XII

It was left to Sir Julian, as not infrequently happened, to look upon

the varied assortment of flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the tide of

Lady Rossiter's eloquence.

Whilst Edna sat indoors, rather limply endeavouring to maintain a high

level of sympathetic brightness round the exhausted subject of Miss

Easter's projected wedding-present, Julian, having ascertained the

presence of his three guests indoors, hastily walked out of the house.

He sought his habitual refuge--the long, deserted stretch of shore

skirted by a pebbly ridge, locally known as the sea-wall.

There he found Miss Marchrose.

If Julian had counted upon finding the foam-flecked, windy spot in its

usual state of solitude, he gave no sign of being disconcerted.

They exchanged greetings and prepared to walk the mile length of the

sea-wall together. In spite of the strength of the salt wind blowing

full against them, the blue knitted cap that she wore needed no

restraining hand, and she was restfully free from fluttering ends and

tags of garments.

With great abruptness she began to speak as they walked.

"I knew that you were related to the Isbisters, of course. If you

remember, Lady Rossiter said something about them that night that we

had dinner together, and I thought at the time----"

She broke off, and Julian, conscious of extreme curiosity as to the

reason why she had suddenly introduced so admittedly _scabreux_ a

topic, enquired after a moment:

"What did you think at the time?"

"I thought Lady Rossiter wished me to understand that she knew of the

relationship in which I once stood to Captain Isbister."

For the life of him, Julian could think of no rejoinder.

"I know that things of that kind always _are_ known, and the people

I've been thrown with, sooner or later, always turned out to have heard

the story. Or if they hadn't," said Miss Marchrose in a voice of calm

despair, "someone took the trouble to tell them."

"Officiousness is the crying sin of the age," Julian observed

sententiously.

"It seems to me a purely individual matter. It can't concern anyone

else--not even the people who employ me."

"Certainly not."

"Did you know? But of course you did."

"I knew that Clarence Isbister had been engaged to someone of your

name, and that the engagement had been broken off after his accident."

"_I_ broke it off," she said defiantly.

"So one heard."

"Everyone has heard that," said Miss Marchrose. "Everyone has heard

that when he was told that he must be an invalid and helpless for the

rest of his life he offered to release me from the engagement--and I

said yes. And that he was very much upset about it, just at the time."

Julian stifled a fleeting recollection of the well-worn legend

accompanying the story of Captain Isbister's betrayal.

"Of course, it is inevitable that his relations should have heard about

it, I suppose," Miss Marchrose said.

Julian felt inclined to reply, "Clarence Isbister is an ass, and

not worth worrying about," and then decided that _that_ would not

do, and awaited her next words in silence. He perceived that some

unusual emotion had strung her to the pitch of excitement at which

self-contained people become reckless, and emotional ones untruthful.

Having already formed the conclusion that Miss Marchrose belonged to

the former class, he listened with the greater interest.

Her next words gave him a clue to the vexation that vibrated in her

tones.

"I was angry, I'm afraid, this morning, when Miss Easter actually began

about it."

"Extremely impertinent of her. I hope you told her so."

"She is very good-natured," said Miss Marchrose remorsefully. "She has

always gone out of her way to be nice to me, and when I began to be

angry with her she only said, 'Oh, I'm so dreadfully sorry; I should

never tell a soul except Douglas, you know, so you needn't mind my

knowing about it.'"

At her faint mimicry of Iris' affected little pipe they both laughed.

"As a matter of fact, poor little thing, she only wanted me to

contradict the version that she had heard. She said she couldn't and

wouldn't believe it, and was sure that her--her informant had been

mistaken."

Sir Julian wondered grimly whether Miss Marchrose was as little at a

loss as himself to identify the informant in question. Her next words

rather relieved him.

"She may very well have heard it from the girl she lives with.

Curiously enough, she was once governess to Lady Mary Isbister's little

girl, and it is quite probable that she heard something about it

there. I don't know. There seem to be no end to the coincidences that

accumulate round unpleasant things. It happened more than three years

ago, and he's married now, and perfectly happy--why can't it be allowed

to rest?"

