THE WALL BETWEEN
"The child has brought us luck--luck at last, Mildred," Dr. Carruthers
was saying, a few hours later. "When I lifted her in my arms she was as
light as a feather. A poor little shabby, overworked thing, all eyes,
and too big a forehead. Her boots were broken, and I noticed that her
fingers were rough with hard work."
He was walking up and down his wife's drawing-room in a tremendous state
of excitement, while she smiled at him from the sofa.
"It is wonderful, coming just now, too, when I had made up my mind that
we couldn't keep afloat here much longer, and had resolved to give up
this house at the September quarter and retire into a dingier part of
the town. Once it is known that I am Lady Anne Hamilton's medical man
the snobs of the neighbourhood will all be sending for me."
"Poor Dr. Pownall!" said Mrs. Carruthers, laughing softly.
"Oh, Pownall is all right. They say he's immensely wealthy. He can
retire now and enjoy his money. If the public did not go back on him
he'd be a dead man in five or six years. He does the work of twenty men.
I pity the others, the poor devils who are waiting on fortune as I have
waited."
"There is no fear of Lady Anne disappointing you?" she asked, in a
hesitating voice. She did not like to seem to throw cold water on his
joyful mood.
"There is no fear," he answered, standing midway of the room with its
three large windows. "She is coming to see you, Milly. If I have failed
in anything you will succeed. You will see me at the top of the tree
yet. You will have cause to be proud of me."
"I am always proud of you. Kit," she said, in a low, impassioned voice.
Meanwhile, Lady Anne herself had made a pilgrimage to Wistaria Terrace
in the hour preceding the luncheon hour. She had left Mary in a deep
chair in the big drawing-room. Outside were the boughs of trees. From
the windows you could surprise the secrets of the birds if you would.
The room was very spacious, with chairs and sofas round the walls, a
great mirror at either end, a paper on its walls which pretended to be
panels wreathed in roses. The ceiling had a gay picture of gods and
goddesses reclining in a flowery mead. The mantelpiece was Carrara
marble, curiously inlaid with coloured wreaths. There was a fire in the
brass grate, although it was summer weather. The proximity of the trees
and the natural climate of the place meant damp. The fire sparkled in
the brass dogs and the brass jambs of the fireplace. The skin of a tiger
stretched itself along the floor. The terrible teeth grinned almost at
Mary's feet.
The child was sick and faint from the pain of having her arm set. She
lay in the deep sofa, covered with red damask, amid a bewildering
softness of cushions and rugs, and wondered what Lady Anne was saying to
Mamie. Mamie was Mrs. Gray. From the first Mary had not called her
Mother. Her name was Matilda, and Mamie was a sort of compromise.
Meanwhile, Lady Anne had gone out by her garden, through the stable, and
into the lane at the back. There was a little door open in the opposite
wall; beyond it was a shabby trellis with scarlet-runners clambering
upon it.
Lady Anne peeped within. A disheartened-looking woman was hanging a
child's frock on the line which was stretched from wall to wall. Three
children, ranging in age from two to five, were sitting on the grass
plot. Two were playing with white stones. The third was surveying its
own small feet with great interest, sucking at a fat thumb as though it
conveyed some delicious nourishment.
"Do I speak to Mrs. Gray?" asked Lady Anne, advancing. She had a
sunshade over her head, a deep-fringed thing with a folding handle. She
had bought it in Paris in the days of the Second Empire.
Mrs. Gray stared at the stranger within her gates, whom she knew by
sight. There was some perturbation in her face. She had been worried
about the unusual duration of Mary's absence. Mary had not come back
with the market basket which contained the children's dinner. At one
o'clock the four elder ones would be upon her, ravening. What on earth
had become of Mary? The poor woman had not realised how much she
depended on Mary, since Mary was always present and always willing to
take the burdens off her stepmother's thin, stooped shoulders on to her
own.
Now she caught sight of the market-basket. One of Lady Anne's
white-capped maids had come in and deposited it quietly.
"Mary?" she gasped. "What has become of Mary?"
"Pray don't frighten yourself," said Lady Anne. "I have a message
from Mary. She is at my house. As a matter of fact, she met with an
accident. There--don't go so pale. It is only a matter of time. Her arm
is broken. She got it broken in saving the life of my little Maltese,
who had strayed out and had got in the way of the tram. I always said
that those trams should not be allowed. The tracks are so very
unpleasant--dangerous even, for the carriages of gentlefolk. There is
far too much traffic allowed on the public highways nowadays, far too
much. People ought to walk if they cannot keep carriages."
She broke off abruptly and looked at the three small children.
"These are yours?" she asked. "They seem very close together in age."
"A year and a half, three years, four years and three months," said Mrs.
