Life, the Interpreter

By Phyllis Bottome

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Title: Life, the Interpreter

Author: Phyllis Bottome

Release date: March 3, 2025 [eBook #75508]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1902

Credits: Mardi Desjardins and the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team from page images generously made available by Internet Archive


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE, THE INTERPRETER ***

                                  LIFE

                            THE INTERPRETER

                                   BY
                            PHYLLIS BOTTOME



                        LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
                    91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
                           LONDON AND BOMBAY
                                  1902




                            Copyright, 1902,
                                   BY
                         LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.


                   ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK




                         LIFE, THE INTERPRETER

                 *        *        *        *        *




                               CHAPTER I


    “To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without it
    is power.”

“BUT the extraordinary thing is that it has happened!” The lady who
seemed a victim of this surprise lay back in her luxurious chair and
exhibited a small foot on the fender.

“Black velvet slippers,” said her companion critically, “on a brass
fender are really, my dear, a poem. Where do you learn these things?
Poor Muriel, her feet were always rather large!”

“She had everything in her favor,” said Mrs. le Mentier, the first
speaker. “Money, position, a face and figure one could do a good deal
with. She was simply ruined by her earnestness. I have often said to
her, ‘Well, Muriel, why don’t you take up the Church?’ But she never
did; she said it was too comfortable and that it would crush her. I’m
sure she’s not too comfortable now!”

Mrs. Huntly rose and went to the window. It was raining dismally, with a
constant reiterated drip, drip on the tiles. She turned back, shivering
a little, to the cosey boudoir of her friend with whom she had just been
lunching.

“I often wonder,” she said thoughtfully, “if it wasn’t Jack Hurstly
after all. You know I had them last summer with me; and though poor
Muriel always managed things very well, there were times—— And then he
went off suddenly, you know; and she said she couldn’t imagine what I
could see in him, though I know for certain she bore with that brutal
bull-terrier of his, and pretended to like it, while all the time she
loathed animals—dogs especially.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. le Mentier; “and she’s really dropped out—one can’t do
anything! All the time when she isn’t actually at that tiresome Stepney
club of hers she’s contriving things for it—positively it amounts to a
terror! She asked me last week to sing at a smoking concert for some
factory hands. I told her I thought smoking concerts for those kind of
people were simply immoral, and she actually flamed up and cried, ‘You
sing for Captain Hurstly and his do-nothing friends, who can afford to
amuse themselves, and you won’t sing for men whose daily life is a hell,
and whose only amusements are unspeakably degrading!’ Of course I
stopped her at once. I told her she should give them Bible lessons. She
saw how silly she had been then, and laughed in that dear old way of
hers, and said, ‘You always had such a lot of common sense, Edith!’ But
you see she must be dropped. She’ll begin to talk about her soul next!”
Her friend yawned.

“Well, my dear,” she said, “don’t you get earnest too. That wretched
Madame Veune is coming to fit me at three o’clock, so I must be off. Oh,
by-the-bye, if Muriel should turn up to-morrow you might ask her to come
and see me—I don’t know her slum address—one must do what one can, you
know. Good-bye, dear.” And the two affectionately kissed and parted.

Mrs. Huntly frowned as she drove home. Muriel Dallerton had been an old
friend of hers, and she really meant to do what she could for her.




                               CHAPTER II


    “The sky is not less blue because the blind man cannot see it.”

MURIEL DALLERTON knelt on the floor of a small lodging-house room by the
fire. It was with evident difficulty that she could make it burn at all,
for the soot kept rolling down and the chimney threatened to smoke. She
had not yet accustomed herself to black hands every time she touched the
shovel.

The worst of it was she expected her uncle and guardian to tea, and she
had to confess to herself that the prospect was not pleasing.

She had lived with her uncle ever since she had been an orphan at six
years of age, and she had been sent to an expensive boarding-school and
been finished in Paris. After three triumphant London seasons, every
moment of which she had lived through with the same earnest delight that
was one of her most striking characteristics, she had come to the
conclusion that in some way or other she was wasting her life.

She had for a whole year tried every way of doing good that was
compatible with a house full of servants, a stable full of horses, and a
social position. But at every turn she met with opposition—this, that,
the other was “not nice”—not “the proper thing”—the horses couldn’t go
out—what would the servants think—she was upsetting the whole
house—people would begin to talk. She confessed herself lamentably
deficient in the sense of what was the proper thing, and on her own side
she felt she could no longer bear the strain of the double life.

She was needed all day at the club. She had organized games, classes,
recitations, employments and entertainments for men, women and children,
and all needed her personal supervision.

It was not that she was not fond of pleasure—she had immense capacities
for enjoyment. She was known by all her acquaintances as that “radiant
Miss Dallerton”—only to _live_ for pleasure that was different, and
little by little she found herself “dropped out.”

Society is very exacting: it demands the whole heart and constant
attendance at its haunts, so that when Muriel Dallerton finally
announced her intention of going to live in a model tenement next to her
club, society was careful to make plain to her that reluctantly, and
with all due respect for her ten thousand a year, until she returned to
her senses and her west-end house, society must pass her by on the other
side. Her uncle, Sir Arthur Dallerton, felt deeply what was generally
termed her “extraordinary attitude”—it cast a reflection upon him. He
missed her gracious household ways, the little attentions with which she
had surrounded him. He had, it is true, neglected her atrociously; but
up till now she had always, as he framed it, “done her duty by him.” Her
living away from him was a positive slur.

Sir Arthur Dallerton was coming this afternoon to shake her resolution,
and he had no doubt whatever of his success.

Muriel tussled with the fire, which finally consented to burn, then she
rose to her feet, brought out some tea-things, and began to toast a
muffin.

A bunch of daffodils in a cracked vase did much to improve the
appearance of the room; a touch here, and there finished it; and she had
scarcely taken off her outdoor things and washed her hands (very unused
to the work they had been put to) when a dismal slavey announced, “A
genelman to see yer, miss,” and backed almost on to the gentleman in
question, who with an exclamation of disgust pushed past her into the
room.

“My dear Muriel,” he said, “this is disgraceful!” He paused as she ran
forward to meet and relieve him of his hat and umbrella. She looked up
at him, her face beaming with smiles.

“Dear,” she laughed, “did the blackbeetle quite crush you? How horrid!
But now you’ll sit down here and have some tea. You needn’t insult that
chair by doubting it. It will bear anything I know—I saw the landlady
sit on it, and nothing happened!”

Her uncle sat down gingerly. “Were those people,” he said coldly, “down
in what I can only call a yard—a _yard_, Muriel!—the people you
imagine you have a mission amongst?”

Muriel poured out the tea. “They look as if they needed it, don’t they,
dear?” she said, handing him a cup. “There, you’ve got a _whole_ handle,
and only two chips round the rim! Yes, those were some of my people. I
hope they weren’t in your way?”

“They are extremely in my way, Muriel—extremely; I may say I am greatly
inconvenienced by them. I suppose you realize that I am alone in the
world; and yet you seem to imagine that your duty is to be among these
unpleasant characters in filthy slums instead of at home looking after
my comfort.”

Muriel smiled a little to herself as she thought of the array of
servants the great house held, of the friends and cronies at the club,
where he spent the greater part of his time. “His comfort!”—surely
there were enough people in the world already looking after that.

“Uncle Arthur,” she said, “we’ve talked all this out before, haven’t we?
We don’t see it quite in the same light. I am very sorry you are not
comfortable. If the servants——”

“Muriel,” he interrupted in a raised voice, “how dare you mention
servants to me! Do you imagine that when I refer to comfort I mean
personal attendance? You have never had any heart! Mine has always been
an essentially affectionate nature. It is domestic companionship that I
desire; and now that you are of an age to be of some comfort to me, you
fly off to—Heaven knows where!—and throw me back on the servants!”

Muriel sighed gently and laid her hand on his. “Dear uncle, you have
always been so good to me. But you see you weren’t always at home, and a
girl nowadays isn’t satisfied simply in being domestic.”

“I should scarcely have imagined _you_, my niece Muriel, accusing me of
neglect! You invariably lose your temper upon these subjects, which
proves that you feel yourself to be in the wrong. You know perfectly
well that you can have any woman you want to live with you as lady
companion, but you’re so independent and obstinate——”

“That no one would live with me if you asked them,” she finished
merrily. “Ah!—but please don’t talk about this any more,” she pleaded
as he strove to begin again. “We shall never agree! I must have my work
to do. I cannot be happy without it, and I cannot do it at home. But I
only ask for nine months of it. It is April now, and in July you shall
have me back for three whole months, and do just what you like, dear.
Isn’t that a splendid bargain?”

The tea was very nice, and the buttered muffins especially were done to
a turn.

Sir Arthur Dallerton crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair
(forgetful of its former occupant). “My dear,” he said mildly, “what
will people say? Have you ever thought of that?”

“Yes, dear uncle,” said Muriel, smiling; “I have thought of it, and I
have come to the conclusion that I had better not think about it any
more. Won’t you have some more muffin?”

Sir Arthur Dallerton graciously accepted another piece. It did not occur
to him that Muriel had eaten nothing—those sort of things never did
occur to him. If it had done so he would have put it down to
hysteria—the one great refuge for the selfish.

“Mrs. le Mentier,” he pursued, “who is a very sensible woman, told me
what people were saying, and I think you ought to know of it too.”

Muriel rose and looked out of the window. It was still raining heavily.

“Well?” she said a little wearily.

“They say this is a mere whim of yours to bring Jack Hurstly to book.”

The girl by the window stood quite still. She did not see the children
in the yard below playing cheerfully in the gutter; she did not even
notice one of her most hopeful cases reel across the court in a
condition which would have filled her soul with pity and disgust two
minutes before. Her uncle thought her cold and indifferent, or possibly
sullen.

“Yes!” he said bitterly, “that is the sort of thing, Muriel, that your
conduct forces me to put up with.” Muriel faced him suddenly.

“Mrs. le Mentier,” she said quietly, “is——” she paused, “is very much
mistaken if she thinks such absurd rumors have power to affect me; and I
do not think you need be put out by what she says, for nobody who knows
either Captain Hurstly or myself would believe her.” Her uncle rose to
his feet.

“You seem to be in a very bad temper, Muriel,” he said. “I knew what
would be the result of your taking up this work. But it’s very
depressing to _me_. I shall go home—when you come to a proper frame of
mind, let me know.” She ran forward and kissed him.

“But _you_ do love me, don’t you?” she whispered.

“Of course, Muriel, if you would only give up your absurd whim.” She
drew back a little.

“Mind the stairs,” she laughed; “and oh, whatever you do, don’t tread on
the blackbeetle.” She watched him cross the yard, and bowl off in a
hansom. Somehow she felt very forlorn and lonely all by herself. She was
startled to feel a tear-drop on her hand. “Nonsense!” she said; “it’s
time for the girls’ cooking class!” She gave herself a little shake and
put on her things.

She found herself saying as she left the room, “If Jack thinks so I’ll
never, never speak to him again.” She was a little impatient at the
cooking class.




                              CHAPTER III


    “And custom lies upon thee with a weight: heavy as frost, and
    deep almost as life.”

“YOU are quite right in thinking I care for her, Mrs. Huntly, and have
done ever since I knew her,” said Jack Hurstly, looking hard at an
inoffensive poker. “But there’s no doing anything with her. I am not
earnest enough, it seems. She objects to my club, my sport, and all my
set. I believe she even objects to my regiment. At any rate she thinks I
am wasting my time here in England, and ought to be sweating in some
beastly tropics—Heaven knows why!”

“So you ought, Jack, so you ought,” said Mrs. Huntly soothingly. “Muriel
is quite right. It’s positively shameful the lives our society young men
lead. A horse, a gun, a club and a dress-suit, what a catalogue of
occupations! Can you increase it?”

“Oh, well,” said her companion rather sheepishly, “I’m no worse than the
other fellows, am I, Mrs. Huntly?”

“My dear Jack, she’s not going to marry the ‘other fellows,’ is she? You
had better leave them out of the question; and if your ambition is to be
no worse than they are you had better dispense with Muriel. Go off and
hunt somewhere, and then come back and marry a girl of your own sort.”

The door opened. “Miss Dallerton” the butler announced. Muriel came
forward into the middle of the room. There was such a warm, gracious
dignity about her that people who had little to recommend them but the
external felt thin in her presence. Mrs. Huntly greeted her warmly. Jack
said very little, but as his eyes rested on her Mrs. Huntly thought that
the hunting expedition, if it ever came off, must be a long one.

“I’m so glad, so glad to see you both,” cried Muriel joyously,
“particularly as you are neither of you going to ask me for soup
tickets! Dearest Mary, are you really well? And what a comfort it is to
see a pretty dress! And won’t you please both tell me all about
everybody, and who has married who, though they ought to have done
better? I feel so ignorant.” She sat down by Mary Huntly, caressing her
hand, and looking with glad eyes from one to the other like a child out
for a holiday.

“Oh, my dear girl,” cried Mrs. Huntly mournfully, “to think that you are
out of it all! It almost breaks my heart!”

“Mary, how dare you! I came to be pacified, and if I’m reproached I
shall simply turn tail and run away! You don’t reproach me, do you,
Captain Hurstly?”

“Perhaps I should like to, if you gave me time,” he said, smiling.

“Oh, but I won’t, not for any such purpose—you shan’t have a moment of
it. But who is this?” A young girl had entered the room; she was
dangerously pretty (it is the only adjective one can use), and she was
perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Huntly introduced her to them. She was a
young cousin of hers, Gladys Travers.