"No one has any right to attempt to force your confidence."

"Miss Easter didn't do that, exactly. I think she thought I should be

only too ready to explain away the story as it stood, and throw some

light which would show that I hadn't just thrown over a man who cared

for me on the grounds of his being condemned to the life of a paralytic

invalid."

"I should find it very difficult to believe that you did that," said

Sir Julian gently.

There was a pause.

"The facts of the story, in the main, are perfectly correct. I told

Miss Easter so."

They had reached the end of the sea-wall, and as they turned

mechanically back upon their footsteps, Sir Julian for a moment found

himself facing her.

The look in her eyes was doubtful, defiant, beseeching, all at once.

Something in it evoked from him a very sincere and simple desire to

reassure her.

"Won't you tell me about it, if you care to? I'm quite sure that,

whatever the facts may be, there is another aspect to them than the

obvious one."

He heard a little gasp that unmistakably denoted relief.

"Thank you very much. It's so much easier now you've said that--and I

_want_ to tell you about it. You'll understand, perhaps."

"Don't hurry," said Julian, more with reference to a certain

breathlessness in her speech than to the increased speed at which she

was walking beside him.

However, she slackened her pace and presently began to speak quietly.

"I don't suppose you know exactly what it's like for a girl with no

home of her own--the difficulty of having any friends, or seeing anyone

except just the people one's working with--not that there was ever

anyone I wanted to see particularly, the men I associated with were all

of Mr. Cooper's type, as nice and as polite as could be, always--but I

had nothing in common with them except the day's work. There were a few

friends of my father's--he was an architect--but after his death they

rather dropped away from us. They were the sort of people who turned up

their noses at the dressmaking business. My mother took it up, after he

died, because it was the only thing she could do to make money, and she

hoped it would mean that I need never go out and work for myself when

I grew up. I'm glad," said Miss Marchrose vehemently, "I'm glad and

thankful that she never lived to see the muddle I made of everything."

Sir Julian remained silent, aware that she was talking to herself as

much as to him.

"After she died I got a job in Southampton Row. I lived in a hostel

for women workers. It was all right in a way, but deadly lonely. And

I wasn't used to the sort of girls who live at those places, and I

thought myself too good for them--and of course they saw it. They used

to play cards in the evening, or some of them played the piano, and

sometimes they made up parties to go to the pit at the theatre--but

after I'd been disagreeable once or twice, naturally they didn't ask

me any more. And I never sat in the public sitting-room downstairs,

but always went up to my own bedroom. And I read a book at meals. You

don't know how people who do that are _hated_. So they ought to be,

I suppose, but in those days I thought it was quite worth while to

make them all indignant, and find myself left in peace. But all the

time I was more and more lonely, and I used to sit and think in the

evenings, wondering how I could bear it if all my life was going to

be like that--just working on and on and then becoming like one of

the older women at that hostel--there were _dozens_ of them--pinched

and discontented, always worrying over expense, and why there weren't

two helpings of pudding at dinner, with nothing to do, nothing to

remember, nothing to look forward to--knowing themselves utterly and

absolutely unnecessary in the world. And they'd got used to it--that

was the ghastly part of it--and yet they couldn't always have been like

that. Once they must have passed through awful phases of rebellion

and despair, like me, and hoping against hope that something glorious

and brilliant would turn up--the sort of things that only happen in

books--and then gradually they'd got resigned--and hopeless, and

indifferent--the worst of all. And I felt that all that, year after

year, would be coming nearer and nearer to me----"

"It couldn't," muttered Julian. "Marriage, for instance----"

"Of course, everyone said that. My mother said it--she kept on talking

about 'When you marry, Pauline,' as though it was something almost

inevitable. My aunt said it, when I spent my holidays at her house. At

first I used to say it myself--thinking, like fools of girls always do,

that love meant happiness and that it was bound to come."

The bitterness in her tone shocked him, but he said nothing.

