It was seldom he was disturbed in any form of sequestered speculation,
or that at his times of predilection, especially that of the long autumn
blankness between the season of trippers and the season of Bath-chairs,
there were westward stragglers enough to jar upon his settled sense of
priority. For himself his seat, the term of his walk, was consecrated;
it had figured to him for years as the last (though there were others,
not immediately near it, and differently disposed, that might have
aspired to the title); so that he could invidiously distinguish as he
approached, make out from a distance any accident of occupation, and
never draw nearer while that unpleasantness lasted. What he disliked
was to compromise on his tradition, whether for a man, a woman or a
connoodling couple; it was to idiots of this last composition he most
objected, he having sat there, in the past, alone, having sat there
interminably with Nan, having sat there with--well, with other women
when women, at hours of ease, could still care or count for him, but
having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger.
It was a world of fidgets and starts, however, the world of his present
dreariness--he alone possessed in it, he seemed to make out, of the
secret, of the dignity of sitting still with one’s fate; so that if
he took a turn about or rested briefly elsewhere even foolish
philanderers--though this would never have been his and Nan’s way--ended
soon by some adjournment as visibly pointless as their sprawl.
Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of
desolation--which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption;
where, for that matter, moreover, once he had settled at his end, it
was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the
Marina, take this liberty with other resting presences; but his own
struck them perhaps in general as either of too grim or just of too
dingy a vicinage. He might have affected the fellow-lounger as a man
evil, unsociable, possibly engaged in working out the idea of a
crime; or otherwise, more probably--for on the whole he surely looked
harmless--devoted to the worship of some absolutely unpractical remorse.
On a certain October Saturday he had got off, as usual, early; but the
afternoon light, his pilgrimage drawing to its aim, could still show
him, at long range, the rare case of an established usurper. His impulse
was then, as by custom, to deviate a little and wait, all the more
that the occupant of the bench was a lady, and that ladies, when alone,
were--at that austere end of the varied frontal stretch--markedly
discontinuous; but he kept on at sight of this person’s rising, while he
was still fifty yards off, and proceeding, her back turned, to the edge
of the broad terrace, the outer line of which followed the interspaced
succession of seats and was guarded by an iron rail from the abruptly
lower level of the beach. Here she stood before the sea, while our
friend on his side, recognising no reason to the contrary, sank into the
place she had quitted. There were other benches, eastward and off by the
course of the drive, for vague ladies. The lady indeed thus thrust upon
Herbert’s vision might have struck an observer either as not quite vague
or as vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design.
Not that our own observer at once thought of these things; he only took
in, and with no great interest, that the obtruded presence was a “real”
lady; that she was dressed--he noticed such matters--with a certain
elegance of propriety or intention of harmony; and that she remained
perfectly still for a good many minutes; so many in fact that he
presently ceased to heed her, and that as she wasn’t straight before
him, but as far to the left as was consistent with his missing her
profile, he had turned himself to one of his sunsets again (though
it wasn’t quite one of his best) and let it hold him for a time that
enabled her to alter her attitude and present a fuller view. Without
other movement, but her back now to the sea and her face to the odd
person who had appropriated her corner, she had taken a sustained
look at him before he was aware she had stirred. On that apprehension,
however, he became also promptly aware of her direct, her applied
observation. As his sense of this quickly increased he wondered who she
was and what she wanted--what, as it were, was the matter with her; it
suggested to him, the next thing, that she had, under some strange idea,
actually been waiting for him. Any idea about him to-day on the part of
any one could only be strange.
Yes, she stood there with the ample width of the Marina between them,
but turned to him, for all the world, as to show frankly that she was
concerned with him. And she _was_--oh yes--a real lady: a middle-aged
person, of good appearance and of the best condition, in quiet but
“handsome” black, save for very fresh white kid gloves, and with a
pretty, dotty, becoming veil, predominantly white, adjusted to her
countenance; which through it somehow, even to his imperfect sight,
showed strong fine black brows and what he would have called on the spot
character. But she was pale; her black brows were the blacker behind
the flattering tissue; she still kept a hand, for support, on the
terrace-rail, while the other, at the end of an extended arm that had
an effect of rigidity, clearly pressed hard on the knob of a small and
shining umbrella, the lower extremity of whose stick was equally, was
sustainingly, firm on the walk. So this mature, qualified, important
person stood and looked at the limp, undistinguished--oh his values of
aspect now!--shabby man on the bench.
