"It wasn't that, sir. The sun was shining that beautiful outside, and I
never minded the sermon, only I did get tired of sitting still. But I
never done it again--our little Sally, she died soon after."
Lancelot checked his laughter. "Poor little fool!" he thought. Then to
brighten her up again he asked cheerily, "And what else did you do on the
farm?"
"Oh, please sir, missus will be wanting me now."
"Bother missus. I want some more milk," he said, emptying the milk-jug
into the slop-basin. "Run down and get some."
Mary Ann was startled by the splendour of the deed. She took the jug
silently and disappeared.
When she returned he said: "Well, you haven't told me half yet. I suppose
you kept bees?"
"Oh, yes, and I fed the pigs."
"Hang the pigs! Let's hear something more romantic."
"There was the calves to suckle sometimes, when the mother died or was
sold."
"Calves! H'm! H'm! Well, but how could you do that?"
"Dipped my fingers in milk, and let the calves suck 'em. The silly
creatures thought it was their mother's teats. Like this."
With a happy inspiration she put her fingers into the slop-basin, and
held them up dripping.
Lancelot groaned. It was not only that his improved Mary Ann was again
sinking to earth, unable to soar in the romantic aether where he would
fain have seen her volant; it was not only that the coarseness of her
nature had power to drag her down, it was the coarseness of her red,
chapped hands that was thrust once again and violently upon his reluctant
consciousness.
Then, like Mary Ann, he had an inspiration.
"How would you like a pair of gloves, Mary Ann?"
He had struck the latent feminine. Her eyes gleamed. "Oh, sir!" was all
she could say. Then a swift shade of disappointment darkened the eager
little face.
"But I never goes out," she cried.
"I never _go_ out," he corrected, shuddering.
"I never _go_ out," said Mary Ann, her lip twitching.
"That doesn't matter. I want you to wear them indoors."
"But there's nobody to see 'em indoors!"
"I shall see them," he reminded her.
"But they'll get dirty."
"No they won't. You shall only wear them when you come to me. If I buy
you a nice pair of gloves, will you promise to put them on every time I
ring for you?"
"But what'll missus say?"
"Missus won't see them. The moment you come in, you'll put them on, and
just before going out--you'll take them off! See!"
"Yessir. Then nobody'll see me looking so grand but you."
"That's it. And wouldn't you rather look grand for me than for anybody
else?"
"Of course I would, sir," said Mary Ann, earnestly, with a grateful
little sigh.
So Lancelot measured her wrist, feeling her pulse beat madly. She really
had a very little hand, though to his sensitive vision the roughness of
the skin seemed to swell it to a size demanding a boxing glove. He bought
her six pairs of tan kid, in a beautiful cardboard box. He could ill
afford the gift, and made one of his whimsical grimaces when he got the
bill. The young lady who served him looked infinitely more genteel than
Mary Ann. He wondered what she would think if she knew for whom he was
buying these dainty articles. Perhaps her feelings would be so outraged
she would refuse to participate in the transaction. But the young lady
was happily unconscious; she had her best smile for the handsome,
aristocratic young gentleman, and mentioned his moustache later to her
bosom-friend in the next department.
And thus Mary Ann and Lancelot became the joint owners of a secret, and
coplayers in a little comedy. When Mary Ann came into the room, she would
put whatever she was carrying on a chair, gravely extract her gloves from
her pocket, and draw them on, Lancelot pretending not to know she was in
the room, though he had just said, "Come in." After allowing her a minute
he would look up. In the course of a week this became mechanical, so that
he lost the semi-ludicrous sense of secrecy which he felt at first, as
well as the little pathetic emotion inspired by her absolute
unconsciousness that the performance was not intended for her own
gratification. Nevertheless, though he could now endure to see Mary Ann
handling the sugar tongs, he remained cold to her for some weeks. He had
kissed her again in the flush of her joy at the sight of the gloves, but
after that there was a reaction. He rarely went to the club now (there
was no one with whom he was in correspondence except music publishers,
and they didn't reply), but he dropped in there once soon after the glove
episode, looked over the papers in the smoking-room, and chatted with a
popular composer and one or two men he knew. It was while the waiter was
holding out the coffee-tray to him that Mary Ann flashed upon his
consciousness. The thought of her seemed so incongruous with the sober
magnificence, the massive respectability that surrounded him, the
cheerful, marble hearth reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious
lounges, the well-groomed old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots,
the suave, noiseless satellites, that Lancelot felt a sudden pang of
bewildered shame. Why, the very waiter who stood bent before him would
disdain her. He took his coffee hastily, with a sense of personal
unworthiness. This feeling soon evaporated, but it left less of
resentment against Mary Ann which made him inexplicable to her.
Fortunately, her habit of acceptance saved her some tears, though she
shed others. And there remained always the gloves. When she was putting
them on she always felt she was slipping her hands in his.
And then there was yet a further consolation.
For the gloves had also a subtle effect on Lancelot. They gave him a
sense of responsibility. Vaguely resentful as he felt against Mary Ann
(in the intervals of his more definite resentment against publishers),
he also felt that he could not stop at the gloves. He had started
refining her, and he must go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves. He
must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands.
He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So,
whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these
grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour
against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded
astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her
feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had she known
how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which came quite
natural. She had only dropped her "h's" temporarily, as one drops country
friends in coming to London. Curiously enough, Mary Ann did not regard
the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the old. They were a
new language; she knew two others, her mother-tongue and her missus's
tongue. She would as little have thought of using her new linguistic
acquirements in the kitchen as of wearing her gloves there. They were for
Lancelot's ears only, as her gloves were for his eyes.
All this time Lancelot was displaying prodigious musical activity, so
much so that the cost of ruled paper became a consideration. There was no
form of composition he did not essay, none by which he made a shilling.
Once he felt himself the prey of a splendid inspiration, and sat up all
night writing at fever pitch, surrounded with celestial harmonies,
audible to him alone; the little room resounded with the thunder of a
mighty orchestra, in which every instrument sang to him individually--the
piccolo, the flute, the oboes, the clarionets, filling the air with a
silver spray of notes; the drums throbbing, the trumpets shrilling, the
four horns pealing with long stately notes, the trombones and bassoons
vibrating, the violins and violas sobbing in linked sweetness, the 'cello
and the contra-bass moaning their under-chant. And then, in the morning,
when the first rough sketch was written, the glory faded. He threw down
his pen, and called himself an ass for wasting his time on what nobody
would ever look at. Then he laid his head on the table, overwrought, full
of an infinite pity for himself. A sudden longing seized him for some one
to love him, to caress his hair, to smooth his hot forehead. This mood
passed too; he smoothed the slumbering Beethoven instead. After a while
he went into his bedroom, and sluiced his face and hands in ice-cold
water, and rang the bell for breakfast.