Imperceptibly the atmosphere changed. Mrs. Huntly and Muriel drew apart
from the other two, and Muriel could not help noticing how perfectly
satisfied Captain Hurstly seemed with his companion, and how well they
got on together.

When she rose to go Gladys crossed over to her. “May I come to see you,
Miss Dallerton?” she asked. “I want so much to know about your work, and
I—I like you so much! Don’t think me frightful. I have lived in the
States, you know, and people say all Americans are forgiven everything!
I do really want so much to know you.” She spoke in quick, low tones,
the expression changing as the shadows on a pool change under a light
wind. She was very appealing.

“Oh, but it’s dear of you to like me,” said Muriel, smiling. “Please
come _really_, will you? You will always find me somewhere about the
club—Mary has the address.”

She turned to Captain Hurstly.

“I am coming with you, if I may,” he said. The two descended to the
street in silence.

“You’re looking awfully dragged and thin, Miss Muriel,” he said at last.

“You always were so hopelessly rude,” she laughed.

“You know what I think about the whole thing?” he said gravely.

“Ah, it’s _that_ which makes me tired!” she sighed. “All my friends say
just the same. They won’t think how—how hard they make it for
me—no—not even you.”

“Even me?” he asked quietly. She bit her lips; she was losing her head
it seemed; she must not do that.

“I take the ’bus at this corner,” she said.

“I think we’ll go by hansom,” said her escort. She smiled.

“You always _will_ contradict me, Captain Hurstly.”

“You will not contradict _me_ if I remind you that you used to call
me—Jack?” he ventured.

The hansom drove up, and Muriel put out her hand to him. She
unmistakably intended to go alone, even though she had let him choose
her vehicle.

“I may come and see you?” he asked. She frowned a little.

“I’m very busy, you know,” she said.

“Does that mean I’m not to come?”

“You might come,” she suggested suddenly, “and bring Mary’s little
cousin; she can’t come alone.”

“I can though,” he persisted. She shook her head and laughed merrily.

“Mary’s little cousin,” she said as she drove off, “or not at all!” And
he never went.




                               CHAPTER IV


    “What’s the use of crying when the mother that bore ye (Mary,
    pity women!) knew it all afore ye?”

THE club room, large and bare, with a bench or two and one long table,
was full of girls, though at first glance you might not have been
inclined to call them so. They were all so inexpressibly old. As they
stood talking in groups, large and broad, with their frowsy hair and
draggle-tailed dresses, lifting loud, rough voices and breaking from
time to time into hoarse roars of laughter, they could scarcely be
called prepossessing. These were the girls who had warned a
simple-minded lady Bible-reader that “if she didn’t tyke ’erself orf
they’d strip her”—and they would have done it.

As Muriel Dallerton entered the room the whole gang swarmed towards her
in greeting. They loved her. “She ’adn’t got no nonsense about ’er,”
“She was a real good sort, and no mistake,” and they showed their
appreciation of her by rushing from their ten hours’ work into the club
and paying with treasured pennies the tiny entrance fees she exacted for
the classes.

To-day was cooking class, and from a great cupboard were drawn two dozen
aprons, which they themselves had helped to buy and make.

Muriel knew just what wages they had, and never denied them the dignity
of giving a little, if they had that little to give.

Two long hours’ class followed. To the girls who were accustomed to
factory work it was mere play, and the pleasure and excitement of seeing
how Mary Ann’s scones or Minnie Newlove’s pie turned out was
inexhaustible.

It was not until it was over and the cooking boards and utensils put
away that Muriel missed one of the number. Lizzie Belk was a girl who
attended most regularly, and Muriel walked over to her mate to inquire
after her.

“Mary Ann, where is Lizzie this afternoon?” she asked. There was a
titter of laughter from the group of girls with her.

“Ye will! will ye!” shrieked Mary Ann in a sudden fury. “I’ll bash yer
’ead in for ye, Florrie Stevens!” she cried to a girl whose laughter was
the loudest. “What right ’ave ye to pass it on _my_ mate? I’ll tell ye,
miss.” She appealed to Muriel. “Florrie’s none so straight as she can
blacken poor Liz.” Muriel leaned against the table, feeling sick.

“Hush, Mary, you must not talk like that,” she said at last. “What is
the matter with Lizzie?” There was an uneasy silence. “The rest of you
can go,” said Muriel. “Good-night, girls, go out quietly, please.” And
the girls nodding to her in rough good-nature went out leaving her alone
with Lizzie’s mate.

Muriel crossed to her side and took her hand gently. “Poor Lizzie!” she
said softly. “Poor, poor Lizzie!” Mary burst into tears.

“’E ’adn’t ought to er done it, miss, ’e really ’adn’t!” she sobbed.
“She was alwers a straight ’un, was Liz, an’ ’e promised ’er the lines
an’ all, an’ now——”

“Where is she, Mary?” said Muriel quietly.

“She ain’t got nowheres to go to ’cept the ’orspital. They turned ’er
off to-day at the factory; an’ ’er father’s beat ’er somethink hawful,
miss, the blasted, drunken sot!” Muriel still held her hand.

“I think we had better go and find her,” she said.

“Ye won’t ’ave nought to do with the likes o’ ’er, will ye?” asked the
girl in blank astonishment.

“Yes, Mary; don’t you think Lizzie needs help?”

“She needs it bad, miss.”

“Then that’s what we’re going to give her,” said Muriel firmly. Mary
still stood where she was.

“Ye—ye won’t be rough on her, miss?” she begged in shamefaced tones.
“’E treated ’er cruel bad.”

“No, Mary, I won’t be rough on her. I’m not angry at all, only so _very,
very_ sorry. It’s such a dreadful thing, isn’t it? Poor Lizzie, we must
do all we can for her.” Mary’s big hand tightened over the slender
fingers of their “wonderful lady,” who seemed to understand without
being told, and never said more than she meant to do.

They went out into the streets together. Lizzie was not hard to find.
She was in a deserted yard near the factory, among heaps of refuse and
mouldered iron. She had cried till she could cry no more, and lay in a
sort of hopeless apathy, with wide, dull eyes staring straight in front
of her. Muriel knelt down by her side, and Mary, with the unobtrusive
delicacy many of the poorest have, turned away for a little.

“Lizzie,” said Muriel, as if she were speaking to a little child,
“Lizzie, I want you to come with me.”

“Oh, my God!” said the girl. “Oh, my God!”

“You will come, won’t you, Lizzie?” She put out her hand.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” wailed the girl. “Who brought ye ’ere? Ye
don’t know what I am. Oh, my God! my God!”

“I know all about it, Lizzie, and you must get up now and come with me.”

“They shan’t tyke me to the ’orspital, I tell yer—no, nor hanywheres.
’Ome? I daren’t show my fice there! D’ye see my harm an’ my ’ead? Father
did that, an’ ’e said ’e’d kill me if I was to come back! Oh, let me
alone! Why don’t ye let me alone?”

“Get up, Lizzie,” said Muriel, rising briskly to her feet. “Get up at
once. I am not going to take you either home or to the hospital. You are
coming back with Mary and me to the club, and I shall find a room for
you in my lodgings.”

“Oh, now, Liz, do come, lovey, do come!” Mary urged. Lizzie rose dizzily
to her feet, and between the two they got her back somehow—first to the
club, and when they had fed her they took her to a room next Muriel’s.

The landlady did not say much. “If the young lydy choose to look hafter
the likes o’ ’er, well an’ good, if not she could not stiy, of course.”
But the young lady did choose to look after her, and to pay double for
the room as well, so there was no more to be said.

It was a terrible night. Muriel never forgot it. She sat there holding
the girl’s hand and hearing the whole story—the old, old story, told in
all its crude, black reality between gasping sobs.

“’E said as ’ow I should ’ave my lines,” she groaned; “an’ now ’e says
we’d starve. But I shouldn’t care for that, miss—no, I shouldn’t, if
honly they couldn’t call me——”

“No, dear, no! they shan’t call you that,” Muriel murmured. “What is his
name, Lizzie?”

“Oh, ’e ’adn’t er ought to a treated me so—Gawd knows ’ow I loves ’im!
No!—I can’t tell ye ’is name, dear miss—don’t hask it!”

“But you must tell me, Lizzie.”

“Not if I was to die for it, miss!”

“If you tell me I can help you, Lizzie, perhaps to—to get your lines.”

“Oh, miss, ’e’d never forgive me!”

“Then I can do nothing, Lizzie.”

The girl sobbed afresh. Muriel rose and went to the window. Out of the
dark clouds the stars peeped timorously, as if afraid to look down on
the sad, sordid world beneath. A church clock chimed the hour—twelve
o’clock—and from the public-house across the way a burst of brawling
voices broke. It was illegal she thought to close so late.

The candle on the washstand flickered miserably. She went back to the
bedside, and with careful, tender hands put back the heavy hair and
sponged away the tears.

“Lizzie,” she said, and it seemed to her as if the whole of London stood
still to listen, “there is some one I love with all my heart—I—I think
I could forgive him anything.” She drew in her breath with a long gasp.
“Now—won’t you tell me his name, Lizzie?” she pleaded. The two women
looked at each other. The girl raised herself on her elbow and stared as
if she were weighing the soul of the other woman (she had forgotten she
was a lady). At last she sank back satisfied. “If she had a man,” Lizzie
thought, “she might understand.”

“It’s—it’s Hobbs—Dick Hobbs,” she said. “Ye won’t be ’ard on ’im,
miss. They can’t ’elp it, can they? Not as I knows on—an’ hanyway
’twere all my fault, I think.”

“I—I won’t be hard on him, Lizzie.” The tears were rolling down her
cheeks. “And now I’ll put out this light, and you’ll go to sleep, won’t
you? And to-morrow I’ll see Dick and get a license, and—and
everything.”

“Oh, miss!” cried the girl—“not my lines?”

“Yes, Lizzie! If you’re a good girl and go to sleep you shall have your
lines to show.” Muriel left her. When she came back a few minutes later
she found the exhausted girl fast asleep; her face was red and swollen
still with crying, but there was a happy smile on her lips. She was only
seventeen.

“And there are thousands like this—thousands,” thought Muriel. “God
forgive us our blindness and their pain.”

Suddenly she felt very faint and dizzy. She remembered she had had
nothing to eat since her tea with Mary Huntly. She covered her face with
her hands, for she realized more overwhelmingly than ever that she could
never marry Jack Hurstly. But though she had cried for the other girl,
no tears came now.




                               CHAPTER V


        “My God, I would not live, save that I think this gross,
          hard-seeming world
        Is our misshapen vision of the Powers behind the world that make
          our griefs our gains.”

A BROAD-BUILT, hulking fellow with a coarse, brutal face shouldered his
way towards Muriel. It was one of the men’s evenings, and she had
dropped in a moment to speak to the superintendent, and to give one of
the men something to take home to his sick wife. When the man reached
her she led him to a quiet corner of the room. She had never felt afraid
yet, nor did she feel so now; only as she looked at the flushed,
scowling face she felt a little hopeless.

“They said as ’ow you wanted to speak to me, miss.”

“Yes, Dick, I do.” She paused, wondering how best to make her appeal to
him—where in fact was that spark of the Divine she so passionately
believed in, so seldom touched, yet trusted that she touched more often
than she knew. “Lizzie is with me, Dick,” she said at last. “Do you
think that you have treated her quite fairly?” The scowl changed to a
senseless, meaning smile. Muriel felt her eyes flash, but she had
herself well in hand. “Do you think it is quite a brave, manly thing to
do,” she asked with slow, quiet intensity, “to ruin a girl’s life—a
girl you pretend to care for—who has trusted in you? Would you not be
ashamed of breaking your word to another man? Yet you seem to think it
no great harm to betray a woman! A woman like Lizzie too, who is only a
child after all, and who kept so straight. She is very ill indeed, Dick,
and when—when the child is born I think she will die. Wouldn’t you call
a man who had behaved so to your sister a—a murderer?” The man’s sullen
eyes were fixed on the floor; he shifted awkwardly from one leg to the
other.

“I don’t see has ye ’ave hany call to speak to me like that, miss. I
ain’t no worse than the other chaps I knows on. I’d like to do fair by
Liz, but I ain’t earning enough to keep a wife.”

“You should have thought of that before you made Lizzie a mother,” said
Muriel sternly. “And now you will leave her alone to starve,” she added
with quiet scorn, “after having taken away her only chance of earning
her living, and—and having done the very worst you could.”

The man said nothing; his face was heavy with inarticulate rage; she
felt that he wanted intensely to knock her down. One of his mates
remarked to a group of men that “’Obbs looked horful hugly.” It did not
occur to him though to walk away. Suddenly her voice softened.

“Dick,” she said, “you’re not that sort of man at all—you know you are
not. You hadn’t thought of it before—that was all, wasn’t it? You
didn’t mean to harm poor Lizzie so. And she loves you, Dick—she wasn’t
a bit angry with you—she doesn’t blame you at all.” (It had not exactly
occurred to the man that she did. It was a new idea to him that she had
a right to.)

“And—and so I can tell her that you _want_ to marry her—will marry her
at once, Dick, won’t you, before—before it’s too late? You will let me
tell her that, won’t you?” Still no answer. “I trust you,” she said
softly; “I feel so sure that you have the makings of a good man.”

