowardly fashion lingered unduly outside among the rugs
and the travelling impedimenta. I felt somehow that he would prefer to
come face to face with his home in silence. He drank a pretty stiff dose
of brandy before sitting down, and moved the lamp away from his eyes.
"Letters," I indicated.
"Bother letters! Open them or throw them in the fire."
I did neither, but transferred them to his bureau. Then, seeing he was
disinclined for conversation, I relit my old briar pipe that had been
suffered to go out, and lolled in an arm-chair facing the fender.
Presently I surveyed him from the side of an eye. His chin was sunk on
his chest, he was staring at his boots with the blank look of a gambler
who has staked his last. There was something in his attitude that made
me wish myself a dog or a woman, that I might lick, or croon, or croodle
some softness into that stony mask. The silence was so long--so pregnant
with unsyllabled anguish--that at last I closed a warm hand over his
fingers as they clasped the arm-end of his chair.
"Well?"
"Well," he said, huskily, starting a little from his coma and poking a
coal with the toe of his boot, "it's over."
"So I suppose; and the pearl was not----"
"Not for my handling," he interrupted. "I knew you'd think something
hard of her, but you won't, you won't when I tell you----"
He stretched his hand to his glass and emptied it before continuing.
"It came about sooner than I intended--the horizon was so serene I
wanted to lay-to for a bit--but it was no use. We were talking of
something--I forget what--and I made a quotation. You know the chap who
said, 'Show me a woman's clothes at different periods of her life and I
will tell you her history'?"
"Yes; I forget his name, but I think it was a Frenchman."
"Well, I quoted him. Pretended to a like perspicacity: it was a
sneaking, cowardly ruse to know more of her."
"Had she told you nothing?"
"All this week I had known no more than what we both knew or
surmised--that there was a secret panel somewhere."
"And in your tapping for hollows----?"
"The spring flew; yes, but not as you suppose. I pretended that a sight
of even a few of her past dresses might suggest a fragmentary romance,
though of course she was too young for histories such as were meant by
the originator of the idea. She is only twenty-four," he parenthesised,
"was married at nineteen; I learnt that."
"Well?"
"She snapped at my offer--was almost ardent in her wish to test me.
"'I could show you the most important dresses I have worn in the last
seven years,' she said. 'I used to clothe myself in gowns to match my
moods at one time,' she added.
"I saw myself face to face with the last fence, and baulked. I began
backing out. There were soft places, I could not tell how deep or how
soft, beyond, and I was nervous.
"'Come,' she urged, spurring with almost excited insistence, 'if you
outline with the smallest correctness I will supply the lights and
shades truthfully.'
"She said the last words with pathetic emphasis that frightened me.
"I determined to change the subject. Caught the little finger of her
left hand and kissed it. Did I tell you she had never shaken hands with
me with her right--that she had explained she kept it for secular and
the other for sacred use? I kissed it, in the centre of her palm, and
her body curled like a sensitive plant with the warmth of my lips. I
blushed for having doubted her purity or her love."
He buried his head in his hands and seemed disinclined to reveal more.
But after a long pause he began afresh.
"I'm telling you everything--exactly as it happened--that you may
reverence her. She's too clean and transparent to be clouded by vulgar
doubt," he said, rather to himself than to me.
"She insisted on my accompanying her to a sparsely-furnished room," he
went on. "The walls were fitted with hooks and slides to improvise a
wardrobe.
"'I have kept some of my gowns since I was a girl,' she sighed.
"'Those, I suppose, that were episodic?' I affected to laugh to waive
her seriousness.
"'Oh, the everyday ones were thrown away--worn out: these were most of
them connected with'--she hesitated--'eventful occasions.'
"I again wavered--allusions to these eventful occasions seemed to
portend grief to her and pain incidentally to me.
"I caught her wrist as it turned the handle of the wardrobe door, and
remonstrated. 'I refuse to see them; I know nothing of clothes and I'm
not a detective, I won't pry into your past secrets, either of sorrow or
of joy.'
"Her hand shook in my clasp.
"'Don't stop me,' she cried, imperatively. 'Help me--I want you to know
them.'