There was a knock at the door in response.
"Come in!" he said gently--his emotions had left him tired to the point
of tenderness. And then he waited a minute while Mary Ann was drawing on
her gloves.
"Did you ring, sir?" said a wheezy voice, at last. Mrs. Leadbatter had
got tired of waiting.
Lancelot started violently--Mrs. Leadbatter had latterly left him
entirely to Mary Ann. "It's my hastmer," she had explained to him
apologetically, meeting him casually in the passage. "I can't trollop up
and down stairs as I used to when I fust took this house five-an'-twenty
year ago, and pore Mr. Leadbatter--" and here followed reminiscences
long since in their hundredth edition.
"Yes; let me have some coffee--very hot--please," said Lancelot, less
gently. The woman's voice jarred upon him; and her features were not
redeeming.
"Lawd, sir, I 'ope that gas 'asn't been burnin' all night, sir," she
said, as she was going out.
"It has," he said shortly.
"You'll hexcoose me, sir, but I didn't bargen for that. I'm only a
pore, honest, 'ard-workin' widder, and I noticed the last gas bill was
'eavier then hever since that black winter that took pore Mr. Leadbatter
to 'is grave. Fair is fair, and I shall 'ave to reckon it a hextry, with
the rate gone up sevenpence a thousand and my Rosie leavin' a fine
nurse-maid's place in Bayswater at the end of the month to come 'ome and
'elp 'er mother, 'cos my hastmer--"
"Will you please shut the door after you?" interrupted Lancelot, biting
his lip with irritation. And Mrs. Leadbatter, who was standing in the
aperture with no immediate intention of departing, could find no repartee
beyond slamming the door as hard as she could.
This little passage of arms strangely softened Lancelot to Mary Ann. It
made him realise faintly what her life must be.
"I should go mad and smash all the crockery!" he cried aloud. He felt
quite tender again towards the uncomplaining girl.
Presently there was another knock. Lancelot growled, half prepared to
renew the battle, and to give Mrs. Leadbatter a piece of his mind on the
subject. But it was merely Mary Ann.
Shaken in his routine, he looked on steadily while Mary Ann drew on her
gloves; and this in turn confused Mary Ann. Her hand trembled.
"Let me help you," he said.
And there was Lancelot buttoning Mary Ann's glove just as if her name
were Guinevere! And neither saw the absurdity of wasting time upon an
operation which would have to be undone in two minutes. Then Mary Ann,
her eyes full of soft light, went to the sideboard and took out the
prosaic elements of breakfast.
When she returned, to put them back, Lancelot was astonished to see her
carrying a cage--a plain square cage, made of white tin wire.
"What's that?" he gasped.
"Please, Mr. Lancelot, I want to ask you to do me a favour." She dropped
her eyelashes timidly.
"Yes, Mary Ann," he said briskly. "But what have you got there?"
"It's only my canary, sir. Would you--please, sir, would you mind?"--then
desperately, "I want to hang it up here, sir!"
"Here?" he repeated in frank astonishment. "Why?"
"Please, sir, I--I--it's sunnier here, sir, and I--I think it must be
pining away. It hardly ever sings in my bedroom."
"Well, but," he began--then seeing the tears gathering on her eyelids, he
finished with laughing good-nature--"as long as Mrs. Leadbatter doesn't
reckon it an extra."
"Oh, no, sir," said Mary Ann, seriously. "I'll tell her. Besides, she
will be glad, because she don't like the canary--she says its singing
disturbs her. Her room is next to mine, you know, Mr. Lancelot."
"But you said it doesn't sing much."
"Please, sir, I--I mean in summer," explained Mary Ann, in rosy
confusion; "and--and--it'll soon be summer, sir."
"Sw--e-e-t!" burst forth the canary, suddenly, as if encouraged by Mary
Ann's opinion.
It was a pretty little bird--one golden yellow from beak to tail, as
though it had been dipped in sunshine.
"You see, sir," she cried eagerly, "it's beginning already."
"Yes," said Lancelot, grimly; "but so is Beethoven."
"I'll hang it high up--in the window," said Mary Ann, "where the dog
can't get at it."
"Well, I won't take any responsibilities," murmured Lancelot, resignedly.
"No, sir, I'll attend to that," said Mary Ann, vaguely.
After the installation of the canary Lancelot found himself slipping more
and more into a continuous matter-of-course flirtation; more and more
forgetting the slavey in the candid young creature who had, at moments,
strange dancing lights in her awakened eyes, strange flashes of witchery
in her ingenuous expression. And yet he made a desultory struggle against
what a secret voice was always whispering was a degradation. He knew she
had no real place in his life; he scarce thought of her save when she
came bodily before his eyes with her pretty face and her trustful glance.
He felt no temptation to write sonatas on her eyebrow--to borrow Peter's
variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write sonnets on
his mistress's eyebrow"--and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit
mistress for him--this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek,
accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her.
The women of his dreams were quite other--beautiful, voluptuous, full of
the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty thought, with dark
amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic melodies. They hovered
about him as he wrote and played--Venuses rising from the seas of his
music. And then--with his eyes full of the divine tears of youth, with
his brain a hive of winged dreams--he would turn and kiss merely Mary
Ann! Such is the pitiful breed of mortals.
And after every such fall, he thought more contemptuously of Mary
Ann. Idealise her as he might, see all that was best in her as he
tried to, she remained common and commonplace enough. Her ingenuousness,
while from one point of view it was charming, from another was but a
pleasant synonym for silliness. And it might not be ingenuousness--or
silliness--after all! For, was Mary Ann as innocent as she looked? The
guilelessness of the dove might very well cover the wisdom of the
serpent. The instinct--the repugnance that made him sponge off her first
kiss from his lips--was probably a true instinct. How was it possible a
girl of that class should escape the sordid attentions of street swains?
Even when she was in the country she was well-nigh of wooable age, the
likely cynosure of neighbouring ploughboys' eyes. And what of the other
lodgers!