His eyes were glued on the floor. He felt more bewildered than angry,
and still obstinately clung to silence, which could not, as he phrased
it, “let him in for anything.”

Muriel took a rose she was wearing. With a sudden impulse she held it
out to him. “I gave Lizzie one,” she said gently, “one like this. Would
you like to wear it?” It seemed easier to take it than to speak, but
somehow he was impelled to look at her. Her eyes were fastened on him
with a look he never forgot—grave, earnest, truthful—as if she had
weighed his soul and was simply waiting for the proof of her judgment.

A voice he scarcely recognized for his own growled, “Well, then, what if
I does?”

“Thank God!” she murmured softly. “Thank God!” He waited for his answer.
She smiled at him so wonderfully that he felt the tears rise to his
eyes. Her own eyes swam in them. “I will help you all I can,” she said.
“Now come with me to Lizzie.” He followed unwillingly.

The men by the door shouted something after him as he passed. He did not
hear. He followed her clumsily with creaking boots into a room that
resembled nothing he had ever seen before, though it was simply
furnished; and sitting in a large chair by the fire was Lizzie. Her eyes
were fastened on the door with a dumb, questioning look. She moved her
lips as if they were dry. Then she saw him.

“Oh, my man! my man!” she cried. Muriel shut the door quietly, and left
them alone together. She felt suddenly as if she could never feel
hopeless again.




                               CHAPTER VI


    “The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”

    “YOU have not come to see me for some time, Jack, yet we used to
    be good friends once, didn’t we? One seems to have one’s seasons
    for those kind of things, then they drop out. With sleeves, you
    know, one mustn’t keep the fashion on a bit too long. I have
    known dressmakers—but I won’t trouble you with my philosophy. I
    am going to have dear Mrs. Huntly and a charming cousin of hers
    to dinner, and so thought you might, perhaps, care to join us,
    though I’m candid enough to admit I hope it will not be merely
    for the charming cousin’s sake.

                                                “EDITH LE MENTIER.”

Jack Hurstly read the note, written on rich, heavy cream, a tiny,
definite hand between large margins. It all seemed very familiar to him.
Three years ago there used to be a drawer full of them, though he had
burned them of course, he remembered, after the scene in the garden. It
had all been very graceful and harmless, and he had immensely admired
and pitied her with her dense husband, who shattered her dainty little
subtleties with a heavy word or two, and “called things,” as she
plaintively remarked to Jack, “by their proper names, as if things,” she
had added, “should ever be called by names at all, and least of all by
their right ones.”

Then he had met Muriel. He thought of that first evening, and of her
frank, disarming look, and of how she not only did not say things she
did not mean, but actually went so far as to say the things she did.

It was a change from a little winding stream now here, now there, to a
free, open lake with its clear reflection from the sky.

It was natural that after this should come the scene in the garden; what
he could not understand was this little dinner three years afterwards.

Curiosity and Muriel’s wilful remoteness prompted him to accept the
invitation; but he did so formally.

Edith, when she read his letter, broke into a little laugh.

“A joke, my dear?” her husband asked, looking over his newspaper across
the breakfast table.

“Certainly not, Ted,” said Edith; “I should never dream of laughing at a
joke at breakfast time!” Her husband returned to his sporting
notes—they seemed to him so much easier to understand.

Mrs. le Mentier prepared to meet her guests by dressing in Jack
Hurstly’s favorite color. It happened to be the one which suited her;
but it is possible she would have worn it if it had not. It takes a
woman longer than three years to forget a man’s favorite colors, and
longer still not to wear them when she remembers.

Gladys Travers was the first to arrive, with Mary Huntly’s brother, a
deeply earnest young clergyman with thoughtful eyes. “Cyril had to bring
me,” she said, smiling, “because Mary had a headache, one of those
horrid dark-room ones, you know, with tea and toast. I don’t believe he
quite approves though of dinner parties, do you, Cyril?” Mrs. le Mentier
shook hands with him sympathetically.

“I know quite well what you feel,” she said in her slow, gentle voice.
“It’s the herding together of rich people to eat brilliantly, while all
the great half of the world have no brilliance and no dinner, and I
think it is so good of you to come. I’ve only just _really_ one or two
to-night, so I hope you won’t find us very worldly.”

Cyril Johnstone had blushed at his cousin’s speech, but now that his
hostess paused he said gently, “Mary was so very sorry she could not
come.”

“Dear Mary,” Edith murmured as she glided across the room to welcome two
men who had entered at the same time—Jack Hurstly and a young doctor, a
man of good family and even better brains. “How good of you to come,
doctor!” said she, her eyes sparkling their most vivid welcome. “One
feels,” she said, turning to the young clergyman, “with busy men like
you what a debt of gratitude one owes. Now you, Captain Hurstly,” she
added (for the first time addressing Jack), “had, I am sure, nothing to
give up?”

“Everything to attract, certainly,” said Jack with a smile at Gladys,
who was glancing with laughing, observant eyes from one to the other.

Dinner was announced, and Edith, taking the young priest’s arm, followed
the rest of the party. She was thinking it extremely stupid of dear Mary
to have a dark-room headache, and she was talking to Mr. Johnstone on
the marvellous utility of Bands of Hope.

“Yes,” she said, glancing over the flower-decked table, “it’s the name
itself. Hope! What a lot it calls up, doesn’t it? Spring mornings, one
imagines, and skies too blue to deny one anything. There’s something in
the word which makes one think of waves.”

“Because they break themselves on the rocks?” suggested Gladys, “or
cover quicksands?”

“It’s a word,” said the doctor, smiling, “with a very expansive meaning,
and a use even more expanded than its meaning.”

Mr. Johnstone looked across to Mrs. le Mentier. “It’s one of the
cardinal virtues,” he said gently.

“And they,” said his cousin, looking at Jack, “always close a
conversation, because you see it’s so inconvenient to have to take off
one’s shoes.”

Mr. Johnstone looked shocked, and Edith started another subject.

“My husband,” she said, “is away—fishing, I think it is. He has, poor
man, a deadly feud against all animal nature, and he spends his time
trying to exterminate it. I must confess it seems to me rather a
hopeless quest.”

“Don’t you English say,” asked Gladys of the doctor, “that it’s
strengthening to the character?”

The doctor smiled. “More to the muscles than to the character, I should
fancy,” he said.

“But isn’t it one of your tests of a character,” she persisted, “in
England that it should _have_ fine muscles?” The conversation became
international. Edith watched, but took no part; she was listening to
Jack, who was not talking to her.

He was instead appealing to Cyril Johnstone. “Are you at all
interested,” he asked, “in those slum clubs?” The priest’s face
brightened.

“Immensely,” he said. “My work is there, you know, and so I have seen a
good deal of them. But of course you refer to those under parochial
guidance?”

“Captain Hurstly,” Mrs. le Mentier broke in, “is referring, I feel sure,
to the sweetest free-lance in the world, a dear friend of ours who has
thought it her duty to disassociate herself from her home, and even to a
certain extent from the Church, because she thinks she can, as the
phrase goes, ‘reach nearer to the people’s hearts’ that way. You’ll
admit it’s heroically brave of her. People’s hearts give one such shocks
when one _does_ get near them.”

“A case of hysteria,” murmured the doctor under his breath, “in its most
patent modern form.”

Gladys glanced lightly at Jack Hurstly; then she said in a sweet,
penetrating voice, “There you are wrong, doctor. Muriel is the most
healthy-minded girl I know.”

“Her hysteria may be confined to one form,” he ventured.

“Ah, but you should see her!” said Gladys. Here the voice of Cyril
Johnstone broke in.

“It seems to me,” he exclaimed, “the saddest thing in the world and the
most useless. There has been too much talk about the people’s hearts,
too many missions of sentimental women. What can they give the people?
Their need, their crying need, is for the cultivation of the soul, and
it is we—set apart as God’s ministers—who are called upon, and to whom
alone rightly belongs the unspeakable privilege and duty of serving the
poor!”

Mrs. le Mentier looked gravely devotional and stifled a yawn.

Jack Hurstly looked at Gladys, who again meeting his look broke out into
a defence.

“And while the Low and the High, the Broad and the Long (if there _are_
any long, or if they aren’t all long), quarrel as to who shall help the
poor, and how they shall be dressed to do it, what are the poor going to
do? And why shouldn’t a woman, or even a man for that matter, go down
among them and teach them how to live? What kind of souls are you going
to teach in wretchedly uncultivated bodies, cousin Cyril? And if you
believe in clubs, why aren’t you thankful for their work, even if the
clergy are not asked to take Bible classes in them? As for Muriel and
her poor, she’s taught them how to smile, and I actually heard one of
them say ‘Thank you’ the other day. I don’t believe an archbishop could
do as much even with his robes on.”

Mr. Johnstone opened his mouth to answer her tirade; but Jack Hurstly,
who had been listening delightedly, clapped his hands and laughed, and
he felt that it was impossible to argue against a joke. Mrs. le Mentier
rose to her feet smiling. She felt that her dinner had not helped her
much; and she did not love Gladys.

“Let us leave the gentlemen alone, dear,” she said, “to discuss our
short-comings and their dominion. It’s an entrancing subject, I
believe—when you can have it all your own way.”

The two women floated gracefully out of the room. They were rejoined
very shortly by the men, whom it is presumed found their points of view
on “the entrancing subject” too different for prolonged discussion.
Gladys and the doctor stood out on the balcony.

The balmy June evening filled with the noises of the streets below
seemed very soothing to them, and their talk interested both immensely,
so much so that they did not hear Mrs. le Mentier preparing to sing, and
only ceased when her low, sweet voice rang out, “Life and the world and
mine ownself are changed for a dream’s sake—for a dream’s sake.”

It was a simple song, but she sung it with a quiet passion and intensity
that entirely captivated her audience. When the song was over they were
not ready with their applause, and even the doctor looked as if he had
met an ideal. Edith sang again, and they went home, all but Jack
Hurstly. “I must speak to you a minute, Jack,” his hostess had murmured
as he turned over the leaves of her music, and for the song’s sake he
stayed.

She stood in the middle of the room, her hands held loosely in front of
her, like a child’s. “Haven’t you punished me long enough—Jack?” she
asked.

“My dear Mrs. le Mentier,” he began.

“Ah!” she murmured, “Mrs. le Mentier! Mrs.—le Mentier—Jack!”

He had before wished that he had never come; there seemed now nothing
else to do but to wish it more strongly. She looked so young and
piteous, and her eyes were full of a real emotion. The only ways left
were to be weak or brutal. The last alternative would end the scene
quicker.

“It doesn’t seem much good, does it,” he finally said, “to go over all
this again?”

She smiled wistfully. “Is it all over then for you?” she asked. “Do you
know, it was silly of me, wasn’t it? I somehow thought you might still
be the same, and the three years’ penance enough for the past mistake?”
She spoke with a kind of strained slowness very pitiful to hear.

“Things have changed so!” he muttered.

“Things?” she laughed. “How a man falls back on the inanimate! Things
don’t change, my dear Jack, but women grow older and men grow
wiser—that’s all. Let me congratulate you then on your increase of
wisdom, and you will be a little sorry—for my increasing age?” He
frowned and looked at the door; she winced as if he had struck her. “You
want to go?” she said. “Well, there’s one thing, my dear Jack, for you
to remember. If you should get tired of your sweet firebrand in the
slums, ‘things have not changed,’ you will remember, won’t you? And
women don’t—so the way is still open.”

He stepped past her to the door, but he turned back to look at her (he
often turned back). She was twisting her fan in her hands and trying to
smile.

“You can always come back,” she said.

“Oh! I’m not such a brute as that!” exclaimed the man at the door.

“Oh, aren’t you?” she laughed. “You have your limits, then? I’m so glad!
And you had better go now, for I have mine too.”

When the door closed firmly after him limits seemed to dissolve. She put
the fan down carefully on the table, and she looked at her miserable
face in the glass with a vague, ulterior satisfaction, for even if one’s
heart was broken it was something of a comfort that one looked
distinctly pretty in tears.




                              CHAPTER VII


    “So long as we know not what it opens, nothing can be more
    beautiful than a key.”

THE short June days soon came to an end, and Muriel found them none too
short, for warmth can only be enjoyed by the luxurious, and her life at
present was anything but that.

If one plunged into the work and life of the people it needed strength
both of will and body to carry one through its disillusions.

There was nothing in the least exciting in the work before her—it was
merely very hard. Occasionally it was true the great opportunity would
arise, as it had done in the case of poor Liz. But next to their
extraordinary infrequency came the swiftness with which all the
greatness evaporated: their very sins were so matter-of-fact, and the
larger elements in life were taken so unpicturesquely that they seemed
shorn of their solemnity, and then strangely robbed of all “the trailing
clouds” of mystery. When a widow spoke of her dead husband as “’E made a
beautiful corpse, ’e did—yer ought to er seen ’im, miss,” the word died
on her lips, and to look at a dead baby as being “one less mouth to
feed,” jarred on all her tender notes of sympathy by the crudity of its
truth.

Muriel wrote to Gladys, who, strange to say, had come to see her alone,
not once but often, that she had never known “death could be vulgar
before;” and, though she felt very worried at the thought of shutting up
the club for three months, she confessed to herself her heart rose at
the thought of the long, easy luxury of house-parties, country days, and
even a glimpse of the sea. People, too, who said a little more—and
meant a little less—she looked forward to meeting with a positive sense
of rest. Clear black and white were rather glaring she thought, and how
life was mellowed by a little mist! Jack Hurstly had never been to see
her. She had heard of him occasionally from Gladys.

