"I'm afraid Joe Dollfus was rather rude to you to-day, dear," Fenella

said to her old mistress one afternoon over the teacups. Madame's

irruption into the affair upon the strength of an old "understanding"

which her pupil could neither remember nor would deny, had, in fact, at

last proved too much for Mr. Dollfus's manners.

"Pooh!" said madame, airily. "I'm not hurt. I don't care what the

little bounder says. It's rather a good sign, in fact, that he

_should_ lose his temper. That type always does when they see

you've the whip hand."

"How have we the whip hand?" Fenella never questioned the implied

association of interest.

"My dear, because we're not dependent on Joe's say-so for a living.

We're not a bankrupt solicitor's daughter with a mother and young

sisters to support. We're not poor."

This was about the time that doubts were beginning to assail Fenella.

"Oh, but I am _really_," she persisted, rather ruefully.

"Well, you're not to all appearance, and it's appearances that count.

Look at where you live! look at your relations! Oh, I've rubbed that

all in; trust me."

Fenella sighed. A home in which strangers gave orders; relations under

whose roof she would never be tempted again--for that chapter in her

life was closed definitely. She had answered one incoherent, penitent

letter, and sent back two more unopened.

"My dear Nellikins," said the kind-hearted dame, "have some more tea

and don't look so worried. I know we're rather a sham, but try to

_feel_ the part. Be a winner!" She patted the slim hand held out

for the teacup. "You do _look_ one so, my dear. Once you admit,"

she went on, in a voice slightly veiled by buttered toast, "once you

admit, even to yourself, that you're not doing a thing for fun and

because you like it, the game's up. Because it's this sort of people

who are coming to the front everywhere now--in books, and pictures, and

music, and the stage--and everything."

"I've always heard that dabblers never did anything!"

"My dear, who said 'dabblers'? And besides"--impatiently--"a lot

of that musty, fusty old wisdom wants tearing up and writing

over again. How can any one who has to worry do the work that

_pays_. Clever! Oh, yes, they may be very clever, but all they

succeed in doing with their cleverness is in making the people

who matter--the rich, important people--uncomfortable. And they

_will--not--be--made--uncomfortable_, my dear. Besides, they never

last long. Worry kills them off like the cold kills the flies."

Fenella did not pursue the subject. She felt all the vulgarity

of her old mistress, but she felt also an unaccountable sense of

protection in her company. Brazen, alert, competent, grasping, utterly

disillusioned, mature; with good looks that seem to have settled down

for fifteen years' hard service; smartly dressed, opaque of eye,

unrestrained of laugh and anecdote with condescending patrons; living

in discreet little houses, in discreet little streets off fashionable

thoroughfares, with open-work lace blinds at their windows--Berthe,

Clarice, Suzanne, Estelle, as the case may be--latterly even, Elizabeth

and Kate: polishing nails, crimping hair, ironing out wrinkles,

reducing flesh, kneading and anointing the pampered body; teaching

dancing, selling fans and lace; "advising" decoration, dabbling in

magic, undertaking "confidential" commissions; with a range of service

that touches impropriety at one extreme and heroism at the other, and

often with a past of their own behind them in which the finer feelings

have perished, but not a good heart, the De Rudders of the world play

their part in the parasitical life of the rich bravely enough--play

it often, too, with a secret hatred and contempt for the class whose

follies they fatten on that would be a revelation to the mere reformer.

* * * * *

The trouble began with an interview that poor Lady Anne was "accorded"

early in November. The place, a sober "Adams" parlor, distempered

in green, furnished in the old oak of commerce, and hung with Romney

engravings in black carved wood frames. Between the two gaunt windows a

writing-desk, littered with memorandum blocks, supports a large silver

inkstand bearing the legend: "To JAS. PEMMER-LLOYD, Esq., M.

R. C. S., from a grateful patient." To right, a low couch covered with

a white linen cloth and with some mysterious mechanism or other at its

head. At its foot, a glass table on rubber wheels, its two tiers loaded

with multiform electro-plated apparatus. Carpet obtrusively thick.

"But are you quite sure?" she was saying.

Her companion, a dark, keen-faced man of few words, seems to consider

awhile. Conversation in Harley and Weymouth Streets is expensive: even

so, it was felt that Pemmer-Lloyd gave short weight.

"Personally," he answered, "I have no doubt whatever. Of course, if

you wish, I can arrange a consultation or meet your own doctor. It was

quite irregular you're not bringing him."

"Never ride again! Never--ride--again!" Poor Lady Anne kept repeating

the dreadful sentence over and over to herself.

"Doctor!" she said aloud. "I have no doctor. Never been ill in my life.

And what's the use of paying more money to a lot of men who'll only dot

your i's and cross your t's for you? You're the top of the tree, ain't

you?"

Pemmer-Lloyd, who was writing at his desk, did not deny the soft

impeachment.

"I've written two names," he said, "on the back of your prescription.

The apparatus can be obtained at either. The massage should be done in

the evening--at your own house, if possible. You will find it a little

exhausting at first. Thank you."

Lady Anne laid down two golden coins and a florin near the grateful

patient's inkstand, stuffed the prescription into the pocket of her

tweed coat, and stumped out to her cab.

"Druce," she said, when the door was opened for her at Suffolk Square,

"I shall want you and Twyford to come up and help me pack after lunch.

I am going to Market Harborough to-morrow."

She returned unexpectedly after the Christmas holidays, walking a

thought more lamely than before, and with a new absorbed gentleness

in her manner. She kept her room for three days, writing busily. Many

callers, some of them strangers to the servants who admitted them,

drove up in cabs and carriages. For the first time since she had taken

the rooms her brother, Lord Windybank, spent two nights in the house.

Fenella's empty bed was made up for him. On the evening of the second

day, after dinner, the two maid-servants were called up to Lady Anne's

sitting-room. The earl, a little horsey-legged man, with the face,

hair, chin, and voice of his sister, was standing on the hearth-rug.

His eyes were inflamed, and he blew his nose violently from time to

time on an Indian silk handkerchief, an assortment of which he seemed

to keep in the various pockets of his frieze suit. Old Mr. Attneave,

the solicitor, stood by the writing-desk, wrapped in the grave

professional manner that covers all human contingencies. The girls

curtsied, signed a document, laboriously, in a space indicated by the

lawyer's chalky finger, curtsied again, and turned to leave the room.

Lady Anne called them back, handed each of them a couple of bank-notes

from a little pile beneath an enamelled paper-weight, and kissed the

dazed hand-maidens on the cheek.

"Be good women," she said, gravely. "Do your duty by your mistress. If

I have given cause of offence to either of you, or made your work hard

and ungrateful, by word or deed, remember I asked your pardon for it.

And now bid your mistress come and see me as soon as is convenient."

Mrs. Barbour entered the room five minutes later with a white, scared

face.

"Mrs. Barbour, this is Lord Windybank, my brother. Mr. Attneave I

think you have met before. Stop snivelling, Windy;--please do. Won't

you sit down? I'm going away to-morrow, Mrs. Barbour, for a short

stay in another neighborhood, and whether I shall come back is rather

doubtful. No, it isn't nonsense, Windy; I caught the red-headed one's

eye when he didn't know I was looking. The other was too old to let

anything out. Mrs. Barbour, I want to see your little girl before I go

away."

"I'll telegraph for her at once, m'lady."

Lady Anne pursed her lip. "Telegraph for her in the morning," she said.

"It's late, and I don't want the child to come up at night. Besides, it

will spoil her rest."

"Are you ill, m'lady?" Mrs. Barbour asked, much mystified. There seemed

to be so little change in the long white fretful face.

"Oh, dear, yes; quite seriously, ceremoniously ill, I assure you.

Please don't look at me that way. You can't see anything. I don't

believe any of them can, though they pretend to. And now about Fenella.

Mr. Attneave, will you please explain?"

As the lawyer, in dry calculated sentences, explained the details and

conditions of the little legacy, Mrs. Barbour broke down and wept

after the fashion of her class, with great whoops, and holding her

housekeeping apron to her eyes. All her little world seemed to be

crumbling. She was not, by nature, an impressionable woman, but had it

been her lot, as it is the lot of so many of her kind, to hear, month

by month, new footsteps echo on her stairs; to see, month by month,

strange faces people her rooms, the dignity of proprietorship, the

sense of being mistress of a home, which had done so much to soften

and sweeten her, must have missed her altogether, and the wear and

tear upon her perceptions vulgarized her heart far quicker than feet

or hands shabbied her house. During fifteen years, as far as Lady Anne

was concerned, without the slightest temptation to anything that could

be construed as a "liberty," or a single soul-searching as regards her

own equivocal social status, the service of love had, little by little,

been substituting itself for the service of gain. Custom and habit are

strong with all who have attained middle life, but with women, after a

certain age is reached, they are tyrants. Nor was it in its monetary

aspect chiefly, though that might well have given her pause, that the

sense of bereavement reached her. Simple words are most convincing. She

was wondering how, "if anything should happen," poor Lady Anne in the

nursing home, to which she was evidently bound, she could ever find the

heart to wait upon strangers in her rooms.

"----five hundred pounds, until the age of twenty-one, unless upon an

occasion of urgent necessity, the nature of which shall be determined

by said trustees, appointed on the one part by the said Honorable Mrs.

Nigel Kedo Barbour----"

"Boo-hoo!" wept the honorable lady.

The invalid patted her upon the shoulder. "My dear, good friend, do

control yourself!"

"Oh, I can't, I can't! Oh! I never shall stop in this house. It won't

be the same to me."

The broken phrases struggled through her tears like bubbles through

water. The lawyer had to stop.

"I suppose," Lady Anne said, after the faithful Druce had led her

weeping mistress away, "that class doesn't really know what their ideas

are until they've put them into words. They say a lot over, and then

pick out the ones they want to keep. Oh, I shall be glad when it's over

one way or another, Windy. I think I know now how poor Uncle Eustace

must have felt the day before Major Hartnett shot him. There's not much

difference between a duel and an operation."

* * * * *

Thus it was to a house cold and dark with the shadow of change and

worse that Fenella came home. Mercifully she was spared questioning on

her own pale cheeks and dull eyes. Mrs. Barbour was in no mood to be

entertained with a description of her doings among the fine folk. Lady

Anne was dozing when she arrived, and might not be disturbed. The poor

lady was already invested with something of her perilous state. A nurse

in a blue linen dress and goffered cap, whose lightest word was law,

moved softly up and down stairs in felt ward slippers, carrying various

mysterious burdens. She called Fenella at about midnight. The girl had

taken off her outer garments and put on a fleecy dressing-gown.

