"Company for my little lady!" the excited girl exclaimed. "She is to

have her pretty hair curled, and her best frock put on, and to go

downstairs to see mamma's fine friends."

Nelly took the outrage with the docility that was one of her charms.

"Gee-gees, Drucie," she said, pointing over her shoulder as she was

borne away. "Gee-gees in the Thquare."

The warm-hearted maid gave her a tight and quite unauthorized hug.

"Gee-gees, indeed! Well, they may _trot! trot! trot!_ until their

feet drop off, before they find anything finer than we're going to show

them."

The carriage folk were in the front part of the big tastelessly

furnished drawing-room, which ran the whole depth of the house,

and which happened to be unlet at the time. A fire, just lit, was

crackling and smoking sullenly. The elder lady sat, with a transient

air, as much on the edge of a little gilt chair as is compatible

with a seat at all. I am not quite certain whether vinegar can be

frozen at certain temperatures or not. If so, her smile recalled the

experiment. The young girl sat back in a velvet rocking chair, her

slender black-stockinged legs reaching the ground from time to time as

it oscillated. She had a little pale round face; her lank, whitey-gold

hair was cut as straight at her waist as it was at her forehead.

She had taken off her gloves, and the bony over-manicured fingers

were interlocked in her lap with a sort of feeble repression. Near a

table, covered with tea-things, but from which no hospitality had been

dispensed, Mrs. Barbour was sitting, no less upright than her visitor.

She was flushed and there was the fullness of suppressed tears round

her eyelids, but there was as little sign of defeat in her face and

attitude as in the other woman's unpleasant smile. The fine lady raised

her lorgnette as the child was carried in. She turned languidly to her

daughter.

"Your poor uncle's face. Oh, the very image!" she exclaimed, with an

emphasis that extinguished any lingering idea poor Mrs. Barbour may

have kept of a share in the matter.

Set upon the ground, the child beauty gravitated instantly to mother's

skirts, and from this coign of vantage surveyed her visitors. Mrs.

Barbour put the curls back from her forehead and stooped to her ear.

"Nelly," said she, "this is your aunt, Lady Lulford, your Aunty

Hortense, come to see poor father's little girl. Won't you go and give

her a kiss?"

The grasp tightened upon her skirt.

"Oh, shame!" the mother murmured, with a reproach in her voice that the

glistening eyes belied. "Is this my kind little Nelly? Come over, then,

with mother."

With a sidelong glance at the tea-table, Fenella was led, obliquely,

across the thick new pile carpet, and received a kiss upon her forehead

that was not much warmer than the window against which it had just been

pressed.

"And now your cousin. Cousin----"

"Leslie," said Lady Lulford, covering a slight yawn with her golden

card-case, and glancing out of the window toward her horses.

The girl's face seemed to yearn and melt as the reluctant little feet

were guided to her. She pursed her pale lips and held out her thin

arms. Fenella was to remember it years afterwards with a spasm of pity

and indignation. But she was only a baby now, and struggled in the weak

embrace. Once back at her mother's side, a violent reaction of shyness

set in, and she buried her face in the maternal lap.

"Impressionable, too; like poor Nigel," the peeress remarked to her

daughter in the same icy voice.

"Come," the mother coaxed, "hasn't Nelly a word to say? Her

aunty"--Lady Lulford winched--"her aunty and cousin will think they've

got a little dumb girl for a niece."

Fenella raised her face. "I weally----" she began, and, not finding

encouragement to proceed, down went the black head again.

Mother lifts it gently.

"----was----" Nelly's finger went to her mouth. Her glance wavered,

wandered tortuously along the floor, and finally and suddenly focussed

the tea equipage.

"----in the middle of my tea." Louder and with sudden confidence as the

full nature of the outrage was realized, "Weally was in the middle of

my tea."

Lady Lulford smiled abstractedly. Leslie's lips moved. The mother drew

her little girl closer.

"You shall have your tea presently, dear," she said, "but I want you to

listen to me first. Now, tell me," she seemed to steady her voice, "how

would you like to go into the country with your aunt and Cousin Leslie?"

Nelly's eyes grew big and round. "And mother?" added she, joining the

palms of her hands, baby-wise, with stiff outspread fingers.

"No, dear. Mother must stay in London, because she has so much to do."

There was an agitation of the black curls, and from under them a most

decided negative evolved itself.

"Oh, but my precious," the mother pleaded, as that other mother may

have pleaded before the judgment seat of the great wise king; "just

for a while; to see the green trees, and the moo-cows, and the bunnies,

and, and----"

"The deer," said Lady Lulford, raising the conversation to a higher

and, shall we say, ancestral level.

"Great--big--stags, baby," the cousin broke in, with her eager,

unsteady voice, "great big stags with horns like this," and she made a

pair with fingers that were almost as fleshless.

Fenella refused to weigh the catalogue of attractions a moment. The

head shook faster and faster till the dark curls whipped first one

cheek and then another.

"Not for a little while? Not for a few weeks?" Mrs. Barbour urged,

almost roughly.

At this persistence in a quarter where it was so little to be looked

for, two fat tears distilled themselves in Fenella's eyes and rolled

down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and I regret to say her face

lost, temporarily, its attractive power. Mrs. Barbour snatched her up

and sprang to her feet.

"She sha'n't be teased," she cried passionately, clasping the child to

her breast. Then, turning quickly first to Lady Lulford and afterward

to her daughter, "Don't you see she's too young now? She's only a baby,

really. Perhaps later----"

The Viscountess turned upon her own offspring the cold ceremonial eye

that on company nights lifted the ladies at Freres Lulford to their

feet and up into the drawing-room.

"We must really go now, Leslie," she said, with a little explanatory

wave of the card-case. "So many calls, you know. Well, Mrs. Barbour,"

turning to her hostess with an evident effort, "I suppose we mustn't

expect you to decide such a matter in a hurry. For the present I think

I may say our offer, Myles's and mine, stands open. I still think it is

what poor Nigel would most have wished. And even if you should decide

not to accept it now, remember, if at any time--at any time----" and in

this golden air of good intentions Lady Lulford's visit ended.

"That is an ordeal well over, Leslie," she said, a few moments later,

leaning back and closing her eyes slightly, as the carriage door

slammed and the tall footman with a crook from the waist still in his

long straight back, swung himself to his perch.

"Mother," said Leslie, nervously, pulling at her gloves, "we could

hardly--could hardly----"

"Could hardly _what_, my dear? You are so disjointed at times."

"----expect her to give up _such a pet_," the girl said

impulsively, with a gush of feeling that seemed to leave her colder and

weaker than ever.

Her mother lifted the frozen gloved hand that seemed to blight like

frost, and gave a little tinkling laugh.

"My dear, when you are my age you will not rate so highly what is

a mere animal passion. _True_ love would consider the child's

material interests first. I still hope," with a little hostile back

glance as the barouche rolled out of Suffolk Square, "that Nigel's

daughter may not have to grow up in the basement of a lodging-house."

"The _basement_? Mother!"

"My dear, foolish girl, you surely don't think the room we were in

to-day (atrocious taste!) is used by them. No, my dear! They live at

the bottom of the area, eat and gossip with the servants; sometimes, I

have no doubt, the policeman drops in to tea. The _Honorable_ Mrs.

Barbour!" And Lady Lulford gave her unpleasant laugh again.

"Mamma!" cried Leslie, really shocked now, "you don't suppose she uses

_that_?"

"Why not, my dear? She's either very foolish or has more delicacy

than I give her credit for if she doesn't. Why, she could have her

house full of rich vulgar Americans all the year round. Are we at Lady

Dunsmuir's already? Thank heavens, Leslie, we're not calling on the

servants' hall this time."

* * * * *

Meanwhile, at the house they had left, an aggrieved small person sat

on a cushion and comforted the ache at her heart very much after the

fashion of older and presumably wiser people, with mother's rejected

dainties. Stretched on a wolf-skin rug, in an attitude that had been

a common one with her in days when, the Cornish sun dappling her back

and making illuminating splashes on the novelettes that were her mental

food, she had dreamed away whole summer afternoons thus in her father's

orchard, the farmer's daughter watched the busy, sticky mouth at work,

her face wholly given up to the animal affection that Lady Lulford was

at that very moment reprehending.

"Why didn't you want to kiss your Aunty Hortense?" she asked presently.

No answer, but much sucking, as the sugary bottom of the cup was

reached. The mother loosened the little fingers and put it aside.

"Come, Nelly," she urged; "answer mother!" Who has not coveted a

child's thought at times?

This one seemed to consider.

"_Be-tos_," she said at last, cryptically, like some little

Chinese oracle.

"_Be-tos_, of what? That's not any answer. And, oh, law! child,

how backward you do speak for a great girl of four!"

Hard pressed, Nelly struggled to her feet. She clenched her little

hands, puckered her forehead. The mother held her breath as she waited.

"Be-tos----Oh! be-tos she didn't _smell_ nice!"

And, as the woman rolled back, shaking unrestrainedly with laughter.

"----like you do, mummy; like you do, mummy," the child cried, flinging

her arms round her mother's neck and burying her flushed face in the

soft shoulder.