Sir Arthur wished her to come at once to Blacklands, a house in a
beautiful vicinity, not too far from the conveniences of life; and
towards the end of July, very tired and fagged, Muriel packed up her
things to go. There were many good-byes to be said, but they were all
over now with the exception of Liz—Liz and the baby. She had not seen
either of them lately. As she knocked at the door she heard the long,
fretful wail of a sick child, and then the ungracious tones of a woman’s
voice.

“Ah, it’s you, is it?” she added shrilly as Muriel entered. “I thought
you had given us the slip. No, I ain’t been comin’ to the club, nor I
don’t mean to—nor Dick neither, we ’ave ’ad enough of it, we ’ave.”

Muriel showed no surprise. She sat down and looked at the poor little
baby tossing disconsolately on its mother’s lap.

“Isn’t he well?” she asked.

“No, ’e ain’t,” said Liz more gently; “’e do take on somethink hawful in
this ’eat. ’E cries all night, and Dick won’t come nigh ’im. I’d a been
a deal better off without ’im, that’s what I’d a been. What’s the use o’
a ’usband who drinks all ’e earns? ’E don’t do _me_ no good, and I don’t
do ’im no good—we’re better apart.” She looked at Muriel viciously in
her increasing anger and fear, turning on the first object she met.

“You’re very tired, Lizzie,” she said gently, “and very hot. Have you
been sitting up all night with baby?”

“I don’t keep no nurse!”

“Poor little thing,” said Muriel, holding out her arms for it; “poor
little dear.”

“’E’ll crease your pretty skirt.” Muriel laughed.

“Now, tell me,” she said, “what do you mean about Dick. Is he really
taking to drink?”

Lizzie forgot her resentment and poured out her troubles, and so again
the woman in Muriel conquered. Yet she knew that there would be no
gratitude for what she did. Lizzie only envied her—“her pretty frock.”

She wrote to her uncle promising to go down the next day. Muriel arrived
at Blacklands to be met by the footman and a carriage. The trappings of
a luxury she had spurned seemed at present very grateful to her. They
belonged, she realized, to a class of things one does not actually need,
and yet seems to miss more than even the necessities. As she drove
comfortably through the village she was possessed by a complete set of
new faculties. All her old fund of light-hearted laughter sprang again
within her; her quick, observant eyes (which she had used more lately to
ignore than to observe) found beauties at every turn. She felt a desire
to sketch two cottages half lost in honeysuckle planted with the most
perfect effect of naturalness under the old tower of the ivy-covered
church. The churchyard seemed the most perfectly restful thing she had
ever seen. She longed to pick the hedge flowers; to let the wind blow
about her hair, with no restraining erection to keep it in place; to
walk barefoot across the cool, green fields; to hunt for birds’ nests in
the wood; to climb the hills at sunset time—in short, a passion of
longing to come near to Nature held her; to forget all the many
inventions of the clever, brutal, unscrupulous mind of man; to be once,
for however little time, one with the world as “God has made it.” She
found herself taking off her gloves, and at that moment the carriage
swept up the drive of a large old house, with an exterior too ancient to
be quarrelled with, and an interior too full of the best of modern
“improvements” to be in the least appropriate.

Gladys was standing on the steps. She held Muriel in her arms. On the
younger girl’s face there was an almost passionate welcome, and she
tried to hide her eagerness in laughter, chatting in graceful snatches
over a thousand little nothings as the two girls went to their rooms.
“Did Muriel know that there was no one there but themselves?—everybody
was coming down to-morrow. Yes, that abominable little flirt, Edith le
Mentier, and her husband with his exquisite stupidity, a cloak which
covered all his other sins—in the eyes of his wife at least. Mary
Huntly, too, not Tom—he couldn’t. These business men really worked; but
Muriel was a business woman, wasn’t she—the dear Muriel.” Muriel
declared she only worked for the sake of enjoying laziness. They went
down to tea. “That doctor, too,” Gladys continued, “with an advanced
sister with red hair, cigarette and a bull-dog—at least I think it’s a
bull-dog.”

“Of course it is,” laughed Muriel. “You must retain something, however
far you advance, and the bull-dog does that for you.”

“The doctor overworked, you know; and the sister’s devoted. Then there’s
Captain Hurstly, of course!”

“Why of course?” said Muriel quietly.

“Oh, well——” Gladys stopped, “don’t you want him?”

“No, my dear, I don’t.”

“Your uncle thought——”

“Oh, when he thinks,” laughed Muriel, lifting her shoulders.

“And there’s a friend of his——”

“My uncle’s?”

“Silly!—Captain Hurstly’s—a Sir Somebody Bruce.”

“Alec?” suggested Muriel, quietly selecting some seed-cake. “I know him
well.”

“Do you?” said Gladys, “I scarcely know him at all. What did you think
of him?” Her little air of indifference was beautiful. Muriel sighed.

“He’s like the rest,” she said wearily. “Splendid, capable,
broad-shouldered and—useless. I think if I were a man like that I
should use my talent as a good shot for personal purposes; it would seem
to me less wasteful.”

“Oh, but, Muriel, we girls we’re none of us any better. You, dearest,
you’re different. And in America I was different too. There’s so little
strain in being happy there—so little waste in pleasure. The rush of
life, its width and lack of limits, is a continual occupation; but here
there are too many women. Some of them must be old maids. It’s like the
game of musical chairs. They none of them, you see, want to be left out,
so they take the first place vacant. They have an eye on their
opportunities; they make efforts to attain, and a masterly mamma backs
them. When you come to think of it—their training, their suppression!
You can’t wonder they take their first opening. But for women to be
hunters—forgive the naked, cruel term, darling—is repulsive. Oh, if I
had a daughter I should drown her, or bring her up to something more
worth living for!”

She walked about the room putting this and that to rights. The housemaid
had done it before her, but the quick, nervous movements delivered her
of the tension she seemed under.

“Something’s very badly wrong,” thought Muriel, and aloud she suggested
the garden.

The birds were making twilight magical on the velvet lawn. They sat
breathing in the soft, rich air, heavy with the scent of summer flowers,
too utterly at peace with Nature and the restful spell she can throw at
moments over the most tortured hearts to do more than hush themselves
into silence.

Muriel was the first to speak. She remembered long afterwards how
startling her voice sounded.

“You have something to ask me?”

“Ah!—no, no.”

“Something to tell me?”

“It’s hard—oh, Muriel, dearest—dearest, it’s hard!” cried Gladys.

“Hard things are sometimes better shared,” said Muriel.

“The hardest and the dearest sometimes can’t be,” Gladys sighed. “What
can I do?” she added miserably. “It’s so old and stale, just the eternal
wrong situations Nature pulls about so, or man gets twisted into! Mary,
my cousin, you know, wants me—wants me to marry. I’m dependent on her,
you see, since father failed in the States. They had me educated in
England, and they ruined that for me—the steady setness that might have
helped me now—by the wildest three years in America. Sixteen!—and
their world without barriers, where everybody wants you to have a good
time! No, I’m not crying—not for that. It lasted three years, and after
the smash they sent me here. Mary doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m
not her sort—I’m always getting into scrapes. I seem to have got into
the nursery again, where there is nothing but corners. I’m in leading
strings to a—maid. There’s only one way out of my nursery, Mary
says—Muriel, it’s open now—but I almost think I’d rather throw myself
out of the window than make use of it.”

Muriel looked at her. “And is there no other door?” she asked gently.

“Ah! not mine—somebody else’s, and—they’ve got the key.”

“Where does it lead to?” Muriel asked.

“I—I don’t know. The most beautiful place in the world, I fancy; but if
it was a wilderness it would be the only way for me!” Timidly Gladys put
out her hands, and Muriel held them, drawing the girl closer to her. She
asked with wonderful mother-eyes the question no words could draw from
her.

“Yes,” she said at last, “people made a mistake when they thought the
world was large. It’s very small—one woman’s heart can hold the whole
of it.”

“Muriel,” the other gasped, “Muriel, do you care for him?”

“For Alec Bruce, dear child? No!” Suddenly her hands grew cold, a fear
seized her, cutting her breath short and making the silence strangely
empty. “You don’t mean him?” she asked very slowly as if she were just
learning to talk. The girl shook her head. “You mean Jack Hurstly?”
pursued Muriel gently inexorable. The girl caught her hands away and
covered her face.

“Oh, Muriel! Muriel!” she sobbed. “I don’t—I don’t care for him.”

“Neither do I,” said Muriel very coldly.

“Don’t you?—don’t you?” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining like stars
through a cloud. “Then, oh, dearest—my dearest, give me the key!”

Muriel stood quite still smiling. She felt as if she were having a
photograph taken; she must not move; she must try to look
pleasant—that’s what they call it. She was still so long that Gladys
looked up in wonder. The elder girl drew her into her arms.

“It will be sure to come out well,” she murmured. Then aloud: “Little
darling, you have always had the key—mine was only a skeleton one, and,
Gladys, I never could have used it.” The girl clung to her shivering
with joy.

“Then, after all, you do care for him a little?” Muriel said tenderly.
Gladys lifted up her eyes. They seemed much older—they were so happy
and so sure.

“I told you there was only the one way—the one way in all God’s earth
for me. I think I should have thrown myself out of the window if you
hadn’t given me the key!”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Muriel half sobbing.

Gladys smiled. “Dearest, you don’t understand—you see you don’t care
for him as I do!” she said.

“No,” repeated Muriel very slowly and carefully, “I don’t quite
understand—you see I don’t—don’t care for him. Do you know, little
dear, it’s getting rather chilly. Hadn’t we better go in and dress for
dinner?”

“Oh, to think of dinner!” laughed Gladys. “How we do mix things, don’t
we? It’s too terribly material.”

But of the two she had the better appetite. Muriel had never lied
before, and she found it very tiring.




                              CHAPTER VIII


    “A self-sacrifice that is thorough must never pause.”

“Sunday,” said Edith le Mentier, lazily swaying her parasol, “does my
religion for me. When I hear the sweet church bells chiming over the
cow-laden fields I say to myself this is a Christian country. Cows and a
church—certainly I, too, must be a Christian.”

“And your responsibility ends there?” asked Gladys, who with others of
the party was dressed to go to the little church across the fields.

“My responsibility, my dear, er—Miss Gladys—as you so deliciously call
it, is never at work in that sphere. No! I recognize it at my
dressmaker’s; I am crushed under it in shops; I frequently come face to
face with it in the choice of a cook. Beyond this,” Mrs. le Mentier put
out a dainty foot under a frilled petticoat, “beyond this I am a
rational being—that is, whenever it is possible I persuade some one
else to do my effort-making for me. Captain Hurstly, I want a footstool;
dear, delightful creatures, do go and do my praying for me; Sir Arthur,”
here she put her head graciously towards their slightly embarrassed
host, “is going to stay to keep me company.”

“Delighted, I am sure,” murmured Sir Arthur, handing Gladys’ prayer-book
which he had been carrying to the doctor, who stood grimly and
uncompromisingly silent. It was natural that after that Gladys and Dr.
Grant should walk together and Muriel find herself with Jack Hurstly.
Cynthia Grant, the doctor’s sister, had not yet returned from a visit to
the stables with Sir Alec. Muriel had not seen Jack for some time. He
was always large and masterful (in the most calmly protective meaning of
the word), but there was to-day a certain alertness and unobtrusive
eagerness in his manner that was new to her. They knew each other well
enough to be able to float off easily into commonplace chatter. It paved
the way for all the important things which lost their stiffness by being
set in a background of familiar banter.

“I’m having a holiday,” said Jack, smiling down at her oddly.

“You a holiday! You look terribly as if you needed it!” she laughed.

“I’ve been working rather hard, really,” he said.

“Fishing is over?” she asked.

“Oh, Miss Muriel, but I’ve had a harder job to tackle. I’ve been trying
to get the place at home in decent order—getting cottages built and all
that sort of thing.”

“You were always so practical,” she murmured.

“Because, you see, the place has been a little weedy lately, and as I am
to be off again soon I wanted to leave it in order before I went.”

“Hunting big game?” she suggested indifferently.

“Well—yes, rather. You see there’s been a little scrapping in India on
the frontier, and—well, I thought it would be rather jolly to have a
shot at the little beggars myself. You see the regiment being at
Aldershot a fellow hasn’t got much to do, and so I have
joined—temporarily, of course—a batch of men who are going out in
September. Do you wish me luck?”

“Your occupations,” said Muriel coldly, “always seem to me a little
brutal.” Then she glanced more kindly at him.

He was disconsolately grumbling, “Oh, I say now!” and cutting the heads
off the nettles with his stick. They were nearing the church.

“Oh, I hope, Jack,” she used the name with her old deliberate frankness,
looking him in the eyes, steadily and kindly, “that you will have the
best of luck. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you set to work
again, and make something of all that’s in you—all I know that’s in
you.”

He beamed with pleasure, though he was still a little puzzled at her
former sharpness. “It’s awfully good of you, Miss Muriel,” he said,
opening the gate; “and you—you must know that if I am worth anything at
all it’s all owing to you. And now that you say you believe in me,” he
drew a long breath, “I think I could do anything—anything in the world
to show you you’re not mistaken.”

Muriel said nothing. When they reached the porch she turned to him, and
not looking at him said slowly, “I am quite sure I am not mistaken,
Jack.”

