

Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine
Smith and David.

         _This Edition is intended for circulation only in India_
                        _and the British Colonies_

                                * * * * *

                       Macmillan’s Colonial Library

                                * * * * *





                              THE REAL THING


                             AND OTHER TALES

                                    BY

                               HENRY JAMES

                                * * * * *

                                  London
                            MACMILLAN AND CO.
                               AND NEW YORK
                                   1893

                                * * * * *

                             COPYRIGHT, 1892,
                            BY MACMILLAN & CO.

                                * * * * *

                              Norwood Press:
                   J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
                           Boston, Mass, U.S.A.

                                * * * * *




NOTE.


THE second of the following tales bore, on its first appearance, in _The
Cosmopolitan_, a different title.

                                * * * * *




CONTENTS.

                              PAGE
THE REAL THING                   1
SIR DOMINICK FERRAND            45
NONA VINCENT                   131
THE CHAPERON                   181
GREVILLE FANE                  249

THE REAL THING.


I.


WHEN the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced “A
gentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the
wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters.  Sitters
my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense I should have
preferred.  However, there was nothing at first to indicate that they
might not have come for a portrait.  The gentleman, a man of fifty, very
high and very straight, with a moustache slightly grizzled and a dark
grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both of which I noted
professionally—I don’t mean as a barber or yet as a tailor—would have
struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking.  It was a
truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a
good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public
institution.  A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this
paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a “personality.”
Moreover one would scarcely come across two variations together.

Neither of the pair spoke immediately—they only prolonged the preliminary
gaze which suggested that each wished to give the other a chance.  They
were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them in—which, as I
afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing they could have done.
In this way their embarrassment served their cause.  I had seen people
painfully reluctant to mention that they desired anything so gross as to
be represented on canvas; but the scruples of my new friends appeared
almost insurmountable.  Yet the gentleman might have said “I should like
a portrait of my wife,” and the lady might have said “I should like a
portrait of my husband.”  Perhaps they were not husband and wife—this
naturally would make the matter more delicate.  Perhaps they wished to be
done together—in which case they ought to have brought a third person to
break the news.

“We come from Mr. Rivet,” the lady said at last, with a dim smile which
had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a “sunk” piece of painting,
as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty.  She was as tall and
straight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten years less to
carry.  She looked as sad as a woman could look whose face was not
charged with expression; that is her tinted oval mask showed friction as
an exposed surface shows it.  The hand of time had played over her
freely, but only to simplify.  She was slim and stiff, and so
well-dressed, in dark blue cloth, with lappets and pockets and buttons,
that it was clear she employed the same tailor as her husband.  The
couple had an indefinable air of prosperous thrift—they evidently got a
good deal of luxury for their money.  If I was to be one of their
luxuries it would behove me to consider my terms.

“Ah, Claude Rivet recommended me?” I inquired; and I added that it was
very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted
landscape, this was not a sacrifice.

The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked
round the room.  Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his
moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark:

“He said you were the right one.”

“I try to be, when people want to sit.”

“Yes, we should like to,” said the lady anxiously.

“Do you mean together?”

My visitors exchanged a glance.  “If you could do anything with _me_, I
suppose it would be double,” the gentleman stammered.

“Oh yes, there’s naturally a higher charge for two figures than for one.”

“We should like to make it pay,” the husband confessed.

“That’s very good of you,” I returned, appreciating so unwonted a
sympathy—for I supposed he meant pay the artist.

A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady.  “We mean for the
illustrations—Mr. Rivet said you might put one in.”

“Put one in—an illustration?” I was equally confused.

“Sketch her off, you know,” said the gentleman, colouring.

It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had rendered
me; he had told them that I worked in black and white, for magazines, for
story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had
frequent employment for models.  These things were true, but it was not
less true (I may confess it now—whether because the aspiration was to
lead to everything or to nothing I leave the reader to guess), that I
couldn’t get the honours, to say nothing of the emoluments, of a great
painter of portraits out of my head.  My “illustrations” were my
pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch of art (far and away the most
interesting it had always seemed to me), to perpetuate my fame.  There
was no shame in looking to it also to make my fortune; but that fortune
was by so much further from being made from the moment my visitors wished
to be “done” for nothing.  I was disappointed; for in the pictorial sense
I had immediately _seen_ them.  I had seized their type—I had already
settled what I would do with it.  Something that wouldn’t absolutely have
pleased them, I afterwards reflected.

“Ah, you’re—you’re—a—?” I began, as soon as I had mastered my surprise.
I couldn’t bring out the dingy word “models”; it seemed to fit the case
so little.

“We haven’t had much practice,” said the lady.

“We’ve got to _do_ something, and we’ve thought that an artist in your
line might perhaps make something of us,” her husband threw off.  He
further mentioned that they didn’t know many artists and that they had
gone first, on the off-chance (he painted views of course, but sometimes
put in figures—perhaps I remembered), to Mr. Rivet, whom they had met a
few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was sketching.

“We used to sketch a little ourselves,” the lady hinted.

“It’s very awkward, but we absolutely _must_ do something,” her husband
went on.

“Of course, we’re not so _very_ young,” she admitted, with a wan smile.

With the remark that I might as well know something more about them, the
husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat new pocket-book (their
appurtenances were all of the freshest) and inscribed with the words
“Major Monarch.”  Impressive as these words were they didn’t carry my
knowledge much further; but my visitor presently added: “I’ve left the
army, and we’ve had the misfortune to lose our money.  In fact our means
are dreadfully small.”

“It’s an awful bore,” said Mrs. Monarch.

They evidently wished to be discreet—to take care not to swagger because
they were gentlefolks.  I perceived they would have been willing to
recognise this as something of a drawback, at the same time that I
guessed at an underlying sense—their consolation in adversity—that they
_had_ their points.  They certainly had; but these advantages struck me
as preponderantly social; such for instance as would help to make a
drawing-room look well.  However, a drawing-room was always, or ought to
be, a picture.

In consequence of his wife’s allusion to their age Major Monarch
observed: “Naturally, it’s more for the figure that we thought of going
in.  We can still hold ourselves up.”  On the instant I saw that the
figure was indeed their strong point.  His “naturally” didn’t sound vain,
but it lighted up the question.  “_She_ has got the best,” he continued,
nodding at his wife, with a pleasant after-dinner absence of
circumlocution.  I could only reply, as if we were in fact sitting over
our wine, that this didn’t prevent his own from being very good; which
led him in turn to rejoin: “We thought that if you ever have to do people
like us, we might be something like it.  _She_, particularly—for a lady
in a book, you know.”

I was so amused by them that, to get more of it, I did my best to take
their point of view; and though it was an embarrassment to find myself
appraising physically, as if they were animals on hire or useful blacks,
a pair whom I should have expected to meet only in one of the relations
in which criticism is tacit, I looked at Mrs. Monarch judicially enough
to be able to exclaim, after a moment, with conviction: “Oh yes, a lady
in a book!”  She was singularly like a bad illustration.

“We’ll stand up, if you like,” said the Major; and he raised himself
before me with a really grand air.

I could take his measure at a glance—he was six feet two and a perfect
gentleman.  It would have paid any club in process of formation and in
want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal
window.  What struck me immediately was that in coming to me they had
rather missed their vocation; they could surely have been turned to
better account for advertising purposes.  I couldn’t of course see the
thing in detail, but I could see them make someone’s fortune—I don’t mean
their own.  There was something in them for a waistcoat-maker, an
hotel-keeper or a soap-vendor.  I could imagine “We always use it” pinned
on their bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a vision of the
promptitude with which they would launch a table d’hôte.

Mrs. Monarch sat still, not from pride but from shyness, and presently
her husband said to her: “Get up my dear and show how smart you are.”
She obeyed, but she had no need to get up to show it.  She walked to the
end of the studio, and then she came back blushing, with her fluttered
eyes on her husband.  I was reminded of an incident I had accidentally
had a glimpse of in Paris—being with a friend there, a dramatist about to
produce a play—when an actress came to him to ask to be intrusted with a
part.  She went through her paces before him, walked up and down as Mrs.
Monarch was doing.  Mrs. Monarch did it quite as well, but I abstained
from applauding.  It was very odd to see such people apply for such poor
pay.  She looked as if she had ten thousand a year.  Her husband had used
the word that described her: she was, in the London current jargon,
essentially and typically “smart.”  Her figure was, in the same order of
ideas, conspicuously and irreproachably “good.”  For a woman of her age
her waist was surprisingly small; her elbow moreover had the orthodox
crook.  She held her head at the conventional angle; but why did she come
to _me_?  She ought to have tried on jackets at a big shop.  I feared my
visitors were not only destitute, but “artistic”—which would be a great
complication.  When she sat down again I thanked her, observing that what
a draughtsman most valued in his model was the faculty of keeping quiet.

“Oh, _she_ can keep quiet,” said Major Monarch.  Then he added, jocosely:
“I’ve always kept her quiet.”

“I’m not a nasty fidget, am I?” Mrs. Monarch appealed to her husband.

He addressed his answer to me.  “Perhaps it isn’t out of place to
mention—because we ought to be quite business-like, oughtn’t we?—that
when I married her she was known as the Beautiful Statue.”

“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Monarch, ruefully.

“Of course I should want a certain amount of expression,” I rejoined.

“Of _course_!” they both exclaimed.

“And then I suppose you know that you’ll get awfully tired.”

“Oh, we _never_ get tired!” they eagerly cried.

“Have you had any kind of practice?”

They hesitated—they looked at each other.  “We’ve been photographed,
_immensely_,” said Mrs. Monarch.

“She means the fellows have asked us,” added the Major.

“I see—because you’re so good-looking.”

“I don’t know what they thought, but they were always after us.”

“We always got our photographs for nothing,” smiled Mrs. Monarch.

“We might have brought some, my dear,” her husband remarked.

“I’m not sure we have any left.  We’ve given quantities away,” she
explained to me.

“With our autographs and that sort of thing,” said the Major.

“Are they to be got in the shops?” I inquired, as a harmless pleasantry.

“Oh, yes; hers—they used to be.”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on the floor.



II.


I COULD fancy the “sort of thing” they put on the presentation-copies of
their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand.  It was
odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them.  If they
were now so poor as to have to earn shillings and pence, they never had
had much of a margin.  Their good looks had been their capital, and they
had good-humouredly made the most of the career that this resource marked
out for them.  It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep
intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting which
had given them pleasant intonations.  I could see the sunny
drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn’t read, in which Mrs.
Monarch had continuously sat; I could see the wet shrubberies in which
she had walked, equipped to admiration for either exercise.  I could see
the rich covers the Major had helped to shoot and the wonderful garments
in which, late at night, he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about
them.  I could imagine their leggings and waterproofs, their knowing
tweeds and rugs, their rolls of sticks and cases of tackle and neat
umbrellas; and I could evoke the exact appearance of their servants and
the compact variety of their luggage on the platforms of country
stations.

They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn’t do anything
themselves, but they were welcome.  They looked so well everywhere; they
gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and “form.”  They
knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves in
consequence.  They were not superficial; they were thorough and kept
themselves up—it had been their line.  People with such a taste for
activity had to have some line.  I could feel how, even in a dull house,
they could have been counted upon for cheerfulness.  At present something
had happened—it didn’t matter what, their little income had grown less,
it had grown least—and they had to do something for pocket-money.  Their
friends liked them, but didn’t like to support them.  There was something
about them that represented credit—their clothes, their manners, their
type; but if credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink
reverberates, the chink at least must be audible.  What they wanted of me
was to help to make it so.  Fortunately they had no children—I soon
divined that.  They would also perhaps wish our relations to be kept
secret: this was why it was “for the figure”—the reproduction of the face
would betray them.

I liked them—they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if they
would suit.  But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily
believe in them.  After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of
my life was the detestation of the amateur.  Combined with this was
another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over
the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of
representation.  I liked things that appeared; then one was sure.
Whether they _were_ or not was a subordinate and almost always a
profitless question.  There were other considerations, the first of which
was that I already had two or three people in use, notably a young person
with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had
come to me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I was
still—perhaps ignobly—satisfied.  I frankly explained to my visitors how
the case stood; but they had taken more precautions than I supposed.
They had reasoned out their opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them
of the projected _édition de luxe_ of one of the writers of our day—the
rarest of the novelists—who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar
and dearly prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had
had the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full
light of a higher criticism—an estimate in which, on the part of the
public, there was something really of expiation.  The edition in
question, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high
reparation; the wood-cuts with which it was to be enriched were the
homage of English art to one of the most independent representatives of
English letters.  Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me that they had
hoped I might be able to work _them_ into my share of the enterprise.
They knew I was to do the first of the books, “Rutland Ramsay,” but I had
to make clear to them that my participation in the rest of the
affair—this first book was to be a test—was to depend on the satisfaction
I should give.  If this should be limited my employers would drop me
without a scruple.  It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was
making special preparations, looking about for new people, if they should
be necessary, and securing the best types.  I admitted however that I
should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do for
everything.

“Should we have often to—a—put on special clothes?” Mrs. Monarch timidly
demanded.

“Dear, yes—that’s half the business.”

“And should we be expected to supply our own costumes?”

“Oh, no; I’ve got a lot of things.  A painter’s models put on—or put
off—anything he likes.”

“And do you mean—a—the same?”

“The same?”

Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.

“Oh, she was just wondering,” he explained, “if the costumes are in
_general_ use.”  I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned further
that some of them (I had a lot of genuine, greasy last-century things),
had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living, world-stained men
and women.  “We’ll put on anything that fits,” said the Major.

“Oh, I arrange that—they fit in the pictures.”

“I’m afraid I should do better for the modern books.  I would come as you
like,” said Mrs. Monarch.

“She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for contemporary
life,” her husband continued.

“Oh, I can fancy scenes in which you’d be quite natural.”  And indeed I
could see the slipshod rearrangements of stale properties—the stories I
tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading
them—whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people.  But I had to
return to the fact that for this sort of work—the daily mechanical
grind—I was already equipped; the people I was working with were fully
adequate.

“We only thought we might be more like _some_ characters,” said Mrs.
Monarch mildly, getting up.

Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness that
was touching in so fine a man.  “Wouldn’t it be rather a pull sometimes
to have—a—to have—?”  He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing
what he meant.  But I couldn’t—I didn’t know.  So he brought it out,
awkwardly: “The _real_ thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady.”  I was
quite ready to give a general assent—I admitted that there was a great
deal in that.  This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following up his
appeal with an unacted gulp: “It’s awfully hard—we’ve tried everything.”
The gulp was communicative; it proved too much for his wife.  Before I
knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and burst into tears.
Her husband sat down beside her, holding one of her hands; whereupon she
quickly dried her eyes with the other, while I felt embarrassed as she
looked up at me.  “There isn’t a confounded job I haven’t applied
for—waited for—prayed for.  You can fancy we’d be pretty bad first.
Secretaryships and that sort of thing?  You might as well ask for a
peerage.  I’d be _anything_—I’m strong; a messenger or a coalheaver.  I’d
put on a gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front of the
haberdasher’s; I’d hang about a station, to carry portmanteaus; I’d be a
postman.  But they won’t _look_ at you; there are thousands, as good as
yourself, already on the ground.  _Gentlemen_, poor beggars, who have
drunk their wine, who have kept their hunters!”

I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were presently
on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on an hour.  We
were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm came in with a wet
umbrella.  Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then walk
half-a-mile.  She looked a trifle blowsy and slightly splashed.  I
scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking afresh how odd it was
that, being so little in herself, she should yet be so much in others.
She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but she was an ample heroine of
romance.  She was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent
everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she had the faculty, as
she might have had a fine voice or long hair.

She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer, but she had two or three
“points,” and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a kind of
whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters, and
not an ounce of respect, especially for the _h_.  The first thing my
visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless
perfection they visibly winced at it.  The rain had come on since their
arrival.

“I’m all in a soak; there _was_ a mess of people in the ’bus.  I wish you
lived near a stytion,” said Miss Churm.  I requested her to get ready as
quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which she always
changed her dress.  But before going out she asked me what she was to get
into this time.

“It’s the Russian princess, don’t you know?” I answered; “the one with
the ‘golden eyes,’ in black velvet, for the long thing in the
_Cheapside_.”

“Golden eyes?  I _say_!” cried Miss Churm, while my companions watched
her with intensity as she withdrew.  She always arranged herself, when
she was late, before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors a little,
on purpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing her, what would
be expected of themselves.  I mentioned that she was quite my notion of
an excellent model—she was really very clever.

“Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?” Major Monarch asked,
with lurking alarm.

“When I make her, yes.”

“Oh, if you have to _make_ her—!” he reasoned, acutely.

“That’s the most you can ask.  There are so many that are not makeable.”

“Well now, _here’s_ a lady”—and with a persuasive smile he passed his arm
into his wife’s—“who’s already made!”

“Oh, I’m not a Russian princess,” Mrs. Monarch protested, a little
coldly.  I could see that she had known some and didn’t like them.
There, immediately, was a complication of a kind that I never had to fear
with Miss Churm.

This young lady came back in black velvet—the gown was rather rusty and
very low on her lean shoulders—and with a Japanese fan in her red hands.
I reminded her that in the scene I was doing she had to look over
someone’s head.  “I forget whose it is; but it doesn’t matter.  Just look
over a head.”

“I’d rather look over a stove,” said Miss Churm; and she took her station
near the fire.  She fell into position, settled herself into a tall
attitude, gave a certain backward inclination to her head and a certain
forward droop to her fan, and looked, at least to my prejudiced sense,
distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous.  We left her looking
so, while I went down-stairs with Major and Mrs. Monarch.

“I think I could come about as near it as that,” said Mrs. Monarch.

“Oh, you think she’s shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art.”

However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort, founded on
their demonstrable advantage in being the real thing.  I could fancy them
shuddering over Miss Churm.  She was very droll about them when I went
back, for I told her what they wanted.

“Well, if _she_ can sit I’ll tyke to bookkeeping,” said my model.

“She’s very lady-like,” I replied, as an innocent form of aggravation.

“So much the worse for _you_.  That means she can’t turn round.”

“She’ll do for the fashionable novels.”

“Oh yes, she’ll _do_ for them!” my model humorously declared.  “Ain’t
they had enough without her?” I had often sociably denounced them to Miss
Churm.



III.


IT was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I
first tried Mrs. Monarch.  Her husband came with her, to be useful if
necessary—it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would
prefer to come with her.  At first I wondered if this were for
“propriety’s” sake—if he were going to be jealous and meddling.  The idea
was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily have
brought our acquaintance to a close.  But I soon saw there was nothing in
it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was (in addition to the
chance of being wanted), simply because he had nothing else to do.  When
she was away from him his occupation was gone—she never _had_ been away
from him.  I judged, rightly, that in their awkward situation their close
union was their main comfort and that this union had no weak spot.  It
was a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for
pessimists to crack.  Their address was humble (I remember afterwards
thinking it had been the only thing about them that was really
professional), and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the
Major would have been left alone.  He could bear them with his wife—he
couldn’t bear them without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t
be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too absorbed in my
work to talk.  But I liked to make him talk—it made my work, when it
didn’t interrupt it, less sordid, less special.  To listen to him was to
combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.
There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not to know any of the people
he and his wife had known.  I think he wondered extremely, during the
term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I _did_ know.  He hadn’t a stray
sixpence of an idea to fumble for; so we didn’t spin it very fine—we
confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor (saddlers
and breeches-makers and how to get good claret cheap), and matters like
“good trains” and the habits of small game.  His lore on these last
subjects was astonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master
with the ornithologist.  When he couldn’t talk about greater things he
could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn’t accompany him
into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the
conversation without a visible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily
have knocked one down.  He looked after the fire and had an opinion on
the draught of the stove, without my asking him, and I could see that he
thought many of my arrangements not half clever enough.  I remember
telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come
and teach me how to live.  Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the
essence was: “Give me even such a bare old barrack as _this_, and I’d do
something with it!”  When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an
illustration of the superior courage of women.  His wife could bear her
solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by
various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our
relations markedly professional—not letting them slide into sociability.
She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not
cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in
his place, she never thought me quite good enough for an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was
capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as if she were
before a photographer’s lens.  I could see she had been photographed
often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose
unfitted her for mine.  At first I was extremely pleased with her
lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines,
to see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil.  But
after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I
would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a
photograph.  Her figure had no variety of expression—she herself had no
sense of variety.  You may say that this was my business, was only a
question of placing her.  I placed her in every conceivable position, but
she managed to obliterate their differences.  She was always a lady
certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady.  She was the
real thing, but always the same thing.  There were moments when I was
oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she _was_ the real
thing.  All her dealings with me and all her husband’s were an
implication that this was lucky for _me_.  Meanwhile I found myself
trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own
transform itself—in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance,
to poor Miss Churm.  Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would,
she always, in my pictures, came out too tall—landing me in the dilemma
of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out
of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from my
idea of such a personage.

The case was worse with the Major—nothing I could do would keep _him_
down, so that he became useful only for the representation of brawny
giants.  I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the
illustrative note; I wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the
world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type.  I had
quarrelled with some of my friends about it—I had parted company with
them for maintaining that one _had_ to be, and that if the type was
beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo), the servitude was only a gain.
I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael; I might only be a presumptuous young
modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner
than character.  When they averred that the haunting type in question
could easily _be_ character, I retorted, perhaps superficially: “Whose?”
It couldn’t be everybody’s—it might end in being nobody’s.

After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I perceived more clearly
than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided
precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course
with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable
talent for imitation.  Her usual appearance was like a curtain which she
could draw up at request for a capital performance.  This performance was
simply suggestive; but it was a word to the wise—it was vivid and pretty.
Sometimes, even, I thought it, though she was plain herself, too
insipidly pretty; I made it a reproach to her that the figures drawn from
her were monotonously (_bêtement_, as we used to say) graceful.  Nothing
made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feel that she could sit
for characters that had nothing in common with each other.  She would
accuse me at such moments of taking away her “reputytion.”

It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from the repeated
visits of my new friends.  Miss Churm was greatly in demand, never in
want of employment, so I had no scruple in putting her off occasionally,
to try them more at my ease.  It was certainly amusing at first to do the
real thing—it was amusing to do Major Monarch’s trousers.  They _were_
the real thing, even if he did come out colossal.  It was amusing to do
his wife’s back hair (it was so mathematically neat,) and the particular
“smart” tension of her tight stays.  She lent herself especially to
positions in which the face was somewhat averted or blurred; she abounded
in lady-like back views and _profils perdus_.  When she stood erect she
took naturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters represent
queens and princesses; so that I found myself wondering whether, to draw
out this accomplishment, I couldn’t get the editor of the _Cheapside_ to
publish a really royal romance, “A Tale of Buckingham Palace.”
Sometimes, however, the real thing and the make-believe came into
contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or
coming to make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered her
invidious rivals.  The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed
her no more than if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional
loftiness, but simply because, as yet, professionally, they didn’t know
how to fraternise, as I could guess that they would have liked—or at
least that the Major would.  They couldn’t talk about the omnibus—they
always walked; and they didn’t know what else to try—she wasn’t
interested in good trains or cheap claret.  Besides, they must have
felt—in the air—that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of their
ever knowing how.  She was not a person to conceal her scepticism if she
had had a chance to show it.  On the other hand Mrs. Monarch didn’t think
her tidy; for why else did she take pains to say to me (it was going out
of the way, for Mrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?

One day when my young lady happened to be present with my other sitters
(she even dropped in, when it was convenient, for a chat), I asked her to
be so good as to lend a hand in getting tea—a service with which she was
familiar and which was one of a class that, living as I did in a small
way, with slender domestic resources, I often appealed to my models to
render.  They liked to lay hands on my property, to break the sitting,
and sometimes the china—I made them feel Bohemian.  The next time I saw
Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly by making a scene
about it—she accused me of having wished to humiliate her.  She had not
resented the outrage at the time, but had seemed obliging and amused,
enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch, who sat vague and silent,
whether she would have cream and sugar, and putting an exaggerated simper
into the question.  She had tried intonations—as if she too wished to
pass for the real thing; till I was afraid my other visitors would take
offence.

Oh, _they_ were determined not to do this; and their touching patience
was the measure of their great need.  They would sit by the hour,
uncomplaining, till I was ready to use them; they would come back on the
chance of being wanted and would walk away cheerfully if they were not.
I used to go to the door with them to see in what magnificent order they
retreated.  I tried to find other employment for them—I introduced them
to several artists.  But they didn’t “take,” for reasons I could
appreciate, and I became conscious, rather anxiously, that after such
disappointments they fell back upon me with a heavier weight.  They did
me the honour to think that it was I who was most _their_ form.  They
were not picturesque enough for the painters, and in those days there
were not so many serious workers in black and white.  Besides, they had
an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them—they had secretly set
their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication
of our fine novelist.  They knew that for this undertaking I should want
no costume-effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case
in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and, presumably,
genteel.  If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for
the labour would of course be long and the occupation steady.

One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband—she explained his absence
by his having had to go to the City.  While she sat there in her usual
anxious stiffness there came, at the door, a knock which I immediately
recognised as the subdued appeal of a model out of work.  It was followed
by the entrance of a young man whom I easily perceived to be a foreigner
and who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English word but my
name, which he uttered in a way that made it seem to include all others.
I had not then visited his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue;
but as he was not so meanly constituted—what Italian is?—as to depend
only on that member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but
graceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in
which the lady before me was engaged.  I was not struck with him at
first, and while I continued to draw I emitted rough sounds of
discouragement and dismissal.  He stood his ground, however, not
importunately, but with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which
amounted to innocent impudence—the manner of a devoted servant (he might
have been in the house for years), unjustly suspected.  Suddenly I saw
that this very attitude and expression made a picture, whereupon I told
him to sit down and wait till I should be free.  There was another
picture in the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there
were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown
back, about the high studio.  He might have been crossing himself in St.
Peter’s.  Before I finished I said to myself: “The fellow’s a bankrupt
orange-monger, but he’s a treasure.”

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to open
the door for her, standing there with the rapt, pure gaze of the young
Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice.  As I never insisted, in such
situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he
had the making of a servant (and I needed one, but couldn’t pay him to be
only that), as well as of a model; in short I made up my mind to adopt my
bright adventurer if he would agree to officiate in the double capacity.
He jumped at my offer, and in the event my rashness (for I had known
nothing about him), was not brought home to me.  He proved a sympathetic
though a desultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree the
_sentiment de la pose_.  It was uncultivated, instinctive; a part of the
happy instinct which had guided him to my door and helped him to spell
out my name on the card nailed to it.  He had had no other introduction
to me than a guess, from the shape of my high north window, seen outside,
that my place was a studio and that as a studio it would contain an
artist.  He had wandered to England in search of fortune, like other
itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and a small green handcart,
on the sale of penny ices.  The ices had melted away and the partner had
dissolved in their train.  My young man wore tight yellow trousers with
reddish stripes and his name was Oronte.  He was sallow but fair, and
when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked like an
Englishman.  He was as good as Miss Churm, who could look, when required,
like an Italian.



IV.


I THOUGHT Mrs. Monarch’s face slightly convulsed when, on her coming back
with her husband, she found Oronte installed.  It was strange to have to
recognise in a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her magnificent
Major.  It was she who scented danger first, for the Major was
anecdotically unconscious.  But Oronte gave us tea, with a hundred eager
confusions (he had never seen such a queer process), and I think she
thought better of me for having at last an “establishment.”  They saw a
couple of drawings that I had made of the establishment, and Mrs. Monarch
hinted that it never would have struck her that he had sat for them.
“Now the drawings you make from _us_, they look exactly like us,” she
reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed
just their defect.  When I drew the Monarchs I couldn’t, somehow, get
away from them—get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had
not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture.  Miss
Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly,
because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead
who go to heaven are lost—in the gain of an angel the more.

By this time I had got a certain start with “Rutland Ramsay,” the first
novel in the great projected series; that is I had produced a dozen
drawings, several with the help of the Major and his wife, and I had sent
them in for approval.  My understanding with the publishers, as I have
already hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, in this
particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committed to me; but my
connection with the rest of the series was only contingent.  There were
moments when, frankly, it _was_ a comfort to have the real thing under
one’s hand; for there were characters in “Rutland Ramsay” that were very
much like it.  There were people presumably as straight as the Major and
women of as good a fashion as Mrs. Monarch.  There was a great deal of
country-house life—treated, it is true, in a fine, fanciful, ironical,
generalised way—and there was a considerable implication of
knickerbockers and kilts.  There were certain things I had to settle at
the outset; such things for instance as the exact appearance of the hero,
the particular bloom of the heroine.  The author of course gave me a
lead, but there was a margin for interpretation.  I took the Monarchs
into my confidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I mentioned my
embarrassments and alternatives.  “Oh, take _him_!” Mrs. Monarch murmured
sweetly, looking at her husband; and “What could you want better than my
wife?” the Major inquired, with the comfortable candour that now
prevailed between us.

I was not obliged to answer these remarks—I was only obliged to place my
sitters.  I was not easy in mind, and I postponed, a little timidly
perhaps, the solution of the question.  The book was a large canvas, the
other figures were numerous, and I worked off at first some of the
episodes in which the hero and the heroine were not concerned.  When once
I had set _them_ up I should have to stick to them—I couldn’t make my
young man seven feet high in one place and five feet nine in another.  I
inclined on the whole to the latter measurement, though the Major more
than once reminded me that _he_ looked about as young as anyone.  It was
indeed quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, so that it would
have been difficult to detect his age.  After the spontaneous Oronte had
been with me a month, and after I had given him to understand several
different times that his native exuberance would presently constitute an
insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of
his heroic capacity.  He was only five feet seven, but the remaining
inches were latent.  I tried him almost secretly at first, for I was
really rather afraid of the judgment my other models would pass on such a
choice.  If they regarded Miss Churm as little better than a snare, what
would they think of the representation by a person so little the real
thing as an Italian street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public
school?

If I went a little in fear of them it was not because they bullied me,
because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their really
pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they counted on me so
intensely.  I was therefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he was
always of such good counsel.  He painted badly himself, but there was no
one like him for putting his finger on the place.  He had been absent
from England for a year; he had been somewhere—I don’t remember where—to
get a fresh eye.  I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we
were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense of emptiness
was creeping into my life.  I hadn’t dodged a missile for a year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet blouse,
and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked cigarettes till the
small hours.  He had done no work himself, he had only got the eye; so
the field was clear for the production of my little things.  He wanted to
see what I had done for the _Cheapside_, but he was disappointed in the
exhibition.  That at least seemed the meaning of two or three
comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan, on a folded
leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued from his lips with the smoke
of the cigarette.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with _you_?”

“Nothing save that I’m mystified.”

“You are indeed.  You’re quite off the hinge.  What’s the meaning of this
new fad?” And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which
I happened to have depicted both my majestic models.  I asked if he
didn’t think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable,
given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing
to arrive at; but I let that pass, I was so anxious to see exactly what
he meant.  The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed
this was _not_ what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the
contrary, I might have been trying for that.  I maintained that I was
working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to
commend me.  “Well, there’s a big hole somewhere,” he answered; “wait a
bit and I’ll discover it.”  I depended upon him to do so: where else was
the fresh eye?  But he produced at last nothing more luminous than “I
don’t know—I don’t like your types.”  This was lame, for a critic who had
never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of
execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.

“In the drawings you’ve been looking at I think my types are very
handsome.”

“Oh, they won’t do!”

“I’ve had a couple of new models.”

“I see you have.  _They_ won’t do.”

“Are you very sure of that?”

“Absolutely—they’re stupid.”

“You mean _I_ am—for I ought to get round that.”

“You _can’t_—with such people.  Who are they?”

I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly: “_Ce
sont des gens qu’il faut mettre à la porte_.”

“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfully good,” I compassionately
objected.

“Not seen them?  Why, all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with
them.  It’s all I want to see of them.”

“No one else has said anything against it—the _Cheapside_ people are
pleased.”

“Everyone else is an ass, and the _Cheapside_ people the biggest asses of
all.  Come, don’t pretend, at this time of day, to have pretty illusions
about the public, especially about publishers and editors.  It’s not for
_such_ animals you work—it’s for those who know, _coloro che sanno_; so
keep straight for _me_ if you can’t keep straight for yourself.  There’s
a certain sort of thing you tried for from the first—and a very good
thing it is.  But this twaddle isn’t _in_ it.”  When I talked with Hawley
later about “Rutland Ramsay” and its possible successors he declared that
I must get back into my boat again or I would go to the bottom.  His
voice in short was the voice of warning.

I noted the warning, but I didn’t turn my friends out of doors.  They
bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me
not to sacrifice them—if there was anything to be done with them—simply
to irritation.  As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have
pervaded my life not a little.  I have a vision of them as most of the
time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on an old velvet bench to be
out of the way, and looking like a pair of patient courtiers in a royal
ante-chamber.  I am convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter
they held their ground because it saved them fire.  Their newness was
losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel that they were
objects of charity.  Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and
after I was fairly launched in “Rutland Ramsay” Miss Churm arrived pretty
often.  They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted
her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they
had attempted to study the work—it was lying about the studio—without
discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.  They had dipped
into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many
passages.  I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of
Jack Hawley’s warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if
dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.
Hawley had made their acquaintance—he had met them at my fireside—and
thought them a ridiculous pair.  Learning that he was a painter they
tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but
he looked at them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: they
were a compendium of everything that he most objected to in the social
system of his country.  Such people as that, all convention and
patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no
business in a studio.  A studio was a place to learn to see, and how
could you see through a pair of feather beds?

The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that, at first, I
was shy of letting them discover how my artful little servant had begun
to sit to me for “Rutland Ramsay.”  They knew that I had been odd enough
(they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists,) to pick a
foreign vagabond out of the streets, when I might have had a person with
whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they learned how
high I rated his accomplishments.  They found him in an attitude more
than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an organ-grinder.
There were several things they never guessed, and one of them was that
for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured, it
occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as the menial.  I kept
putting this off, I didn’t like to ask him to don the livery—besides the
difficulty of finding a livery to fit him.  At last, one day late in the
winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte (he caught one’s idea
in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I was going very
straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh
about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at), like
country-callers—they always reminded me of that—who have walked across
the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay to luncheon.
Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea—I knew they wanted it.  The
fit was on me, however, and I couldn’t let my ardour cool and my work
wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it.  So I asked
Mrs. Monarch if she would mind laying it out—a request which, for an
instant, brought all the blood to her face.  Her eyes were on her
husband’s for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.
Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an end
to it.  So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was moved
to give it as complete a lesson as I could.  They bustled about together
and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil.  I know they
felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared
I said: “He’ll have a cup, please—he’s tired.”  Mrs. Monarch brought him
one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman
at a party, squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.