It was extraordinary, but the fact of her interest, by immensely
surprising, by immediately agitating him, blinded him at first to her
identity and, for the space of his long stare, diverted him from it;
with which even then, when recognition did break, the sense of the
shock, striking inward, simply consumed itself in gaping stillness. He
sat there motionless and weak, fairly faint with surprise, and there
was no instant, in all the succession of so many, at which Kate Cookham
could have caught the special sign of his intelligence. Yet that she
did catch something he saw--for he saw her steady herself, by her
two supported hands, to meet it; while, after she had done so, a very
wonderful thing happened, of which he could scarce, later on, have made
a clear statement, though he was to think it over again and again. She
moved toward him, she reached him, she stood there, she sat down near
him, he merely passive and wonderstruck, unresentfully “impressed,”
gaping and taking it in--and all as with an open allowance on the part
of each, so that they positively and quite intimately met in it, o the
impertinence for their case, this case that brought them again,
after horrible years, face to face, of the vanity, the profanity, the
impossibility, of anything between them but silence.
Nearer to him, beside him at a considerable interval (oh she was
immensely considerate!) she presented him, in the sharp terms of
her transformed state--but thus the more amply, formally,
ceremoniously--with the reasons that would serve him best for not having
precipitately known her. She was simply another and a totally different
person, and the exhibition of it to which she had proceeded with this
solemn anxiety was all, obviously, for his benefit--once he had, as
he appeared to be doing, provisionally accepted her approach. He had
remembered her as inclined to the massive and disowned by the graceful;
but this was a spare, fine, worn, almost wasted lady--who had repaired
waste, it was true, however, with something he could only appreciate as
a rich accumulation of manner. She was strangely older, so far as that
went--marked by experience and as if many things had happened to
her; her face had suffered, to its improvement, contraction and
concentration; and if he had granted, of old and from the first, that
her eyes were remarkable, had they yet ever had for him this sombre
glow? Withal, something said, she had flourished--he felt it, wincing at
it, as that; she had had a life, a career, a history--something that
her present waiting air and nervous consciousness couldn’t prevent his
noting there as a deeply latent assurance. She had flourished, she had
flourished--though to learn it after this fashion was somehow at the
same time not to feel she flaunted it. It wasn’t thus execration that
she revived in him; she made in fact, exhibitively, as he could only
have put it, the matter of long ago irrelevant, and these extraordinary
minutes of their reconstituted relation--how many? how few?--addressed
themselves altogether to new possibilities.
Still it after a little awoke in him as with the throb of a touched
nerve that his own very attitude was supplying a connection; he knew
presently that he wouldn’t have had her go, _couldn’t_ have made a
sign to her for it--which was what she had been uncertain of--without
speaking to him; and that therefore he was, as at the other, the hideous
time, passive to whatever she might do. She was even yet, she was
always, in possession of him; she had known how and where to find him
and had appointed that he should see her, and, though he had never
dreamed it was again to happen to him, he was meeting it already as if
it might have been the only thing that the least humanly _could_.
Yes, he had come back there to flop, by long custom, upon the bench of
desolation _as_ the man in the whole place, precisely, to whom nothing
worth more than tuppence could happen; whereupon, in the grey desert of
his consciousness, the very earth had suddenly opened and flamed. With
this, further, it came over him that he hadn’t been prepared and
that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn’t fit to receive
a visit--any visit; a flush for his felt misery, in the light of her
opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he
was--she should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at
last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That,
however, didn’t relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another
moment the odd desperate gesture of raising both his hands to his face
and letting them, while he pressed it to them, cover and guard it. It
was as he held them there that she at last spoke.
“I’ll go away if you wish me to.” And then she waited a moment. “I
mean now--now that you’ve seen I’m here. I wanted you to know it, and I
thought of writing--I was afraid of our meeting accidentally. Then I was
afraid that if I wrote you might refuse. So I thought of this way--as
I knew you must come out here.” She went on with pauses, giving him a
chance to make a sign. “I’ve waited several days. But I’ll do what you
wish. Only I should like in that case to come back.” Again she stopped;
but strange was it to him that he wouldn’t have made her break off. She
held him in boundless wonder. “I came down--I mean I came from town--on
purpose. I’m staying on still, and I’ve a great patience and will give
you time. Only may I say it’s important? Now that I do see you,” she
brought out in the same way, “I see how inevitable it was--I mean that I
should have wanted to come. But you must feel about it as you can,” she
wound up--“till you get used to the idea.”