VII

MOSTLY LADY ANNE

So the baby hands threw their dice, and as the dice fell the game was

played out. Life unfolded itself amid the fog or rain or thwarted

sunlight of the staid Tyburnian square, which should have had for

tutelary deity some sleepy god, yawning and stretching himself in the

centre of its smoky grass plot. Before the opening consciousness, like

figures in an enchanted frieze, such phenomena passed as are likely

to haunt area railings: The muffin man, tinkling his bell down murky

streets and terraces at the uplifting hour of tea-time; the policeman

with his bull's-eye lantern, waking the rails to a good-night dance

along blank stuccoed walls and shuttered windows; broad hipped Welsh

milkwomen in plaid shawls, with shining pails clanking from their

wooden yokes; the old blind Dalmatian dog that panted at the corner of

the mews and drummed the hot pavement with his tail. Once a year for

one blissful month the town baby became a sand baby, building castles,

scooping moats with her wooden spade for the tide to crumble (oh,

Nelly! there's a tide that knows all our castles are sand); racing with

bare-legged chance companions along the purring lips of the treacherous

sea. Child of suppressed love and of absolute surrender, she grew up

straight, strong and ardent; fair of face, light of foot, and with

a pitiful, generous heart that could not wait its time to love, but

before the dimpled hands could reach or turn the stiff handle of the

hall door, had made to itself friends of the world's wretchedness.

The old Garibaldian accordion player, with the twisted leg, learned

to look for the little _signorina_, beautiful as the sun of

Naples, which he dreamed of at night in his cellar at Saffron Hill;

the ancient mariner with snow-white hair and beard (a terrible case!

says the Charity Organization Society) kept a bow of quite especial

condescension for Missie's penny at Number Eleven; while it was fine

to see with what a sweep of his great red hand to his battered hat old

Paddy Crimmin, the drunken Delhi hero, would straighten his racked body

of a cold Sunday morning as the little creature, her dark face aglow

with newly discovered color against the white road and snow-burdened

trees, stopped at his crossing to grope with mittened fingers for the

penny, nestling in her pocket next a sixpence which I am sure she

begrudged the cold impersonal offertory plate later on.

She possessed her mother's life as a single flame possesses a dark

room, creating its light, its color, and its motion. The slave does not

always make the tyrant, and to the homely woman who tended her, kissed

her limbs fragrant from the bath, twisted her curls round fingers that

thrilled with love and worship--who coaxed her from forbidden ways

with toys and sweets, and whose voice was never once pitched in even

the gentlest accent of authority, Fenella gave her heart in return.

All the fairies, it seemed, were at her christening, even to the fairy

Gratitude, who, I hear, is not often asked out nowadays.

For her child's sake, and spurred on by love, Mrs. Barbour toiled and

schemed incessantly. Far less mercenary of soul than the aristocratic

patrons who haggled over extras, inspected cold joints with a

questioning eye and wanted their rooms "kept over" while they disported

themselves at Homburg or Cannes--naturally credulous in fact, and

inclined to believe the best of every one, the woman effected an actual

change in her nature and under all her suave manner became distrustful,

peremptory, and mercenary. The terms she wrung from the butcher, baker,

and grocer before mentioned, with the bait of prompt payment in one

hand and the threat of the big stores at Brompton and Bayswater in

the other, were, perhaps, as unprecedented as those easy-going family

purveyors one and all declared them to be. In bed at night while she

should have been sleeping, in church on Sunday when she should have

been harkening the sermon, her brain was busy with an endless double

entry sum of receipts and outgoings, the profit of which she wrote

off, variously, but always under the one heading, something after

this fashion: "Fenella Account. To an amber satin eiderdown quilt,

same as I saw at Hampton's on Friday; to plum-colored silk stockings

such as the lady at the end of No. 6 just now is making no attempt

to conceal; item, to a black fox stole and toque--the silver pointed

ones are cheaper, but they say the hairs come out; item, to a silver

manicure set like Miss Rigby's." And the poor woman, absorbed in her

fond calculations, would scribble an imaginary total with one wrinkled,

black-gloved finger across the gilt cross of her Book of Common

Prayer, to the scandal of her left-hand pew-neighbor, and the no small

mystification of Fenella on her right, wondering what mummy was "up to

now."

She kept the girl from school until she was twelve years old, making

shift with whatever deposit of a church school education stayed in her

own head, eked out with the ministrations of various depressing and

untrained governesses, and last but not least with lessons from Lady

Anne Caslon, whose only fault was that they were necessarily irregular.

Lady Anne was the first of two permanent lodgers who, about Fenella's

sixth year, made their home at Number Eleven, and, for a number of

years, almost lifted Mrs. Barbour's precarious venture to the dignified

level of a settled income. The rooms had only just been given up, by

"parties" with whom money seemed to be no object, amid indignant tears

on the one side and a glow of respectable resolve on the other; but

Mrs. Barbour had not yet signified the vacancy through the columns of

the _Morning Post_, while we need hardly add that no window-card

ever shocked the susceptibilities of Suffolk Square. I suspect myself

that the Lulford connection were anxious to confine the collateral

skeleton within limits that could be controlled by them, and kept a

furtively watchful eye on the room-letting branch of the family.

Lady Anne appeared on a blustering March morning: a short, middle-aged

woman, none the less active because she limped from an old hunting

accident, with a long, white, bony face--the face of some great mystic

abbess of old days--a distinct prognathous of the lower jaw, and a

high, narrow forehead, from which her colorless fair hair was tightly

drawn and twisted into an absurd little knob at the nape of the neck.

On every feature, movement, and accent was stamped the indefinable

_cachet_ of the governing caste. She was wearing a frieze coat

and skirt, a man's collar and tie, and a green Alpine hat, carried an

ash stick, and was pulling against, rather than leading, a hideous

and powerful white bull-terrier, bristlingly intent upon the feline

possibilities of successive areas.

She stumped through the vacant floors on her low-heeled shoes, rapped

the wainscot as though she rather suspected secret passages, gave a

derogatory poke of her ashplant to the feather mattresses, turned on

both taps in the bathroom, and concluded her tour with a sudden descent

upon the kitchen, where three maids, busy upon a noontide lunch, rose

and curtsied awkwardly.

"I'll take 'em," she said abruptly, turning suddenly in the hall upon

the aggrieved proprietress. "The rooms will have to be repapered of

course--and a hard mattress, and I have my own pictures; oh! and you'll

turn those tufty, musty armchair things with ball fringes into some

other room, won't you?--like a good soul. Any children? I thought I

heard----Down, Rock! _Down_, sir!"

The bull-terrier, tied to the hall-stand, had lain, whining unhappily,

sweating, and wrinkling his pink muzzle, while his mistress roamed

up and down stairs. Now he was standing, tense and rigid, growling

ominously, at a tiny hand that pushed a biscuit hospitably against his

clenched, bared teeth. Lady Anne struck the threatening head aside and

lifted the child in her strong arms.

"So this is your little girl? This is Fenella?"

"Yes, m' lady," said Mrs. Barbour, hasty and apologetic in manner for

all her secret resentment. "But she's a good, quiet little thing, and

I'll see she gives no trouble."

Lady Anne did not answer. She had pushed back those rebellious curls

and was brooding the flower-like face.

"Dear heart!" was all she said aloud, and the rest was murmured under

her breath.

She set the child on the floor and held out the little nerveless hand,

still clenched on the biscuit, toward the bull-terrier.

"You must be careful with strange dogs, baby, particularly this breed.

They aren't like any other sort of dog. Take it, Rock!"

Rock crunched the biscuit wastefully between his powerful jaws.

"No crumbs, sir!"

He sniffed up about a third of the biscuit, which he had let fall on

the tiled floor.

"Say 'Thank you.'"

The animal gave the small fist that was tendered him three enormous

licks, and glanced at his mistress out of his savage pink eyes.

"That's right! Mustn't ever bite this one, Rock! She isn't a cat, and

never going to be one either, I know."

"I hope the child will be no obstacle, m' lady," put in Mrs. Barbour,

stiffly.

"Obstacle!" Lady Anne repeated. "God bless me, no. Why should she be?

You must have your baby, I suppose, same as I have my dog. What's her

name?"

"Fenella, m' lady."

"Very well. You be good to Rock--I'll be good to Fenella. I'll send a

postcard when I've arranged things," she said. "Come on, Rock!"

* * * * *

"Why was the lady c'yin', mummy?" asked Fenella, whose accent still

left much to be desired.

Mrs. Barbour could not enlighten her. She was wondering herself why the

woman had first called her child Fenella and then asked her name. A

conversation in the corner of the dining-room at the Palmyra Club half

an hour later might have carried her mystification a little further.

"I don't think I'll do a _matinée_ with you this afternoon,

Brenda," Lady Anne was saying to her dearest friend. "Seeing Nigel's

baby has rather upset me. I think I'll go to my room and howl for a

bit."

"What's _she_ like, Nanno?" asked the dearest, narrowing her eyes

through the smoke of her cigarette.

"Nice, comfy, child-bearing sort of person. She has no airs. That was a

lie of the Lulford woman."

"I believe," said Brenda Newcombe slowly, as if the opinion were the

fruit of some thought and a little disillusion, "that's the sort most

men like Nigel like in their hearts."

"Men like Nigel----!"

"Philosophers--I mean. Over-educated, ultra-refined. They divorce their

intellect and their instincts so thoroughly that the result is----"

Lady Anne raised her shapely white hand deprecatingly.

"I know what you're going to say quite well, Brenda. You needn't finish

it."

"To give one instance," went on the irrepressible Brenda; "did you

never hear that Don Hinchey's wife has to wear print dresses and, oh!

everything very plain when they're alone in Northumberland."

