IV

As Oleron sat by his fire that evening, pondering Miss Bengough's

prognostication that difficulties awaited him in his work, he came to the

conclusion that it would have been far better had she kept her beliefs to

herself. No man does a thing better for having his confidence damped at

the outset, and to speak of difficulties is in a sense to make them.

Speech itself becomes a deterrent act, to which other discouragements

accrete until the very event of which warning is given is as likely as

not to come to pass. He heartily confounded her. An influence hostile

to the completion of _Romilly_ had been born.

And in some illogical, dogmatic way women seem to have, she had attached

this antagonistic influence to his new abode. Was ever anything so

absurd! "You'll never finish _Romilly_ here." ... Why not? Was this her

idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down

to indolence and dropping out of the race? The place was well enough--it

was entirely charming, for that matter--but it was not so demoralising as

all that! No; Elsie had missed the mark that time....

He moved his chair to look round the room that smiled, positively

smiled, in the firelight. He too smiled, as if pity was to be

entertained for a maligned apartment. Even that slight lack of robust

colour he had remarked was not noticeable in the soft glow. The drawn

chintz curtains--they had a flowered and trellised pattern, with baskets

and oaten pipes--fell in long quiet folds to the window-seats; the rows

of bindings in old bookcases took the light richly; the last trace of

sallowness had gone with the daylight; and, if the truth must be told,

it had been Elsie herself who had seemed a little out of the picture.

That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it.

Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice

that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her,

marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the

slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat _was_

characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse

for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and

general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron

inclined to the austere in taste....

Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not

made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared

that afternoon--large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the

prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in

his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at

the time, and that unconsciously his attitude, even while she had been

there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little

obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and

behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of

mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed

for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for

the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so....

Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking

thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent weeks

and weeks of afternoons--she, the good chum, on whose help he would have

counted had all the rest of the world failed him--she, whose loyalty to

him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath in her--Elsie

to be even in thought dissected thus! He was an ingrate and a cad....

Had she been there in that moment he would have abased himself before

her.

For ten minutes and more he sat, still gazing into the fire, with that

humiliating red fading slowly from his cheeks. All was still within and

without, save for a tiny musical tinkling that came from his kitchen--the

dripping of water from an imperfectly turned-off tap into the vessel

beneath it. Mechanically he began to beat with his finger to the faintly

heard falling of the drops; the tiny regular movement seemed to hasten

that shameful withdrawal from his face. He grew cool once more; and when

he resumed his meditation he was all unconscious that he took it up again

at the same point....

It was not only her florid superfluity of build that he had approached in

the attitude of criticism; he was conscious also of the wide differences

between her mind and his own. He felt no thankfulness that up to a

certain point their natures had ever run companionably side by side; he

was now full of questions beyond that point. Their intellects diverged;

there was no denying it; and, looking back, he was inclined to doubt

whether there had been any real coincidence. True, he had read his

writings to her and she had appeared to speak comprehendingly and to the

point; but what can a man do who, having assumed that another sees as he

does, is suddenly brought up sharp by something that falsifies and

discredits all that has gone before? He doubted all now.... It did for a

moment occur to him that the man who demands of a friend more than can be

given to him is in danger of losing that friend, but he put the thought

aside.

Again he ceased to think, and again moved his finger to the distant

dripping of the tap....

And now (he resumed by-and-by), if these things were true of Elsie

Bengough, they were also true of the creation of which she was the

prototype--Romilly Bishop. And since he could say of Romilly what for

very shame he could not say of Elsie, he gave his thoughts rein. He did

so in that smiling, fire-lighted room, to the accompaniment of the

faintly heard tap.

There was no longer any doubt about it; he hated the central character

of his novel. Even as he had described her physically she overpowered

the senses; she was coarse-fibred, over-coloured, rank. It became true

the moment he formulated his thought; Gulliver had described the

Brobdingnagian maids-of-honour thus: and mentally and spiritually she

corresponded--was unsensitive, limited, common. The model (he closed his

eyes for a moment)--the model stuck out through fifteen vulgar and

blatant chapters to such a pitch that, without seeing the reason, he had

been unable to begin the sixteenth. He marvelled that it had only just

dawned upon him.