A finer instinct--that of a gentleman--kept him from putting any
questions to Mary Ann. Indeed, his own delicacy repudiated the images
that strove to find entry in his brain, even as his fastidiousness shrank
from realising the unlovely details of Mary Ann's daily duties--these
things disgusted him more with himself than with her. And yet he found
himself acquiring a new and illogical interest in the boots he met
outside doors. Early one morning he went halfway up the second flight of
stairs--a strange region where his own boots had never before trod--but
came down ashamed and with fluttering heart as if he had gone up to steal
boots instead of to survey them. He might have asked Mary Ann or her
"missus" who the other tenants were, but he shrank from the topic. Their
hours were not his, and he only once chanced on a fellow-man in the
passage, and then he was not sure it was not the tax-collector. Besides,
he was not really interested--it was only a flicker of idle curiosity as
to the actual psychology of Mary Ann. That he did not really care he
proved to himself by kissing her next time. He accepted her as she
was--because she was there. She brightened his troubled life a little,
and he was quite sure he brightened hers. So he drifted on, not worrying
himself to mean any definite harm to her. He had quite enough worry with
those music publishers.
The financial outlook was, indeed, becoming terrifying. He was glad there
was nobody to question him, for he did not care to face the facts.
Peter's threat of becoming a regular visitor had been nullified by his
father despatching him to Germany to buy up some more Teutonic patents.
"Wonderful are the ways of Providence!" he had written to Lancelot. "If I
had not flown in the old man's face and picked up a little German here
years ago, I should not be half so useful to him now.... I shall pay a
flying visit to Leipsic--not on business."
But at last Peter returned, Mrs. Leadbatter panting to the door to let
him in one afternoon without troubling to ask Lancelot if he was "at
home." He burst upon the musician, and found him in the most
undisguisable dumps.
"Why didn't you answer my letter, you impolite old bear?" Peter asked,
warding off Beethoven with his umbrella.
"I was busy," Lancelot replied pettishly.
"Busy writing rubbish. Haven't you got 'Ops.' enough? I bet you haven't
had anything published yet."
"I am working at a grand opera," he said in dry, mechanical tones. "I
have hopes of getting it put on. Gasco, the _impresario_, is a member of
my club, and he thinks of running a season in the autumn. I had a talk
with him yesterday."
"I hope I shall live to see it," said Peter, sceptically.
"I hope you will," said Lancelot, sharply.
"None of my family ever lived beyond ninety," said Peter, shaking his
head dolefully; "and then, my heart is not so good as it might be."
"It certainly isn't!" cried poor Lancelot. "But everybody hits a chap
when he's down."
He turned his head away, striving to swallow the lump that would rise to
his throat. He had a sense of infinite wretchedness and loneliness.
"Oh, poor old chap; is it so bad as all that?" Peter's somewhat strident
voice had grown tender as a woman's. He laid his hand affectionately on
Lancelot's tumbled hair. "You know I believe in you with all my soul. I
never doubted your genius for a moment. Don't I know too well that's what
keeps you back? Come, come, old fellow. Can't I persuade you to write
rot? One must keep the pot boiling, you know. You turn out a dozen
popular ballads, and the coin'll follow your music as the rats did the
pied piper's. Then, if you have any ambition left, you kick away the
ladder by which you mounted, and stand on the heights of art."
"Never!" cried Lancelot. "It would degrade me in my own eyes. I'd rather
starve; and you can't shake them off--the first impression is everything;
they would always be remembered against me," he added after a pause.
"Motives mixed," reflected Peter. "That's a good sign." Aloud he said,
"Well, you think it over. This is a practical world, old man; it wasn't
made for dreamers. And one of the first dreams that you've got to wake
from is the dream that anybody connected with the stage can be relied on
from one day to the next. They gas for the sake of gassing, or they tell
you pleasant lies out of mere goodwill, just as they call for your
drinks. Their promises are beautiful bubbles, on a basis of soft soap,
and made to 'bust.'"
"You grow quite eloquent," said Lancelot, with a wan smile.
"Eloquent! There's more in me than you've yet found out. Now then! Give
us your hand that you'll chuck art, and we'll drink to your popular
ballad--hundredth thousand edition, no drawing-room should be without
it."
Lancelot flushed. "I was just going to have some tea. I think it's five
o'clock," he murmured.
"The very thing I'm dying for," cried Peter, energetically; "I'm as
parched as a pea." Inwardly he was shocked to find the stream of whisky
run dry.
So Lancelot rang the bell, and Mary Ann came up with the tea-tray in the
twilight.
"We'll have a light," cried Peter, and struck one of his own with a
shadowy underthought of saving Mary Ann from a possible scolding, in case
Lancelot's matches should be again unapparent. Then he uttered a comic
exclamation of astonishment. Mary Ann was putting on a pair of gloves! In
his surprise he dropped the match.
Mary Ann was equally startled by the unexpected sight of a stranger, but
when he struck his second match her hands were bare and red.
"What in Heaven's name were you putting on gloves for, my girl?" said
Peter, amused.
Lancelot stared fixedly at the fire, trying to keep the blood from
flooding his cheeks. He wondered that the ridiculousness of the whole
thing had never struck him in its full force before. Was it possible
he could have made such an ass of himself?
"Please, sir, I've got to go out, and I'm in a hurry," said Mary Ann.
Lancelot felt intense relief. An instant after his brow wrinkled itself.
"Oho!" he thought. "So this is Miss Simpleton, is it?"
"Then why did you take them off again?" retorted Peter.
Mary Ann's repartee was to burst into tears and leave the room.
"Now I've offended her," said Peter. "Did you see how she tossed her
pretty head?"
"Ingenious minx," thought Lancelot.
"She's left the tray on a chair by the, door," went on Peter. "What an
odd girl! Does she always carry on like this?"
"She's got such a lot to do. I suppose she sometimes gets a bit queer in
her head," said Lancelot, conceiving he was somehow safeguarding Mary
Ann's honour by the explanation.
"I don't think that," answered Peter. "She did seem dull and stupid when
I was here last. But I had a good stare at her just now, and she seems
rather bright. Why, her accent is quite refined--she must have picked it
up from you."
"Nonsense, nonsense," exclaimed Lancelot, testily.
The little danger--or rather the great danger of being made to appear
ridiculous--which he had just passed through, contributed to rouse him
from his torpor. He exerted himself to turn the conversation, and was
quite lively over tea.
"Sw--eet! Sw--w--w--w--eet!" suddenly broke into the conversation.
