'NO MORE THAN A GLIMMER'
Forty-eight hours had passed since Peggy Ryle fled from Danes Inn. How
they had gone Airey Newton could scarcely tell; as he looked back, they
seemed to hold little except the ever-reiterated cry, 'The shame of
it--you're rich!' But still the contents of the safe were intact, and no
entries had been cancelled in the red-leather book. A dozen times he had
taken the book, looked through it, and thrown it from him again. A clash
of passions filled him; the old life he had chosen, with its strange,
strong, secret delight and its sense of hidden power, fought against the
new suggestion. It was no longer of much moment to him that Peggy knew
or that it was Peggy's voice which had cried out the bitter reproach.
These things now seemed accidental. Peggy or another--it mattered
little.
Yet he had sent for Tommy Trent, and reproached him; he was eager to
reproach anybody besides himself.
'I told nobody,' protested Tommy, in indignant surprise. Then the
thought flashed on him. 'Was it Peggy?' he asked incredulously. Airey's
nod started all the story. His view was what Peggy had foreseen; he
found no arguments to weigh against that breaking of her word which had
made him seem a traitor in the eyes of his friend.
'A woman setting the world right is the most unscrupulous thing in the
world,' he declared angrily. 'You believe I never meant to break faith,
old fellow? I shall have it out with her, you may be sure.' He paused
and then added, 'I can't believe she'll let it go any further, you
know.'
To that also Airey seemed more than half-indifferent now; the old
furtive solicitude for his secret, the old shame lest it should escape,
seemed to be leaving him, or at least to be losing half their force, in
face of some greater thing in his mind. He had himself to deal with
now--what he was, not what was said or thought of him. But he did not
intercede with Tommy's sternness against Peggy; he let it pass.
'I don't blame you. It's done now. You'd better leave me alone,' he
said.
Tommy went and sought Peggy with wrath in his heart; but for all these
two days she was obstinately invisible. She was not to be found in
Harriet Street, and none of her circle had seen her. It may be surmised
that she wandered desolately through fashionable gatherings and haunts
of amusement, slinking home late at night. It is certain that she did
not wish to meet Tommy Trent, that she would not for the world have
encountered Airey Newton. There seemed to be gunpowder in the air of all
familiar places; in the reaction of fear after her desperate venture
Peggy withdrew herself to the safety of the unknown.
Airey sat waiting, his eyes constantly looking to the clock. Trix was
coming to see him; she had written that she needed advice, and that he
was the only friend she had to turn to in such a matter. 'Peggy is no
use to me in the particular way I want help, and I have something to
tell which I could tell to nobody but her or you.' He knew what she had
to tell; the fact that she came to tell it to him was proof positive
that she had heard nothing from Peggy. He had not forbidden her coming.
Though it might be agony to him, yet he willed that she should come;
beyond that point his will was paralysed.
In dainty and costly garb she came, still the vision of riches which had
first struck his eyes when he saw her at the beginning of her campaign
in London; yet though this was her outward seeming, her air and manner
raised in him a remoter memory, bringing back to mind the pathetic
figure at the Paris hotel. It was easy to see that she held no secret
of his, and that he had no reproach to fear. Her burden lay in her own
secret that she must tell, in the self-reproach against which she had no
defence. Of neither part of Peggy's double treachery had she any
suspicion.
'Long ago I told you I should come if I got into trouble. Here I am!'
Her effort at gaiety was tremulous and ill-sustained.
'Yes, I know you've been in trouble.'
'Oh, I don't mean that. That's all over. It's something else. Will you
listen? It's not easy to say.'
He gave her a chair and stood by the mantelpiece himself, leaning his
elbow on it and his chin on his hand. For a minute or two he did not
attend to her; his mind flew back to his own life, to his past work and
its success, to those fruits of success which had come to usurp the
place not merely of success but of the worthy work itself. She had been
stammering out the first part of her story for some while before he
turned to her and listened, with sombre eyes set on her nervous face. At
that instant she seemed to him an enemy. She had come to rob him. Why
should he be robbed because this woman had been a fool? So put, the
argument sounded strong and sensible; it made short work of
sentimentality. If he sent her away empty, what harm was done? Tommy
Trent would think as he had always thought--no less, no worse. For the
rest, it was only to take just offence with the girl who had put him to
shame, and to see her no more. The old life, the old delight, held out
alluring arms to him.