Gray, forgetting in her special cause for pride her awe of Lady Anne.
"Dear me, I should have thought they were all twins," said the old lady.
"How very remarkable! Have you any more?"
"Four at school. The eldest is nine. You see, they came so quickly, my
lady. Only for Mary I don't know how I should have reared them."
"H'm! Mary is very stunted. It struck me that she would have been tall
if she had had a chance. Those heavy babies, doubtless. Well, I am going
to keep Mary for a while. How will you do without her?"
Mrs. Gray's faded eyes filled with tears.
"I can't imagine, my lady. You see, we have never kept a servant. When I
lived at home with my Mamma we always had three. Mr. Gray has literary
attainments, my lady. He is not practical."
"I can send you an excellent charwoman," Lady Anne broke in, "for the
present. I will see what is to be done about Mary. The child has
rendered me an inestimable service. I must do something for her in
return. By the way, she is not your daughter?"
"My stepdaughter."
"Ah, I thought so. Well, the charwoman shall come in at once. She can
cook. Later on, we shall see--we shall see."
"By the way," said Lady Anne, coming back with a rustle of silks while
Mrs. Gray yet stood in bewilderment, holding the baby's frock in her
limp fingers. "By the way, Mary is very anxious about her father--how he
will take her accident. Will you tell your husband that I shall be glad
to see him when he comes home this evening?"
"I will, my lady," said Mrs. Gray; "and, my lady, would you please not
to mention to Mr. Gray about the charwoman? He's that proud; it would
hurt him, I'm sure. If he isn't told he'll never know she's there. A
child isn't as easily deceived as Walter."
"I shall certainly not tell him," Lady Anne said graciously. She did not
object to the honest pride in Walter Gray. He was probably a superior
man for his station, being Mary's father. As for that poor slattern,
Lady Anne had lived too long in the world to be amazed by the marriages
men made, either in her own exalted circle or in those below it.
Walter Gray came, in a flutter of tender anxiety, at half-past six in
the evening, to Lady Anne's garden, where Mary was sitting in her wicker
chair under the mulberry tree. Lady Anne had given orders that he was to
be shown out to the garden when he called.
"My poor little girl!" he said, with an arm about Mary's shoulder.
Then he took off his hat to Lady Anne. There was respect in his manner,
but nothing over-humble, nothing to say that they were not equals in a
sense. His eyes, at once bright and dreamy, rested on her with a
friendly regard.
"The man has gentle blood in him somewhere," said the old lady to
herself. She had a sense of humour which kept her knowledge of her own
importance from becoming overweening. "I believe his respect is for my
age, not for my rank. I wonder what the world is coming to!"
She went away then and left the father and daughter together. Walter,
who had taken a chair by Mary's, looked with a half-conscious pleasure
round the velvet sward on which the shadows of the trees lay long. The
trees were at their full summer foliage, dark as night, mysterious,
magnificent.
"What a very pleasant place!" Walter Gray said, with grave enjoyment.
"How sweet the evening smells are! How quiet everything is! Who could
believe that Wistaria Terrace was over the wall?"
"I have been missing Wistaria Terrace," Mary said. "You don't know how
lonesome it feels for the children. I wonder how Mamie is getting on
without me. I want to go home. Indeed, I feel quite able to. I don't
know how I shall do without going home."
"If you went home," said Walter Gray, unexpectedly practical, "your arm
would never set, Mary. You'd be forgetting and doing all manner of
things you oughtn't to do. If Lady Anne is kind enough to ask you to
visit her, stay a while and rest, dear. Indeed, you do too much for your
size."
"You will all miss me so dreadfully."
"Indeed, I don't think we shall miss you--in that way. Oddly enough--I
suppose Matilda was on her mettle--the house seemed quieter when I came
home. The children were in bed. I smelt something good from the kitchen.
Don't imagine that we shall not be able to do without you, child."
Mary, who knew no more of the capable charwoman than Walter Gray did,
looked on this speech of her father's as a mere string of tender
subterfuges. She said nothing, but her eyes rested on her grey woollen
skirt, faded by wear and the weather, and she had an unchildish sense of
the incongruity of her presence as a visitor in Lady Anne's house.
Walter Gray's glance roamed over his young daughter. He saw nothing of
her dreary attire. He saw only the spiritual face, over-pale, the
slender, young, unformed body, graceful as a half-opened flower in its
ill-fitting covering, the slender feet that had a suggestion of race,
the toil-worn hands the fingers of which tapered to fine points.
"You have always done too much, child," he said, with sudden, tender
compunction.
When he rose to go Mary clung to him as though their parting was to be
for years.
"I will come in again to-morrow," he said. "I shall sleep better
to-night for thinking of you in this quiet, restful place. Get some
roses in your cheeks, little girl, before you come back to us."