"More mysteries!" cried Peter. "What's that?"
"Only a canary."
"What, another musical instrument! Isn't Beethoven jealous? I wonder he
doesn't consume his rival in his wrath. But I never knew you liked
birds."
"I don't particularly. It isn't mine."
"Whose is it?"
Lancelot answered briskly: "Mary Ann's. She asked to be allowed to keep
it here. It seems it won't sing in her attic; it pines away."
"And do you believe that?"
"Why not? It doesn't sing much even here."
"Let me look at it--ah, it's a plain Norwich yellow. If you wanted a
singing canary you should have come to me; I'd have given you one 'made
in Germany'--one of our patents--they train them to sing tunes and that
puts up the price."
"Thank you, but this one disturbs me sufficiently."
"Then why do you put up with it?"
"Why do I put up with that Christmas number supplement over the
mantel-piece? It's part of the furniture. I was asked to let it be here
and I couldn't be rude."
"No, it's not in your nature. What a bore it must be to feed it! Let me
see, I suppose you give it canary seed biscuits--I hope you don't give
it butter."
"Don't be an ass!" roared Lancelot. "You don't imagine I bother my head
whether it eats butter or--or marmalade."
"Who feeds it then?"
"Mary Ann, of course."
"She comes in and feeds it?"
"Certainly."
"Several times a day?"
"I suppose so."
"Lancelot," said Peter, solemnly. "Mary Ann's mashed on you."
Lancelot shrank before Peter's remark as a burglar from a policeman's
bull's-eye. The bull's-eye seemed to cast a new light on Mary Ann, too,
but he felt too unpleasantly dazzled to consider that for the moment; his
whole thought was to get out of the line of light.
"Nonsense!" he answered; "why, I'm hardly ever in when she feeds it, and
I believe it eats all day long--gets supplied in the morning like a
coal-scuttle. Besides, she comes in to dust and all that when she
pleases. And I do wish you wouldn't use that word 'mashed.' I loathe it."
Indeed, he writhed under the thought of being coupled with Mary Ann. The
thing sounded so ugly--so squalid. In the actual, it was not so
unpleasant, but looked at from the outside--unsympathetically--it
was hopelessly vulgar, incurably plebeian. He shuddered.
"I don't know," said Peter. "It's a very expressive word, is 'mashed.'
But I will make allowance for your poetical feelings and give up the
word--except in its literal sense, of course. I'm sure you wouldn't
object to mashing a music publisher!"
Lancelot laughed with false heartiness. "Oh, but if I'm to write those
popular ballads, you say he'll become my best friend."
"Of course he will," cried Peter, eagerly sniffing at the red herring
Lancelot had thrown across the track. "You stand out for a royalty on
every copy, so that if you strike ile--oh, I beg your pardon, that's
another of the phrases you object to, isn't it?"
"Don't be a fool," said Lancelot, laughing on. "You know I only object to
that in connection with English peers marrying the daughters of men who
have done it."
"Oh, is that it? I wish you'd publish an expurgated dictionary with most
of the words left out, and exact definitions of the conditions under
which one may use the remainder. But I've got on a siding. What was I
talking about?"
"Royalty," muttered Lancelot, languidly.
"Royalty? No. You mentioned the aristocracy, I think." Then he burst into
a hearty laugh. "Oh, yes--on that ballad. Now, look here! I've brought
a ballad with me, just to show you--a thing that is going like wildfire."
"Not _Good-night and Good-by_, I hope," laughed Lancelot.
"Yes--the very one!" cried Peter, astonished.
"_Himmel!_" groaned Lancelot, in comic despair.
"You know it already?" inquired Peter, eagerly.
"No; only I can't open a paper without seeing the advertisement and the
sickly sentimental refrain."
"You see how famous it is, anyway," said Peter. "And if you want to
strike--er--to make a hit you'll just take that song and do a deliberate
imitation of it."
"Wha-a-a-t!" gasped Lancelot.
"My dear chap, they all do it. When the public cotton to a thing, they
can't have enough of it."
"But I can write my own rot, surely."
"In the face of all this litter of 'Ops.' I daren't dispute that for a
moment. But it isn't enough to write rot--the public want a particular
kind of rot. Now just play that over--oblige me." He laid both hands on
Lancelot's shoulders in amicable appeal.
Lancelot shrugged them, but seated himself at the piano, played the
introductory chords, and commenced singing the words in his pleasant
baritone.
Suddenly Beethoven ran towards the door, howling.
Lancelot ceased playing and looked approvingly at the animal.
"By Jove! he wants to go out. What an ear for music that animal's got."
Peter smiled grimly. "It's long enough. I suppose that's why you call him
Beethoven."
"Not at all. Beethoven had no ear--at least not in his latest period--he
was deaf. Lucky devil! That is, if this sort of thing was brought round
on barrel-organs."
"Never mind, old man! Finish the thing."
"But consider Beethoven's feelings!"
"Hang Beethoven!"
"Poor Beethoven. Come here, my poor maligned musical critic! Would they
give you a bad name and hang you? Now you must be very quiet. Put your
paws into those lovely long ears of yours, if it gets too horrible. You
have been used to high-class music, I know, but this is the sort of thing
that England expects every man to do, so the sooner you get used to it,
the better." He ran his fingers along the keys. "There, Peter, he's
growling already. I'm sure he'll start again, the moment I strike the
theme."
"Let him! We'll take it as a spaniel obligato."
"Oh, but his accompaniments are too staccato. He has no sense of time."
"Why don't you teach him, then, to wag his tail like the pendulum of a
metronome? He'd be more use to you that way than setting up to be a
musician, which Nature never meant him for--his hair's not long enough.
But go ahead, old man, Beethoven's behaving himself now."
Indeed, as if he were satisfied with his protest, the little beast
remained quiet, while his lord and master went through the piece. He did
not even interrupt at the refrain:--
"Kiss me, good-night, dear love,
Dream of the old delight;
My spirit is summoned above,
Kiss me, dear love, good-night."
"I must say it's not so awful as I expected," said Lancelot, candidly;
"it's not at all bad--for a waltz."
"There, you see!" cried Peter, eagerly; "the public are not such fools
after all."
"Still, the words are the most maudlin twaddle!" said Lancelot, as if he
found some consolation in the fact.