"You must be very quiet," Nurse Adelaide said, "and not stay more than

half an hour. I want her to settle for the night while she is out of

pain."

Inside a fire burnt cheerily, and a kettle sung its happy and heartless

song. A tilted lamp plunged half the room into shadow and the air was

sickly with the smell of some anodyne.

"Is that Nelly?" said a voice from the shadow.

The girl bent over the bed and put her lips to the high bony forehead.

"You mustn't cry so, child. You always had such fat tears, Nelly.

There's one running in my eye now. Are you dressed?"

"Only ha-half."

"Get under the quilt, then. Be careful, child. I'm 'this side up;

fragile; with care.'"

"Dear Lady Anne, is it true what they say? Are you very ill?"

"My dear, I have about one chance in a thousand of ever walking the

streets again. It's all my own fault. I had an awful spill, child; none

of them know how bad it was. But what could I do? There was the gate

with some patent latch or other and I didn't dare get down. I'd never

have got up again. Pepper knew it was no use. He tried to roll his dear

old eyes back to tell me, bless his heart. And the off-hoof was just a

little lazy. Ugh! I'm very wicked, I suppose. Often, after lying awake

all night, I've had to bite my lip not to scream when some clumsy lout

put me up wrong. Once I was up, I didn't mind. But it was worth it.

Oh, Lord! it was worth it. One only has one life. I'd do it again. I'd

have been a poor creature, Nelly, without horses and dogs. They've

always understood me better than people. If there's a God for them,

He's good enough for me, and if there isn't I don't want one either.

Windy was shocked because I wanted to call a vet in consultation....

What did I want to tell you, child? Oh! I've been hearing tales about

you in the last week. Of course they're all lies. What's become of your

pirate friend?--don't pretend you don't know who I mean--Paul Ingram.

Wasn't that the creature's name. All over, is it? So much the better.

He was no good, Nelly. I saw that the night we talked together. A man

can't play beggar-my-neighbor with the world and win, and that's what

he wanted. Bryan's better, but I'm afraid he's spoilt another way. But

don't let a lot of old-woman talk frighten you away from him. There's a

lot of nonsense talked about girls' 'characters.' Every poor girl has

to take risks, and every poor girl's mother knows it. There's only two

rules. Never do what would lose you your own self-respect, and never

love a poor man for his handsome face. You won't, will you, child? You

know, when a person's dying they're allowed to make a deposition; so

here's mine: There's nothing matters on this earth but just--money.

You think every one knows that? Oh! they don't. It wouldn't do if they

did. So all sorts of other things--art and high ideals, and, yes--even

religion, are given 'em to amuse themselves with until it's too late.

Then, of course, they have to pretend they're satisfied. But give 'em

their chance over again; you'd see. And for a girl with a face like

yours it ought to be so easy. Oh, Nelly, what does your love matter if

_his_ buys you health and beauty fifteen years longer, and angel

children, and a house with lovely gracious rooms, and cool green lawns

in summer, and the winter in the sun, and motor-cars and horses, while

poorer women are scrambling and pushing and taking their turns for

'buses and trams in the rain, and a strong arm to help you whenever

you need it, and honor and peace in your gray hairs. My own life hasn't

been much, but think what it would have been for little ugly Anne

Caslon if great-grandfather hadn't dipped his fingers in the Irish

Exchequer. And yet--what am I saying?--if Nigel Barbour would have held

up his finger, Nelly, I'd have gone with him and cooked his meals and

washed his clothes in a garret----"

The nurse tapped Fenella on the shoulder.

"I think you'd best go now. She's been talking some time. I want to

settle her for the night."

She shook a bottle as she spoke and poured out a cloudy mixture into a

glass.

"Good-night, my pet! Do you remember when I taught you to read--'Ned

had a gad--' and you wanted to know what a 'gad' was, and I forgot to

find out. I'm afraid we shall never know now."

"I'll see you in the morning," murmured Fenella, as she kissed her.

Miss Rigby was on the landing outside, dishevelled, round-eyed, and in

a wrapper, asking news of her dear friend in a tragic whisper.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was because she cried herself to sleep that Nelly slept so

late. The house was all topsy-turvy, and by the time they remembered

to call her Lady Anne had been taken away. Her bedroom windows were

wide open and Twyford was strewing tea-leaves on the carpet as Fenella

passed the door. She had taken very little luggage--just a portmanteau

full of linen and a dressing-case, and two days later she went a longer

journey and took no luggage at all.

IX

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

Just as we are used to hearing from time to time that the lives of

certain great ones of the earth are insured for many thousands of

pounds in quarters which their demise will unsettle but certainly not

move to grief, so there are lives dismissed at their close with scant

obituary notice, the shadow of whose eclipse reaches far beyond the

covenanted few who wear mourning for their sakes.

The house in Suffolk Square never really recovered the shock of poor

Lady Anne's taking off. Her rooms, stripped of their household gods,

repapered and repainted, stood empty for weeks before Mrs. Barbour

could even be prevailed upon to notify their vacancy, and when she

did move, the paying guests whom they attracted were not of a sort to

efface the hard-riding lady's wholesome memory or to make her the less

keenly regretted. London is changing daily, and in nothing so much as

in the accommodation it offers the stranger within its gates. Cheap

hotels, the diseased craving for a veneered luxury, rapid transit

from outskirts to centre--all combine to render what was always a

precarious living well-nigh a hopeless one. In vain do old-fashioned

people, unable or unwilling to read the signs of the times, advertise

the family atmosphere to a public anxious to escape from it--quiet

and seclusion to a generation that droops unless it feels its spirits

uplifted by the wind and whirl of life. Between the tragic end of

the old dispensation and the final dispersion there was a squalid

interlude which Fenella never could recall in after years without

a sinking of the heart as at the memory of a ravaged sanctuary. A

dreadful Anglo-Indian _ménage_, which washed the dirty linen of

ten stations with doors and windows open; a grumbling _ayah_ whose

gaudy rags clung to her, like wet cloths to a clay model, and whose

depredations upon kitchen and larder on behalf of her screaming charges

drove cook to revolt. A prim flaxen-tailed family who practised upon

the piano all day by turns, and whose high-nosed parent did not think

Miss Rigby "respectable." Was she, indeed, respectable? Mrs. Barbour

had had her doubts from the first, and in spite of Lady Anne's breezy

assurances, or perhaps on account of them, had long suspected a secret

treaty of oblivion and protection between the two women. It had seemed,

however, to include a tacit clause against direct communication, and

with the new order the weaker woman appeared to see her way to break

through this restriction upon her social aptitudes. She contracted a

distressing habit of rapping at the doors of the first-floor rooms,

to borrow, to return, to remonstrate, to apologize for remonstrating.

Her friendship with little Mrs. Lovelace of Mian Meer, especially was,

until its stormy close, over a disputed bargain at a "White Sale," of

a suddenness and intensity calculated to revive a weakened faith in

human affinities. Even the mother of the musical Miss Measons, after

a glance at a skilfully disposed basket of calling-cards, called her

"my dear" before she called her "that woman." In short, to express in

one word a delayed and painful process, Jasmine Rigby deteriorated day

by day, paid at long intervals, under pressure, and with cheques that

were not her own, and finally, yielding no doubt to the instinct of

flight from those whose good opinion we have forfeited, took a tearful

and sentimental departure from the rooms which had been witness to

fifteen futile years, and God alone knows what frenzied resolutions,

what agonies of remorse and self-contempt as well. Financially, her

loss was a serious matter, for she had rich and powerful connections,

who might be trusted never to let her sink too deeply into debt nor

beyond a certain standard of outward respectability: in other ways it

would be idle to deny Mrs. Barbour felt it a relief. It afforded her

an opportunity to reduce her establishment and to sell off some of the

furniture. But the joy of turning our possessions into ready money and

of ridding ourselves of old associates who have become encumbrances is

a dearly bought one. It is likely that her health had been secretly

unsatisfactory for years. It failed visibly from the day poor Druce,

with the tears streaming down her honest wooden face, clasped her young

mistress to her sparely covered chest in the hall and said "Good-bye."

She had never been a good sleeper, but insomnia now became her nightly

habit. Her cheeks grew flabby, her eyes dull; her comely face exchanged

its pleasant pallor for a disquieting earthen tint.

Fenella would have been less than human if, amid all these anxieties,

regrets, and annoyances, Lumsden's letters had come to her otherwise

than as cheerful heralds from a happier world, bright assurances of a

better time in store. He wrote oftener than many friends, though not

as often as most lovers. He was generous enough or wise enough not to

depart from the note he had struck during their conversation upon the

day of winter sports at Freres Lulford. She was still his "investment,"

always "in training." And yet it was marvellous what a very wide field

of inquiry, of advice and speculation, this position was held to

justify. Her cheeks sometimes burned at Bryan's letters. Even when they

were mere cheery chronicles of sport and pleasure, there was a little

mocking undercurrent of sarcasm in them--sarcasm, as a rule, at the

expense of society's hypocrisies--its standards of what might and what

might not be permitted between two friends of opposite sexes, which she

secretly resented--resented, that is to say, to the extent of never

referring to it in her answers. Why should Bryan expect her to take the

more cynical view, she wondered? Surely illusions were permissible to

a girl of her age. What man who respected one, wished one well, would

see her cheated of them? Clever letters are seldom written without

ulterior motive. When heart speaks to heart it does so in language that

admits of no double construction. It would save many a tangle were more

sophisticated ones subjected to a merciless paraphrase.

For the rest, the time had probably passed when, in any sense of the

word, she could be said to be "afraid" of Lumsden. He stood before her

imagination now in all his pleasant power, holding open the gates of

the fairyland to which he had the golden key, encouraging, inviting

her to enter. Once through the gates, she had no doubt of her ability

to justify and to repay. That money can discharge any obligation was

just one of the obscuring simplicities of her youth. Another was that

a stigma attached to the acceptance of money or money's visible worth.

Beyond a cab-fare, she would have shrunk from such a thing as from

actual dishonor; yet that money, to the extent of many hundreds of

pounds, was being risked upon her untested power to please gave her

only a very vague sense of indebtedness. It is true that to Bryan's

personal interest she referred, with a completeness that was a little

unfair to Mr. Dollfus's really kind heart, the ameliorations in her

hard task--the warm dressing-room, the polite seriousness with which

her views were entertained by the leader of the orchestra, the chair

in the wings at rehearsals. She even fancied that she could detect a

conspiracy to keep the seamy side of theatrical life from her. Mr.