Then it came over me that she had made a great effort for me—made it with
a kind of nobleness—and that I owed her a compensation.  Each time I saw
her after this I wondered what the compensation could be.  I couldn’t go
on doing the wrong thing to oblige them.  Oh, it _was_ the wrong thing,
the stamp of the work for which they sat—Hawley was not the only person
to say it now.  I sent in a large number of the drawings I had made for
“Rutland Ramsay,” and I received a warning that was more to the point
than Hawley’s.  The artistic adviser of the house for which I was working
was of opinion that many of my illustrations were not what had been
looked for.  Most of these illustrations were the subjects in which the
Monarchs had figured.  Without going into the question of what _had_ been
looked for, I saw at this rate I shouldn’t get the other books to do.  I
hurled myself in despair upon Miss Churm, I put her through all her
paces.  I not only adopted Oronte publicly as my hero, but one morning
when the Major looked in to see if I didn’t require him to finish a
figure for the _Cheapside_, for which he had begun to sit the week
before, I told him that I had changed my mind—I would do the drawing from
my man.  At this my visitor turned pale and stood looking at me.  “Is
_he_ your idea of an English gentleman?” he asked.

I was disappointed, I was nervous, I wanted to get on with my work; so I
replied with irritation: “Oh, my dear Major—I can’t be ruined for _you_!”

He stood another moment; then, without a word, he quitted the studio.  I
drew a long breath when he was gone, for I said to myself that I
shouldn’t see him again.  I had not told him definitely that I was in
danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt
the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless
collaboration, the lesson that, in the deceptive atmosphere of art, even
the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.

I didn’t owe my friends money, but I did see them again.  They
re-appeared together, three days later, and under the circumstances there
was something tragic in the fact.  It was a proof to me that they could
find nothing else in life to do.  They had threshed the matter out in a
dismal conference—they had digested the bad news that they were not in
for the series.  If they were not useful to me even for the _Cheapside_
their function seemed difficult to determine, and I could only judge at
first that they had come, forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave.
This made me rejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for
I had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging
away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive glory.  It had been
suggested by the passage in which Rutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to
Artemisia’s piano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while she
ostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music.  I had done Miss Churm
at the piano before—it was an attitude in which she knew how to take on
an absolutely poetic grace.  I wished the two figures to “compose”
together, intensely, and my little Italian had entered perfectly into my
conception.  The pair were vividly before me, the piano had been pulled
out; it was a charming picture of blended youth and murmured love, which
I had only to catch and keep.  My visitors stood and looked at it, and I
was friendly to them over my shoulder.

They made no response, but I was used to silent company and went on with
my work, only a little disconcerted (even though exhilarated by the sense
that _this_ was at least the ideal thing), at not having got rid of them
after all.  Presently I heard Mrs. Monarch’s sweet voice beside, or
rather above me: “I wish her hair was a little better done.”  I looked up
and she was staring with a strange fixedness at Miss Churm, whose back
was turned to her.  “Do you mind my just touching it?” she went on—a
question which made me spring up for an instant, as with the instinctive
fear that she might do the young lady a harm.  But she quieted me with a
glance I shall never forget—I confess I should like to have been able to
paint _that_—and went for a moment to my model.  She spoke to her softly,
laying a hand upon her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl,
understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a
few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss Churm’s head twice as
charming.  It was one of the most heroic personal services I have ever
seen rendered.  Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and,
looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a
noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my
paint-box.

The Major meanwhile had also been looking for something to do and,
wandering to the other end of the studio, saw before him my breakfast
things, neglected, unremoved.  “I say, can’t I be useful _here_?” he
called out to me with an irrepressible quaver.  I assented with a laugh
that I fear was awkward and for the next ten minutes, while I worked, I
heard the light clatter of china and the tinkle of spoons and glass.
Mrs. Monarch assisted her husband—they washed up my crockery, they put it
away.  They wandered off into my little scullery, and I afterwards found
that they had cleaned my knives and that my slender stock of plate had an
unprecedented surface.  When it came over me, the latent eloquence of
what they were doing, I confess that my drawing was blurred for a
moment—the picture swam.  They had accepted their failure, but they
couldn’t accept their fate.  They had bowed their heads in bewilderment
to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be
so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve.
If my servants were my models, my models might be my servants.  They
would reverse the parts—the others would sit for the ladies and
gentlemen, and _they_ would do the work.  They would still be in the
studio—it was an intense dumb appeal to me not to turn them out.  “Take
us on,” they wanted to say—“we’ll do _anything_.”

When all this hung before me the _afflatus_ vanished—my pencil dropped
from my hand.  My sitting was spoiled and I got rid of my sitters, who
were also evidently rather mystified and awestruck.  Then, alone with the
Major and his wife, I had a most uncomfortable moment, He put their
prayer into a single sentence: “I say, you know—just let _us_ do for you,
can’t you?” I couldn’t—it was dreadful to see them emptying my slops; but
I pretended I could, to oblige them, for about a week.  Then I gave them
a sum of money to go away; and I never saw them again.  I obtained the
remaining books, but my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch
did me a permanent harm, got me into a second-rate trick.  If it be true
I am content to have paid the price—for the memory.




SIR DOMINICK FERRAND.


I.


“THERE are several objections to it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter
it,” Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of
words in the postscript in which he had added: “If you’ll come in and see
me, I’ll show you what I mean.”  This communication had reached Jersey
Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed his
leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorial behest.
He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and he had no desire to
look eager—it was not in his interest; but how could he maintain a
godlike calm, principled though he was in favour of it, the first time
one of the great magazines had accepted, even with a cruel reservation, a
specimen of his ardent young genius?

It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be
aware of the great roar of the “underground,” that, in his third-class
carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of
acrid smoke, to his inner sense.  It was really degrading to be eager in
the face of having to “alter.”  Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at
that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need,
but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior boldness
which were exactly what the conductor of the “Promiscuous Review” would
be sure to be down upon.  He made believe—as if to the greasy
fellow-passenger opposite—that he felt indignant; but he saw that to the
small round eye of this still more downtrodden brother he represented
selfish success.  He would have liked to linger in the conception that he
had been “approached” by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought
in the office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there
was no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there
for a familiar bore.  The only thing that was clearly flattering was the
fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction.  He should therefore
be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and that would more
than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr. Locket’s inexorable
earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled, about his showing no symptom
of the faculty really creative.  “You don’t seem able to keep a character
together,” this pitiless monitor had somewhere else remarked.  Peter
Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped, considered, in
the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked
himself whose character had fallen to pieces now.  Tormenting indeed had
always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative head without the
creative hand.

It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his mission to
Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged by an incident
occurring at Jersey Villas.  On leaving the house (he lived at No.  3,
the door of which stood open to a small front garden), he encountered the
lady who, a week before, had taken possession of the rooms on the ground
floor, the “parlours” of Mrs. Bundy’s terminology.  He had heard her, and
from his window, two or three times, had even seen her pass in and out,
and this observation had created in his mind a vague prejudice in her
favour.  Such a prejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent
test; it had been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was
still less to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano.  She had
furthermore a little boy and a very sweet voice, of which Peter Baron had
caught the accent, not from her singing (for she only played), but from
her gay admonitions to her child, whom she occasionally allowed to amuse
himself—under restrictions very publicly enforced—in the tiny black patch
which, as a forecourt to each house, was held, in the humble row, to be a
feature.  Jersey Villas stood in pairs, semi-detached, and Mrs.
Ryves—such was the name under which the new lodger presented herself—had
been admitted to the house as confessedly musical.  Mrs. Bundy, the
earnest proprietress of No. 3, who considered her “parlours” (they were a
dozen feet square), even more attractive, if possible, than the second
floor with which Baron had had to content himself—Mrs. Bundy, who
reserved the drawing-room for a casual dressmaking business, had threshed
out the subject of the new lodger in advance with our young man,
reminding him that her affection for his own person was a proof that,
other things being equal, she positively preferred tenants who were
clever.

This was the case with Mrs. Ryves; she had satisfied Mrs. Bundy that she
was not a simple strummer.  Mrs. Bundy admitted to Peter Baron that, for
herself, she had a weakness for a pretty tune, and Peter could honestly
reply that his ear was equally sensitive.  Everything would depend on the
“touch” of their inmate.  Mrs. Ryves’s piano would blight his existence
if her hand should prove heavy or her selections vulgar; but if she
played agreeable things and played them in an agreeable way she would
render him rather a service while he smoked the pipe of “form.”  Mrs.
Bundy, who wanted to let her rooms, guaranteed on the part of the
stranger a first-class talent, and Mrs. Ryves, who evidently knew
thoroughly what she was about, had not falsified this somewhat rash
prediction.  She never played in the morning, which was Baron’s
working-time, and he found himself listening with pleasure at other hours
to her discreet and melancholy strains.  He really knew little about
music, and the only criticism he would have made of Mrs. Ryves’s
conception of it was that she seemed devoted to the dismal.  It was not,
however, that these strains were not pleasant to him; they floated up, on
the contrary, as a sort of conscious response to some of his broodings
and doubts.  Harmony, therefore, would have reigned supreme had it not
been for the singularly bad taste of No. 4.  Mrs. Ryves’s piano was on
the free side of the house and was regarded by Mrs. Bundy as open to no
objection but that of their own gentleman, who was so reasonable.  As
much, however, could not be said of the gentleman of No. 4, who had not
even Mr. Baron’s excuse of being “littery” (he kept a bull-terrier and
had five hats—the street could count them), and whom, if you had listened
to Mrs. Bundy, you would have supposed to be divided from the obnoxious
instrument by walls and corridors, obstacles and intervals, of massive
structure and fabulous extent.  This gentleman had taken up an attitude
which had now passed into the phase of correspondence and compromise; but
it was the opinion of the immediate neighbourhood that he had not a leg
to stand upon, and on whatever subject the sentiment of Jersey Villas
might have been vague, it was not so on the rights and the wrongs of
landladies.

Mrs. Ryves’s little boy was in the garden as Peter Baron issued from the
house, and his mother appeared to have come out for a moment, bareheaded,
to see that he was doing no harm.  She was discussing with him the
responsibility that he might incur by passing a piece of string round one
of the iron palings and pretending he was in command of a “geegee”; but
it happened that at the sight of the other lodger the child was seized
with a finer perception of the drivable.  He rushed at Baron with a
flourish of the bridle, shouting, “Ou geegee!” in a manner productive of
some refined embarrassment to his mother.  Baron met his advance by
mounting him on a shoulder and feigning to prance an instant, so that by
the time this performance was over—it took but a few seconds—the young
man felt introduced to Mrs. Ryves.  Her smile struck him as charming, and
such an impression shortens many steps.  She said, “Oh, thank you—you
mustn’t let him worry you”; and then as, having put down the child and
raised his hat, he was turning away, she added: “It’s very good of you
not to complain of my piano.”

“I particularly enjoy it—you play beautifully,” said Peter Baron.

“I have to play, you see—it’s all I can do.  But the people next door
don’t like it, though my room, you know, is not against their wall.
Therefore I thank you for letting me tell them that you, in the house,
don’t find me a nuisance.”

She looked gentle and bright as she spoke, and as the young man’s eyes
rested on her the tolerance for which she expressed herself indebted
seemed to him the least indulgence she might count upon.  But he only
laughed and said “Oh, no, you’re not a nuisance!” and felt more and more
introduced.

The little boy, who was handsome, hereupon clamoured for another ride,
and she took him up herself, to moderate his transports.  She stood a
moment with the child in her arms, and he put his fingers exuberantly
into her hair, so that while she smiled at Baron she slowly, permittingly
shook her head to get rid of them.

“If they really make a fuss I’m afraid I shall have to go,” she went on.

“Oh, don’t go!” Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which made
his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of another.
She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably,
passed back into the house.  She had made an impression which remained
till the other party to the conversation reached the railway-station,
when it was superseded by the thought of his prospective discussion with
Mr. Locket.  This was a proof of the intensity of that interest.

The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter Baron,
who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm.  He had had the
question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a flutter which ought to have
been a sense of triumph and which indeed at first he succeeded in
regarding in this light.  Mr. Locket had had to admit that there was an
idea in his story, and that was a tribute which Baron was in a position
to make the most of.  But there was also a scene which scandalised the
editorial conscience and which the young man had promised to rewrite.
The idea that Mr. Locket had been so good as to disengage depended for
clearness mainly on this scene; so it was easy to see his objection was
perverse.  This inference was probably a part of the joy in which Peter
Baron walked as he carried home a contribution it pleased him to classify
as accepted.  He walked to work off his excitement and to think in what
manner he should reconstruct.  He went some distance without settling
that point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked vaguely into
shop-windows for solutions and hints.  Mr. Locket lived in the depths of
Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and Baron took his way
homeward along the King’s Road.  There was a new amusement for him, a
fresher bustle, in a London walk in the morning; these were hours that he
habitually spent at his table, in the awkward attitude engendered by the
poor piece of furniture, one of the rickety features of Mrs. Bundy’s
second floor, which had to serve as his altar of literary sacrifice.  If
by exception he went out when the day was young he noticed that life
seemed younger with it; there were livelier industries to profit by and
shop-girls, often rosy, to look at; a different air was in the streets
and a chaff of traffic for the observer of manners to catch.  Above all,
it was the time when poor Baron made his purchases, which were wholly of
the wandering mind; his extravagances, for some mysterious reason, were
all matutinal, and he had a foreknowledge that if ever he should ruin
himself it would be well before noon.  He felt lavish this morning, on
the strength of what the Promiscuous would do for him; he had lost sight
for the moment of what he should have to do for the Promiscuous.  Before
the old bookshops and printshops, the crowded panes of the
curiosity-mongers and the desirable exhibitions of mahogany “done up,” he
used, by an innocent process, to commit luxurious follies.  He
refurnished Mrs. Bundy with a freedom that cost her nothing, and lost
himself in pictures of a transfigured second floor.

On this particular occasion the King’s Road proved almost unprecedentedly
expensive, and indeed this occasion differed from most others in
containing the germ of real danger.  For once in a way he had a bad
conscience—he felt himself tempted to pick his own pocket.  He never saw
a commodious writing-table, with elbow-room and drawers and a fair
expanse of leather stamped neatly at the edge with gilt, without being
freshly reminded of Mrs. Bundy’s dilapidations.  There were several such
tables in the King’s Road—they seemed indeed particularly numerous today.
Peter Baron glanced at them all through the fronts of the shops, but
there was one that detained him in supreme contemplation.  There was a
fine assurance about it which seemed a guarantee of masterpieces; but
when at last he went in and, just to help himself on his way, asked the
impossible price, the sum mentioned by the voluble vendor mocked at him
even more than he had feared.  It was far too expensive, as he hinted,
and he was on the point of completing his comedy by a pensive retreat
when the shopman bespoke his attention for another article of the same
general character, which he described as remarkably cheap for what it
was.  It was an old piece, from a sale in the country, and it had been in
stock some time; but it had got pushed out of sight in one of the upper
rooms—they contained such a wilderness of treasures—and happened to have
but just come to light.  Peter suffered himself to be conducted into an
interminable dusky rear, where he presently found himself bending over
one of those square substantial desks of old mahogany, raised, with the
aid of front legs, on a sort of retreating pedestal which is fitted with
small drawers, contracted conveniences known immemorially to the knowing
as davenports.  This specimen had visibly seen service, but it had an
old-time solidity and to Peter Baron it unexpectedly appealed.

He would have said in advance that such an article was exactly what he
didn’t want, but as the shopman pushed up a chair for him and he sat down
with his elbows on the gentle <DW72> of the large, firm lid, he felt that
such a basis for literature would be half the battle.  He raised the lid
and looked lovingly into the deep interior; he sat ominously silent while
his companion dropped the striking words: “Now that’s an article I
personally covet!”  Then when the man mentioned the ridiculous price
(they were literally giving it away), he reflected on the economy of
having a literary altar on which one could really kindle a fire.  A
davenport was a compromise, but what was all life but a compromise?  He
could beat down the dealer, and at Mrs. Bundy’s he had to write on an
insincere card-table.  After he had sat for a minute with his nose in the
friendly desk he had a queer impression that it might tell him a secret
or two—one of the secrets of form, one of the sacrificial
mysteries—though no doubt its career had been literary only in the sense
of its helping some old lady to write invitations to dull dinners.  There
was a strange, faint odour in the receptacle, as if fragrant, hallowed
things had once been put away there.  When he took his head out of it he
said to the shopman: “I don’t mind meeting you halfway.”  He had been
told by knowing people that that was the right thing.  He felt rather
vulgar, but the davenport arrived that evening at Jersey Villas.



II.


“I DARESAY it will be all right; he seems quiet now,” said the poor lady
of the “parlours” a few days later, in reference to their litigious
neighbour and the precarious piano.  The two lodgers had grown regularly
acquainted, and the piano had had much to do with it.  Just as this
instrument served, with the gentleman at No. 4, as a theme for
discussion, so between Peter Baron and the lady of the parlours it had
become a basis of peculiar agreement, a topic, at any rate, of
conversation frequently renewed.  Mrs. Ryves was so prepossessing that
Peter was sure that even if they had not had the piano he would have
found something else to thresh out with her.  Fortunately however they
did have it, and he, at least, made the most of it, knowing more now
about his new friend, who when, widowed and fatigued, she held her
beautiful child in her arms, looked dimly like a modern Madonna.  Mrs.
Bundy, as a letter of furnished lodgings, was characterised in general by
a familiar domestic severity in respect to picturesque young women, but
she had the highest confidence in Mrs. Ryves.  She was luminous about her
being a lady, and a lady who could bring Mrs. Bundy back to a gratified
recognition of one of those manifestations of mind for which she had an
independent esteem.  She was professional, but Jersey Villas could be
proud of a profession that didn’t happen to be the wrong one—they had
seen something of that.  Mrs. Ryves had a hundred a year (Baron wondered
how Mrs. Bundy knew this; he thought it unlikely Mrs. Ryves had told
her), and for the rest she depended on her lovely music.  Baron judged
that her music, even though lovely, was a frail dependence; it would
hardly help to fill a concert-room, and he asked himself at first whether
she played country-dances at children’s parties or gave lessons to young
ladies who studied above their station.

Very soon, indeed, he was sufficiently enlightened; it all went fast, for
the little boy had been almost as great a help as the piano.  Sidney
haunted the doorstep of No.  3 he was eminently sociable, and had
established independent relations with Peter, a frequent feature of which
was an adventurous visit, upstairs, to picture books criticised for not
being _all_ geegees and walking sticks happily more conformable.  The
young man’s window, too, looked out on their acquaintance; through a
starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour before him, made him almost
more aware of her comings and goings than he felt he had a right to be.
He was capable of a shyness of curiosity about her and of dumb little
delicacies of consideration.  She did give a few lessons; they were
essentially local, and he ended by knowing more or less what she went out
for and what she came in from.  She had almost no visitors, only a decent
old lady or two, and, every day, poor dingy Miss Teagle, who was also
ancient and who came humbly enough to governess the infant of the
parlours.  Peter Baron’s window had always, to his sense, looked out on a
good deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown him was that
there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able to command for
twopence the services of somebody less joyous.  Mrs. Ryves was a
struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it), but she occupied a
pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had lived on—and from a noble nursery—into
a period of diplomas and humiliation.

Mrs. Ryves sometimes went out, like Baron himself, with manuscripts under
her arm, and, still more like Baron, she almost always came back with
them.  Her vain approaches were to the music-sellers; she tried to
compose—to produce songs that would make a hit.  A successful song was an
income, she confided to Peter one of the first times he took Sidney,
blasé and drowsy, back to his mother.  It was not on one of these
occasions, but once when he had come in on no better pretext than that of
simply wanting to (she had after all virtually invited him), that she
mentioned how only one song in a thousand was successful and that the
terrible difficulty was in getting the right words.  This rightness was
just a vulgar “fluke”—there were lots of words really clever that were of
no use at all.  Peter said, laughing, that he supposed any words he
should try to produce would be sure to be too clever; yet only three
weeks after his first encounter with Mrs. Ryves he sat at his delightful
davenport (well aware that he had duties more pressing), trying to string
together rhymes idiotic enough to make his neighbour’s fortune.  He was
satisfied of the fineness of her musical gift—it had the touching note.
The touching note was in her person as well.

The davenport was delightful, after six months of its tottering
predecessor, and such a re-enforcement to the young man’s style was not
impaired by his sense of something lawless in the way it had been gained.
He had made the purchase in anticipation of the money he expected from
Mr. Locket, but Mr. Locket’s liberality was to depend on the ingenuity of
his contributor, who now found himself confronted with the consequence of
a frivolous optimism.  The fruit of his labour presented, as he stared at
it with his elbows on his desk, an aspect uncompromising and
incorruptible.  It seemed to look up at him reproachfully and to say,
with its essential finish: “How could you promise anything so base; how
could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?”  The alterations
demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude
of his conception of the public mind were degrading.  The public mind!—as
if the public _had_ a mind, or any principle of perception more
discoverable than the stare of huddled sheep!  Peter Baron felt that it
concerned him to determine if he were only not clever enough or if he
were simply not abject enough to rewrite his story.  He might in truth
have had less pride if he had had more skill, and more discretion if he
had had more practice.  Humility, in the profession of letters, was half
of practice, and resignation was half of success.  Poor Peter actually
flushed with pain as he recognised that this was not success, the
production of gelid prose which his editor could do nothing with on the
one side and he himself could do nothing with on the other.  The truth
about his luckless tale was now the more bitter from his having managed,
for some days, to taste it as sweet.

As he sat there, baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what
was meant by the “rewards” of literature, he generally ended by tossing
away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the
sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music.  Success
in these experiments wouldn’t be a reward of literature, but it might
very well become a labour of love.  The experiments would be pleasant
enough for him if they were pleasant for his inscrutable neighbour.  That
was the way he thought of her now, for he had learned enough about her,
little by little, to guess how much there was still to learn.  To spend
his mornings over cheap rhymes for her was certainly to shirk the
immediate question; but there were hours when he judged this question to
be altogether too arduous, reflecting that he might quite as well perish
by the sword as by famine.  Besides, he did meet it obliquely when he
considered that he shouldn’t be an utter failure if he were to produce
some songs to which Mrs. Ryves’s accompaniments would give a circulation.
He had not ventured to show her anything yet, but one morning, at a
moment when her little boy was in his room, it seemed to him that, by an
inspiration, he had arrived at the happy middle course (it was an art by
itself), between sound and sense.  If the sense was not confused it was
because the sound was so familiar.

He had said to the child, to whom he had sacrificed barley-sugar (it had
no attraction for his own lips, yet in these days there was always some
of it about), he had confided to the small Sidney that if he would wait a
little he should be intrusted with something nice to take down to his
parent.  Sidney had absorbing occupation and, while Peter copied off the
song in a pretty hand, roamed, gurgling and sticky, about the room.  In
this manner he lurched like a little toper into the rear of the
davenport, which stood a few steps out from the recess of the window,
and, as he was fond of beating time to his intensest joys, began to bang
on the surface of it with a paper-knife which at that spot had chanced to
fall upon the floor.  At the moment Sidney committed this violence his
kind friend had happened to raise the lid of the desk and, with his head
beneath it, was rummaging among a mass of papers for a proper envelope.
“I say, I say, my boy!” he exclaimed, solicitous for the ancient glaze of
his most cherished possession.  Sidney paused an instant; then, while
Peter still hunted for the envelope, he administered another, and this
time a distinctly disobedient, rap.  Peter heard it from within and was
struck with its oddity of sound—so much so that, leaving the child for a
moment under a demoralising impression of impunity, he waited with quick
curiosity for a repetition of the stroke.  It came of course immediately,
and then the young man, who had at the same instant found his envelope
and ejaculated “Hallo, this thing has a false back!” jumped up and
secured his visitor, whom with his left arm he held in durance on his
knee while with his free hand he addressed the missive to Mrs. Ryves.

As Sidney was fond of errands he was easily got rid of, and after he had
gone Baron stood a moment at the window chinking pennies and keys in
pockets and wondering if the charming composer would think his song as
good, or in other words as bad, as he thought it.  His eyes as he turned
away fell on the wooden back of the davenport, where, to his regret, the
traces of Sidney’s assault were visible in three or four ugly scratches.
“Confound the little brute!” he exclaimed, feeling as if an altar had
been desecrated.  He was reminded, however, of the observation this
outrage had led him to make, and, for further assurance, he knocked on
the wood with his knuckle.  It sounded from that position commonplace
enough, but his suspicion was strongly confirmed when, again standing
beside the desk, he put his head beneath the lifted lid and gave ear
while with an extended arm he tapped sharply in the same place.  The back
was distinctly hollow; there was a space between the inner and the outer
pieces (he could measure it), so wide that he was a fool not to have
noticed it before.  The depth of the receptacle from front to rear was so
great that it could sacrifice a certain quantity of room without
detection.  The sacrifice could of course only be for a purpose, and the
purpose could only be the creation of a secret compartment.  Peter Baron
was still boy enough to be thrilled by the idea of such a feature, the
more so as every indication of it had been cleverly concealed.  The
people at the shop had never noticed it, else they would have called his
attention to it as an enhancement of value.  His legendary lore
instructed him that where there was a hiding-place there was always a
hidden spring, and he pried and pressed and fumbled in an eager search
for the sensitive spot.  The article was really a wonder of neat
construction; everything fitted with a closeness that completely saved
appearances.

It took Baron some minutes to pursue his inquiry, during which he
reflected that the people of the shop were not such fools after all.
They had admitted moreover that they had accidentally neglected this
relic of gentility—it had been overlooked in the multiplicity of their
treasures.  He now recalled that the man had wanted to polish it up
before sending it home, and that, satisfied for his own part with its
honourable appearance and averse in general to shiny furniture, he had in
his impatience declined to wait for such an operation, so that the object
had left the place for Jersey Villas, carrying presumably its secret with
it, two or three hours after his visit.  This secret it seemed indeed
capable of keeping; there was an absurdity in being baffled, but Peter
couldn’t find the spring.  He thumped and sounded, he listened and
measured again; he inspected every joint and crevice, with the effect of
becoming surer still of the existence of a chamber and of making up his
mind that his davenport was a rarity.  Not only was there a compartment
between the two backs, but there was distinctly something _in_ the
compartment!  Perhaps it was a lost manuscript—a nice, safe,
old-fashioned story that Mr. Locket wouldn’t object to.  Peter returned
to the charge, for it had occurred to him that he had perhaps not
sufficiently visited the small drawers, of which, in two vertical rows,
there were six in number, of different sizes, inserted sideways into that
portion of the structure which formed part of the support of the desk.
He took them out again and examined more minutely the condition of their
sockets, with the happy result of discovering at last, in the place into
which the third on the left-hand row was fitted, a small sliding panel.
Behind the panel was a spring, like a flat button, which yielded with a
click when he pressed it and which instantly produced a loosening of one
of the pieces of the shelf forming the highest part of the
davenport—pieces adjusted to each other with the most deceptive
closeness.

This particular piece proved to be, in its turn, a sliding panel, which,
when pushed, revealed the existence of a smaller receptacle, a narrow,
oblong box, in the false back.  Its capacity was limited, but if it
couldn’t hold many things it might hold precious ones.  Baron, in
presence of the ingenuity with which it had been dissimulated,
immediately felt that, but for the odd chance of little Sidney Ryves’s
having hammered on the outside at the moment he himself happened to have
his head in the desk, he might have remained for years without suspicion
of it.  This apparently would have been a loss, for he had been right in
guessing that the chamber was not empty.  It contained objects which,
whether precious or not, had at any rate been worth somebody’s hiding.
These objects were a collection of small flat parcels, of the shape of
packets of letters, wrapped in white paper and neatly sealed.  The seals,
mechanically figured, bore the impress neither of arms nor of initials;
the paper looked old—it had turned faintly sallow; the packets might have
been there for ages.  Baron counted them—there were nine in all, of
different sizes; he turned them over and over, felt them curiously and
snuffed in their vague, musty smell, which affected him with the
melancholy of some smothered human accent.  The little bundles were
neither named nor numbered—there was not a word of writing on any of the
covers; but they plainly contained old letters, sorted and matched
according to dates or to authorship.  They told some old, dead story—they
were the ashes of fires burned out.

As Peter Baron held his discoveries successively in his hands he became
conscious of a queer emotion which was not altogether elation and yet was
still less pure pain.  He had made a find, but it somehow added to his
responsibility; he was in the presence of something interesting, but (in
a manner he couldn’t have defined) this circumstance suddenly constituted
a danger.  It was the perception of the danger, for instance, which
caused to remain in abeyance any impulse he might have felt to break one
of the seals.  He looked at them all narrowly, but he was careful not to
loosen them, and he wondered uncomfortably whether the contents of the
secret compartment would be held in equity to be the property of the
people in the King’s Road.  He had given money for the davenport, but had
he given money for these buried papers?  He paid by a growing
consciousness that a nameless chill had stolen into the air the penalty,
which he had many a time paid before, of being made of sensitive stuff.
It was as if an occasion had insidiously arisen for a sacrifice—a
sacrifice for the sake of a fine superstition, something like honour or
kindness or justice, something indeed perhaps even finer still—a
difficult deciphering of duty, an impossible tantalising wisdom.
Standing there before his ambiguous treasure and losing himself for the
moment in the sense of a dawning complication, he was startled by a
light, quick tap at the door of his sitting-room.  Instinctively, before
answering, he listened an instant—he was in the attitude of a miser
surprised while counting his hoard.  Then he answered “One moment,
please!” and slipped the little heap of packets into the biggest of the
drawers of the davenport, which happened to be open.  The aperture of the
false back was still gaping, and he had not time to work back the spring.
He hastily laid a big book over the place and then went and opened his
door.

It offered him a sight none the less agreeable for being unexpected—the
graceful and agitated figure of Mrs. Ryves.  Her agitation was so visible
that he thought at first that something dreadful had happened to her
child—that she had rushed up to ask for help, to beg him to go for the
doctor.  Then he perceived that it was probably connected with the
desperate verses he had transmitted to her a quarter of an hour before;
for she had his open manuscript in one hand and was nervously pulling it
about with the other.  She looked frightened and pretty, and if, in
invading the privacy of a fellow-lodger, she had been guilty of a
departure from rigid custom, she was at least conscious of the enormity
of the step and incapable of treating it with levity.  The levity was for
Peter Baron, who endeavoured, however, to clothe his familiarity with
respect, pushing forward the seat of honour and repeating that he
rejoiced in such a visit.  The visitor came in, leaving the door ajar,
and after a minute during which, to help her, he charged her with the
purpose of telling him that he ought to be ashamed to send her down such
rubbish, she recovered herself sufficiently to stammer out that his song
was exactly what she had been looking for and that after reading it she
had been seized with an extraordinary, irresistible impulse—that of
thanking him for it in person and without delay.

“It was the impulse of a kind nature,” he said, “and I can’t tell you
what pleasure you give me.”

She declined to sit down, and evidently wished to appear to have come but
for a few seconds.  She looked confusedly at the place in which she found
herself, and when her eyes met his own they struck him as anxious and
appealing.  She was evidently not thinking of his song, though she said
three or four times over that it was beautiful.  “Well, I only wanted you
to know, and now I must go,” she added; but on his hearthrug she lingered
with such an odd helplessness that he felt almost sorry for her.

“Perhaps I can improve it if you find it doesn’t go,” said Baron.  “I’m
so delighted to do anything for you I can.”

“There may be a word or two that might be changed,” she answered, rather
absently.  “I shall have to think it over, to live with it a little.  But
I like it, and that’s all I wanted to say.”

“Charming of you.  I’m not a bit busy,” said Baron.

Again she looked at him with a troubled intensity, then suddenly she
demanded: “Is there anything the matter with you?”

“The matter with me?”

“I mean like being ill or worried.  I wondered if there might be; I had a
sudden fancy; and that, I think, is really why I came up.”

“There isn’t, indeed; I’m all right.  But your sudden fancies are
inspirations.”

“It’s absurd.  You must excuse me.  Good-by!” said Mrs. Ryves.

“What are the words you want changed?” Baron asked.

“I don’t want any—if you’re all right.  Good-by,” his visitor repeated,
fixing her eyes an instant on an object on his desk that had caught them.
His own glanced in the same direction and he saw that in his hurry to
shuffle away the packets found in the davenport he had overlooked one of
them, which lay with its seals exposed.  For an instant he felt found
out, as if he had been concerned in something to be ashamed of, and it
was only his quick second thought that told him how little the incident
of which the packet was a sequel was an affair of Mrs. Ryves’s.  Her
conscious eyes came back to his as if they were sounding them, and
suddenly this instinct of keeping his discovery to himself was succeeded
by a really startled inference that, with the rarest alertness, she had
guessed something and that her guess (it seemed almost supernatural), had
been her real motive.  Some secret sympathy had made her vibrate—had
touched her with the knowledge that he had brought something to light.
After an instant he saw that she also divined the very reflection he was
then making, and this gave him a lively desire, a grateful, happy desire,
to appear to have nothing to conceal.  For herself, it determined her
still more to put an end to her momentary visit.  But before she had
passed to the door he exclaimed: “All right?  How can a fellow be
anything else who has just had such a find?”

She paused at this, still looking earnest and asking: “What have you
found?”

“Some ancient family papers, in a secret compartment of my
writing-table.”  And he took up the packet he had left out, holding it
before her eyes.  “A lot of other things like that.”

“What are they?” murmured Mrs. Ryves.

“I haven’t the least idea.  They’re sealed.”

“You haven’t broken the seals?” She had come further back.

“I haven’t had time; it only happened ten minutes ago.”

“I knew it,” said Mrs. Ryves, more gaily now.

“What did you know?”

“That you were in some predicament.”

“You’re extraordinary.  I never heard of anything so miraculous; down two
flights of stairs.”

“_Are_ you in a quandary?” the visitor asked.

“Yes, about giving them back.”  Peter Baron stood smiling at her and
rapping his packet on the palm of his hand.  “What do you advise?”

She herself smiled now, with her eyes on the sealed parcel.  “Back to
whom?”

“The man of whom I bought the table.”

“Ah then, they’re not from _your_ family?”

“No indeed, the piece of furniture in which they were hidden is not an
ancestral possession.  I bought it at second hand—you see it’s old—the
other day in the King’s Road.  Obviously the man who sold it to me sold
me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point of view it was
stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber or that mysterious
documents were buried there.  Ought I to go and tell him?  It’s rather a
nice question.”

