The following morning there came to "Miss H. Sorrenford" a letter from
David Lee--an urgent letter because he had been so long impatient,
demanding an explanation of her silence. The explanation was that
each time she had re-read the note of thanks he had written before
leaving town her imposture had looked to her more shameful; but after
considering a great deal how to say as much in her answer, she did
not say it at all. She told him instead something of her feelings in
returning to the house that was called her home.
It was very sweet, very strange, to David to receive the first of her
confessions breathing a familiar presence. Hilda had never seemed so
close to him as she did in the hour when he pored over these pages of
her sister's. He heard Hilda's voice while he welcomed Bee's thoughts;
when he replied to Bee, he saw Hilda's face. And it was the face, not
the thoughts, that maddened him with longing. It was the face that was
dizzying him as he paltered with his conscience and offered prayers to
the future. Though he did not discriminate, though he associated the
soul of the woman with the form of the girl, the triumph was to the
physical. The form, not the soul, tempted him to renounce his father's
gospel, even while he proclaimed the soul his justification. The charm
of the woman's letters lay no longer in what she said, but in his belief
that the girl said it.
Hilda's fairness, not Bee's mind, held his love; and in his confidences
to Bee there was a cadence that there had not been, a difference
which she strove to persuade herself was imaginary, because to admit
that it existed would be to realise that the photograph had wrought
mischief. There was nothing tangible, no word to point to, but beneath
the intimate record of his doings, and the references to his work,
underlying the intuition which enabled him to respond, as always, to
more than she had spelt, she felt something in her friend's letters that
was new, something--she was conscious of it only in moments--something
that made them now a man's letters to a woman.
When September was nearing its end, David received a few lines from
Ownie. She wrote:
"I have been meaning to congratulate you oh the success of the book of
poems that people are talking about. So you have made a hit? Well, I
am very glad. I was always sure when you were a child you would do well
at writing--you have all my poor father's talent. Well, I am very glad.
Though I haven't had a chance to read it, and never seen anything of
you, I am delighted to hear you have done so well. I hope you are well,
and don't forget I like to see you whenever you have time to spare." She
remained, on paper, his "Affectionate Mother."
His conscience pricked him, for his last visit had been paid in the
spring. When he sent a copy of the book, which he knew would bore her to
the verge of extinction, he promised to call on her the next Sunday.
He went in the afternoon. The latest of the Swiss lads to be described
in the advertisements as "man servant" opened the door while struggling
into his coat. His English was as unintelligible as his predecessors',
and David had doubts whether she was at home while he waited in the
hall. Dinner was over, but the smell of it lingered; she was unlikely
to be out, he thought. The Swiss sped back, and delivering himself of
strange syllables, led the way to the drawing-room. It was empty, and
the smell of dinner was less strong here. After some minutes Ownie came
in.
Her hair was yellow still, but the yellow of a "restorer," not the
yellow of her youth, and under this piteous travesty of the past her
aged face looked older. The years had caricatured her defects, and
her business had stamped its mark upon her. Ownie was a bulky woman
with a long upper lip and a fretful, vulgar mouth. In conversation
she had the restless eye and mechanical smile of the boarding-house
keeper, who during three meals every day makes an effort at cheerful
small-talk--illustrating the advantages of the district in which her
boarding-house is situated--while she listens suspensive to the
servant inquiring behind a chair whether the occupant will "take any
more." Of the girl who had once smiled victoriously in the mirror of
a theatre vestibule nothing was left; in her stead was all the pathos
of a lifetime. Only to the bulky woman it was given still to discern a
likeness to the girl. Nature had yielded that; she did not see herself
as she was. To her the rouge on her cheeks was not so palpable, the
wrinkles were not so deep. Dyed, painted, dreary, she sank into a chair,
and yawned widely, with her hands in her lap.
"I thought you were never coming again," she said.
He pleaded stress of work: "And I've been in the country since I saw
you. Well, how are you, mother?"
"Oh, nothing to brag about; the heat has been killing, hasn't it? _I_
should have liked a change too.... I haven't been able to read your book
yet--I can't read for long, it tries my eyes so; I must get some new
glasses. Well, are you making a fortune out of it?"
"It's selling splendidly--for poetry. Yes, I shall make a good deal by
it, strange to say. If you want a change, why not go to Brighton for a
week or two? I"--he was embarrassed--"I can give you the money."
"Oh, it isn't that," she explained with another gape; "I can't leave
the house. Who's going to look after it while I'm gone? It's an awful
drag if you haven't got a house-keeper. And if you have, you can't go
away and leave everything to her! Fancy you with money to spare, though!
Well, you've got to thank _me_ for that, David--your cleverness comes
from _my_ side. You didn't have your father's voice, you know; if you
hadn't written, I don't know what you'd have done."
He did not know either; his life would have been insupportable if he
hadn't written. He looked beyond her vaguely, and nodded. "Is the house
full?" he asked.
"Pretty full. They're most of them new now--Americans, and people
up for a few weeks; the others 'll be coming back at the end of the
month.... There's another boarding-house opened round the corner; they
keep the gas full up in every room all the evening."
"As an advertisement?"
"Yes; it's stupid. Not enough people pass here in the evening to make it
pay. It isn't as if it were at the seaside. Would you like a cup o' tea
or anything?"
"No, thanks," he said.
"You may as well. I want a cup o' tea myself; it'll wake me up--I was
just going to have forty winks when the man told me you were here."