And _this_ was to have been his Beatrice, his vision! As Elsie she was to

have gone into the furnace of his art, and she was to have come out the

Woman all men desire! Her thoughts were to have been culled from his own

finest, her form from his dearest dreams, and her setting wherever he

could find one fit for her worth. He had brooded long before making the

attempt; then one day he had felt her stir within him as a mother feels

a quickening, and he had begun to write; and so he had added chapter to

chapter....

And those fifteen sodden chapters were what he had produced!

Again he sat, softly moving his finger....

Then he bestirred himself.

She must go, all fifteen chapters of her. That was settled. For what was

to take her place his mind was a blank; but one thing at a time; a man

is not excused from taking the wrong course because the right one is not

immediately revealed to him. Better would come if it was to come;

in the meantime--

He rose, fetched the fifteen chapters, and read them over before he

should drop them into the fire.

But instead of putting them into the fire he let them fall from his hand.

He became conscious of the dripping of the tap again. It had a tinkling

gamut of four or five notes, on which it rang irregular changes, and it

was foolishly sweet and dulcimer-like. In his mind Oleron could see the

gathering of each drop, its little tremble on the lip of the tap, and the

tiny percussion of its fall, "Plink--plunk," minimised almost to

inaudibility. Following the lowest note there seemed to be a brief

phrase, irregularly repeated; and presently Oleron found himself waiting

for the recurrence of this phrase. It was quite pretty....

But it did not conduce to wakefulness, and Oleron dozed over his fire.

When he awoke again the fire had burned low and the flames of the candles

were licking the rims of the Sheffield sticks. Sluggishly he rose,

yawned, went his nightly round of door-locks and window-fastenings, and

passed into his bedroom. Soon he slept soundly.

But a curious little sequel followed on the morrow. Mrs. Barrett usually

tapped, not at his door, but at the wooden wall beyond which lay Oleron's

bed; and then Oleron rose, put on his dressing-gown, and admitted her. He

was not conscious that as he did so that morning he hummed an air; but

Mrs. Barrett lingered with her hand on the door-knob and her face a

little averted and smiling.

"De-ar me!" her soft falsetto rose. "But that will be a very o-ald tune,

Mr. Oleron! I will not have heard it this for-ty years!"

"What tune?" Oleron asked.

"The tune, indeed, that you was humming, sir."

Oleron had his thumb in the flap of a letter. It remained there.

"_I_ was humming?... Sing it, Mrs. Barrett."

Mrs. Barrett prut-prutted.

"I have no voice for singing, Mr. Oleron; it was Ann Pugh was the singer

of our family; but the tune will be very o-ald, and it is called 'The

Beckoning Fair One.'"

"Try to sing it," said Oleron, his thumb still in the envelope; and Mrs.

Barrett, with much dimpling and confusion, hummed the air.

"They do say it was sung to a harp, Mr. Oleron, and it will be very

o-ald," she concluded.

"And _I_ was singing that?"

"Indeed you wass. I would not be likely to tell you lies."

With a "Very well--let me have breakfast," Oleron opened his letter; but

the trifling circumstance struck him as more odd than he would have

admitted to himself. The phrase he had hummed had been that which he had

associated with the falling from the tap on the evening before.

V

Even more curious than that the commonplace dripping of an ordinary

water-tap should have tallied so closely with an actually existing air

was another result it had, namely, that it awakened, or seemed to awaken,

in Oleron an abnormal sensitiveness to other noises of the old house. It

has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive

quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the

place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on

its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's fires caused it to stretch its

old anatomy; and certainly a whole world of insect life bored and

burrowed in its baulks and joists. At any rate, Oleron had only to sit

quiet in his chair and to wait for a minute or two in order to become

aware of such a change in the auditory scale as comes upon a man who,

conceiving the midsummer woods to be motionless and still, all at once

finds his ear sharpened to the crepitation of a myriad insects.