“Are the papers of value?” Mrs. Ryves inquired.

“I haven’t the least idea.  But I can ascertain by breaking a seal.”

“Don’t!” said Mrs. Ryves, with much expression.  She looked grave again.

“It’s rather tantalising—it’s a bit of a problem,” Baron went on, turning
his packet over.

Mrs. Ryves hesitated.  “Will you show me what you have in your hand?”

He gave her the packet, and she looked at it and held it for an instant
to her nose.  “It has a queer, charming old fragrance,” he said.

“Charming?  It’s horrid.”  She handed him back the packet, saying again
more emphatically “Don’t!”

“Don’t break a seal?”

“Don’t give back the papers.”

“Is it honest to keep them?”

“Certainly.  They’re yours as much as the people’s of the shop.  They
were in the hidden chamber when the table came to the shop, and the
people had every opportunity to find them out.  They didn’t—therefore let
them take the consequences.”

Peter Baron reflected, diverted by her intensity.  She was pale, with
eyes almost ardent.  “The table had been in the place for years.”

“That proves the things haven’t been missed.”

“Let me show you how they were concealed,” he rejoined; and he exhibited
the ingenious recess and the working of the curious spring.  She was
greatly interested, she grew excited and became familiar; she appealed to
him again not to do anything so foolish as to give up the papers, the
rest of which, in their little blank, impenetrable covers, he placed in a
row before her.  “They might be traced—their history, their ownership,”
he argued; to which she replied that this was exactly why he ought to be
quiet.  He declared that women had not the smallest sense of honour, and
she retorted that at any rate they have other perceptions more delicate
than those of men.  He admitted that the papers might be rubbish, and she
conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when he offered to settle
the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist, acknowledging that,
absurd as it was, she was nervous.  Finally she put the whole thing on
the ground of his just doing her a favour.  She asked him to retain the
papers, to be silent about them, simply because it would please her.
That would be reason enough.  Baron’s acquaintance, his agreeable
relations with her, advanced many steps in the treatment of this
question; an element of friendly candour made its way into their
discussion of it.

“I can’t make out why it matters to you, one way or the other, nor why
you should think it worth talking about,” the young man reasoned.

“Neither can I.  It’s just a whim.”

“Certainly, if it will give you any pleasure, I’ll say nothing at the
shop.”

“That’s charming of you, and I’m very grateful.  I see now that this was
why the spirit moved me to come up—to save them,” Mrs. Ryves went on.
She added, moving away, that now she had saved them she must really go.

“To save them for what, if I mayn’t break the seals?” Baron asked.

“I don’t know—for a generous sacrifice.”

“Why should it be generous?  What’s at stake?” Peter demanded, leaning
against the doorpost as she stood on the landing.

“I don’t know what, but I feel as if something or other were in peril.
Burn them up!” she exclaimed with shining eyes.

“Ah, you ask too much—I’m so curious about them!”

“Well, I won’t ask more than I ought, and I’m much obliged to you for
your promise to be quiet.  I trust to your discretion.  Good-by.”

“You ought to _reward_ my discretion,” said Baron, coming out to the
landing.

She had partly descended the staircase and she stopped, leaning against
the baluster and smiling up at him.  “Surely you’ve had your reward in
the honour of my visit.”

“That’s delightful as far as it goes.  But what will you do for me if I
burn the papers?”

Mrs. Ryves considered a moment.  “Burn them first and you’ll see!”

On this she went rapidly downstairs, and Baron, to whom the answer
appeared inadequate and the proposition indeed in that form grossly
unfair, returned to his room.  The vivacity of her interest in a question
in which she had discoverably nothing at stake mystified, amused and, in
addition, irresistibly charmed him.  She was delicate, imaginative,
inflammable, quick to feel, quick to act.  He didn’t complain of it, it
was the way he liked women to be; but he was not impelled for the hour to
commit the sealed packets to the flames.  He dropped them again into
their secret well, and after that he went out.  He felt restless and
excited; another day was lost for work—the dreadful job to be performed
for Mr. Locket was still further off.



III.


TEN days after Mrs. Ryves’s visit he paid by appointment another call on
the editor of the Promiscuous.  He found him in the little wainscoted
Chelsea house, which had to Peter’s sense the smoky brownness of an old
pipebowl, surrounded with all the emblems of his office—a litter of
papers, a hedge of encyclopædias, a photographic gallery of popular
contributors—and he promised at first to consume very few of the moments
for which so many claims competed.  It was Mr. Locket himself however who
presently made the interview spacious, gave it air after discovering that
poor Baron had come to tell him something more interesting than that he
couldn’t after all patch up his tale.  Peter had begun with this, had
intimated respectfully that it was a case in which both practice and
principle rebelled, and then, perceiving how little Mr. Locket was
affected by his audacity, had felt weak and slightly silly, left with his
heroism on his hands.  He had armed himself for a struggle, but the
Promiscuous didn’t even protest, and there would have been nothing for
him but to go away with the prospect of never coming again had he not
chanced to say abruptly, irrelevantly, as he got up from his chair:

“Do you happen to be at all interested in Sir Dominick Ferrand?”

Mr. Locket, who had also got up, looked over his glasses.  “The late Sir
Dominick?”

“The only one; you know the family’s extinct.”

Mr. Locket shot his young friend another sharp glance, a silent retort to
the glibness of this information.  “Very extinct indeed.  I’m afraid the
subject today would scarcely be regarded as attractive.”

“Are you very sure?” Baron asked.

Mr. Locket leaned forward a little, with his fingertips on his table, in
the attitude of giving permission to retire.  “I might consider the
question in a special connection.”  He was silent a minute, in a way that
relegated poor Peter to the general; but meeting the young man’s eyes
again he asked: “Are you—a—thinking of proposing an article upon him?”

“Not exactly proposing it—because I don’t yet quite see my way; but the
idea rather appeals to me.”

Mr. Locket emitted the safe assertion that this eminent statesman had
been a striking figure in his day; then he added: “Have you been studying
him?”

“I’ve been dipping into him.”

“I’m afraid he’s scarcely a question of the hour,” said Mr. Locket,
shuffling papers together.

“I think I could make him one,” Peter Baron declared.

Mr. Locket stared again; he was unable to repress an unattenuated “You?”

“I have some new material,” said the young man, colouring a little.
“That often freshens up an old story.”

“It buries it sometimes.  It’s often only another tombstone.”

“That depends upon what it is.  However,” Peter added, “the documents I
speak of would be a crushing monument.”

Mr. Locket, hesitating, shot another glance under his glasses.  “Do you
allude to—a—revelations?”

“Very curious ones.”

Mr. Locket, still on his feet, had kept his body at the bowing angle; it
was therefore easy for him after an instant to bend a little further and
to sink into his chair with a movement of his hand toward the seat Baron
had occupied.  Baron resumed possession of this convenience, and the
conversation took a fresh start on a basis which such an extension of
privilege could render but little less humiliating to our young man.  He
had matured no plan of confiding his secret to Mr. Locket, and he had
really come out to make him conscientiously that other announcement as to
which it appeared that so much artistic agitation had been wasted.  He
had indeed during the past days—days of painful indecision—appealed in
imagination to the editor of the Promiscuous, as he had appealed to other
sources of comfort; but his scruples turned their face upon him from
quarters high as well as low, and if on the one hand he had by no means
made up his mind not to mention his strange knowledge, he had still more
left to the determination of the moment the question of how he should
introduce the subject.  He was in fact too nervous to decide; he only
felt that he needed for his peace of mind to communicate his discovery.
He wanted an opinion, the impression of somebody else, and even in this
intensely professional presence, five minutes after he had begun to tell
his queer story, he felt relieved of half his burden.  His story was very
queer; he could take the measure of that himself as he spoke; but
wouldn’t this very circumstance qualify it for the Promiscuous?

“Of course the letters may be forgeries,” said Mr. Locket at last.

“I’ve no doubt that’s what many people will say.”

“Have they been seen by any expert?”

“No indeed; they’ve been seen by nobody.”

“Have you got any of them with you?”

“No; I felt nervous about bringing them out.”

“That’s a pity.  I should have liked the testimony of my eyes.”

“You may have it if you’ll come to my rooms.  If you don’t care to do
that without a further guarantee I’ll copy you out some passages.”

“Select a few of the worst!” Mr. Locket laughed.  Over Baron’s
distressing information he had become quite human and genial.  But he
added in a moment more dryly: “You know they ought to be seen by an
expert.”

“That’s exactly what I dread,” said Peter.

“They’ll be worth nothing to me if they’re not.”

Peter communed with his innermost spirit.  “How much will they be worth
to _me_ if they _are_?”

Mr. Locket turned in his study-chair.  “I should require to look at them
before answering that question.”

“I’ve been to the British museum—there are many of his letters there.
I’ve obtained permission to see them, and I’ve compared everything
carefully.  I repudiate the possibility of forgery.  No sign of
genuineness is wanting; there are details, down to the very postmarks,
that no forger could have invented.  Besides, whose interest could it
conceivably have been?  A labor of unspeakable difficulty, and all for
what advantage?  There are so many letters, too—twenty-seven in all.”

“Lord, what an ass!” Mr. Locket exclaimed.

“It will be one of the strangest post-mortem revelations of which history
preserves the record.”

Mr. Locket, grave now, worried with a paper-knife the crevice of a
drawer.  “It’s very odd.  But to be worth anything such documents should
be subjected to a searching criticism—I mean of the historical kind.”

“Certainly; that would be the task of the writer introducing them to the
public.”

Again Mr. Locket considered; then with a smile he looked up.  “You had
better give up original composition and take to buying old furniture.”

“Do you mean because it will pay better?”

“For you, I should think, original composition couldn’t pay worse.  The
creative faculty’s so rare.”

“I do feel tempted to turn my attention to real heroes,” Peter replied.

“I’m bound to declare that Sir Dominick Ferrand was never one of mine.
Flashy, crafty, second-rate—that’s how I’ve always read him.  It was
never a secret, moreover, that his private life had its weak spots.  He
was a mere flash in the pan.”

“He speaks to the people of this country,” said Baron.

“He did; but his voice—the voice, I mean, of his prestige—is scarcely
audible now.”

“They’re still proud of some of the things he did at the Foreign
Office—the famous ‘exchange’ with Spain, in the Mediterranean, which took
Europe so by surprise and by which she felt injured, especially when it
became apparent how much we had the best of the bargain.  Then the
sudden, unexpected show of force by which he imposed on the United States
our interpretation of that tiresome treaty—I could never make out what it
was about.  These were both matters that no one really cared a straw
about, but he made every one feel as if they cared; the nation rose to
the way he played his trumps—it was uncommon.  He was one of the few men
we’ve had, in our period, who took Europe, or took America, by surprise,
made them jump a bit; and the country liked his doing it—it was a
pleasant change.  The rest of the world considered that they knew in any
case exactly what we would do, which was usually nothing at all.  Say
what you like, he’s still a high name; partly also, no doubt, on account
of other things his early success and early death, his political ‘cheek’
and wit; his very appearance—he certainly was handsome—and the
possibilities (of future personal supremacy) which it was the fashion at
the time, which it’s the fashion still, to say had passed away with him.
He had been twice at the Foreign Office; that alone was remarkable for a
man dying at forty-four.  What therefore will the country think when it
learns he was venal?”

Peter Baron himself was not angry with Sir Dominick Ferrand, who had
simply become to him (he had been “reading up” feverishly for a week) a
very curious subject of psychological study; but he could easily put
himself in the place of that portion of the public whose memory was long
enough for their patriotism to receive a shock.  It was some time
fortunately since the conduct of public affairs had wanted for men of
disinterested ability, but the extraordinary documents concealed (of all
places in the world—it was as fantastic as a nightmare) in a “bargain”
picked up at second-hand by an obscure scribbler, would be a calculable
blow to the retrospective mind.  Baron saw vividly that if these relics
should be made public the scandal, the horror, the chatter would be
immense.  Immense would be also the contribution to truth, the
rectification of history.  He had felt for several days (and it was
exactly what had made him so nervous) as if he held in his hand the key
to public attention.

“There are too many things to explain,” Mr. Locket went on, “and the
singular _provenance_ of your papers would count almost overwhelmingly
against them even if the other objections were met.  There would be a
perfect and probably a very complicated pedigree to trace.  How did they
get into your davenport, as you call it, and how long had they been
there?  What hands secreted them? what hands had, so incredibly, clung to
them and preserved them?  Who are the persons mentioned in them? who are
the correspondents, the parties to the nefarious transactions?  You say
the transactions appear to be of two distinct kinds—some of them
connected with public business and others involving obscure personal
relations.”

“They all have this in common,” said Peter Baron, “that they constitute
evidence of uneasiness, in some instances of painful alarm, on the
writer’s part, in relation to exposure—the exposure in the one case, as I
gather, of the fact that he had availed himself of official opportunities
to promote enterprises (public works and that sort of thing) in which he
had a pecuniary stake.  The dread of the light in the other connection is
evidently different, and these letters are the earliest in date.  They
are addressed to a woman, from whom he had evidently received money.”

Mr. Locket wiped his glasses.  “What woman?”

“I haven’t the least idea.  There are lots of questions I can’t answer,
of course; lots of identities I can’t establish; lots of gaps I can’t
fill.  But as to two points I’m clear, and they are the essential ones.
In the first place the papers in my possession are genuine; in the second
place they’re compromising.”

With this Peter Baron rose again, rather vexed with himself for having
been led on to advertise his treasure (it was his interlocutor’s
perfectly natural scepticism that produced this effect), for he felt that
he was putting himself in a false position.  He detected in Mr. Locket’s
studied detachment the fermentation of impulses from which, unsuccessful
as he was, he himself prayed to be delivered.

Mr. Locket remained seated; he watched Baron go across the room for his
hat and umbrella.  “Of course, the question would come up of whose
property today such documents would legally he.  There are heirs,
descendants, executors to consider.”

“In some degree perhaps; but I’ve gone into that a little.  Sir Dominick
Ferrand had no children, and he left no brothers and no sisters.  His
wife survived him, but she died ten years ago.  He can have had no heirs
and no executors to speak of, for he left no property.”

“That’s to his honour and against your theory,” said Mr. Locket.

“I _have_ no theory.  He left a largeish mass of debt,” Peter Baron
added.  At this Mr. Locket got up, while his visitor pursued: “So far as
I can ascertain, though of course my inquiries have had to be very rapid
and superficial, there is no one now living, directly or indirectly
related to the personage in question, who would be likely to suffer from
any steps in the direction of publicity.  It happens to be a rare
instance of a life that had, as it were, no loose ends.  At least there
are none perceptible at present.”

“I see, I see,” said Mr. Locket.  “But I don’t think I should care much
for your article.”

“What article?”

“The one you seem to wish to write, embodying this new matter.”

“Oh, I don’t wish to write it!” Peter exclaimed.  And then he bade his
host good-by.

“Good-by,” said Mr. Locket.  “Mind you, I don’t say that I think there’s
nothing in it.”

“You would think there was something in it if you were to see my
documents.”

“I should like to see the secret compartment,” the caustic editor
rejoined.  “Copy me out some extracts.”

“To what end, if there’s no question of their being of use to you?”

“I don’t say that—I might like the letters themselves.”

“Themselves?”

“Not as the basis of a paper, but just to publish—for a sensation.”

“They’d sell your number!” Baron laughed.

“I daresay I should like to look at them,” Mr. Locket conceded after a
moment.  “When should I find you at home?”

“Don’t come,” said the young man.  “I make you no offer.”

“I might make _you_ one,” the editor hinted.  “Don’t trouble yourself; I
shall probably destroy them.”  With this Peter Baron took his departure,
waiting however just afterwards, in the street near the house, as if he
had been looking out for a stray hansom, to which he would not have
signalled had it appeared.  He thought Mr. Locket might hurry after him,
but Mr. Locket seemed to have other things to do, and Peter Baron
returned on foot to Jersey Villas.



IV.


ON the evening that succeeded this apparently pointless encounter he had
an interview more conclusive with Mrs. Bundy, for whose shrewd and
philosophic view of life he had several times expressed, even to the good
woman herself, a considerable relish.  The situation at Jersey Villas
(Mrs. Ryves had suddenly flown off to Dover) was such as to create in him
a desire for moral support, and there was a kind of domestic
determination in Mrs. Bundy which seemed, in general, to advertise it.
He had asked for her on coming in, but had been told she was absent for
the hour; upon which he had addressed himself mechanically to the task of
doing up his dishonoured manuscript—the ingenious fiction about which Mr.
Locket had been so stupid—for further adventures and not improbable
defeats.  He passed a restless, ineffective afternoon, asking himself if
his genius were a horrid delusion, looking out of his window for
something that didn’t happen, something that seemed now to be the advent
of a persuasive Mr. Locket and now the return, from an absence more
disappointing even than Mrs. Bundy’s, of his interesting neighbour of the
parlours.  He was so nervous and so depressed that he was unable even to
fix his mind on the composition of the note with which, on its next
peregrination, it was necessary that his manuscript should be
accompanied.  He was too nervous to eat, and he forgot even to dine; he
forgot to light his candles, he let his fire go out, and it was in the
melancholy chill of the late dusk that Mrs. Bundy, arriving at last with
his lamp, found him extended moodily upon his sofa.  She had been
informed that he wished to speak to her, and as she placed on the
malodorous luminary an oily shade of green pasteboard she expressed the
friendly hope that there was nothing wrong with his ’ealth.

The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself together sufficiently
to reply that his health was well enough but that his spirits were down
in his hoots.  He had a strong disposition to “draw” his landlady on the
subject of Mrs. Ryves, as well as a vivid conviction that she constituted
a theme as to which Mrs. Bundy would require little pressure to tell him
even more than she knew.  At the same time he hated to appear to pry into
the secrets of his absent friend; to discuss her with their bustling
hostess resembled too much for his taste a gossip with a tattling servant
about an unconscious employer.  He left out of account however Mrs.
Bundy’s knowledge of the human heart, for it was this fine principle that
broke down the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly that it was
not meddling with Mrs. Ryves’s affairs to try and find out if she struck
such an observer as happy.  Crudely, abruptly, even a little blushingly,
he put the direct question to Mrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably straight
to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they were
indeed but different phases of the same), and which the good woman
answered with expression when she ejaculated: “Think it a liberty for you
to run down for a few hours?  If she do, my dear sir, just send her to me
to talk to!”  As regards happiness indeed she warned Baron against
imposing too high a standard on a young thing who had been through so
much, and before he knew it he found himself, without the responsibility
of choice, in submissive receipt of Mrs. Bundy’s version of this
experience.  It was an interesting picture, though it had its
infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting of the fact that it
had sprung essentially from the virginal brain of Miss Teagle.
Amplified, edited, embellished by the richer genius of Mrs. Bundy, who
had incorporated with it and now liberally introduced copious
interleavings of Miss Teagle’s own romance, it gave Peter Baron much food
for meditation, at the same time that it only half relieved his curiosity
about the causes of the charming woman’s underlying strangeness.  He
sounded this note experimentally in Mrs. Bundy’s ear, but it was easy to
see that it didn’t reverberate in her fancy.  She had no idea of the
picture it would have been natural for him to desire that Mrs. Ryves
should present to him, and she was therefore unable to estimate the
points in respect to which his actual impression was irritating.  She had
indeed no adequate conception of the intellectual requirements of a young
man in love.  She couldn’t tell him why their faultless friend was so
isolated, so unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud.  On the other
hand she could tell him (he knew it already) that she had passed many
years of her life in the acquisition of accomplishments at a seat of
learning no less remote than Boulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been
intimately acquainted with the late Mr. Everard Ryves, who was a “most
rising” young man in the city, not making any year less than his clear
twelve hundred.  “Now that he isn’t there to make them, his mourning
widow can’t live as she had then, can she?” Mrs. Bundy asked.

Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of another
way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train which rattled
him down to Dover.  The place, as he approached it, seemed bright and
breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far enough nor frequent
enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid.  Mrs. Bundy had of course
given him the address he needed, and on emerging from the station he was
on the point of asking what direction he should take.  His attention
however at this moment was drawn away by the bustle of the departing
boat.  He had been long enough shut up in London to be conscious of
refreshment in the mere act of turning his face to Paris.  He wandered
off to the pier in company with happier tourists and, leaning on a rail,
watched enviously the preparation, the agitation of foreign travel.  It
was for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to
have the very draught?  He turned away as he dropped this interrogative
sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of the pier two
ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of the same
wistfulness.  The little boy indeed happened to look round for a moment,
upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our
young man a source of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned.  He
bounded forward with irrepressible cries of “Geegee!” and Peter lifted
him aloft for an embrace.  On putting him down the pilgrim from Jersey
Villas stood confronted with a sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who had
followed her little charge.  “What’s the matter with the old woman?” he
asked himself as he offered her a hand which she treated as the merest
detail.  Whatever it was, it was (and very properly, on the part of a
loyal _suivante_) the same complaint as that of her employer, to whom,
from a distance, for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch, he flourished
his hat as she stood looking at him with a face that he imagined rather
white.  Mrs. Ryves’s response to this salutation was to shift her
position in such a manner as to appear again absorbed in the Calais boat.
Peter Baron, however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfully
endeavoured to wrest from him—a policy in which he was aided by Sidney’s
own rough but instinctive loyalty; and he was thankful for the happy
effect of being dragged by his jubilant friend in the very direction in
which he had tended for so many hours.  Mrs. Ryves turned once more as he
came near, and then, from the sweet, strained smile with which she asked
him if he were on his way to France, he saw that if she had been angry at
his having followed her she had quickly got over it.

“No, I’m not crossing; but it came over me that you might be, and that’s
why I hurried down—to catch you before you were off.”

“Oh, we can’t go—more’s the pity; but why, if we could,” Mrs. Ryves
inquired, “should you wish to prevent it?”

“Because I’ve something to ask you first, something that may take some
time.”  He saw now that her embarrassment had really not been resentful;
it had been nervous, tremulous, as the emotion of an unexpected pleasure
might have been.  “That’s really why I determined last night, without
asking your leave first to pay you this little visit—that and the intense
desire for another bout of horse-play with Sidney.  Oh, I’ve come to see
you,” Peter Baron went on, “and I won’t make any secret of the fact that
I expect you to resign yourself gracefully to the trial and give me all
your time.  The day’s lovely, and I’m ready to declare that the place is
as good as the day.  Let me drink deep of these things, drain the cup
like a man who hasn’t been out of London for months and months.  Let me
walk with you and talk with you and lunch with you—I go back this
afternoon.  Give me all your hours in short, so that they may live in my
memory as one of the sweetest occasions of life.”

The emission of steam from the French packet made such an uproar that
Baron could breathe his passion into the young woman’s ear without
scandalising the spectators; and the charm which little by little it
scattered over his fleeting visit proved indeed to be the collective
influence of the conditions he had put into words.  “What is it you wish
to ask me?” Mrs. Ryves demanded, as they stood there together; to which
he replied that he would tell her all about it if she would send Miss
Teagle off with Sidney.  Miss Teagle, who was always anticipating her
cue, had already begun ostentatiously to gaze at the distant shores of
France and was easily enough induced to take an earlier start home and
rise to the responsibility of stopping on her way to contend with the
butcher.  She had however to retire without Sidney, who clung to his
recovered prey, so that the rest of the episode was seasoned, to Baron’s
sense, by the importunate twitch of the child’s little, plump, cool hand.
The friends wandered together with a conjugal air and Sidney not between
them, hanging wistfully, first, over the lengthened picture of the Calais
boat, till they could look after it, as it moved rumbling away, in a
spell of silence which seemed to confess—especially when, a moment later,
their eyes met—that it produced the same fond fancy in each.  The
presence of the boy moreover was no hindrance to their talking in a
manner that they made believe was very frank.  Peter Baron presently told
his companion what it was he had taken a journey to ask, and he had time
afterwards to get over his discomfiture at her appearance of having
fancied it might be something greater.  She seemed disappointed (but she
was forgiving) on learning from him that he had only wished to know if
she judged ferociously his not having complied with her request to
respect certain seals.

“How ferociously do you suspect me of having judged it?” she inquired.

“Why, to the extent of leaving the house the next moment.”

They were still lingering on the great granite pier when he touched on
this matter, and she sat down at the end while the breeze, warmed by the
sunshine, ruffled the purple sea.  She  a little and looked
troubled, and after an instant she repeated interrogatively: “The next
moment?”

“As soon as I told you what I had done.  I was scrupulous about this, you
will remember; I went straight downstairs to confess to you.  You turned
away from me, saying nothing; I couldn’t imagine—as I vow I can’t imagine
now—why such a matter should appear so closely to touch you.  I went out
on some business and when I returned you had quitted the house.  It had
all the look of my having offended you, of your wishing to get away from
me.  You didn’t even give me time to tell you how it was that, in spite
of your advice, I determined to see for myself what my discovery
represented.  You must do me justice and hear what determined me.”

Mrs. Ryves got up from her scat and asked him, as a particular favour,
not to allude again to his discovery.  It was no concern of hers at all,
and she had no warrant for prying into his secrets.  She was very sorry
to have been for a moment so absurd as to appear to do so, and she humbly
begged his pardon for her meddling.  Saying this she walked on with a
charming colour in her cheek, while he laughed out, though he was really
bewildered, at the endless capriciousness of women.  Fortunately the
incident didn’t spoil the hour, in which there were other sources of
satisfaction, and they took their course to her lodgings with such
pleasant little pauses and excursions by the way as permitted her to show
him the objects of interest at Dover.  She let him stop at a
wine-merchant’s and buy a bottle for luncheon, of which, in its order,
they partook, together with a pudding invented by Miss Teagle, which, as
they hypocritically swallowed it, made them look at each other in an
intimacy of indulgence.  They came out again and, while Sidney grubbed in
the gravel of the shore, sat selfishly on the Parade, to the
disappointment of Miss Teagle, who had fixed her hopes on a fly and a
ladylike visit to the castle.  Baron had his eye on his watch—he had to
think of his train and the dismal return and many other melancholy
things; but the sea in the afternoon light was a more appealing picture;
the wind had gone down, the Channel was crowded, the sails of the ships
were white in the purple distance.  The young man had asked his companion
(he had asked her before) when she was to come back to Jersey Villas, and
she had said that she should probably stay at Dover another week.  It was
dreadfully expensive, but it was doing the child all the good in the
world, and if Miss Teagle could go up for some things she should probably
be able to manage an extension.  Earlier in the day she had said that she
perhaps wouldn’t return to Jersey Villas at all, or only return to wind
up her connection with Mrs. Bundy.  At another moment she had spoken of
an early date, an immediate reoccupation of the wonderful parlours.
Baron saw that she had no plan, no real reasons, that she was vague and,
in secret, worried and nervous, waiting for something that didn’t depend
on herself.  A silence of several minutes had fallen upon them while they
watched the shining sails; to which Mrs. Ryves put an end by exclaiming
abruptly, but without completing her sentence: “Oh, if you had come to
tell me you had destroyed them—”

“Those terrible papers?  I like the way you talk about ‘destroying!’  You
don’t even know what they are.”

“I don’t want to know; they put me into a state.”

“What sort of a state?”

“I don’t know; they haunt me.”

“They haunted me; that was why, early one morning, suddenly, I couldn’t
keep my hands off them.  I had told you I wouldn’t touch them.  I had
deferred to your whim, your superstition (what is it?) but at last they
got the better of me.  I had lain awake all night threshing about,
itching with curiosity.  It made me ill; my own nerves (as I may say)
were irritated, my capacity to work was gone.  It had come over me in the
small hours in the shape of an obsession, a fixed idea, that there was
nothing in the ridiculous relics and that my exaggerated scruples were
making a fool of me.  It was ten to one they were rubbish, they were
vain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical joke on the
part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the former possessor of
the confounded davenport.  The longer I hovered about them with such
precautions the longer I was taken in, and the sooner I exposed their
insignificance the sooner I should get back to my usual occupations.
This conviction made my hand so uncontrollable that that morning before
breakfast I broke one of the seals.  It took me but a few minutes to
perceive that the contents were not rubbish; the little bundle contained
old letters—very curious old letters.”

“I know—I know; ‘private and confidential.’  So you broke the other
seals?”  Mrs. Ryves looked at him with the strange apprehension he had
seen in her eyes when she appeared at his door the moment after his
discovery.

“You know, of course, because I told you an hour later, though you would
let me tell you very little.”

Baron, as he met this queer gaze, smiled hard at her to prevent her
guessing that he smarted with the fine reproach conveyed in the tone of
her last words; but she appeared able to guess everything, for she
reminded him that she had not had to wait that morning till he came
downstairs to know what had happened above, but had shown him at the
moment how she had been conscious of it an hour before, had passed on her
side the same tormented night as he, and had had to exert extraordinary
self-command not to rush up to his rooms while the study of the open
packets was going on.  “You’re so sensitively organised and you’ve such
mysterious powers that you re uncanny,” Baron declared.

“I feel what takes place at a distance; that’s all.”

“One would think somebody you liked was in danger.”

“I told you that that was what was present to me the day I came up to see
you.”

“Oh, but you don’t like me so much as that,” Baron argued, laughing.

She hesitated.  “No, I don’t know that I do.”

“It must be for someone else—the other person concerned.  The other day,
however, you wouldn’t let me tell you that person’s name.”

Mrs. Ryves, at this, rose quickly.  “I don’t want to know it; it’s none
of my business.”

“No, fortunately, I don’t think it is,” Baron rejoined, walking with her
along the Parade.  She had Sidney by the hand now, and the young man was
on the other side of her.  They moved toward the station—she had offered
to go part of the way.  “But with your miraculous gift it’s a wonder you
haven’t divined.”

“I only divine what I want,” said Mrs. Ryves.

“That’s very convenient!” exclaimed Peter, to whom Sidney had presently
come round again.  “Only, being thus in the dark, it’s difficult to see
your motive for wishing the papers destroyed.”

Mrs. Ryves meditated, looking fixedly at the ground.  “I thought you
might do it to oblige me.”

“Does it strike you that such an expectation, formed in such conditions,
is reasonable?”

Mrs. Ryves stopped short, and this time she turned on him the clouded
clearness of her eyes.  “What do you mean to do with them?”

It was Peter Baron’s turn to meditate, which he did, on the empty asphalt
of the Parade (the “season,” at Dover, was not yet), where their shadows
were long in the afternoon light.  He was under such a charm as he had
never known, and he wanted immensely to be able to reply: “I’ll do
anything you like if you’ll love me.”  These words, however, would have
represented a responsibility and have constituted what was vulgarly
termed an offer.  An offer of what? he quickly asked himself here, as he
had already asked himself after making in spirit other awkward dashes in
the same direction—of what but his poverty, his obscurity, his attempts
that had come to nothing, his abilities for which there was nothing to
show?  Mrs. Ryves was not exactly a success, but she was a greater
success than Peter Baron.  Poor as he was he hated the sordid (he knew
she didn’t love it), and he felt small for talking of marriage.
Therefore he didn’t put the question in the words it would have pleased
him most to hear himself utter, but he compromised, with an angry young
pang, and said to her: “What will you do for me if I put an end to them?”

She shook her head sadly—it was always her prettiest movement.  “I can
promise nothing—oh, no, I can’t promise!  We must part now,” she added.
“You’ll miss your train.”

He looked at his watch, taking the hand she held out to him.  She drew it
away quickly, and nothing then was left him, before hurrying to the
station, but to catch up Sidney and squeeze him till he uttered a little
shriek.  On the way back to town the situation struck him as grotesque.



V.


IT tormented him so the next morning that after threshing it out a little
further he felt he had something of a grievance.  Mrs. Ryves’s
intervention had made him acutely uncomfortable, for she had taken the
attitude of exerting pressure without, it appeared, recognising on his
part an equal right.  She had imposed herself as an influence, yet she
held herself aloof as a participant; there were things she looked to him
to do for her, yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him
from the doing.  She should either have had less to say or have been
willing to say more, and he asked himself why he should be the sport of
her moods and her mysteries.  He perceived her knack of punctual
interference to be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility
that he resented.  Why didn’t she set up at once as a professional
clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully?  In purely
private life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, her evasions
disturbed at any rate his own tranquillity.

What disturbed it still further was that he received early in the day a
visit from Mr. Locket, who, leaving him under no illusion as to the
grounds of such an honour, remarked as soon as he had got into the room
or rather while he still panted on the second flight and the smudged
little slavey held open Baron’s door, that he had taken up his young
friend’s invitation to look at Sir Dominick Ferrand’s letters for
himself.  Peter drew them forth with a promptitude intended to show that
he recognised the commercial character of the call and without
attenuating the inconsequence of this departure from the last
determination he had expressed to Mr. Locket.  He showed his visitor the
davenport and the hidden recess, and he smoked a cigarette, humming
softly, with a sense of unwonted advantage and triumph, while the
cautious editor sat silent and handled the papers.  For all his caution
Mr. Locket was unable to keep a warmer light out of his judicial eye as
he said to Baron at last with sociable brevity—a tone that took many
things for granted: “I’ll take them home with me—they require much
attention.”

The young man looked at him a moment.  “Do you think they’re genuine?”
He didn’t mean to be mocking, he meant not to be; but the words sounded
so to his own ear, and he could see that they produced that effect on Mr.
Locket.

“I can’t in the least determine.  I shall have to go into them at my
leisure, and that’s why I ask you to lend them to me.”

He had shuffled the papers together with a movement charged, while he
spoke, with the air of being preliminary to that of thrusting them into a
little black bag which he had brought with him and which, resting on the
shelf of the davenport, struck Peter, who viewed it askance, as an object
darkly editorial.  It made our young man, somehow, suddenly apprehensive;
the advantage of which he had just been conscious was about to be
transferred by a quiet process of legerdemain to a person who already had
advantages enough.  Baron, in short, felt a deep pang of anxiety; he
couldn’t have said why.  Mr. Locket took decidedly too many things for
granted, and the explorer of Sir Dominick Ferrand’s irregularities
remembered afresh how clear he had been after all about his indisposition
to traffic in them.  He asked his visitor to what end he wished to remove
the letters, since on the one hand there was no question now of the
article in the Promiscuous which was to reveal their existence, and on
the other he himself, as their owner, had a thousand insurmountable
scruples about putting them into circulation.

Mr. Locket looked over his spectacles as over the battlements of a
fortress.  “I’m not thinking of the end—I’m thinking of the beginning.  A
few glances have assured me that such documents ought to be submitted to
some competent eye.”

“Oh, you mustn’t show them to anyone!” Baron exclaimed.