"Pshaw! Brenda; _quel conte!_"

"Nanno, it's gospel. She told Lady Carphilly, and Lady Carphilly told

me. She wore them once to a fancy dress, and looked so well that now

when Donny's bored he makes her put them on. She hates it, but he says

it's the only way she can keep his love."

* * * * *

Lady Anne moved in as soon as the alterations that her austere soul

demanded had been made; the walls hung with a paper that Mrs. Barbour

compared scornfully but exactly to a dry mustard plaster, and various

ebullient studies of still life removed to make way for old-wood

engraved portraits and Alken sporting prints. She began the morning,

violently, with a cold bath at seven; breakfasted--continentally--on

dry bread and coffee at eight, and wrote nearly all the morning at

a roll-topped Sheraton desk, whose drawers slid in and out on brass

rails as smoothly as the oiled pistons of a machine. It was at this

desk that Fenella stammered through her letters. Seated upon the

highest chair the room afforded, made higher still by an Italian gilt

leather cushion, the little girl spelled out the adventures of Tom

and Dick, Nat and Ned, and other monosyllabic heroes of childhood.

Nelly's attention wandered very easily. Her voice would die away to

a murmur--her head fall lower and lower until the dark curls quite

covered the heavy type and wood cuts, along which a very neatly pointed

cedar pencil, held in a firm white hand, moved with such exasperating

deliberation. Then she would begin to suck her thumb, and, finding

no encouragement to relaxation of effort in the lowered lids and

compressed mouth above her shoulder, would let her eyes wander round

the room. Under the high white mantelpiece the fire burned cheerily,

with little bubbles of gas and spurts of flame: above it, a silver

clock set in a horseshoe ticked so quickly that the slow passage of the

hands across its face was one mystery the more for the child brain to

puzzle out. The room smelt like a man's, of morocco leather and boot

cream, and the vague but piercing scent of naked steel in between.

Under a curtain to the right of the fireplace, which did not quite

reach the stained floor, Lady Anne's long boots, on high wooden trees,

stood, an orderly row of eight polished toes, like booted eavesdroppers

behind an arras. Over the "Melton Hunt Breakfast," between crossed

hunting crops, a fox's mask still wore the grin with which it was

twitching one December afternoon years and years ago when the mangled

pelt smoked upon the raw Leinster air and little, ugly, hard-riding

Lady Anne, in long bottle-green habit and flaxen pig-tail, was held up

amid the yelping red muzzled pack and blooded to the hunt; while--most

interesting and distracting of all--close to the fire, with his nose

between his paws, deliciously unemployed, lay Roquelaure, blinking

friendly eyes which seemed to say, in the secret language that children

and animals share for a few short years--

"Oh! I say, baby, ain't lessons over yet?"

Three times a week, when her correspondence was done, and a wire

basket full of square, rough envelopes with scarlet seals awaited the

afternoon post, Lady Anne would go riding in the Park. She stumped

through the hall in a short habit and wide-brimmed billycock hat, under

whose elastic band the uses of the yellow-white knot of hair became

suddenly obvious, looking more than ever like an abbess: a hunting, not

a praying, abbess this time. Outside a stable lad from the mews held

a tall, nervous horse by the head. Lady Anne would hold the child up

to pat the hairy, quivering nose, bid her have no fear of the sliding

eyes; would run her fingers down the horse's flanks and legs, maybe

pick up and inspect a hoof cunningly; at last, jumping into her saddle

out of the groom's hand, would straighten the sidling beast with one

blow of her riding crop on his buttock, and be off, her right knee

almost in line with the maned neck, and holding in the caitiff head

with hands that were a proverb in the shires. Fenella always watched

her out of sight, her eyes shining--the palms of her hands pressed hard

together.

VIII

THE SECOND FLOOR

By this time Miss Rigby might possibly have arisen and be watching the

horse and its rider through her curtains. Emilie Rigby was the second

of the permanent paying guests. She was tall, languid, graceful and

disorderly, of uncertain age, but with a growing opacity of skin and

with darkening shadows under her short-sighted eyes to tell of the

ebbing life forces within: much younger in the afternoon than in the

morning, and recovering her youth hour by hour as the day aged. In

her rooms on the second floor she led the spoiled, sensuous life of

an odalisque or a Persian cat. She breakfasted in bed, lunched in a

wrapper and with her hair coiled carelessly upon her neck, had a hot

bath, with elaborations, at three, and left the house an hour later,

in a cab whose destinations, despite all efforts of Druce and Kendal,

remain conjectural to this day. She dined from home almost nightly, but

had few correspondents, and her visitors gave Mrs. Barbour no anxiety.

She had a telephone installed in her room, whose sharp summons soon

became one of the habitual sounds of the dark, still house. The baffled

Druce, carrying up an unascetic luncheon at one, frequently found the

door locked in her face and was forced to wait until a conversation,

punctuated with bursts of laughter and far too disjointed to be worth

listening to through the keyhole, wore itself away. Lady Anne answered

for her.

"Respectable?" she exclaimed abruptly, in response to a guarded query.

"Of course Jasmine Rigby's respectable. We dined at the same house last

month. Only, if I were you----" she hesitated, unwilling to spoil

the perfect relief in her landlady's face, "if I were you, I wouldn't

have Nelly in and out there too much, once she begins to grow up. Her

clothes alone are enough to unsettle the girl."

But it is hard, with four servants and three households to control, to

keep an efficient eye upon inquiring youth, whose fingers are already

beginning to pluck restlessly at the many hued skirt of life; and the

hardship becomes greater when you are filled with pity for a loneliness

that is part of your own contriving. As long as Fenella was a very

little girl, beyond coaxing her in now and then to pet as one would

pet a pretty kitten, Miss Rigby took scant notice of the child. But as

she grew in years and stature, and a beauty that was becoming more of

the earth and less of the angels was confirmed in her, I am afraid the

scented, sophisticated atmosphere of the second floor began to exercise

its delayed but inevitable charm. One of those foolish intimacies began

which almost every pretty young girl can remember, often with shame

and impatience. There was a year when the woman, nearly forty, and

the girl, not yet fourteen, were "Jasmine" and "Nelly" to each other;

when little cocked-hat notes (oh, how deftly folded!) were apt to lurk

under the doily mats on Fenella's dressing-table, to be answered by

ignorant, misspelt letters from the blindly adoring child. The jaded

woman of fashion and pleasure (no; I don't know what place she filled

in her world, nor is speculation worth while) took an early opportunity

of showing the little parson's daughter the beauty of her arms and

shoulders--talked unreservedly before her, dressed her up in her

gowns and _lingerie_, let her lie upon the bed and prattle while

she herself sat before the mirror, waging her unwearied warfare with

time--refreshed herself with the girl's homage, laughed away as much as

she dared of her innocence, and finally, in a last spasm of confidence,

unlocked a drawer, hesitated, and put into the girl's hands a bundle of

letters, bidding her, with a flushed cheek and the ghost of a giggle,

to read them over and to let her know how their literary beauties

affected her. "When you've read them," said she, "maybe I'll tell you

who they came from."

Fenella left the room puzzled, a little frightened, but with no

instinct to tell her that possibly she was holding her damnation in her

hand.

What happened next? One of those happy accidents, perhaps, that good

angels know how to arrange. The packet was returned, unopened, next

morning, by Lady Anne, in the course of an interview which left her

fellow-lodger considerable repairs to effect before she faced the world

anew. An hour later the good genius, habited for her ride, knocked

timidly at the door of Mrs. Barbour's sanctum in the hitherto unvisited

nether regions.

Mrs. Barbour rose to her feet when she saw who her caller was, but Lady

Anne signed for her to remain seated. She seemed nervous and awkward,

and put her hands to her side. They say her horse kicked her there the

day she broke her ankle; oh! only a touch; no notice was taken of it at

the time.

"I've come to speak about our little girl," she said, sitting down and

crossing her booted legs.

Mrs. Barbour bridled a little; but youthful habits are strong. She

resumed her deferential manner.

"I trust she has been giving no trouble, m'lady."

"She has perhaps exposed a meddling old woman to the worst snub of her

life. I'm going to be crude, Mrs. Barbour. What on earth are you going

to make of that child?"

Mrs. Barbour plaited the table cover, but seemed to have no answer

ready.

"She's growing lovelier every day" (the foolish mother's eyes

glistened); "she dresses like a little fashion plate; she has more

silver stuff and finery in her room than any of us girls had at Castle

Cullen; she hasn't a friend in the world nor an idea in her head; and

we've an instance," with a glance up at the ceiling, "near enough at

hand, where beauty with nothing else can bring a woman."

Mrs. Barbour's eyes began to fill. Not a single harsh truth but voiced

a reproach that had been nibbling her own heart for years.

"Why don't you send her to school? Do you know that if you were a poor

woman you could be fined or sent to prison?"

"Schools are so dear."

"Stuff! They're cheaper and better than they ever were. There's

nothing young folk can't do now. You can go from a boarding school

to the 'varsity on a string. Let's send her to school, Mrs. B.," she

persisted. "You've no time to look after her, and neither have I."

"Not boarding school," the mother pleaded. "I couldn't be parted from

her now."

"Who said anything about boarding schools? There are plenty of day

schools. None of them are perfect, I know. But it can't be put off. All

the danger isn't out of doors. Let her go and get a little honest mud

on the bottom of her skirts, and come home every evening to have it

brushed off."