"Yes, but I didn't write _them_!" replied Peter, quickly. Then he grew
red and laughed an embarrassed laugh. "I didn't mean to tell you, old
man. But there--the cat's out. That's what took me to Brahmson's that
afternoon we met! And I harmonised it myself, mind you, every crotchet. I
picked up enough at the Conservatoire for that. You know lots of fellows
only do the tune--they give out all the other work."
"So you are the great Keeley Lesterre, eh?" said Lancelot, in amused
astonishment.
"Yes; I have to do it under another name. I don't want to grieve the old
man. You see, I promised him to reform, when he took me back to his
heart and business."
"Is that strictly honourable, Peter?" said Lancelot, shaking his head.
"Oh, well! I couldn't give it up altogether, but I do practically stick
to the contract--it's all overtime, you know. It doesn't interfere a bit
with business. Besides, as you'd say, it isn't music," he said slyly.
"And just because I don't want it I make a heap of coin out of it--that's
why I'm so vexed at your keeping me still in your debt."
Lancelot frowned. "Then you had no difficulty in getting published?" he
asked.
"I don't say that. It was bribery and corruption so far as my first song
was concerned. I tipped a professional to go down and tell Brahmson he
was going to take it up. You know, of course, well-known singers get
half-a-guinea from the publisher every time they sing a song."
"No; do they?" said Lancelot. "How mean of them!"
"Business, my boy. It pays the publisher to give it them. Look at the
advertisement!"
"But suppose a really fine song was published, and the publisher refused
to pay this blood-money?"
"Then I suppose they'd sing some other song, and let that moulder on the
foolish publisher's shelves."
"Great Heavens!" said Lancelot, jumping up from the piano in wild
excitement. "Then a musician's reputation is really at the mercy of a
mercenary crew of singers, who respect neither art nor themselves. Oh,
yes, we are indeed a musical people!"
"Easy there! Several of 'em are pals of mine, and I'll get them to take
up those ballads of yours as soon as you write 'em."
"Let them go to the devil with their ballads!" roared Lancelot, and with
a sweep of his arm whirled _Good-night_ and _Good-by_ into the air. Peter
picked it up and wrote something on it with a stylographic pen which he
produced from his waistcoat pocket.
"There!" he said, "that'll make you remember it's your own property--and
mine--that you are treating so disrespectfully."
"I beg your pardon, old chap," said Lancelot, rebuked and remorseful.
"Don't mention it," replied Peter. "And whenever you decide to become
rich and famous--there's your model."
"Never! Never! Never!" cried Lancelot, when Peter went at ten. "My poor
Beethoven! What you must have suffered! Never mind, I'll play you your
moonlight sonata."
He touched the keys gently and his sorrows and his temptations faded from
him. He glided into Bach, and then into Chopin and Mendelssohn, and at
last drifted into dreamy improvisation, his fingers moving almost of
themselves, his eyes half closed, seeing only inward visions.
And then, all at once, he awoke with a start, for Beethoven was barking
towards the door, with pricked-up ears and rigid tail.
"Sh! You little beggar," he murmured, becoming conscious that the hour
was late, and that he himself had been noisy at unbeseeming hours.
"What's the matter with you?" And, with a sudden thought, he threw open
the door.
It was merely Mary Ann.
Her face--flashed so unexpectedly upon him--had the piquancy of a vision,
but its expression was one of confusion and guilt; there were tears on
her cheeks; in her hand was a bedroom candle-stick.
She turned quickly, and began to mount the stairs. Lancelot put his hand
on her shoulder, and turned her face towards him and said in an imperious
whisper:--
"Now then, what's up? What are you crying about?"
"I ain't--I mean I'm _not_ crying," said Mary Ann, with a sob in her
breath.
"Come, come, don't fib. What's the matter?"
"I'm not crying, it's only the music," she murmured.
"The music," he echoed, bewildered.
"Yessir. The music always makes me cry--but you can't call it crying--it
feels so nice."
"Oh, then you've been listening!"
"Yessir." Her eyes drooped in humiliation.
"But you ought to have been in bed," he said. "You get little enough
sleep as it is."
"It's better than sleep," she answered.
The simple phrase vibrated through him, like a beautiful minor chord. He
smoothed her hair tenderly.
"Poor child!" he said.
There was an instant's silence. It was past midnight, and the house was
painfully still. They stood upon the dusky landing, across which a bar of
light streamed from his half-open door, and only Beethoven's eyes were
upon them. But Lancelot felt no impulse to fondle her, only just to lay
his hand on her hair, as in benediction and pity.
"So you liked what I was playing," he said, not without a pang of
personal pleasure.
"Yessir; I never heard you play that before."
"So you often listen!"
"I can hear you, even in the kitchen. Oh, it's just lovely! I don't care
what I have to do then, if it's grates or plates or steps. The music goes
and goes, and I feel back in the country again, and standing, as I used
to love to stand of an evening, by the stile, under the big elm, and
watch how the sunset did redden the white birches, and fade in the water.
Oh, it was so nice in the springtime, with the hawthorn that grew on the
other bank, and the bluebells--"
The pretty face was full of dreamy tenderness, the eyes lit up
witchingly. She pulled herself up suddenly, and stole a shy glance at
her auditor.
"Yes, yes, go on," he said; "tell me all you feel about the music."
"And there's one song you sometimes play that makes me feel floating on
and on like a great white swan."
She hummed a few bars of the _Gondel-Lied_--flawlessly.
"Dear me! you have an ear!" he said, pinching it. "And how did you like
what I was playing just now?" he went on, growing curious to know how his
own improvisations struck her.
"Oh, I liked it so much," she whispered back, enthusiastically;
"because it reminded me of my favourite one--every moment I did think--I
thought--you were going to come into that."
The whimsical sparkle leapt into his eyes. "And I thought I was so
original," he murmured.
"But what I liked best," she began, then checked herself, as if suddenly
remembering she had never made a spontaneous remark before, and lacking
courage to establish a precedent.
"Yes--what you liked best?" he said encouragingly.
"That song you sang this afternoon," she said shyly.
"What song? I sang no song," he said, puzzled for a moment.
"Oh, yes! That one about--
"'Kiss me, dear love, good-night.'
"I was going upstairs but it made me stop just here--and cry."
He made his comic grimace.
"So it was you Beethoven was barking at! And I thought he had an ear! And
I thought you had an ear! But no! You're both Philistines after all.
Heigho!"
She looked sad. "Oughtn't I to ha' liked it?" she asked anxiously.