"I wish I were going back now," said Mary piteously. She looked round
the old walls with their climbing fruit trees as though they were the
walls of a prison. "It is awful not to be able to come and go. And Mamie
will never be able to do without me. The children will be ill----"
He left her in tears. As he re-entered the house by its iron steps up to
a glass door Lady Anne came out from her morning-room and called him
within. He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with
yellowed marble busts of great men on top of the book-cases. His feet
sank in soft carpets. The smell of a pot of lilies mingled with the
smell of leather bindings. The light in the room, filtered through the
leaves of an overhanging creeper, was green and gold. It seemed to him
that he must have known such a room in some other world, where he had
not had to make watches all day with a glass screwed in his eye, but had
abundant leisure for books and beautiful things. Not but that there
might be worse things than the watchmaking. Over the works of the
watches, the fine little wheels and springs, Walter Gray thought hard,
thought incessantly. He thought, perhaps, the harder that he had neither
the leisure nor opportunity for putting down his thoughts on paper or
imparting them to another like-minded with himself. How his fellows
would have stared if they could have known the things that went on
inside Walter Gray's mind as he leant above his table, peering into the
interior of the watch-cases!
"Sit down, Mr. Gray," said Lady Anne graciously; "I want to talk to you
about Mary."
She approached the matter delicately, having wit enough to see that
Walter Gray was no common person. While she talked she looked with frank
admiration at his face: the fine, high, delicate nose; the arched brows,
like Mary's own; the over-development of the forehead. The dust of years
and worries lay thick upon his face, yet Lady Anne said to herself that
it was a beautiful face beneath the dust.
"I want to talk to you about Mary," she went on. "The child interests me
strongly. She is a fine vessel, this little daughter of yours. Pray
excuse me if I speak plainly. She has been doing far too much for her
age and her strength. Haven't you noticed that she is pulled down to
earth? Those babies, Mr. Gray--they are remarkably fat and heavy; they
are killing Mary."
"Her mother died of consumption," Walter Gray said, his face whitening
with terror.
"Ah!" the old lady thought; "she is the child of his heart. Those three
twins are merely the children of his home. That poor drudge of a mother
of theirs! Mary is the child of her father's heart and mind."
Then aloud: "You had better let me have her, Mr. Gray."
"Let you have her, Lady Anne? What would you do with my Mary?"
He looked scarcely less aghast than he had done a moment before at the
suggestion of consumption.
"Not separate her from you, Mr. Gray. This house is my home, and I am
not likely to leave it, except for a month or two at a time, at my age.
I think the child will be a companion to me. I have no romantic
suggestions to make. I am not proposing to adopt Mary. I shall pay her a
salary, and give her opportunities for education that you cannot. She
interests me, as I have said. Let me have her. When I no longer need
her--I am an old woman, Mr. Gray--she will be fit to earn her own
living. Everything I have goes back to my nephew Jarvis Lord Iniscrone.
But Mary will not suffer. Think! What have you to give her but a life of
drudgery under which she will break down--die, perhaps?"
She watched the emotion in his face with her little keen, bright eyes.
"It is not a fine lady's caprice?" he said. "You won't make my Mary
accustomed to better things than I could give her and then send her back
to be a drudge?"
"The Lord judge between thee and me," she answered solemnly.
"Then I trust you, Lady Anne Hamilton," he said.
The strange thing was that the proud old lady was gratified, almost
flattered, by the confidence in Walter Gray's unworldly eyes.
"Thank you, Mr. Gray," she said; then, as he took up his hat to go, she
laid a detaining hand on his shabby coat sleeve.
"Why not have dinner with Mary in the garden?" she suggested. "Do, pray.
I want you to tell her what we have agreed upon. I can send word to Mrs.
Gray."
Walter Gray was pleased enough to go back to his little girl whom he had
left in tears for the comfortless house and the burden of the young
stepbrothers and stepsisters. It was pleasure, half pain, to see the
uplifted face with which Mary regarded him when she saw him return. How
was he going to put the barrier between them that this plan to which he
had given his consent would surely mean? He had no illusions. Over the
wall, Lady Anne had said. But the wall that separated Wistaria Terrace
and the Mall was in reality a high and a great wall. He would never have
Mary in the old close communion again. All passes. How good the old
times were that were only a few hours away, yet seemed worlds! Never
again! They would never be all and all to each other in a solitude which
took no count of the others. Yet it was for Mary's sake. For Mary's sake
the wall was to rise between them. As he began to tell her the strange,
wonderful thing, his heart was heavy within him because a chapter of his
life was closed. He had come to the end of an epoch. Henceforth things
might be conceivably better, but--they would be different.