“You may think me presumptuous, but the eye that I venture to allude to
in those terms—”

“Is the eye now fixed so terribly on _me_?” Peter laughingly interrupted.
“Oh, it would be interesting, I confess, to know how they strike a man of
your acuteness!”  It had occurred to him that by such a concession he
might endear himself to a literary umpire hitherto implacable.  There
would be no question of his publishing Sir Dominick Ferrand, but he
might, in due acknowledgment of services rendered, form the habit of
publishing Peter Baron.  “How long would it be your idea to retain them?”
he inquired, in a manner which, he immediately became aware, was what
incited Mr. Locket to begin stuffing the papers into his bag.  With this
perception he came quickly closer and, laying his hand on the gaping
receptacle, lightly drew its two lips together.  In this way the two men
stood for a few seconds, touching, almost in the attitude of combat,
looking hard into each other’s eyes.

The tension was quickly relieved however by the surprised flush which
mantled on Mr. Locket’s brow.  He fell back a few steps with an injured
dignity that might have been a protest against physical violence.
“Really, my dear young sir, your attitude is tantamount to an accusation
of intended bad faith.  Do you think I want to steal the confounded
things?”  In reply to such a challenge Peter could only hastily declare
that he was guilty of no discourteous suspicion—he only wanted a limit
named, a pledge of every precaution against accident.  Mr. Locket
admitted the justice of the demand, assured him he would restore the
property within three days, and completed, with Peter’s assistance, his
little arrangements for removing it discreetly.  When he was ready, his
treacherous reticule distended with its treasures, he gave a lingering
look at the inscrutable davenport.  “It’s how they ever got into that
thing that puzzles one’s brain!”

“There was some concatenation of circumstances that would doubtless seem
natural enough if it were explained, but that one would have to remount
the stream of time to ascertain.  To one course I have definitely made up
my mind: not to make any statement or any inquiry at the shop.  I simply
accept the mystery,” said Peter, rather grandly.

“That would be thought a cheap escape if you were to put it into a
story,” Mr. Locket smiled.

“Yes, I shouldn’t offer the story to _you_.  I shall be impatient till I
see my papers again,” the young man called out, as his visitor hurried
downstairs.

That evening, by the last delivery, he received, under the Dover
postmark, a letter that was not from Miss Teagle.  It was a slightly
confused but altogether friendly note, written that morning after
breakfast, the ostensible purpose of which was to thank him for the
amiability of his visit, to express regret at any appearance the writer
might have had of meddling with what didn’t concern her, and to let him
know that the evening before, after he had left her, she had in a moment
of inspiration got hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfect
accompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her.  She had scrawled,
as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note, mystic, mocking musical
signs which had no sense for her correspondent.  The whole letter
testified to a restless but rather pointless desire to remain in
communication with him.  In answering her, however, which he did that
night before going to bed, it was on this bright possibility of their
collaboration, its advantages for the future of each of them, that Baron
principally expatiated.  He spoke of this future with an eloquence of
which he would have defended the sincerity, and drew of it a picture
extravagantly rich.  The next morning, as he was about to settle himself
to tasks for some time terribly neglected, with a sense that after all it
was rather a relief not to be sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand,
who had become dreadfully distracting; at the very moment at which he
habitually addressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, he was
agitated by the arrival of a telegram which proved to be an urgent
request from Mr. Locket that he would immediately come down and see him.
This represented, for poor Baron, whose funds were very low, another
morning sacrificed, but somehow it didn’t even occur to him that he might
impose his own time upon the editor of the Promiscuous, the keeper of the
keys of renown.  He had some of the plasticity of the raw contributor.
He gave the muse another holiday, feeling she was really ashamed to take
it, and in course of time found himself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr.
Locket’s own table—so much nobler an expanse than the slippery <DW72> of
the davenport—considering with quick intensity, in the white flash of
certain words just brought out by his host, the quantity of happiness, of
emancipation that might reside in a hundred pounds.

Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-four hours, had
discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literary remains that his visitor
found him primed with an offer.  A hundred pounds would be paid him that
day, that minute, and no questions would be either asked or answered.  “I
take all the risks, I take all the risks,” the editor of the Promiscuous
repeated.  The letters were out on the table, Mr. Locket was on the
hearthrug, like an orator on a platform, and Peter, under the influence
of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which
happened to be nearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a
pivot, he whirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter
with an eye intended to be cold.  What surprised him most was to find Mr.
Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication which
he would have expected Mr. Locket not to take.  “Hush it all up; a barren
scandal, an offence that can’t be remedied, is the thing in the world
that least justifies an airing—” some such line as that was the line he
would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in weighing
questions of propriety and who had only the other day objected, in the
light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinterested art.  But the
author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put his finger on the place
in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his last visit that, if
given to the world in the pages of the Promiscuous, Sir Dominick’s
aberrations would sell the edition.  It was not necessary for Mr. Locket
to reiterate to his young friend his phrase about their making a
sensation.  If he wished to purchase the “rights,” as theatrical people
said, it was not to protect a celebrated name or to lock them up in a
cupboard.  That formula of Baron’s covered all the ground, and one
edition was a low estimate of the probable performance of the magazine.

Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the editorial
presence, took a long walk on the Embankment.  His impressions were at
war with each other—he was flurried by possibilities of which he yet
denied the existence.  He had consented to trust Mr. Locket with the
papers a day or two longer, till he should have thought out the terms on
which he might—in the event of certain occurrences—be induced to dispose
of them.  A hundred pounds were not this gentleman’s last word, nor
perhaps was mere unreasoning intractability Peter’s own.  He sighed as he
took no note of the pictures made by barges—sighed because it all might
mean money.  He needed money bitterly; he owed it in disquieting
quarters.  Mr. Locket had put it before him that he had a high
responsibility—that he might vindicate the disfigured truth, contribute a
chapter to the history of England.  “You haven’t a right to suppress such
momentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared, thinking how the
series (he would spread it into three numbers) would be the talk of the
town.  If Peter had money he might treat himself to ardour, to bliss.
Mr. Locket had said, no doubt justly enough, that there were ever so many
questions one would have to meet should one venture to play so daring a
game.  These questions, embarrassments, dangers—the danger, for instance,
of the cropping-up of some lurking litigious relative—he would take over
unreservedly and bear the brunt of dealing with.  It was to be remembered
that the papers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree;
such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before, the
feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing he should have to
place himself at the positive disadvantage of being silent about.  He
would rather give no account of the matter at all than expose himself to
the ridicule that such a story would infallibly excite.  Couldn’t one see
them in advance, the clever, taunting things the daily and weekly papers
would say?  Peter Baron had his guileless side, but he felt, as he
worried with a stick that betrayed him the granite parapets of the
Thames, that he was not such a fool as not to know how Mr. Locket would
“work” the mystery of his marvellous find.  Nothing could help it on
better with the public than the impenetrability of the secret attached to
it.  If Mr. Locket should only be able to kick up dust enough over the
circumstances that had guided his hand his fortune would literally be
made.  Peter thought a hundred pounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the
Promiscuous could bring itself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in
the light of literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our young man.
The explanation of this anomaly was of course that the editor shrewdly
saw a dozen ways of getting his money back.  There would be in the
“sensation,” at a later stage, the making of a book in large type—the
book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one
preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity,
of a great historical humbug, the sum “down,” in other words, that any
lively publisher would give for it, figured vividly in Mr. Locket’s
calculations.  It was therefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at
first hand with the lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego.
Peter gave a masterful laugh, rejoicing in his heart that, on the spot,
in the _repaire_ he had lately quitted, he had not been tempted by a
figure that would have approximately represented the value of his
property.  It was a good job, he mentally added as he turned his face
homeward, that there was so little likelihood of his having to struggle
with that particular pressure.



VI.


WHEN, half an hour later, he approached Jersey Villas, he noticed that
the house-door was open; then, as he reached the gate, saw it make a
frame for an unexpected presence.  Mrs. Ryves, in her bonnet and jacket,
looked out from it as if she were expecting something—as if she had been
passing to and fro to watch.  Yet when he had expressed to her that it
was a delightful welcome she replied that she had only thought there
might possibly be a cab in sight.  He offered to go and look for one,
upon which it appeared that after all she was not, as yet at least, in
need.  He went back with her into her sitting-room, where she let him
know that within a couple of days she had seen clearer what was best; she
had determined to quit Jersey Villas and had come up to take away her
things, which she had just been packing and getting together.

“I wrote you last night a charming letter in answer to yours,” Baron
said.  “You didn’t mention in yours that you were coming up.”

“It wasn’t your answer that brought me.  It hadn’t arrived when I came
away.”

“You’ll see when you get back that my letter is charming.”

“I daresay.”  Baron had observed that the room was not, as she had
intimated, in confusion—Mrs. Ryves’s preparations for departure were not
striking.  She saw him look round and, standing in front of the fireless
grate with her hands behind her, she suddenly asked: “Where have you come
from now?”

“From an interview with a literary friend.”

“What are you concocting between you?”

“Nothing at all.  We’ve fallen out—we don’t agree.”

“Is he a publisher?”

“He’s an editor.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t agree.  I don’t know what he wants, but,
whatever it is, don’t do it.”

“He must do what _I_ want!” said Baron.

“And what’s that?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you when he has done it!”  Baron begged her to let him
hear the “musical idea” she had mentioned in her letter; on which she
took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave him,
with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the
accompaniment of his song.  She phrased the words with her sketchy
sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise,
throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of
the young artist in the presence for the first time of “production”—the
proofs of his book, the hanging of his picture, the rehearsal of his
play.  When she had finished he asked again for the same delight, and
then for more music and for more; it did him such a world of good, kept
him quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of his spirit.  She dropped
her own experiments and gave him immortal things, and he lounged there,
pacified and charmed, feeling the mean little room grow large and vague
and happy possibilities come back.  Abruptly, at the piano, she called
out to him: “Those papers of yours—the letters you found—are not in the
house?”

“No, they’re not in the house.”

“I was sure of it!  No matter—it’s all right!” she added.  She herself
was pacified—trouble was a false note.  Later he was on the point of
asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the
house; but he let it pass.  The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle
that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness,
as one opened one’s eyes to it.  He closed his eyes—he wanted another
vision.  Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her
explanation would have been stranger than the fact.  Moreover they had
other things to talk about, in particular the question of her putting off
her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the
valuable protection of Sidney.  This was indeed but another face of the
question of her dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should
she dine?)—accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia,
in their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho.  Mrs.
Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the proper
moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany him—it
dealt in macaroni and Chianti—the pair put their elbows on the crumpled
cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed
away and the young man’s cigarette lighted by her command, became
increasingly confidential.  They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheap
places, and came home in “busses” and under umbrellas.

On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he had
never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at the end,
she would let him come into her sitting-room for five minutes.  He felt
on this point a passion of suspense and impatience, and yet for what
would it be but to tell her how poor he was?  This was literally the
moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.
Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the day his
whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses had changed.  At Jersey
Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her
glimmering taper, had said: “Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you
like!”), in her precarious parlour, which was indeed, after the
brilliances of the evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him
stand while he explained that he had certainly everything in the way of
fame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faith and
energy—to say nothing of her supreme dearness—were all on his side.  Why,
if one’s beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the
conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him out,
would make just the blessed difference?  Whether Mrs. Ryves heard him out
or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle happens to be silent;
but after he had got possession of both her hands and breathed into her
face for a moment all the intensity of his tenderness—in the relief and
joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a rising flood—she checked him
with better reasons, with a cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt
there was something deep.  Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier
than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains—impossibilities
and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache
for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy.  She had liked him—if
she hadn’t she wouldn’t have let him think so!—but she protested that she
had not, in the odious vulgar sense, “encouraged” him.  Moreover she
couldn’t talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she begged
him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over.  There were
peculiarities in her position, considerations insurmountable.  She got
rid of him with kind and confused words, and afterwards, in the dull,
humiliated night, he felt that he had been put in his place.  Women in
her situation, women who after having really loved and lost, usually
lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts steal away.  But there
was something in his whimsical neighbour that struck him as terribly
invulnerable.



VII.


“I’VE had time to look a little further into what we’re prepared to do,
and I find the case is one in which I should consider the advisability of
going to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket.  Jersey Villas the next
morning had had the privilege of again receiving the editor of the
Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport, where the bone of
contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of papers that showed how
much they had been handled, was placed well in view.  “We shall see our
way to offering you three hundred, but we shouldn’t, I must positively
assure you, see it a single step further.”

Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in his
pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath and
with inflections that for his own sake he endeavoured to make humorous:
“Three hundred—three hundred.”  His state of mind was far from hilarious,
for he felt poor and sore and disappointed; but he wanted to prove to
himself that he was gallant—was made, in general and in particular, of
undiscourageable stuff.  The first thing he had been aware of on stepping
into his front room was that a four-wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s
luggage upon it, stood at the door of No. 3.  Permitting himself, behind
his curtain, a pardonable peep, he saw the mistress of his thoughts come
out of the house, attended by Mrs. Bundy, and take her place in the
modest vehicle.  After this his eyes rested for a long time on the
sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who kept bobbing at the window of
the cab an endlessly moralising old head.  Mrs. Ryves had really taken
flight—he had made Jersey Villas impossible for her—but Mrs. Bundy, with
a magnanimity unprecedented in the profession, seemed to express a belief
in the purity of her motives.  Baron felt that his own separation had
been, for the present at least, effected; every instinct of delicacy
prompted him to stand back.

Mr. Locket talked a long time, and Peter Baron listened and waited.  He
reflected that his willingness to listen would probably excite hopes in
his visitor—hopes which he himself was ready to contemplate without a
scruple.  He felt no pity for Mr. Locket and had no consideration for his
suspense or for his possible illusions; he only felt sick and forsaken
and in want of comfort and of money.  Yet it was a kind of outrage to his
dignity to have the knife held to his throat, and he was irritated above
all by the ground on which Mr. Locket put the question—the ground of a
service rendered to historical truth.  It might be—he wasn’t clear; it
might be—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at
any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry,
interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant.  He stared
tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the
day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so
sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn’t endure them.
Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in the course of
the day that he was obliged to seek humbler quarters.  Suddenly he
interrupted Mr. Locket; he observed to him: “I take it that if I should
make you this concession the hospitality of the Promiscuous would be by
that very fact unrestrictedly secured to me.”

Mr. Locket stared.  “Hospitality—secured?”  He thumbed the proposition as
if it were a hard peach.

“I mean that of course you wouldn’t—in courtsey, in gratitude—keep on
declining my things.”

“I should give them my best attention—as I’ve always done in the past.”

Peter Baron hesitated.  It was a case in which there would have seemed to
be some chance for the ideally shrewd aspirant in such an advantage as he
possessed; but after a moment the blood rushed into his face with the
shame of the idea of pleading for his productions in the name of anything
but their merit.  It was as if he had stupidly uttered evil of them.
Nevertheless be added the interrogation:

“Would you for instance publish my little story?”

“The one I read (and objected to some features of) the other day?  Do you
mean—a—with the alteration?” Mr. Locket continued.

“Oh, no, I mean utterly without it.  The pages you want altered contain,
as I explained to you very lucidly, I think, the very _raison d’être_ of
the work, and it would therefore, it seems to me, be an imbecility of the
first magnitude to cancel them.”  Peter had really renounced all hope
that his critic would understand what he meant, but, under favour of
circumstances, he couldn’t forbear to taste the luxury, which probably
never again would come within his reach, of being really plain, for one
wild moment, with an editor.

Mr. Locket gave a constrained smile.  “Think of the scandal, Mr. Baron.”

“But isn’t this other scandal just what you’re going in for?”

“It will be a great public service.”

“You mean it will be a big scandal, whereas my poor story would be a very
small one, and that it’s only out of a big one that money’s to be made.”

Mr. Locket got up—he too had his dignity to vindicate.  “Such a sum as I
offer you ought really to be an offset against all claims.”

“Very good—I don’t mean to make any, since you don’t really care for what
I write.  I take note of your offer,” Peter pursued, “and I engage to
give you to-night (in a few words left by my own hand at your house) my
absolutely definite and final reply.”

Mr. Locket’s movements, as he hovered near the relics of the eminent
statesman, were those of some feathered parent fluttering over a
threatened nest.  If he had brought his huddled brood back with him this
morning it was because he had felt sure enough of closing the bargain to
be able to be graceful.  He kept a glittering eye on the papers and
remarked that he was afraid that before leaving them he must elicit some
assurance that in the meanwhile Peter would not place them in any other
hands.  Peter, at this, gave a laugh of harsher cadence than he intended,
asking, justly enough, on what privilege his visitor rested such a demand
and why he himself was disqualified from offering his wares to the
highest bidder.  “Surely you wouldn’t hawk such things about?” cried Mr.
Locket; but before Baron had time to retort cynically he added: “I’ll
publish your little story.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’ll publish anything you’ll send me,” Mr. Locket continued, as he went
out.  Peter had before this virtually given his word that for the letters
he would treat only with the Promiscuous.

The young man passed, during a portion of the rest of the day, the
strangest hours of his life.  Yet he thought of them afterwards not as a
phase of temptation, though they had been full of the emotion that
accompanies an intense vision of alternatives.  The struggle was already
over; it seemed to him that, poor as he was, he was not poor enough to
take Mr. Locket’s money.  He looked at the opposed courses with the
self-possession of a man who has chosen, but this self-possession was in
itself the most exquisite of excitements.  It was really a high revulsion
and a sort of noble pity.  He seemed indeed to have his finger upon the
pulse of history and to be in the secret of the gods.  He had them all in
his hand, the tablets and the scales and the torch.  He couldn’t keep a
character together, but he might easily pull one to pieces.  That would
be “creative work” of a kind—he could reconstruct the character less
pleasingly, could show an unknown side of it.  Mr. Locket had had a good
deal to say about responsibility; and responsibility in truth sat there
with him all the morning, while he revolved in his narrow cage and,
watching the crude spring rain on the windows, thought of the dismalness
to which, at Dover, Mrs. Ryves was going back.  This influence took in
fact the form, put on the physiognomy of poor Sir Dominick Ferrand; he
was at present as perceptible in it, as coldly and strangely personal, as
if he had been a haunting ghost and had risen beside his own old
hearthstone.  Our friend was accustomed to his company and indeed had
spent so many hours in it of late, following him up at the museum and
comparing his different portraits, engravings and lithographs, in which
there seemed to be conscious, pleading eyes for the betrayer, that their
queer intimacy had grown as close as an embrace.  Sir Dominick was very
dumb, but he was terrible in his dependence, and Peter would not have
encouraged him by so much curiosity nor reassured him by so much
deference had it not been for the young man’s complete acceptance of the
impossibility of getting out of a tight place by exposing an individual.
It didn’t matter that the individual was dead; it didn’t matter that he
was dishonest.  Peter felt him sufficiently alive to suffer; he perceived
the rectification of history so conscientiously desired by Mr. Locket to
be somehow for himself not an imperative task.  It had come over him too
definitely that in a case where one’s success was to hinge upon an act of
extradition it would minister most to an easy conscience to let the
success go.  No, no—even should he be starving he couldn’t make money out
of Sir Dominick’s disgrace.  He was almost surprised at the violence of
the horror with which, as he shuffled mournfully about, the idea of any
such profit inspired him.  What was Sir Dominick to him after all?  He
wished he had never come across him.

In one of his brooding pauses at the window—the window out of which never
again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryves glide across the little garden
with the step for which he had liked her from the first—he became aware
that the rain was about to intermit and the sun to make some grudging
amends.  This was a sign that he might go out; he had a vague perception
that there were things to be done.  He had work to look for, and a
cheaper lodging, and a new idea (every idea he had ever cherished had
left him), in addition to which the promised little word was to be
dropped at Mr. Locket’s door.  He looked at his watch and was surprised
at the hour, for he had nothing but a heartache to show for so much time.
He would have to dress quickly, but as he passed to his bedroom his eye
was caught by the little pyramid of letters which Mr. Locket had
constructed on his davenport.  They startled him and, staring at them, he
stopped for an instant, half-amused, half-annoyed at their being still in
existence.  He had so completely destroyed them in spirit that he had
taken the act for granted, and he was now reminded of the orderly stages
of which an intention must consist to be sincere.  Baron went at the
papers with all his sincerity, and at his empty grate (where there lately
had been no fire and he had only to remove a horrible ornament of
tissue-paper dear to Mrs. Bundy) he burned the collection with infinite
method.  It made him feel happier to watch the worst pages turn to
illegible ashes—if happiness be the right word to apply to his sense, in
the process, of something so crisp and crackling that it suggested the
death-rustle of bank-notes.

When ten minutes later he came back into his sitting-room, he seemed to
himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger view.  It was as
if some interfering mass had been so displaced that he could see more sky
and more country.  Yet the opposite houses were naturally still there,
and if the grimy little place looked lighter it was doubtless only
because the rain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in.  Peter
went to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing so beheld
at the garden gate the humble “growler” in which a few hours before he
had seen Mrs. Ryves take her departure.  It was unmistakable—he
remembered the knock-kneed white horse; but this made the fact that his
friend’s luggage no longer surmounted it only the more mystifying.
Perhaps the cabman had already removed the luggage—he was now on his box
smoking the short pipe that derived relish from inaction paid for.  As
Peter turned into the room again his ears caught a knock at his own door,
a knock explained, as soon as he had responded, by the hard breathing of
Mrs. Bundy.

“Please, sir, it’s to say she’ve come back.”

“What has she come back for?” Baron’s question sounded ungracious, but
his heartache had given another throb, and he felt a dread of another
wound.  It was like a practical joke.

“I think it’s for you, sir,” said Mrs. Bundy.  “She’ll see you for a
moment, if you’ll be so good, in the old place.”

Peter followed his hostess downstairs, and Mrs. Bundy ushered him, with
her company flourish, into the apartment she had fondly designated.

“I went away this morning, and I’ve only returned for an instant,” said
Mrs. Ryves, as soon as Mrs. Bundy had closed the door.  He saw that she
was different now; something had happened that had made her indulgent.

“Have you been all the way to Dover and back?”

“No, but I’ve been to Victoria.  I’ve left my luggage there—I’ve been
driving about.”

“I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”

“Very much.  I’ve been to see Mr. Morrish.”

“Mr. Morrish?”

“The musical publisher.  I showed him our song.  I played it for him, and
he’s delighted with it.  He declares it’s just the thing.  He has given
me fifty pounds.  I think he believes in us,” Mrs. Ryves went on, while
Baron stared at the wonder—too sweet to be safe, it seemed to him as
yet—of her standing there again before him and speaking of what they had
in common.  “Fifty pounds! fifty pounds!” she exclaimed, fluttering at
him her happy cheque.  She had come back, the first thing, to tell him,
and of course his share of the money would be the half.  She was rosy,
jubilant, natural, she chattered like a happy woman.  She said they must
do more, ever so much more.  Mr. Morrish had practically promised he
would take anything that was as good as that.  She had kept her cab
because she was going to Dover; she couldn’t leave the others alone.  It
was a vehicle infirm and inert, but Baron, after a little, appreciated
its pace, for she had consented to his getting in with her and driving,
this time in earnest, to Victoria.  She had only come to tell him the
good news—she repeated this assurance more than once.  They talked of it
so profoundly that it drove everything else for the time out of his
head—his duty to Mr. Locket, the remarkable sacrifice he had just
achieved, and even the odd coincidence, matching with the oddity of all
the others, of her having reverted to the house again, as if with one of
her famous divinations, at the very moment the trumpery papers, the
origin really of their intimacy, had ceased to exist.  But she, on her
side, also had evidently forgotten the trumpery papers: she never
mentioned them again, and Peter Baron never boasted of what he had done
with them.  He was silent for a while, from curiosity to see if her fine
nerves had really given her a hint; and then later, when it came to be a
question of his permanent attitude, he was silent, prodigiously,
religiously, tremulously silent, in consequence of an extraordinary
conversation that he had with her.

This conversation took place at Dover, when he went down to give her the
money for which, at Mr. Morrish’s bank, he had exchanged the cheque she
had left with him.  That cheque, or rather certain things it represented,
had made somehow all the difference in their relations.  The difference
was huge, and Baron could think of nothing but this confirmed vision of
their being able to work fruitfully together that would account for so
rapid a change.  She didn’t talk of impossibilities now—she didn’t seem
to want to stop him off; only when, the day following his arrival at
Dover with the fifty pounds (he had after all to agree to share them with
her—he couldn’t expect her to take a present of money from him), he
returned to the question over which they had had their little scene the
night they dined together—on this occasion (he had brought a portmanteau
and he was staying) she mentioned that there was something very
particular she had it on her conscience to tell him before letting him
commit himself.  There dawned in her face as she approached the subject a
light of warning that frightened him; it was charged with something so
strange that for an instant he held his breath.  This flash of ugly
possibilities passed however, and it was with the gesture of taking still
tenderer possession of her, checked indeed by the grave, important way
she held up a finger, that he answered: “Tell me everything—tell me!”

“You must know what I am—who I am; you must know especially what I’m not!
There’s a name for it, a hideous, cruel name.  It’s not my fault!  Others
have known, I’ve had to speak of it—it has made a great difference in my
life.  Surely you must have guessed!” she went on, with the thinnest
quaver of irony, letting him now take her hand, which felt as cold as her
hard duty.  “Don’t you see I’ve no belongings, no relations, no friends,
nothing at all, in all the world, of my own?  I was only a poor girl.”

“A poor girl?” Baron was mystified, touched, distressed, piecing dimly
together what she meant, but feeling, in a great surge of pity, that it
was only something more to love her for.

“My mother—my poor mother,” said Mrs. Ryves.

She paused with this, and through gathering tears her eyes met his as if
to plead with him to understand.  He understood, and drew her closer, but
she kept herself free still, to continue: “She was a poor girl—she was
only a governess; she was alone, she thought he loved her.  He did—I
think it was the only happiness she ever knew.  But she died of it.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you tell me—it’s so grand of you!” Baron murmured.
“Then—your father?”  He hesitated, as if with his hands on old wounds.

“He had his own troubles, but he was kind to her.  It was all misery and
folly—he was married.  He wasn’t happy—there were good reasons, I
believe, for that.  I know it from letters, I know it from a person who’s
dead.  Everyone is dead now—it’s too far off.  That’s the only good
thing.  He was very kind to me; I remember him, though I didn’t know
then, as a little girl, who he was.  He put me with some very good
people—he did what he could for me.  I think, later, his wife knew—a lady
who came to see me once after his death.  I was a very little girl, but I
remember many things.  What he could he did—something that helped me
afterwards, something that helps me now.  I think of him with a strange
pity—I _see_ him!” said Mrs. Ryves, with the faint past in her eyes.
“You mustn’t say anything against him,” she added, gently and gravely.

“Never—never; for he has only made it more of a rapture to care for you.”

“You must wait, you must think; we must wait together,” she went on.
“You can’t tell, and you must give me time.  Now that you know, it’s all
right; but you had to know.  Doesn’t it make us better friends?” asked
Mrs. Ryves, with a tired smile which had the effect of putting the whole
story further and further away.  The next moment, however, she added
quickly, as if with the sense that it couldn’t be far enough: “You don’t
know, you can’t judge, you must let it settle.  Think of it, think of it;
oh you will, and leave it so.  I must have time myself, oh I must!  Yes,
you must believe me.”

She turned away from him, and he remained looking at her a moment.  “Ah,
how I shall work for you!” he exclaimed.

“You must work for yourself; I’ll help you.”  Her eyes had met his eyes
again, and she added, hesitating, thinking: “You had better know,
perhaps, who he was.”

Baron shook his head, smiling confidently.  “I don’t care a straw.”

“I do—a little.  He was a great man.”

“There must indeed have been some good in him.”

“He was a high celebrity.  You’ve often heard of him.”

Baron wondered an instant.  “I’ve no doubt you’re a princess!” he said
with a laugh.  She made him nervous.

“I’m not ashamed of him.  He was Sir Dominick Ferrand.”

Baron saw in her face, in a few seconds, that she had seen something in
his.  He knew that he stared, then turned pale; it had the effect of a
powerful shock.  He was cold for an instant, as he had just found her,
with the sense of danger, the confused horror of having dealt a blow.
But the blood rushed back to its courses with his still quicker
consciousness of safety, and he could make out, as he recovered his
balance, that his emotion struck her simply as a violent surprise.  He
gave a muffled murmur: “Ah, it’s you, my beloved!” which lost itself as
he drew her close and held her long, in the intensity of his embrace and
the wonder of his escape.  It took more than a minute for him to say over
to himself often enough, with his hidden face: “Ah, she must never, never
know!”

She never knew; she only learned, when she asked him casually, that he
had in fact destroyed the old documents she had had such a comic caprice
about.  The sensibility, the curiosity they had had the queer privilege
of exciting in her had lapsed with the event as irresponsibly as they had
arisen, and she appeared to have forgotten, or rather to attribute now to
other causes, the agitation and several of the odd incidents that
accompanied them.  They naturally gave Peter Baron rather more to think
about, much food, indeed, for clandestine meditation, some of which, in
spite of the pains he took not to be caught, was noted by his friend and
interpreted, to his knowledge, as depression produced by the long
probation she succeeded in imposing on him.  He was more patient than she
could guess, with all her guessing, for if he was put to the proof she
herself was not left undissected.  It came back to him again and again
that if the documents he had burned proved anything they proved that Sir
Dominick Ferrand’s human errors were not all of one order.  The woman he
loved was the daughter of her father, he couldn’t get over that.  What
was more to the point was that as he came to know her better and
better—for they did work together under Mr. Morrish’s protection—his
affection was a quantity still less to be neglected.  He sometimes
wondered, in the light of her general straightness (their marriage had
brought out even more than he believed there was of it) whether the
relics in the davenport were genuine.  That piece of furniture is still
almost as useful to him as Mr. Morrish’s patronage.  There is a
tremendous run, as this gentlemen calls it, on several of their songs.
Baron nevertheless still tries his hand also at prose, and his offerings
are now not always declined by the magazines.  But he has never
approached the Promiscuous again.  This periodical published in due
course a highly eulogistic study of the remarkable career of Sir Dominick
Ferrand.




NONA VINCENT.


I.


“I WONDERED whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as
they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave.  She looked
down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her
proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm.  Her charm was
always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which
was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling
that he always made several false starts before departure.  He had spent
some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden
drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his
life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the
cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms.  His
tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a
usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one
so young, and very independent for one so poor.  He was eight-and-twenty,
but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities
and disappointments.  The opportunity to talk of some of these in
Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of
London.  This inconvenience took for him principally the line of
insensibility to Allan Wayworth’s literary form.  He had a literary form,
or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance
was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered.  She
was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could
often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession),
while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and
unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain
in the plash of the marble basin.

The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next her
at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour into a
feast of reason.  There was no motive for her asking him to come to see
her but that she liked him, which it was the more agreeable to him to
perceive as he perceived at the same time that she was exquisite.  She
was enviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feel less
unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to be one of them.
He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn
his head in the kindness of a kind woman.  Mrs. Alsager occupied so
completely the ground of possession that she would have been condemned to
inaction had it not been for the principle of giving.  Her husband, who
was twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a
heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was monumental),
owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many other things.
He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and liked her to have
other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a greater acreage to their
life.  His own appetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary,
and his theory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so that
between them the pair should astound by their consumption.  His ideas
were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good fortune to be
carried out by a person of perfect delicacy.  Her delicacy made her play
strange tricks with them, but he never found this out.  She attenuated
him without his knowing it, for what he mainly thought was that he had
aggrandised _her_.  Without her he really would have been bigger still,
and society, breathing more freely, was practically under an obligation
to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of
mystified respect.  She felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and
her leisure into the things of the soul—the most beautiful things she
knew.  She found them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred
places, and particularly in a dim and sacred region—the region of active
pity—over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it
would have been an impertinence to lift them.  But she cultivated other
beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of something fine the
moments at which it most seemed to her to come true were when she saw
beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of art.  She loved the perfect
work—she had the artistic chord.  This chord could vibrate only to the
touch of another, so that appreciation, in her spirit, had the added
intensity of regret.  She could understand the joy of creation, and she
thought it scarcely enough to be told that she herself created happiness.
She would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just
here that her liberty failed her.  She had not the voice—she had only the
vision.  The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as
she said, could do something.

As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was admirably
hospitable to such people as a class.  She believed Allan Wayworth could
do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the ways in which he
meant to show it.  He talked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled
him for other listeners.  With her fair bloom and her quiet grace she was
indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided to him that she
would have liked to scribble (she had in fact not mentioned it to a
creature), he would have been in a perfect position for asking her why a
woman whose face had so much expression should not have felt that she
achieved.  How in the world could she express better?  There was less
than that in Shakespeare and Beethoven.  She had never been more generous
than when, in compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he
brought his play to read to her.  He had spoken of it to her before, and
one dark November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an
escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came
in—“I’ve done it, I’ve done it!”  She made him tell her all about it—she
took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully apt.  She
had spoken from the first as if he were on the point of being acted,
making him jump, with her participation, all sorts of dreary intervals.
She liked the theatre as she liked all the arts of expression, and he had
known her to go all the way to Paris for a particular performance.  Once
he had gone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn.  She had
been struck, when he sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had
spoken words that helped him to believe in it.  As soon as he had rung
down his curtain on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that
he kept the thing for repeated last touches.  Finally, on Christmas day,
by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it.  It was in three acts
and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with
contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the hand
if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.

Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent, for
years, in several foreign countries successively, of a conspicuous London
journal, had died just after this, leaving his mother and her two other
children, portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a very
dull German town.  The young man’s beginnings in London were difficult,
and he had aggravated them by his dislike of journalism.  His father’s
connection with it would have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of
his friends judged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)
_intraitable_ on the question of form.  Form—in his sense—was not
demanded by English newspapers, and he couldn’t give it to them in
_their_ sense.  The demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth
spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that
didn’t pay for style.  The only person who paid for it was really Mrs.
Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the perfect.  She paid in her
own way, and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would
have made him feel that if he didn’t receive his legal dues his palm was
at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity.  He had his limitations,
his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the most alive, and he
was restless and sincere.  It is however the impression he produced on
Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she thought him not only remarkably
good-looking but altogether original.  There were some usual bad things
he would never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut
to success.