She spoke so for accommodation, for discretion, for some ulterior view
already expressed in her manner, that, after taking well in, from behind
his hands, that this was her very voice--oh ladylike!--heard, and heard
in deprecation of displeasure, after long years again, he uncovered his
face and freshly met her eyes. More than ever he couldn’t have known
her. Less and less remained of the figure all the facts of which had
long ago so hardened for him. She was a handsome, grave, authoritative,
but refined and, as it were, physically rearranged person--she, the
outrageous vulgarity of whose prime assault had kept him shuddering so
long as a shudder was in him. That atrocity in her was what everything
had been built on, but somehow, all strangely, it was slipping from him;
so that, after the oddest fashion conceivable, when he felt he mustn’t
let her go, it was as if he were putting out his hand to save the past,
the hideous real unalterable past, exactly as she had been the cause of
its being and the cause of his undergoing it. He should have been too
awfully “sold” if he wasn’t going to have been right about her.
“I don’t mind,” he heard himself at last say. Not to mind had seemed for
the instant the length he was prepared to go; but he was afterward aware
of how soon he must have added: “You’ve come on purpose to see me?” He
was on the point of putting to her further: “What then do you want of
me?” But he would keep--yes, in time--from appearing to show he cared.
If he showed he cared, where then would be his revenge? So he was
already, within five minutes, thinking his revenge uncomfortably over
instead of just comfortably knowing it. What came to him, at any
rate, as they actually fell to talk, was that, with such precautions,
considerations, reduplications of consciousness, almost avowed feelings
of her way on her own part, and light fingerings of his chords of
sensibility, she was understanding, she _had_ understood, more things
than all the years, up to this strange eventide, had given him an
inkling of. They talked, they went on--he hadn’t let her retreat, to
whatever it committed him and however abjectly it did so; yet keeping
off and off, dealing with such surface facts as involved ancient
acquaintance but held abominations at bay. The recognition, the
attestation that she _had_ come down for him, that there would be
reasons, that she had even hovered and watched, assured herself a little
of his habits (which she managed to speak of as if, on their present
ampler development, they were much to be deferred to), detained them
enough to make vivid how, listen as stiffly or as serenely as he might,
she sat there in fear, just as she had so stood there at first, and that
her fear had really to do with her calculation of some sort of chance
with him. What chance could it possibly be? Whatever it might have
done, on this prodigious showing, with Kate Cookham, it made the present
witness to the state of his fortunes simply exquisite: he ground his
teeth secretly together as he saw he should have to take _that_. For
what did it mean but that she would have liked to pity him if she could
have done it with safety? Ah, however, he must give her no measure of
safety!
By the time he had remarked, with that idea, that she probably saw few
changes about them there that weren’t for the worse--the place was going
down, down and down, so fast that goodness knew where it would stop--and
had also mentioned that in spite of this he himself remained faithful,
with all its faults loving it still; by the time he had, after that
fashion, superficially indulged her, adding a few further light and
just sufficiently dry reflections on local matters, the disappearance of
landmarks and important persons, the frequency of gales, the low policy
of the town-council in playing down to cheap excursionists: by the time
he had so acquitted himself, and she had observed, of her own motion,
that she was staying at the Royal, which he knew for the time-honoured,
the conservative and exclusive hotel, he had made out for himself
one thing at least, the amazing fact that he had been landed by his
troubles, at the end of time, in a “social relation,” of all things
in the world, and how of that luxury he was now having unprecedented
experience. He had but once in his life had his nose in the Royal, on
the occasion of his himself delivering a parcel during some hiatus in
his succession of impossible small boys and meeting in the hall the
lady who had bought of him, in the morning, a set of Crabbe, largely, he
flattered himself, under the artful persuasion of his acute remarks
on that author, gracefully associated by him, in this colloquy, he
remembered, with a glance at Charles Lamb as well, and who went off in
a day or two without settling, though he received her cheque from London
three or four months later.
_That_ hadn’t been a social relation; and truly, deep within his appeal
to himself to be remarkable, to be imperturbable and impenetrable, to
be in fact quite incomparable now, throbbed the intense vision of his
drawing out and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He
would do it, moreover--that would be the refinement of his art--not only
without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by
seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting
to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering
by the time he had brought her--it had taken ten minutes--down to a
consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the reported precarious
state, for instance, of the syndicate running the Bijou Theatre at the
Pierhead--all as an admonition that she might want him to want to know
why she was thus waiting on him, might want it for all she was
worth, before he had ceased to be so remarkable as not to ask her. He
didn’t--and this assuredly was wondrous enough--want to do anything
worse to her than let her flounder; but he was willing to do that so
long as it mightn’t prevent his seeing at least where _he_ was. He
seemed still to see where he was even at the minute that followed her
final break-off, clearly intended to be resolute, from make-believe
talk.
“I wonder if I might prevail on you to come to tea with me to-morrow at
five.”