Trix Trevalla stumbled on, all unconscious of the great battle that she
fought for another, anxious only to tell her story truthfully, and yet
not so as to seem a creature too abject.
'That's the end of it,' she said at last with a woeful smile. 'After
Glowing Stars and the other debts, I may have forty shillings a week or
thereabouts. But I want to show you my investments, and I want you to
tell me what I ought to sell and what few I might best try to keep.
Every pound makes a difference, you know.' The intense conviction of a
convert spoke in the concluding words.
'Why do you think I know about such things?'
'Oh, I daresay Mr. Trent would know better, but I couldn't make up my
mind to tell him. And I've no right to bother him. I seem to have a
right to bother you, somehow.' She smiled again for an instant, and
raised her eyes to his. 'Because of what you said at Paris! You
remember?'
'You hold me responsible still, I see.'
'Oh, that's our old joke,' she said, fearing to seem too serious in her
fanciful claim. 'But still it does always seem to me that we've been in
it together; all through it your words have kept coming back, and I've
thought of you here. I think you were always in my mind. Well, that's
foolish. Anyhow you'll tell me what you think?'
'At least I didn't tell you to trust Fricker.'
'Please don't,' she implored. 'That's the worst of all. That's the thing
I can't bear to think of. I thought myself a match for him. And
now----!' Her outspread hands accepted any scornful description.
She came to him and put into his hand a paper on which she had drawn up
some sort of a statement of her ventures, of her debts, and of her
position as she understood it. He took it and glanced through it.
'Heavens, how you spent money!' he exclaimed, in involuntary horror.
She blushed painfully: could she point out how little that had mattered
when she was going to be Lady Mervyn?
'And the losses in speculation! You seem never to have been in anything
sound!'
'They deceived me,' she faltered. 'Oh, I know all that! Must you say
that again? Tell me--what will there be left? Will there be enough
to--to exist upon? Or must I'--she broke into a smile of ridicule--'or
must I try to work?'
There was a pathetic absurdity about the suggestion. Airey's gruff
laugh relieved the sternness of his indignation.
'Yes, I've shown such fine practical talents, haven't I?' she asked
forlornly.
'You were very extravagant, but you'd have been in a tolerable position
but for Fricker. Dramoffskys and Glowing Stars between them have done
the mischief.'
'Yes. If I hadn't cheated him, and he hadn't cheated me in return, I
should have been in a tolerable position. But I knew that before I came
here, Mr. Newton.'
'Well, it's the truth,' he persisted, looking at her grimly over the top
of the paper.
'You needn't repeat it,' she flashed out indignantly. Then her tone
changed suddenly. 'Forgive me; it's so hard to hear the truth sometimes,
to know it's true, to have nothing to answer.'
'Yes, it is hard sometimes,' Airey agreed.
'Oh, you don't know. You've not cheated and been cheated; you've had
nothing to conceal, nothing to lie about, nothing that you dreaded being
found out in.' She wrung her hands despairingly.
'I've warned you before now not to idealise me.'
'I can't help it. I believe even your Paris advice was all right, if I'd
understood it rightly. You didn't mean that I was to think only of
myself and nothing of anybody else, to do nothing for anyone, to share
nothing with anyone. You meant I was to make other people happy too,
didn't you?'
'I don't know what I meant,' he growled, as he laid her paper on the
mantelpiece.
Trix wandered to the window and sat down in the chair generally
appropriated to Peggy Ryle.
'I'm sick of myself,' she said.
'A self's not such an easy thing to get rid of, though.'
She glanced at him with some constraint. 'I'm afraid I'm bothering you?
I really have no right to make you doleful over my follies. You've kept
out of it all yourself; I needn't drag you into it.' She rose as if she
would go. Airey Newton stood motionless. It seemed as though he would
let her leave him without a word.
She had not in her heart believed that he would. She in her turn stood
still for a moment. When he made no sign, she raised her head in proud
resentment; her voice was cold and offended. 'I'm sorry I troubled you,
Mr. Newton.' She began to walk towards the door, passing him on the way.