The poor woman struggled with her trouble. "It isn't that," she said

brokenly, "but--but, I can't explain it. There are things that don't

brush off--ever. She is so ignorant of what the world thinks of--of

people like me. They'll teach her it all at school; they'll teach her

to despise her m-m-mother...."

She broke down and, burying her face in her hands, wept the

unrestrained tears of her class.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she moaned. "I knew it must come. She's so

pretty--so pretty; such a little aristocrat. I'm only her mother by

accident, really. And she'll make fine friends and be asked out, and

wonder why she can't ask 'em back, and I'll have to tell her: 'Nelly,

dear, it's because your mother is only a poor woman that father married

to save her name, that lets lodgings to her betters for a living, and

wouldn't let you go to your own people when they asked for you; and

you can never have a friend of your own class as long as you live with

her.'"

Lady Anne kept her arm across the broad, bowed shoulders.

"Let's try it," she said cheerily. "I'll answer for Nelly, and I think

I can answer for the others. You have no conception how the world is

changing. I have the very school in my eye, too. I know the principal.

Sunlight and science, and knowledge that's innocent because it's

thorough, and open windows upon life that blow away all the whispers in

the corners, and a proper reverence for the body that, after all, is

all we're sure of. As for the money--well, I'm a meddlesome old body,

and you can heap coals of fire on my head by letting me be responsible.

I don't blame you for spending money on her clothes: besides--Sharland

College is dressy."

She wrote to her friend that night:

"DEAR LOUISA:

"I'm sending you a little girl who is the daughter of a dear, dead

chum of mine. She's extravagantly pretty, very dull, quite poor--is

being brought up as though she were an heiress and has a heart that

I believe will prove a greater danger to her than her face or her

poverty. For God's sake, Louisa, find out if she has any special

talent that will help her to a living, and ground her and grind

her until she's taken hold. I'm fond of the child, and shouldn't

die happy if I thought there was any risk of her joining the one

profession for which previous experience isn't essential.

"The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it

no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."

IX

SHARLAND COLLEGE

Fenella was nearly fourteen when she went to school. After Mrs. Barbour

had seen her into the green horse-omnibus which at that date still

rolled sedately westward along the Park paling the poor woman went

home and, regarding with a stricken eye the untidy relics of a hurried

breakfast, sat down and had a good cry. She would see her daughter

again in a few hours, but her instinct told her that the parting was

not one to be measured by time or distance.

At school Fenella achieved an instant success. At her lessons she

remained a sad dunce, but Sharland College had the modern conception

of bodily beauty as a supreme merit, and for its sake and also a

little for the amiability that accompanied it, Nelly's shortcomings in

algebra and geometry were forgiven and so mitigated by the assistance

of plainer and cleverer girls anxious for her friendship as to be

scarcely noticeable. She had become a fashion in the school before the

end of her second term, and a host of extravagant, flattering nicknames

attested this heady popularity. She was "Astarte" and "Principessa"

in the higher forms; "Flash" in the gymnasium and swimming bath--a

tribute to her bodily agility; "Zenobia" for one winter term, shortened

into "Nobs" during a frenzied hockey rally and forthwith abandoned;

"Greuzy" in artistic circles; while, oftenest of all and most eloquent

of all--for it voiced the sense of a common possession--she was "Our

Nelly." I do not know whether it is to her credit or discredit that

the intimacy with Miss Rigby came to a sudden and unforced end in her

first term. Poor Jasmine was forgotten or remembered only as a rather

unhealthy dream. Fenella began even to refer to her flippantly as her

"past"; "Ma, has my 'past' got up yet?" she would ask at midday on

half-holidays when she came home to change for hockey or tennis and

wanted to use the telephone.

It was upon wintry half-holidays that poor Mrs. Barbour felt her

desolation most keenly. It did not seem to matter so much when she

knew Nelly was working at school. There was a hungry and noisy return

at half-past four to be looked forward to, and a whole golden evening

during which she might knit and watch the dark head bent above the

irksome home task. And in the summer she would not have had the child

otherwise employed than in winning roses on lawn or river for the

colorless cheeks that she was uneducated enough to think indicated a

latent delicacy. But on rainy autumn afternoons, so brief and dark,

with the fire burning cosily in the shabby parlor and only a prospect

of forty feet of smoky grass, a leprous plaster cupid and the black

wall of the mews to entertain herself with, it seemed unjust, even

vaguely ominous to her peace, that her nestling preferred to beat her

new-fledged wings out in the dark and cold. She never complained,

but tried for a while to tempt her child to stay at home with her

"favorite" books, her "favorite" armchair, a box of chocolates--poor

ineffectual wiles that the short-sighted eyes of youth, set upon the

quest of high-spiced pleasure abroad, passed over without seeing. There

would be a hasty gobbled luncheon, taken standing, like the last meal

in Egypt; a frenzied search behind old magazines that were never read

and old music that was never played, for shoes and shin-guards--"Must

have my new shin-guards to-day, mummy. Kilburn hack simply rotten--" a

kiss, for the chocolates, given on the wing, and Fenella in red tam o'

shanter and belted jacket of scarlet pilot cloth was off--through the

area and up the steps.

"Expect me when you see me, mummy. I may chew with one of the girls."

She was not a religious woman, but she used to pray about this time,

miserably and humbly, for her child's heart to be left to her. And, in

the morning, between two mouthfuls of porridge, it was just possible

that Fenella might look at her sharply, and say--

"What've you been doing to yourself, mummy? You look like a boiled owl

this morning."

Who else was to notice that an old woman's eyes were red?

But there were times, also, which the mother came to look for, as

sex stole inexorably upon the slangy, boyish woman-child, when the

princess wearied of her kingdom, the tireless wings began to droop,

and the fledgling crept under the old sheltering wing for comfort.

She would come down after lunch, dressed in her house frock, sit

down unexpectedly on her mother's knee, grip the broad shoulders,

and held thus at arms' length, gaze at her for minutes together as

though with some new knowledge in the steadfast eyes. She would cover

her with tender names of disrespect--with cooing infractions of the

fifth commandment. "Dear old fathead!" "Dear old stoopid!" "Silly old

motherbird!" But she was strangely averse to the caresses with which

her mother, always expansive, would have repaid the endearing insults.

"Don't kiss me, donkey," she would cry, breaking away. "Can't you see

this is one of my touch-me-notish days? Hook me up the back and send

Drucie out for some chocolates. I'm going to stop with you all the

afternoon."

"Dearie," said the mother, timidly, one day, "won't the girls miss you

and come looking for you?"

Fenella knit her brows, but did not look up from her book.

"Of course they know where you live, don't they, dear?"

"No--yes. Oh! I don't know. Mother, can't you see I'm reading?"

Next Saturday Fenella was "playing away." The mother, still pursuing a

train of thought that had not really been interrupted during the week,

was wondering whether it would not be possible, by sending Miss Rigby

away (she had never cared for the woman), and by moving Lady Anne up

one story, to take the whole of the first floor for herself and her

child. The girl _must_ have somewhere to bring her friends. She

stuck her needles into her wool and sought pencil and paper. But the

figures that foot it merrily enough when it is a matter of addition,

limp wearily and stubbornly when subtraction is in question. She caught

her breath at the result of her calculations. And yet--the situation

was intolerable.

In the middle of her reverie a gate creaked and slammed. There

was a clatter of feet on the steps--a rattle of sticks along the

railings--Babel let loose in the area, and, before the woman could give

a shape to the panic at her heart, into the big, shabby room, like an

ill-trained chorus at a theatre, tumbled a rout of girls--short and

tall--dark and fair--all dressed alike in red jackets and caps.

They were of all ages from twelve to sixteen. Some had the promise of

beauty in a few years to come--some were only comely with the freshness

of youth and health, but from one and all, in spite of strident voice,

awkwardness of gesture, and self-consciousness of regard, there

radiated that evanescent and mournful charm which is possessed by any

bevy of girl comrades that touches childhood at its one extreme and

womanhood at the other. With a comprehensive sweep of her arm Fenella

introduced her rabble court.

"Ma--these are the girls! Girls--this is ma! Hurry up and get

us something to eat. We've been playing at Blackheath, and they

only gave us one biscuit each with tea. And, look here, girls,"

turning from her mother's dazed face upon the brawling team, "if

you make a row and upset our lodgers, you'll" (impressively)

"_never--come--here--again_!"

Fenella's popularity not only survived this shameful exposure, but

followed her into the Christmas holidays. The most delightful of all

missives began to lie, three and four at a time, on the breakfast

table by her plate, "begging the pleasure." Mrs. Barbour, who did a

considerable amount of good by stealth, had arrested a thirsty genius

on a downward course from the Bond Street ateliers to Marylebone

Workhouse, and, with this strange being, who wore a palpable

transformation, smelt of brandy, and called her "Modder-moselle," Nelly

spent many a fruitful morning, pinning, fitting, and cutting, while

the machine whirred and bumped on a table near by. She tasted for the

first time the delights of the waxed floor, the heavy golden air,

the cadenced wind--all the witchery of dance-land. Sleek "freshers"

with lacquered heads, "down for the short--" pink, alert subalterns

on Christmas furlough from Chatham and Aldershot, with funny cropped

moustaches like a toothbrush--delightful middies in uniform, with

cracking voices, wrote her name stiffly and illegibly on their

programmes or, if they were very smart, on an immaculate shirt cuff.