For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way, as
he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which
struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from
within.  He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to
him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low
in an air thick with vulgarity.  It was hedged about with sordid
approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering.  The man of
letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which
was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his immemorial
heritage.  Aspects change, however, with the point of view: Wayworth had
waked up one morning in a different bed altogether.  It is needless here
to trace this accident to its source; it would have been much more
interesting to a spectator of the young man’s life to follow some of the
consequences.  He had been made (as he felt) the subject of a special
revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in love.  An angel had taken
him by the hand and guided him to the shabby door which opens, it
appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere.  The scenic idea
was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a
purity which made some others look ingloriously rough.  It had the high
dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural.  It
was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the
incorruptibility of line and law.  It was bare, but it was erect, it was
poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for
justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled.  There was a fearful
amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare intensity.  You
were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the ship, but what a
motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic
as the dance of a goddess!  Wayworth took long London walks and thought
of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its
suggestion.  His imagination glowed and melted down material, his
intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze.  He saw not only
the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; the
future opened before him and he seemed to walk on marble slabs.  The more
he tried the dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it
the more he perceived in it.  What he perceived in it indeed he now
perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk, before some
flaring shop-window, the place immediately constituted itself behind
footlights, became a framed stage for his figures.  He hammered at these
figures in his lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their
tabernacle; he was like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with
the passion for perfection.  When he was neither roaming the streets with
his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas
on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details
that would amuse her in later and still happier hours.  Her eyes were
full of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and
she murmured, divinely—

“And now—to get it done, to get it done!”

“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly rolling
up his type-copy.  “But that’s a totally different part of the business,
and altogether secondary.”

“But of course you want to be acted?”

“Of course I do—but it’s a sudden descent.  I want to intensely, but I’m
sorry I want to.”

“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a
little off her guard.

“How can you say that?  It’s there that they end!”

“Ah, wait to see where they end!”

“I mean they’ll now be of a totally different order,” Wayworth explained.
“It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more difficult than to
write a play that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparison
with them the complications that spring up at this point are of an
altogether smaller kind.”

“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs. Alsager; “they’re discouraging,
because they’re vulgar.  The other problem, the working out of the thing
itself, is pure art.”

“How well you understand everything!”  The young man had got up,
nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to the
fire and his arms folded.  The roll of his copy, in his fist, was
squeezed into the hollow of one of them.  He looked down at Mrs. Alsager,
smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from eyes still
charmed and suffused.  “Yes, the vulgarity will begin now,” he presently
added.

“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”

“I shall suffer in a good cause.”

“Yes, giving _that_ to the world!  You must leave it with me, I must read
it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw
the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic
identity now to him, out of his grasp.  “Who in the world will do it?—who
in the world _can_?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves.
Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned
the book round to him, pointing out a speech.  “That’s the most beautiful
place—those lines are a perfection.”  He glanced at the spot she
indicated, and she begged him to read them again—he had read them
admirably before.  He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she
held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed a
cadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetious complacency which he
hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face.  “Ah, who can utter such
lines as _that_?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do
_her_?”

“We’ll find people to do them all!”

“But not people who are worthy.”

“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough.  I’ll work with
them—I’ll grind it into them.”  He spoke as if he had produced twenty
plays.

“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.

“But I shall have to find my theatre first.  I shall have to get a
manager to believe in me.”

“Yes—they’re so stupid!”

“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and
wait,” said Allan Wayworth.  “Do you see me hawking it about London?”

“Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.”

“It’s what I shall have to do.  I shall be old before it’s produced.”

“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried.  “I know one
or two of them,” she mused.

“Do you mean you would speak to them?”

“The thing is to get them to read it.  I could do that.”

“That’s the utmost I ask.  But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.”

She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes.  “You sha’n’t wait.”

“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.

“That is _you_ may, but _I_ won’t!  Will you leave me your copy?” she
went on, turning the pages again.

“Certainly; I have another.”  Standing near him she read to herself a
passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them
out.  “Oh, if _you_ were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed.

“That’s the last thing I am.  There’s no comedy in _me_!”

She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius.  “Is there
any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.

She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and
a “Perhaps that will be for you to determine!”  But before he could
disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking
about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their
friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their
sympathy.  Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had
taken a tremendous fancy to her.  “I can’t _tell_ you how I like that
woman!” she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only
be balm to the artistic spirit.

“I’m awfully glad she lives a bit.  What I feel about her is that she’s a
good deal like _you_,” Wayworth observed.

Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red.  This was
evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn’t, however, treat it
as a joke.  “I’m not impressed with the resemblance.  I don’t see myself
doing what she does.”

“It isn’t so much what she _does_,” the young man argued, drawing out his
moustache.

“But what she does is the whole point.  She simply tells her love—I
should never do that.”

“If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her
for it?”

“It isn’t what I like her for.”

“What else, then?  That’s intensely characteristic.”

Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of
having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from.  But the one she produced was
unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not
finding others.  “I like her because _you_ made her!” she exclaimed with
a laugh, moving again away from her companion.

Wayworth laughed still louder.  “You made her a little yourself.  I’ve
thought of her as looking like you.”

“She ought to look much better,” said Mrs. Alsager.  “No, certainly, I
shouldn’t do what _she_ does.”

“Not even in the same circumstances?”

“I should never find myself in such circumstances.  They’re exactly your
play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine.  However,”
Mrs. Alsager went on, “her behaviour was natural for _her_, and not only
natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and noble.  I can’t
sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which you make one accept
it, and I tell you frankly that it’s evident to me there must be a
brilliant future before a young man who, at the start, has been capable
of such a stroke as that.  Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as
intensely as I feel that I don’t resemble her!”

“Don’t exaggerate that,” said Allan Wayworth.

“My admiration?”

“Your dissimilarity.  She has your face, your air, your voice, your
motion; she has many elements of your being.”

“Then she’ll damn your play!” Mrs. Alsager replied.  They joked a little
over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth’s
hostess soon remarked: “You’ve got your remedy, however: have her done by
the right woman.”

“Oh, have her ‘done’—have her ‘done’!” the young man gently wailed.

“I see what you mean, my poor friend.  What a pity, when it’s such a
magnificent part—such a chance for a clever serious girl!  Nona Vincent
is practically your play—it will be open to her to carry it far or to
drop it at the first corner.”

“It’s a charming prospect,” said Allan Wayworth, with sudden scepticism.
They looked at each other with eyes that, for a lurid moment, saw the
worst of the worst; but before they parted they had exchanged vows and
confidences that were dedicated wholly to the ideal.  It is not to be
supposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager would help him
made Wayworth less eager to help himself.  He did what he could and felt
that she, on her side, was doing no less; but at the end of a year he was
obliged to recognise that their united effort had mainly produced the
fine flower of discouragement.  At the end of a year the lustre had, to
his own eyes, quite faded from his unappreciated masterpiece, and he
found himself writing for a biographical dictionary little lives of
celebrities he had never heard of.  To be printed, anywhere and anyhow,
was a form of glory for a man so unable to be acted, and to be paid, even
at encyclopædic rates, had the consequence of making one resigned and
verbose.  He couldn’t smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could at
least reflect that he had done his best to learn from the drama that it
is a gross impertinence almost anywhere.  He had knocked at the door of
every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous expense, had multiplied
type-copies of _Nona Vincent_ to replace the neat transcripts that had
descended into the managerial abyss.  His play was not even declined—no
such flattering intimation was given him that it had been read.  What the
managers would do for Mrs. Alsager concerned him little today; the thing
that was relevant was that they would do nothing for _him_.  That
charming woman felt humbled to the earth, so little response had she had
from the powers on which she counted.  The two never talked about the
play now, but he tried to show her a still finer friendship, that she
might not think he felt she had failed him.  He still walked about London
with his dreams, but as months succeeded months and he left the year
behind him they were dreams not so much of success as of revenge.
Success seemed a colourless name for the reward of his patience;
something fiercely florid, something sanguinolent was more to the point.
His best consolation however was still in the scenic idea; it was not
till now that he discovered how incurably he was in love with it.  By the
time a vain second year had chafed itself away he cherished his fruitless
faculty the more for the obloquy it seemed to suffer.  He lived, in his
best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play
and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing
could be.  It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to
the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the
difference.  He was at last able to leave England for three or four
months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother and
sisters.

Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return he received from Mrs.
Alsager a telegram consisting of the words: “Loder wishes see you—putting
_Nona_ instant rehearsal.”  He spent the few hours before his departure
in kissing his mother and sisters, who knew enough about Mrs. Alsager to
judge it lucky this respectable married lady was not there—a relief,
however, accompanied with speculative glances at London and the morrow.
Loder, as our young man was aware, meant the new “Renaissance,” but
though he reached home in the evening it was not to this convenient
modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded.  He spent a late hour with
Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed with calculation.  She told him that
Mr. Loder was charming, he had simply taken up the play in its turn; he
had hopes of it, moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist
might almost be qualified as ecstatic.  It had been cast, with a margin
for objections, and Violet Grey was to do the heroine.  She had been
capable, while he was away, of a good piece of work at that foggy old
playhouse the “Legitimate;” the piece was a clumsy _réchauffé_, but she
at least had been fresh.  Wayworth remembered Violet Grey—hadn’t he, for
two years, on a fond policy of “looking out,” kept dipping into the
London theatres to pick up prospective interpreters?  He had not picked
up many as yet, and this young lady at all events had never wriggled in
his net.  She was pretty and she was odd, but he had never prefigured her
as Nona Vincent, nor indeed found himself attracted by what he already
felt sufficiently launched in the profession to speak of as her artistic
personality.  Mrs. Alsager was different—she declared that she had been
struck not a little by some of her tones.  The girl was interesting in
the thing at the “Legitimate,” and Mr. Loder, who had his eye on her,
described her as ambitious and intelligent.  She wanted awfully to get
on—and some of those ladies were so lazy!  Wayworth was sceptical—he had
seen Miss Violet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres
but only in one aspect.  Nona Vincent had a dozen aspects, but only one
theatre; yet with what a feverish curiosity the young man promised
himself to watch the actress on the morrow!  Talking the matter over with
Mrs. Alsager now seemed the very stuff that rehearsal was made of.  The
near prospect of being acted laid a finger even on the lip of inquiry; he
wanted to go on tiptoe till the first night, to make no condition but
that they should speak his lines, and he felt that he wouldn’t so much as
raise an eyebrow at the scene-painter if he should give him an old oak
chamber.

He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be other than
this, and yet he couldn’t have expressed to himself what it would be.
Danger was there, doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art,
and still more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed to
catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of victory.  Nothing
could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted.  It would
be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn’t prevent him,
however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word “bad” from his
vocabulary.  It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it
didn’t apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already
outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent
alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem.  When he went
down to the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him like the temple of
fame) Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs. Alsager had announced,
struck him as the genius of hospitality.  The manager began to explain
why, for so long, he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that
interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what
reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated.  He liked, in the whole business of
discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should
probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should like.
He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought to
penetrate her possibilities.  She certainly had a few; they were
qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence; he
sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention, repeating over
to himself as convincingly as he could that she was not common—a
circumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playing seemed
to him desperately so.  He perceived that this was why it pleased the
audience; he divined that it was the part they enjoyed rather than the
actress.  He had a private panic, wondering how, if they liked _that_
form, they could possibly like his.  His form had now become quite an
ultimate idea to him.  By the time the evening was over some of Miss
Violet Grey’s features, several of the turns of her head, a certain
vibration of her voice, had taken their place in the same category.  She
_was_ interesting, she was distinguished; at any rate he had accepted
her: it came to the same thing.  But he left the theatre that night
without speaking to her—moved (a little even to his own mystification) by
an odd procrastinating impulse.  On the morrow he was to read his three
acts to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he
felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.
Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that though
he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet
Grey’s person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in
Nona’s.  He didn’t wish to see the actress so directly, or even so simply
as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both
through the performer and through the “Legitimate.”  Before he went to
bed that night he posted three words to Mrs. Alsager—“She’s not a bit
like it, but I dare say I can make her do.”

He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the next day, at the
reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, at the reading, and most
of all with the reading itself.  The whole affair loomed large to him and
he magnified it and mapped it out.  He enjoyed his occupation of the big,
dim, hollow theatre, full of the echoes of “effect” and of a queer smell
of gas and success—it all seemed such a passive canvas for his picture.
For the first time in his life he was in command of resources; he was
acquainted with the phrase, but had never thought he should know the
feeling.  He was surprised at what Loder appeared ready to do, though he
reminded himself that he must never show it.  He foresaw that there would
be two distinct concomitants to the artistic effort of producing a play,
one consisting of a great deal of anguish and the other of a great deal
of amusement.  He looked back upon the reading, afterwards, as the best
hour in the business, because it was then that the piece had most struck
him as represented.  What came later was the doing of others; but this,
with its imperfections and failures, was all his own.  The drama lived,
at any rate, for that hour, with an intensity that it was promptly to
lose in the poverty and patchiness of rehearsal; he could see its life
reflected, in a way that was sweet to him, in the stillness of the little
semi-circle of attentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and
muddy-booted, actors.  Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to
say to, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let her
have the soul of her part.  Her attitude was graceful, but though she
appeared to listen with all her faculties her face remained perfectly
blank; a fact, however, not discouraging to Wayworth, who liked her
better for not being premature.  Her companions gave discernible signs of
recognising the passages of comedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then
for being inexpressive.  She evidently wished before everything else to
be simply sure of what it was all about.

He was more surprised even than at the revelation of the scale on which
Mr. Loder was ready to proceed by the discovery that some of the actors
didn’t like their parts, and his heart sank as he asked himself what he
could possibly do with them if they were going to be so stupid.  This was
the first of his disappointments; somehow he had expected every
individual to become instantly and gratefully conscious of a rare
opportunity, and from the moment such a calculation failed he was at sea,
or mindful at any rate that more disappointments would come.  It was
impossible to make out what the manager liked or disliked; no judgment,
no comment escaped him; his acceptance of the play and his views about
the way it should be mounted had apparently converted him into a veiled
and shrouded figure.  Wayworth was able to grasp the idea that they would
all move now in a higher and sharper air than that of compliment and
confidence.  When he talked with Violet Grey after the reading he
gathered that she was really rather crude: what better proof of it could
there be than her failure to break out instantly with an expression of
delight about her great chance?  This reserve, however, had evidently
nothing to do with high pretensions; she had no wish to make him feel
that a person of her eminence was superior to easy raptures.  He guessed,
after a little, that she was puzzled and even somewhat frightened—to a
certain extent she had not understood.  Nothing could appeal to him more
than the opportunity to clear up her difficulties, in the course of the
examination of which he quickly discovered that, so far as she _had_
understood, she had understood wrong.  If she was crude it was only a
reason the more for talking to her; he kept saying to her “Ask me—ask me:
ask me everything you can think of.”

She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first
rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made them
strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the dawn of a
success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of the stage,
with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she was in
earnest.  He felt more and more that his heroine was the keystone of his
arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to take her.  But when
he reminded this young lady of the way the whole thing practically
depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly scandalised: she spoke
more than once as if that could scarcely be the right way to construct a
play—make it stand or fall by one poor nervous girl.  She was almost
morbidly conscientious, and in theory he liked her for this, though he
lost patience three or four times with the things she couldn’t do and the
things she could.  At such times the tears came to her eyes; but they
were produced by her own stupidity, she hastened to assure him, not by
the way he spoke, which was awfully kind under the circumstances.  Her
sincerity made her beautiful, and he wished to heaven (and made a point
of telling her so) that she could sprinkle a little of it over Nona.
Once, however, she was so touched and troubled that the sight of it
brought the tears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened
that, turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr.
Loder.  The manager stared, glanced at the actress, who turned in the
other direction, and then smiling at Wayworth, exclaimed, with the humour
of a man who heard the gallery laugh every night:

“I say—I say!”

“What’s the matter?” Wayworth asked.

“I’m glad to see Miss Grey is taking such pains with you.”

“Oh, yes—she’ll turn me out!” said the young man, gaily.  He was quite
aware that it was apparent he was not superficial about Nona, and
abundantly determined, into the bargain, that the rehearsal of the piece
should not sacrifice a shade of thoroughness to any extrinsic
consideration.

Mrs. Alsager, whom, late in the afternoon, he used often to go and ask
for a cup of tea, thanking her in advance for the rest she gave him and
telling her how he found that rehearsal (as _they_ were doing it—it was a
caution!) took it out of one—Mrs. Alsager, more and more his good genius
and, as he repeatedly assured her, his ministering angel, confirmed him
in this superior policy and urged him on to every form of artistic
devotion.  She had, naturally, never been more interested than now in his
work; she wanted to hear everything about everything.  She treated him as
heroically fatigued, plied him with luxurious restoratives, made him
stretch himself on cushions and rose-leaves.  They gossipped more than
ever, by her fire, about the artistic life; he confided to her, for
instance, all his hopes and fears, all his experiments and anxieties, on
the subject of the representative of Nona.  She was immensely interested
in this young lady and showed it by taking a box again and again (she had
seen her half-a-dozen times already), to study her capacity through the
veil of her present part.  Like Allan Wayworth she found her encouraging
only by fits, for she had fine flashes of badness.  She was intelligent,
but she cried aloud for training, and the training was so absent that the
intelligence had only a fraction of its effect.  She was like a knife
without an edge—good steel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away
at her hard dramatic loaf, she couldn’t cut it smooth.



II.


“CERTAINLY my leading lady won’t make Nona much like _you_!” Wayworth one
day gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager.  There were days when the prospect
seemed to him awful.

“So much the better.  There’s no necessity for that.”

“I wish you’d train her a little—you could so easily,” the young man went
on; in response to which Mrs. Alsager requested him not to make such
cruel fun of her.  But she was curious about the girl, wanted to hear of
her character, her private situation, how she lived and where, seemed
indeed desirous to befriend her.  Wayworth might not have known much
about the private situation of Miss Violet Grey, but, as it happened, he
was able, by the time his play had been three weeks in rehearsal, to
supply information on such points.  She was a charming, exemplary person,
educated, cultivated, with highly modern tastes, an excellent musician.
She had lost her parents and was very much alone in the world, her only
two relations being a sister, who was married to a civil servant (in a
highly responsible post) in India, and a dear little old-fashioned aunt
(really a great-aunt) with whom she lived at Notting Hill, who wrote
children’s books and who, it appeared, had once written a Christmas
pantomime.  It was quite an artistic home—not on the scale of Mrs.
Alsager’s (to compare the smallest things with the greatest!) but
intensely refined and honourable.  Wayworth went so far as to hint that
it would be rather nice and human on Mrs. Alsager’s part to go there—they
would take it so kindly if she should call on them.  She had acted so
often on his hints that he had formed a pleasant habit of expecting it:
it made him feel so wisely responsible about giving them.  But this one
appeared to fall to the ground, so that he let the subject drop.  Mrs.
Alsager, however, went yet once more to the “Legitimate,” as he found by
her saying to him abruptly, on the morrow: “Oh, she’ll be very
good—she’ll be very good.”  When they said “she,” in these days, they
always meant Violet Grey, though they pretended, for the most part, that
they meant Nona Vincent.

“Oh yes,” Wayworth assented, “she wants so to!”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a little
inconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie: “Does she want to
_very_ much?”

“Tremendously—and it appears she has been fascinated by the part from the
first.”

“Why then didn’t she say so?”

“Oh, because she’s so funny.”

“She _is_ funny,” said Mrs. Alsager, musingly; and presently she added:
“She’s in love with you.”

Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out.  “What is there
funny in that?” he demanded; but before his interlocutress could satisfy
him on this point he inquired, further, how she knew anything about it.
After a little graceful evasion she explained that the night before, at
the “Legitimate,” Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of the actor-manager, had paid
her a visit in her box; which had happened, in the course of their brief
gossip, to lead to her remarking that she had never been “behind.”  Mrs.
Beaumont offered on the spot to take her round, and the fancy had seized
her to accept the invitation.  She had been amused for the moment, and in
this way it befell that her conductress, at her request, had introduced
her to Miss Violet Grey, who was waiting in the wing for one of her
scenes.  Mrs. Beaumont had been called away for three minutes, and during
this scrap of time, face to face with the actress, she had discovered the
poor girl’s secret.  Wayworth qualified it as a senseless thing, but
wished to know what had led to the discovery.  She characterised this
inquiry as superficial for a painter of the ways of women; and he
doubtless didn’t improve it by remarking profanely that a cat might look
at a king and that such things were convenient to know.  Even on this
ground, however, he was threatened by Mrs. Alsager, who contended that it
might not be a joking matter to the poor girl.  To this Wayworth, who now
professed to hate talking about the passions he might have inspired,
could only reply that he meant it couldn’t make a difference to Mrs.
Alsager.

“How in the world do you know what makes a difference to _me_?” this lady
asked, with incongruous coldness, with a haughtiness indeed remarkable in
so gentle a spirit.

He saw Violet Grey that night at the theatre, and it was she who spoke
first of her having lately met a friend of his.

“She’s in love with you,” the actress said, after he had made a show of
ignorance; “doesn’t that tell you anything?”

He blushed redder still than Mrs. Alsager had made him blush, but
replied, quickly enough and very adequately, that hundreds of women were
naturally dying for him.

“Oh, I don’t care, for you’re not in love with _her_!” the girl
continued.

“Did she tell you that too?” Wayworth asked; but she had at that moment
to go on.

Standing where he could see her he thought that on this occasion she
threw into her scene, which was the best she had in the play, a brighter
art than ever before, a talent that could play with its problem.  She was
perpetually doing things out of rehearsal (she did two or three to-night,
in the other man’s piece), that he as often wished to heaven Nona Vincent
might have the benefit of.  She appeared to be able to do them for every
one but him—that is for every one but Nona.  He was conscious, in these
days, of an odd new feeling, which mixed (this was a part of its oddity)
with a very natural and comparatively old one and which in its most
definite form was a dull ache of regret that this young lady’s unlucky
star should have placed her on the stage.  He wished in his worst
uneasiness that, without going further, she would give it up; and yet it
soothed that uneasiness to remind himself that he saw grounds to hope she
would go far enough to make a marked success of Nona.  There were strange
and painful moments when, as the interpretress of Nona, he almost hated
her; after which, however, he always assured himself that he exaggerated,
inasmuch as what made this aversion seem great, when he was nervous, was
simply its contrast with the growing sense that there _were_
grounds—totally different—on which she pleased him.  She pleased him as a
charming creature—by her sincerities and her perversities, by the
varieties and surprises of her character and by certain happy facts of
her person.  In private her eyes were sad to him and her voice was rare.
He detested the idea that she should have a disappointment or an
humiliation, and he wanted to rescue her altogether, to save and
transplant her.  One way to save her was to see to it, to the best of his
ability, that the production of his play should be a triumph; and the
other way—it was really too queer to express—was almost to wish that it
shouldn’t be.  Then, for the future, there would be safety and peace, and
not the peace of death—the peace of a different life.  It is to be added
that our young man clung to the former of these ways in proportion as the
latter perversely tempted him.  He was nervous at the best, increasingly
and intolerably nervous; but the immediate remedy was to rehearse harder
and harder, and above all to work it out with Violet Grey.  Some of her
comrades reproached him with working it out only with her, as if she were
the whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford to be
neglected, they were all so tremendously good.  She was the only person
concerned whom he didn’t flatter.

The author and the actress stuck so to the business in hand that she had
very little time to speak to him again of Mrs. Alsager, of whom indeed
her imagination appeared adequately to have disposed.  Wayworth once
remarked to her that Nona Vincent was supposed to be a good deal like his
charming friend; but she gave a blank “Supposed by whom?” in consequence
of which he never returned to the subject.  He confided his nervousness
as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, who easily understood that he had a
peculiar complication of anxieties.  His suspense varied in degree from
hour to hour, but any relief there might have been in this was made up
for by its being of several different kinds.  One afternoon, as the first
performance drew near, Mrs. Alsager said to him, in giving him his cup of
tea and on his having mentioned that he had not closed his eyes the night
before:

“You must indeed be in a dreadful state.  Anxiety for another is still
worse than anxiety for one’s self.”

“For another?” Wayworth repeated, looking at her over the rim of his cup.

“My poor friend, you’re nervous about Nona Vincent, but you’re infinitely
more nervous about Violet Grey.”

“She _is_ Nona Vincent!”

“No, she isn’t—not a bit!” said Mrs. Alsager, abruptly.

“Do you really think so?” Wayworth cried, spilling his tea in his alarm.

“What I think doesn’t signify—I mean what I think about that.  What I
meant to say was that great as is your suspense about your play, your
suspense about your actress is greater still.”

“I can only repeat that my actress _is_ my play.”

Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.

“Your actress is your—”

“My what?” the young man asked, with a little tremor in his voice, as his
hostess paused.

“Your very dear friend.  You’re in love with her—at present.”  And with a
sharp click Mrs. Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant receptacle.

“Not yet—not yet!” laughed her visitor.

“You will be if she pulls you through.”

“You declare that she _won’t_ pull me through.”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softly murmured: “I’ll
pray for her.”

“You’re the most generous of women!” Wayworth cried; then  as if
the words had not been happy.  They would have done indeed little honour
to a man of tact.

The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs. Alsager.  She
had suddenly been called to Torquay, to see a relation who was seriously
ill; she should be detained there several days, but she had an earnest
hope of being able to return in time for his first night.  In any event
he had her unrestricted good wishes.  He missed her extremely, for these
last days were a great strain and there was little comfort to be derived
from Violet Grey.  She was even more nervous than himself, and so pale
and altered that he was afraid she would be too ill to act.  It was
settled between them that they made each other worse and that he had now
much better leave her alone.  They had pulled Nona so to pieces that
nothing seemed left of her—she must at least have time to grow together
again.  He left Violet Grey alone, to the best of his ability, but she
carried out imperfectly her own side of the bargain.  She came to him
with new questions—she waited for him with old doubts, and half an hour
before the last dress-rehearsal, on the eve of production, she proposed
to him a totally fresh rendering of his heroine.  This incident gave him
such a sense of insecurity that he turned his back on her without a word,
bolted out of the theatre, dashed along the Strand and walked as far as
the Bank.  Then he jumped into a hansom and came westward, and when he
reached the theatre again the business was nearly over.  It appeared,
almost to his disappointment, not bad enough to give him the consolation
of the old playhouse adage that the worst dress-rehearsals make the best
first nights.

The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; the theatre had
been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday.  Every one, on the Wednesday,
did his best to let every one else alone, and every one signally failed
in the attempt.  The day, till seven o’clock, was understood to be
consecrated to rest, but every one except Violet Grey turned up at the
theatre.  Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr. Loder looked in another
direction, which was as near as they came to conversation.  Wayworth was
in a fidget, unable to eat or sleep or sit still, at times almost in
terror.  He kept quiet by keeping, as usual, in motion; he tried to walk
away from his nervousness.  He walked in the afternoon toward Notting
Hill, but he succeeded in not breaking the vow he had taken not to meddle
with his actress.  She was like an acrobat poised on a slippery ball—if
he should touch her she would topple over.  He passed her door three
times and he thought of her three hundred.  This was the hour at which he
most regretted that Mrs. Alsager had not come back—for he had called at
her house only to learn that she was still at Torquay.  This was probably
queer, and it was probably queerer still that she hadn’t written to him;
but even of these things he wasn’t sure, for in losing, as he had now
completely lost, his judgment of his play, he seemed to himself to have
lost his judgment of everything.  When he went home, however, he found a
telegram from the lady of Grosvenor Place—“Shall be able to come—reach
town by seven.”  At half-past eight o’clock, through a little aperture in
the curtain of the “Renaissance,” he saw her in her box with a cluster of
friends—completely beautiful and beneficent.  The house was
magnificent—too good for his play, he felt; too good for any play.
Everything now seemed too good—the scenery, the furniture, the dresses,
the very programmes.  He seized upon the idea that this was probably what
was the matter with the representative of Nona—she was only too good.  He
had completely arranged with this young lady the plan of their relations
during the evening; and though they had altered everything else that they
had arranged they had promised each other not to alter this.  It was
wonderful the number of things they had promised each other.  He would
start her, he would see her off—then he would quit the theatre and stay
away till just before the end.  She besought him to stay away—it would
make her infinitely easier.  He saw that she was exquisitely dressed—she
had made one or two changes for the better since the night before, and
that seemed something definite to turn over and over in his mind as he
rumbled foggily home in the four-wheeler in which, a few steps from the
stage-door, he had taken refuge as soon as he knew that the curtain was
up.  He lived a couple of miles off, and he had chosen a four-wheeler to
drag out the time.

When he got home his fire was out, his room was cold, and he lay down on
his sofa in his overcoat.  He had sent his landlady to the dress-circle,
on purpose; she would overflow with words and mistakes.  The house seemed
a black void, just as the streets had done—every one was, formidably, at
his play.  He was quieter at last than he had been for a fortnight, and
he felt too weak even to wonder how the thing was going.  He believed
afterwards that he had slept an hour; but even if he had he felt it to be
still too early to return to the theatre.  He sat down by his lamp and
tried to read—to read a little compendious life of a great English
statesman, out of a “series.”  It struck him as brilliantly clever, and
he asked himself whether that perhaps were not rather the sort of thing
he ought to have taken up: not the statesmanship, but the art of brief
biography.  Suddenly he became aware that he must hurry if he was to
reach the theatre at all—it was a quarter to eleven o’clock.  He
scrambled out and, this time, found a hansom—he had lately spent enough
money in cabs to add to his hope that the profits of his new profession
would be great.  His anxiety, his suspense flamed up again, and as he
rattled eastward—he went fast now—he was almost sick with alternations.
As he passed into the theatre the first man—some underling—who met him,
cried to him, breathlessly:

“You’re wanted, sir—you’re wanted!”  He thought his tone very ominous—he
devoured the man’s eyes with his own, for a betrayal: did he mean that he
was wanted for execution?  Some one else pressed him, almost pushed him,
forward; he was already on the stage.  Then he became conscious of a
sound more or less continuous, but seemingly faint and far, which he took
at first for the voice of the actors heard through their canvas walls,
the beautiful built-in room of the last act.  But the actors were in the
wing, they surrounded him; the curtain was down and they were coming off
from before it.  They had been called, and _he_ was called—they all
greeted him with “Go on—go on!”  He was terrified—he couldn’t go on—he
didn’t believe in the applause, which seemed to him only audible enough
to sound half-hearted.

“Has it gone?—_has_ it gone?” he gasped to the people round him; and he
heard them say “Rather—rather!” perfunctorily, mendaciously too, as it
struck him, and even with mocking laughter, the laughter of defeat and
despair.  Suddenly, though all this must have taken but a moment, Loder
burst upon him from somewhere with a “For God’s sake don’t keep them, or
they’ll _stop_!”  “But I can’t go on for _that_!”  Wayworth cried, in
anguish; the sound seemed to him already to have ceased.  Loder had hold
of him and was shoving him; he resisted and looked round frantically for
Violet Grey, who perhaps would tell him the truth.  There was by this
time a crowd in the wing, all with strange grimacing painted faces, but
Violet was not among them and her very absence frightened him.  He
uttered her name with an accent that he afterwards regretted—it gave
them, as he thought, both away; and while Loder hustled him before the
curtain he heard some one say “She took her call and disappeared.”  She
had had a call, then—this was what was most present to the young man as
he stood for an instant in the glare of the footlights, looking blindly
at the great vaguely-peopled horseshoe and greeted with plaudits which
now seemed to him at once louder than he deserved and feebler than he
desired.  They sank to rest quickly, but he felt it to be long before he
could back away, before he could, in his turn, seize the manager by the
arm and cry huskily—“Has it really gone—_really_?”

Mr. Loder looked at him hard and replied after an instant: “The play’s
all right!”

Wayworth hung upon his lips.  “Then what’s all wrong?”

“We must do something to Miss Grey.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She isn’t _in_ it!”

“Do you mean she has failed?”

“Yes, damn it—she has failed.”

Wayworth stared.  “Then how can the play be all right?”

“Oh, we’ll save it—we’ll save it.”

“Where’s Miss Grey—where _is_ she?” the young man asked.

Loder caught his arm as he was turning away again to look for his
heroine.  “Never mind her now—she knows it!”

Wayworth was approached at the same moment by a gentleman he knew as one
of Mrs. Alsager’s friends—he had perceived him in that lady’s box.  Mrs.
Alsager was waiting there for the successful author; she desired very
earnestly that he would come round and speak to her.  Wayworth assured
himself first that Violet had left the theatre—one of the actresses could
tell him that she had seen her throw on a cloak, without changing her
dress, and had learnt afterwards that she had, the next moment, flung
herself, after flinging her aunt, into a cab.  He had wished to invite
half a dozen persons, of whom Miss Grey and her elderly relative were
two, to come home to supper with him; but she had refused to make any
engagement beforehand (it would be so dreadful to have to keep it if she
shouldn’t have made a hit), and this attitude had blighted the pleasant
plan, which fell to the ground.  He had called her morbid, but she was
immovable.  Mrs. Alsager’s messenger let him know that he was expected to
supper in Grosvenor Place, and half an hour afterwards he was seated
there among complimentary people and flowers and popping corks, eating
the first orderly meal he had partaken of for a week.  Mrs. Alsager had
carried him off in her brougham—the other people who were coming got into
things of their own.  He stopped her short as soon as she began to tell
him how tremendously every one had been struck by the piece; he nailed
her down to the question of Violet Grey.  Had she spoilt the play, had
she jeopardised or compromised it—had she been utterly bad, had she been
good in any degree?

“Certainly the performance would have seemed better if _she_ had been
better,” Mrs. Alsager confessed.

“And the play would have seemed better if the performance had been
better,” Wayworth said, gloomily, from the corner of the brougham.

“She does what she can, and she has talent, and she looked lovely.  But
she doesn’t _see_ Nona Vincent.  She doesn’t see the type—she doesn’t see
the individual—she doesn’t see the woman you meant.  She’s out of it—she
gives you a different person.”

“Oh, the woman I meant!” the young man exclaimed, looking at the London
lamps as he rolled by them.  “I wish to God she had known _you_!” he
added, as the carriage stopped.  After they had passed into the house he
said to his companion:

“You see she _won’t_ pull me through.”

“Forgive her—be kind to her!” Mrs. Alsager pleaded.

“I shall only thank her.  The play may go to the dogs.”

“If it does—if it does,” Mrs. Alsager began, with her pure eyes on him.

“Well, what if it does?”

She couldn’t tell him, for the rest of her guests came in together; she
only had time to say: “It _sha’n’t_ go to the dogs!”