He didn’t so much as answer it--though he could scarcely believe his
ears. To-morrow was Sunday, and the proposal referred, clearly, to the
custom of “five-o’clock” tea, known to him only by the contemporary
novel of manners and the catchy advertisement of table-linen. He had
never in his life been present at any such luxurious rite, but he was
offering practical indifference to it as a false mark of his sense that
his social relation had already risen to his chin. “I gave up my very
modest, but rather interesting little old book business, perhaps you
know, ever so long ago.”
She floundered so that she could say nothing--meet _that_ with no
possible word; all the less too that his tone, casual and colourless,
wholly defied any apprehension of it as a reverse. Silence only came;
but after a moment she returned to her effort. “If you _can_ come I
shall be at home. To see you otherwise than thus was in fact what, as
I tell you, I came down for. But I leave it,” she returned, “to your
feeling.”
He had at this, it struck him, an inspiration; which he required however
a minute or two to decide to carry out; a minute or two during which
the shake of his foot over his knee became an intensity of fidget. “Of
course I know I still owe you a large sum of money. If it’s about _that_
you wish to see me,” he went on, “I may as well tell you just here that
I shall be able to meet my full obligation in the future as little as
I’ve met it in the past. I can never,” said Herbert Dodd, “pay up that
balance.”
He had looked at her while he spoke, but on finishing looked off at the
sea again and continued to agitate his foot. He knew now what he had
done and why; and the sense of her fixed dark eyes on him during his
speech and after didn’t alter his small contentment. Yet even when she
still said nothing he didn’t turn round; he simply kept his corner as
if _that_ were his point made, should it even be the last word between
them. It might have been, for that matter, from the way in which she
presently rose, gathering herself, her fine umbrella and her very small
smart reticule, in the construction of which shining gilt much figured,
well together, and, after standing another instant, moved across to the
rail of the terrace as she had done before and remained, as before, with
her back to him, though this time, it well might be, under a different
fear. A quarter of an hour ago she hadn’t tried him, and had had that
anxiety; now that she had tried him it wasn’t easier--but she was
thinking what she still could do. He left her to think--nothing in fact
more interesting than the way she might decide had ever happened to him;
but it was a part of this also that as she turned round and came nearer
again he didn’t rise, he gave her no help. If she got any, at least,
from his looking up at her only, meeting her fixed eyes once more in
silence, that was her own affair. “You must think,” she said--“you
must take all your time, but I shall be at home.” She left it to him
thus--she insisted, with her idea, on leaving him something too. And
on her side as well she showed an art--which resulted, after another
instant, in his having to rise to his feet. He flushed afresh as he did
it--it exposed him so shabbily the more; and now if she took him in,
with each of his seedy items, from head to foot, he didn’t and couldn’t
and wouldn’t know it, attaching his eyes hard and straight to something
quite away from them.
It stuck in his throat to say he’d come, but she had so curious a way
with her that he still less could say he wouldn’t, and in a moment had
taken refuge in something that was neither. “Are you married?”--he put
it to her with that plainness, though it had seemed before he said it to
do more for him than while she waited before replying.
“No, I’m not married,” she said; and then had another wait that might
have amounted to a question of what this had to do with it.
He surely couldn’t have told her; so that he had recourse, a little
poorly as he felt, but to an “Oh!” that still left them opposed. He
turned away for it--that is for the poorness, which, lingering in the
air, had almost a vulgar platitude; and when he presently again wheeled
about she had fallen off as for quitting him, only with a pause, once
more, for a last look. It was all a bit awkward, but he had another
happy thought, which consisted in his silently raising his hat as for a
sign of dignified dismissal. He had cultivated of old, for the occasions
of life, the right, the discriminated bow, and now, out of the grey
limbo of the time when he could care for such things, this flicker of
propriety leaped and worked She might, for that matter, herself have
liked it; since, receding further, only with her white face toward him,
she paid it the homage of submission. He remained dignified, and she
almost humbly went.
V
Nothing in the world, on the Sunday afternoon, could have prevented
him from going; he was not after all destitute of three or four such
articles of clothing as, if they wouldn’t particularly grace the
occasion, wouldn’t positively dishonour it. That deficiency might have
kept him away, but no voice of the spirit, no consideration of pride. It
sweetened his impatience in fact--for he fairly felt it a long time
to wait--that his pride would really most find its account in his
acceptance of these conciliatory steps. From the moment he could put
it in that way--that he couldn’t refuse to hear what she might have, so
very elaborately, to say for herself--he ought certainly to be at his
ease; in illustration of which he whistled odd snatches to himself as
he hung about on that cloud-dappled autumn Sunday, a mild private
minstrelsy that his lips hadn’t known since when? The interval of the
twenty-four hours, made longer by a night of many more revivals than
oblivions, had in fact dragged not a little; in spite of which, however,
our extremely brushed-up and trimmed and polished friend knew an
unprecedented flutter as he was ushered, at the Royal Hotel, into Miss
Cookham’s sitting-room. Yes, it was an adventure, and he had never had
an adventure in his life; the term, for him, was essentially a term
of high appreciation--such as disqualified for that figure, under due
criticism, every single passage of his past career.