She danced with the verve of one exercising a fine natural gift, but

hated "sitting out," and acquired a distracting habit of wandering on

her partner's arm, along corridors and up stairs, through palms and

around screens, in search of friends similarly coupled. She called this

the "visiting figure," but, oh! the despair of inflammable youth, its

head full of incoherent adoration, to which darkness and solitude would

have given such burning words. This little unchaperoned girl, with her

perilously attractive beauty, discovered endless address and resource

in keeping male fervor at a distance. The following conversation is on

record, heard from palm-filled obscurity:

"Look here, Bobby! I'm sitting with you in the dark, 'cos you said the

light hurt your bad eye; but if you _paw_ you'll have two bad eyes

to look after 'stead of one."

Toward the end of her third year at Sharland College Lady Anne received

a letter from Miss Garrett, of which the following was part:

"... About Fenella Barbour. No. I haven't forgotten the promise

I made you to let you know if the girl showed marked ability in

any one direction. Strangely enough, Madame de Rudder, of Hanover

Street, our dancing and calisthenic mistress, called upon me about

her only yesterday. She tells me the child shows a talent for

bodily movement (she calls it 'genius': poor abused word!) such as

she never marked in a girl before. She is revising some old dances,

_Pavanes_ and _Corantos_, for private house parties, and

wants Fenella to join a quartette she is making up. Remembering

what you told me, I mentioned (guardedly) the expense of dresses,

etc., but she would not hear of the girl's incurring any outlay.

Not only this. She says that if Fenella could come, even two days

a week, as assistant at Hanover Street, she could have her tuition

free and, in time, be employed regularly, at very good pay: much

better than we can afford our own under-mistresses, who are all

graduates, as you know.

"It seems to me, dear Anne, that a _métier_ offers here: not

a very exalted one, it is true, but in the only line for which the

girl has shown any talent at all. Will you, if you think fit, speak

to the mother before I do anything further and ascertain her views.

I have met Mrs. Barbour. She is a puzzling and, I should say,

rather foolish woman, who evidently married far above her class.

"The idea, if followed out, will of course abridge Fenella's school

career, or even terminate it; but, to tell you the truth, dear

Anne, although I am fond of the child, I am only half sorry for

this. Don't misunderstand me. The girl is as good as gold, and I

know (who should judge better) has a soul like crystal. But her

influence among us has been an unsettling one.

"... I picked out the much beloved 'Collywobble' in the

Country-house Supplement from among the Sea grave, with dear Lady

Anne 'up.' What a pretty beast it is!"

Fenella was seventeen when she left school. She thought life a great

joke, she had not said a prayer for two years, and the saddest sight

she had seen was a fallen sparrow (counted, but number unrecorded) on

the path in Holland Walk.

X

THE WAY OF A MAID

Planche's "History of British Costume," 2 vols. 2500_b_, in the

Library of the British Museum, is a helpful work of reference. It is

replete with information, and the wood-cuts are spirited. Its size and

cumbersomeness, however, are disadvantages. It is emphatically a book

you would not care to read in bed. Add to this, that it is forming

the summit of an unsteady pile of books with which your arms are

filled--that you are handicapped further with a big black fur muff,

and that your nerves are already on edge with the strangeness of the

place....

_Crash!!!..._

One heavy morocco-bound volume lay, open and face downward, on the

floor; the other was following it fast, ringleader in a tragic glissade

over the smooth black fur. Fenella bit her lip and did not quite

suppress a word whose most obvious rhyme is "lamb." In a terror-struck

flash she saw all the results of her carelessness: attendants bearing

down upon her--expostulation--disgrace and final ejectment beyond those

heavy swing doors that she never, never should have passed. She was

really very frightened.

A man who had been ransacking the shelves by her side, with a long arm

that reached easily from top to bottom of the bookcase, turned quickly

at the smothered exclamation. With a swift movement of one hand, he

stayed the avalanche, and with the other picked up the fallen volume

from the floor.

"Oh! thank you--thank you!" said Fenella, almost hysterically. She

was looking up--a good way up--into the kindest, grayest eyes she had

ever seen.... Eyes!--eyes! the little, unprotected girl encountered

them everywhere. In train or 'bus, in the street, in the untempered

light of the lately constructed tube railway. Hard eyes; preoccupied

eyes, full of some sick trouble of their own which passed her over,

unseeing; bitter, arrogant eyes that seemed to find her beauty and her

pretty clothes an offence; eyes vicious and bold, the worst of all,

that would not leave her, that stung her cheeks, as though the heat of

the evil passions behind them were being focussed upon her through a

lens, and beneath whose level, insulting conjecture her flesh crept and

her hands clenched themselves in an agony of shame and helpless anger.

But these eyes were different to all the others. She could look at them

as steadily as at a cloudy sky: they seemed full of some tender wisdom.

And of humor too. Already their twinkle mitigated what she felt to be a

tragedy.

The stranger took the books from her one by one and bestowed them

compactly in the hollow of his own arm.

"Have you got a seat?" he asked.

"No," said Fenella, in an agitated whisper. "Can I go anywhere I like?

Are they all free?"

The man's smile broadened and showed his fine long teeth.

"We'll try and find you a free one," he said. "Come on with me." His

accent was strange; not quite English, yet not foreign.

She followed her protector on tip toe, averting her eyes from the

indignant glances that she was sure were being levelled at her. One

lean old monk _was_ scowling, but he was really thinking of

something else. Then there was a dreadful fat negro, like Othello

turned scholar, who rolled his eyes. Fenella could not help peeping at

the leaves he was turning over, to confirm an unscientific conviction

of her own, that the black _did_ really come off sometimes.

Her guide stopped at an empty place, arranged her books neatly upon

the flat leather-covered desk, pulled out a cane-seated chair on

casters, and, bowing slightly, sat down in the next place and began to

read one of a number of manuscript leaves with which it was strewn. She

divested herself of gloves and furs, and commenced turning the pages

of one of her books gingerly. Occasionally, she put her finger to her

mouth, and then, remembering where she was, stopped with a shudder, as

at danger escaped.

The man who had helped her was writing busily on a thick paper pad.

When he had reached the bottom of each page, he blotted it, numbered

it in the top right-hand corner, and added it carelessly to an untidy

pile at his left hand. Sometimes, before tearing it off, he read it

over, apparently without enthusiasm, erased words, and sometimes whole

sentences, with impatient curly "twiddles" of his quill pen, wrote

words in between the lines and added various cabalistic signs and

letters in the margin. He was very much occupied, and Fenella, whom

no book had ever absorbed, saw that she might watch him covertly and

safely.

So this was the way books were written! She wondered who he was. Not

Bernard Shaw--his hair was too short. Nor Rider Haggard--his face was

too narrow. She could not think of any other writer with a beard. She

considered him good-looking--in a strange way. She never would have, I

will not say looked, but wanted to look after him in the street, still

in a way she could not define, it was nice to be sitting next him. She

liked his leanness and dryness. She hated fat men whose sleek hair

seemed to be soaking up superabundant moisture from their bodies. Then,

his beard was trimmed so closely to his cheek it was hard to say where

it began, and his moustache was brushed out of the way once and for

all. He didn't keep "twiddling" _it_. Yes; it would be quite safe

to sit opposite while he ate soup.

There was a man quite like him on the very page before her.... Ah!

Yes. That was what he wanted. A big ruff showing the hairy throat,

and a little cloak, swung from his shoulders, and big puffy--whatever

they called them--nearly to his knees, and a long rapier sticking up

in the air--how awkward on staircases though--but not a silly little

_toque_ like that, stuck on one side, and not--oh, not earrings

in his ears. Who was it? "Duc de Guise." What a pity she had forgotten

(forgotten!) all her French. Yes; that was what was the matter with

him, she decided. His good looks were simply out of fashion. She looked

backward and forward from the book to his face, from his face to the

book, two or three times. Suddenly she became aware he was looking

straight at her.

"_Oh! help!_"

"Anything I can do?" asked the stranger helpfully, in a low voice that

was far less obtrusive than any whisper.

"C-could you translate this little bit for me, please? I'm no good at

French," Fenella stammered, pushing her book toward him.

"Which little bit?"

She indicated a paragraph at random and as far from the picture as

possible. She caught her breath at her audacity. "Forward minx, I

am." She hoped he wouldn't hang over her shoulder to translate, like

handsome Mr. Curzon, the drawing master at Sharland, heedless, or

perhaps not heedless, of the burning cheek so near his own, and the

suppressed titters of "the girls."

M. de Guise drew the open book toward him, and, tearing off a slip

of paper, began to write on it in a cranky but rapid hand, with an

occasional glance at the foreign text.

"Here you are. I hope you will be able to read my writing."

"Thank you very much indeed," said Fenella, demurely.

"Anything else you want? Paper?"

She had dived into her muff and was splitting open various envelopes

with her forefinger.

"If you wouldn't mind. But I'm giving you so much trouble."

"No trouble at all. Here are three sheets. You have a pencil?"

"M--m."

"If it's one you stole from the catalogue desk I wouldn't suck it.

Those aren't the sort you suck. See! you've made a blue smudge on your

lips."

Fenella dived into her muff again, and, drawing out what I believe is

termed a vanity bag, examined her lips on the little mirror. She rubbed

them hard.