He came away before the others, restless with the desire to go to Notting
Hill even that night, late as it was, haunted with the sense that Violet
Grey had measured her fall.  When he got into the street, however, he
allowed second thoughts to counsel another course; the effect of knocking
her up at two o’clock in the morning would hardly be to soothe her.  He
looked at six newspapers the next day and found in them never a good word
for her.  They were well enough about the piece, but they were unanimous
as to the disappointment caused by the young actress whose former efforts
had excited such hopes and on whom, on this occasion, such pressing
responsibilities rested.  They asked in chorus what was the matter with
her, and they declared in chorus that the play, which was not without
promise, was handicapped (they all used the same word) by the odd want of
correspondence between the heroine and her interpreter.  Wayworth drove
early to Notting Hill, but he didn’t take the newspapers with him; Violet
Grey could be trusted to have sent out for them by the peep of dawn and
to have fed her anguish full.  She declined to see him—she only sent down
word by her aunt that she was extremely unwell and should be unable to
act that night unless she were suffered to spend the day unmolested and
in bed.  Wayworth sat for an hour with the old lady, who understood
everything and to whom he could speak frankly.  She gave him a touching
picture of her niece’s condition, which was all the more vivid for the
simple words in which it was expressed: “She feels she isn’t right, you
know—she feels she isn’t right!”

“Tell her it doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter a straw!” said Wayworth.

“And she’s so proud—you know how proud she is!” the old lady went on.

“Tell her I’m more than satisfied, that I accept her gratefully as she
is.”

“She says she injures your play, that she ruins it,” said his
interlocutress.

“She’ll improve, immensely—she’ll grow into the part,” the young man
continued.

“She’d improve if she knew how—but she says she doesn’t.  She has given
all she has got, and she doesn’t know what’s wanted.”

“What’s wanted is simply that she should go straight on and trust me.”

“How can she trust you when she feels she’s losing you?”

“Losing me?” Wayworth cried.

“You’ll never forgive her if your play is taken off!”

“It will run six months,” said the author of the piece.

The old lady laid her hand on his arm.  “What will you do for her if it
does?”

He looked at Violet Grey’s aunt a moment.  “Do you say your niece is very
proud?”

“Too proud for her dreadful profession.”

“Then she wouldn’t wish you to ask me that,” Wayworth answered, getting
up.

When he reached home he was very tired, and for a person to whom it was
open to consider that he had scored a success he spent a remarkably
dismal day.  All his restlessness had gone, and fatigue and depression
possessed him.  He sank into his old chair by the fire and sat there for
hours with his eyes closed.  His landlady came in to bring his luncheon
and mend the fire, but he feigned to be asleep, so as not to be spoken
to.  It is to be supposed that sleep at last overtook him, for about the
hour that dusk began to gather he had an extraordinary impression, a
visit that, it would seem, could have belonged to no waking
consciousness.  Nona Vincent, in face and form, the living heroine of his
play, rose before him in his little silent room, sat down with him at his
dingy fireside.  She was not Violet Grey, she was not Mrs. Alsager, she
was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of
friendship or of penitence.  Yet she was more familiar to him than the
women he had known best, and she was ineffably beautiful and consoling.
She filled the poor room with her presence, the effect of which was as
soothing as some odour of incense.  She was as quiet as an affectionate
sister, and there was no surprise in her being there.  Nothing more real
had ever befallen him, and nothing, somehow, more reassuring.  He felt
her hand rest upon his own, and all his senses seemed to open to her
message.  She struck him, in the strangest way, both as his creation and
as his inspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness of success.
If she was so charming, in the red firelight, in her vague,
clear- garments, it was because he had made her so, and yet if
the weight seemed lifted from his spirit it was because she drew it away.
When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed to speak of safety and
freedom and to make a green garden of the future.  From time to time she
smiled and said: “I live—I live—I live.”  How long she stayed he couldn’t
have told, but when his landlady blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent
was no longer there.  He rubbed his eyes, but no dream had ever been so
intense; and as he slowly got out of his chair it was with a deep still
joy—the joy of the artist—in the thought of how right he had been, how
exactly like herself he had made her.  She had come to show him that.  At
the end of five minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call
his landlady back—he wanted to ask her a question.  When the good woman
reappeared the question hung fire an instant; then it shaped itself as
the inquiry:

“Has any lady been here?”

“No, sir—no lady at all.”

The woman seemed slightly scandalised.  “Not Miss Vincent?”

“Miss Vincent, sir?”

“The young lady of my play, don’t you know?”

“Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!”

“No I don’t, at all.  I think I mean Mrs. Alsager.”

“There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir.”

“Nor anybody at all like her?”

The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly taken him.
Then she asked in an injured tone: “Why shouldn’t I have told you if
you’d ’ad callers, sir?”

“I thought you might have thought I was asleep.”

“Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the lamp—and well you’d earned
it, Mr. Wayworth!”

The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram; it was just
as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and go down to the theatre.

“See me to-night in front, and don’t come near me till it’s over.”

It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for the
evening.  He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her from the depths of
a box.  He was in no position to say how she might have struck him the
night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with
admiration and gratitude.  She _was_ in it, this time; she had pulled
herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every
turn.  Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge,
and as he judged he exulted.  He was thrilled and carried away, and he
was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what
unfathomable art she had managed in a few hours to effect such a change
of base.  It was as if _she_ had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing
a clearness had been breathed upon the picture.  He kept himself quiet in
the _entr’actes_—he would speak to her only at the end; but before the
play was half over the manager burst into his box.

“It’s prodigious, what she’s up to!” cried Mr. Loder, almost more
bewildered than gratified.  “She has gone in for a new reading—a blessed
somersault in the air!”

“Is it quite different?” Wayworth asked, sharing his mystification.

“Different?  Hyperion to a satyr!  It’s devilish good, my boy!”

“It’s devilish good,” said Wayworth, “and it’s in a different key
altogether from the key of her rehearsal.”

“I’ll run you six months!” the manager declared; and he rushed round
again to the actress, leaving Wayworth with a sense that she had already
pulled him through.  She had with the audience an immense personal
success.

When he went behind, at the end, he had to wait for her; she only showed
herself when she was ready to leave the theatre.  Her aunt had been in
her dressing-room with her, and the two ladies appeared together.  The
girl passed him quickly, motioning him to say nothing till they should
have got out of the place.  He saw that she was immensely excited, lifted
altogether above her common artistic level.  The old lady said to him:
“You must come home to supper with us: it has been all arranged.”  They
had a brougham, with a little third seat, and he got into it with them.
It was a long time before the actress would speak.  She leaned back in
her corner, giving no sign but still heaving a little, like a subsiding
sea, and with all her triumph in the eyes that shone through the
darkness.  The old lady was hushed to awe, or at least to discretion, and
Wayworth was happy enough to wait.  He had really to wait till they had
alighted at Notting Hill, where the elder of his companions went to see
that supper had been attended to.

“I was better—I was better,” said Violet Grey, throwing off her cloak in
the little drawing-room.

“You were perfection.  You’ll be like that every night, won’t you?”

She smiled at him.  “Every night?  There can scarcely be a miracle every
day.”

“What do you mean by a miracle?”

“I’ve had a revelation.”

Wayward stared.  “At what hour?”

“The right hour—this afternoon.  Just in time to save me—and to save
_you_.”

“At five o’clock?  Do you mean you had a visit?”

“She came to me—she stayed two hours.”

“Two hours?  Nona Vincent?”

“Mrs. Alsager.”  Violet Grey smiled more deeply.  “It’s the same thing.”

“And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?”

“By letting me look at her.  By letting me hear her speak.  By letting me
know her.”

“And what did she say to you?”

“Kind things—encouraging, intelligent things.”

“Ah, the dear woman!” Wayworth cried.

“You ought to like her—she likes _you_.  She was just what I wanted,” the
actress added.

“Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?”

“She said you thought she was like her.  She _is_—she’s exquisite.”

“She’s exquisite,” Wayworth repeated.  “Do you mean she tried to coach
you?”

“Oh, no—she only said she would be so glad if it would help me to see
her.  And I felt it did help me.  I don’t know what took place—she only
sat there, and she held my hand and smiled at me, and she had tact and
grace, and she had goodness and beauty, and she soothed my nerves and
lighted up my imagination.  Somehow she seemed to _give_ it all to me.  I
took it—I took it.  I kept her before me, I drank her in.  For the first
time, in the whole study of the part, I had my model—I could make my
copy.  All my courage came back to me, and other things came that I
hadn’t felt before.  She was different—she was delightful; as I’ve said,
she was a revelation.  She kissed me when she went away—and you may guess
if I kissed _her_.  We were awfully affectionate, but it’s _you_ she
likes!” said Violet Grey.

Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and he had rarely
been more mystified.  “Did she wear vague, clear- garments?” he
asked, after a moment.

Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in to supper.  “_You_ know
how she dresses!”

He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and a little
solemn.  He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager the next day.  He did
so, but he was told at her door that she had returned to Torquay.  She
remained there all winter, all spring, and the next time he saw her his
play had run two hundred nights and he had married Violet Grey.  His
plays sometimes succeed, but his wife is not in them now, nor in any
others.  At these representations Mrs. Alsager continues frequently to be
present.




THE CHAPERON.


I.


AN old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the
fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees.  She was dressed in
deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however, by the
somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in obedience to
something that was passing in her mind.  She was far from the lamp, but
though her eyes were fixed upon her active needles she was not looking at
them.  What she really saw was quite another train of affairs.  The room
was spacious and dim; the thick London fog had oozed into it even through
its superior defences.  It was full of dusky, massive, valuable things.
The old lady sat motionless save for the regularity of her clicking
needles, which seemed as personal to her and as expressive as prolonged
fingers.  If she was thinking something out, she was thinking it
thoroughly.

When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, it might have
been guessed that the appearance of this young lady was not an
interruption of her meditation, but rather a contribution to it.  The
young lady, who was charming to behold, was also in deep mourning, which
had a freshness, if mourning can be fresh, an air of having been lately
put on.  She went straight to the bell beside the chimney-piece and
pulled it, while in her other hand she held a sealed and directed letter.
Her companion glanced in silence at the letter; then she looked still
harder at her work.  The girl hovered near the fireplace, without
speaking, and after a due, a dignified interval the butler appeared in
response to the bell.  The time had been sufficient to make the silence
between the ladies seem long.  The younger one asked the butler to see
that her letter should be posted; and after he had gone out she moved
vaguely about the room, as if to give her grandmother—for such was the
elder personage—a chance to begin a colloquy of which she herself
preferred not to strike the first note.  As equally with herself her
companion was on the face of it capable of holding out, the tension,
though it was already late in the evening, might have lasted long.  But
the old lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifle ungraciously,
the girl’s superior resources.

“Have you written to your mother?”

“Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come and see her in the
morning.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” asked the grandmother.

“I don’t quite know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to say that you’ve made up your mind.”

“Yes, I’ve done that, granny.”

“You intend to respect your father’s wishes?”

“It depends upon what you mean by respecting them.  I do justice to the
feelings by which they were dictated.”

“What do you mean by justice?” the old lady retorted.

The girl was silent a moment; then she said: “You’ll see my idea of it.”

“I see it already!  You’ll go and live with her.”

“I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow and tell her that I
think that will be best.”

“Best for her, no doubt!”

“What’s best for her is best for me.”

“And for your brother and sister?”  As the girl made no reply to this her
grandmother went on: “What’s best for them is that you should acknowledge
some responsibility in regard to them and, considering how young they
are, try and do something for them.”

“They must do as I’ve done—they must act for themselves.  They have their
means now, and they’re free.”

“Free?  They’re mere children.”

“Let me remind you that Eric is older than I.”

“He doesn’t like his mother,” said the old lady, as if that were an
answer.

“I never said he did.  And she adores him.”

“Oh, your mother’s adorations!”

“Don’t abuse her now,” the girl rejoined, after a pause.

The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it the next moment
by saying: “It will be dreadful for Edith.”

“What will be dreadful?”

“Your desertion of her.”

“The desertion’s on her side.”

“Her consideration for her father does her honour.”

“Of course I’m a brute, _n’en parlons plus_,” said the girl.  “We must go
our respective ways,” she added, in a tone of extreme wisdom and
philosophy.

Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began to roll it up.
“Be so good as to ring for my maid,” she said, after a minute.  The young
lady rang, and there was another wait and another conscious hush.  Before
the maid came her mistress remarked: “Of course then you’ll not come to
_me_, you know.”

“What do you mean by ‘coming’ to you?”

“I can’t receive you on that footing.”

“She’ll not come _with_ me, if you mean that.”

“I don’t mean that,” said the old lady, getting up as her maid came in.
This attendant took her work from her, gave her an arm and helped her out
of the room, while Rose Tramore, standing before the fire and looking
into it, faced the idea that her grandmother’s door would now under all
circumstances be closed to her.  She lost no time however in brooding
over this anomaly: it only added energy to her determination to act.  All
she could do to-night was to go to bed, for she felt utterly weary.  She
had been living, in imagination, in a prospective struggle, and it had
left her as exhausted as a real fight.  Moreover this was the culmination
of a crisis, of weeks of suspense, of a long, hard strain.  Her father
had been laid in his grave five days before, and that morning his will
had been read.  In the afternoon she had got Edith off to St. Leonard’s
with their aunt Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric.
Lastly, she had made up her mind to act in opposition to the formidable
will, to a clause which embodied if not exactly a provision, a
recommendation singularly emphatic.  She went to bed and slept the sleep
of the just.

“Oh, my dear, how charming!  I must take another house!”  It was in these
words that her mother responded to the announcement Rose had just
formally made and with which she had vaguely expected to produce a
certain dignity of effect.  In the way of emotion there was apparently no
effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this was not
simply on account of the general line of non-allusion taken by the
extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like her elder sister.
Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to her daughter, the slightest
consciousness that her position was peculiar; but the recollection of
something more than that fine policy was required to explain such a
failure, to appreciate Rose’s sacrifice.  It was simply a fresh reminder
that she had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but a
tinted and stippled surface.  Her situation was peculiar indeed.  She had
been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the
eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the
contemporaneous.  That attention had been fixed on it for several days,
fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence
as to his wife’s misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles
Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public.  The case was
pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree.  The folly of the
wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted
her children, she had followed the “other fellow” abroad.  The other
fellow hadn’t married her, not having had time: he had lost his life in
the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the prohibitory term
had expired.

Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of the
austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation more
public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive.  She had not
prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had come back to
London to take her chance.  But London would give her no chance, would
have nothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you could never
tell how London would behave.  It would not receive Mrs. Tramore again on
any terms, and when she was spoken of, which now was not often, it was
inveterately said of her that she went nowhere.  Apparently she had not
the qualities for which London compounds; though in the cases in which it
does compound you may often wonder what these qualities are.  She had not
at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, her husband was liked
and her children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will
parenthetically pity.  It was thought interesting and magnanimous that
Charles Tramore had not married again.  The disadvantage to his children
of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather oddly,
was counted as _his_ sacrifice.  His mother, whose arrangements were
elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of
laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was
independent, having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively
discussed, determined to lead her own life.  She had set up a home at St.
Leonard’s, and that contracted shore had played a considerable part in
the upbringing of the little Tramores.  They knew about their mother, as
the phrase was, but they didn’t know her; which was naturally deemed more
pathetic for them than for her.  She had a house in Chester Square and an
income and a victoria—it served all purposes, as she never went out in
the evening—and flowers on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance
of youth.  The income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest
from the man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life, and
in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent implication
that it was a sort of afterglow of the same connection.

Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some
individuality of disposition.  Edith, the second girl, clung to her aunt
Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the elder
daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself.  Collectively, of course,
they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family group, however,
was casual and intermittent.  He was charming and vague; he was like a
clever actor who often didn’t come to rehearsal.  Fortune, which but for
that one stroke had been generous to him, had provided him with deputies
and trouble-takers, as well as with whimsical opinions, and a reputation
for excellent taste, and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on
morocco sofas, and a beautiful absence of purpose.  Nature had thrown in
a remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his children’s
heads when they were glossy from the nursery brush.  On Rose’s eighteenth
birthday he said to her that she might go to see her mother, on condition
that her visits should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the
year.  She was to go alone; the other children were not included in the
arrangement.  This was the result of a visit that he himself had paid his
repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only encounter during the
fifteen years.  The girl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who
was full of tell-tale secrecies.  She availed herself eagerly of the
license, and in course of the period that elapsed before her father’s
death she spent with Mrs. Tramore exactly eight hours by the watch.  Her
father, who was as inconsistent and disappointing as he was amiable,
spoke to her of her mother only once afterwards.  This occasion had been
the sequel of her first visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what
she thought of the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.  He
had only said “Did she take you out?” and when Rose answered “Yes, she
put me straight into a carriage and drove me up and down Bond Street,”
had rejoined sharply “See that that never occurs again.”  It never did,
but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to be in Bond
Street at that particular hour.

After this the periodical interview took place in private, in Mrs.
Tramore’s beautiful little wasted drawing-room.  Rose knew that, rare as
these occasions were, her mother would not have kept her “all to herself”
had there been anybody she could have shown her to.  But in the poor
lady’s social void there was no one; she had after all her own
correctness and she consistently preferred isolation to inferior
contacts.  So her daughter was subjected only to the maternal; it was not
necessary to be definite in qualifying that.  The girl had by this time a
collection of ideas, gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted,
in the ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the tree
of knowledge.  She not only had an approximate vision of what every one
had done, but she had a private judgment for each case.  She had a
particular vision of her father, which did not interfere with his being
dear to her, but which was directly concerned in her resolution, after
his death, to do the special thing he had expressed the wish she should
not do.  In the general estimate her grandmother and her grandmother’s
money had their place, and the strong probability that any enjoyment of
the latter commodity would now be withheld from her.  It included Edith’s
marked inclination to receive the law, and doubtless eventually a more
substantial memento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question whether
her own course might not contribute to make her sister’s appear
heartless.  The answer to this question however would depend on the
success that might attend her own, which would very possibly be small.
Eric’s attitude was eminently simple; he didn’t care to know people who
didn’t know _his_ people.  If his mother should ever get back into
society perhaps he would take her up.  Rose Tramore had decided to do
what she could to bring this consummation about; and strangely enough—so
mixed were her superstitions and her heresies—a large part of her motive
lay in the value she attached to such a consecration.

Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, and if her eyes
were fixed on a special achievement it was much more for the sake of that
achievement and to satisfy a latent energy that was in her than because
her heart was wrung by this sufferer.  Her heart had not been wrung at
all, though she had quite held it out for the experience.  Her purpose
was a pious game, but it was still essentially a game.  Among the ideas I
have mentioned she had her idea of triumph.  She had caught the
inevitable note, the pitch, on her very first visit to Chester Square.
She had arrived there in intense excitement, and her excitement was left
on her hands in a manner that reminded her of a difficult air she had
once heard sung at the opera when no one applauded the performer.  That
flatness had made her sick, and so did this, in another way.  A part of
her agitation proceeded from the fact that her aunt Julia had told her,
in the manner of a burst of confidence, something she was not to repeat,
that she was in appearance the very image of the lady in Chester Square.
The motive that prompted this declaration was between aunt Julia and her
conscience; but it was a great emotion to the girl to find her
entertainer so beautiful.  She was tall and exquisitely slim; she had
hair more exactly to Rose Tramore’s taste than any other she had ever
seen, even to every detail in the way it was dressed, and a complexion
and a figure of the kind that are always spoken of as “lovely.”  Her eyes
were irresistible, and so were her clothes, though the clothes were
perhaps a little more precisely the right thing than the eyes.  Her
appearance was marked to her daughter’s sense by the highest distinction;
though it may be mentioned that this had never been the opinion of all
the world.  It was a revelation to Rose that she herself might look a
little like that.  She knew however that aunt Julia had not seen her
deposed sister-in-law for a long time, and she had a general impression
that Mrs. Tramore was to-day a more complete production—for instance as
regarded her air of youth—than she had ever been.  There was no
excitement on her side—that was all her visitor’s; there was no
emotion—that was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions more
primal.  Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother’s plan.  It was
to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to explain
nor to extenuate.  She would leave everything to her child; with her
child she was secure.  She only wanted to get back into society; she
would leave even that to her child, whom she treated not as a high-strung
and heroic daughter, a creature of exaltation, of devotion, but as a new,
charming, clever, useful friend, a little younger than herself.  Already
on that first day she had talked about dressmakers.  Of course, poor
thing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances there were not
many things she _could_ talk about.  “She wants to go out again; that’s
the only thing in the wide world she wants,” Rose had promptly,
compendiously said to herself.  There had been a sequel to this
observation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own room half an
hour before she had, on the important evening, made known her decision to
her grandmother: “Then I’ll _take_ her out!”

“She’ll drag you down, she’ll drag you down!” Julia Tramore permitted
herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish
prophecy.

As the girl’s own theory was that all the dragging there might be would
be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look at her
aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.

“Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you
occupy, and I sha’n’t trouble you.”

“Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I’ve
toiled over you, the way I’ve lived for you?” Miss Tramore demanded.

“Don’t reproach _me_ for being kind to my mother and I won’t reproach you
for anything.”

“She’ll keep you out of everything—she’ll make you miss everything,” Miss
Tramore continued.

“Then she’ll make me miss a great deal that’s odious,” said the girl.

“You’re too young for such extravagances,” her aunt declared.

“And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them: how
do you arrange that?  My mother’s society will make me older,” Rose
replied.

“Don’t speak to me of your mother; you _have_ no mother.”

“Then if I’m an orphan I must settle things for myself.”

“Do you justify her, do you approve of her?” cried Miss Tramore, who was
inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose limitations made
the girl appear pert.

Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away: “I
think she’s charming.”

“And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?”

“Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model.  But I can’t
discuss my mother with you.”

“You’ll have to discuss her with some other people!” Miss Tramore
proclaimed, going out of the room.

Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular vaticination.
There was something her aunt might have meant by it, but her aunt rarely
meant the best thing she might have meant.  Miss Tramore had come up from
St. Leonard’s in response to a telegram from her own parent, for an
occasion like the present brought with it, for a few hours, a certain
relaxation of their dissent.  “Do what you can to stop her,” the old lady
had said; but her daughter found that the most she could do was not much.
They both had a baffled sense that Rose had thought the question out a
good deal further than they; and this was particularly irritating to Mrs.
Tramore, as consciously the cleverer of the two.  A question thought out
as far as _she_ could think it had always appeared to her to have
performed its human uses; she had never encountered a ghost emerging from
that extinction.  Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself
off; and certainly if she wasn’t afraid of that she wasn’t afraid of
anything.  Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl
was afraid.  She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her
the possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there during
her father’s illness.  There had been a going and coming of her maid, a
thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it appeared to old
Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness, the indecency, of
her granddaughter’s prospective connection had already gathered about the
place.  It was a violation of the decorum of bereavement which was still
fresh there, and from the indignant gloom of the mistress of the house
you might have inferred not so much that the daughter was about to depart
as that the mother was about to arrive.  There had been no conversation
on the dreadful subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore’s
(her son never came to it) there were always, even after funerals and
other miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be
cheerful and superficial.  Rose had sat down as if nothing had
happened—nothing worse, that is, than her father’s death; but no one had
spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.

Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from her
grandmother—the old lady desired to see her in the drawing-room.  She had
on her bonnet, and she went down as if she were about to step into her
cab.  Mrs. Tramore sat there with her eternal knitting, from which she
forebore even to raise her eyes as, after a silence that seemed to
express the fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood motionless, she
began: “I wonder if you really understand what you’re doing.”

“I think so.  I’m not so stupid.”

“I never thought you were; but I don’t know what to make of you now.
You’re giving up everything.”

The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called herself
“everything”; but she checked this question, answering instead that she
knew she was giving up much.

“You’re taking a step of which you will feel the effect to the end of
your days,” Mrs. Tramore went on.

“In a good conscience, I heartily hope,” said Rose.

“Your father’s conscience was good enough for his mother; it ought to be
good enough for his daughter.”

Rose sat down—she could afford to—as if she wished to be very attentive
and were still accessible to argument.  But this demonstration only
ushered in, after a moment, the surprising words “I don’t think papa had
any conscience.”

“What in the name of all that’s unnatural do you mean?” Mrs. Tramore
cried, over her glasses.  “The dearest and best creature that ever
lived!”

“He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was delightful.  But he never
reflected.”

Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a farrago,
a _galimatias_.  Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to
deal, intellectually, with a fine shade.  Then while her needles, which
had paused an instant, began to fly again, she rejoined: “Do you know
what you are, my dear?  You’re a dreadful little prig.  Where do you pick
up such talk?”

“Of course I don’t mean to judge between them,” Rose pursued.  “I can
only judge between my mother and myself.  Papa couldn’t judge for me.”
And with this she got up.

“One would think you were horrid.  I never thought so before.”

“Thank you for that.”

“You’re embarking on a struggle with society,” continued Mrs. Tramore,
indulging in an unusual flight of oratory.  “Society will put you in your
place.”

“Hasn’t it too many other things to do?” asked the girl.

This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to meet it with
a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy answer.  “Your ignorance would
be melancholy if your behaviour were not so insane.”

“Oh, no; I know perfectly what she’ll do!” Rose replied, almost gaily.
“She’ll drag me down.”

“She won’t even do that,” the old lady declared contradictiously.
“She’ll keep you forever in the same dull hole.”

“I shall come and see _you_, granny, when I want something more lively.”

“You may come if you like, but you’ll come no further than the door.  If
you leave this house now you don’t enter it again.”

Rose hesitated a moment.  “Do you really mean that?”

“You may judge whether I choose such a time to joke.”

“Good-bye, then,” said the girl.

“Good-bye.”

Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other side of the
door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and buried her face in her
hands.  She had burst into tears, and she sobbed there for a moment,
trying hard to recover herself, so as to go downstairs without showing
any traces of emotion, passing before the servants and again perhaps
before aunt Julia.  Mrs. Tramore was too old to cry; she could only drop
her knitting and, for a long time, sit with her head bowed and her eyes
closed.

Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no footmen, but
this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the stairs.  She offered
no challenge however; she only said: “There’s some one in the parlour who
wants to see you.”  The girl demanded a name, but Miss Tramore only
mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved.  Rose instantly reflected that
there was only one man in the world her aunt would look such deep things
about.  “Captain Jay?” her own eyes asked, while Miss Tramore’s were
those of a conspirator: they were, for a moment, the only embarrassed
eyes Rose had encountered that day.  They contributed to make aunt
Julia’s further response evasive, after her niece inquired if she had
communicated in advance with this visitor.  Miss Tramore merely said that
he had been upstairs with her mother—hadn’t she mentioned it?—and had
been waiting for her.  She thought herself acute in not putting the
question of the girl’s seeing him before her as a favour to him or to
herself; she presented it as a duty, and wound up with the proposition:
“It’s not fair to him, it’s not kind, not to let him speak to you before
you go.”

“What does he want to say?” Rose demanded.

“Go in and find out.”

She really knew, for she had found out before; but after standing
uncertain an instant she went in.  “The parlour” was the name that had
always been borne by a spacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment
occupied by her father during his frequent phases of residence in Hill
Street—episodes increasingly frequent after his house in the country had,
in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of his spending too much money,
been disposed of at a sacrifice which he always characterised as horrid.
He had been left with the place in Hertfordshire and his mother with the
London house, on the general understanding that they would change about;
but during the last years the community had grown more rigid, mainly at
his mother’s expense.  The parlour was full of his memory and his habits
and his things—his books and pictures and _bibelots_, objects that
belonged now to Eric.  Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it
was the place in which she could still be nearest to him.  But she felt
far from him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door.  This was
a very different presence.  He had not liked Captain Jay.  She herself
had, but not enough to make a great complication of her father’s
coldness.  This afternoon however she foresaw complications.  At the very
outset for instance she was not pleased with his having arranged such a
surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt.  It was probably aunt
Julia who had sent for him; her grandmother wouldn’t have done it.  It
placed him immediately on their side, and Rose was almost as disappointed
at this as if she had not known it was quite where he would naturally be.
He had never paid her a special visit, but if that was what he wished to
do why shouldn’t he have waited till she should be under her mother’s
roof?  She knew the reason, but she had an angry prospect of enjoyment in
making him express it.  She liked him enough, after all, if it were
measured by the idea of what she could make him do.

In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you would have
gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on finding the
complements of some of his qualities.  He would not however have struck
you in the least as incomplete, for in every case in which you didn’t
find the complement you would have found the contradiction.  He was in
the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high-shouldered.  He looked
every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered that he had
missed his vocation in not becoming a parson.  He took a public interest
in the spiritual life of the army.  Other persons still, on closer
observation, would have felt that his most appropriate field was neither
the army nor the church, but simply the world—the social, successful,
worldly world.  If he had a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other he
had a Court Guide concealed somewhere about his person.  His profile was
hard and handsome, his eyes were both cold and kind, his dark straight
hair was imperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked with grey.  There
was nothing in existence that he didn’t take seriously.  He had a
first-rate power of work and an ambition as minutely organised as a
German plan of invasion.  His only real recreation was to go to church,
but he went to parties when he had time.  If he was in love with Rose
Tramore this was distracting to him only in the same sense as his
religion, and it was included in that department of his extremely
sub-divided life.  His religion indeed was of an encroaching, annexing
sort.  Seen from in front he looked diffident and blank, but he was
capable of exposing himself in a way (to speak only of the paths of
peace) wholly inconsistent with shyness.  He had a passion for instance
for open-air speaking, but was not thought on the whole to excel in it
unless he could help himself out with a hymn.  In conversation he kept
his eyes on you with a kind of colourless candour, as if he had not
understood what you were saying and, in a fashion that made many people
turn red, waited before answering.  This was only because he was
considering their remarks in more relations than they had intended.  He
had in his face no expression whatever save the one just mentioned, and
was, in his profession, already very distinguished.

He had seen Rose Tramore for the first time on a Sunday of the previous
March, at a house in the country at which she was staying with her
father, and five weeks later he had made her, by letter, an offer of
marriage.  She showed her father the letter of course, and he told her
that it would give him great pleasure that she should send Captain Jay
about his business.  “My dear child,” he said, “we must really have some
one who will be better fun than that.”  Rose had declined the honour,
very considerately and kindly, but not simply because her father wished
it.  She didn’t herself wish to detach this flower from the stem, though
when the young man wrote again, to express the hope that he _might_
hope—so long was he willing to wait—and ask if he might not still
sometimes see her, she answered even more indulgently than at first.  She
had shown her father her former letter, but she didn’t show him this one;
she only told him what it contained, submitting to him also that of her
correspondent.  Captain Jay moreover wrote to Mr. Tramore, who replied
sociably, but so vaguely that he almost neglected the subject under
discussion—a communication that made poor Bertram ponder long.  He could
never get to the bottom of the superficial, and all the proprieties and
conventions of life were profound to him.  Fortunately for him old Mrs.
Tramore liked him, he was satisfactory to her long-sightedness; so that a
relation was established under cover of which he still occasionally
presented himself in Hill Street—presented himself nominally to the
mistress of the house.  He had had scruples about the veracity of his
visits, but he had disposed of them; he had scruples about so many things
that he had had to invent a general way, to dig a central drain.  Julia
Tramore happened to meet him when she came up to town, and she took a
view of him more benevolent than her usual estimate of people encouraged
by her mother.  The fear of agreeing with that lady was a motive, but
there was a stronger one, in this particular case, in the fear of
agreeing with her niece, who had rejected him.  His situation might be
held to have improved when Mr. Tramore was taken so gravely ill that with
regard to his recovery those about him left their eyes to speak for their
lips; and in the light of the poor gentleman’s recent death it was
doubtless better than it had ever been.

He was only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gave him time to
take the measure of it.  After he had spoken to her about her
bereavement, very much as an especially mild missionary might have spoken
to a beautiful Polynesian, he let her know that he had learned from her
companions the very strong step she was about to take.  This led to their
spending together ten minutes which, to her mind, threw more light on his
character than anything that had ever passed between them.  She had
always felt with him as if she were standing on an edge, looking down
into something decidedly deep.  To-day the impression of the
perpendicular shaft was there, but it was rather an abyss of confusion
and disorder than the large bright space in which she had figured
everything as ranged and pigeon-holed, presenting the appearance of the
labelled shelves and drawers at a chemist’s.  He discussed without an
invitation to discuss, he appealed without a right to appeal.  He was
nothing but a suitor tolerated after dismissal, but he took strangely for
granted a participation in her affairs.  He assumed all sorts of things
that made her draw back.  He implied that there was everything now to
assist them in arriving at an agreement, since she had never informed him
that he was positively objectionable; but that this symmetry would be
spoiled if she should not be willing to take a little longer to think of
certain consequences.  She was greatly disconcerted when she saw what
consequences he meant and at his reminding her of them.  What on earth
was the use of a lover if he was to speak only like one’s grandmother and
one’s aunt?  He struck her as much in love with her and as particularly
careful at the same time as to what he might say.  He never mentioned her
mother; he only alluded, indirectly but earnestly, to the “step.”  He
disapproved of it altogether, took an unexpectedly prudent, politic view
of it.  He evidently also believed that she would be dragged down; in
other words that she would not be asked out.  It was his idea that her
mother would contaminate her, so that he should find himself interested
in a young person discredited and virtually unmarriageable.  All this was
more obvious to him than the consideration that a daughter should be
merciful.  Where was his religion if he understood mercy so little, and
where were his talent and his courage if he were so miserably afraid of
trumpery social penalties?  Rose’s heart sank when she reflected that a
man supposed to be first-rate hadn’t guessed that rather than not do what
she could for her mother she would give up all the Engineers in the
world.  She became aware that she probably would have been moved to place
her hand in his on the spot if he had come to her saying “Your idea is
the right one; put it through at every cost.”  She couldn’t discuss this
with him, though he impressed her as having too much at stake for her to
treat him with mere disdain.  She sickened at the revelation that a
gentleman could see so much in mere vulgarities of opinion, and though
she uttered as few words as possible, conversing only in sad smiles and
headshakes and in intercepted movements toward the door, she happened, in
some unguarded lapse from her reticence, to use the expression that she
was disappointed in him.  He caught at it and, seeming to drop his
field-glass, pressed upon her with nearer, tenderer eyes.

“Can I be so happy as to believe, then, that you had thought of me with
some confidence, with some faith?”

“If you didn’t suppose so, what is the sense of this visit?” Rose asked.

“One can be faithful without reciprocity,” said the young man.  “I regard
you in a light which makes me want to protect you even if I have nothing
to gain by it.”

“Yet you speak as if you thought you might keep me for yourself.”

“For _yourself_.  I don’t want you to suffer.”

“Nor to suffer yourself by my doing so,” said Rose, looking down.

“Ah, if you would only marry me next month!” he broke out inconsequently.