Lavigne, the stage-manager, never swore in her presence, though from

her dressing-room she often heard language whose very volume implied

profanity reverberate like stage thunder through the dark empty

auditorium.

When general rehearsals began in March, among her new comrades upon the

draughty, echoing boards, who stood blowsy or haggard in the perverse

up-thrown light and exchanged the knowing, raffish jargon of their

craft, there was abundant discussion as to her precise position, but

no doubt at all. It is a pitiful thing to relate, but Bryan even got

the credit of the clothes in which poor foolish Mrs. Barbour had sunk

the profits of her enterprise. Fenella's dress had always possessed

sophistication, and although by this time she was "economizing,"

enough of elegance remained from the old life to wreck her character

in the new. But where she was now such things were a common-place. The

misconception even was of use to her in one way. It removed her from

the envy of those who were struggling upward on the strength of mere

talents. Seen from the wings, her dancing made little impression upon a

race not prone to enthusiasm, and notoriously bad judges of their own

craft. She was to have the lime-light, the big letters on the bills,

the "fat"--that was enough. She was _hors concours_, a thing

apart. The latest recruit might dream, and did dream, of having the

same chance some day. A strange thing, that it should be not so much

"luck" which failure resents as the crown upon hard work.

By an unhappy coincidence, the first dress rehearsal was called

upon the day when her spirits were at lowest ebb. The night before,

her mother, unable to keep the secret locked up in her breast any

longer, had exposed with tears and incoherent self-reproach, the whole

disastrous domestic situation. It was all mismanagement, muddle,

abused confidence, rights signed away for a tithe of their value,

mortgages and life assurances effected in the interests of people whose

one service seemed to have been to draw the strangling net a little

tighter. Fenella closed the eyes of her mental vision firmly and wisely

against the disastrous prospect. She let her mother have her cry out

upon her shoulder.

"No, dear; of course I'm not angry with you, or only a tiny bit for

letting me be a foolish over-dressed little pig all these years.

We'll give up this great big house before it's swallowed all that's

left and move into a smaller one. They must give us something for

the lease. And I've got Lady Anne's money coming to me in two years.

We can raise something on that now. I'll speak to Mr. Dollfus about

it. And Mr. Lavigne told me the _Dime Duchess_ comes on early

in May; then I shall begin to draw salary, and all our troubles will

be over. And, mummy, you _must_ give those disgusting people

upstairs notice. Never mind what they owe. Turn them out! I'll live in

a garret with you, dear, but I won't have our home turned into a common

lodging-house."

But, for all her brave words, her own spirits sank. Was she so sure

of success, after all? To have so much depending upon it was only a

reason the more for misgiving. Dancing seemed to be in the air. The

flaming posters that met her eye on every side, of women in one stage

or another of uncoveredness, filled her with nausea. Nothing depresses

true genius so much as to feel that an inspiration with which they

could deal worthily is given broadcast, under various mean forms of

impulse or emulation, to those whose touch can only degrade. It is a

failing so like unworthy envy that even to be forced to admit it to

oneself is demoralizing.

When she reached the theatre a drama that was no part of the _Dime

Duchess_ was in progress. Miss Enid Carthew stood down centre. Her

dress was Doucet and her hat Virot. Her sable coat was open at the

throat and a diamond _collier_ streamed blue fire on her agitated

bosom. Her arm, thrust through a muff whose tails swept the dusty

stage, was akimbo on her slender hip. She had a pretty, dissipated,

sour face and a quantity of fair hair.

"Oh! I can't have it at all, Mr. Dollfus," she was saying, evidently

not for the first time, biting her lips and tapping the stage with her

foot. The manager, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, his back

to the footlights, straddled his legs in a truculent manner.

"You can't haf it!" he repeated, derisively. "Well, can yer lump it?

Ah! Think yer the only tin can in the alley, dontcher, eh? Think you're

de manachment, ain't it? I tell you once for all: I bills who I like,

unt I bills 'em as big's I like. Now then--ah! eh?"

"You can tell all this to my solicitor," said Miss Carthew, loftily.

The word seemed to goad Mr. Dollfus to frenzy. He took a stride

forward and shook a brown, ringed finger within an inch or two of Miss

Carthew's Grecian profile.

"Now, don't gif me no contract talk. Pleace--_pleace_ don't. 'Cos

I drew up de contract, and I know what's in um. You can't holt me on de

contract--see? You can go on rehearsing or you can t'row yer part down,

and that's all--now?"

"I've a good mind to do it."

"Vell, make yer goot mind up quick, pleace, 'cos this happens ter be my

busy day."

Before poor Fenella could retreat from the storm, the leading lady

looked her up and down with an expression that was meant for contempt,

but only succeeded in expressing dislike. The advantage of five years

is not to be annihilated by a glance.

"Another of Lumsden's kindergarten," she observed, with a short,

disagreeable laugh, and, having launched this Parthian shaft, exit left.

Mr. Dollfus turned upon the cause of the trouble rather irritably.

"Vot! aintcher dressed yet, neither. Good Got! ve oughter be t'rough

the first act. Run upstairs at once! And while we're waiting let's

haf the finale ofer again. I ain't satisfied yet, Mr. Lavigne. Come,

_kapell-meister_!"

Somehow, and by an effort of her whole will, Fenella got through her

two dances without actual disaster. For the first time in her life

discouragement failed to react in bodily movement. Her limbs felt

heavy--out of accord with the music, and, though this is a strange

term for arms and legs, maliciously stupid. Once she stumbled and

all but fell. Mr. Dollfus looked puzzled, and in the wings, where a

brisk murmur of sympathy with the deposed favorite had been running,

significant glances were exchanged.

She was leaving the stage-door, glad to be in the cool, wet street,

when a big man who was holding cheerful converse with an exquisite

youth--all waist and relaxed keenness--raised his hat and made a little

familiar sign with his head for her to wait. Next moment Lumsden

had cut his conversation short, resisting an obvious appeal for

introduction, and was holding out his hand.

"Hello, Flash!"

At another time she would have been glad to see him, but, with that

dreadful sentence ringing in her ears, his touch seemed an abasement.

She plucked her hand away.

"I thought you were in Cannes."

"Came back Tuesday. Had lunch?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Get in, then, and let me drive you home."

There was a dark green motor-coupé standing by the curb. Fenella took a

seat in it automatically. She noticed he had no difficulty in recalling

her address.

"I've been sitting in front watching you."

"I wish I'd done better. I made a fool of myself to-day."

"Oh, you were all right. Been over-working?"

She shook her head.

"Dolly told me there was a breeze. Hope it didn't upset you."

No answer.

"Bless you! That sort of thing's an everyday affair with us. Oh, fie,

Flash!"

"Sir Bryan"--and a big sob.

"Well, what is it? Having trouble with the boys?"

"I know you'll be furious."

"Never mind. Spit it out in mummy's hand."

"Don't make me laugh. I--I want to give it up."

"Pshaw!"

"Oh, but I do."

"What on earth for?"

She clenched her hands. "Because I feel such a _humbug_ coming on

this way. Those other girls have worked and worked and been acting when

I was at school. And now I step in front of them because--oh! you know

what they think."

"I warned you of that before, you know."

"Yes; but I didn't realize then."

"And now, because a spiteful woman has said the obvious thing, you do.

Oh, fie, Flash! This is weak-minded. I wish you knew her own history."

The girl turned to him, and even laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

"Sir Bryan, that's the mistake you make. You're always telling me--I

mean in your letters--what a hypocrite this person or that is. But

it doesn't make any difference to me. Of course, we understand one

another, don't we?"

"I think we've made a start," Lumsden replied, in all seriousness.

"Yes, but those girls at the Dominion--some of them even younger than

me. Think what I must seem to them. I can't go to them and say, 'Oh,

believe me, it's not what you think.' And so the more they admire me,

and the better I succeed, the greater scandal I shall be to them. And

perhaps, some day----Oh! it seems such a responsibility, doesn't it?"

"Such a big one, that I advise you to put it out of your head."

"Oh, if I could!"

"Well, don't do anything in a hurry. And, oh, by the way, Flash, I

believe I met an old friend of yours last night. World's a small place."

"A friend of mine? One of the people from Lulford?"

"Oh, no. Further back. At La Palèze. By George! that seems ancient

history."

His kind, candid expression did not change, and yet not a detail of the

girl's agitation was escaping him.

"Where did you meet him? Tell me, quick!"

"Don't look so scared. It was at a very nice house indeed, and he was

looking uncommonly well."

"Did you speak to him?"

"No. He hadn't much to say. It was at the Rees house, and he's

evidently _épris_."

"What's that?"

"Why, smitten with his pretty hostess--Mrs. Hepworth--the woman who

calls herself Althea Rees, and writes rummy books. He stayed behind.

I saw it arranged, like the fly, with my little eye. I finished the

evening with Nick Templeton, who knows 'em well, and he says every

one's expecting----Hello! here we are."

He held her hand again at parting, and this time she didn't snatch

it away. Once inside the door, she returned a languid negative to

the suggestion of lunch, and went upstairs to change her clothes and

think over what she had just heard. First she cried a little, though

nothing like as much as she had expected from the apparent weight at

her heart; then, opening her trunk, she took out a leather box and

emptied all his letters on to the hearth. So often, during that last

lonely week by the sea, when she was hungering for news of him in vain,

had she taken them down to the dunes to read, that there was almost

a teaspoonful of fine sand at the bottom of the case. She had even

been reading them over, she remembered, the day Bryan spoke to her

first. She sat down on the hearth-rug, struck a match, and, crumbling

each letter scientifically in her hand, burned piecemeal about half

her little hoard from the wrecked past. Then she lost patience and

locked the rest away. She was chilly; there had been no warmth in this

sudden eager flame. She stretched herself and looked once more at her

reflection in the long mirror. Her tears had thickened her features and

throat. Something strangely, suddenly mature--some new adaptibility to

life's sterner purposes--was looking back at her. She had wept--oh, how

she had wept!--before, and yet only yesterday with her tears it had

been the aspect of childhood that returned upon her. You would have

said then: "There is a little girl who has broken her doll"; not until

to-day: "There is a woman who has broken her heart." Was it so, indeed?