The church was cold and dark after the bright sunshine in the fields. In
the church she remembered Gladys, and forgot to listen to the sermon.
She and the doctor walked back together and quarrelled all the way.

It was that still, impossible hour of Sunday afternoon when the
drowsiness of after lunch and the distance of five-o’clock tea combine
to make inaction of one sort or another absolutely essential. Sir Arthur
Dallerton, however, was uncomfortably wide awake. His protracted
conversation with his charming guest contributed not a little to the
unnatural keenness of his feelings, and with Sir Arthur Dallerton to
feel keenly was to be in more or less of a bad temper. He saw Muriel out
of his smoking-room window, and beckoned to her to come in.

“What are you doing, Muriel,” he asked severely, “at this time of the
afternoon?”

“Everybody is going out on the river after tea, so I was seeing about
the boats,” she said.

“That, Muriel, is the business of the gardener.”

“I like minding the gardener’s business,” said Muriel smiling.

“My dear,” said her uncle gravely, “If you would leave the gardener’s
business alone, and attend a little more to your own, I should be better
pleased.”

“What do you mean, uncle?” the girl asked, sitting down opposite him
with her wide-open, unembarrassed eyes.

“Of course I know that it makes no difference to you what I wish—that I
take for granted to begin with.”

She moved her head impatiently; she hated the way he had of opening any
discussion with injured personalities. He waited for a protest, and not
hearing one he continued with increased vehemence.

“You are now twenty-seven. You have had plenty of opportunities to
settle down in life. I have never attempted to force your hand——” A
look in the girl’s eyes suggested the prudence of this course. “I must
say I have been uncommonly generous in overlooking your extraordinary
schemes, but I never dreamed they excluded marriage. May I ask,
Muriel—I think I have a right to know—if all my hopes are to be in
vain simply through the obstinacy of an untrained, selfish girl? Do you,
Muriel—I insist upon knowing this—intend to marry?”

“I am sorry you insist, uncle,” said Muriel very quietly, though two
bright spots of angry color burned in her cheeks, “because I am afraid I
can give you no satisfactory answer to your hopes. It is very
improbable—if you really wish to know—that I shall ever marry.”

“What about Jack Hurstly?”

“I do not know to what you refer.”

“I thought your objection to him was that he didn’t stick to his
profession. He’s sticking to it fast enough now.” Muriel winced. “And,”
he continued with more hope of success, “he’ll probably get potted by a
native, and then perhaps you’ll be satisfied. You women who talk the
most about cruelty are always the ones to send us poor devils to our
graves.”

“I have never had any objection to Jack Hurstly, and I have none now,
but I certainly am not going to marry him. If he gets killed in India,
as you thoughtfully suggested, it will perhaps prove to you that he is
beyond your matrimonial schemes. I do not believe anything else would,”
said Muriel, now thoroughly aroused. She looked lovely when she was
angry: the gray eyes blazed and widened, the firm chin became
inexorable, and her nostrils dilated like a spirited horse. Her uncle,
who had an eye for beauty, appreciated her appearance, but was too vexed
to remark on it.

“Gad! you have the temper of a devil!” he grumbled in reluctant
admiration; “but if you won’t have Jack Hurstly, you won’t. And on the
whole you might do better. What I want you thoroughly to understand is
I’ll have no monkey business with that young doctor. I didn’t ask him
down here, or you either, for any such purpose. If you had liked Jack
Hurstly, well and good. I wouldn’t have opposed the match. He’s got
blood, and he’s got money, and I have nothing against him. But I have
set my heart on one thing if you won’t have him.” He stopped a moment.
“Muriel,” he said, “you know my heart is weak, and it’s very bad for me
to be opposed.”

Muriel smiled; the scene lost its strain; the gay voices of idlers on
the lawn came in through the windows with the after-dinner grace of the
“wise thrushes” in the shrubbery. They all sounded so restful and
contented. But she—must she battle till her life’s end? Tears of
self-pity rose to her eyes. Her uncle supposed them to be signs of
softening grace.

“My child,” he said, “Sir Alec Bruce is a good man, and he loves you.”

“He has a good income and a good family,” suggested the girl
maliciously.

Sir Arthur waved them aside grandly. “I have set my heart upon the
match,” said; “my life is risked by a disappointment.”

Muriel crushed her hands together nervously. “And what about my life?”
she said at last. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter,” and ignoring her
uncle’s wrathful exclamation she stepped out of the French windows and
joined the idlers on the lawn. Sir Arthur waited a few moments for a
heart attack to come on, but as nothing happened he also went into the
garden. But a few moments had dissipated the group, and only Cynthia
Grant remained with a bull-dog and a cigarette. She looked extremely
unsympathetic, and grumbling under his breath something far from
complimentary about advanced young women he returned to the house. A
moment later Dr. Grant joined his sister on the lawn. The bull-dog,
appropriately named “Grip,” looked wistfully from one to the other. He
knew it was impossible to be at the feet of both at the same time, and
so with chivalrous courtesy he curled himself up once more by his
mistress’s side and listened with heavily absorbed eyes to the following
conversation.

“Do you really mean to do it?” asked Cynthia curtly.

“If I hadn’t, why should I have come here?” replied her brother, giving
short puffs at his pipe. “You know I feel awfully out of this sort of
thing—an abominably lazy lot.” Grip, who with the magnificent patience
of the strong had long been putting up with an inquisitive and
infuriating fly, now relieved his feelings with a successful snap.

Cynthia laughed bitterly. “You won’t get her so easily as that,” she
said by way of illustration. “And why should I want you to? Has it never
occurred to you, my dear brother, that I might prefer you better
unmarried. It’s a slackening sort of thing at best for a man, and we’ve
always roughed it together, haven’t we, Geoff? Pretty cosily, too, I
think.”

“You might get married yourself,” he said gloomily. The girl
suggestively lit a cigarette.

“I don’t think so, Geoff,” she said with a queer little laugh. “Has it
never occurred to you that I’m thirty, and you’ve never been
particularly keen on it before?”

“I’m not now—but I think it’s a good thing for a girl.”

“You mean for a man, don’t you?” He looked at her quietly.

“You’re not like yourself to-day, Sis,” he said gently. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re trying to marry Muriel Dallerton. She’s in love with Jack
Hurstly, whom she’s trying to marry to that emotional little Gladys
thing. Meanwhile, unless they are all very careful, Edith le Mentier
means to play her own game with them all.”

“How do you know Miss Dallerton’s in love with Hurstly?” asked the
doctor, savagely ignoring the rest of the remarks. She turned on him
with mocking eyes.

“She is interested in his conversation,” she said, and they both burst
out laughing. Grip placed his head massively on her hands and looked
both question and reproach at her. “His business, Grip,” she said, “is
to get perfectly rested, not to tread on lazy people’s corns, and to see
as much as possible of the right young lady. As for me, Grip”—she
dropped some inconveniently heated ashes on his pink nose, which made
him shake his head and blink severely like a shocked old lady—“where do
I come in? Well, I have my own little game to play. And here’s dear
Edith in a fresh pink gown. Let’s go and meet her—she’s so fond of us
both. And you——” she looked back with a whimsical tenderness at her
brother, “just go down to the river and find your young lady, only for
Heaven’s sake don’t glare at her like that!”




                               CHAPTER IX


    “It is sometimes possible to say ‘No,’ but hard to live up to
    it.”

MURIEL had not in the least intended to find herself alone with Jack
Hurstly in a canoe. It all happened so naturally that protests and
excuses were out of the question. She looked rather wistfully at Gladys
in a larger boat, who was talking with nervous gaiety to Alec Bruce,
while Mary Huntly in the stern looked on with serene approval. Gladys
would not look at her friend, and something in the girl’s manner and
carriage seemed to denote an intense displeasure, which, after her
confidence to Muriel, was not on the whole incomprehensible. Muriel
sighed hopelessly. Circumstances, she thought, were against her, and
Jack was with her; she might be stronger than the circumstances, but she
had begun to feel that she was not as strong as Jack.

“I really have changed my life a bit,” he went on, as if continuing
their last conversation. “Do you know when you went to Stepney, and I
got to know about all you were doing—how you gave those girls such a
good time and helped them in their homes, and all that, you know—it
made me feel what a cheap sort of thing the life of the fellows about
town is, and how, after all, there isn’t so very much in just having a
good time if there’s nothing else besides or beyond it. I hope you won’t
think I’m talking awful rot?” he interrupted himself nervously. She
shook her head; she found it difficult to speak; her hand dipped in the
water seemed to her a sort of illustration of how impossible it was to
grasp her treasure even while it surrounded her. They were singing down
the stream the air of a new opera, and that, and the trailing branches
overhead, would have made a wonder of beauty if she had not loved
Gladys. “Sacrifices lasted too long,” she thought.

“And so,” he continued, watching her with eager, earnest eyes as he
talked, “while I was waiting for leave to go out to India I started a
sort of club at home—among the tenants, you know. Nothing much of a
place—only games and a room where the men can go and smoke and read
their papers in the mornings. And it struck me that Miss Gladys’
cousin—am I boring you?”

“No, Jack—Gladys’ cousin?”

“That Parson Cyril Johnstone,” he explained, “was really an awfully good
sort, and might help me a bit with the men—on his own line, you know.
And as the vicar wanted a curate, it seemed to fit in rather decently. I
had no idea how awfully interesting that kind of thing could be. Why,
now I know the men, and drop in to play a game of billiards with them,
you couldn’t believe how jolly they are with me; and many of them more
decent, wholesome kind of men than one’s own sort. I should so much like
to show you the place, Muriel, and ask your advice about it. I’m afraid
I’m an awfully poor hand at managing that kind of thing.”

“Mr. Cyril Johnstone knows more about men’s clubs than I do!” she
replied with half-averted head. Jack smiled. He was not used to Muriel
in this mood; it was more like other women whom he had been used to.

“You see,” he said, “Cyril Johnstone is all very well in his way, but an
unecclesiastical eye might be able to suggest more.”

“I feel quite sure,” said Muriel firmly, “that my eyes will be able to
suggest nothing.”

“They must have changed then a good deal in the last few minutes,” said
Jack coolly; “they have always suggested plenty to me.” Muriel looked up
desperately, and saw Dr. Grant on the bank.

“Row to the shore, please, Jack,” she said, “there is room for the
doctor.” Jack set his lips together firmly. He had no intention of
rowing to the shore for any such purpose.

“Sorry,” he said; “I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

“I must insist,” she replied coldly.

“Please don’t, for I hate to disobey your wishes,” he pleaded.

“You overlook the alternative,” cried Muriel.

“Muriel,” he said, “you don’t really mean it—I know you don’t wish it!”
He knew this would have been fatal with another woman, but he counted on
her sincerity. She looked from him to the shore, and back again to the
softly shaded water.

“I must ask you to do it just the same,” she said finally. He turned the
boat into mid-stream, and they floated awhile in silence.

“It is the first time I have ever refused to do what you wanted,” he
said at last, drawing a deep breath.

“It is the last time I shall ever give you an opportunity,” said Muriel
coldly. But if she had hoped to prevent further words her hope was in
vain.

“You told me once that you cared for me, Muriel, but that I wasn’t worth
marrying. I have tried to make myself a bit more so, and now you are not
going to tell me, are you, that you have changed your mind?” She faced
him steadily.

“I can’t marry you,” she said. “Please don’t ask me questions, Jack.”

“But I must,” he said frowning. “Why can’t you marry me?” She was
silent. “You don’t love me?”

“Perhaps I never did.”

“Nonsense, dear, you’re not that sort. Tell me the truth—you do love
me?” Muriel turned in exasperation.

“Oh, yes, then, if you _will_ have it. I _do_ love you, but I’m not now
or at any other time ever going to marry you!”

They had forgotten the other boat and the river. A burst of merry
laughter awoke them to the fact that they had drifted on a snag, and
that the rest of the party had been watching them for the last few
minutes from the opposite bank.

It was the doctor after all who rowed out to their assistance and took
Muriel home after tea across the fields. Muriel was desperate. Jack had
found means to say to her that he did not in the least believe her, and
that he was not going to give her up. Gladys had found means of very
pointedly, though with exquisite intangibility, expressing a state of
mind anything but pleasant to her friend. The constant flow of bright,
good-natured chaff, the utterly superficial, pleasant brightness of the
boating party, gave Muriel a feeling of weariness and age. She felt glad
to be with the doctor. He at least left her alone and seemed contented
to talk or to be silent in an easy, effortless way. Perhaps it was
because in his profession a man “learns to do his watching without its
showing pain.” He talked chiefly about his sister, and when they got
home advised her in an off-hand manner “to go and lie down.”

“But I am not tired,” she cried, half vexed.

“No,” he replied soothingly; “still you know it’s a warm afternoon; you
would find it restful.” Muriel smiled submissively.

“To tell the truth,” she said, “I think perhaps I am a bit tired,” and
she went upstairs.

An hour afterwards there came a soft knock at the door and Cynthia Grant
came in.

“They told me you had a headache,” she said apologetically, “and I came
to see if I could do anything for you.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Muriel gratefully; “but do come and sit
down. My headache was only an excuse for laziness, and it would do it
good to be talked to.”

Cynthia sat down near the sofa, and after a little conversation on
general subjects, began in abrupt, curt tones to tell Muriel the story
of her life.