And he smiled to think of man's arbitrary distinction between that which

has life and that which has not. Here, quite apart from such recognisable

sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his

panelling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a

whole house talking to him had he but known its language. Beams settled

with a tired sigh into their old mortices; creatures ticked in the walls;

joints cracked, boards complained; with no palpable stirring of the air

window-sashes changed their positions with a soft knock in their frames.

And whether the place had life in this sense or not, it had at all events

a winsome personality. It needed but an hour of musing for Oleron to

conceive the idea that, as his own body stood in friendly relation to his

soul, so, by an extension and an attenuation, his habitation might

fantastically be supposed to stand in some relation to himself. He even

amused himself with the far-fetched fancy that he might so identify

himself with the place that some future tenant, taking possession, might

regard it as in a sense haunted. It would be rather a joke if he, a

perfectly harmless author, with nothing on his mind worse than a novel he

had discovered he must begin again, should turn out to be laying the

foundation of a future ghost!...

In proportion, however, as he felt this growing attachment to the fabric

of his abode, Elsie Bengough, from being merely unattracted, began to

show a dislike of the place that was more and more marked. And she did

not scruple to speak of her aversion.

"It doesn't belong to to-day at all, and for you especially it's bad,"

she said with decision. "You're only too ready to let go your hold on

actual things and to slip into apathy; _you_ ought to be in a place

with concrete floors and a patent gas-meter and a tradesmen's lift. And

it would do you all the good in the world if you had a job that made you

scramble and rub elbows with your fellow-men. Now, if I could get you a

job, for, say, two or three days a week, one that would allow you heaps

of time for your proper work--would you take it?"

Somehow, Oleron resented a little being diagnosed like this. He thanked

Miss Bengough, but without a smile.

"Thank you, but I don't think so. After all each of us has his own life

to live," he could not refrain from adding.

"His own life to live!... How long is it since you were out, Paul?"

"About two hours."

"I don't mean to buy stamps or to post a letter. How long is it since you

had anything like a stretch?"

"Oh, some little time perhaps. I don't know."

"Since I was here last?"

"I haven't been out much."

"And has _Romilly_ progressed much better for your being cooped up?"

"I think she has. I'm laying the foundations of her. I shall begin the

actual writing presently."

It seemed as if Miss Bengough had forgotten their tussle about the first

_Romilly_. She frowned, turned half away, and then quickly turned again.

"Ah!... So you've still got that ridiculous idea in your head?"

"If you mean," said Oleron slowly, "that I've discarded the old

_Romilly_, and am at work on a new one, you're right. I have still got

that idea in my head."

Something uncordial in his tone struck her; but she was a fighter. His

own absurd sensitiveness hardened her. She gave a "Pshaw!" of impatience.

"Where is the old one?" she demanded abruptly.

"Why?" asked Oleron.

"I want to see it. I want to show some of it to you. I want, if you're

not wool-gathering entirely, to bring you back to your senses."

This time it was he who turned his back. But when he turned round again

he spoke more gently.

"It's no good, Elsie. I'm responsible for the way I go, and you must

allow me to go it--even if it should seem wrong to you. Believe me, I

am giving thought to it.... The manuscript? I was on the point of burning

it, but I didn't. It's in that window-seat, if you must see it."

Miss Bengough crossed quickly to the window-seat, and lifted the lid.

Suddenly she gave a little exclamation, and put the back of her hand

to her mouth. She spoke over her shoulder:

"You ought to knock those nails in, Paul," she said.

He strode to her side.

"What? What is it? What's the matter?" he asked. "I did knock them

in--or, rather, pulled them out."

"You left enough to scratch with," she replied, showing her hand. From

the upper wrist to the knuckle of the little finger a welling red wound

showed.

"Good--Gracious!" Oleron ejaculated.... "Here, come to the bathroom and

bathe it quickly--"

He hurried her to the bathroom, turned on warm water, and bathed and

cleansed the bad gash. Then, still holding the hand, he turned cold water

on it, uttering broken phrases of astonishment and concern.

"Good Lord, how did that happen! As far as I knew I'd ... is this water

too cold? Does that hurt? I can't imagine how on earth ... there; that'll

do--"

"No--one moment longer--I can bear it," she murmured, her eyes closed....