"Oh, yes," he said reassuringly; "it's very popular. No drawing-room is
without it."
She detected the ironic ring in his voice. "It wasn't so much the music,"
she began apologetically.
"Now--now you're going to spoil yourself," he said. "Be natural."
"But it wasn't," she protested. "It was the words--"
"That's worse," he murmured below his breath.
"They reminded me of my mother as she laid dying."
"Ah!" said Lancelot.
"Yes, sir, mother was a long time dying--it was when I was a little girl
and I used to nurse her--I fancy it was our little Sally's death that
killed her, she took to her bed after the funeral and never left it till
she went to her own," said Mary Ann, with unconscious flippancy. "She
used to look up to the ceiling and say that she was going to little
Sallie, and I remember I was such a silly then, I brought mother flowers
and apples and bits of cake to take to Sally with my love. I put them on
her pillow, but the flowers faded and the cake got mouldy--mother was
such a long time dying--and at last I ate the apples myself, I was so
tired of waiting. Wasn't I silly?" And Mary Ann laughed a little laugh
with tears in it. Then growing grave again, she added: "And at last, when
mother was really on the point of death, she forgot all about little
Sally and said she was going to meet Tom. And I remember thinking she was
going to America--I didn't know people talk nonsense before they die."
"They do--a great deal of it, unfortunately," said Lancelot, lightly,
trying to disguise from himself that his eyes were moist. He seemed to
realise now what she was--a child; a child who, simpler than most
children to start with, had grown only in body, whose soul had been
stunted by uncounted years of dull and monotonous drudgery. The blood
burnt in his veins as he thought of the cruelty of circumstance and the
heartless honesty of her mistress. He made up his mind for the second
time to give Mrs. Leadbatter a piece of his mind in the morning.
"Well, go to bed now, my poor child," he said, "or you'll get no rest at
all."
"Yessir."
She went obediently up a couple of stairs, then turned her head
appealingly towards him. The tears still glimmered on her eyelashes. For
an instant he thought she was expecting her kiss, but she only wanted to
explain anxiously once again, "That was why I liked that song, 'Kiss me,
good-night, dear love.' It was what my mother--"
"Yes, yes, I understand," he broke in, half amused, though somehow the
words did not seem so full of maudlin pathos to him now. "And there--" he
drew her head towards him--"Kiss _me_, good-night--"
He did not complete the quotation; indeed, her lips were already drawn
too close to his. But, ere he released her, the long-repressed thought
had found expression.
"You don't kiss anybody but me?" he said half playfully.
"Oh, no, sir," said Mary Ann, earnestly.
"What!" more lightly still. "Haven't you got half a dozen young men?"
Mary Ann shook her head, more regretfully than resentfully. "I told you I
never go out--except for little errands."
She had told him, but his attention had been so concentrated on the
ungrammatical form in which she had conveyed the information, that the
fact itself had made no impression. Now his anger against Mrs. Leadbatter
dwindled. After all, she was wise in not giving Mary Ann the run of the
London streets.
"But"--he hesitated. "How about the--the milkman--and the--the other
gentlemen?"
"Please, sir," said Mary Ann, "I don't like them."
After that no man could help expressing his sense of her good taste.
"Then you won't kiss anybody but me," he said, as he let her go for the
last time. He had a Quixotic sub-consciousness that he was saving her
from his kind by making her promise formally.
"How could I, Mr. Lancelot?" And the brimming eyes shone with soft light.
"I never shall--never."
It sounded like a troth.
He went back to the room and shut the door, but could not shut out her
image. The picture she had unwittingly supplied of herself took
possession of his imagination: he saw her almost as a dream-figure--the
virginal figure he knew--standing by the stream in the sunset, amid the
elms and silver birches, with daisies in her hands and bluebells at her
feet, inhaling the delicate scent that wafted from the white hawthorn
bushes, and watching the water glide along till it seemed gradually to
wash away the fading colours of the sunset that glorified it. And as he
dwelt on the vision he felt harmonies and phrases stirring and singing in
his brain, like a choir of awakened birds. Quickly he seized paper and
wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of his pen--a reverie
full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and woodland sunsets and the
gracious innocence of maidenhood. When it was done he felt he must give
it a distinctive name. He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting
titles innumerable. Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from
which he sought to pick a word or two as one plucks a violet from a posy.
At last a half-tender, half-whimsical look came into his face, and
picking his pen out of his hair, he wrote merely--"Marianne."
It was only natural that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain
herself--or be maintained--at this idyllic level. But her fall was
aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular
business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist German
Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a
prize-symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal Palace Concert.
This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot's head away from all but
thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been luckless enough to be
again discovered cleaning the steps--and without gloves. Against such a
spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless. If Mary Ann did not
immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in which she had
started, it was only because of Lancelot's supplementary knowledge of the
creature. But as he passed her by, solicitous as before not to tread upon
her, he felt as if all the cold water in her pail were pouring down the
back of his neck.
Nevertheless, the effect of both of these turns of fortune was transient.
The symphony was duly performed, and dismissed in the papers as
promising, if over-ambitious; the only tangible result was a suggestion
from the popular composer, who was a member of his club, that Lancelot
should collaborate with him in a comic opera, for the production of which
he had facilities. The composer confessed he had a fluent gift of tune,
but had no liking for the drudgery of orchestration, and, as Lancelot was
well up in these tedious technicalities, the two might strike a
partnership to mutual advantage.
Lancelot felt insulted, but retained enough mastery of himself to reply
that he would think it over. As he gave no signs of life or thought, the
popular composer then wrote to him at length on the subject, offering him
fifty pounds for the job, half of it on account. Lancelot was in sore
straits when he got the letter, for his stock of money was dwindling to
vanishing point, and he dallied with the temptation sufficiently to take
the letter home with him. But his spirit was not yet broken, and the
letter, crumpled like a rag, was picked up by Mary Ann and straightened
out, and carefully placed upon the mantel-shelf.
Time did something of a similar service for Mary Ann herself, picking
her up from the crumpled attitude in which Lancelot had detected her on
the doorstep, straightening her out again, and replacing her upon her
semi-poetic pedestal. But, as with the cream-laid note-paper, the
wrinklings could not be effaced entirely; which was more serious for Mary
Ann.
Not that Mary Ann was conscious of these diverse humours in Lancelot.