What struck him at the moment as qualifying in the highest degree this
actual passage was the fact that at no great distance from his hostess
in the luxurious room, as he apprehended it, in which the close of day
had begun to hang a few shadows, sat a gentleman who rose as she rose,
and whose name she at once mentioned to him. He had for Herbert Dodd all
the air of a swell, the gentleman--rather red-faced and bald-headed, but
moustachioed, waistcoated, necktied to the highest pitch, with an effect
of chains and rings, of shining teeth in a glassily monocular smile; a
wondrous apparition to have been asked to “meet” him, as in contemporary
fiction, or for him to have been asked to meet. “Captain Roper, Mr.
Herbert Dodd”--their entertainer introduced them, yes; but with a sequel
immediately afterward more disconcerting apparently to Captain Roper
himself even than to her second and more breathless visitor; a “Well
then, good-bye till the next time,” with a hand thrust straight out,
which allowed the personage so addressed no alternative but to lay aside
his teacup, even though Herbert saw there was a good deal left in it,
and glare about him for his hat. Miss Cookham had had her tea-tray on a
small table before her, she had served Captain Roper while waiting
for Mr. Dodd; but she simply dismissed him now, with a high sweet
unmistakable decision, a knowledge of what she was about, as our hero
would have called it, which enlarged at a stroke the latter’s view of
the number of different things and sorts of things, in the sphere of the
manners and ways of those living at their ease, that a social relation
would put before one. Captain Roper would have liked to remain, would
have liked more tea, but Kate signified in this direct fashion that
she had had enough of him. Herbert had seen things, in his walk of
life--rough things, plenty; but never things smoothed with that especial
smoothness, carried out as it were by the fine form of Captain Roper’s
own retreat, which included even a bright convulsed leave-taking
cognisance of the plain, vague individual, of no lustre at all and with
the very low-class guard of an old silver watch buttoned away under an
ill-made coat, to whom he was sacrificed.
It came to Herbert as he left the place a shade less remarkable--though
there was still wonder enough and to spare--that he had been even
publicly and designedly sacrificed; exactly so that, as the door closed
behind him, Kate Cookham, standing there to wait for it, could seem to
say, across the room, to the friend of her youth, only by the expression
of her fine eyes: “There--see what I do for you!” “For” him--that was
the extraordinary thing, and not less so that he was already, within
three minutes, after this fashion, taking it in as by the intensity of a
new light; a light that was one somehow with this rich inner air of
the plush-draped and much-mirrored hotel, where the fire-glow and
the approach of evening confirmed together the privacy, and the loose
curtains at the wide window were parted for a command of his old
lifelong Parade--the field of life so familiar to him from below and in
the wind and the wet, but which he had never in all the long years hung
over at this vantage.
“He’s an acquaintance, but a bore,” his hostess explained in respect to
Captain Roper. “He turned up yesterday, but I didn’t invite him, and I
had said to him before you came in that I was expecting a gentleman with
whom I should wish to be alone. I go quite straight at my idea that way,
as a rule; but you know,” she now strikingly went on, “how straight I
go. And he had had,” she added, “his tea.”
Dodd had been looking all round--had taken in, with the rest, the
brightness, the distinguished elegance, as he supposed it, of the
tea-service with which she was dealing and the variously tinted appeal
of certain savoury edibles on plates. “Oh but he _hadn’t_ had his tea!”
he heard himself the next moment earnestly reply; which speech had at
once betrayed, he was then quickly aware, the candour of his interest,
the unsophisticated state that had survived so many troubles. If he was
so interested how could he be proud, and if he was proud how could he be
so interested?
He had made her at any rate laugh outright, and was further conscious,
for this, both that it was the first time of that since their new
meeting, and that it didn’t affect him as harsh. It affected him,
however, as free, for she replied at once, still smiling and as a part
of it: “Oh, I think we shall get on!”
This told him he had made some difference for her, shown her the way,
or something like it, that she hadn’t been sure of yesterday; which
moreover wasn’t what he had intended--he had come armed for showing her
nothing; so that after she had gone on with the same gain of gaiety,
“You must at any rate comfortably have yours,” there was but one answer
for him to make.