"As I'm telling you these things that I've never told anyone, I'd

better tell you the whole truth," said Miss Marchrose, her voice

coldly dispassionate all at once. "I am not in the least attractive.

No one, except Clarence Isbister, has ever wanted to marry me. Some

girls--sometimes quite pretty ones--are like that. They don't know what

it means to be wanted by anyone."

"Stop that," said Julian. "I can't stand it. No man has any right to

hear this sort of thing. Besides, it's nonsense. You were never in a

position to know any men of your own sort."

"I used to tell myself that. But it wasn't altogether true. There were

always plenty of people at my aunt's house--she lived in Hampstead--and

both my cousins went to a school of art, and had any number of friends,

and they were always nice to me, and took me to all their parties when

I was with them. That's how I met Clarence Isbister--at the Chelsea

Arts Ball. He'd come with a party of people, and one of them knew my

cousin Dolly, and she introduced him to me, and he brought Mr. Isbister

and said he wanted to know me. He was only a boy--twenty-one, I think."

"Quite old enough to know his own mind."

"Was he? To my dying day," said Miss Marchrose very simply, "I shall

never understand why he fell in love with me. I danced very badly, but

he didn't seem to mind, and asked me to sit out with him instead. We

talked, but I don't think we had anything much in common. I told him I

was a teacher of shorthand, having my holiday. He kept beside me the

whole evening and asked to be introduced to Dolly and if he might come

and see us in Hampstead. Of course she said yes. I always remember

Dolly when we got back, after the ball, and how she said, 'Pauline,

that man's fallen in love with you. And, mark my words, _he's the sort

who'd ask one to marry him_.'

"And she was quite right. Dolly was always right about men, though the

sort of men she knew weren't the same sort as Clarence.

"Well, you know, I was engaged to him. I was twenty-five, and I'd been

dreading the future, and it seemed, in a way, the most unexpected

chance of escaping everything I was most afraid of. But I don't know if

you'll ever believe it if I tell you how much I hesitated."

"I shall believe anything you tell me. Why did you hesitate?"

"Because he was twenty-one, and an ass," replied Miss Marchrose, with

the most unexpected candour. "And I didn't even like him much; he

irritated me nearly unbearably sometimes. It was very ungrateful of

me, but it seemed to me that he loved me without rhyme or reason--he

knew nothing whatever about me. And I told him that I didn't care for

him. But I think, partly, the fuss his people made helped to make him

want it all the more, just to show them that he _would_ take his own

way. They'd always made a baby of him at home, I gathered, and he had

suddenly begun to resent it."

"Yes," said Julian thoughtfully, "that tallies with the little I

remember of the Isbisters, when I met them several years ago. Did you

ever stay there?"

"No. His father and mother were much too angry about it, but he had

money of his own and they couldn't stop it. We were more or less

engaged when he had his accident. He'd been at home, and he'd been

hoping that his mother was coming round a little, and that perhaps he

could take me to see her in London. He was very fond of his mother;

but poor Clarence! he was like a little boy--talking of the 'lark' it

would be to steal a march on them all, and get married at a Registrar's

Office one morning."

"Would you have done that?"

"I thought I would--I was back at work by then, and in the hostel

again. He used to come and take me for walks and drives and out to

dinner--and often and often I was miserable and felt that I was taking

everything from him, and giving him nothing at all. And besides----"

"What?"

"I suppose no one gives up romantic ideals, if they've had them,

without a struggle," said Miss Marchrose, speaking very fast.

"Believe me," said Julian gently, "it is worth while to remain faithful

to one's romantic ideals. People will tell you that to relinquish them

means progress--but don't believe them. One is the poorer all the rest

of one's life for having let them go."

"No one else has ever said that to me. I said it to myself

sometimes--but most of the time I honestly thought that I should be

a fool to chuck away what Clarence offered me. And when he had his

accident, in the country, I knew nothing about it for a week after it

had happened--naturally, no one thought of letting me know. I imagined

all sorts of things--that he'd chucked me, you know. And I was angry

and furious and disappointed--in spite of everything. But my aunt

read about the accident in some paper or other, and wrote to me. And

afterwards Clarence's mother wrote."