"'So be it,' I said, and pushed back the door. Then she suddenly flung
herself in front of it, between me and the row of dainty frocks and
shimmering laces. She looked like Cassandra--in a soft, yellowy flannel
gown with loose sleeves falling away from her pink arms that blushed
with the heaving blood in her warm breasts--like Cassandra guarding the
gate of a citadel, though her lips said in a tone richer than wine,
sweeter than music, 'Kiss me first.'"
There was a long pause--Yeldham sat blankly staring at the coals, and I
gazed intently into the mists of nicotine that curled upwards to the
ceiling. Through them I could conjure a vision of her bronzed coronal
and Aubrey's massive muscularity, and could picture her glowing arms
around his neck--a convolvulus entwining a Gothic column.
"There are some kisses," he said presently, "that are worth the whole
sum of human pleasure. Pleasure! Faugh!--a rotten word--belonging to
those who only half live!"
He handled a cigarette mechanically and lit it.
"Well," he continued, "the first dress was white. A virginal thing of
simple gauze and flummery, with a frontage of puffings to make up for
bust development. Quite a girl's dress. Women, you know, are less
generous in the matter of--chiffon, don't they call it?--and more so in
the matter of flesh. It was her debut dress--I supposed--but she
contradicted.
"'No,' she explained, 'not quite that. One's debut is a hazy affair: all
excitement, wonder, blush, and clumsiness, with little or no enjoyment.
Yet how many of us would give the long, grey end of life for that first
night's dappling of peach bloom? It was the frock I wore on the evening
I first met my husband.'
"She spoke his name with a dull accent of grief, and I buried myself
amongst the flippery. Her kiss was moist on my lips, and I had no taste
for allusions to the dead man.
"The next thing was a riding habit--torn across the skirt.
"'A cropper,' I remarked; 'and enjoyed, or this memento would scarcely
be here?'
"'That,' she allowed, sadly, 'is a natural inference--correct in this
case, but not in all.' I glanced hurriedly along the line for relics of
crape--but she resumed my enlightenment. 'This was a souvenir of a grand
day's hunting and a broken ankle.'
"'And someone?' I hinted.
"'Yes; George--my husband--carried me home.'
"I turned abruptly to a party frock--the colour of a rose. There was a
green patch on the right breast--the blurr of crushed flowers.
"'No occasion to state what this means,' I snapped irritably. I was
seized with a desire to close the wardrobe on these trophies of
conquest.
"'No,' she said, with a quiver of the lips, 'we were married soon
after.'
"I threw myself into an arm-chair in the sulks, but she moved on to show
another gown--a bed or invalid gown--worn and faded.
"'An illness,' I said; 'you had no strength left for coquetry?'
"'Puerperal fever,' she explained. 'My baby died, and my brain--it
seemed to get paroxysms of depression and exaltation. Don't you think
that a supernatural power ordains our moods, shifts the evenness of
balance, makes us sometimes irresponsible?'
"There was a lambent excitement in her manner, which was usually gentle,
almost lethargic.
"'We can't be responsible for our brains in illness, particularly fever.
But you recovered?' I said, pointing to some fine azure drapery
encrusted with Japanese gold.
"'I recovered; yes, but I never wore that.'
"'It belonged to someone you loved?'
"'It was mine,' she said, 'and was worn by a woman I hated. She borrowed
it one night after coming over in the rain; she used to attend me
devotedly during my illness.'
"'Yet you hated her?' I asked, taking my cue from the curl of her lip.
"'Not then. In those days I thought men were true--George truest of
all--and women good.'
"I smiled, but she was quite serious.
"'In this way;' she explained, 'I imagined that if they sinned, it was
either for sheer love or for bare life.'
"I looked down at the gold storks on the heavy eastern silk, and said,
'And when did you change your opinion?'
"'When I hung away this gown, and determined it should never touch me.'
"'This woman showed you a new type?'
"'Yes,' she replied, very simply, 'she neither loved nor starved.'
"For a long time the poor girl remained mute, staring at the ill-fated
blue garment, and one of white cambric that hung the last on the hooks.
I rose to put my arm round her, to break the skein of unpleasant
associations, but she moved away, and said in a hard, almost defiant,
voice:--
"'There is one more; tell me its tale if you can, and if not----'
"She paused while I took the fine lace and lawn into my fingers; it
seemed a summer dress, scarcely crushed; in front, however, and on the
sleeve was a splash of dull red-brown.