Had it survived the first, the crueller blow, to break now at a piece

of intelligence that was only to be looked for? Had there been hope,

insane and unavowed? And why could she not hate him, as was her right?

Why was it that only a brooding, yearning pity for him survived this

final evidence of his faithlessness? Oh! it was because life was so

hard on him--always would be so hard on him. Into whatever toils he had

fallen, she could forgive him, because she knew he had not been seeking

his own happiness when he fell. Just as she had never once conjectured

concerning the old loves, so now she hazarded no guess as to the

history of the new; but her woman's instinct, her appreciation of the

nature by whose complexities her clear, sane common-sense had refused

to be baffled, served her truly. It was still his compassion that sold

him into new bondage--still his fatal fellowship with all that was

weak, maimed or forsaken that, like a millstone round his neck, sunk

him out of her sight. Hate him? Oh, what an uprush of smothered waters!

What a tingling, as love like blood flowed back into her numbed heart,

rebuked the suggestion! She reached out her arms to the mirror, and

from its frozen depths, like an embodiment of all he had renounced in

life--happiness, love, laughter, and ease of heart--the woman whom he

had held shyly and awkwardly against his distracted heart, and whom

to-morrow a thousand base eyes would covet, reached out her arms, too,

in a mocking response.

"Oh, darling! why couldn't you trust me a little longer? Just because I

couldn't _say_ things, didn't I feel them? I was what you wanted

most. Just because I _was_ so different. Why weren't you a little

patient with me, Paul?"

And now for her work. There was another rehearsal next week, but she

couldn't wait. She would telephone Joe; have one called for Friday.

They should see something then. She had a bit up her sleeve.

She was leaving her bedroom, humming over the first bars of her

_Chaconne_, when she cannoned into the little maid who had

replaced the irreproachable Druce. The sleeves of the girl's print

dress were rolled up to her elbows, her cap awry.

"Frances, it's five o'clock. Why aren't you dressed?"

"Oh, miss! It's the missus."

"Your mistress? What's the matter with her?"

"Oh, miss, I dunno. She's a setting in the big armchair. It ain't

sleep. Me nor cook can't rouse 'er, try 'ow we may. She's a moanin',

too. I think it must be some kind of a stroke."

X

MONSIEUR DE VALBONNETTE

One of Paul's peculiarities, which I think I have indicated before, was

a remissness in paying out the small coin of friendship. His visits

were apparently governed by caprice, and as unaccountable as the fall

of the red or black in roulette. Not to have seen him for the last

month gave no warrant to expect him within the next. On the other

hand, to have been honored with a visit last night was some reason for

expecting a return on the morrow.

I had not seen him for two months when I ran across him in the foyer

of the Elite Theatre. It was the first night of Durnham's _Miss

Muffet_. (You will remember Brasier as "the Spider.") Things

apparently were inextricably tangled up for all the smart sinners,

and I was rather dreading the fourth act. I was surprised to see him

there, though I knew he had got into journalism. In the twilight of our

under-world one may know a man a long time before one knows what he is

doing--perhaps only discover it then because he is found nibbling at

the same loaf as oneself. I had never seen Ingram before in evening

dress; he looked very gaunt and foreign and distinguished. One mentally

added a red ribbon and the enamelled cross of the Légion d'Honneur.

"Hullo, Ingram! you a first-nighter?"

"I'm doing it for the _Parthenon_!"

"Oh! of course." Rumor had not lied, then. I had a horrible feeling

that my comment sounded "knowing," and a suspicion that Ingram flushed

at my tone. I made haste to change it.

"Lucky devil! You've got nearly a week to do Brasier's genius justice

in. What d'you think of it all?"

"Pah! London bouquet. Sin and sachet powder."

"You won't say that in the _Parthenon_?"

"No." I noticed then how tired he looked. The bell began to ring.

"Look here, old man! You're quite impossible, but I want a chat. Where

can you come on to afterward? Pimlico's so far away. What do you say to

the _Concentric_?" (I belong perforce to an "all-night" club.)

Ingram demurred. "No, thanks. I don't much care for the frescoes at

the _Concentric_. I've got rooms--a room, I should say--nearly as

close. It's not a bad little crib. Come round there as soon as you've

fired in your stuff." And I pencilled the address on my shirt-cuff.

Paul's room was at the top of a narrow, old-world house in Beak Street,

almost looking into Golden Square. A creeper wandered over the front,

and there were little painted iron balconies at each window. The first

floor was taken up by a bowed, weather-stained shop front, and behind

its narrow panes, on a rusty wire blind, appeared the following legend

in gilt lettering:

"J. FOUDRINIER

Table Liner and Leather Gilder."

The narrow staircase up which we climbed--for he let me in himself--was

fragrant with the smell that is said to make radicals.

"What d'you think of it, Prentice?"

"Fine! Atmosphere here, my boy."

"It might be worse," said Paul, apparently misunderstanding my remark.

"Imagine fried fish!"

I looked round me as he fought with a stubborn fire. The room was poor

and low; its furnishings mere flotsam of the Middle Victorian era. The

bureau and tallboy that I used to admire so much at Westminster were

gone. My heart sank a little. Paul wasn't getting on.

"Come over here a minute, Prentice," he said, getting up and taking the

lamp. "Look!"

Upon the old-fashioned shutter which folded back in the window recess I

made out a long name, clumsily cut and half obliterated by paint.

"What do you make of it?"

"It's not very distinct. There's a C and a V."

"I'll read it for you. It's '_C. Gaillard de Valbonette_.' That

thing at the top is meant for a coronet. Some French _émigré_

had this room a hundred years ago, and amused himself by cutting his

name. All this quarter swarmed with them at one time--Golden Square,

Broad Street, King Street. Can't you imagine him at work here for a

whole Sunday morning, with a nice pea-soup fog out in the square, and

speculating about his wife or sweetheart in the Conciergerie. He's

great company at times, is M. de Valbonette."

"I think you live too much alone, Ingram," I said.

He put down the lamp. "I wonder do I?" he said, twisting his beard.

"But it's Satan reproving sin."

"Let's club lonelinesses, then," I answered impulsively. "I know what

I'll have to put up with by now. Remember the old warning, '_Vae

Soli!_' If nothing else in the classics were true, that is."

"No," he said, roughly, "it's the wrong time. How can I afford a friend

when I'm throwing out ballast all around. And besides"--he seemed to

struggle with an invincible repugnance to speak--"Prentice, I'm living

on money a woman--gives me."

"Oh!" Shocked as I was, I tried to keep my voice flat and toneless.

Even as it escaped me, the exclamation was rather a request for further

enlightenment.

"You won't repeat your invitation now?"

I got to my feet. "Yes, I will. You can come to-morrow--to-night, if

you like. You're too good to lose, Ingram. I'm poor; but there's enough

for two men like ourselves to struggle along on, even now. I can get

you work of a sort almost at once; it'll be hack work, but you won't

feel equal to anything better for awhile. Later on, when you're more

yourself----"

Ingram shivered, and then, putting his hands on my shoulders,

considered me a long while gravely and tenderly. I could have cursed to

think of the charm of the man, wasted in loneliness and silence, and

put to such base uses at last.

"My! but you're _white_, Prentice, you're _white_," he said.

"Sit down"--in a lighter voice. "It's not as bad as it sounds. A man

doesn't fall into a pit like that so suddenly. No; at first it was

advances--advances; nothing more."

"On your book?" catching at a straw.

"Yes--on my book."

"From publishers?"

"I thought so at first. When I asked the question outright, it was too

late. I was in debt already."

"But, my dear Ingram," I said, immensely relieved; "if Mrs. Hepworth--I

suppose you mean Mrs. Hepworth----?"

"Yes."

"Well, if she liked to back her own opinion, I don't see where dishonor

comes in at all. She's helped other people. And even if, when it's

published, it turns out badly----"

"Prentice, it never will be published through her."

"Get it back then. We'll try somewhere else."

"I'm afraid I'd have some trouble even to get it back now."

The mystification was getting too much for me. I shrugged my shoulders

helplessly.

"I'm sorry to seem mysterious," said Paul, "but I really am telling

you all I know myself. I even hoped you'd be able to throw some light

on it. Because you know as well as I do how it started. She was

enthusiastic, wasn't she? Would see no fault. She advised me to cut a

good deal, it's true; but it wasn't for reasons I could object to.

Anyway I didn't object. I was too proud and happy. For once in my life

I tasted full appreciation, full understanding. Oh! I know what that

look of yours means--that I've been taking a woman's gush for gospel.

But, I can tell you, a thing rings true or false to me the first

time. Do you know, Prentice, once we were motoring to some place near

Aylesbury, and she went ten miles out of our way to see the church

where Ffoulkes--the English parson, you know--was a curate once. I'd

just picked on the place haphazard, and then described it later. You

know my mania for exactness in trifles. Nothing would satisfy her but

to get out of the car, have the church opened, and scout around the

vicarage. Now, is that genuine or isn't it? I tell you, sir, she made

the people of my own book live for me--used to invent comments for them

upon things we heard, so much in character that I wondered how I could

have forgotten them myself."

"And then----?"

"And then"--wearily--"the subject dropped. When I spoke about it, which

wasn't often, her answers were as evasive as a woman's can be who, I

think, can't lie. I'm not an insistent person, and she seemed to guess

it. Money got short: she guessed that too--offered me advances on the

publication. Ever so delicately, mind."

"That was the very time for the _éclaircissement_."

"I know, I know. Don't be too grim. For me it's almost impossible

to throw any sort of kindness back in people's faces. It's been

responsible for half the unhappiness of my life. Then she got me this

thing on the _Parthenon_. Lord, how I hate it! and the people it

brings me into contact with, and how they must hate me! Sleek young

barristers, on the make--you know the sort--dine out every night and

say, 'Dear lady.'"

"Ingram! I say 'dear lady' sometimes."

"Yes, yes--but not the way they do. A precious johnny-cake of an art

critic who wears thumb-rings and doesn't wash behind his ears...."

I hadn't been listening very attentively. A light was breaking in upon

me.

"You meet a good many priests at Mrs. Hepworth's, don't you?"

Ingram raised his hands expressively. "My dear Prentice, at all

hours--dinner, tea and lunch--bishops, deans, canons, monsignori. I

don't know half their titles."

"I gather you don't find them sympathetic."

"Prentice, I just writhe."

"Aren't they civil?"