His eyes played again over the tea-things--they seemed strangely to help
him; but he didn’t sit down.
“I’ve come, as you see--but I’ve come, please, to understand; and if you
require to be alone with me, and if I break bread with you, it seems to
me I should first know exactly where I am and to what you suppose I so
commit myself.” He had thought it out and over and over, particularly
the turn about breaking bread; though perhaps he didn’t give it, in
her presence--this was impossible, her presence altered so many
things--quite the full sound or the weight he had planned.
But it had none the less come to his aid--it had made her perfectly
grave. “You commit yourself to nothing. You’re perfectly free. It’s only
I who commit myself.”
On which, while she stood there as if all handsomely and deferentially
waiting for him to consider and decide, he would have been naturally
moved to ask her what she committed herself then _to_--so moved, that
is, if he hadn’t, before saying it, thought more sharply still of
something better. “Oh, that’s another thing.”
“Yes, that’s another thing,” Kate Cookham returned. To which she added,
“So _now_ won’t you sit down?” He sank with deliberation into the seat
from which Captain Roper had risen; she went back to her own and while
she did so spoke again. “I’m _not_ free. At least,” she said over her
tea-tray, “I’m free only for this.”
Everything was there before them and around them, everything massive and
shining, so that he had instinctively fallen back in his chair as for
the wondering, the resigned acceptance of it; where her last words
stirred in him a sense of odd deprecation. Only for “that”? “That” was
everything, at this moment, to his long inanition, and the effect, as if
she had suddenly and perversely mocked him, was to press the spring of a
protest. “Isn’t ‘this’ then riches?”
“Riches?” she smiled over, handing him his cup--for she had triumphed in
having struck from him a question.
“I mean haven’t you a lot of money?” He didn’t care now that it was out;
his cup was in his hand, and what was that but proved interest? He had
succumbed to the social relation.
“Yes, I’ve money. Of course you wonder--but I’ve wanted you to wonder.
It was to make you take that in that I came. So now you know,” she said,
leaning back where she faced him, but in a straighter chair and with her
arms closely folded, after a fashion characteristic of her, as for some
control of her nerves.
“You came to show you’ve money?”
“That’s one of the things. Not a lot--not even very much. But enough,”
said Kate Cookham.
“Enough? I should think so!” he again couldn’t help a bit crudely
exhaling.
“Enough for what I wanted. I don’t always live like this--not at all.
But I came to the best hotel on purpose. I wanted to show you I could.
Now,” she asked, “do you understand?”
“Understand?” He only gaped.
She threw up her loosed arms, which dropped again beside her. “I did it
_for_ you--I did it _for_ you!”
“‘For’ me----?”
“What I did--what I did here of old.”
He stared, trying to see it. “When you made me pay you?”
“The Two Hundred and Seventy--all I could get from you, as you reminded
me yesterday, so that I had to give up the rest It was my idea,” she
went on--“it was my idea.”
“To bleed me quite to death?” Oh, his ice was broken now!
“To make you raise money--since you could, you _could_. You did, you
did--so what better proof?”
His hands fell from what he had touched; he could only stare--her own
manner for it was different now too. “I did. I did indeed--!” And the
woful weak simplicity of it, which seemed somehow all that was left him,
fell even on his own ear.
“Well then, here it is--it isn’t lost!” she returned with a graver face.
“‘Here’ it is,” he gasped, “my poor agonised old money--my blood?”
“Oh, it’s _my_ blood too, you must know now!” She held up her head as
not before--as for her right to speak of the thing to-day most precious
to her. “I took it, but this--my being here this way--is what I’ve made
of it! That was the idea I had!”
Her “ideas,” as things to boast of, staggered him. “To have everything
in the world, like this, at my wretched expense?”
She had folded her arms back again--grasping each elbow she sat firm;
she knew he could see, and had known well from the first, what she had
wanted to say, difficult, monstrous though it might be. “No more than
at my own--but to do something with your money that you’d never do
yourself.”
“Myself, myself?” he wonderingly wailed. “Do you know--or don’t
you?--what my life has been?”
She waited, and for an instant, though the light in the room had failed
a little more and would soon be mainly that of the flaring lamps on the
windy Parade, he caught from her dark eye a silver gleam of impatience.
“You’ve suffered and you’ve worked--which, God knows, is what I’ve done!
_Of course_ you’ve suffered,” she said--“you inevitably had to! We have
to,” she went on, “to do or to be or to get anything.”
“And pray what have I done or been or got?” Herbert Dodd found it almost
desolately natural to demand.