"'Paint?' I suggested, 'or blood. An accident, perhaps?' and in
questioning I met her eyes.
"'Don't, don't!' I cried, 'don't speak!' I flung myself back in the
chair, and covered my face to avoid the sight of hers--the expression of
horror that was staring from it.
"'I will, I must speak. Yes, blood; his blood. Oh!' she exclaimed,
standing in front of me in that Cassandra-like attitude I had noticed
before, 'I can see it now. George had gone to the country--so he had
said--and I, to pass the time, dined with an uncle at Bignards. You know
the room--the thousand lights and loaded tables, the chink of glass and
glow of silver--the gay and brilliant company that is always there? We
dined, and were leaving afterwards for the Opera. My uncle passed out
first, and I was about to follow him, when, at a little table _a deux_,
I saw George and her; George looking down, down into her eyes and her
bosom, with a hot red flush in his cheeks, and a lifted wine-glass in
his hand. I don't know what happened; I burst between them, flung the
glass from his fingers, and then----'
"I thought she must scream, but only a gasp escaped her. She looked at
something on the ground and added in an awed, strangely intense voice,
'He was dead!'
"The tone compelled me to her side; a torrent of agony seemed frozen at
her lips.
"'Hush! Hush!' I implored. 'Your brain was deranged: you had been
ill----'
"I had recovered. Did you never read of the Reymond affair? I am that
miserable woman. Lucky, some people have called me, because in France
they are human and class such deeds as _crimes passionels_.'
"My words I cannot remember. They were violent reiterations of love,
assurances that I had read and recalled the catastrophe--the fatal
result of a glass splint probing an artery--and had pitied her before I
knew her. I protested, raved, threatened, vowed I had come with the one
object of linking my life to hers, and that now, more than ever, my mind
was fixed.
"But she remained cold, almost severe. 'You remember,' she said, 'how I
fled from you to spare myself a Tantalus torture--a hungering for
spiritual peace, a thirsting for rare devotion which you seemed to be
offering with laden hands?'
"'Your longings must have been slight!' I scoffed, ungenerously.
"'Listen,' she cried, still standing rigid, though the thrilling tone of
her voice confessed her emotion. 'The verdict of acquittal was merely a
doom to perpetual remorse. "A life for a life," was cried to me from
even the day-break cheeping of the birds. I thought to make atonement by
fasting and prayer: I hoped for it in attending the stricken--walking
hand-in-hand with disease. On stormy nights I fancied I might save some
drowning soul from wreck; earn an innocent life at the cost of my own; I
was ready--craving of God the hour and the opportunity, but it never
came. I have knelt and starved, I have nursed the sick to health, I have
rescued a child from the depths, and yet I live!'
"I clutched her gown, kissed it, abjured her to leave her theories of
atonement with Heaven, and trust her future and its serenity to me. But
she put me aside.
"'Oh, Aubrey, be merciful--spare me all you can, for I am like a pilgrim
who faints in sight of the Great Road. I know now that it is not the
pulse of life, but the colour and the scent of it that make one's
sacrifice. I believe that every guilty soul must have his moment of high
opportunity--of expiation, and this is mine. You are brave, you are
great, you are generous. Shall you tempt me--and stay; or will you save
me--and go?'"
Poor Yeldham's voice broke to a hoarse whisper, and I laid a sympathetic
hand upon his knee.
"And you, Aubrey, you went?"
"I am here," he answered, with a groan that was more pitiful than tears.
For Love or Science?
"This morn a throstle piped to me,
''Tis time that mates were wooed and won--
The daffodils are on the lea.'"
There is always a store of benevolence and magnanimity in the heart that
beats at an altitude of nearly four feet from the ground. Wit, wisdom,
and energy may go pit-a-pat "at the double" on lower levels, but great
souledness and probity only come to their perfection in a steadier
region.
Beyond these last-quoted virtues Ralph Danby had few. He was rather
lethargic and decidedly clumsy. His six-feet-three of flesh and blood
was knotty with muscle, but, in the garments of the polite, the
muscularity showed like adipose tissue and spoilt him. In feature he was
pronounced perfect.
"Perfect as regenerate man can well be," raved a lady artist, who,
before he had been in Hampstead a week, had implored him to pose for a
painting of early Scandinavian classicism. He wore a Vandyke beard--not
because he liked it, but to avoid the casualties of his native
clumsiness, which made shaving as farcical as Heidelberg duelling--and
permitted its amber waves to roam caressingly close to his chin with a
negligence that was the more graceful because unstudied.