"Is it gone now, please?"

"Quite." How red the child's lips were. He glanced right and left

and put his fingers to his own. A few fretful knowledge seekers were

looking toward the chatter. Their glances were hostile.

"_A la besogne!_" said he, beneath his breath, and turned to his

work again.

Fenella shook her shoulders and settled herself in the most industrious

attitude she could think of. At the end of an hour she had drawn three

figures and could think of no further excuse for remaining. Most of

the wisdom of the world was around her and above her, but she felt no

temptation to disturb it. The man at her side had apparently forgotten

her existence. She put her books away, one by one, trying to prevent

her shoes squeaking, but making a great bustle, really, yet he did not

look round. When she came back at last to get her furs and gloves, he

was gone. She left the room with a little sinking of the heart, but not

more than one feels when, say, an interesting fellow-traveller whom we

hoped was coming on all the way to London, gets out at Rugby. It is

true that in her preoccupation she forgot to claim her umbrella.

When she reached Oxford Street she was reminded by passing an Express

Dairy that it was past five and that she would reach home late for

tea. Tea, as a rite, retained all its old significance for Fenella.

Some of her old school-fellows had studios or flats within easy reach,

and, perhaps, six months ago she would have made for one of them. But,

already, she thought she noticed a difference. The girls were growing

up--acquiring individuality, and her own path was diverging more and

more. They liked her to come in to tea, but preferably on a day when no

men were expected. She was already learning the hard truth that life

must be played with the lone hand. A good many of her triumphs lay

behind her.

She turned to the dairy, and going upstairs as far as she could, took a

seat in the smoking-room and ordered weak tea and a teacake. She liked

muffins and crumpets and teacakes with "heaps and heaps" of butter.

The tea-room, being near the Museum, was full of its _habitués_.

She saw three or four she had noticed there, playing chess or talking

together in high mincing tones interspersed with cackling laughter.

She did not recognize the accent of the "illuminated." Some had lined,

seamed faces, with long hair, and would have looked better with a

clerical collar. Those that looked strong looked rough. How different

to her "courtier." She began to think of him anew, to calculate her

chances of ever running across him again. One thing was certain, she

would never, never go back to that terrible place again.

The teacake was long in coming, and as she looked up impatiently she

saw him standing in the middle of the room. She recognized him at once

by the rather rakish felt hat that had lain on his desk. He had a long

blue overcoat with a belt and a funny yellow silk handkerchief round

his neck. She wanted him very much to look round, but surmised he had

a favorite waitress and was looking for her. Perhaps the naïve wish

reached him. He turned, and, smiling, came toward her, as straight as a

partner about to claim his dance.

"Hullo! Got tired? I missed you when I came back."

"I only came to draw three pictures."

He hung his coat up and sat opposite her in a matter-of-fact way that

robbed the action of significance. Still, the lady who had brought the

teacake waited for his order with a sub-surface smile. She had seen so

many "Museum goings-on."

"You're not often here, are you?... Yes, tea, please. No--nothing with

it."

Fenella leaned forward confidently. "It's my very first visit. Don't

tell, will you? I _fudged_ a ticket."

"'Fudged'?"

"Came with another girl's--Phyllis Harmans. Do you know her?"

The gray eyes twinkled. "No. You're the only lady I ever speak to in

the Museum."

"Would I get into any trouble if I was found out?"

"We'd all get into trouble if we were found out. The best way is not to

attract attention. Don't drop your books again."

"Is it hard to get a ticket?"

"It's criminally easy. But I shouldn't advise you to. It's a place

for old fogies like me. You look pale. Do you get plenty of outdoor

exercise?"

Fenella rubbed her cheek. "That's not paleness. You're fussy, like

mummy. I'm a healthy brute. And I shouldn't call you an old fogy.

You're--brown. Have you travelled much?"

"Oh!--round the world and back again."

"Coming back's nice, isn't it?"

"Only when it's coming home."

"Isn't your home here? I _thought_ you spoke--funny. Haven't you

any one who looks after you? A mother--or a sister?"

"No mother, no sister, no wife." The stranger spoke incisively. "No

sweetheart, even," he added, after an appreciable pause.

Fenella blushed. Of course she hadn't meant to ask that; still, it

was interesting to know. The child had a strange pertinacity in

constructing correct views of new acquaintances that deceived a good

many people.

A sudden squall lashed the windows with rain. She looked round in

affright.

"Oh!--help!" she said again, softly.

"Now what's the matter?"

"I've forgotten my 'brolly'."

"Your _what_?"

"My brolly: my 'mush'; ma's best gold-handled umbrella."

"I'll lend you mine."

"Oh! it isn't that. I get the 'bus at the door, and only have a step to

walk at the other end. But how'm I to get it back?"

"Aren't you coming again soon?"

She shook her head. You would never have guessed the stranger felt

disappointed. He felt in his pocket and pushed a card across the table.

"Write an address on that," he said, "and leave me your check. I'll

have it sent to-night by a messenger boy."

Fenella considered a moment. The card lay face downward, and it was a

great temptation. But her good breeding triumphed. Without turning it

over she wrote her name and address, very slowly, in print letters.

Meantime she soliloquized thus:

"I hate rain. It's harder on women. Your petties get wet and slop

round your ankles. I wish I could always dress as a boy. It's so

picture-squeak--picturesque I mean. I do sometimes. Dances, you know:

in a quartette, gavottes and things. I'm a boy, 'cos you can't teach

men.... There you are. I hope you can read it.... I had a ripping dress

at the 'Bechway' in the spring. Blue and silver, and powdered hair, and

a little diamondy sword."

"Which you could use upon occasion with great spirit, I'll wager,

Monsieur le Marquis."

"Oh, rather!" rejoined Fenella. (How nicely he speaks French.) "I'm

good at fencing. I was captain of the 'gym' at our school."

The man just glanced at the card and put it into his pocket

absent-mindedly. He was wondering what kind the school might be that

had taught this distractingly friendly child to dance and fence, but

not to read French and, above all, not to be careful--with that face

and figure--how she spoke to strangers.

Meantime, something in this last speech had reminded the girl of the

first fine rapture of Ruritania, years ago.

"You're a novelist, aren't you?" she said.

"Of sorts," he admitted.

"I wish I was intellectual"--wistfully.

"You're better. You're cute."

"_Cute--cute--!_ What does that mean? Clever?"

"Not exactly."

"Pretty, then?"

"Well, a kind of clever prettiness."

"You mean smart!"

"Well, smart. Let us be English at all costs."

"I don't see how you can think _me_ smart," she said, with a

rueful inflection in her voice.

"Why not?"

"Talking to a strange man as I've done."

At sight of the troubled young face, something that was not exactly

suspicion, but which had guarded his manner till now, disappeared. He

laughed quite freely, and it was wonderful how the sudden gaiety made

him look at once younger and more foreign. He put his hand across and

just touched the girl's arm.

"Dear child," said he, "talk to as many strange men as you like. The

stranger the better. It's ordinary ones you must be careful about."

"Ordinary ones----?"

"Yes. Beware the Least Common Multiple. Therein lies danger to you. I

prophesy it."

"I must go," said Nelly, rising as she spoke. "It isn't getting any

drier."

He put his coat on and followed her to the door. She noticed he left

threepence for the waitress. How extravagant, after just a cup of tea!

He kept beside her across the street, holding his umbrella over her

head.

"I should like to read your book when it comes out," she said, as her

omnibus hove in sight. "Why do you laugh?"

He was laughing because he knew the book. "How are you to ask for it

without knowing the talented author's name?"

She hesitated. "Well," she said, almost reluctantly, "what _is_

his name?"

He noticed the effort and his manner stiffened. "It's one I needn't be

ashamed to tell you, and you needn't be ashamed to hear. My name is

Paul Ingram. Here's your 'bus. Good-bye. I don't ask you yours."

Fenella turned on the step and laughed at him over her muff.

"Goosey! You've got it in your waistcoat pocket."

XI

AN INTERLUDE

All this happened on a Saturday, and Paul had a full day to think it

over. He went back to his work on Monday, and, for reasons he did

not stop to define, not only chose the same place, but even had the

weakness to try to keep the desk next it free by depositing his hat and

gloves there. It would be hard to say what he expected. He had looked

at the address more carefully when he was sending back the umbrella,

and it confirmed the impression he had already received from the girl's

clothes and casual, assured manner. She was some daughter of a good

family, he felt sure, guarded and checked, and so the more inclined to

kick over the traces when away from watchful home eyes. Had he been an

Englishman the very perfection of her turnout might have still further

puzzled him, and he might have been inclined to speculate as to how so

young a girl came by all the rings she wore; far too many, though they

were only pretty baubles. But Ingram came from a country where beauty

does not wait on marriage for its adornment. He was even ignorant that

a set has arisen there, the most artificial and utterly contemptible,

surely, in the world, which has sacrificed the healthy freedom that was

its birthright, to ape the social hypocrisies and superstitions that

Europe is outgrowing.

Anyway, she had made him feel very old, and for the moment out of

conceit with his self-imposed tasks, just as some wild, free creature

of fur or feather encountered on a holiday walk in the country might

distaste any one of us with his own humdrum workaday life. And he had

the same further impulse that the wayfarer may have had to arrest the

busy, aimless errand, close his hand on the furry flank--prison the

fluttering wings, and, having made the creature share his captivity a

moment, to open his fingers and let the throbbing quarry go free. A

desire so innocent--so purely intellectual, that it scarcely deserves

the hard name of the lust of the eye, and has nothing whatever in

common with the lusts of the flesh.