It made her cover him again as with all she was thinking of. “Can you
imagine nothing, or can’t you conceive--?” And then as her challenge
struck deeper in, deeper down than it had yet reached, and with the
effect of a rush of the blood to his face, “It was _for_ you, it was
_for_ you!” she again broke out--“and for what or whom else could it
have been?”
He saw things to a tune now that made him answer straight: “I thought at
one time it might be for Bill Frankle.”
“Yes--that was the way you treated me,” Miss Cookham as plainly replied.
But he let this pass; his thought had already got away from it. “What
good then--its having been for me--has that ever done me?”
“Doesn’t it do you any good _now?_” his friend returned. To which she
added, with another dim play of her tormented brightness, before he
could speak: “But if you won’t even have your tea----!”
He had in fact touched nothing and, if he could have explained, would
have pleaded very veraciously that his appetite, keen when he came in,
had somehow suddenly failed. It was beyond eating or drinking, what she
seemed to want him to take from her. So if he looked, before him, over
the array, it was to say, very grave and graceless: “Am I to understand
that you offer to repay me?”
“I offer to repay you with interest, Herbert Dodd”--and her emphasis of
the great word was wonderful.
It held him in his place a minute, and held his eyes upon her; after
which, agitated too sharply to sit still, he pushed back his chair and
stood up. It was as if mere distress or dismay at first worked in him,
and was in fact a wave of deep and irresistible emotion which made him,
on his feet, sway as in a great trouble and then, to correct it,
throw himself stiffly toward the window, where he stood and looked out
unseeing. The road, the wide terrace beyond, the seats, the eternal sea
beyond that, the lighted lamps now flaring in the October night-wind,
with the few dispersed people abroad at the tea-hour; these things,
meeting and melting into the firelit hospitality at his elbow--or was it
that portentous amenity that melted into _them?_--seemed to form round
him and to put before him, all together, the strangest of circles
and the newest of experiences, in which the unforgettable and the
unimaginable were confoundingly mixed. “Oh, oh, oh!”--he could only
almost howl for it.
And then, while a thick blur for some moments mantled everything,
he knew she had got up, that she stood watching him, allowing for
everything, again all “cleverly” patient with him, and he heard her
speak again as with studied quietness and clearness. “I wanted to take
care of you--it was what I first wanted--and what you first consented
to. I’d have done it, oh I’d have done it, I’d have loved you and helped
you and guarded you, and you’d have had no trouble, no bad blighting
ruin, in all your easy, yes, just your quite jolly and comfortable life.
I showed you and proved to you this--I brought it home to you, as I
fondly fancied, and it made me briefly happy. You swore you cared for
me, you wrote it and made me believe it--you pledged me your honour
and your faith. Then you turned and changed suddenly from one day to
another; everything altered, you broke your vows, you as good as told me
you only wanted it off. You faced me with dislike, and in fact tried not
to face me at all; you behaved as if you hated me--you had seen a girl,
of great beauty, I admit, who made me a fright and a bore.”
This brought him straight round. “No, Kate Cookham.”
“Yes, Herbert Dodd.” She but shook her head, calmly and nobly, in the
now gathered dusk, and her memories and her cause and her character--or
was it only her arch-subtlety, her line and her “idea”?--gave her an
extraordinary large assurance.
She had touched, however, the treasure of his own case--his terrible
own case that began to live again at once by the force of her talking of
hers, and which could always all cluster about his great asseveration.
“No, no, never, never; I had never seen her then and didn’t dream of
her; so that when you yourself began to be harsh and sharp with me,
and to seem to want to quarrel, I could have but one idea--which was
an appearance you didn’t in the least, as I saw it then, account for or
disprove.”
“An appearance--?” Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know
which one.
“How _shouldn’t_ I have supposed you really to care for Bill
Frankle?--as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money
to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn’t marry me. I was
only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn’t happened;
and perhaps,” he added the next instant with something of a conscious
lapse from the finer style, “hadn’t been in question.”
She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he
had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her
something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for
a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window
again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of
her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, “Oh, the blind,
the pitiful folly!”--to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her
own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on.
“Have it then that there wasn’t much to do--between your finding that
you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to
the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself.”
Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised
that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly--not so
_very!_--take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it
wasn’t to perjure himself with any pretence that, “another woman” or no
other woman, he hadn’t, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was
taking tea with her--or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this
made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he
distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under
favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a
young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had
never before conversed. Dodd’s own position was that of acquiescing in
this recall of what had so bitterly been--but he hadn’t come back to
her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for _her_
it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she
touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she _was_ indeed,
and all overwhelmingly, touching everything--with a hand of which the
boldness grew.