"She didn't ask you, then, to give him up?"

"She didn't say anything about my being engaged to him at all. But when

he was better, still in the nursing-home, he wrote himself, and told me

that most likely he would be half-paralysed for the rest of his life.

They really thought he would be, then, you know. And he asked me if

I thought I could bear it. That was when I first began to realise my

own inadequacy. You see, all the time I'd been thinking of _him_, and

how young he was--how unlike what I'd sometimes fancied. But when he

wrote like that, I knew that I couldn't even write the only sort of

letter that would have been any good. I was worse than useless. I wrote

the sort of answer that really meant nothing at all--though I put all

the sort of affectionate expressions that he liked, and anything and

everything I could think of--but I didn't answer one word about our

engagement. I couldn't. I wrote to him every day, and all the while I

was trying to gain time, to think it all out.

"You've no idea how difficult it is sometimes just to get time and a

place for thinking. There was my work all day, and then I used to fancy

I'd have the evening--but it was so cold in my room, and I found that

I was only thinking about _that_ all the time, and how I could keep

my hands warm. And in bed--one always imagines one can do all one's

thinking in bed. But one can't! Things look quite different in the

night, somehow much more important--I can't explain; and then all the

shorthand outlines one had been making all day on the blackboard seemed

to come into the darkness. I'm making it all sound muddled, I know--but

that's what it was. Just a muddle, and all the relative values of

things seeming to turn upside down." She paused.

"I understand," said Julian.

"In the end, Clarence wrote again, and said he must release me from the

engagement; he couldn't ask me to marry a man who would most likely

never be able to walk again. And I thought, and thought--till I was

nearly frantic. You see, in a way, it would be the impulse of every

woman to feel that she was all the more bound in honour to stick to a

man _because_ of that--of course, I'm not speaking about those people

who love one another, that's different. But it kept coming over me like

a wave--how unthinkable it would be to refuse to marry a man after all,

after one had promised, just when he'd had that appalling knock from

Fate and everything that made his life worth living had been taken

away. As though one could never do enough to make up for it all.... But

in the end it was that which decided me. You see, I knew that I could

never make up--and not only that, but that I might make it far, far

worse for him. It seemed to me that only a very great love could have

been adequate. And I not only didn't love him, but I knew myself--I'm

not patient, I'm not an unselfish woman. Heaven only knows what I

should be, married to an invalid, to an unfortunate boy who cared for

me, and who would be utterly dependent on me for all the things that

matter most. And I could have given him nothing--I should have been

worse than useless to him. There was nothing real between us--only just

his infatuation--and I _knew_ that couldn't last. I believed then,

when I thought of him as a cripple, that if I'd married Clarence, he

would have come to hate me. Before he was hurt, I'd meant to risk it

and to try and be a good wife to him, though even then I knew I was

cheating--taking all he could give me, and bringing so little. But

afterwards, it seemed to me that it would be a worse cheating to try

and meet a tremendous demand like that with just nothing at all. So I

wrote and tried to explain it to him, and tell him why I wouldn't say

I'd marry him in spite of it all."

For the last time, they reached the end of the sea-wall and turned,

once more facing the blustering wind. In the rapidly gathering twilight

Julian could only see that her face was very pale.

"Well," she said, with a very small, rather tired laugh, "he didn't

become a cripple for life, and he married somebody else, who was

suitable. And I sometimes wonder whether I was a fool."

"I don't think you wonder really," said Sir Julian steadily. "You

know as well as I do that you had been led into a false position, and

that you had the courage to act up to your own inmost convictions,

instead of making bad worse by yielding to the impulse of a generous

self-sacrifice that is bound to spell disaster unless there is the

capability of sustained effort to back it. Lacking that capability,

as you were aware of lacking it, you were brave enough to set obvious

sentiment at defiance."