Unconscious of changes in herself she could not conceive herself related
to his variations of mood; still less did she realise the inward
struggle, of which she was the cause. She was vaguely aware that he had
external worries, for all his grandeur, and if he was by turns brusque,
affectionate, indifferent, playful, brutal, charming, callous,
demonstrative, she no more connected herself with these vicissitudes than
with the caprices of the weather. If her sun smiled once a day it was
enough. How should she know that his indifference was often a victory
over himself, as his amativeness was a defeat?
If any excuse could be found for Lancelot, it would be that which he
administered to his conscience morning and evening like a soothing syrup.
His position was grown so desperate that Mary Ann almost stood between
him and suicide. Continued disappointment made his soul sick; his proud
heart fed on itself. He would bite his lips till the blood came, vowing
never to give in. And not only would he not move an inch from his ideal,
he would rather die than gratify Peter by falling back on him; he would
never even accept that cheque which was virtually his own.
It was wonderful how, in his stoniest moments, the sight of Mary Ann's
candid face, eloquent with dumb devotion, softened and melted him. He
would take her gloved hand and press it silently. And Mary Ann never knew
one iota of his inmost thought! He could not bring himself to that;
indeed, she never for a moment appeared to him in the light of an
intelligent being; at her best she was a sweet, simple, loving child. And
he scarce spoke to her at all now--theirs was a silent communion--he had
no heart to converse with her as he had done. The piano too was almost
silent; the canary sang less and less, though spring was coming, and
glints of sunshine stole between the wires of its cage; even Beethoven
sometimes failed to bark when there was a knock at the street door.
And at last there came a day when--for the first time in his
life--Lancelot inspected his wardrobe, and hunted together his odds and
ends of jewelry. From this significant task he was aroused by hearing
Mrs. Leadbatter coughing in his sitting-room.
He went in with an interrogative look.
"Oh, my chest!" said Mrs. Leadbatter, patting it. "It's no use my denyin'
of it, sir, I'm done up. It's as much as I can do to crawl up to the top
to bed. I'm thinkin' I shall have to make up a bed in the kitchen. It
only shows 'ow right I was to send for my Rosie, though quite the lady,
and where will you find a nattier nursemaid in all Bayswater?"
"Nowhere," assented Lancelot, automatically.
"Oh, I didn't know you'd noticed her running in to see 'er pore old
mother of a Sunday arternoon," said Mrs. Leadbatter, highly gratified.
"Well, sir, I won't say anything about the hextry gas, though a poor
widder and sevenpence hextry on the thousand, but I'm thinkin' if you
would give my Rosie a lesson once a week on that there pianner, it would
be a kind of set-off, for you know, sir, the policeman tells me your
winder is a landmark to 'im on the foggiest nights."
Lancelot flushed, then wrinkled his brows. This was a new idea
altogether. Mrs. Leadbatter stood waiting for his reply, with a
deferential smile tempered by asthmatic contortions.
"But have you got a piano of your own?"
"Oh, no, sir," cried Mrs. Leadbatter, almost reproachfully.
"Well; but how is your Rosie to practise? One lesson a week is of very
little use anyway, but unless she practises a good deal it'll only be a
waste of time."
"Ah, you don't know my Rosie," said Mrs. Leadbatter, shaking her head
with sceptical pride. "You mustn't judge by other gels--the way that gel
picks up things is--well, I'll just tell you what 'er school-teacher,
Miss Whiteman said. She says--"
"My good lady," interrupted Lancelot, "I practised six hours a day
myself."
"Yes, but it don't come so natural to a man," said Mrs. Leadbatter,
unshaken. "And it don't look natural neither to see a man playin' the
pianner--it's like seein' him knittin'."
But Lancelot was knitting his brows in a way that was exceedingly
natural. "I may as well tell you at once that what you propose is
impossible. First of all, because I am doubtful whether I shall remain
in these rooms; and secondly, because I am giving up the piano
immediately. I only have it on hire, and I--I--" He felt himself
blushing.
"Oh, what a pity!" interrupted Mrs. Leadbatter. "You might as well let me
go on payin' the hinstalments, instead of lettin' all you've paid go for
nothing. Rosie ain't got much time, but I could allow 'er a 'our a day if
it was my own pianner."
Lancelot explained "hire" did not mean the "hire system." But the idea of
acquiring the piano, having once fired Mrs. Leadbatter's brain, could not
be extinguished. The unexpected conclusion arrived at was that she was to
purchase the piano on the hire system, allowing it to stand in Lancelot's
room, and that five shillings a week should be taken off his rent in
return for six lessons of an hour each, one of the hours counterbalancing
the gas grievance. Reviewing the bargain, when Mrs. Leadbatter was gone,
Lancelot did not think it at all bad for him.
"Use of the piano. Gas," he murmured, with a pathetic smile, recalling
the advertisements he had read before lighting on Mrs. Leadbatter's. "And
five shillings a week--it's a considerable relief! There's no loss of
dignity either--for nobody will know. But I wonder what the governor
would have said!"
The thought shook him with silent laughter; a spectator might have
fancied he was sobbing.
But, after the lessons began, it might almost be said it was only when a
spectator was present that he was not sobbing. For Rosie, who was an
awkward, ungraceful young person, proved to be the dullest and most
butter-fingered pupil ever invented for the torture of teachers; at
least, so Lancelot thought, but then he had never had any other pupils,
and was not patient. It must be admitted, though, that Rosie giggled
perpetually, apparently finding endless humour in her own mistakes. But
the climax of the horror was the attendance of Mrs. Leadbatter at the
lessons, for, to Lancelot's consternation, she took it for granted that
her presence was part of the contract. She marched into the room in her
best cap, and sat, smiling, in the easy chair, wheezing complacently and
beating time with her foot. Occasionally she would supplement Lancelot's
critical observations.
"It ain't as I fears to trust 'er with you, sir," she also remarked about
three times a week, "for I knows, sir, you're a gentleman. But it's the
neighbours; they never can mind their own business. I told 'em you was
going to give my Rosie lessons, and you know, sir, that they _will_ talk
of what don't concern 'em. And, after all, sir, it's an hour, and an
hour is sixty minutes, ain't it, sir?"
And Lancelot, groaning inwardly, and unable to deny this chronometry,
felt that an ironic Providence was punishing him for his attentions to
Mary Ann.