Suddenly he sprang forward and caught her by the hands.
'Don't go!' he said in a peremptory yet half-stifled whisper.
Trix's eyes filled with tears. 'I thought you couldn't really mean to do
that,' she murmured. 'Oh, think of what it is, think of it! What's left
for me?'
He had loosed her hands as quickly as he had caught them, and she
clasped them in entreaty.
'I'm neither bad enough nor good enough. I tried to marry for position
and money. I was bad enough to do that. I wasn't bad enough to go on
telling the lies. Oh, I began! Now I'm not good enough or brave enough
to face what I've brought myself to. And yet it would kill me to be bad
enough and degraded enough to take the only way out.'
'What way do you mean?'
'I can't tell you about that,' she said. 'I should be too ashamed. But
some day you may hear I've done it. How am I to resist? Is it worth
resisting? Am I worth saving at all?'
She had never seemed to him so much worth saving. And he knew that he
could save her, if he would pay the price. He guessed, too, what she
hinted at; there was only one thing that a woman like her could speak of
as at once a refuge and a degradation, as a thing that killed her and
yet a thing that she might come to do. Peggy Ryle had told him that he
loved her, and he had not denied it then. Still less could he deny it
now, with the woman herself before him in living presence.
She saw that he had guessed what was in her mind.
'Men can't understand women doing that sort of thing, I know,' she went
on. 'I suppose it strikes them with horror. They don't understand what
it is to be helpless.' Her voice shook. 'I've had a great deal of
hardship, and I can't bear it any more. I'm a coward in the end, I
suppose. My gleam of good days has made me a coward at the thought of
bad ones again.' She added, after a pause, 'You'll look at the statement
and let me know what you think, won't you? It might just make all the
difference.' Again she paused. 'It seems funny to stand here and tell
you that, if necessary, I shall probably sell myself; that's what it
comes to. But you know so much about me already, and--and I know you'd
like me if--if it was humanly possible to do anything except despise me.
Wouldn't you? So do look carefully at the paper and go into the figures,
please. Because I--even I--don't want to sell myself for money.'
What else was he doing with himself? The words hit home. If the body
were sold, did not the soul pass too? If the soul were bartered, what
value was it to keep the body? Peggy had begged him to save this woman
pain; unconsciously she herself asked a greater rescue than that. And
she offered him, still all unconsciously, a great salvation. Was it
strange that she should talk of selling herself for money? Then was it
not strange too that he had been doing that very thing for years, and
had done it of deliberate choice, under the stress of no fear and of no
necessity? The picture of himself that had been dim, that Tommy Trent
had always refused to make clearer, that even Peggy Ryle's passionate
reproach had left still but half-revealed, suddenly stood out before his
eyes plain and sharp in every outline. He felt that it was a thing to be
loathed.
She saw his face stern and contracted with the pain of his thoughts.
'Yes, I've told you all the truth about myself, and that's how you
look!' she said.
He smiled bitterly at her mistake, and fixed his eyes on her as he
asked:--
'Could you change a man, if you gave yourself to him? Could you drive
out his devil, and make a new man of him? Could you give him a new life,
a new heart, a new character?'
'I should have no such hopes. My eyes would be quite open.' Her thoughts
were on Beaufort Chance.
'No, but couldn't you?' he urged, with a wistful persistence. 'If you
knew the worst of him and would still look for something good--something
you could love and could use to make the rest better? Couldn't you make
him cease being what he hated being? Couldn't you have a power greater
than the power of the enemy in him? If you loved him, I mean.'
'How could I love him?' she asked wonderingly.
'If he loved you?'
'What does such a man mean by love?' she murmured scornfully.
'I wonder if you could do anything like that,' he went on. 'Women have,
I suppose. Could you?'
'Oh, don't talk about the thing. I hope I may have courage to throw it
aside.'
He started a little. 'Ah, you mean---- No, I was thinking of something
else.'
'And how could such a woman as I am make any man better?' She smiled in
a faint ridicule of the idea; but she ceased to think of leaving him,
and sat down by the table. For the moment he seemed to pay little
attention to where she was or what she did; he spoke to her indeed, but
his air was absent and his eyes aloof.