"Oh, intensely! It's their mental attitude that maddens me. So

perpetually on guard, so impermeable to argument: bearing the

condemnation of the massed intellect of Europe with a pitying smile,

denying words their plain significance. What is it, Prentice? Is

every one else really wrong? Does to be born at Guipuscoa instead of

at Epworth make all the difference? Do these men know something that

you and I don't? Sometimes in their company I almost feel I'm under

mesmeric influence."

"Perhaps you are. I've always suspected you of being mediumistic. But,

tell me, don't you suspect anything from all this?"

"Suspect--what?"

"That your book is really being held up because these men won't give it

an _imprimatur_."

"Good Lord! I'm not one of their flock."

"No, but Althea is."

Paul flushed savagely, and muttered something I could not catch.

"Don't be too hard on her, Ingram. Probably her position's harder than

either of us can conceive."

"Don't be afraid. There are about a hundred solid reasons why I

couldn't be hard, even if I wanted to. Besides, I'm ceasing to care."

"Got the hump, in fact."

"Call it what you like. The book's become a scandal--a reproach. It's

a relief not to see or hear of it. Once a certain point is reached a

sense of humor comes to your rescue, and you cease to take a thing

seriously. Something else is worrying me far more just now."

"What is it?"

"You'll only think me an old woman for my pains."

"Never," I answered stoutly. "Your virility is in your way."

"Do you believe in dreams?"

"Not as a rule. But at two o'clock in the morning, alone with you in a

Soho attic whose associations you've just pointed out, I'm not so sure."

"I'm having the same one every night."

"Oh! What is it? A woman, or merely a tartan cat with acetylene eyes?"

"It's a woman."

"Go and see her then. Nothing will exorcise it like that."

"But it doesn't. Oh, Prentice! it's no use beating round the bush. You

must know. I mean the woman we've just been talking about."

I confess I had been rather thinking of the Continental Express at

Charing Cross.

"Go ahead old man," was all I said. "It will do you good to tell."

"It's in a church--always. A sort of foreign building with colored

marble columns, gloomy side chapels, silver lamps, dark paintings of

well-nourished virgin martyrs----"

"Wait a minute. Is it any place you've seen?"

"No. I'm sure of that.... She's always kneeling before one of the side

altars. I'm not clear why I'm in the church at all. I'm not meeting

her. Her back is turned, and she doesn't seem to know I'm there. And

yet, mind you, I feel--I'm as certain as a man can be that there's

something or other she wants to tell me--wants me to know. Something

she's struggling with, and I'm not to go until it's told."

"At this point you wake?"

"I used to until last night. Do I sound childish, yet?"

"I'm immensely interested, Ingram. No one but a gross fool laughs at

these things to-day."

"Well, last night I lost patience, and began to look around and to take

bearings. I noticed there was a way in between the chapels, so you

could pass from one to the other. I could get in front of her, see her

face if I wanted to. Of course I wanted to. I tell you, I was tired

out with all this nightly waiting. But something or other I couldn't

see--'a Voice,' if you like--said, 'No, you can't!' 'Why not?' I

argued. The answer was foolish."

"What was it?"

"'_It breaks the Law_'."

I moved restlessly. "But I hope you didn't mind the Law."

"No; I went in."

"Well----?"

He took a long breath. "Prentice, she's been dead for years and years."

"Pshaw!"

"Yes, dead, I tell you. There's nothing gruesome about it.

Just--bleached--whiteness. But you can't mistake. You'd only have to

lay your hand on her and she'd crumble away."

There was not a sound for a few moments, until becoming conscious my

expression must look strange, I grabbed the poker and began to make

brisk play with it. I also decided not to tell Paul I recognized the

church perfectly from his description.

"What do you think of it?"

"Think? Oh, nothing. It's some sub-conscious crazy notion that has

never been definitely formed in your own brain, so waits until you're

asleep to sprout. The same thing's happened to me. Once I was visiting

some people. They were so far disagreeable that one had to be very

careful what one said before them. And every night I spent in their

house I used to dream I was crossing the lawn, and underfoot, wherever

I walked, were ducklings, and frogs, and new-born kittens, and

everything that's most unpleasant to tread upon. You probably won't

have the dream again.... What's the matter?"

"Look over there, Prentice! Do you see anything queer?"

I followed his eyes in the direction of the window upon whose shutter

he had shown me the half-obliterated carving. To evidence my entire

honesty in this matter, I will premise that, having shifted the lamp

from the centre of the table in order to find me a pipe, Paul had

plunged all that half of the room in shadow, and also that the curtain,

which he had drawn roughly aside to show me the _émigré's_ work,

still hung in awkward, bulgy folds. This much having been freely

allowed, I don't mind going on and declaring that I saw, apparently

as plainly as I have seen anything in my life, a man sitting upon

the narrow window-seat. Every detail was distinct. He was as small

as a woman, apparently old, and dressed entirely in black, with a

white collar or cravat. One leg hung down to the floor, the other

was drawn up to his chin, and his face rested upon it. He had white

hair, gathered up or cut short round his ears, and a black cap. His

expression was unforgettable. Serene, disdainful anger best expresses

it.

I looked at him only a moment, for I don't believe in encouraging

visions. In two strides I was across the room and shook the curtain

loose.

"There goes some of your ghost," I said. I put the lamp back on the

table. Its white reflection vanished from the blurred and darkened

pane. "And there goes the rest!"

Paul didn't seem to listen. He was twisting his beard.

"See his face, Prentice? Now, I wonder what I said that irritated him?"

XI

"INEXTRICIBLE ERROR"

It was quarter to seven when Ingram arrived at the house in Portland

Place. Althea, already dressed for dinner, sat writing at her desk in

the big white room. It was the same desk, battered and inkstained, at

which years ago--a staid little maid with a big pigtail, terminating

in a sort of heavy tassel of auburn hair--she had prepared her home

lessons. At one corner the leather lining had begun to curl up.

She scarcely looked round when he was announced, but thrust a bare

white arm over the back of her chair.

"You find me achieving a last chapter," said she. "Sit down somewhere

and, in the name of our common art, respect a fellow-laborer's agony."

"I suppose I'm unpardonably early."

"Doubly privileged mortal, then, to find yourself welcome."

"Do I abuse my privileges, Althea?"

"Never in the world. You are as unobtrusive, my dear friend, as a gray

sky."

Paul, as he sat down by the fire, wondered why the phrase rang

reminiscently. Who had compared his eyes once before to rain-clouds?

Oh! he remembered. It was the little girl, in the summer-time, by the

sea. He seldom thought of her now; when he did, it was without such a

personal pang of loss as might have been expected. She had come--she

had gone. The life before he had known her, the life after, like parted

leaden waters in the wake of a ship, closed above her memory.

For form's sake, and in order that his presence might not fret his

hostess, he picked up a book at random and opened it on his knee; but

his eyes, after a few minutes' aimless reading, left the printed page

and rested on her. She was writing quickly. The fountain-pen poised,

pounced, ran forward, and was checked anew. A little pucker on her

forehead straightened out as each sentence was completed. The shaded

electric lamp before her left the brows in a green shadow, but flooded

neck and arms with naked light. She was dressed in black; a long limp

scarf the color of a dead rose-leaf lay across her shoulders, trailed

upon the carpet, moved with the motion of the restless bare arm. Her

beautiful chestnut hair was drawn up from her neck and dressed high on

her head in soft rolls and plaits. Looking at her, and remembering the

furnace through which she had passed, Ingram marvelled once again that

the searing flame should have left so little evident trace upon her.

He had come prepared for explanation, reproaches, rupture even, but

never in his life had he felt less ardor for battle, more doubt as to

whether the cause were worthy the warfare. Hope deferred, neglect,

dejection, had nearly done their work. He was beginning to doubt his

own powers, inclining more each day to take the world's estimate of

them as final. He had been writing a good deal lately, and to little

purpose; it seemed unlikely that, years before, he had done better. No

man endowed with the artist's temperament ever gained ease to himself

by deliberately writing down to some imagined popular level. It is

doubtful even whether the thing is to be done at all; probably every

one that succeeds, even in the coarse acceptation of the term, succeeds

by doing the best that is in him. The world may have no eye for genius,

but it is quick to detect disrespect.

It was early in March: he had known her now nearly six months. To say

that they had become better friends in that time would be inexact; it

is juster to say that, from the high level of her first acclaim, he

had never known her to descend. She had seemed to divine that he was

already sick of beginnings that led nowhere, and lacked patience for

the circumspect steps that friendship in the first degree requires.

From the outset she showed him a full measure. She had a multitude of

friends--much devotion, even, at her command. Here and there, amid the

exotic sentimentality that for some reason or other was the dominant

note in her circle, a graver, truer note vibrated; and yet, before he

had known her a month, Paul must have been obtuse indeed not to have

noticed a special appeal in her voice and a special significance in the

hand-clasp that was kept for him. And if he was not precisely grateful,

he was, at any rate, tremendously impressed. He had learnt her history,

and no adventitious aid that riches, popularity, fine clothing or

jewels--and none of these was wanting--could have lent her would so

overwhelmingly have presented her to his imagination as this. That she

should have emerged from such an ordeal at all was wonderful, but that

she should have come through it beautiful still, gentle and plaintively

wise, lent an almost spectral charm to her beauty, and the same

significance to her lightest comment on men or things that one strives

to read into a rapped-out message wrung from the dubious silence of the

grave. The strange unreality which none who knew Althea well escaped

noticing, though all did not call it by the same name, reached him,

oppressed as he was by the burden of the material world, almost like a

native air. In her house he breathed freely, forgot his chagrins, was

enveloped in a formless sympathy that, by anticipating the unwelcome

thought, spared him even the humiliation of uttering it.

Perhaps, without looking at him, she had guessed his thought now. At

least there was a little conscious gaiety in her voice as she laid by

her pen and packed the loose sheets square.

"_Voilà!_" said she. To speak French always carries the register a

key higher. She switched off the light, and moved to the seat opposite

him with a soft rustle of skirts. One finger-tip was marked with ink.

She put it furtively to her lips and streaked it, schoolgirl fashion,

down her black dress.

"Would you like to know who you are dining with?" she asked, taking

a slip of paper from the mantelpiece. "We're very worldly indeed

to-night. 'Marchesina d'Empoli, the Countess of Hatherley, Lady Claire

Templeton, Mrs. Sidney Musgrave.' Here! see for yourself."

As Paul glanced over the list, she put one slender foot on the curb of

the fender and pulled her skirt a few inches above her ankle.