Presently he led her back to the sitting-room and bound the hand in one

of his handkerchiefs; but his face did not lose its expression of

perplexity. He had spent half a day in opening and making serviceable the

three window-boxes, and he could not conceive how he had come to leave an

inch and a half of rusty nail standing in the wood. He himself had opened

the lids of each of them a dozen times and had not noticed any nail; but

there it was....

"It shall come out now, at all events," he muttered, as he went for a

pair of pincers. And he made no mistake about it that time.

Elsie Bengough had sunk into a chair, and her face was rather white; but

in her hand was the manuscript of _Romilly_. She had not finished with

_Romilly_ yet. Presently she returned to the charge.

"Oh, Paul, it will be the greatest mistake you ever, _ever_ made if you

do not publish this!" she said.

He hung his head, genuinely distressed. He couldn't get that incident of

the nail out of his head, and _Romilly_ occupied a second place in his

thoughts for the moment. But still she insisted; and when presently he

spoke it was almost as if he asked her pardon for something.

"What can I say, Elsie? I can only hope that when you see the new

version, you'll see how right I am. And if in spite of all you _don't_

like her, well ..." he made a hopeless gesture. "Don't you see that I

_must_ be guided by my own lights?"

She was silent.

"Come, Elsie," he said gently. "We've got along well so far; don't let us

split on this."

The last words had hardly passed his lips before he regretted them. She

had been nursing her injured hand, with her eyes once more closed; but

her lips and lids quivered simultaneously. Her voice shook as she spoke.

"I can't help saying it, Paul, but you are so greatly changed."

"Hush, Elsie," he murmured soothingly; "you've had a shock; rest for a

while. How could I change?"

"I don't know, but you are. You've not been yourself ever since you came

here. I wish you'd never seen the place. It's stopped your work, it's

making you into a person I hardly know, and it's made me horribly anxious

about you.... Oh, how my hand is beginning to throb!"

"Poor child!" he murmured. "Will you let me take you to a doctor and have

it properly dressed?"

"No--I shall be all right presently--I'll keep it raised----"

She put her elbow on the back of her chair, and the bandaged hand rested

lightly on his shoulder.

At that touch an entirely new anxiety stirred suddenly within him.

Hundreds of times previously, on their jaunts and excursions, she had

slipped her hand within his arm as she might have slipped it into the arm

of a brother, and he had accepted the little affectionate gesture as a

brother might have accepted it. But now, for the first time, there rushed

into his mind a hundred startling questions. Her eyes were still closed,

and her head had fallen pathetically back; and there was a lost and

ineffable smile on her parted lips. The truth broke in upon him. Good

God!... And he had never divined it!

And stranger than all was that, now that he did see that she was lost in

love of him, there came to him, not sorrow and humility and abasement,

but something else that he struggled in vain against--something entirely

strange and new, that, had he analysed it, he would have found to be

petulance and irritation and resentment and ungentleness. The sudden

selfish prompting mastered him before he was aware. He all but gave it

words. What was she doing there at all? Why was she not getting on with

her own work? Why was she here interfering with his? Who had given her

this guardianship over him that lately she had put forward so

assertively?--"Changed?" It was she, not himself, who had changed....

But by the time she had opened her eyes again he had overcome his

resentment sufficiently to speak gently, albeit with reserve.

"I wish you would let me take you to a doctor."

She rose.

"No, thank you, Paul," she said. "I'll go now. If I need a dressing I'll

get one; take the other hand, please. Good-bye--"

He did not attempt to detain her. He walked with her to the foot of the

stairs. Half-way along the narrow alley she turned.

"It would be a long way to come if you happened not to be in," she said;

"I'll send you a postcard the next time."

At the gate she turned again.

"Leave here, Paul," she said, with a mournful look. "Everything's wrong

with this house."

Then she was gone.

Oleron returned to his room. He crossed straight to the window-box. He

opened the lid and stood long looking at it. Then he closed it again and

turned away.

"That's rather frightening," he muttered. "It's simply not possible that

I should not have removed that nail...."