"I'm sorry." He rang the bell. "I wish I'd come at another time."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," she returned; "there's always something.... I
suppose you haven't heard from Vivian?"
"I never hear from him. I think it's nearly a year since I saw him. What
is he doing?"
"He's got a first-rate berth. He left the company at the end of the
last tour; you knew he was on tour with a theatrical company, didn't
you? He's settled in one place now--much nicer for him than travelling
all the time, a great improvement in every way." She roused herself to
boast feebly about Vivian. "Not many young men of his age get into such
a thing; it's a very responsible position, to be business manager of a
theatre. And there's the salary all the year round--every week he's
sure of so much. That's an advantage you can't hope for, eh? You may
be comfortably off one year, and have nothing the next. Writing is so
precarious--you never know where you are."
"I jog along," said David amiably.
"Oh yes," she allowed, "I'm sure it's wonderful, your keeping yourself
as you have. And it's nice to have your book talked about. But of course
there's no certainty about your profession--you can't depend on that
sort of thing." She tittered. "Fame is all very well, but I'm afraid
Vivian would say 'Give _me_ a regular income.' ... He'll be up on
Sunday, if you'd like to see him."
"Yes, I'll come in," he answered. "What town has he gone to?"
"Beckenhampton," she said; "the Theatre Royal."
"Beckenhampton?" He looked at her wide-eyed.
"Do you know it?"
"N-no," he said; "no, I don't know it exactly. How long has he been
there?"
"Oh, two or three months. He's having great times, I believe--he's so
popular wherever he goes; he gets asked out to supper parties, and
all that." She hesitated, toying with the keeper on her finger, as he
remembered her toying in his childhood with rings that flashed. But now
the ring no longer turned. "I rather fancy there's an attraction," she
went on more slowly; "I hope to goodness it isn't serious! Don't let out
that I said anything when you meet him; I didn't mean to mention it."
"An attraction?"
She lifted her fat shoulders impatiently. "There may be nothing in it,
but young men are so soft; any girl can catch the smartest of them. It
wouldn't astonish me a bit when he comes up, to hear that he's engaged.
I had a gushing letter from him a few weeks ago, telling me he'd met the
prettiest girl he'd ever seen. I know what that means! He wouldn't have
written about her if he hadn't lost his head. And he doesn't answer my
questions. It looks as if he's making an idiot of himself."
"Who is she?" asked David, in a low voice.
"He didn't say. What's the difference who she is? You may be sure she
hasn't got a sixpence to bless herself with. A nice mess he'll make of
his life if he doesn't take care. It's a lucky thing for you that you
haven't got that sort of risk to run. 'A young man married is a man
that's marred,' as Ouida says."
"Shakespeare," he said, in the same dull tone; "not Ouida."
"Was it? It's at the beginning of one of Ouida's books, I know. If your
brother gets married at his age, he might as well hang himself at once."
The tremor was in his pulses still. But Beckenhampton was not a
village--the coincidence was so unlikely; he kept repeating that it
couldn't be.
"If his salary is such a good one, and he's fond of her----" he demurred.
"'Such a good one'? Well"--she was a shade confused--"it's good enough
for him as he is; it wouldn't go far with a wife and family to keep.
Besides, a man's always better off single than married; only he's so
soft as soon as a pretty face comes along. Some artful minx who wants
a home makes up to him, and all of a sudden he imagines he can't go
through life without her. Good Lord! if a man could see into a girl's
head while she's gushing about the view and pretending she's an angel.
Men are taken in by every girl they meet, the fools!" Her scorn of the
fools was in no wise restrained by the fact that she had captured two
husbands herself. She was thinking of her son. When a woman lives to see
the arts by which she gained her husband practised to ensnare her son,
candour can reveal no more. Nor in the badly constructed tragedy of life
is there any other situation that comes so close to poetical justice.
David found the afternoon the most irksome that he had spent at
Regent's Park. Though he told himself that his misgiving was fantastic,
it continued to disturb him, and while he sipped weak tea, and made
perfunctory responses, he was trying to define Hilda's feeling for him,
questioning whether it was in woman's nature for Hilda to write to him
as he believed she wrote, and yet to be susceptible to the courtship
of another man. Vivian was handsome, debonair, "so popular wherever he
went." Yes, Vivian had always been popular, he remembered bitterly.
Might not the passion of a lover at her side prove a stronger force than
the worship of a correspondent which had never been confessed? Could she
not say--might she not be happy to say--that by never a word had her
letters to himself been more than the letters of a friend? Then Vivian
would take her from him. Vivian, who it seemed to him in a burst of fear
and jealousy had always taken everything, would rob him of her too!...
But, again, the coincidence was so improbable. Besides, his mother might
be wrong; she might be exaggerating the idlest fancy; perhaps Vivian had
no desire to marry anyone!
He was relieved when the clock gave him an excuse to rise.
"Well, good-bye, mother." He avoided her complexion and dropped a kiss
on her dyed fringe.
"Must you go?" she said. "Er--David, if you're really sure you can spare
a few pounds, I'd be very glad of the money to get a new dress with.
I haven't got a decent thing to put on for dinner. This blouse is so
shabby I'm ashamed to sit at the table in it."
He promised to send what she wanted, and took up his hat. When his hand
was on the door-knob, she asked him if he would stay to supper; but he
declined the invitation. As he made his way home, he repeated more than
once that his tremor was ridiculous, and assured himself that he was
much amused at his folly. He smiled stiffly, to prove his amusement....
Still he wished that the week were past and Vivian had come to town. He
would feel easier when he had seen Vivian.