"'Sir Bryan Lumsden?' Who's he?"

"A stock-broking baronet, sir, of my acquaintance."

"That's a lurid description."

"He's very good to my 'Sparrow Parties.' Do you know him, that you pick

him out?"

"I've seen him once," said Ingram slowly, pulling at his beard. "His

manners where women are concerned did not impress me."

She tapped the rail with her foot. "You are very unmannerly. Mustn't I

ask the world and the flesh sometimes?"

"What about the devil?"

She gave a tentative and rather frightened glance at his sardonic face.

"I think _he_ comes the earliest."

There was no mistaking her meaning. Paul put the slip back on the

mantelpiece.

"Don't you think," said he, speaking with equal intention, "that it's

as well even the devil should be allowed to state a case at times?"

"Perhaps--I don't know," Althea faltered in reply.

"Excuse me if I bore you. I don't ask often. Is there any news of my

luckless story?"

"Some one is reading it."

"Some publisher?"

"Not exactly. I--I wanted an opinion from some one who--from some

one----"

"Some one quite impartial, you mean?"

"Not quite that, either. From some one who is able to take a very

special point of view."

Ingram laughed grimly. "Why don't you get some of your worldly friends

to teach you how to lie?"

"_Sir!_"

He regarded her from head to foot and back again. Her cheeks

flamed--not altogether with anger. It was not unpleasant to be looked

at hard by him.

"Althea," he said at last, "suppose I told you I had come to-night to

quarrel with you?"

She turned with a strange, scared appeal in her eyes.

"Oh! I should beg you not to. Don't ever quarrel with me, Paul--please."

The artless speech was so unlike anything he had ever heard from

her--her voice, as she uttered it, so uncomfortably reminiscent of

another, whose vain pleading had only just ceased to vibrate in

his heart, that Paul had what may be best described as a moment of

sentimental vertigo.

He laid his hand lightly upon hers. "Dear Mrs. Hepworth, do you dream I

could be harsh with you?"

She did not move her hand from under his, nor appear conscious that

one chapter of their intimacy was irretrievably ended by the impulsive

moment.

"I only know I dread your anger. I suspect it can be awful."

"You shall never be sure, then. But reproof at least you must bear.

Althea, you have put me under an obligation that no man finds

tolerable."

Now she snatched her hand away. "Oh!" with a catch in her voice, "that

is unworthy of you."

"And you are keeping me from what is at least a chance to discharge it."

"It is not I who keeps you from it."

The blood rushed to Ingram's head. "Some occult tribunal, then--some

inquisition against whose unwarrantable interference my whole soul

protests."

"Hush!" for he had raised his voice. "I think I hear a ring. People

are beginning to arrive, and I must fly. Come down in about five

minutes--it will look better--and wait after the rest are gone. I think

you had best understand my position in this matter clearly. That much

is due you."

XII

A CATASTROPHE

Checked in mid-course, and with all his righteous indignation bottled

up, Paul, I expect, hardly found the "worldly" dinner a diverting

affair. He had reached the stage of mental development--a mid-way

one, be it noted--where types interest more than persons, and none of

those he met to-night aroused in him anything save a burning desire

for their speedy effacement. Lumsden did not appear to remember him,

which was hardly wonderful, considering the complete change of dress

and environment. Besides which the baronet was a man very much occupied

and in request throughout dinner. He was just back from the _Côte

d'Azur_, and was primed with the true inwardness of the approaching

Manby-Millett sensation. Lucy Millett was passing through Paris alone,

and thought it civil to leave a card on the only Mrs. Manby at the

_Superbe_ because she had sent her a wedding present. Mrs. Manby's

reputation hadn't reached her, it seems, which was hardly wonderful,

seeing Lucy was a daughter of the great Quaker sago-refining family,

and rather out of things. She had left her own card and her husband's,

and by a mistake of the clerk only the smaller card was handed to the

gay lady on her return. Result: that Lucy found a _petit bleu_

waiting when she got back from a round of the shops, which gave

everything away. "Most impassioned," Lumsden understood, on good

authority, and quite up to Manby form.

"And if you put that in one of your books, Mrs. Hepworth, people would

say there was too much--what d'you call it?--coincidence, wouldn't

they, now?"

It happened that Lady Robert Millett had been the first woman Ingram

had interviewed for the _Parthenon_. He remembered the sandy

haired girl-wife at Isleworth, with her high teeth, awkward kindness

and innocent pride, who had given him tea and, "as a special favor,"

shown him her white squirrels and blue-wattled Japanese fowl. Well--her

happiness was destroyed. He did not join in the laughter when some one

achieved a stammering, knock-kneed epigram in French; something about

_sagou_ and _sagesse_.

Captain Templeton had just won a seat for his party in a three-cornered

contest. He detailed with considerable verve the intrigues necessary

to induce a labor candidate to run and split the vote. The Liberal's

wife had social ambitions. "I hope we shall meet in town, Captain

Templeton," she had said after the poll. "We're Liberal; but

_naturally_ most of our friends are on your side of the house."

At the top of the table, with his noble old ivory-white face, silver

hair, and limitless shirt-front, their host sat, a fine flower of

democracy, and enjoyed his daughter's social success. His ponderous

civilities failed to absorb the little Italian marchesina on his right

(Gioconda, they say, of the _Fool's Errand_). Her heart was at the

noisy end of the table; continually, at some new outburst, she would

clap her tiny ringed hands autocratically for silence. "_What_ is

this? _What_ is this? I have not heard well." Things had to be

repeated, explained, for her benefit.

Paul was nearest the door, and rose to open it as the women passed out.

His hostess, who had barely addressed a word to him during dinner,

bent forward as she passed and reminded him of his promise. Lumsden

was the only man who seemed to notice the incident; and Ingram thought

he caught the tail end of a look of intelligence as he returned to

the table. But it was gone instantly, and presently the men drew to

the side next the fire and began to talk tariffs. Tongue-tied amidst

the women's chatter, their host easily dominated the conversation

now. He spoke of Republican prospects at the Mid-West conventions,

their intimate association with business prosperity, discussed the new

influences at Washington with good-natured banter, predicted worse

times before a "banner-year," hinted what was worth watching meantime.

The men listened to him intently--even Lumsden--carelessly, sipping

their coffee or rolling their liqueurs round and round in tiny gilt

glasses. Every word was golden now. Art, literature, philosophy, all

the visions that visit an idle mood, blew off like mists when the sun

mounts the sky. Paul, watching him in silence, felt an involuntary

respect, a pride despite himself, in their common nationality.

"You're force," he was saying to himself, "blind Titanic force--that's

what you are. And our business is with you and not with this trash

that cumbers the ground and obscures the issue; these parasites, who

imagine the things their own hearts covet were the incentive to men

like yourself, who corrupt you because they fear you, and with grave,

attentive faces are trying to make you believe now that there's great

personal merit in what you've been doing. You've sucked up riches from

a disorganized society that your energy took unawares, because you

couldn't help it, and you spend it on yourselves because you don't know

any better way. Well, we must show you one. The force that creates,

the wisdom that could distribute--these two are groping for each other

through a maze of laws, human and divine, that the world has outgrown.

They must mingle, must come together, must interpenetrate, and if

priests and judges hinder, then priests and judges must go. They were

made for man, not man for them."

"... so if you've bought warrants at sixty-three merely on the report

of divisions inside the amalgamation, you haven't done badly, Lumsden.

And now, Lord Hatherley, what do you say? Shall we join the ladies

upstairs?"

* * * * *

An hour later Ingram was alone with his host and hostess. His presence,

_ami de maison_ as he had become, did not restrain Mr. Rees from a

palpable yawn.

"You look tired, father," said Althea, putting her arm over his broad

shoulder. "What are you going to do? Mr. Ingram and I have something to

talk over."

"I think I shall read Lew Wallace for half an hour, honey, and then go

to bed. Have my hot milk sent to the study."

"Let us go upstairs to my own room," said Althea, when he was gone. "I

can always talk better there."

Ingram followed her, and, as she preceded him gracefully, something

forlorn and lonely in her face and figure struck him, over-receptive of

such impressions as he was. He thought she drooped. Once she stumbled

slightly.

She often wrote till morning, and the fire was still burning brightly

in her room. She took the strip of paper on which the names of her

guests had been written and, reading it over again, crumpled it in her

hand with a little gesture of disgust and weariness, and threw it into

the glowing coals.

"_Ugh!_" she said.

"Why do you have them, then?" asked Paul, more reasonably than politely.

"Oh!" impatiently, "you don't understand." She hesitated a moment.

"Don't you ever find such people strangely interesting yourself?"

"The least so of any class I've met," Paul replied, without hesitation.

"I mean--sit down, please--because they are so _free_."

"----of scruples?"

"Yes, of scruples, if you will. Don't you see as long as one has work

to do, or an ideal to follow, or conscience to consider, or a heart

even, one's life must, in a sense be incomplete, fettered, bound. One

must leave off in unexpected places--never go quite to the logical end,

never run the whole gamut."

"That's just as well, isn't it--for other people's sakes?"

"Perhaps. You don't read Newman, I suppose?"

"Never."

"He speaks, in one of his poems, of 'A secret joy that Hell is near.'

Now, he was a great saint, Mr. Ingram; no Augustine, but one of the

predestined of God's love, who never in the whole course of their lives

commit a vile act, say a vile word, nor probably entertain an ill

thought. And yet, you see, he felt it."

She had taken out her handkerchief, and was twisting it nervously into

a rope.

"'_A secret joy that Hell is near!_' That's what I feel at times.

That's what I've been feeling all to-night, as I listened to those

people. It's wicked, I know. It's even a refinement of wickedness."

"I think it's nerves."

"Oh, no, you don't. I won't submit to that kind of talk from you--but

I'm not keeping you from bed to discuss my temperament. About your

story: I'm so sorry I can't help you to publish it."

"Owing, I gather, to its religious views?"

"Why deny it? Yes."

"As exemplified in the Rev. Mr. Ffoulkes, the Salvation Merchant?"

"Oh! don't laugh. It's terribly serious. You have--I don't know where

you learnt it--such a terrifying plausibility in your case against

Providence. Nothing strikes at faith like a perverted mysticism."

"Name one instance!"--a little bitterly. "I'm beginning to forget what

I did say."

"Well, you say that the most obvious result of punishment is to destroy

the sense of guilt."

"So it is."

"Yes--perhaps. But----"

"In short, one may bear witness for your God, but not against Him?"