Why she told it, it would be impossible to tell, except that she wished
to approach nearer to the girl who had won her brother’s love, and that
such a confidence was the most painful sacrifice it was in her power to
make. It was a strange story of how she and her brother had studied
together side by side for their degree; of how she had advanced even
farther than he, till at length, finding she was outstripping him, in
one magnificent burst of sacrifice she had thrown the whole thing up;
but how the fascination of her work proved almost too much for her, till
in desperation she left her brother altogether, and went to the Paris
studios to study art. Here she paused awhile as if reluctant to speak
further. “You don’t know,” she said, “what it was to have lived as I
did, almost as a man among men. It was only we two—my brother and
I—against the world, you know, and it’s a hard world. After I left
him—I’m not going to tell you the whole story—there was a man who was
a very fine fellow, an Englishman and an artist, and he fell in love
with me before he quite knew—well, all the incidents of my life. Paris
is rather a place for incidents, you know. He wanted to marry me. But,
of course, I told him—and, I daresay, it wasn’t an ideal story. At any
rate he told me he could not make me his wife, and I care far too much
for him to be satisfied with anything else. So I went back to my
brother, and I have been with him ever since. I help him with his cases,
and, as his practice is rather large, and contains a good many poor
people, I find enough to do. Are you horribly shocked, Miss Dallerton?”

“Have you given up your art?” said Muriel. The other girl went to the
window. She laughed nervously.

“Art?” she said. “I never look at a picture if I can help it.”

“And does your brother know?”

“Everything; but it has made no difference.”

“I wonder why you told me?” said Muriel thoughtfully. Cynthia smiled.

“You look as if people were in the habit of telling you things.
Besides—I don’t know—it seemed to me as if you ought to know the truth
if we were to be friends.”

“I hope we shall be,” said Muriel softly—“I hope very much we shall
be.”

“I think,” said Cynthia as she went to the door, “that if I had known
you, it might have been different.”

Muriel puzzled thoughtfully awhile over the rather grim pair she had
come into contact with. She had known very little of that great wide
world of professional life. Society and the slums, though they were a
great contrast, were not, she thought, so great a mystery. But though
Muriel was distinctly broad-minded for a woman, it was impossible for
her just at present to absorb herself in abstract problems when her own
life presented such pressing personal ones. Her first misery at Gladys’
jealousy and misunderstanding seemed gone. To her surprise she had begun
to feel almost a sense of relief. If she didn’t understand, it was plain
there was not so very much to worry about. If one looks for too many
things in one place, the few things one finds lose their significance.
It is not one’s love so much that gets dulled as one’s sense of
importance. The halo of expectation fails; next time one’s eagerness
goes with slower feet, and is positively astonished if it ever gets met
at all. So that now Muriel felt she had simply over-estimated both her
friends’ characters and affection, and that nothing therefore remained
but to clearly make Gladys see she did not intend to marry Jack Hurstly.
Her responsibility ended there she told herself, after that she need not
try to keep up this very unequal friendship any more. As for Cynthia
Grant, she was a woman and old enough to know what to take for granted,
and how not to be exacting.




                               CHAPTER X


        “O Heart! O blood that freezes! blood that burns!
        Earth’s returns for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin:
        Shut them in; with their triumphs and the glories and the rest—
        Love is best!”
                                                —ROBERT BROWNING.

VERY firm and self-reliant natures make sometimes the natural mistake of
under-estimating the power of passion. Their full self-control and
constant watchfulness ignore the possibility of the strange touch of
sudden lawlessness—the betrayal of the blood. That one could be one
moment standing reason-bound, content, a soul at peace, and in another
swept over the verge of thought into a sea of feeling, was absurd to
Muriel. Yet the swift flash takes place: the world, like a curtain,
rolls up, and all the conventions, the safeguards, the stationary
landscapes, disappear! It was such a moment which took possession of her
the very night that she had decided to give her lover to another woman.
The evening had passed pleasantly, and the still glory of the summer
night drew the party out into the dusk of the garden. Muriel slipped
away from the rest and wandered into a little wilderness some distance
from the house, wondering how best to carry out her plans, when suddenly
all the blood in her body rushed to her heart, for there beside her
stood the man she loved. It had been possible for her in the calm of
loneliness and heartache to dispose of Jack, but now—the moon’s gold
and silver gliding through the clouds; the thrushes calling heart to
heart their breathless rapture in a liquid continuity of song; all the
passion and the pain rushing into beauty, thrilled and throbbing with
the heart of night—it was difficult to resist now. And the stars, how
they shone down on love, each one a light struck from the royal conquest
of their queen, the moon! They were enwrapped in that dream so boundless
and so limited which for one breathless moment holds all the world can
teach, and then scatters and breaks into the hundred lesser lights of
life. A sigh broke the charm, and Muriel, wondering, withdrew herself
from his arms, abashed and yet elated at her defeat, so much more sweet
than any of the triumphs life had held for her.

“Now,” said Jack, smiling down at her, “are you going to tell me that
you don’t care?”

“I am afraid,” said Muriel, “that it would not be very convincing if I
did. It seems to me,” she added breathlessly, “as if before I had been
living only on the outskirts of life. I did not know it was like that!”
She looked at him wistfully, and asked humbly, “Is it quite right, Jack,
do you think?”

“What, my dearest?”

“To forget everything; to see nothing but the world a background, and
that one great avowal drowning all the rest?”

“I think it must be,” said Jack. “Just because it’s so powerful it must
be meant to be good—in itself, you know—only some of us poor chaps
don’t know how to use it.”

Muriel shivered a little; there was dampness in the air; the trees
seemed to quiver. She remembered Liz and the squalid scenes where the
power which meant heaven to her had meant darkness and life-long misery
to the other woman. Had she gained the world only to lose it? Jack
wrapped her shawl tenderly over her shoulders.

“You must go in, little woman,” he said practically. “Now you’re mine
you shan’t run any risks, not even summer ones. Shall I speak to your
uncle?” he asked her as they neared the little artificial lights of the
house.

“Not yet,” she whispered hoarsely, with a terrible fear in her eyes.
Jack followed her glance. It rested on a young girl’s face. Gladys was
standing close at the French window looking out into the
night—desperate, wild, despairing.

“There’s something wrong with the child,” Muriel said quick to
Jack—“bad news from home, I think,” for even at that moment she knew
she must keep the other woman’s secret. “Let me go to her,
darling—good-night! It’s awful, isn’t it,” she said, “to be so selfish
and so happy!”

She caught her hand from him, hurrying into the house. “It’s wicked,
it’s wicked,” she murmured, “to be happy at all.”

Gladys called out over the approaching figure, “There is a letter for
Captain Hurstly!” He came unwillingly forward into the light about the
window. Muriel stood now with her hand in the girl’s looking back at
him. Gladys herself seemed unaware of the touch. She was smiling
painfully; the “On Her Majesty’s Service” seemed to demand attention.

Jack opened it, read it, glanced for a moment to Muriel, and placed it
in his pocket.

“What does it say?” said Gladys, and Jack, so absorbed by its purpose
and the strangeness of the scene, never knew till afterwards that it was
not Muriel who had spoken. He tried to make light of it.

“Oh, I’m called off sooner than I expected.”

“When?” They both spoke at once this time. Again he only heard Muriel.

“The fact is—well, to-night,” he owned unsteadily. Gladys stepped
quickly forward; a little quivering light shone in her eyes; she caught
her breath and half unconsciously held out her hands.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Captain Hurstly!” she cried; “and I wish you—I wish
you the very best luck in the world.” He looked towards Muriel, but she
was gone. He met the girl’s eyes again. His own felt unaccountably
misty. Muriel was gone, and this little thing was wishing him the very
best luck in the world. He pressed her hands gratefully.

“Thank you, thank you awfully,” he murmured. “I think I’ve got it
to-night——”

“Oh, where’s that tiresome Jack Hurstly?” cried a voice from the window.
“I left him my fan to take care of, and——”

“I’ve got it here, Mrs. le Mentier,” cried Jack hastily, stepping
through the low French window with the missing fan in his hand.

When he drove off an hour later to catch the midnight train it was Edith
le Mentier who, side by side with Muriel, stood at the door to see him
off. Looking back he saw that it was with her he had left “the very best
luck in the world.” He had quite forgotten all about Gladys. From her
window she watched him go on fire with love and happiness. His last
words rang in her ears. She never doubted that they were meant for her.
He had no time to say more then; but when he came back, not Muriel in
all her beauty, nor any other woman, nor any other thing could ever come
between them again she thought. And he would come back! The moonlight
and the soft fragrance of the dusky night, what were they any of them
but the earth’s pledges to her that her heaven should come again to meet
that other heaven in her heart?

“I have broken my fan,” said Edith le Mentier to Muriel as they went up
to bed. “So stupid of me, wasn’t it; but at any rate I was not going to
let Captain Hurstly have another one.” Muriel looked straight before
her.

“Another one, Edith?” she repeated.

“Yes, stupid, didn’t you know men were in the habit of keeping people’s
fans when they were—well, rather—don’t you know?”

“I am afraid I’m rather dense—good-night,” said Muriel wearily. She
stopped outside Gladys’ door, but there was no light or sound. “She’s
asleep,” she thought, “I won’t disturb her,” and went on to her own
room. It seemed rather strange to her that anybody could sleep.




                               CHAPTER XI


              “My Faith?—
        Which Religion I profess?—
          None of which I mention make.
        Wherefore so? And can’t you guess?—
          For Religion’s sake.”
                     —GEORGE MACDONALD.

THE morning brought counsel to Muriel. She would say nothing. Jack would
not return for a year or two, and in the meantime Gladys’ passionate
little heart might have turned elsewhere, or in any case the quick pain
of certainty be less. For herself she turned her eager mind anew to the
work before her. Love acted as a spur upon the discipline of her life;
it made the dark places plainer, and lit up with light and hope the
saddest mysteries. She was one of those few souls in whom experiences
can never conflict or stand in opposition to each other. She knit them
link by link into a chain binding her closer and higher towards her
ideals. She never thought much about her difficulties until she came up
to them, but when she once faced them they helped her afterwards. Edith
le Mentier’s delicate insinuation she had felt a passing disgust at, and
had straightway brushed aside. Jealousy and suspicion need darkness and
a closed-up room; all Muriel’s rooms were open to the sky and bright
with sunshine. Nevertheless when she looked at Edith le Mentier she felt
an uneasiness she could not account for.

The party broke up the next morning. The doctor and his sister returned
to town, while the others went to various other country houses, Muriel
and her uncle going to Scotland for the remainder of her holiday. She
was impatient to go back to her work, and the month passed in making
arrangements and re-arrangements all involving voluminous
correspondence. She wrote to Cyril Johnstone about Captain Hurstly’s
club work, and as it was under parochial guidance, and various ritual
stipulations of the young man’s were agreed to by the open-minded,
slightly lax old vicar, he was soon settled in deeply earnest and
energetic work such as the slow old parish had never seen before. Yet,
as Muriel soon saw, the example of his stern habits and indefatigable
labor bore much fruit of admiration and respect, though scarcely that
imitation which the zealous young priest expected the doctrines he would
have died for to bring forth. He was not satisfied with Muriel’s
generous explanation. “It’s your doctrines that have made you, and if
the people accept you, surely they are on the way to accept the
doctrines?” She returned a week earlier than her uncle wished her to, to
encourage Jack’s “Parson,” though she wrote to Jack that “your young
priest doesn’t at all approve of me. He considers me a shallow society
woman with a club craze, and shakes his head over my unaccountable
friendship with you. He gave me splendid advice the other day, and I’m
afraid I lost my temper with him, but the gravity with which he regarded
me as he said, ‘My dear young lady, I am not speaking to you as a mere
man, but from my priestly office,’ restored my sense of humor. . . . But
no, Jack, I have a reason for wishing our engagement private. If it were
any feeling of my own I would tell you, as it is you must take it on
trust as you do me. Did you ever know Mrs. le Mentier very well?”

Muriel wrote the last sentence and then crossed it out. He might
think—— Besides, it was so absurd. She felt angry with herself for
having crossed it out—it was so unimportant. She was surprised that
night by a letter from Cynthia Grant, who had passed out of her mind
with the press of duty and pleasure and life. Now, however, she awoke to
a vigorous interest.

    “You will be surprised at what I am going to ask,” the letter
    ran, “but I hope that won’t shake you into the negative attitude
    that it does some people. I’m not going to tell you that I have
    any ‘religious views’ (and you will excuse me if I say that with
    most people they are little more—and distant views at that),
    because I haven’t; only it happens to please me to work, and I
    like you, consequently if you see any opening for a capable
    woman doctor who can give free ‘instruction’ to young women and
    practical help as well, let me know and I’ll come to you. My
    brother approves of my plan, and is going to get an assistant.

                                                     “Yours,
                                                “CYNTHIA GRANT, M.D.

    “_P.S._—I am particularly anxious for interesting tumors.”

Muriel thought for a moment, then laughed, and wired back: “Please come,
plenty of interesting tumors.”