'Because, if the woman couldn't, if it turned out that she couldn't, the
last state would be worse than the first. Murder added to _felo de se_!
There's that to consider.' Now he returned to her in an active
consciousness of her presence. 'Suppose you loved a man who had one
great--well, one great devil in him? Could you love a man with a devil
in him?'
There was a touch of humour hardly won in his voice. Trix responded to
it.
'With a thousand, if he was a man after all!'
'Ah, yes, I daresay. But with one--one immense fellow--a fellow who had
sat on him and flattened him for years? Could you fight the fellow and
beat him?'
Trix thought. 'I think I might have perhaps, before--before I got a
devil too, you know.'
'Say he was a swindler--could you keep him straight? Say he was
cruel--could you make him kind?' He paused an instant. 'Suppose he was a
churl--could you open his heart?'
'All that would be very, very hard, even for a good woman,' said Trix
Trevalla. 'And you know that in a case something like those I failed
before.'
'Because, if you couldn't, it would be hell to you, and worse hell to
him.'
'Yes,' murmured Trix. 'That would be it exactly.'
'But if you could----' He walked to the window and looked out. 'It would
be something like pulling down the other side of the Inn and giving the
sun fair play,' said he.
'But could the man do anything for her?' asked Trix. 'Something I said
started you on this. The man I thought of would do nothing but make the
bad worse. If she were mean first, he'd make her meaner; if she lied
before, she'd have to lie more; and he'd--he'd break down the last of
her woman's pride.'
'I don't mean a man like that.'
'No, and you're not thinking of a woman like me.'
'She'd have to take the place of the thing that had mastered him; he'd
have to find more delight in her than in it; she'd have to take its
place as the centre of his life.' He was thinking out his problem before
her.
At last Trix was stirred to curiosity. Did any man argue another's case
like this? Was any man roused in this fashion by an abstract discussion?
Or if he were dissuading her from the step she had hinted at, was not
his method perversely roundabout? She looked at him with inquiring eyes.
In answer he came across the room to her.
'Yet, if there were a man and a woman such as we've been speaking of,
and there was half the shadow of a chance, oughtn't they to clutch at
it? Oughtn't they to play the bold game? Ought they to give it up?'
His excitement was unmistakable now. Again he looked in her eyes as he
had once before. She could do nothing but look up at him, expecting what
he would say next. But he drew back from her, seeming to repent of what
he had said, or to retreat from its natural meaning. He wandered back to
the hearthrug, and fingered the statement of her position that lay on
the mantelpiece. He was frowning and smiling too; he looked very
puzzled, very kindly, almost amused.
'Wouldn't they be fools not to have a shot?' he asked presently. 'Only
she ought to know the truth first, and he'd find it deuced hard to tell
her.'
'She would have found it very hard to tell him.'
'But she would have?'
'Yes--if she loved him,' said Trix, smiling. 'Confession and humiliation
comfort women when they're in love. When they're not----' She shuddered.
Presumably Barslett came into her mind.
'If he never told her at all, would that be fair?'
'She couldn't forgive that, if she found it out.'
'No?'
'Well, it would be very difficult.'
'But if she never found it out?'
'That would be the grandest triumph of all for her, perhaps,' said Trix
very softly. For now, vague, undefined, ignorant still, but yet sure at
its mark, had come the idea that somehow, for some reason, Airey Newton
spoke not of Beaufort Chance, nor of another, not of some abstraction
or some hypothetical man, but of his very self. 'My prayer to him would
be not to tell me, and that I might never know on earth. If I knew ever,
anywhere, then I should know too what God had let me do.'
'But if he never told you, and some day you found out?'
Trix looked across at him--at his dreary smile and his knitted brow. She
amended the judgment she had given a minute before: 'We could cry
together, or laugh together, or something, couldn't we?' she asked.
He came near her again and seemed to take a survey of her from the
feather in her hat to the toe of her polished boot.
'It's a confounded incongruous thing that you should be ruined,' he
grumbled; his tone was a sheer grumble, and it made Trix smile again.
'A fool and her money----' she suggested as a time-honoured explanation.