"I know I must sound illogical to you. It is so hard to explain."

"Don't try, please."

She was silent awhile, staring into the fire. "Mr. Ingram, you've

heard, perhaps, that my life has not been a happy one.

"A word here and there. _Que sais-je?_"

"Exactly. What do you know? What can any one know of it? Imagination

even couldn't do justice to the whole truth. I came out of it not

desolate, alone; not only sick of body and soul, but even degraded.

Yes, I mean it. A degraded wretch--that's how I saw myself. The poor

street-walker seemed a clean and honorable thing beside me."

"And so you became a Catholic. Is this the usual way into the fold?"

"It is, for many. Yes," she went on, with a strange glow in her eyes,

"for those who have endured great wickedness as for those who have

committed it, God be thanked, there is one respirable medium left on

earth. Call it what you will--a hospital of sick souls, a home for

moral convalescents."

"I call it nothing. I take your word for it. Does this account for the

decrepitude of so much of your doctrine?"

"Ah! don't be clever, Paul. Cleverness is a little thing. At least I

should be loyal to that in which I have found peace, self-respect, a

new life."

"You misjudge me, Althea. I grudge you none of your comfort. God is

true if He's true for you, and He's true, for you, if the thought of

Him gives you peace."

There really seemed nothing more to say, and he got to his feet.

"Send along my manuscript," he said, "whenever it's convenient, and

dismiss the matter from your mind. It makes no difference."

"Why are you in such a hurry to go?" she asked fretfully, and put her

hand to her head. She seemed to sway.

"Are you ill?" Ingram asked, coming across and standing beside her.

"My head went queer suddenly," she said. "It does that lately. It's

fatigue, I think. Listen to me, Paul Ingram. I want to strike a bargain

with you."

"Well."

"I want to buy 'Sad Company' myself."

"In order to destroy it?"

No answer.

"And at what do you assess the damage, moral and material, to your

creed that its suppression will avoid. Come, now! just for curiosity's

sake."

"Five hundred pounds--a thousand if----"

He interrupted her brusquely. "You must have taken leave of your

senses. Do you think I'm to be bought? Burn the thing yourself, if you

like--burn it in the name of whatever god it offends--but don't impute

dishonor ever again to a man, even to a man that doesn't believe in

Him."

She caught at his sleeve. "Oh, but you must have some money for

it," she said, incoherently. "You must--you must! Don't rob me of a

pleasure. You've travelled the world over, but you don't know what

poverty in London means. Why, only to-night, as I looked down the

table and saw your face so--so proud and fine, and thought how little

stood between you and--there! I won't even name it. But don't be

stubborn--for my sake. Because you must have money; you must have

money, dear."

At the last word he took her in his arms.

"Let me go!" she whispered, pushing him away with all the poor force

of her bare arms. "I didn't mean this. Oh! believe me. Upon my honor I

didn't--nothing like this, Paul."

Ingram only drew her closer. "Stop struggling," he said, with

authority. "That's better. Now then--kiss me properly."

XIII

NEW WINE--OLD BOTTLE

When the Reverend Antony Vernon, on the very morrow of a controversy

whose issue was hailed variously in various quarters--here as a

triumph and as a scandal there--forsook his fellow's rooms in Wadham,

his parish of St. Hedwige, and the Hernandes Ethical Lectureship, to

take the old, old beaten track toward the City of the Seven Hills and

intellectual disenfranchisement, beyond a languid wonder as to what

might await him in the less indulgent fold his migration aroused little

interest. Excommunication or a cardinal's hat? Either, it was felt,

might be the crown of his new career. He took no disciples with him in

his incontinent flight, and he left no spiritual orphans to bewail his

loss. No vindication of the strange step was ever published by him, and

it cannot be pretended that his reserve balked any very keen curiosity.

After all, had not the question been worn threadbare--to rags--years

ago? To the fervor of the 'forties a generation had succeeded too weary

of dogmatic strife to account for its own actions, far less demand

an account from others; satisfied, in short, since it saved time and

trouble, to accept the plea of impulse in full extenuation. During the

traditional nine days, it is true, his motives were guessed at idly in

the Common Room. Intellectual despair, said one; another, a recoil from

the abyss to which a will to believe with the minimum of revelation

always leads; a third might hint at reasons more personal and intimate

still. None knew; and, when a few weeks had passed, none cared. The

Reverend Antony Vernon was absolved and forgotten.

After his ordination in Rome, Archbishop Manning, who had been an

old Oxford friend of his father, gave him a curacy in the northeast

of London, in a district which had not then acquired its present

sinister reputation, but was beginning to earn it. The mission itself

was an old one, founded in the days of captivity and bishops _in

partibus_; so much the fabric witnessed, a square box-like structure

of hard yellow brick, with a stucco portico, and on each side four

round-headed, narrow-paned windows of pinky-white glass, obscured by a

wooden galley, and, on the side that faced the street, still bearing

traces of some sort of wash which had once discreetly veiled the

mysteries within. And yet, in its unpretending ugliness, the humble

fane did not lack a certain charm denied to the great Gothic barn that

has replaced it. It had been built upon the site of what had been a

city merchant's suburban estate in the days of hoop and powder. Upon

the side furthest from the street, two or three of the old garden trees

had been spared, which of a sunny afternoon, according as the season

lay, stained the clear panes a tremulous green and gold, or fretted

them with an uneasy tracery of tangled branches. One guessed that,

within the memory of man, before the city had spilled its desolating

overflow around and beyond, gardens had bloomed--orchards borne fruit

beneath these weather-stained walls, the odors of the hayfield stolen

in at times and mingled its incense with that of the altar. For with

cities it is as with the generations of men--new buildings upon which

the old have gazed carry on, when they themselves have grown gray, the

tradition of all that has been demolished and displaced around them.

"I am sending you into great temptation, Vernon," Manning had said

to him at parting. (He had opened his heart to his superior, and

there were no secrets between the two men). "The mission is the most

difficult in the whole archdiocese. Since the trams were built the

East End is pouring its cramped population into it in thousands. The

old respectable families are leaving, in absolute panic, as soon as

they can sell or surrender their leases. There will be no better centre

in three or four years' time for a great missionary effort; but until

Swinton dies or retires nothing much can be done. You will have need

of all your faith and of all your tact. Abroad you will encounter

an animalism such as you cannot have conceived possible; at home, a

creed almost without love, and to which only the darker side of the

revelation seems to have been vouchsafed. Get to know your people

quietly; watch your armor, and--pray! And, above all," he continued,

laying a hand that was already ethereal upon the young don's shoulder,

"above all, Vernon, never despair of the poor. Don't be appalled by

anything you see or hear. The degradation is great, but it is my

experience it seldom reaches down as far as the soul. A word will work

conversion here--a week's illness make a saint. It is far, far easier

to wash the filth off of them than it is to heal the ulcer of the rich,

or purify the intellect of men like you and me. It is God's crowning

mercy to his elect. 'Blessed are the poor!'"

Vernon quickly discovered that the difficulties had not been

over-rated. Father Swinton, the missionary rector, was a scion of an

old Northumbrian family. His eccentricity, probably congenital and

the result of long continued intermarriage, had been heightened by

a solitary life until it reached a pitch that was almost monomania.

Beneath the outward uniformity which Catholic discipline imposes he

concealed a fanatical Jansenist heart. He was perhaps the last of a

generation of priests who took a perverse pride in the insular and

secluded character which three centuries of persecution had impressed

upon the Roman communion in England. He boasted of never having made a

convert, and resented the new expansiveness as a personal grievance. He

never returned to his "chapel"--you would have earned his resentment

by calling it a church--from a visit to more pretentious missions

without experiencing a stealthy joy in his own square, painted pews,

his railed gallery and bare altar, flanked only by two small plaster

statues which a great lady, stubborn as himself, had imposed upon him

as the price of peace. Two of his many aversions he made no attempt

to conceal: he hated Irish curates, and he hated the beautiful modern

devotion of the Sacred Heart.

"God bless my soul, Vernon!" he cried, one evening, shortly after

the arrival of the new curate, waddling into the dining-room after

benediction. "Do you know what's just happened me? No? Well, sir, a

woman came into my sanctuary just now--my very sanctuary, sir!--as I

was covering the altar, and asked me to bless a piece of red flannel

for her--a common piece of red household flannel, sir, cut into the

shape of a heart. Called it her '_Badge_!' I said: 'Take your

blasphemous piece of red flannel home, ma'am! It's too small for a

chest-protector, so make a penwiper of it. God bless my soul! haven't

you seven sacraments?'"

Far from being shocked, the archbishop laughed at the story until the

tears ran out of his watery blue eyes.

"Dear old Swinton!" was all his comment; "last of the Gallicans!"

Vernon was early struck by the gaiety and love of fun among his

fellow-workers in the vineyard.

As for the curates: he discovered he was the successor to a long line

whose misplaced fervor and attempts to familiarize the channels of

grace had brought them into collision with the heady old man.

"_Four--times--a--year_, Mr. Vernon," his rector would assert,

bringing the palm of his hand down on the table at each word. "Four

times a year, sir, and no more, if I had my way. And the three

months in between all too short to prepare for the reception of

this tremendous"--at the word something that was almost ecstasy

descended upon the foolish old face--"_tremendous_ Sacrament!

Besides"--fretfully--"none of 'em knew how to eat like gentlemen."

Perhaps on account of his superior table manners, perhaps for other

reasons, Vernon's enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the proselyte--was

condoned. Often during his strenuous later life he looked back upon

those three years of curacy as perhaps the happiest he had known. If

he might not sow the seed broadcast, at least he could sow and tend

it in his own heart. He loved to read his breviary of an afternoon,

pacing up and down between two green matted grass lawns, under the

creeper-covered wall of the meek little house of God. The sun,

filtering through the tender leaves of the plane trees, made a dappled

puzzle-pattern on the broad flagged walk at his feet, or, if the season

was late, he crisped their shed vesture beneath his low buckled shoes.