It was the first day of October before the two women settled to work.
Life opened before them full, arduous, engrossing. Around them in
teeming factories and crowded dust-yards lived the people into whose
lives their own brought knowledge, health, horizon. Year after year
these sordid lives go on, working until dead-tired they stumble home and
stand an hour or two in the close streets full of the dangers and
temptations of the city; the holidays’ rough carnivals of over-feeding
and drinking. Death, disease and sin the only breaks in the grim
monotony of passing years, and now slowly and gradually the change was
taking place. From their work the young people streamed into the clubs,
and were taught little by little lessons of life, courtesy,
truthfulness, honesty; and these not by confronting them with strange
virtues, but in developing their own, generosity, kindliness and the
marvellous quality of “straightness,” the shield of so many of the poor.
Men found billiards and other games, even cards, though gambling was not
allowed; they could pass their evenings in social good fellowship
without spending their wages or staggering home drunk. Their wives, too,
in another part were not less well cared for, and their sons and
daughters, kept out of the streets four or five nights out of the seven,
were all the more inclined to stay at home on the other two. More than
all this, living among them and sharing all they suffered was a “lidy,”
who if she had chosen need never have done a stroke of work, or given a
thought to anything but pleasure and ease and beauty. Though some of the
more hardened jeered at her for her sacrifice, the greater part were
drawn in generous animation and gratitude into the work, and even those
who jeered left her alone and would have fought any who tried to do her
an injury.

“You only touch the fringe,” Cynthia said to her one day. “So what’s the
use? When you die it will all sink back again!”

“Do you know,” said Muriel smiling, “I believe there is healing in the
very hem of His garment, and that all these children in whom we start a
larger life will in time permeate the apathetic multitude. As for
ourselves, don’t doubt that when we die the work will not go on. Truly I
should be very despairing if I dreamed that such tremendous purposes
rested on my shoulders. We just fit in here, that’s all, and make the
room larger for the next comer!”

“Humph!” said Cynthia dryly; “after I’d made the room larger, I should
prefer sitting in it myself.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Muriel; “you would go on to make an addition to the
house!”

“My brother comes here to-night,” Cynthia stated abruptly. “He’s going
to bring a magic lantern for the men, and show them some of his Chinese
slides.”

“I’m so glad,” said Muriel gratefully.

“Do you like him?” Cynthia asked.

“Like your brother? Of course, very much.”

“So little as that?” cried Cynthia laughing wistfully. “Oh, Muriel,
Muriel!” Muriel colored and frowned. It was a subject that visibly
annoyed her, and which she tried to ignore. Dr. Grant had been very kind
to the club. She had tried to believe he was interested in the work; it
was a little baffling to find it hinted that it might be the worker.
Cynthia watched her carefully. “Is there nothing besides the work?” she
thought to herself. She introduced the subject of a meal, and Muriel
laughingly discovered she had forgotten her lunch.

“You were writing letters at lunch time, weren’t you?” suggested
Cynthia.




                              CHAPTER XII


                “Mercy every way
        Is infinite—and who can say?”

THERE was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street
corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is
constantly drawing attention to the inconveniences of one’s clothing.
The clouds were the dull brown of approaching rain, drifting in rags
across the chilly sky. Cynthia Grant, who had been all the night before
and half the day through fighting over the undesirable life of a mother
and child, felt almost aggrieved that she had saved them both. “What did
I want to do it for? The whole system’s rotten! Why should it be
considered mercy to prolong the agony instead of cutting it short? I
don’t care for the woman; I hate the child; and, even if I liked them
both, I don’t think their lives worth living. Why that drunken brute of
a husband, who is always throwing chairs at the poor thing, should say
‘Thank God!’ when I told him she’d live is a puzzle; he could easily
have got some one fresh to throw chairs at, and the brat is only one
mouth more to feed! I feel far more sympathy for that woman with ten
children who told me she had had ‘no churchyard luck’.” She chuckled
grimly to herself, and looked with a tolerant, amused gaze at the narrow
alley, with its children at play in the gutters, wizened and old, with
sharp, cruel, degraded little faces, slatternly women at doors, and
skulking forms, that were scarcely human, lurking in corners and in the
wretched rooms that were called “living,” a phrase more applicable to
the vermin that inhabited them than the half-human creatures that
sprawled there. It was a bad alley, and the tough knotted stick in
Cynthia’s hand did not look out of place.

“Yes,” she thought to herself, “Muriel must be impelled by some pretty
desperate attraction to give up her life to this sort of thing. It will
make her old before her time. And as for the people here, her influence
will probably cease as most influence does with her presence, and
trickle off them as easily as water off a duck’s back. As for me, I
suppose I might as well be _here_ as anywhere else—now.”

She looked at the sky and wondered what poets saw in it. It suggested to
her nothing but the need of a broom. She was tired out when she reached
rooms over the club, and glad of the tea Muriel had prepared for her.

Muriel could not stay, for it was the time when her girls came out of
the factory, and she must be ready to meet them. She was in one of her
merriest and brightest moods. The gloom of the outside world could not
touch her; even the sordid misery of the streets she had visited that
afternoon only seemed to her vistas of future sunshine. She believed in
no sympathy that stopped at sorrow; but it was because she believed so
deeply in the reality of sorrow that she knew the certainty of joy.

“What makes you so happy?” said Cynthia wistfully; “I see nothing to
cause it.” Muriel wrinkled her eyebrows as she always did when puzzled.
Geoff called it her “frowning for a vision,” and compared it to a
sailor’s whistling for a wind. At last the partial vision came.

“I don’t see why it should be so difficult to be happy,” she said. “All
that one hasn’t got is bound to come some day; all that one truly _has_
will never go. And when one is quite sure of that oneself, it is
beautiful to be able to encourage one’s bit of the world to go on
waiting for _their_ bright side. And how good and bright and dear things
really are if we only come to look through them, and don’t make
_culs-de-sac_ of sorrows. If love is the key of the world, joy is the
hand that turns it, I feel sure. To make a creed of joy and a fact of
love is to win half the battles, and be ready to fight the other half.
But you know all this just as well as I do, and practise it far
better—so what’s the use of talking? Simple things become mysteries
directly you try to explain them. Mind you rest and sleep. I’ll be back
for supper,” and she disappeared. It grew dark in the room afterwards.




                              CHAPTER XIII


    “This world’s judgment cries ‘Consequences,’ and leaves it to a
    higher court to take account of Aims.”

IT was decided that one more effort should be made to rescue Muriel
Dallerton.

Mary Huntly, persuaded by her husband, wrote asking her for two days
early in the season.

Cynthia peremptorily ordered her to go, and she went.

The weather in the opening charm of June would to most people have been
better spent in the country; only London lovers felt the greater charm
of the full, bright season set in the green freshness of the Park.

There was a ball the first night, and Muriel danced in a dream of
delight at the old easy ways, and all the beauties of sight and sound
and sense. Gladys was away on a visit, so the return to civilization was
marked by no jar of severed friendship.

A day spent on the river with one of those groups, where each one knows
his neighbor well enough for associations to make past pleasures present
ones, and yet not too deeply to be able to play lightly on the surface
of personalities, made Muriel thirsty for more. It is true that there
were strained relationships even there, though hidden with a cultivated
ease; but she refused to see them, and let herself be soothed into a
fairyland of fancies.

Mary had arranged as a climax a tea-party in the gardens.

“Of course,” she said apologetically, “one knows they aren’t private,
but it’s the best place in the world to wander, if only on that account.
Wandering I always think the chief charm of tea out-of-doors; it’s a
compensation for one’s hair being blown about and the butter melting.”

“It all depends on having the right person to wander with,” suggested
her companion.

“Well, but what are all our social efforts but an attempt to find the
right person—and then wander?” laughed Mrs. Huntly. “It’s the magic
lottery that makes London seasons, and keeps up house-parties——”

“And finally limits one to a wedding ring,” interrupted one of the
group.

“Or charms one away from the limits!” ventured a daring young man to
Muriel. She felt vaguely uncomfortable, these children of light played
so near the brink of things.

“I don’t think I quite know what you mean,” she said gravely.

“He doesn’t mean anything,” said Mary Huntly shortly. The young man
turned to someone with whom he needn’t explain. Muriel wondered whether
she would enjoy wandering in the gardens. “At any rate I shall not have
the right person,” she thought.

When the afternoon came the overpowering youthfulness of spring danced
in her veins, and made it easy for the unpleasant to pass from her mind.
She was with a little group who had not yet separated to wander, when
she saw a woman whom she had known crossing the grass at a little
distance from where they sat.

“Why, there is Sally Covering,” she cried. “It seems years since I have
seen her!” There was a moment’s awkward silence. Muriel looked in
astonishment from one to the other. They all began to talk in the way of
people who wish to ignore an impossible moment. Alec Bruce, who was one
of the party, asked her an irrelevant question, but she brushed it
aside.

“I am going to speak to her,” she said.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Alec. They spoke rapidly, and Muriel
felt the color rush to her face. She felt annoyed with herself for
speaking at all; but now that she had spoken she would not be a coward,
so she walked the intervening space, and came up with the woman.

“Mrs. Covering! you haven’t forgotten me?” she cried. The woman started
at the sound of her name, and turned sharply. She was painted more than
a little, and inartistically. She gave a queer little laugh as she took
Muriel’s outstretched hand.

“Dear me, no!” she said; “I am not the one who forgets, Miss Dallerton.”
Muriel held her hand and looked into her eyes.

“I suppose you will think me very rude to stop you like this!” she said;
“but I should like so much to talk to you a few moments, if you are not
engaged.”

Mrs. Covering withdrew her hand. She was embarrassed, puzzled, and a
trifle defiant.

“I cannot think what you wish to say to me, Miss Dallerton,” she
answered; “but I am quite at your disposal for the next few minutes.”

They walked together in silence for a moment, Muriel searching for the
right word. She remembered the woman’s story now. She had left her
husband, and made what the set she lived in called the “dreadful break.”
Muriel could not quite remember with whom; but people did not talk to
her much about that kind of thing, and she had only heard the outlines
of the story. What Muriel finally did say was not in the least what Mrs.
Covering expected.

“You have never been to see me,” she said, “in my new home.”

“Oh! I don’t see people now,” said Mrs. Covering, with some bitterness;
“I have got out of the habit.”

“Mrs. Covering,” said Muriel, “I should like to be able to contradict a
report about you. Will you give me leave?” Mrs. Covering made an attempt
to remain defiant.

“Really, Miss Dallerton,” she began, “I cannot conceive——” But as she
looked at the girl’s honest, tender eyes her lips quivered. “It’s no
use,” she said. “Please let us say good-bye here. It was very good of
you to speak to me.”

“But it isn’t true?” said Muriel. Mrs. Covering looked back to where
through the trees her old acquaintances in ostentatious conversation
pretended not to be watching them.

“Well, anyway,” she said, “I was honest enough to leave my husband; if I
hadn’t I might be over there now with your friends.” Muriel took her
hand. She knew that sometimes the human touch does more than the work of
words.

“Will you come to me?” she said. “Will you promise to come to me when
you want help? That you will want help I feel sure; for you are sad
already, and you can’t help being more sad. Only don’t get desperate.
Come to me, and we will find some way out of it together!”

“I’m not sad!” said Mrs. Covering quickly. “I don’t see why you should
think so. I’m happy—absolutely happy! Can’t you see how happy I am?”
She bit her lip to keep it from quivering. “And as for there being an
end—Oh, Miss Dallerton, there isn’t an _end_ for a woman like me,
there’s only—a new beginning!”

“And that you will try with me?” said Muriel with an insistence that she
herself could scarcely understand.

“The ten minutes are up,” said Mrs. Covering trying hard to smile, “and
I have an appointment. If it is ever possible I will come to you, Miss
Dallerton—at any rate I shall never forget that you asked me. But I do
not think I shall come.”

She walked quickly away, and Muriel watched her in silence. She
remembered that people had said Sally Covering was the best-dressed
woman in London. She was still—for it is rarely that the little things
change. We don’t forget to put on gloves because our heart is broken.
Muriel felt a passion to be alone. Alone in this world of green, robbed
for the moment of its fresh beauty; alone to face the problem that rose
in inexorable, dark power in society as well as in the slums—the
problem which seems ever the same unrelenting enemy of joy and health
and the beauty of life, and attacked the vital principles of all she
believed in and hoped for. It was very difficult to go back to the group
of merry idlers, dancing like butterflies over a precipice—butterflies
intent on hiding from the unwary that there _is_ a precipice.

The buzz of talk increased as she drew near them. One lady put up her
lorgnette and looked at her as if she were some new invention, and then
turning said in a perfectly audible voice: “The paragon of virtue
approaches, but I don’t see the lost sheep!” The group dispersed and
left Muriel for a moment with her hostess.

“Oh, Muriel, how _could_ you do such a thing?” wailed Mary Huntly.
“People must draw a line somewhere, you know. They may swallow the
slums, but for _you_—before their very eyes——”

“To speak to an old friend,” said Muriel quietly. “Mary, you can’t blame
me. It’s terrible! terrible! But just because it is, one can’t let it
pass!” Mary shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s hopeless to argue with you, child,” she said. “Yet even you must
see that if people _will_ do such things, they must be ignored for the
sake of society at large.”

“Society at large,” said Muriel bitterly, “which has caused the trouble,
must protect itself from its own victims, I understand, Mary.”

“But what would you have one do?” said Mary Huntly. “What good did your
speaking to her do?”

“It showed her that one cared,” said Muriel. “Too late, I am afraid, in
her case. But one must give them a chance to come back, or at least see
where they have gone, and wake them up to the horror of it! If you leave
them to wake up too late for themselves, they will only fall into a
deeper horror!”

“A woman of that sort,” said Mrs. Huntly “is incorrigible—simply
incorrigible, Muriel.”

“Oh, Mary, you don’t mean that, I know. If it was some one you loved you
would try to help her!”