'But ruin doesn't suit me, there's no doubt of that. Perhaps, after all,
I was right to try to be rich, though I tried in such questionable
ways.'
'You wouldn't be content to be poor?'
Trix was candid with him and with herself. 'Possibly--if everything else
was very perfect.'
He pressed her hard. 'Could everything else seem perfect?'
She laughed uncomfortably. 'You understand wonderfully well,
considering----!' A little wave of her arm indicated the room in Danes
Inn.
'Yes, I understand,' he agreed gravely.
Again she rose. 'Well, I'm a little comforted,' she declared. 'You and
Peggy and the rest of you always do me good. You always seemed the
alternative in the background. You're the only thing now--or I'll try to
make you. That doesn't sound overwhelmingly cordial, but it's
well-meant, Mr. Newton.'
She held out her hand to him, but added as an afterthought, 'And you
will tell me what to do about the investments, won't you?'
'And what will you do about the other man?'
Her answer was to give him both hands, saying, 'Help me!'
He looked long at her and at last answered, 'Yes, if you'll let me.'
'Thanks,' she murmured, pressing his hands and then letting them go with
a sigh of relief. He smiled at her, but not very brightly; there was an
effort about it. She understood that the subject was painful to him,
because it suggested degradation for her; she had a hope that it was
distasteful for another reason; to her these were explanations enough
for the forced aspect of his smile.
He took up the paper again, and appeared to read it over.
'Not a bad list,' he said. 'You ought to be able to realise pretty well,
as prices go now; they're not ruling high, you know.'
'What a lot you learn from your eyrie here!'
'All that comes in in business,' he assured her. 'No, they're not so
bad, except the speculations, of course.'
'Except Glowing Stars! But, after all, most of them are Glowing Stars.'
He appeared to consider again; then he said slowly, and as though every
word cost him a thought, 'I shouldn't altogether despair even of Glowing
Stars. No, don't be in a hurry to despair of Glowing Stars.'
'What?' Incredulity cried out in her tone, mingled with the fancied hope
of impossible good fortune. 'You can't conceivably mean that Mr. Fricker
is wrong about them? Oh, if that were true!'
'Does it make all that difference?'
'Yes, yes, yes! Not the money only, but the sense of folly--of childish
miserable silliness.' She was eager to show him how much that fancied
distant hope could mean.
'I promise nothing--but Fricker deceived you before. He lied when he
told you they were all right; he may be lying when he tells you they're
all wrong.'
'But what good could that do him?'
'If you threw them on the market the price would fall. Suppose he wanted
to buy!'
Luckily Trix did not wait to analyse the suggestion; she flew to the
next difficulty.
'But the liability?'
'I'll look into it, and let you know. Don't cherish any hope.'
'No, but you must have meant that there was a glimmer of hope?' She
insisted urgently, turning a strained, agitated face up to his.
'If you'll swear to think it no more than a glimmer--a glimmer let it
be.'
'You always tell me the truth. I'll remember--a glimmer.'
'No more,' he insisted, with a marked pertinacity.
'No more, on my honour,' said Trix Trevalla.
She had gone towards the door; he followed till he was by the little
table. He stood there and picked up the red book in his hand.
'No more than a glimmer,' he repeated, 'because things may go all wrong
in the end still.'
'Not if they depend on you!' she cried, with a gaiety inspired by the
hope which he did not altogether forbid, and by the trust that she had
in him.
'Even though they depended altogether on me.' He flung the book down and
came close to her. 'If they go right, I shall thank heaven for sending
you here to-day. And now--I have a thing that I must do.'
'Yes, I've taken a terrible lot of your time. Good-bye.' She yielded to
her impulse towards intimacy, towards knowing what he did, how he spent
his time. 'Are you going to work? Are you going to try and invent
things?'
'No, I'm going to study that book.' He pointed to it with a shrug.
'What's inside?'
'I don't know what I shall find inside,' he told her.
'Good news or bad? The old story or a new one? I can't tell.'
'You don't mean to tell me--that's clear anyhow,' laughed Trix.
'Impertinent questions politely evaded! I take the hint. Good-bye. And,
Mr. Newton--a glimmer of hope!'
'Yes, a glimmer,' he said, passing his hand over his brow rather
wearily.