Often, as his lips moved in the prayer that he had now got by heart,

his eyes, wandering from the familiar page, would map out by the line,

and square the foundation of his settlement--his bustling citadel of

the friends of God--so soon to arise in the great wilderness, blotting

out this selfish little oasis of peace and stillness forever. This very

walk the vault of a chancel should cover--vast, imposing, lined with

glowing chapels that pictured in fresco and mosaic the hard-won battles

of the Church militant--draped with embroidered banners of guild and

confraternity. Here, at the ivied presbytery gable, where a mob of

sparrows, heedless of impending change, were repairing their frail

tenements of straw, the gymnasium should stand, with a dining-hall

above, where from henceforth his daily meals should be taken in the

company of the starving and the outcast; of the workless man, hovering

with amazement upon the brink of crime; of the felon, still sore from

the stringent hand of earthly justice; guests gathered at his Master's

bidding from highway and byway, and set down with the broad robe of

charity over their bowed shoulders. And once a week at night, when

chairs and benches had been cleared away, the piano should tinkle and

the fiddle tune, and lads and lasses, in whose perverse minds guilt and

gaiety had become convertible terms, should learn the religion of joy,

and dance the devil out of their souls.

These were his dreams during three years. And yet, in his imagination,

susceptible as a woman's to any influence of beauty and grace, and,

like a woman's, sworn foe of all that is ugly and irrevocable in

life, the quiet close was full of voices that reproached him for

their outcasting. He used to pray against his weakness at night, when

confessions were over and the church closed. Horse-cars jingled past

the doors. The windows shook with raucous oaths; with cries of buyers

and sellers in the market outside, from mouths furred with blasphemy

and filthy talk; the naphtha flares threw strange, troubled shadows

over the doomed pews and galleries.

Father Swinton fell ill in the middle of the third year, and after

lingering a few months, died rather suddenly. At his death it was

discovered that his private charities had been unbounded, and had

eaten up all his inheritance. He left nothing of his own behind, save

a family genealogy, in which the connection between the Swintons

of Dimpleshall and the Swintons of Blacklash is clearly traced--a

connection which, it would appear, Mackenzie, in his "View of the

County of Northumberland," has been at pains to dispute, and a bound

manuscript, much thumbed, of meditations on the Passion. The projected

work had hardly waited on his death; indeed, Vernon was called to his

superior's agony from a consultation with his architect. No man's

dream is ever realized; but within two years a good deal of his was

an accomplished fact. Vernon was a wealthy man, and, when his own

money was spent, a consummate beggar. The dining-room, the schools,

the gymnasium, the dispensary, and the old folks' hostel took shape

one by one, amid discouragement, covert sarcasm, and abundant prophecy

of failure. The trees fell, the chapel was gutted and torn down as

completely as ever by Gordon rioters; the presbytery, with its panelled

chambers, went the same way; the sparrows took to a dusty wing and,

as covenanted servants, let us hope found sanctuary elsewhere. Last

of all, the chancel, gaunt and bare as yet, a mere shell and outline

of all it should be, but imposing if only by virtue of its bulk, with

traceried windows, flying buttresses, clerestory and triforium,

towered over the wet slate roofs that smoked sullenly all day, like a

slaked furnace, beneath its feet. At the centre of the cross, where

the long chancel met the truncated apse and aisles, an octagonal lead

lantern, lit by eight round lunettes, took the place of tower and

spire. It was at this lantern that men stood to stare; toward it that

the whips of passing van and 'bus drivers inevitably were pointed for

many a long day. For there, set up too high for any to escape His

appeal--a symbol of hope to the hopeless, a fable to the scoffer, a

source of irritation to the Pharisee, lit up at night by two coronals

of electric light that encircled the pierced feet and haloed the

drooping head--the Man of Sorrows watched the sorrowing city, and

plucked His vesture aside to show the wounded and flaming breast--the

Sacred Heart, beneath.

At fifty-eight Canon Vernon would have been a strange portent in the

Common Room at Wadham. He had gained sanctity, but there is no denying

he had lost polish. One cannot sit to table habitually with the outcast

and not become either a little self-righteous or a little disreputable;

and nothing could ever have made Antony Vernon self-righteous. He had

a brown, seamed face, on which the lines of humor and pain crossed and

intercrossed; the loose, mobile mouth of the great actor he might have

been; piercing black eyes, an untidy thatch of dark hair whitening only

at the temples, and thin, sensitive nostrils rimmed with snuff. Snuff

also liberally besprinkled the breast of his shabby cassock. There

had been, three hundred years back, an ancestor who wrote himself M.

de Vernon, and, in reverting to the ancestral faith, Vernon seemed

to have reverted a little to the ancestral type. He had no apparent

austerities, was fond of a certain brand of white wine which grocers

do not stock, and when his young men saw him in his private room,

gave them, together with absolution, an Egyptian cigarette that was

no part of their penance. His life is now matter for biography. In

the district which is bounded roughly by Kingsland Road on the west

and Hackney Road on the south, and which may be said to have London

Fields--a rather tuberculous "lung"--for its centre and playground,

it was even then matter for legend. Upon some of the legends his own

comments were flippant, and we should probably err in attaching greater

importance to them than he did himself. In speaking of his spiritual

influence we are on safer ground. Very few--perhaps none quite--had

ever withstood this. It was the old, old test. Power "went out" from

him. Very unjustly, the worship of which he was the object did not

extend to the hard-working curates with whom he surrounded himself. His

delivery in the pulpit was bad, his writing all but illegible, and, as

he never had time to prepare his sermons for the press, a good deal

has perished that deserved to survive. We preserve a few fragments,

however, as characteristic of his peculiar train of thought.

"_Of love_:

"There is no way to love God but through His creatures. It is

through admiration of the work that we must be brought to the

artist. But often the one condition upon which our love can stay

sinless is that it shall stay silent."

"_Of suffering_:

"There is a genius in suffering as in all else. The confessor may

labor with Christ, the martyr be crucified with Him; it is the

artist alone who can understand or share the agony of Olivet."

"_Of sacrifice_:

"The history of Cain and Abel is full of significance to us. It is

not of the things that renew themselves year by year that God would

have us make our offering. To be acceptable to Him the sacrifice

must be irreparable."

Despite his gaiety, his personal pessimism was unbounded. He was taken

to task for it once by a burly and breezy Jesuit.

"After all, Vernon, God is Lord of life as well as of death."

"True," replied Vernon, as though speaking to himself. "But with a

perceptible bias toward death."

* * * * *

He maintained that while it was our duty to resist all temptations,

there were some so overwhelming that our responsibility was ended when

we asked God to keep them out of our way.

* * * * *

He used to say that the crowning humiliation of the saints was to know

their lives would be written by the devout.

* * * * *

Once upon his return from examining a school taught by religious, he

was observed to be preoccupied, and was asked the reason.

"I was thinking," he said, "that few indeed are to be trusted with the

credulity of childhood."

* * * * *

Of a noted atheist who was very charitable, he remarked: "G---- gives

alms for the hatred of God."

* * * * *

After leaving Oxford his remarks seldom strayed beyond the sphere of

his new duties. When they did, they were apt to be rarely illuminating.

He said of France, for instance: "Four words give us her genius and her

history--'Often conquered, never ashamed.'"

* * * * *

He used to declare that, in striking a balance between a man's

happiness and unhappiness, time was not to be taken into account at

all, because men live all their lives every day of their lives.

* * * * *

Religion, he observed, had an advantage that had not escaped the

worldly mind. There is no other ideal which a man can live for and live

on at the same time.

XIV

SOME THEORIES--AND A WAY OUT

He was sitting in his study late one windy March Saturday when Mrs.

Hepworth was announced. He had been in his confessional all the

evening. A half-finished letter lay on his blotting-pad, but he had

turned away from it and was warming his stockinged feet at the fire.

She was heavily veiled, but he divined a crisis at a glance.

"Are you very busy?" she asked, in a smothered voice.

"Very idle," he answered gaily. "The appearances of industry are

deceitful. I was really--don't tell--toasting my toes. Are you in any

trouble?" he asked in a graver tone, taking her hand in both his.

She nodded, but did not speak. He drew an arm-chair to the fire, and

poked a great lump of coal into a blaze.

"There, there!" said he. "Sit down and have the cry out. I have a

letter to finish and another to write. By the time they are both done

you will be calmer."

He went on with his writing; re-read, sealed, and stamped the two

letters, rang the bell, and, when it was answered by one of the mission

lads, carried them to the door himself. When he turned to her again the

worst was over. She was drying her eyes. He leaned forward and patted

her hand.

"What a big baby we are!"

She returned him a spasmodic smile. She was conscious of a tear-stained

face--possibly a red nose. But then, he was a priest. That made a

difference.

"And now, what is the trouble? Has invention given out? No? Come, come

then, everything else is bearable, isn't it? If I were an imaginative

writer, that fear would never leave me, and would end by paralyzing my

pen. I should have stage-fright every time I sat down opposite a sheet

of paper. It has always been less of a marvel to me that a novel should

be finished well than that it should be finished at all."

Althea hardly listened. She was wondering how she should express

the things of this world in terms that a man of the other should

understand; a necessity--let the prurient believe it or not--that makes

confession a dry business for all parties.

"Father Vernon, has it ever occurred to you that I am a woman as well

as a writer?"

"My dear, a very charming one."

"At least an honest one. Three years ago, you will remember, I came to

you on quite an impersonal matter. You divined an inward trouble--saw

that I had missed the peace which passes understanding, and offered

me--how delicately, I shall never forget--your aid to attain it. I

refused it. You never would guess what the refusal cost me."

"My dear----"

"Yes, yes; let me go on. I must have seemed churlish. But if principles

are to be anything beyond mere idle words, they must be held to; and

one of mine is that for a woman to invite sympathy is only a degree

less shameful than for her to beg for love. The way of the devout woman

with her director is hateful to me. This unseemly self-revelation from

week to week is treachery--treachery to her own heart and to those whom

she takes into it. Am I very heretical?"

"Oh, my child! How it would lighten my task were there more who thought

like you."

"Before I left, you bade me, if ever I was in great trouble, to come to

you again. And now----"

"Now the time has come?"

"Yes." She rubbed her hands nervously one over the other. "I am in

great straits."

"Is the way growing dark or only hard?"

"Oh, _hard--hard_!" she moaned, rocking a little backward and

forward.

She looked up in his face and saw her trouble was guessed. When the

will to help and the powerlessness meet upon a face that regards us

tenderly we read our fate written there in letters of fire.

"Yes," she went on, as though he had spoken. "I am a Catholic: I am a

divorced woman whose husband lives, and I am in love--in love with all

my heart, and soul, and strength."

"The man? Is he free?" Vernon asked, perhaps for something to say.

"Yes. I thank God, whose captive I am, that he at least is free."

"He understands your peculiar position?"

"He understands nothing."