“And give up going to mamma?” Rose waited to see if he would say “What
need that matter?  Can’t your mother come to us?”  But he said nothing of
the sort; he only answered—

“She surely would be sorry to interfere with the exercise of any other
affection which I might have the bliss of believing that you are now
free, in however small a degree, to entertain.”

Rose knew that her mother wouldn’t be sorry at all; but she contented
herself with rejoining, her hand on the door: “Good-bye.  I sha’n’t
suffer.  I’m not afraid.”

“You don’t know how terrible, how cruel, the world can be.”

“Yes, I do know.  I know everything!”

The declaration sprang from her lips in a tone which made him look at her
as he had never looked before, as if he saw something new in her face, as
if he had never yet known her.  He hadn’t displeased her so much but that
she would like to give him that impression, and since she felt that she
was doing so she lingered an instant for the purpose.  It enabled her to
see, further, that he turned red; then to become aware that a carriage
had stopped at the door.  Captain Jay’s eyes, from where he stood, fell
upon this arrival, and the nature of their glance made Rose step forward
to look.  Her mother sat there, brilliant, conspicuous, in the eternal
victoria, and the footman was already sounding the knocker.  It had been
no part of the arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it had been
out of the question—a stroke in such bad taste as would have put Rose in
the wrong.  The girl had never dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly,
perversely, she was glad of it now; she even hoped that her grandmother
and her aunt were looking out upstairs.

“My mother has come for me.  Good-bye,” she repeated; but this time her
visitor had got between her and the door.

“Listen to me before you go.  I will give you a life’s devotion,” the
young man pleaded.  He really barred the way.

She wondered whether her grandmother had told him that if her flight were
not prevented she would forfeit money.  Then, vividly, it came over her
that this would be what he was occupied with.  “I shall never think of
you—let me go!” she cried, with passion.

Captain Jay opened the door, but Rose didn’t see his face, and in a
moment she was out of the house.  Aunt Julia, who was sure to have been
hovering, had taken flight before the profanity of the knock.

“Heavens, dear, where did you get your mourning?” the lady in the
victoria asked of her daughter as they drove away.



II.


LADY MARESFIELD had given her boy a push in his plump back and had said
to him, “Go and speak to her now; it’s your chance.”  She had for a long
time wanted this scion to make himself audible to Rose Tramore, but the
opportunity was not easy to come by.  The case was complicated.  Lady
Maresfield had four daughters, of whom only one was married.  It so
happened moreover that this one, Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, the only person in
the world her mother was afraid of, was the most to be reckoned with.
The Honourable Guy was in appearance all his mother’s child, though he
was really a simpler soul.  He was large and pink; large, that is, as to
everything but the eyes, which were diminishing points, and pink as to
everything but the hair, which was comparable, faintly, to the hue of the
richer rose.  He had also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth,
which made his smile look like a young lady’s.  He had no wish to
resemble any such person, but he was perpetually smiling, and he smiled
more than ever as he approached Rose Tramore, who, looking altogether, to
his mind, as a pretty girl should, and wearing a soft white opera-cloak
over a softer black dress, leaned alone against the wall of the vestibule
at Covent Garden while, a few paces off, an old gentleman engaged her
mother in conversation.  Madame Patti had been singing, and they were all
waiting for their carriages.  To their ears at present came a
vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels.  The air, through banging
doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavy with the stale, slightly sweet
taste of the London season when the London season is overripe and
spoiling.

Guy Mangler had only three minutes to reëstablish an interrupted
acquaintance with our young lady.  He reminded her that he had danced
with her the year before, and he mentioned that he knew her brother.  His
mother had lately been to see old Mrs. Tramore, but this he did not
mention, not being aware of it.  That visit had produced, on Lady
Maresfield’s part, a private crisis, engendered ideas.  One of them was
that the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven the wilful girl
much more than she admitted.  Another was that there would still be some
money for Rose when the others should come into theirs.  Still another
was that the others would come into theirs at no distant date; the old
lady was so visibly going to pieces.  There were several more besides, as
for instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her
father.  The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was part of the
proof of Mrs. Tramore’s decrepitude.  Then there was an equal amount that
her mother had to dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely
count, though of course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a
person of gross insensibility, evidently wouldn’t die of
cold-shouldering.  Equally definite, to do it justice, was the conception
that Rose was in truth remarkably good looking, and that what she had
undertaken to do showed, and would show even should it fail, cleverness
of the right sort.  Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality
that Lady Maresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to whom
she should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies she flung
the veil of a maternal theory that _his_ cleverness was of a sort that
was wrong.  Those who knew him less well were content to wish that he
might not conceal it for such a scruple.  This enumeration of his
mother’s views does not exhaust the list, and it was in obedience to one
too profound to be uttered even by the historian that, after a very brief
delay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby.  Her daughter Bessie
was the only one with her; Maggie was dining with the Vaughan-Veseys, and
Fanny was not of an age.  Mrs. Tramore the younger showed only an
admirable back—her face was to her old gentleman—and Bessie had drifted
to some other people; so that it was comparatively easy for Lady
Maresfield to say to Rose, in a moment: “My dear child, are you never
coming to see us?”

“We shall be delighted to come if you’ll ask us,” Rose smiled.

Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and she was a
woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert.  “I’m sure Guy is longing
for another dance with you,” she rejoined, with the most unblinking
irrelevance.

“I’m afraid we’re not dancing again quite yet,” said Rose, glancing at
her mother’s exposed shoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in
crape.

Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almost wistful.
“Not even at my sister’s ball?  She’s to have something next week.
She’ll write to you.”

Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turned three or four
things over in her mind.  She remembered that the sister of her
interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs. Bray, a bankeress or a
breweress or a builderess, who had so big a house that she couldn’t fill
it unless she opened her doors, or her mouth, very wide.  Rose had learnt
more about London society during these lonely months with her mother than
she had ever picked up in Hill Street.  The younger Mrs. Tramore was a
mine of _commérages_, and she had no need to go out to bring home the
latest intelligence.  At any rate Mrs. Bray might serve as the end of a
wedge.  “Oh, I dare say we might think of that,” Rose said.  “It would be
very kind of your sister.”

“Guy’ll think of it, won’t you, Guy?” asked Lady Maresfield.

“Rather!” Guy responded, with an intonation as fine as if he had learnt
it at a music hall; while at the same moment the name of his mother’s
carriage was bawled through the place.  Mrs. Tramore had parted with her
old gentleman; she turned again to her daughter.  Nothing occurred but
what always occurred, which was exactly this absence of everything—a
universal lapse.  She didn’t exist, even for a second, to any recognising
eye.  The people who looked at her—of course there were plenty of
those—were only the people who didn’t exist for hers.  Lady Maresfield
surged away on her son’s arm.

It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day, inclosing a
card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing the hope that Rose would
come and dine and let her ladyship take her.  She should have only one of
her own girls; Gwendolen Vesey was to take the other.  Rose handed both
the note and the card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only
the name of Miss Tramore.  “You had much better go, dear,” her mother
said; in answer to which Miss Tramore slowly tore up the documents,
looking with clear, meditative eyes out of the window.  Her mother always
said “You had better go”—there had been other incidents—and Rose had
never even once taken account of the observation.  She would make no
first advances, only plenty of second ones, and, condoning no
discrimination, would treat no omission as venial.  She would keep all
concessions till afterwards; then she would make them one by one.
Fighting society was quite as hard as her grandmother had said it would
be; but there was a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate—the
dreariness of such a winter as she had just passed.  Her companion had
cried at the end of it, and she had cried all through; only her tears had
been private, while her mother’s had fallen once for all, at luncheon on
the bleak Easter Monday—produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly
square brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of
town and having tremendous fun.  Rose felt that it was useless to attempt
to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude; for if
people didn’t go to parties (at least a few didn’t) for six months after
their father died, this was the very time other people took for coming to
see them.  It was not too much to say that during this first winter of
Rose’s period with her mother she had no communication whatever with the
world.  It had the effect of making her take to reading the new American
books: she wanted to see how girls got on by themselves.  She had never
read so much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in it when
topics failed with her mother.  They often failed after the first days,
and then, while she bent over instructive volumes, this lady, dressed as
if for an impending function, sat on the sofa and watched her.  Rose was
not embarrassed by such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a
little before, her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in
queer researches to look at.  She was moreover used to her mother’s
attitude by this time.  She had her own description of it: it was the
attitude of waiting for the carriage.  If they didn’t go out it was not
that Mrs. Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmed
prevision of their some day always arriving first.  Mrs. Tramore’s
conversation at such moments was abrupt, inconsequent and personal.  She
sat on the edge of sofas and chairs and glanced occasionally at the fit
of her gloves (she was perpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was
melancholy to see wasted), as people do who are expecting guests to
dinner.  Rose used almost to fancy herself at times a perfunctory husband
on the other side of the fire.

What she was not yet used to—there was still a charm in it—was her
mother’s extraordinary tact.  During the years they lived together they
never had a discussion; a circumstance all the more remarkable since if
the girl had a reason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for
her) Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child.  She only showed in
doing so a happy instinct—the happiest thing about her.  She took in
perfection a course which represented everything and covered everything;
she utterly abjured all authority.  She testified to her abjuration in
hourly ingenious, touching ways.  In this manner nothing had to be talked
over, which was a mercy all round.  The tears on Easter Monday were
merely a nervous gust, to help show she was not a Christmas doll from the
Burlington Arcade; and there was no lifting up of the repentant Magdalen,
no uttered remorse for the former abandonment of children.  Of the way
she could treat her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it
was an uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.  She
took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had noticed
these ladies without knowing their history you would have wondered what
tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful to youth.  No mother
was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and there had never been such a
difference of position between sisters.  Not that the elder one fawned,
which would have been fearful; she only renounced—whatever she had to
renounce.  If the amount was not much she at any rate made no scene over
it.  Her hand was so light that Rose said of her secretly, in vague
glances at the past, “No wonder people liked her!”  She never
characterised the old element of interference with her mother’s
respectability more definitely than as “people.”  They were people, it
was true, for whom gentleness must have been everything and who didn’t
demand a variety of interests.  The desire to “go out” was the one
passion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealed to Rose
Tramore.  She marvelled at its strength, in the light of the poor lady’s
history: there was comedy enough in this unquenchable flame on the part
of a woman who had known such misery.  She had drunk deep of every
dishonour, but the bitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted
candles, for squeezing up staircases and hooking herself to the human
elbow.  Rose had a vision of the future years in which this taste would
grow with restored exercise—of her mother, in a long-tailed dress,
jogging on and on and on, jogging further and further from her sins,
through a century of the “Morning Post” and down the fashionable avenue
of time.  She herself would then be very old—she herself would be dead.
Mrs. Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of
sin was small.  The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her
being dragged down.  If one thing were more present to her than another
it was the very desolation of their propriety.  As she glanced at her
companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a bad woman
she would have been worse than that.  There were compensations for being
“cut” which Mrs. Tramore too much neglected.

The lonely old lady in Hill Street—Rose thought of her that way now—was
the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come to her on
any terms.  She wrote this to her three times over, and she knocked still
oftener at her door.  But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose had
remained in Hill Street it would have been her own function to answer
them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had known for ten years,
considered her, when he told her his mistress was not at home, quite as
he might have considered a young person who had come about a place and of
whose eligibility he took a negative view.  That was Rose’s one pang,
that she probably appeared rather heartless.  Her aunt Julia had gone to
Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make her appear more
so; for Miss Tramore was still the person most scandalised by her
secession.  Edith and she, doubtless, often talked over in Florence the
destitution of the aged victim in Hill Street.  Eric never came to see
his sister, because, being full both of family and of personal feeling,
he thought she really ought to have stayed with his grandmother.  If she
had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done what she
liked with it; but he couldn’t forgive such a want of consideration for
anything of his.  There were moments when Rose would have been ready to
take her hand from the plough and insist upon reintegration, if only the
fierce voice of the old house had allowed people to look her up.  But she
read, ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question of
loyalty to seventy years of virtue.  Mrs. Tramore’s forlornness didn’t
prevent her drawing-room from being a very public place, in which Rose
could hear certain words reverberate: “Leave her alone; it’s the only way
to see how long she’ll hold out.”  The old woman’s visitors were people
who didn’t wish to quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had
not let her alone—that is if they had come to her from her
grandmother—she might perhaps not have held out.  She had no friends
quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it would
not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her father and
his mother divided between them.  Her father disapproved of crude
intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude.  He had married
at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.  Rose felt that she
shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she had seen what _he_ was
worth.  Moreover, she had spoken to him at that last moment in Hill
Street in a way which, taken with her former refusal, made it impossible
that he should come near her again.  She hoped he went to see his
protectress: he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.

It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady Maresfield’s
invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a visit from a certain
Mrs. Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in Hill Street.  She vaguely
knew this lady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which even
busybodies might alleviate.  Mrs. Donovan was poor, but honest—so
scrupulously honest that she was perpetually returning visits she had
never received.  She was always clad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had
an odd air of being prepared for the worst, which was borne out by her
denying that she was Irish.  She was of the English Donovans.

“Dear child, won’t you go out with me?” she asked.

Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell.  She spoke of
something else, without answering the question, and when the servant came
she said: “Please tell Mrs. Tramore that Mrs. Donovan has come to see
her.”

“Oh, that’ll be delightful; only you mustn’t tell your grandmother!” the
visitor exclaimed.

“Tell her what?”

“That I come to see your mamma.”

“You don’t,” said Rose.

“Sure I hoped you’d introduce me!” cried Mrs. Donovan, compromising
herself in her embarrassment.

“It’s not necessary; you knew her once.”

“Indeed and I’ve known every one once,” the visitor confessed.

Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly right; she
greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the week before last, giving
her daughter such a new illustration of her tact that Rose again had the
idea that it was no wonder “people” had liked her.  The girl grudged Mrs.
Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home,
rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep the story
out of Hill Street.  Her mother went away before Mrs. Donovan departed,
and Rose was touched by guessing her reason—the thought that since even
this circuitous personage had been moved to come, the two might, if left
together, invent some remedy.  Rose waited to see what Mrs. Donovan had
in fact invented.

“You won’t come out with me then?”

“Come out with you?”

“My daughters are married.  You know I’m a lone woman.  It would be an
immense pleasure to me to have so charming a creature as yourself to
present to the world.”

“I go out with my mother,” said Rose, after a moment.

“Yes, but sometimes when she’s not inclined?”

“She goes everywhere she wants to go,” Rose continued, uttering the
biggest fib of her life and only regretting it should be wasted on Mrs.
Donovan.

“Ah, but do you go everywhere _you_ want?” the lady asked sociably.

“One goes even to places one hates.  Every one does that.”

“Oh, what I go through!” this social martyr cried.  Then she laid a
persuasive hand on the girl’s arm.  “Let me show you at a few places
first, and then we’ll see.  I’ll bring them all here.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” replied Rose, though in Mrs. Donovan’s
words she perfectly saw her own theory of the case reflected.  For a
quarter of a minute she asked herself whether she might not, after all,
do so much evil that good might come.  Mrs. Donovan would take her out
the next day, and be thankful enough to annex such an attraction as a
pretty girl.  Various consequences would ensue and the long delay would
be shortened; her mother’s drawing-room would resound with the clatter of
teacups.

“Mrs. Bray’s having some big thing next week; come with me there and I’ll
show you what I mane,” Mrs. Donovan pleaded.

“I see what you mane,” Rose answered, brushing away her temptation and
getting up.  “I’m much obliged to you.”

“You know you’re wrong, my dear,” said her interlocutress, with angry
little eyes.

“I’m not going to Mrs. Bray’s.”

“I’ll get you a kyard; it’ll only cost me a penny stamp.”

“I’ve got one,” said the girl, smiling.

“Do you mean a penny stamp?”  Mrs. Donovan, especially at departure,
always observed all the forms of amity.  “You can’t do it alone, my
darling,” she declared.

“Shall they call you a cab?” Rose asked.

“I’ll pick one up.  I choose my horse.  You know you require your start,”
her visitor went on.

“Excuse my mother,” was Rose’s only reply.

“Don’t mention it.  Come to me when you need me.  You’ll find me in the
Red Book.”

“It’s awfully kind of you.”

Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.  “Who will you _have_
now, my child?” she appealed.

“I won’t have any one!”  Rose turned away, blushing for her.  “She came
on speculation,” she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.

Her mother looked at her a moment in silence.  “You can do it if you
like, you know.”

Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked instead:
“See what our quiet life allows us to escape.”

“We don’t escape it.  She has been here an hour.”

“Once in twenty years!  We might meet her three times a day.”

“Oh, I’d take her with the rest!” sighed Mrs. Tramore; while her daughter
recognised that what her companion wanted to do was just what Mrs.
Donovan was doing.  Mrs. Donovan’s life was her ideal.

On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old governesses,
of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had written to her that
she was in London, unoccupied and ill.  This was just the sort of
relation into which she could throw herself now with inordinate zeal; the
idea of it, however, not preventing a foretaste of the queer expression
in the excellent lady’s face when she should mention with whom she was
living.  While she smiled at this picture she threw in another joke,
asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in any degree to constitute the
nucleus of a circle.  She would come to see her, in any event—come the
more the further she was dragged down.  Sunday was always a difficult day
with the two ladies—the afternoons made it so apparent that they were not
frequented.  Her mother, it is true, was comprised in the habits of two
or three old gentlemen—she had for a long time avoided male friends of
less than seventy—who disliked each other enough to make the room, when
they were there at once, crack with pressure.  Rose sat for a long time
with Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that there
could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when she came back
her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a long visit from Mr.
Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for her return.  “He’s in love
with you; he’s coming again on Tuesday,” Mrs. Tramore announced.

“Did he say so?”

“That he’s coming back on Tuesday?”

“No, that he’s in love with me.”

“He didn’t need, when he stayed two hours.”

“With you?  It’s you he’s in love with, mamma!”

“That will do as well,” laughed Mrs. Tramore.  “For all the use we shall
make of him!” she added in a moment.

“We shall make great use of him.  His mother sent him.”

“Oh, she’ll never come!”

“Then _he_ sha’n’t,” said Rose.  Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and
after she had given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.
Rose wished she hadn’t—she herself had another view.  At any rate she
disliked her mother’s view, which she had easily guessed.  Mr. Mangler
did nothing but say how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday,
and what a tremendously jolly visit he had had.  He didn’t remark in so
many words “I had no idea your mother was such a good sort”; but this was
the spirit of his simple discourse.  Rose liked it at first—a little of
it gratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for good
taste.  She had to reflect that one does what one can and that Mr.
Mangler probably thought he was delicate.  He wished to convey that he
desired to make up to her for the injustice of society.  Why shouldn’t
her mother receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever
said she didn’t?  Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about the
disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore’s not having come to
dine with them the night of his aunt’s ball.

“Lady Maresfield knows why I didn’t come,” Rose answered at last.

“Ah, now, but _I_ don’t, you know; can’t you tell _me_?” asked the young
man.

“It doesn’t matter, if your mother’s clear about it.”

“Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when I’m dying to know?”

He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of his visit:
he had at last found a topic after his own heart.  If her mother
considered that he might be the emblem of their redemption he was an
engine of the most primitive construction.  He stayed and stayed; he
struck Rose as on the point of bringing out something for which he had
not quite, as he would have said, the cheek.  Sometimes she thought he
was going to begin: “By the way, my mother told me to propose to you.”
At other moments he seemed charged with the admission: “I say, of course
I really know what you’re trying to do for her,” nodding at the door:
“therefore hadn’t we better speak of it frankly, so that I can help you
with my mother, and more particularly with my sister Gwendolen, who’s the
difficult one?  The fact is, you see, they won’t do anything for nothing.
If you’ll accept me they’ll call, but they won’t call without something
‘down.’”  Mr. Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose
Tramore had a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively,
the project of “accepting” the limpid youth until after she should have
got her mother into circulation.  The cream of the vision was that she
might break with him later.  She could read that this was what her mother
would have liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him,
and the next and the next.

In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the sense on
Rose’s part that the battle was still all to fight; for a round of
country visits was not in prospect, and English watering-places
constituted one of the few subjects on which the girl had heard her
mother express herself with disgust.  Continental autumns had been indeed
for years, one of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore’s atonement, but Rose
could only infer that such fruit as they had borne was bitter.  The stony
stare of Belgravia could be practised at Homburg; and somehow it was
inveterately only gentlemen who sat next to her at the _table d’hôte_ at
Cadenabbia.  Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs. Tramore for
getting back into society; they had only helped her effectually to get
out of it.  She once dropped, to her daughter, in a moralising mood, the
remark that it was astonishing how many of them one could know without
its doing one any good.  Fifty of them—even very clever ones—represented
a value inferior to that of one stupid woman.  Rose wondered at the
offhand way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed
to her that the whole world couldn’t contain such a number.  She had a
sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean.  These cogitations took
place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a flat echo
in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went vaguely down to the
Italian lakes and cities.  Rose guided their course, at moments, with a
kind of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating
their life, though destitute of any definite vision of another life that
would have been open to her.  She had set herself a task and she clung to
it; but she appeared to herself despicably idle.  She had succeeded in
not going to Homburg waters, where London was trying to wash away some of
its stains; that would be too staring an advertisement of their
situation.  The main difference in situations to her now was the
difference of being more or less pitied, at the best an intolerable
danger; so that the places she preferred were the unsuspicious ones.  She
wanted to triumph with contempt, not with submission.

One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the marble church
at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had just passed her on his
way into the cathedral and whose face she had not noticed, had quickly
raised his hat, with a suppressed ejaculation.  She involuntarily glanced
back; the gentleman had paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood
saluting her in the Italian sunshine.  “Oh, good-morning!” she said, and
walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was a little in front.  She
overtook her in a moment, with an unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold
air, that men were worse than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved
into the church.  Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she
looked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this lady’s
eyes.  It made Rose’s take the same direction and rest a second time on
Captain Jay, who was planted just where he had stood a minute before.  He
immediately came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might
speak to her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again.  He had the
expression of a man who wished to say something very important; yet his
next words were simple enough and consisted of the remark that he had not
seen her for a year.

“Is it really so much as that?” asked Rose.

“Very nearly.  I would have looked you up, but in the first place I have
been very little in London, and in the second I believed it wouldn’t have
done any good.”

“You should have put that first,” said the girl.  “It wouldn’t have done
any good.”

He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering way; but
the view he took of it did not prevent him from inquiring, as she slowly
followed her mother, if he mightn’t walk with her now.  She answered with
a laugh that it wouldn’t do any good but that he might do as he liked.
He replied without the slightest manifestation of levity that it would do
more good than if he didn’t, and they strolled together, with Mrs.
Tramore well before them, across the big, amusing piazza, where the front
of the cathedral makes a sort of builded light.  He asked a question or
two and he explained his own presence: having a month’s holiday, the
first clear time for several years, he had just popped over the Alps.  He
inquired if Rose had recent news of the old lady in Hill Street, and it
was the only tortuous thing she had ever heard him say.

“I have had no communication of any kind from her since I parted with you
under her roof.  Hasn’t she mentioned that?” said Rose.

“I haven’t seen her.”

“I thought you were such great friends.”

Bertram Jay hesitated a moment.  “Well, not so much now.”

“What has she done to you?” Rose demanded.

He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that made him
unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence, he brought out the
inquiry: “Miss Tramore, are you happy?”

She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been
reflecting—reflecting that he had broken with her grandmother and that
this pointed to a reason.  It suggested at least that he wouldn’t now be
so much like a mouthpiece for that cold ancestral tone.  She turned off
his question—said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourself away
however you answered it.  When he repeated “You give yourself away?” as
if he didn’t understand, she remembered that he had not read the funny
American books.  This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened
him only by another laugh, and he was evidently preparing another
question, which he wished carefully to disconnect from the former.
Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs. Tramore, it arrived in the
words “Is this lady your mother?”  On Rose’s assenting, with the addition
that she was travelling with her, he said: “Will you be so kind as to
introduce me to her?”  They were so close to Mrs. Tramore that she
probably heard, but she floated away with a single stroke of her paddle
and an inattentive poise of her head.  It was a striking exhibition of
the famous tact, for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might
have made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl spoke
she only said to her companion: “Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I desire the pleasure of making her acquaintance.”

Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood looking at
each other.  “Do you remember what you said to me the last time I saw
you?”

“Oh, don’t speak of that!”

“It’s better to speak of it now than to speak of it later.”

Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one would hear;
but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of safety, and he
unexpectedly exclaimed: “Miss Tramore, I love you more than ever!”

“Then you ought to have come to see us,” declared the girl, quickly
walking on.

“You treated me the last time as if I were positively offensive to you.”

“So I did, but you know my reason.”

“Because I protested against the course you were taking?  I did, I did!”
the young man rang out, as if he still, a little, stuck to that.

His tone made Rose say gaily: “Perhaps you do so yet?”

“I can’t tell till I’ve seen more of your circumstances,” he replied with
eminent honesty.

The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.  “And it’s in order to
see more of them and judge that you wish to make my mother’s
acquaintance?”

He  at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a confused
“Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a little!” which made her stop again.

“Your company will do us great honour, but there must be a rigid
condition attached to our acceptance of it.”

“Kindly mention it,” said Captain Jay, staring at the façade of the
cathedral.

“You don’t take us on trial.”

“On trial?”

“You don’t make an observation to me—not a single one, ever, ever!—on the
matter that, in Hill Street, we had our last words about.”

Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of the church.
“I think you really must be right,” he remarked at last.

“There you are!” cried Rose Tramore, and walked rapidly away.

He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay her.  “If
you’re going to Venice, let me go to Venice with you!”

“You don’t even understand my condition.”

“I’m sure you’re right, then: you must be right about everything.”

“That’s not in the least true, and I don’t care a fig whether you’re sure
or not.  Please let me go.”

He had barred her way, he kept her longer.  “I’ll go and speak to your
mother myself!”

Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air of
audacity accompanying this declaration.  Poor Captain Jay might have been
on the point of marching up to a battery.  She looked at him a moment;
then she said: “You’ll be disappointed!”

“Disappointed?”

“She’s much more proper than grandmamma, because she’s much more
amiable.”

“Dear Miss Tramore—dear Miss Tramore!” the young man murmured helplessly.

“You’ll see for yourself.  Only there’s another condition,” Rose went on.

“Another?” he cried, with discouragement and alarm.

“You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in your lot with us
even for a few days, what our position really is.”

“Is it very bad?” asked Bertram Jay artlessly.

“No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks at
us.”

“Really?” stared the young man.

“We’ve no social existence, we’re utterly despised.”

“Oh, Miss Tramore!” Captain Jay interposed.  He added quickly, vaguely,
and with a want of presence of mind of which he as quickly felt ashamed:
“Do none of your family—?”  The question collapsed; the brilliant girl
was looking at him.

“We’re extraordinarily happy,” she threw out.

“Now that’s all I wanted to know!” he exclaimed, with a kind of
exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on with her briskly to overtake her
mother.

He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that evening to
their _table d’hôte_.  He sat next Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he
accompanied them gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where
they were almost the only ladies in the boxes.  The next day they went
together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while he strolled with
the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, he said to her candidly:
“Your mother’s remarkably pretty.”  She remembered the words and the
feeling they gave her: they were the first note of new era.  The feeling
was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has “presented” her
child and is thinking of the matrimonial market.  Men might be of no use,
as Mrs. Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy
dawn of her confidence that her _protégée_ would go off; and when later,
in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something like it behind a hat or a
fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious ear, “Your mother _is_ in beauty!” or
“I’ve never seen her look better!” she had a faint vision of the yellow
sunshine and the afternoon shadows on the dusty Italian platform.

Mrs. Tramore’s behaviour at this period was a revelation of her native
understanding of delicate situations.  She needed no account of this one
from her daughter—it was one of the things for which she had a scent; and
there was a kind of loyalty to the rules of a game in the silent
sweetness with which she smoothed the path of Bertram Jay.  It was clear
that she was in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections,
and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable that she
would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, “Oh, I know all about _love_!”
Rose could see that she thought their companion would be a help, in spite
of his being no dispenser of patronage.  The key to the gates of fashion
had not been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of the ladies
of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of the Yorkshire moors; but
none the less he might administer a muscular push.  Yes indeed, men in
general were broken reeds, but Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.
Respectability was the woman’s maximum, as honour was the man’s, but this
distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of confidence.
Rose had a great deal of attention for the use to which his
respectability was put; and there mingled with this attention some
amusement and much compassion.  She saw that after a couple of days he
decidedly liked her mother, and that he was yet not in the least aware of
it.  He took for granted that he believed in her but little;
notwithstanding which he would have trusted her with anything except Rose
herself.  His trusting her with Rose would come very soon.  He never
spoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but two or three
of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had, and they made the
best show) were what he had in mind in praising her appearance.  When he
remarked: “What attention Mrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!” he
meant: “What a beautifully simple nature it is!” and when he said:
“There’s something extraordinarily harmonious in the colours she wears,”
it signified: “Upon my word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!”
She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke of it to
Captain Jay.  When Rose saw this she said to herself, “Next season we
shall have only to choose.”  Rose knew what was in the box.

By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen little
old romantic cities in the most frolicsome æsthetic way) she liked their
companion better than she had ever liked him before.  She did him the
justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with himself he was
at least wholly honest with _her_.  She reckoned up everything he had
been since he joined them, and put upon it all an interpretation so
favourable to his devotion that, catching herself in the act of glossing
over one or two episodes that had not struck her at the time as
disinterested she exclaimed, beneath her breath, “Look out—you’re falling
in love!”  But if he liked correctness wasn’t he quite right?  Could any
one possibly like it more than _she_ did?  And if he had protested
against her throwing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of
the benefit conferred but because of the injury received.  He exaggerated
that injury, but this was the privilege of a lover perfectly willing to
be selfish on behalf of his mistress.  He might have wanted her
grandmother’s money for her, but if he had given her up on first
discovering that she was throwing away her chance of it (oh, this was
_her_ doing too!) he had given up her grandmother as much: not keeping
well with the old woman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see
how the perverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it
should promise tolerably, with a view to future operations.  He had had a
simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the girl he loved would
find herself in for.  She could see this now—she could see it from his
present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied him,
with the kindest smile, for the original _naïveté_ as well as for the
actual meekness.  No wonder he hadn’t known what she was in for, since he
now didn’t even know what he was in for himself.  Were there not moments
when he thought his companions almost unnaturally good, almost
suspiciously safe?  He had lost all power to verify that sketch of their
isolation and _déclassement_ to which she had treated him on the great
square at Milan.  The last thing he noticed was that they were neglected,
and he had never, for himself, had such an impression of society.

It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a large, fair,
hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady’s fan in his hand, who
suddenly stood before their little party as, on the third evening after
their arrival in Venice, it partook of ices at one of the tables before
the celebrated Café Florian.  The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to have
revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at a
neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticated glee, to
shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter.  Rose recalled him to her
mother, who looked at first as though she didn’t remember him but
presently bestowed a sufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler.  He
gave with youthful candour the history of his movements and indicated the
whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother and sisters; they had
met the Bob Veseys, who had taken Lord Whiteroy’s yacht and were going to
Constantinople.  His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand
Hotel, but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord
Whiteroy’s cook.  Wasn’t the food in Venice filthy, and wouldn’t they
come and look at the yacht?  She wasn’t very fast, but she was awfully
jolly.  His mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn’t at
first, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who
naturally wouldn’t turn out for her.  Mr. Mangler sat down; he alluded
with artless resentment to the way, in July, the door of his friends had
been closed to him.  He was going to Constantinople, but he didn’t
care—if _they_ were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully
they would look her up.

Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message, which Rose
disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner compatible with her sitting
for half an hour, surrounded by her little retinue, without glancing in
the direction of Mrs. Tramore.  The girl, however, was aware that this
was not a good enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it was
rather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had held off from
Lady Maresfield.  She was a little ashamed now of not having answered the
note in which this affable personage ignored her mother.  She couldn’t
help perceiving indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other
members of the group; she made out an attitude of observation in the
high-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey.  Mrs. Vesey, perhaps, might have
been looking at Captain Jay, for as this gentleman walked back to the
hotel with our young lady (they were at the “Britannia,” and young
Mangler, who clung to them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed
to Rose that he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield’s eldest
daughter, though he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know, her
ladyship.  He expressed himself with more acerbity than she had ever
heard him use (Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about
the young donkey who had been prattling to them.  They separated at the
door of the hotel.  Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr. Mangler, and Bertram
Jay was in other quarters.

“If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn’t you go and speak to her?  I’m sure
she saw you,” Rose said.

Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual.  “Because I
didn’t want to leave you.”

“Well, you can go now; you’re free,” Rose rejoined.

“Thank you.  I shall never go again.”

“That won’t be civil,” said Rose.

“I don’t care to be civil.  I don’t like her.”

“Why don’t you like her?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“I know I do,” the girl acknowledged.

Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this he put out his
hand again.  “She’s too worldly,” he murmured, while he held Rose
Tramore’s a moment.

“Ah, you dear!” Rose exclaimed almost audibly as, with her mother, she
turned away.

The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of our three friends
encountered a stately barge which, though it contained several persons,
seemed pervaded mainly by one majestic presence.  During the instant the
gondolas were passing each other it was impossible either for Rose
Tramore or for her companions not to become conscious that this
distinguished identity had markedly inclined itself—a circumstance
commemorated the next moment, almost within earshot of the other boat, by
the most spontaneous cry that had issued for many a day from the lips of
Mrs. Tramore.  “Fancy, my dear, Lady Maresfield has bowed to us!”

“We ought to have returned it,” Rose answered; but she looked at Bertram
Jay, who was opposite to her.  He blushed, and she blushed, and during
this moment was born a deeper understanding than had yet existed between
these associated spirits.  It had something to do with their going
together that afternoon, without her mother, to look at certain
out-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired her with a desire
to see sincerely.  Mrs. Tramore expressed the wish to stay at home, and
the motive of this wish—a finer shade than any that even Ruskin had ever
found a phrase for—was not translated into misrepresenting words by
either the mother or the daughter.  At San Giovanni in Bragora the girl
and her companion came upon Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of her
sisters, was also endeavouring to do the earnest thing.  She did it to
Rose, she did it to Captain Jay, as well as to Gianbellini; she was a
handsome, long-necked, aquiline person, of a different type from the rest
of her family, and she did it remarkably well.  She secured our
friends—it was her own expression—for luncheon, on the morrow, on the
yacht, and she made it public to Rose that she would come that afternoon
to invite her mother.  When the girl returned to the hotel, Mrs. Tramore
mentioned, before Captain Jay, who had come up to their sitting-room,
that Lady Maresfield had called.  “She stayed a long time—at least it
seemed long!” laughed Mrs. Tramore.