'Well, I must leave you to the secrets of the red book,' she ended.
He came to the top of the stairs with her. Half-way down she turned and
kissed her hand to him. Her step was a thousand times more buoyant; her
smiles came as though native-born again and no longer timid strangers.
Such was the work that a glimmer of hope could do.
To subtract instead of adding, to divide instead of multiplying, to
lessen after increase, to draw out instead of paying in--these
operations, whether with regard to a man's fame, or his power, or his
substance, or even the scope of his tastes and the joy of his
recreations, are precisely those which philosophy assumes to teach us to
perform gracefully and with no exaggerated pangs. The man himself
remains, says popular philosophy; and the pulpit sometimes seconds the
remark, adding thereunto illustrative texts. Consolations conceived in
this vein are probably useful, even though they may conceal a fallacy or
succeed by some pious fraud on the truth. It is a narrow view of a man
which excludes what he holds, what he has done and made. If he must lose
his grasp on that, part of his true self goes with it. The better
teachers inculcate not throwing away but exchange, renunciation here for
the sake of acquisition there, a narrowing of borders on one side that
there may be strength to conquer fairer fields on the other. Could Airey
Newton, who had so often turned in impatience or deafness from the first
gospel, perceive the truth of the second? He was left to fight for
that--left between the red book and the memory of Trix Trevalla.
But Trix went home on feet lighter than had borne her for many a day.
To her nature hope was ever fact, or even better--richer, wider, more
brightly coloured. Airey had given her hope. She swung back the baize
door of Peggy's flat with a cheerful vigour, and called aloud:--
'Peggy, where are you? I've something to tell you, Peggy.'
For once Peggy was there. 'I'm changing my frock,' she cried from her
room in a voice that sounded needlessly prohibitory.
'I want to tell you something,' called Trix. 'I've been to Airey
Newton's----'
Peggy's door flew open; she appeared gownless; her brush was in her
hand, and her hair streamed down her back.
'Oh, your hair!' exclaimed Trix--as she always did when she saw it thus
displayed.
Peggy's scared face showed no appreciation of the impulsive compliment.
'You've been to Airey's, and you've something to tell me?' she said,
scanning Trix with unconcealed anxiety.
But Trix did not appear to be in an accusing mood; she had no charge of
broken faith to launch, or of confidence betrayed.
'I told him how I stood--that I was pretty well ruined,' she explained,
'and he was so kind about it. And what do you think?' She paused for
effect. Peggy had recourse to diplomacy; she flung her masses of hair to
and fro, passing the brush over them in quick dexterous strokes as they
went.
'Well?' she asked, with more indifference than was even polite, much
less plausible.
But Trix noticed nothing; she was too full of the news.
'He told me there was a glimmer of hope for Glowing Stars!'
'He said that?'
Peggy's voice now did full justice to the importance of the tidings.
'Yes, hope for Glowing Stars. Peggy, if it should come out right!'
'If it should!' gasped Peggy. 'What did you say he said?'
'That there was hope for Glowing Stars--that I oughtn't to----'
'No, you told me another word; you said he used another word.'
'Oh, yes, he was very particular about it,' smiled Trix. 'And, of
course, I mustn't exaggerate. He said there was a glimmer of hope.'
'Ah!' said Peggy. 'I'll come into the other room directly, dear.'
She went back to the looking-glass and proceeded with the task of
brushing her hair. Her face underwent changes which that operation
(however artistically performed and consistently successful in its
effect) hardly warranted. She frowned, she smiled, she grew pensive, she
became gloomy, she nodded, she shook her head. Once she shivered as
though in apprehension. Once she danced a step, and then stopped herself
with an emphatic and angry stamp.
'A glimmer of hope!' she murmured at last. 'And poor dear old Airey's
left there in Danes Inn, fighting it out alone!' She joined her hands
behind her head, burying them in the thickness of her hair. 'Oh, Airey
dear, be good,' she whispered; 'do be good!'
She was so wrapped up in this invocation or entreaty that she quite lost
sight of the fact that she herself was relieved of one part of her
burden. Trix could not charge her with treachery now. But then it had
never been Trix's accusation that she feared the most.