And yet he only felt more tenderly towards Mary Ann. Contrasted with
these two vulgar females, whom he came to conceive as her oppressors,
sitting in gauds and finery, and taking lessons which had better befitted
their Cinderella--the figure of Mary Ann definitely reassumed some of its
antediluvian poetry, if we may apply the adjective to that catastrophic
washing of the steps. And Mary Ann herself had grown gloomier--once or
twice he thought she had been crying, though he was too numbed and
apathetic to ask, and was incapable of suspecting that Rosie had anything
to do with her tears. He hardly noticed that Rosie had taken to feeding
the canary; the question of how he should feed himself was becoming every
day more and more menacing. He saw starvation slowly closing in upon him
like the walls of a torture-chamber. He had grown quite familiar with the
pawn-shop now, though he still slipped in as though his goods were
stolen.
And at last there came a moment when Lancelot felt he could bear it no
longer. And then he suddenly saw daylight. Why should he teach only
Rosie? Nay, why should he teach Rosie at all? If he _was_ reduced to
giving lessons--and after all it was no degradation to do so, no
abandonment of his artistic ideal, rather a solution of the difficulty so
simple that he wondered it had not occurred to him before--why should he
give them at so wretched a price? He would get another pupil, other
pupils, who would enable him to dispense with the few shillings he made
by Rosie. He would not ask anybody to recommend him pupils--there was no
need for his acquaintances to know, and if he asked Peter, Peter would
probably play him some philanthropic trick. No, he would advertise.
After he had spent his last gold breast-pin in advertisements, he
realised that to get pianoforte pupils in London was as easy as to get
songs published. By the time he quite realised it, it was May, and then
he sat down to realise his future.
The future was sublimely simple--as simple as his wardrobe had grown.
All his clothes were on his back. In a week or two he would be on the
streets; for a poor widow could not be expected to lodge, partially board
(with use of the piano, gas), an absolutely penniless young gentleman,
though he combined the blood of twenty county families with the genius of
a pleiad of tone poets.
There was only one bright spot in the prospect. Rosie's lessons would
come to an end.
What he would do when he got on the streets was not so clear as the
rest of this prophetic vision. He might take to a barrel-organ--but that
would be a cruel waste of his artistic touch. Perhaps he would die on a
doorstep, like the professor of many languages, whose starvation was
recorded in that very morning's paper.
Thus, driven by the saturnine necessity that sneers at our puny
resolutions, Lancelot began to meditate surrender. For surrender of some
sort must be--either of life or ideal. After so steadfast and protracted
a struggle--oh, it was cruel, it was terrible; how noble, how high-minded
he had been; and this was how the fates dealt with him--but at that
moment--
"Sw--eet," went the canary, and filled the room with its rapturous
demi-semi-quavers, its throat swelling, its little body throbbing with
joy of the sunshine. And then Lancelot remembered--not the joy of the
sunshine, not the joy of life--no, merely Mary Ann.
Noble! high-minded! No, let Peter think that, let posterity think that.
But he could not cozen himself thus! He had fallen--horribly, vulgarly.
How absurd of him to set himself up as a saint, a martyr, an idealist! He
could not divide himself into two compartments like that and pretend that
only one counted in his character. Who was he to talk of dying for art?
No, he was but an everyday man. He wanted Mary Ann--yes, he might as well
admit that to himself now. It was no use humbugging himself any longer.
Why should he give her up? She was his discovery, his treasure-trove,
his property.
And if he could stoop to her, why should he not stoop to popular work, to
devilling, to anything that would rid him of these sordid cares? Bah!
away with all pretences!
Was not this shamefaced pawning as vulgar, as wounding to the artist's
soul as the turning out of tawdry melodies?
Yes, he would escape from Mrs. Leadbatter and her Rosie; he would write
to that popular composer--he had noticed his letter lying on the
mantel-piece the other day--and accept the fifty pounds, and whatever he
did he could do anonymously, so that Peter wouldn't know, after all; he
would escape from this wretched den and take a flat far away, somewhere
where nobody knew him, and there he would sit and work, with Mary Ann for
his housekeeper. Poor Mary Ann! How glad she would be when he told her!
The tears came into his eyes as he thought of her naive delight. He would
rescue her from this horrid, monotonous slavery, and--happy thought--he
would have her to give lessons to instead of Rosie.
Yes, he would refine her; prune away all that reminded him of her wild
growth, so that it might no longer humiliate him to think to what a
companion he had sunk. How happy they would be! Of course the world would
censure him if it knew, but the world was stupid and prosaic, and
measured all things by its coarse rule of thumb. It was the best thing
that could happen to Mary Ann--the best thing in the world. And then the
world _wouldn't_ know.
"Sw--eet," went the canary. "Sw--eet."
This time the joy of the bird penetrated to his own soul--the joy of
life, the joy of the sunshine. He rang the bell violently, as though he
were sounding a clarion of defiance, the trumpet of youth.
Mary Ann knocked at the door, came in, and began to draw on her gloves.
He was in a mad mood--the incongruity struck him so that he burst into a
roar of laughter.
Mary Ann paused, flushed, and bit her lip. The touch of resentment he had
never noted before gave her a novel charm, spicing her simplicity.
He came over to her and took her half-bare hands. No, they were not so
terrible, after all. Perhaps she had awakened to her iniquities, and had
been trying to wash them white. His last hesitation as to her worthiness
to live with him vanished.
"Mary Ann," he said, "I'm going to leave these rooms."
The flush deepened, but the anger faded. She was a child again--her big
eyes full of tears. He felt her hands tremble in his.
"Mary Ann," he went on, "how would you like me to take you with me?"
"Do you mean it, sir?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes, dear." It was the first time he had used the word. The blood
throbbed madly in her ears. "If you will come with me--and be my
little housekeeper--we will go away to some nice spot, and be quite
alone together--in the country if you like, amid the foxglove and
the meadowsweet, or by the green waters, where you shall stand in the
sunset and dream; and I will teach you music and the piano"--her eyes
dilated--"and you shall not do any of this wretched nasty work any more.
What do you say?"
"Sw--eet, sw--eet," said the canary, in thrilling jubilation.
Her happiness was choking her--she could not speak.
"And we will take the canary, too--unless I say good-by to you as well."
"Oh, no, you mustn't leave us here!"
"And then," he said slowly, "it will not be good-by--nor good-night. Do
you understand?"
"Yes, yes," she breathed, and her face shone.
"But think, think, Mary Ann," he said, a sudden pang of compunction
shooting through his breast. He released her hands. "_Do_ you
understand?"
"I understand--I shall be with you, always."