It must be remembered also, to account for his unusual and dangerous

mood, that just about this time he had put his manuscript into my

hands. No period is so demoralizing mentally as one during which we

have relaxed our own efforts, and are indulging in the vague hope of

some good to come to us through other people's.

Tuesday--Wednesday passed. Paul ceased to look for the girl. Why should

he? Hadn't she said she was not coming back. And what a fool he was

even to desire it. She was a pretty memory; he, a writer, should know

the value of such impressions, the pity of disturbing them. Suppose he

met her again, was it likely the glamour of the first encounter would

survive? Apart from the _bizarrerie_ of her quaint, childish

confidences, she had said really nothing that was worth remembering.

On a second meeting he would be sure to find her trivial and vulgar.

Even the pretty manner was probably a trick she had tried elsewhere,

and found "fetching." Toward the end of the week he happened to be

reading, in the course of his work, the diary of a man some of whose

blood, according to family tradition, ran in his own veins: the daily

journal of Cotton Mather. Skimming through the record of that dark,

tortured soul, he lit upon the curious passage wherein the middle-aged

widower, with the naïve self-revelation that sweetens his persecuting

memory, deplores the inroads which a handsome young pupil to whom he

is teaching Latin is making in his self-respect. "The Lord," groans

Mather, piously, "deliver me from this ingenious child!" Paul gave such

a sudden laugh that his neighbors looked at him in wonder. "Bravo,

Cousin Cotton!" he said to himself. "I'm not proud of you, but I'll

forgive you a lot for that." He felt immensely relieved. Who has not

known such a foolish moment of light-heartedness, when something we

have read or heard seems to set us right with ourselves? "_The Lord

deliver me from this ingenious child!_"

That night after dinner he lit a cigar and strolled westward. He

found Number Eleven Suffolk Square easily enough. It was a big,

double-fronted house of cream-colored stucco, with wide steps and

a pillared porch. It happened just then that all three floors were

lit up. This illumination gave the house a festive appearance and

exaggerated its opulent aspect. Against the amber colored blinds the

pattern of handsome lace curtains stood out in bold silhouette. The

kitchen blinds had not been lowered and Paul noted three maid-servants,

two of them in black dresses and caps with long white streamers. On the

other side of the area, across another lighted window, red curtains

were drawn. More servants, probably--butler, coachman, and footman. He

thought of his own home in far Massachusetts; the "hired help" who came

to table with them; his own chapped wrists; the dying mother, rolling

out pastry on the low table to which they wheeled her chair. A feeling

of fierce camaraderie with the toilers, the little ones of the earth,

possessed him; a hatred for luxury and the parade of wealth. He took

three or four turns before the house, and went away. Before he left the

square, however, he kissed his hand toward Number Eleven. "Good-bye,

Fenella," he said. "You're a kind-hearted baby, but I guess the folks

in that house will know how to spoil it when the time comes."

XII

RICHMOND PARK

Next morning, when he went to the reading-room, she was sitting

in the old place. She still wore the long blue coat with all the

buttons--the black fur, and the big plain French hat with a single

parrot-green feather, but, seen a second time, custom tempered somewhat

her formidable smartness. She had a big gauze veil, too, tied round

her hat and falling in long ends over her shoulders. It subdued the

hard childish brightness of her face, making it look both maturer and

softer. She met his surprised look timidly, and, diving into her muff,

held out a white card with a blue stripe down the centre. Her gesture

was meekly disarming--hurriedly explanatory.

"I've joined," she said, anxiously. "I'm a member."

Ingram twirled the card between his fingers. It was early, the great

room was half empty, and there was no need to whisper now.

"And what special line of research are you thinking of pursuing?" he

asked, gravely.

Fenella made haste to disclaim any serious purpose. "But it's a useful

place, isn't it?" she asked. "This morning I only looked in to thank

you."

"To thank me----?"

"For sending my umbrella. I couldn't send a postcard; I didn't know

your address."

"It was no trouble." He was still turning the little card round and

round. "And so you're running away at once?"

Fenella cast her eyes down. "I can't stay," she said. "I've got a dog

with me."

"A dog?"

"Tied to the rails outside near the little house. They'd only keep him

'cos I said I wouldn't be ten minutes. Do you like dogs? I'm taking him

for a run."

Paul experienced a sudden zest for adventure. "Suppose we take him for

a run together? It's such a glorious fall morning."

"Oh, _top-hole_!" said Nelly, joining her hands in the old baby

fashion that had clung to her. "I mean, how nice! Where shall we

ramble? The Gardens?"

"No. I hate the Gardens. Even the sparrows know they're a fraud.

Let's go out to Richmond. We can walk across the Park, have lunch at

Kingston, and be back in time for tea."

Outside the Museum lodge, a horrible old bull-terrier, chained to the

railings, was keeping up a growling soliloquy, with occasional snaps at

imaginary flies, suggested possibly by the late autumn sunshine. He was

very thick and scarred and carried his head to one side.

"This is Rock," announced Fenella, as, with a bewildering smile at

the liveried keeper, she began to drag the veteran to his feet and

along the pavement. "He's an awful old dog; I don't know how old, but

he was a puppy when I was a baby. Isn't it funny? Now he's all lumpy

and stiff, and I'm still growing. Ma says it's because their hearts

beat faster. Heckle--that's a medical boy I know--says he's the oldest

bull-terrier he ever knew, and that what he's asking for when he growls

is a dose of pussy's acid in a dog-biscuit. What's pussy's acid?[1]

Rock is short for Roquelaure, but some of the girls say he smells, and

call him Roquefort. He's not my dog: he's Lady Anne's. She's hunting

somewhere, and I promised her I'd take him out regularly. Oh, I want

to telephone from here. Will you hold him--please? He won't bite.

No, don't shut the doors, I shall stifle.... _B-r-r-r!_ One!

_B-r-r-r!_ Two. I _have_ put the pennies in; didn't you hear

them? 2309 Pad. Yes, I mean Paddington. You say Pad yourself. Hello!

Are you there? Is this Miss Rigby? Oh, good morning, Jas. Jas, be an

angel and tell mummy I shan't be home to lunch. I'm going to have it

at Richmond, with a man. What d'you say? Oh, fie! Oh, tut!... Naughty

puss! Six feet one, a long tawny, silky moustache, and cold, steel-blue

eyes.... What?... I don't know ... I may. Good-bye, Jas. You're an

angel."

[Footnote 1: Possibly Prussic acid.--Ed.]

* * * * *

In the train Ingram took the seat opposite her, and, while she kept

up an incessant chatter, watched her with a kind of ache at his

heart for her beauty. It was more than prettiness: he saw that now.

Those long heavy lashed eyes, whose full lids she had a trick of

pulling--the plaintive, tremulous mouth, too red; the two little tufts

at her temples which even the draught from the closed window blew

across her cheekbone, so fine and dry was her hair; the delicate and

rather salient nose that bespoke impulsiveness. Like all visionaries,

crusaders and other impractical persons, he had at the same time an

intense perception of bodily beauty and an intense jealousy for the

coarse uses to which life puts it. To have retained one's ideals and

to have lost one's illusions--is not this to be subject to all the

tortures that sex can inflict?

They left the station and walked through the defaced streets of the old

Royal Borough, its noble Georgian houses half hidden by plate-glass

shop fronts: they climbed the long ascent to the Park, and stood for

a moment on the terrace to admire the river, an isle-set loop of

silver, at the bottom of a steep glen filled with rusty verdure. Once

inside the wide ciphered gates, they left the gravelled path and by

a soft mouldy foot-track struck into the recesses of the old hunting

pleasaunce. The air was mild and balmy; not a breeze stirred the crisp,

sapless trees that stood waiting to surrender their ruined pomp of

summer to the first wind that required it of them. Fenella gave her

escort her muff and stole. She called Rock to her in a high, clear

voice and, with shrill, chirping whistles, with cracks of her dog-whip,

fluttering of her skirts, with endless enticements and provocations,

lured that much-tried old pensioner on to efforts he had really

outlived. Paul, as he watched her, ignorant no doubt of the exquisite

old Mabinogion simile, thought that her motions resembled nothing so

much as the swooping flight of the swallow before rain. Her limbs

seemed to have the pliancy of whalebone.

Rock wheezed and panted gallantly after his mistress, his paws drumming

stiffly on the ground--his poor old scarred neck held more on one side

than ever. But his heart was not in the chase. He was forever slinking

back to heel. He looked up wistfully at this new, sober-paced friend.

"Here are we," his dim old eyes, with their hardened cornea, seemed to

be saying, "old fellows, both of us, who've taken sharp bites and hard

knocks enough, and it's a bit late in the day to be asking us to show

off our paces, isn't it? Can't we sneak away somewhere together? This

girl will play the very devil with us both if we let her."

"Rock! Rock! Rock!" the clear voice would ring out. "Come here, sir!

Come here _thissminnit_! Lazy--_lazy_ dog!"

And with a despairing throe of his knotted tail, off poor Rock must

pump again.

