RETROSPECTION
“I’ll go up and see her,” said Jane, when they had finished breakfast.
“May I?”
“Yes, if you like; Pine-breeze will show you the way—but, Jane, say
nothing to her of what occurred yesterday; she thinks nobody knows
except one of the servants here.”
“I’ll say nothing,” replied Jane; “but I’ve got some antikamnia tabloids
in my pocket, fortunately, and I’ll just make her take one.”
“All right,” said Leslie; “but for goodness sake don’t poison her.”
This was another point on which Jane had not altered. As a girl she had
been possessed by a passion for drugs, and would swallow anything in the
way of medicine she came across or was given. She had always been
doctoring rabbits and other unfortunate animals, and had once nearly
poisoned herself by taking half a bottle of pain-killer for a dose. And
now here she was, nearly fifteen years after, in Japan, going upstairs
to doctor Campanula, with just the same manner and seriousness of face
with which long ago, medicine bottle in hand, she would give the order:
“Prize its mouth open, Dick; don’t hurt it. Steady now, I’m going to
pour.”
Quarter of an hour later she came down triumphant.
“She took it like a lamb. She’s the dearest child! Now I’m off. I have a
hundred things to do. Will you walk down with me as far as the hotel?”
He accompanied her to the hotel, and neither of them spoke much on the
way.
“I won’t ask you in,” said Jane, when they reached the door, “because it
wouldn’t be proper. Now let me see. To-morrow is the garden-party; we
might do something to-day, you and Campanula and I—might not we?”
“We could run over to Mogi,” he said. “We can get rikshas, have luncheon
there, and come back to tea at my place; and to-night there’s an affair
on at the O Suwa temple, we might go there. Shall I call for you at
twelve or so?”
“Yes,” said Jane, “if you’ll bring a chaperon. You see, now George is
away I must be awfully ‘propindicular,’ like that person in Uncle
Remus—the Terrapin—wasn’t it?”
“I’ll bring Campanula—or one of the Mousmés, at a pinch.”
“Campanula chaperoning me!” said Jane with a laugh. “Well, I don’t care.
It’s only for the sake of Mrs. Grundy.”
“There is no Japanese Mrs. Grundy.”
“No, but there is an English one.”
They parted, and Jane entered the hotel.
She went to her bedroom, got her writing-case out of a portmanteau, and
began to write. She was writing a letter to George.
The first began:
“Your abominable conduct has been discovered. You have heaped
shame on me, you have heaped shame on yourself—”
When she got as far as this she found that it was too melodramatic,
somehow, and the “heaped shames” did not ring true, so she tore it up
and began again:
“My cousin, Richard Leslie, sent for me this morning in great
distress. _How_ you could have acted as you did towards that
sweet child surpasses me. Fortunately for yourself you have run
away—”
She tore this up too, flew into a temper with herself, and then wrote as
follows:
“GEORGE,—I’ve heard everything. Dick is furious, but he’s not
going to do anything, so just stay at Osaka till I come, and
don’t go bolting off anywhere else. And don’t drink too much
port, for if you get another attack of gout _I_ won’t nurse
you.—JANE.
“_P.S._—You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
She sealed this classical epistle and addressed it. Then she remembered
that she might just as well have left it unwritten, for there was no
communication to be had with Osaka till the morrow; and if she posted
it, it would go by the same boat as herself. So she tore it up.
Then she sat down on the side of her bed and bit a corner of her
handkerchief.
She was thinking.
To-morrow she would never see Dick again, most probably, after that.
She had never loved Dick, that is to say in the good old _Family Herald_
way. Their boy and girl relationship had been anything but sentimental.
Recalling the past she could conjure up no tender pictures.
She could see herself clinging to a rod bent like a bow, and shouting to
Dick: “Now then, chucklehead, gaff him!”
She could see herself tramping after him like a squaw after a chief on
rabbiting expeditions—dozens of pictures like this, but none of them
sentimental. She had never thought of marriage till the day she received
a letter from Dick, asking her to marry him; to which she replied by
writing half a dozen letters refusing him, which letters she tore up one
after the other, and then wrote a seventh accepting him, which she
posted.
Now one of the worst evils in an accepted proposal of marriage is this.
That directly they hear of it, the girl’s relations, male and female,
take their implements—nets, ferrets, and so on—and go off rabbiting in
your past.
Dick had not much of a past as far as size goes, but it was well stocked
with game for hunters such as these.
So well stocked that old Mr. Deering, a retired London wine merchant who
had taken a country seat in Scotland, near Glenbruach, put his foot down
and forbade Jane to have anything more to do with her cousin: an order
which would have driven her straight into his arms, had not the
unfortunate Dick, hearing of the inquisition that had been made, come
North inflamed with rage and whisky.
Men drank harder even in the ‘eighties than they do now, and Scotland
was never the home of abstinence; yet the scene Dick Leslie created in
Callander went beyond the bounds of even Scottish convention, and
utterly destroyed any chance of his marriage with Jane du Telle.
Remembering his description of the affair which he gave to M’Gourley on
the Nikko road, you will agree with me that he was not a man who viewed
his own acts—well, as others viewed them.
In this, however, he was by no means singular.
Jane, sitting on her bed and biting the corner of her handkerchief, was
at the same time looking back over the past. She was a person with
an infinite capacity for affection, with no capacity at all for a Grand
Passion. Her life was made up of a bundle of petty interests, and her
history was the history of a pure and somewhat commonplace soul.
She had loved Dick as a brother in the past, and now that he had come
into her life again after all those years (even after that terrible
scene long ago), bringing with him so much from the happy days that were
for ever gone, her heart went out to him as it had never gone to human
being before.
And to-morrow she must say good-bye to him, and never, perhaps, see him
again.
They must part; there was no other thing to be done. She was her own
mistress, with plenty of money at her command; she could have flown in
the face of society, and made Dick forever her own. Such a course did
not even occur to her, for she was a creature bound by the laws of
convention, almost as rigidly as you or I by the laws of gravity.
Out of very light-heartedness she would do things and say things that
would have been dangerous symptoms in a woman of a sterner mold; and men
had often pursued her, led on by this laughing spirit that vanished
behind a veil, which, being lifted, disclosed an adamant door.
Her great danger lay in her compassionate emotions, and all the womanly
nature that lay behind them. Her great danger lay in Richard Leslie, for
he was the only being that had ever aroused them to their full strength.
All at once she cast herself upon the bed, and after the fashion of her
childhood, buried her face in a pillow, and sobbed, and “grat.”
When she had occupied herself thus for some ten minutes, she rose and
looked at herself in the glass, and wondered at her own distorted image,
and how she could possibly be such a fool. But she felt better; the pain
of parting with Dick was not quite so bad, and she felt kindlier towards
George.
If his conduct had taken place in England, I doubt if her anger would
have been so soon assuaged. But they were in Japan—and the Japs, you
know!—
PART THREE
THE BROKEN LATH