At first, when it became known that young Dr Danby intended stepping
into his father's practice, Hampstead resented it. Cabinet Councils of
"tabbies," assembling over their postprandial Bohea, declared they would
none of him. A retired Army doctor, forsooth! What would become of their
nervous ailments, their specially feminine disorders? If they had the
finger-ache, he would be bound to suggest amputation; if liver or
neuralgia, he would insist on active employment--those were the only
formulae known to regimental sawbones, poor benighted things!
But when he came, when it saw the benign blue eyes and lordly physique
of the new practitioner, the feline chorus changed its note, while
neuralgia, _migraine_, and other indefinite and not unbecoming disorders
became quite epidemical in his neighbourhood. Only a few daring persons
ventured to harbour opinions in opposition to the _vox populi_, and
those speedily argued themselves ignorant or prejudiced, or both.
There existed perhaps but one person of his acquaintance who was
absolutely indifferent to the impression created in his new
surroundings--the one and only person for whose goodwill Ralph Danby had
ever cared. He had known her at Gibraltar, a laughing, rosy bride,
brought out by the senior Major, a man almost double her years. But that
seemed ages ago. The Major had been gathered to his fathers, and Mrs
Cameron, with her baby girl, to the great regret of the regiment, had
returned to the vicinity, if not to the care, of her parents in Maida
Vale.
It was this departure, though it would have surprised him had he been
told so, that inspired Ralph Danby with the notion that Army doctoring
was a bore. He came to the conclusion that real work was all he wanted.
What a field was open in metropolitan life with its suffering and pain
for a man's labours--a man who was otherwise good for nothing! And then
the reward--the smiles of the relieved--that existed always, when other
satisfaction failed.
He realised he was down on his luck, but diagnosed no further, and sent
in his papers. Farewell dinners followed, and the mess tried to carry
him round the table at the risk of collective apoplexy (for he was a
huge favourite in every sense of the word), then the _Peninsula_ weighed
anchor, and Gibraltar saw him no more.
It was some time, however, after taking over his new work that he
ventured to call on Mrs Cameron. He respected her widowhood; he feared
the renewal of his acquaintance might revive unhappy recollections; but
he went at last.
He was pathetically nervous when introduced into the tiny drawing-room
where Phoebe sat alone. But the moment he heard her rippling laughter he
was reassured. The room was small, and Ralph was big and clumsy. In his
advance one of those Algerian tables, so admirably constructed to bark
the shins or bang the knees of unsuspecting mortals, gave way before him
and scattered its _bric-a-brac_ far and wide. This trifling incident
served to put him on his old footing at once, and in fact to establish
his identity, for Danby's reputation for wreckage had been universal as
well as costly.
"At it again, you see, Mrs Cameron!" exclaimed he, as he hastened to
right the impediment. "Allow me. I am so sorry. Allow me!" he gasped,
while grovelling with her on the floor in search of some errant trinket
which had rolled into space. She "laughed a merry laugh and said a sweet
say" of forgiveness, while he noted a transient blush on her downy
cheek. He was not a vain man, but he harboured a tiny wonder whether it
had been born at sight of him or of the mere exertion of stooping.
"I have a practice quite near here," he volunteered aloud. "It was the
stooping," decided the inward mentor regretfully.
"How curious!"
He did not think it so, but agreed.
"It _is_ strange. My father is old, and he was quite pleased to retire
when he found me fit for the berth. I thought life at Gib awfully
monotonous, and was glad enough to throw it up."
He had not complained before Phoebe Cameron left, but the question of
his sentiments did not come under discussion. They talked of old friends
a little scrappily and with some constraint--so much had happened since
they had met, and numerous recollections had to be skipped--until his
hostess asked:--
"Would you like to see my wee Phoebe? She is growing wonderfully. She is
nearly two years old now!"
Her voice sank with an inflexion of sorrow. The age of her child
recalled the long blank which occupied the centre of her lifetime's
sheet.
The big man's heart thrilled with pity. He longed to open his wide,
protecting arms and fold the fragile creature to his breast; she seemed
so sweet, so brave, yet so lonely.