When they had nearly crossed the Park, they sat down on a worn seat,

hacked nearly away with amorous knife blades, close to a pond into

which some long-legged wading birds were digging their bills. Around

them and behind them the noble demesne outstretched itself, in long

tree vistas and seemingly illimitable glades, with nothing to scale

them to insignificance. Now and then a motor car rolled softly along

the road to White Lodge, only accentuating their loneliness by its

speed and detachment, or a ghostly little troop of fallow deer passed

slowly and securely to some favored feeding ground. Rock sniffed the

air at them, growled and wrinkled his nose. "We both remember a time

we couldn't have stood this--don't we?" the decayed old sportsman was

no doubt grumbling to himself.

Seeing the girl quiet at his side, Paul began to try and tell her

something of his life, working back, as is the manner of men, from the

things that are nearest their experience and yet are slipping from

their memory, into the never forgotten far past.... The night marches

across the silent desert, spellbound by the silver witchery of the

moon, and through _mehallahs_, that are like a fruitful land

smitten by an evil charm--its houses turned into boulders and brushwood

made of its standing corn: the caravans one may meet with a grave

bearded sheikh riding in front, and the bubbling dromedaries behind

him, laden with great wicker "_D-raths_" full of squalling, naked

children and silk-swathed women, who peep through the osiers and crook

their fingers at the dusty legionaries tramping by in a cloud of their

own dust: the sand pillars that march upon your flank, step and step,

like jealous genii shepherding doomed strangers into their desert: the

joy of the camp at the well, with the day's march done: the incredible

lightness of the sweat-soaked body when the knapsack is lifted off.

... Or that other camp--so far away it is hard to believe it all one

life. Crackling cedar wood and the good smell of coffee on the sharp

light mountain air, and the jinglers riding in the squealing cavvy

with a pother of dust about their unshod feet, all rosy and glorious

like a halo in the cherry-red morning sun: and the long lariats held

wedgewise, and the scamper and scurry as the bronchos are trapped:

and the peering through a fog of sweat and dust for your own brand

on shoulder or buttock, and the whirling ropes, and the laughter and

horseplay as the ponies are blanketed and bitted for the dawn-to-dusk

round-up.

I don't know whether Paul made a poor Othello, but I do know he had

a very indifferent Desdemona. Fenella was forever interrupting the

narrative on one frivolous pretext or another: to throw stick or stone

for poor sleepy Rock to retrieve ("_Guffetchit-Rock! Guffetchit--lazy

dog!_"); to gather a bunch of scarlet berries afar off, whose color

had taken her eye and which were hardly redder than her lips; to run

down for a minute to the pond to see what "those rummy birds" were

digging for so industriously. She had all the _nil admirari_ of

the modern mind: its heedlessness of anything that lies outside its

own experience; its sedulous curiosity for all that lies within. It

was better when they got to Ingram's early life. She could imagine

a country road along which burdocks and hemlock and other green

fleshy things grow as high as young trees, and little gray frame

houses tucked away behind silver birches. She was genuinely and even

tenderly interested in the crippled mother, and at the story of the

sister who died, blew her nose and said she had caught cold in the

train. She clapped her hands at the quilting bees and candy-pulls and

sleigh rides and sugar boiling camps and wished plaintively that she

had been born a little American girl, to have had her share in so

rapturous an adolescence. But even this part of the story was checked

with immaterial, trivial questions such as on children's lips weary

the maternal patience. "What happened the gray mare in the end that

wouldn't pass the new letter-box? How many boys went to the sugar camp?

And how many girls? Did they ever flirt?"

They had luncheon in an upper room of an old inn at Kingston, that

had a curved iron balcony looking down upon the market place. The

panelling was hidden by paper of an iridescent red, covered with a

sprawling pattern of tarnished leaves and flowers. To right and left

of the fireplace two dark pictures of bottle-necked ladies with untidy

hair, brought here from God knows what household dispersion, looked

disdainfully out of the canvas in opposite directions. Some fair or

market was going on in the square below; the misty afternoon air

was full of the bleat of sheep, the lowing of cattle, raucous cries

of costermongers, and the crack of saloon rifles. They were waited

on by a depressed Teuton, upon whose broad white face Paul raised a

wintry smile by addressing him in his own guttural tongue. Fenella,

the palms of her long kid gloves twisted round her bangles, fared

delicately. She gave most of her meat to Rock--eschewed watery sprouts

and fluffily mashed potatoes--and "filled up," as she would and even

did express it, upon plum tart with unlimited cream and sugar. She

would not drink wine or coffee, but ate all the dessert and sent out

for more cob-nuts. She had all sorts of pretty, restless, bad manners:

crumbled bread while she chattered--scored the cloth with a pink nail

while she listened--counted her plum stones three times and made it

"never"--dabbled in her tumbler for lack of a finger bowl--and upon its

rim made, with one wet finger-tip, the hum of innumerable blue bottles,

at which poor Rock barked and snapped under her chair.

It was late when they sat down to lunch, and they had dawdled besides.

The sun was gone and twilight closing in as they recrossed the Park

toward Richmond. She was so silent that Paul asked her, half peering

into the veiled face, whether she had felt the afternoon dull. She said

not; but her negative went no further than a little shake of the head.

She had a trick of looking back every now and then and of measuring

the way they had come, as if to insure a clear recollection of it, and

she allowed Rock--who, rested, fed, and with his head pointed, though

obliquely, for home, was in spirits that contrasted with his depressed

morning mood--to roam at his will. They had just reached the avenue of

trees that looks over Ham House when a furious barking made them turn

their heads. The dog, bristling, and with sidelong leaps that left his

nose in the one direction, was pointing at something in the long grass.

Fenella cracked the whip she had been trailing along the path.

"Rock! _Rock!_ Come here, sir! Oh, Mr. Ingram, go quick and stop

him!" She covered her eyes. "He's got some poor little rabbit or bird."

Paul ran and collared the animal. A brown mottled bird with a wide

yellow beak was fluttering away clumsily, with wings half spread.

Fenella caught it from him as his hand was closing on it.

"Give it to me! Oh, _darling_! are you hurt?" She looked on

her gloves for blood. "Had he bitten it, Mr. Ingram?... There,

_there_--you're quite safe now. I tink oor more f'itened dan hurt,

dear! Is _he_ one of the birds that fly away in the winter, Mr.

Ingram? I'm going to take him home and put him in the conservatory till

spring.... Ah! you _wicked--bad--cruel--fierce_ dog! It's a good

job I gave him so much meat, isn't it Mr. Ingram?--or you'd be gobbled

up, dee-ar!... That's right; put him on the chain. Oh, yes he does, Mr.

Ingram; he eats birds, at least he _scrunches_ them," stroking the

smooth brown back with her lips. "Can we get a cage in Richmond, do you

think?"

Paul looked at his watch. "I think we'd better get a train in

Richmond," he said. "We've been out quite a while, and you only said

'luncheon' over the 'phone. Are you going to bring the bird along?"

"Why--_of course I am_."

"Well, put him in your muff and let us hustle."

Fenella quickened her pace resolutely, but every now and then would

stop to be sure the creature was alive, breaking into a run afterward

to overtake her escort.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, penitently, as she saw him waiting for

her. "I tell you what I'll do. I'll put my finger in every now and then

and, if he pecks, I'll know he's alive. Why does he peck me when I

saved him? Birds have no brain. Cookie had a canary once that flew into

a fly-paper; it took ever so long to unstick his wings. I hope this

isn't one of the sort that won't sing unless its eyes are put out."

In the train the bird still absorbed her. They had a compartment to

themselves, and Paul watched her curiously through his cigar smoke. He

was wondering whether he had been bored or amused. A little of both he

concluded. She was a good girl, but quite immature, and utterly--oh!

utterly trivial. There was probably some babbling old mother at home

whom she took after, for a warning and example. She was lovely, oh,

yes--lovely enough to make the most careless heart ache--the rashest

"gazer wipe his eye." But for a man like himself that was not an entire

explanation. Wherein lay her charm? For charm there was; one, too, that

survived the long day spent in her company. There was no use denying

it; walks in Richmond Park, alone, would be sad affairs from now on.

Alone, because, of course, this one must never be repeated. Butterflies

are pretty things to watch, once in a way; but, since to clutch remains

a human instinct, and since no man who thinks in his heart ever wants

to see that sort of down upon his clumsy fingers, it would be better

if--be better if----What were the clanging, ringing wheels saying now?

Hark!

"Be its beauty its sole duty:

Be its beauty its sole duty...."

Ah! yes. That was what he has been trying to think of all day. And yet

people could be found to called Browning "obscure."

"Be its beauty its sole duty!"

"Oh, Mr. Ingram! Look! It's stopped pecking and is beginning to look

round."

He leaned across the carriage. He may have meant to do no more than

touch the enfolding hands that lay so near his lips. But her own mouth

was nearer still, and he kissed that.

XIII

FIND SOUL--FIND SORROW

In the middle of the night that followed his whole holiday Paul woke

and cursed himself, at length and with conviction. Years ago, in the

good old days when punishment was punishment, with no nonsense talked

about reformatory intent, among the toiling groups that tilled the

earth, made the road or lightered the harbored vessel, here and there

a man was noticed who dragged his left leg a little as he walked. He

was not crippled, nor deformed; he was likely, indeed, to be strong and

formidable beyond his fellows; he did his day's work and earned his

day's wage with the best. But the leg dragged--always would drag. And

the reason passed in whispers: this was an old galley slave--a man who

had worked at the _bagnio_. His leg, from force of habit, still

paused for the effort that once dragged ball and chain behind it.