The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was some grimness in a
colloquy that she had with her daughter after Bertram Jay had departed.
Before this happened Mrs. Vesey’s card, scrawled over in pencil and
referring to the morrow’s luncheon, was brought up to Mrs. Tramore.

“They mean it all as a bribe,” said the principal recipient of these
civilities.

“As a bribe?” Rose repeated.

“She wants to marry you to that boy; they’ve seen Captain Jay and they’re
frightened.”

“Well, dear mamma, I can’t take Mr. Mangler for a husband.”

“Of course not.  But oughtn’t we to go to the luncheon?”

“Certainly we’ll go to the luncheon,” Rose said; and when the affair took
place, on the morrow, she could feel for the first time that she was
taking her mother out.  This appearance was somehow brought home to every
one else, and it was really the agent of her success.  For it is of the
essence of this simple history that, in the first place, that success
dated from Mrs. Vesey’s Venetian _déjeuner_, and in the second reposed,
by a subtle social logic, on the very anomaly that had made it dubious.
There is always a chance in things, and Rose Tramore’s chance was in the
fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some one had said, awfully modern, an
immense improvement on the exploded science of her mother, and capable of
seeing what a “draw” there would be in the comedy, if properly brought
out, of the reversed positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs. Tramore’s
diplomatic daughter.  With a first-rate managerial eye she perceived that
people would flock into any room—and all the more into one of hers—to see
Rose bring in her dreadful mother.  She treated the cream of English
society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn, when she once
more “secured” both the performers for a week at Brimble.  It made a hit
on the spot, the very first evening—the girl was felt to play her part so
well.  The rumour of the performance spread; every one wanted to see it.
It was an entertainment of which, that winter in the country, and the
next season in town, persons of taste desired to give their friends the
freshness.  The thing was to make the Tramores come late, after every one
had arrived.  They were engaged for a fixed hour, like the American
imitator and the Patagonian contralto.  Mrs. Vesey had been the first to
say the girl was awfully original, but that became the general view.

Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels in which Lady
Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist (the elder woman had
to recognise in general in whose veins it was that the blood of the
Manglers flowed) on account of this very circumstance of her attaching
more importance to Miss Tramore’s originality (“Her originality be
hanged!” her ladyship had gone so far as unintelligently to exclaim) than
to the prospects of the unfortunate Guy.  Mrs. Vesey actually lost sight
of these pressing problems in her admiration of the way the mother and
the daughter, or rather the daughter and the mother (it was slightly
confusing) “drew.”  It was Lady Maresfield’s version of the case that the
brazen girl (she was shockingly coarse) had treated poor Guy abominably.
At any rate it was made known, just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was
to be married to Captain Jay.  The marriage was not to take place till
the summer; but Rose felt that before this the field would practically be
won.  There had been some bad moments, there had been several warm
corners and a certain number of cold shoulders and closed doors and stony
stares; but the breach was effectually made—the rest was only a question
of time.  Mrs. Tramore could be trusted to keep what she had gained, and
it was the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glittering
scales, whom the trick had already mainly caught.  By this time there
were several houses into which the liberated lady had crept alone.  Her
daughter had been expected with her, but they couldn’t turn her out
because the girl had stayed behind, and she was fast acquiring a new
identity, that of a parental connection with the heroine of such a
romantic story.  She was at least the next best thing to her daughter,
and Rose foresaw the day when she would be valued principally as a
memento of one of the prettiest episodes in the annals of London.  At a
big official party, in June, Rose had the joy of introducing Eric to his
mother.  She was a little sorry it was an official party—there were some
other such queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade, the
next day but one.

No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fix exactly the
moment at which the girl ceased to take out her mother and began to be
taken out by her.  A later phase was more distinguishable—that at which
Rose forbore to inflict on her companion a duality that might become
oppressive.  She began to economise her force, she went only when the
particular effect was required.  Her marriage was delayed by the period
of mourning consequent upon the death of her grandmother, who, the
younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed by the rumour of her own new
birth.  She was the only one of the dragons who had not been tamed.
Julia Tramore knew the truth about this—she was determined such things
should not kill _her_.  She would live to do something—she hardly knew
what.  The provisions of her mother’s will were published in the
“Illustrated News”; from which it appeared that everything that was not
to go to Eric and to Julia was to go to the fortunate Edith.  Miss
Tramore makes no secret of her own intentions as regards this favourite.

Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her; she is
determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold of her.  Mrs. Vesey however
takes no interest in her at all.  She is whimsical, as befits a woman of
her fashion; but there are two persons she is still very fond of, the
delightful Bertram Jays.  The fondness of this pair, it must be added, is
not wholly expended in return.  They are extremely united, but their life
is more domestic than might have been expected from the preliminary
signs.  It owes a portion of its concentration to the fact that Mrs.
Tramore has now so many places to go to that she has almost no time to
come to her daughter’s.  She is, under her son-in-law’s roof, a brilliant
but a rare apparition, and the other day he remarked upon the
circumstance to his wife.

“If it hadn’t been for you,” she replied, smiling, “she might have had
her regular place at our fireside.”

“Good heavens, how did I prevent it?” cried Captain Jay, with all the
consciousness of virtue.

“You ordered it otherwise, you goose!”  And she says, in the same spirit,
whenever her husband commends her (which he does, sometimes,
extravagantly) for the way she launched her mother: “Nonsense, my
dear—practically it was _you_!”




GREVILLE FANE.


COMING in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying;
can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening?  Let her off easy,
but not too easy.”  I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time
to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: “Will do what I can.”
It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the
hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached.
The difficulty was not of course in letting her off easy but in
qualifying that indulgence.  “I simply won’t qualify it,” I said to
myself.  I didn’t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her so
long that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hour to a
feast of indifference.  I must have seemed abstracted, for the early
years of my acquaintance with her came back to me.  I spoke of her to the
lady I had taken down, but the lady I had taken down had never heard of
Greville Fane.  I tried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books “too
vile.”  I had never thought them very good, but I should let her off
easier than that.

I came away early, for the express purpose of driving to ask about her.
The journey took time, for she lived in the north-west district, in the
neighbourhood of Primrose Hill.  My apprehension that I should be too
late was justified in a fuller sense than I had attached to it—I had only
feared that the house would be shut up.  There were lights in the
windows, and the temperate tinkle of my bell brought a servant
immediately to the door, but poor Mrs. Stormer had passed into a state in
which the resonance of no earthly knocker was to be feared.  A lady, in
the hall, hovering behind the servant, came forward when she heard my
voice.  I recognised Lady Luard, but she had mistaken me for the doctor.

“Excuse my appearing at such an hour,” I said; “it was the first possible
moment after I heard.”

“It’s all over,” Lady Luard replied.  “Dearest mamma!”

She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very tall,
very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if these things, and some
others beside, in her dress, her manner and even her name, were an
implication that she was very admirable.  I had never been able to follow
the argument, but that is a detail.  I expressed briefly and frankly what
I felt, while the little mottled maidservant flattened herself against
the wall of the narrow passage and tried to look detached without looking
indifferent.  It was not a moment to make a visit, and I was on the point
of retreating when Lady Luard arrested me with a queer, casual, drawling
“Would you—a—would you, perhaps, be _writing_ something?”  I felt for the
instant like an interviewer, which I was not.  But I pleaded guilty to
this intention, on which she rejoined: “I’m so very glad—but I think my
brother would like to see you.”  I detested her brother, but it wasn’t an
occasion to act this out; so I suffered myself to be inducted, to my
surprise, into a small back room which I immediately recognised as the
scene, during the later years, of Mrs. Stormer’s imperturbable industry.
Her table was there, the battered and blotted accessory to innumerable
literary lapses, with its contracted space for the arms (she wrote only
from the elbow down) and the confusion of scrappy, scribbled sheets which
had already become literary remains.  Leolin was also there, smoking a
cigarette before the fire and looking impudent even in his grief, sincere
as it well might have been.

To meet him, to greet him, I had to make a sharp effort; for the air that
he wore to me as he stood before me was quite that of his mother’s
murderer.  She lay silent for ever upstairs—as dead as an unsuccessful
book, and his swaggering erectness was a kind of symbol of his having
killed her.  I wondered if he had already, with his sister, been
calculating what they could get for the poor papers on the table; but I
had not long to wait to learn, for in reply to the scanty words of
sympathy I addressed him he puffed out: “It’s miserable, miserable, yes;
but she has left three books complete.”  His words had the oddest effect;
they converted the cramped little room into a seat of trade and made the
“book” wonderfully feasible.  He would certainly get all that could be
got for the three.  Lady Luard explained to me that her husband had been
with them but had had to go down to the House.  To her brother she
explained that I was going to write something, and to me again she made
it clear that she hoped I would “do mamma justice.”  She added that she
didn’t think this had ever been done.  She said to her brother: “Don’t
you think there are some things he ought thoroughly to understand?” and
on his instantly exclaiming “Oh, thoroughly—thoroughly!” she went on,
rather austerely: “I mean about mamma’s birth.”

“Yes, and her connections,” Leolin added.

I professed every willingness, and for five minutes I listened, but it
would be too much to say that I understood.  I don’t even now, but it is
not important.  My vision was of other matters than those they put before
me, and while they desired there should be no mistake about their
ancestors I became more and more lucid about themselves.  I got away as
soon as possible, and walked home through the great dusky, empty
London—the best of all conditions for thought.  By the time I reached my
door my little article was practically composed—ready to be transferred
on the morrow from the polished plate of fancy.  I believe it attracted
some notice, was thought “graceful” and was said to be by some one else.
I had to be pointed without being lively, and it took some tact.  But
what I said was much less interesting than what I thought—especially
during the half-hour I spent in my armchair by the fire, smoking the
cigar I always light before going to bed.  I went to sleep there, I
believe; but I continued to moralise about Greville Fane.  I am reluctant
to lose that retrospect altogether, and this is a dim little memory of
it, a document not to “serve.”  The dear woman had written a hundred
stories, but none so curious as her own.

When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions, and I
believe I had also perpetrated a novel.  She was more than a dozen years
older than I, but she was a person who always acknowledged her
relativity.  It was not so very long ago, but in London, amid the big
waves of the present, even a near horizon gets hidden.  I met her at some
dinner and took her down, rather flattered at offering my arm to a
celebrity.  She didn’t look like one, with her matronly, mild, inanimate
face, but I supposed her greatness would come out in her conversation.  I
gave it all the opportunities I could, but I was not disappointed when I
found her only a dull, kind woman.  This was why I liked her—she rested
me so from literature.  To myself literature was an irritation, a
torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the intellectual part of it like
a Creole in a hammock.  She was not a woman of genius, but her faculty
was so special, so much a gift out of hand, that I have often wondered
why she fell below that distinction.  This was doubtless because the
transaction, in her case, had remained incomplete; genius always pays for
the gift, feels the debt, and she was placidly unconscious of obligation.
She could invent stories by the yard, but she couldn’t write a page of
English.  She went down to her grave without suspecting that though she
had contributed volumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had
not contributed a sentence to the language.  This had not prevented
bushels of criticism from being heaped upon her head; she was worth a
couple of columns any day to the weekly papers, in which it was shown
that her pictures of life were dreadful but her style really charming.
She asked me to come and see her, and I went.  She lived then in
Montpellier Square; which helped me to see how dissociated her
imagination was from her character.

An industrious widow, devoted to her daily stint, to meeting the butcher
and baker and making a home for her son and daughter, from the moment she
took her pen in her hand she became a creature of passion.  She thought
the English novel deplorably wanting in that element, and the task she
had cut out for herself was to supply the deficiency.  Passion in high
life was the general formula of this work, for her imagination was at
home only in the most exalted circles.  She adored, in truth, the
aristocracy, and they constituted for her the romance of the world or,
what is more to the point, the prime material of fiction.  Their beauty
and luxury, their loves and revenges, their temptations and surrenders,
their immoralities and diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on
her writing-table.  She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable
novel, she had a cleverness and a modernness of her own, she had
freshened up the fly-blown tinsel.  She turned off plots by the hundred
and—so far as her flying quill could convey her—was perpetually going
abroad.  Her types, her illustrations, her tone were nothing if not
cosmopolitan.  She recognised nothing less provincial than European
society, and her fine folk knew each other and made love to each other
from Doncaster to Bucharest.  She had an idea that she resembled Balzac,
and her favourite historical characters were Lucien de Rubempré and the
Vidame de Pamiers.  I must add that when I once asked her who the latter
personage was she was unable to tell me.  She was very brave and healthy
and cheerful, very abundant and innocent and wicked.  She was clever and
vulgar and snobbish, and never so intensely British as when she was
particularly foreign.

This combination of qualities had brought her early success, and I
remember having heard with wonder and envy of what she “got,” in those
days, for a novel.  The revelation gave me a pang: it was such a proof
that, practising a totally different style, I should never make my
fortune.  And yet when, as I knew her better she told me her real tariff
and I saw how rumour had quadrupled it, I liked her enough to be sorry.
After a while I discovered too that if she got less it was not that _I_
was to get any more.  My failure never had what Mrs. Stormer would have
called the banality of being relative—it was always admirably absolute.
She lived at ease however in those days—ease is exactly the word, though
she produced three novels a year.  She scorned me when I spoke of
difficulty—it was the only thing that made her angry.  If I hinted that a
work of art required a tremendous licking into shape she thought it a
pretension and a _pose_.  She never recognised the “torment of form”; the
furthest she went was to introduce into one of her books (in satire her
hand was heavy) a young poet who was always talking about it.  I couldn’t
quite understand her irritation on this score, for she had nothing at
stake in the matter.  She had a shrewd perception that form, in prose at
least, never recommended any one to the public we were condemned to
address, and therefore she lost nothing (putting her private humiliation
aside) by not having any.  She made no pretence of producing works of
art, but had comfortable tea-drinking hours in which she freely confessed
herself a common pastrycook, dealing in such tarts and puddings as would
bring customers to the shop.  She put in plenty of sugar and of
cochineal, or whatever it is that gives these articles a rich and
attractive colour.  She had a serene superiority to observation and
opportunity which constituted an inexpugnable strength and would enable
her to go on indefinitely.  It is only real success that wanes, it is
only solid things that melt.  Greville Fane’s ignorance of life was a
resource still more unfailing than the most approved receipt.  On her
saying once that the day would come when she should have written herself
out I answered: “Ah, you look into fairyland, and the fairies love you,
and _they_ never change.  Fairyland is always there; it always was from
the beginning of time, and it always will be to the end.  They’ve given
you the key and you can always open the door.  With me it’s different; I
try, in my clumsy way, to be in some direct relation to life.”  “Oh,
bother your direct relation to life!” she used to reply, for she was
always annoyed by the phrase—which would not in the least prevent her
from using it when she wished to try for style.  With no more prejudices
than an old sausage-mill, she would give forth again with patient
punctuality any poor verbal scrap that had been dropped into her.  I
cheered her with saying that the dark day, at the end, would be for the
like of _me_; inasmuch as, going in our small way by experience and
observation, we depended not on a revelation, but on a little tiresome
process.  Observation depended on opportunity, and where should we be
when opportunity failed?

One day she told me that as the novelist’s life was so delightful and
during the good years at least such a comfortable support (she had these
staggering optimisms) she meant to train up her boy to follow it.  She
took the ingenious view that it was a profession like another and that
therefore everything was to be gained by beginning young and serving an
apprenticeship.  Moreover the education would be less expensive than any
other special course, inasmuch as she could administer it herself.  She
didn’t profess to keep a school, but she could at least teach her own
child.  It was not that she was so very clever, but (she confessed to me
as if she were afraid I would laugh at her) that _he_ was.  I didn’t
laugh at her for that, for I thought the boy sharp—I had seen him at
sundry times.  He was well grown and good-looking and unabashed, and both
he and his sister made me wonder about their defunct papa, concerning
whom the little I knew was that he had been a clergyman.  I explained
them to myself by suppositions and imputations possibly unjust to the
departed; so little were they—superficially at least—the children of
their mother.  There used to be, on an easel in her drawing-room, an
enlarged photograph of her husband, done by some horrible posthumous
“process” and draped, as to its florid frame, with a silken scarf, which
testified to the candour of Greville Fane’s bad taste.  It made him look
like an unsuccessful tragedian; but it was not a thing to trust.  He may
have been a successful comedian.  Of the two children the girl was the
elder, and struck me in all her younger years as singularly colourless.
She was only very long, like an undecipherable letter.  It was not till
Mrs. Stormer came back from a protracted residence abroad that Ethel
(which was this young lady’s name) began to produce the effect, which was
afterwards remarkable in her, of a certain kind of high resolution.  She
made one apprehend that she meant to do something for herself.  She was
long-necked and near-sighted and striking, and I thought I had never seen
sweet seventeen in a form so hard and high and dry.  She was cold and
affected and ambitious, and she carried an eyeglass with a long handle,
which she put up whenever she wanted not to see.  She had come out, as
the phrase is, immensely; and yet I felt as if she were surrounded with a
spiked iron railing.  What she meant to do for herself was to marry, and
it was the only thing, I think, that she meant to do for any one else;
yet who would be inspired to clamber over that bristling barrier?  What
flower of tenderness or of intimacy would such an adventurer conceive as
his reward?

This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally never confided to
me the secret.  He was a joyless, jokeless young man, with the air of
having other secrets as well, and a determination to get on politically
that was indicated by his never having been known to commit himself—as
regards any proposition whatever—beyond an exclamatory “Oh!”  His wife
and he must have conversed mainly in prim ejaculations, but they
understood sufficiently that they were kindred spirits.  I remember being
angry with Greville Fane when she announced these nuptials to me as
magnificent; I remember asking her what splendour there was in the union
of the daughter of a woman of genius with an irredeemable mediocrity.
“Oh! he’s awfully clever,” she said; but she blushed for the maternal
fib.  What she meant was that though Sir Baldwin’s estates were not vast
(he had a dreary house in South Kensington and a still drearier “Hall”
somewhere in Essex, which was let), the connection was a “smarter” one
than a child of hers could have aspired to form.  In spite of the social
bravery of her novels she took a very humble and dingy view of herself,
so that of all her productions “my daughter Lady Luard” was quite the one
she was proudest of.  That personage thought her mother very vulgar and
was distressed and perplexed by the occasional license of her pen, but
had a complicated attitude in regard to this indirect connection with
literature.  So far as it was lucrative her ladyship approved of it, and
could compound with the inferiority of the pursuit by doing practical
justice to some of its advantages.  I had reason to know (my reason was
simply that poor Mrs. Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers
to press an occasional bank-note into her palm.  On the other hand she
deplored the “peculiar style” to which Greville Fane had devoted herself,
and wondered where an author who had the convenience of so lady-like a
daughter could have picked up such views about the best society.  “She
might know better, with Leolin and me,” Lady Luard had been known to
remark; but it appeared that some of Greville Fane’s superstitions were
incurable.  She didn’t live in Lady Luard’s society, and the best was not
good enough for her—she must make it still better.

I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the years she spent
abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shifting sojourns that lay in
the path of my annual ramble.  She betook herself from Germany to
Switzerland and from Switzerland to Italy; she favoured cheap places and
set up her desk in the smaller capitals.  I took a look at her whenever I
could, and I always asked how Leolin was getting on.  She gave me
beautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the boy was
produced for my edification.  I had entered from the first into the joke
of his career—I pretended to regard him as a consecrated child.  It had
been a joke for Mrs. Stormer at first, but the boy himself had been
shrewd enough to make the matter serious.  If his mother accepted the
principle that the intending novelist cannot begin too early to see life,
Leolin was not interested in hanging back from the application of it.  He
was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the
highest literary grounds.  His poor mother gazed at him with extravagant
envy and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made _her_ such a man.  She
explained to me more than once that in her profession she had found her
sex a dreadful drawback.  She loved the story of Madame George Sand’s
early rebellion against this hindrance, and believed that if she had worn
trousers she could have written as well as that lady.  Leolin had for the
career at least the qualification of trousers, and as he grew older he
recognised its importance by laying in an immense assortment.  He grew up
in gorgeous apparel, which was his way of interpreting his mother’s
system.  Whenever I met her I found her still under the impression that
she was carrying this system out and that Leolin’s training was bearing
fruit.  She was giving him experience, she was giving him impressions,
she was putting a _gagnepain_ into his hand.  It was another name for
spoiling him with the best conscience in the world.  The queerest
pictures come back to me of this period of the good lady’s life and of
the extraordinarily virtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it.  She had
an idea that she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats
would allow; but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all
fortunately how much she was laughed at.  She drove her whimsical pen at
Dresden and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the
same romantic and ridiculous fictions.  She carried about her box of
properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets.
She believed in them when others couldn’t, and as they were like nothing
that was to be seen under the sun it was impossible to prove by
comparison that they were wrong.  You can’t compare birds and fishes; you
could only feel that, as Greville Fane’s characters had the fine plumage
of the former species, human beings must be of the latter.

It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her
tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her
children.  The immoral and the maternal lived together in her diligent
days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling the mustaches
of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes.  She was haunted by
solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental _pensions_, and by
unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved in _their_
country.  “I had rather be just paid there,” she usually replied; for
this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled her.
The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the author of so
many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to most of these
pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout, ruddy lady in a cap
like a crumbled pyramid.  She wrote about the affections and the
impossibility of controlling them, but she talked of the price of
_pension_ and the convenience of an English chemist.  She devoted much
thought and many thousands of francs to the education of her daughter,
who spent three years at a very superior school at Dresden, receiving
wonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a
different line from Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a _femme du
monde_.  The girl was musical and philological; she made a specialty of
languages and learned enough about them to be inspired with a great
contempt for her mother’s artless accents.  Greville Fane’s French and
Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she
had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes
into small opportunities.  She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness
was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she
valued least.  Ethel, who had perceived in her pages some remarkable
lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs; but I remember her
telling me a year after the girl had left school that this function had
been very briefly exercised.  “She can’t read me,” said Mrs. Stormer; “I
offend her taste.  She tells me that at Dresden—at school—I was never
allowed.”  The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the best
conscience in the world about her lucubrations.  She had never meant to
fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled before the
Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful
Young Person.  I assured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully
indecent (she hadn’t in fact that reality any more than any other) my
purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had
dropped her not because she was immoral but because she was vulgar.  I
used to figure her children closeted together and asking each other while
they exchanged a gaze of dismay: “Why should she _be_ so—and so
_fearfully_ so—when she has the advantage of our society?  Shouldn’t _we_
have taught her better?”  Then I imagined their recognising with a blush
and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable.  Indeed she was, poor
lady; but it is never fair to read by the light of taste things that were
not written by it.  Greville Fane had, in the topsy-turvy, a serene good
faith that ought to have been safe from allusion, like a stutter or a
_faux pas_.

She didn’t make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was
destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself
exercised it.  But he bore his humiliation much better than his sister,
for he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the
balance.  He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and
aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition.  His mother’s
theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesome
discipline required to prevent young idlers from becoming cads.  He had,
abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two of a Swiss school, but no
consecutive study, no prospect of a university or a degree.  It may be
imagined with what zeal, as the years went on, he entered into the
pleasantry of there being no manual so important to him as the massive
book of life.  It was an expensive volume to peruse, but Mrs. Stormer was
willing to lay out a sum in what she would have called her _premiers
frais_.  Ethel disapproved—she thought this education far too
unconventional for an English gentleman.  Her voice was for Eton and
Oxford, or for any public school (she would have resigned herself) with
the army to follow.  But Leolin never was afraid of his sister, and they
visibly disliked, though they sometimes agreed to assist, each other.
They could combine to work the oracle—to keep their mother at her desk.

When she came back to England, telling me she had got all the continent
could give her, Leolin was a broad-shouldered, red-faced young man, with
an immense wardrobe and an extraordinary assurance of manner.  She was
fondly obstinate about her having taken the right course with him, and
proud of all that he knew and had seen.  He was now quite ready to begin,
and a little while later she told me he _had_ begun.  He had written
something tremendously clever, and it was coming out in the _Cheapside_.
I believe it came out; I had no time to look for it; I never heard
anything about it.  I took for granted that if this contribution had
passed through his mother’s hands it had practically become a specimen of
her own genius, and it was interesting to consider Mrs. Stormer’s future
in the light of her having to write her son’s novels as well as her own.
This was not the way she looked at it herself; she took the charming
ground that he would help her to write hers.  She used to tell me that he
supplied passages of the greatest value to her own work—all sorts of
technical things, about hunting and yachting and wine—that she couldn’t
be expected to get very straight.  It was all so much practice for him
and so much alleviation for her.  I was unable to identify these pages,
for I had long since ceased to “keep up” with Greville Fane; but I was
quite able to believe that the wine-question had been put, by Leolin’s
good offices, on a better footing, for the dear lady used to mix her
drinks (she was perpetually serving the most splendid suppers) in the
queerest fashion.  I could see that he was willing enough to accept a
commission to look after that department.  It occurred to me indeed, when
Mrs. Stormer settled in England again, that by making a shrewd use of
both her children she might be able to rejuvenate her style.  Ethel had
come back to gratify her young ambition, and if she couldn’t take her
mother into society she would at least go into it herself.  Silently,
stiffly, almost grimly, this young lady held up her head, clenched her
long teeth, squared her lean elbows and made her way up the staircases
she had elected.  The only communication she ever made to me, the only
effusion of confidence with which she ever honoured me, was when she
said: “I don’t want to know the people mamma knows; I mean to know
others.”  I took due note of the remark, for I was not one of the
“others.”  I couldn’t trace therefore the steps of her process; I could
only admire it at a distance and congratulate her mother on the results.
The results were that Ethel went to “big” parties and got people to take
her.  Some of them were people she had met abroad, and others were people
whom the people she had met abroad had met.  They ministered alike to
Miss Ethel’s convenience, and I wondered how she extracted so many
favours without the expenditure of a smile.  Her smile was the dimmest
thing in the world, diluted lemonade, without sugar, and she had arrived
precociously at social wisdom, recognising that if she was neither pretty
enough nor rich enough nor clever enough, she could at least in her
muscular youth be rude enough.  Therefore if she was able to tell her
mother what really took place in the mansions of the great, give her
notes to work from, the quill could be driven at home to better purpose
and precisely at a moment when it would have to be more active than ever.
But if she did tell, it would appear that poor Mrs. Stormer didn’t
believe.  As regards many points this was not a wonder; at any rate I
heard nothing of Greville Fane’s having developed a new manner.  She had
only one manner from start to finish, as Leolin would have said.

She was tired at last, but she mentioned to me that she couldn’t afford
to pause.  She continued to speak of Leolin’s work as the great hope of
their future (she had saved no money) though the young man wore to my
sense an aspect more and more professional if you like, but less and less
literary.  At the end of a couple of years there was something monstrous
in the impudence with which he played his part in the comedy.  When I
wondered how she could play _her_ part I had to perceive that her good
faith was complete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagant
fondness.  She loved the young impostor with a simple, blind, benighted
love, and of all the heroes of romance who had passed before her eyes he
was by far the most brilliant.

He was at any rate the most real—she could touch him, pay for him, suffer
for him, worship him.  He made her think of her princes and dukes, and
when she wished to fix these figures in her mind’s eye she thought of her
boy.  She had often told me she was carried away by her own creations,
and she was certainly carried away by Leolin.  He vivified, by
potentialities at least, the whole question of youth and passion.  She
held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelist should feel the whole flood
of life; she acknowledged with regret that she had not had time to feel
it herself, and it was a joy to her that the deficiency might be supplied
by the sight of the way it was rushing through this magnificent young
man.  She exhorted him, I suppose, to let it rush; she wrung her own
flaccid little sponge into the torrent.  I knew not what passed between
them in her hours of tuition, but I gathered that she mainly impressed on
him that the great thing was to live, because that gave you material.  He
asked nothing better; he collected material, and the formula served as a
universal pretext.  You had only to look at him to see that, with his
rings and breastpins, his cross-barred jackets, his early _embonpoint_,
his eyes that looked like imitation jewels, his various indications of a
dense, full-blown temperament, his idea of life was singularly vulgar;
but he was not so far wrong as that his response to his mother’s
expectations was not in a high degree practical.  If she had imposed a
profession on him from his tenderest years it was exactly a profession
that he followed.  The two were not quite the same, inasmuch as _his_ was
simply to live at her expense; but at least she couldn’t say that he
hadn’t taken a line.  If she insisted on believing in him he offered
himself to the sacrifice.  My impression is that her secret dream was
that he should have a _liaison_ with a countess, and he persuaded her
without difficulty that he had one.  I don’t know what countesses are
capable of, but I have a clear notion of what Leolin was.

He didn’t persuade his sister, who despised him—she wished to work her
mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl’s judgment of him
didn’t make me like her better.  It was because it didn’t save her after
all from a mute agreement with him to go halves.  There were moments when
I couldn’t help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging
him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up.  Not a little tacit
conversation passed between us in this way, but he had always the best of
it.  If I said: “Oh, come now, with _me_ you needn’t keep it up; plead
guilty, and I’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, the most
candid expression, in the depths of which I could read: “Oh, yes, I know
it exasperates you—that’s just why I do it.”  He took the line of earnest
inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens
_did_ exaggerate and Thackeray _ought_ to be called a pessimist.  Once he
came to see me, at his mother’s suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask
me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture
to “go.”  He was not resigned to the usual pruderies—he suffered under
them already.  He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far
we might go, for nobody had ever tried.  Did I think _he_ might safely
try—would it injure his mother if he did?  He would rather disgrace
himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one
ought to try.  Wouldn’t _I_ try—couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look at
it as a duty?  Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed—he was
worried, haunted by the question.  He patronised me unblushingly, made me
feel like a foolish amateur, a helpless novice, inquired into my habits
of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly _vieux jeu_ and had not had
the advantage of an early training.  I had not been brought up from the
germ, I knew nothing of life—didn’t go at it on _his_ system.  He had
dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he
made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time
to read anything and could only be vivid with her pen.  If I didn’t kick
him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on her at the
bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her and found her
weary and wasted.  It had waned a good deal, the elation caused the year
before by Ethel’s marriage; the foam on the cup had subsided and there
was a bitterness in the draught.

She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work still harder to
pay even for that.  Sir Baldwin was obliged to be close; his charges were
fearful, and the dream of her living with her daughter (a vision she had
never mentioned to me) must be renounced.  “I would have helped with
things, and I could have lived perfectly in one room,” she said; “I would
have paid for everything, and—after all—I’m some one, ain’t I?  But I
don’t fit in, and Ethel tells me there are tiresome people she _must_
receive.  I can help them from here, no doubt, better than from there.
She told me once, you know, what she thinks of my picture of life.
‘Mamma, your picture of life is preposterous!’  No doubt it is, but she’s
vexed with me for letting my prices go down; and I had to write three
novels to pay for all her marriage cost me.  I did it very well—I mean
the outfit and the wedding; but that’s why I’m here.  At any rate she
doesn’t want a dingy old woman in her house.  I should give it an
atmosphere of literary glory, but literary glory is only the eminence of
nobodies.  Besides, she doubts my glory—she knows I’m glorious only at
Peckham and Hackney.  She doesn’t want her friends to ask if I’ve never
known nice people.  She can’t tell them I’ve never been in society.  She
tried to teach me better once, but I couldn’t learn.  It would seem too
as if Peckham and Hackney had had enough of me; for (don’t tell any one!)
I’ve had to take less for my last than I ever took for anything.”  I
asked her how little this had been, not from curiosity, but in order to
upbraid her, more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had done, for such
concessions.  She answered “I’m ashamed to tell you,” and then she began
to cry.

I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionately moved; she
sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinction of her vogue and the
exhaustion of her vein.  Her little workroom seemed indeed a barren place
to grow flowers, and I wondered, in the after years (for she continued to
produce and publish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged
them out of the soil.  I remember asking her on that occasion what had
become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended to allow him to amuse
himself at her cost.  She rejoined with spirit, wiping her eyes, that he
was down at Brighton hard at work—he was in the midst of a novel—and that
he _felt_ life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it was cruel to
speak of such experiences as a pleasure.  “He goes beneath the surface,”
she said, “and he _forces_ himself to look at things from which he would
rather turn away.  Do you call that amusing yourself?  You should see his
face sometimes!  And he does it for me as much as for himself.  He tells
me everything—he comes home to me with his _trouvailles_.  We are artists
together, and to the artist all things are pure.  I’ve often heard you
say so yourself.”  The novel that Leolin was engaged in at Brighton was
never published, but a friend of mine and of Mrs. Stormer’s who was
staying there happened to mention to me later that he had seen the young
apprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a young lady with a very
pink face.  When I suggested that she was perhaps a woman of title with
whom he was conscientiously flirting my informant replied: “She is
indeed, but do you know what her title is?”  He pronounced it—it was
familiar and descriptive—but I won’t reproduce it here.  I don’t know
whether Leolin mentioned it to his mother: she would have needed all the
purity of the artist to forgive him.  I hated so to come across him that
in the very last years I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she
had come pretty well to the end of her rope.  I didn’t want her to tell
me that she had fairly to give her books away—I didn’t want to see her
cry.  She kept it up amazingly, and every few months, at my club, I saw
three new volumes, in green, in crimson, in blue, on the book-table that
groaned with light literature.  Once I met her at the Academy soirée,
where you meet people you thought were dead, and she vouchsafed the
information, as if she owed it to me in candour, that Leolin had been
obliged to recognise insuperable difficulties in the question of _form_,
he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definite
understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that _she_ would do the
form if he would bring home the substance.  That was now his position—he
foraged for her in the great world at a salary.  “He’s my ‘devil,’ don’t
you see? as if I were a great lawyer: he gets up the case and I argue
it.”  She mentioned further that in addition to his salary he was paid by
the piece: he got so much for a striking character, so much for a pretty
name, so much for a plot, so much for an incident, and had so much
promised him if he would invent a new crime.

“He _has_ invented one,” I said, “and he’s paid every day of his life.”

“What is it?” she asked, looking hard at the picture of the year; “Baby’s
Tub,” near which we happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment.  “I myself will write a little story about it, and
then you’ll see.”

But she never saw; she had never seen anything, and she passed away with
her fine blindness unimpaired.  Her son published every scrap of
scribbled paper that could be extracted from her table-drawers, and his
sister quarrelled with him mortally about the proceeds, which showed that
she only wanted a pretext, for they cannot have been great.  I don’t know
what Leolin lives upon, unless it be on a queer lady many years older
than himself, whom he lately married.  The last time I met him he said to
me with his infuriating smile: “Don’t you think we can go a little
further still—just a little?”  _He_ really goes too far.




***