“But I didn’t let _that_, even, make a difference in what I
wanted--which was all,” she said, “and had only and passionately been,
to take care of you. I had _no_ money whatever--nothing then of my own,
not a penny to come by anyhow; so it wasn’t with mine I could do it. But
I could do it with yours,” she amazingly wound up--“if I could once get
yours out of you.”
He faced straight about again--his eyebrows higher than they had ever
been in his life. “Mine? What penny of it was mine? What scrap beyond a
bare, mean little living had I ever pretended to have?”
She held herself still a minute, visibly with force; only her eyes
consciously attached to the seat of a chair the back of which her
hands, making it tilt toward her a little, grasped as for support.
“You pretended to have enough to marry me--and that was all I afterward
claimed of you when you wouldn’t.”
He was on the point of retorting that he had absolutely pretended to
nothing--least of all to the primary desire that such a way of stating
it fastened on him; he was on the point for ten seconds of giving
her full in the face: “I never _had_ any such dream till you
yourself--infatuated with me as, frankly, you on the whole appeared to
be--got round me and muddled me up and made me behave as if in a way
that went against the evidence of my senses.” But he was to feel as
quickly that, whatever the ugly, the spent, the irrecoverable truth, he
might better have bitten his tongue off: there beat on him there this
strange and other, this so prodigiously different beautiful and dreadful
truth that no far remembrance and no abiding ache of his own could
wholly falsify, and that was indeed all out with her next words.
“That--_using_ it for you and using you yourself for your own
future--was my motive. I’ve led my life, which has been an affair,
I assure you; and, as I’ve told you without your quite seeming to
understand, I’ve brought everything fivefold back to you.”
The perspiration broke out on his forehead. “Everything’s mine?” he
quavered as for the deep piercing pain of it.
“Everything!” said Kate Cookham.
So it told him how she had loved him--but with the tremendous effect
at once of its only glaring out at him from the whole thing that it was
verily she, a thousand times over, who, in the exposure of his youth and
his vanity, had, on the bench of desolation, the scene of yesterday’s
own renewal, left for him no forward steps to take. It hung there for
him tragically vivid again, the hour she had first found him sequestered
and accessible after making his acquaintance at his shop. And from this,
by a succession of links that fairly clicked to his ear as with their
perfect fitting, the fate and the pain and the payment of others stood
together in a great grim order. Everything there then was _his_--to
make him ask what had been Nan’s, poor Nan’s of the constant question
of whether he need have collapsed. She was before him, she was between
them, his little dead dissatisfied wife; across all whose final woe and
whose lowly grave he was to reach out, it appeared, to take gifts. He
saw them too, the gifts; saw them--she bristled with them--in his actual
companion’s brave and sincere and authoritative figure, her strangest of
demonstrations. But the other appearance was intenser, as if their ghost
had waved wild arms; so that half a minute hadn’t passed before the one
poor thing that remained of Nan, and that yet thus became a quite
mighty and momentous poor thing, was sitting on his lips as for its sole
opportunity.
“Can you give me your word of honour that I mightn’t, under decent
advice, have defied you?”
It made her turn very white; but now that she had said what she _had_
said she could still hold up her head. “Certainly you might have defied
me, Herbert Dodd.”
“They would have told me you had no legal case?”
Well, if she was pale she was bold. “You talk of decent advice--!” She
broke off, there was too much to say, and all needless. What she said
instead was: “They would have told you I had nothing.”
“I didn’t so much as ask,” her sad visitor remarked.
“Of course you didn’t so much as ask.”
“I couldn’t be so outrageously vulgar,” he went on.
“_I_ could, by God’s help!” said Kate Cookham.
“Thank you.” He had found at his command a tone that made him feel more
gentlemanlike than he had ever felt in his life or should doubtless ever
feel again. It might have been enough--but somehow as they stood there
with this immense clearance between them it wasn’t. The clearance was
like a sudden gap or great bleak opening through which there blew upon
them a deadly chill. Too many things had fallen away, too many new
rolled up and over him, and they made something within shake him to his
base. It upset the full vessel, and though she kept her eyes on him
he let that consequence come, bursting into tears, weakly crying there
before her even as he had cried to himself in the hour of his youth when
she had made him groundlessly fear. She turned away then--_that_ she
couldn’t watch, and had presently flung herself on the sofa and, all
responsively wailing, buried her own face on the cushioned arm. So for
a minute their smothered sobs only filled the room. But he made out,
through this disorder, where he had put down his hat; his stick and his
new tan-coloured gloves--they had cost two-and-thruppence and would
have represented sacrifices--were on the chair beside it He picked these
articles up and all silently and softly--gasping, that is, but quite on
tiptoe--reached the door and let himself out.