"Oh!" cried Miss Marchrose, in an odd voice between laughter and

sadness, "I have never before heard the case for the defence stated

like that! Thank you, Sir Julian."

They climbed the sandy declivity, tufted with hillocks and boulders

almost invisible in the increasing dusk, and reached the narrow and

stony road at the top.

"We are not far from the farm," said Julian. "You must be tired."

"No, I like going down to the sea. I'm glad I met you. I was so angry

at the beginning of the afternoon--after I'd seen poor little Miss

Easter."

"I'm not at all surprised."

"Do you think," said Miss Marchrose, somewhat more than doubtfully,

"that she is a discreet person?"

Sir Julian so emphatically thought the contrary that for the moment

words almost failed him.

"Let us hope," he said at last, rather grimly, "that decency may

induce her to hold her tongue on a subject of which she knows nothing

whatsoever."

It struck him as he spoke that the foundation of the hope was but a

frail one, and he wondered whether Miss Marchrose was thinking of

Mark Easter as the recipient of his sister's newly-acquired piece of

information.

If so, she gave no further sign of it, and he took her to the door of

the farmhouse almost in silence.

Julian's thoughts that evening were occupied almost exclusively with

Miss Marchrose. The complete frankness with which she had spoken

that afternoon had put before him an extraordinarily new aspect of

the self-contained, competent Lady Superintendent of the College. It

appeared to him that he very well could imagine for himself all that

she had hinted at, rather than described.

The architect father, the excellent, probably middle-class mother,

who had set up a dressmaking business so that her child might live

at home, and the youthful spirit of pride and intolerance that had

resented the very existence of any such endeavour to shield her. Even

the semi-Bohemian, semi-suburban home of the aunt and cousins at

Hampstead came very clearly before his mind's eye. He felt convinced

that the aunt was an elder sister of the paternal Marchrose, and that

she and "Dolly" had brought much common-sense to bear upon the Clarence

equation and that they must have talked the matter over and over, with

a great effect of giving frank and disinterested advice.

And the girl who was tired of her work, who thought herself too good

for the inhabitants of her hostel dwelling, whom "no one had ever

wanted to marry"--it was not altogether wonderful, Julian thought, that

she should have stifled her foolish, schoolgirl dreams of romance and

accepted all that the infatuated boy of "the sort who asks one to marry

him" had been ready to offer her.

Her acceptance of him was much less remarkable than her subsequent

rejection.

It never occurred to Julian for an instant to question that she had

taken her decisive step from any reason but the one she had given: that

of knowing herself unequal to meet the supreme demand suddenly made

upon her. Julian remembered the words that he had twice heard applied

to that refusal of hers.

"Of course she didn't really care for him."

The literal truth, Julian reflected. And it was her resolute facing of

that truth, in defiance of sentiment as of condemnation from others,

that, to Julian's way of thinking, had redeemed the wrong that she had

done to Clarence Isbister no less than to her own inner vision.

"For when all's said and done," said Julian to himself, "what is she

but an incurable romanticist, unable to put up with the second best in

that which, rightly or wrongly, she rates highest in life? But what one

sees ahead for her--that's another matter."

Sir Julian, pessimist and idealist both at once, shrugged his shoulders

and dismissed the speculation. But it had brought him to the thought of

Mark Easter.

He thought that Mark, ten years ago, would have loved her, and that

he would have made her happy. Julian, who had very completely missed

happiness himself, still held that in the knowledge of it lay the

secret of fulfilment. Mark had known it, knew it still. It lived,

fundamental, in himself. But Miss Marchrose should have known it as

a gift from without, a sudden revelation, even if enduring in its

entirety for a little while only. Julian wondered whether she were

destined still to know it, through the man whom he believed should

teach her, through Mark Easter, and if so, at what cost?

He summed it up with his usual, "It's no business of mine. But I

believe she'd think it worth while, at any price--and by Heaven, she's

right!"

Perhaps incurable romanticism was not attributable to Miss Marchrose

only.