Mrs. Huntly turned with relief to welcome Dr. Grant. There was a
positive pleasure in her greeting. It put an end to an unpleasant
situation. The only thing in life that Mrs. Huntly was afraid of was an
unpleasant situation.

“Here’s your doctor, child,” she said in an undertone; “do go and
wander.” Muriel accepted the proposition almost willingly.

Geoff looked this afternoon so strong and unconventional—not even a
frock-coat could make a man-about-town out of him. Not that he in the
least answered her problem. He would probably have refused to discuss it
with her, and would certainly have disagreed with her in his
conclusions; and yet there was something in the strong, sound spirit of
the man infinitely refreshing to her after the cruel butterflies.

It was with a new sense of trust and confidence in him that she wandered
in the gardens. She realized at last that the parting of the ways had
come between her old friends and her new life. Before she had been happy
with them because her eyes were shut, now she saw beneath all that
seemed gay and delightful a horror of selfishness, hardness and wrong.

Mrs. Covering never came to her; but whenever she felt a longing to
return to the old life the thought of her face and the knowledge of what
the day’s wanderings had shown her came back with the same bitterness.

She knew that the man with whom Mrs. Covering had made “the dreadful
break” would soon be received back into society again.

Mothers with marriageable daughters do not ask too many questions if the
woman disappears—and the woman always disappears.

There were times when Muriel almost envied Mary her faith in the
incorrigible—it relieved her of so much responsibility.




                              CHAPTER XIV


                “Saints to do us good
        Must be in heaven, I seem to understand:
        We never find them saints before at least.”

“REALLY, Gladys,” said Mary Huntly firmly, “I think you should give some
reason for the way you are behaving. I don’t want to bother you, but
there was my own brother, Cyril——”

“What’s the use of fast-days and a cope, Mary? I should give him
beefsteaks on Fridays and sausages for vigils, and he would apply for a
separation. Besides, I don’t care for him.”

“There is still Alec Bruce,” said Mary Huntly slowly. “He would let you
have your own way in everything, and never remember a fast from one
year’s end to another. Muriel Dallerton was engaged to him once years
ago, before she met Captain Hurstly. It was her fault entirely that it
was broken off, she was so down on him. By the way, what has become of
your friendship for Muriel?” Gladys shrugged her shoulders.

“Fancy marrying a man who would let you have your own way in everything.
I should be bored to death. No, Mary, I am only twenty, and I really
will marry somebody sometime I promise you.”

She ignored the question about Muriel and got up idly to look at the
paper. After a few minutes it fell on her lap, and she gazed with
wide-open eyes straight in front of her. In print, so that all the world
could see, ran an announcement of a severe hunting accident to Captain
Hurstly of the ——, with the addition that Miss Dallerton, his
_fiancée_, and her uncle were soon to be on their way out to India to
join him. It was thought probable that in the event of Captain Hurstly’s
recovery the young couple would be married out there. Gladys watched
with fascinated gaze the skilful movements of the footmen removing tea.
She never forgot the delicate traced pattern on the cloth, or the two
muffins and a half. She carefully counted and wondered, with an interest
out of proportion to its subject, what would eventually be their fate.
It did not surprise her that Edith le Mentier should be announced, and
she found herself smiling quite naturally at that lady’s little graceful
poses, when suddenly she heard herself addressed by name.

“Have you heard of Muriel Dallerton’s great _coup_? My dear child, you
really should go in for slum clubs—they’re so taking. I should do it
myself if I could ever think of anything to say to those kind of
creatures. And then one finds out that she’s been all the time engaged
to Jack Hurstly, and is actually going out to India to nurse him through
an accident and pull him safely into the bonds of matrimony. If I were a
yellow journalist I could make the most touching headlines for
it—‘Death or Marriage?’ ‘If he survives the first accident, will he
survive the second?’ etc.” Gladys laughed.

“But, Mrs. le Mentier,” she said, “perhaps it’s not so inevitable as all
that. Mary was telling me she had been engaged before.” There was a
moment’s silence. Mrs. Huntly looked sharply across at her friend, and
Edith subdued a smile. She could not resist, however, a little shot.

“Once upon a time there was a naughty boy,” she said, “so Muriel put him
in the corner, and he ran away. Isn’t that true, Mary?” The door opened
and two maiden ladies, who were very charitable and rather plain, took
up Mrs. Huntly’s attention. Gladys drew Edith to the window.

“Is Captain Hurstly a good boy?” she said, smiling. Edith looked down at
her caressingly.

“One’s always good if one isn’t found out,” she said.

“But if one is found out, one is much worse,” persisted Gladys.

“I don’t think Muriel ever cared for Alec Bruce,” said Mrs. le Mentier.
“Why, don’t you wish her to marry Jack?” she added, glancing at the girl
tenderly.

“I’m so sorry for the doctor,” smiled Gladys.

“If Muriel knew,” Gladys continued, “that he was not such a good boy,
she would be certain to put him in the corner even longer, because she
does care for him.”

“If she sees him now while he’s ill she’ll give in. We all do when
Nature takes it into her head to punish,” mused Mrs. le Mentier.

“Then if she knew soon, she wouldn’t go?” asked Gladys. “I’m going to
see her to-morrow,” she added.

“Dear Muriel,” said Mrs. le Mentier.

“Shall I take her any message from you?” Gladys questioned.

“I think,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I must go myself to wish her _bon
voyage_.”

Mrs. le Mentier went home and arranged two little packets of
letters—letters that might have been burned, that ought to have been
burned, only that some women have the fatal habit of holding on to the
wrong things.

Gladys went upstairs and cried, and hated herself, and bathed her eyes,
and hated Muriel more.

Meanwhile, quite unconsciously, Muriel packed her trunk and gave last
directions to Cynthia about the club and its management in her absence,
and in her heart she prayed, “O God, let him live—let him live.”

And Jack Hurstly fought with death and heat and India through long hours
of breathless night.

The boat did not sail until evening, and as Muriel parted from Cynthia
Grant to go on to her uncle’s on a cold, chilly November morning a
hansom drove to the door, and Gladys, deeply veiled, sprang out. She
greeted Muriel with her old tender affection. In a minute or more they
were rattling away through the dim streets together.

“I can’t understand,” said Gladys at last, “what it all means. You
cannot be breaking your word to me—you cannot. I have trusted you so.
But I have waited so long for an explanation, and it has never come, and
now you are going to him.” Muriel looked steadily at her companion with
unfaltering, sad eyes.

“I made a terrible mistake,” she said gently. “For a while I thought it
in my power to give to you that which can’t be transferred. But why
should we talk of this now?—even while we speak he may have passed
beyond it all!” Gladys wrung her hands together desperately.

“He is mine,” she muttered—“mine—and I shall never see his face
again!” Then suddenly she controlled herself. “You have broken your
word?” she asked.

“I have,” said Muriel.

“Do you expect a marriage founded on broken promises to prosper?”

“Hush! he may be dead,” said Muriel.

The hansom drove up to the door; the two girls looked at each other;
Gladys did not get out, but as Muriel moved towards the house she leaned
out of the window. “I pray to God he is dead,” she said quietly, then
she gave the address to the cabman. She left a card at Mrs. le Mentier’s
door: “Muriel is with her uncle—they go to-night.”




                               CHAPTER XV


        “Have you no assurance that, earth at end;
        Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend
        In that higher sphere to which yearnings tend.”

“I HOPE, my dear,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I am not too frightfully
out of place. But the fog drove me to you—it positively did. Mystery is
so more-ish, and you know how dreadfully curious I am. When were you
first engaged to Jack, dear?” Muriel smiled.

“I don’t know, truly,” she said, “for it feels now as if it was always.”

“Then it must have been very recent. Recent things always feel like
that,” said Edith. She sank down before the fire and began to warm her
hands; the rings on them gleamed and glittered with an almost malicious
sparkling. “It is very brave of you to marry Jack,” she murmured,
smiling—“very brave. I hardly think I should have had the pluck to if I
were single again.”

Muriel looked in front of her. She was counting the minutes; every one
seemed a slow, aching century separating her from the man who might be
dying. It was a refined mode of torture to have to talk of him. She
began to understand the feeling of a caged wild beast. As an expression
it is trite, but as an emotion it possessed her as original.

“You are not very consistent, are you?” suggested Mrs. le Mentier with a
little hard laugh. “We none of us are, I suppose; only it’s rather
disappointing to us wicked ones when one of the saints back down. Being
so deficient ourselves we expect so much more of them. It’s the shock
that one feels when a really good cook fails in his favorite dish.”

“I’m afraid I’m not consistent, and I’m sure I’m not one of the saints,”
said Muriel with a little strained smile. “What do you mean, Mrs. le
Mentier?”

“Once on a time,” replied her companion critically, regarding her dainty
hands, “there was a girl who wouldn’t marry a man—there’s nothing so
very astonishing about that, you’ll say; it’s happened before and it may
happen again. But she wouldn’t marry him because she found out that his
record showed a stumble or two. One may consider her a little
fastidious, but one respects her. The man behaved very nicely; he
respected her too. But then there came another man, and human nature
made her forget all about his record, which, when you come to think of
it, is very natural, and not at all to be blamed. It is a pity to be too
fastidious, but one can’t perhaps respect her as much.”

“Mrs. le Mentier,” said Muriel, rising to her feet, “will you kindly
tell me what you mean?” Mrs. le Mentier slowly began to draw on her
gloves—they fitted her to perfection—but she remained seated.

“You might ask Jack when you see him—if he is well enough to be
bothered with such unimportant things—if he remembers four years ago
this last July. You might ask him if he would like you to see his
correspondence at that time. You might laugh with him, when he is
convalescent, over these letters. I have them in this little bag here,
which when I heard of your engagement seemed better in your hands than
mine. You might,” said Edith, holding out her hand to Muriel, and
smiling her sweetest smile, “tell Captain Hurstly that his old friends
have not forgotten him. Good-bye, my dear Muriel; _bon voyage_—my best
respects to your uncle—don’t trouble to come downstairs—do you know
the last good remedy for _mal-de-mer_?—you never suffer from it? That’s
right; a speedy return, my dear, and mind you don’t forget my little
messages to Jack when you see him—good-bye!”

Muriel waited until the door was closed, then she went and looked at the
letters. She knew the handwriting; she hungered for a sight of any words
from him; and she looked at it now as if she was looking at it for the
last time. Then she sat down where Edith le Mentier had been sitting,
and tore them up one by one and threw them into the fire. Muriel had
scarcely finished when Sir Arthur came into the room.

“Muriel!” he cried in a tone of justifiable displeasure, “I have told
you before never to put paper into the fire. Do you know you endanger
our lives by your carelessness? Letters should be put into the
waste-paper basket, not made bonfires of! Have you got your trunks
packed, child, and all your arrangements made? We start in another
hour.”

“Uncle Arthur,” said Muriel quietly, “you will think me very strange, I
know, and very wilful, but I’m not going to start to-day. I’m going back
to the club to-night. I—I don’t think I am feeling very well.”

Expression for the most part is a distinctly limited faculty, and those
who carry it to its bounds in the ordinary occurrence of life find
nothing left to say when the occasion transcends their experience. Sir
Arthur Dallerton was dumb; he made several efforts to speak—he put his
hand to his heart—he stared at the ceiling—he was almost startled into
a prayer—finally he gasped out:—

“You wicked girl! Send my man to me,” and closed his eyes.

Muriel escaped. He had not tried to combat her decision; he was in fact
very much relieved not to have to go. He had only submitted to the
mid-winter journey because it was expected of him—but he was surprised,
horribly surprised. There is something very shocking to an Englishman in
any sudden change: to Sir Arthur Dallerton it amounted to a crime.
Muriel had surprised him, and he could not forgive her.

It was dark when Muriel drove back to the club that night, but the fog
had lifted and the stars were out. There was something in the street
lights and noises that awoke in her the tremendous emptiness the world
can hold. It was a shadow, a delusion, a mere dim, spectral mist, the
background for an infinite weary pain that made the real pivot of the
universe. She almost killed herself with self-reproaches. What was she
that she should blot out the glory of her lover’s world for the words of
a jealous woman?—for a mistake in the past—a sin if you choose. It
might be a sin. If he had sinned all the sins, if he was sin itself, it
didn’t matter—she loved him—loved him—loved him! And the great
steamer with its iron speed might even now be leaving the docks, and she
had set her face against him like a flint, and there was no turning
back. Life had placed before her the old choice of love and duty, and
though passion justified of reason rose with double power to storm the
fortress of her will, and last, and bitterest of all, the traitor within
called to her to give way for hope’s sake, life’s sake, love’s sake,
when it seemed for another’s good—to release one she would have gladly
died to comfort—to gain that which in all the world she most desired
for his sake, for her own, for the apparent good of them both—(Oh, how
the traitor clamors at the gate, the traitor with those eyes, that
voice!)—all the glowing world of hers, the infinite golden gladness of
love—even with those to oppose and madden her, she shut her hands
tight, and with a wordless, inexpressible prayer lifted up her soul.
With most the struggle comes before decision, with many at the point
itself, but with some few it is after the decision is made and when
there is no turning back. So Muriel struggled now, though at the moment
she had been wrapt as it were apart from all uncertainty in the cloud of
renunciation.

“Muriel!” Cynthia stood before her, petrified. Had she had news it was
too late? She drew her towards the fire, and Muriel sat down and looked
at her wistfully as a child might.

“I think I had better tell you all about it now,” she said, “though I
feel sure you will not understand.”

“You have been doing something foolish, I suppose,” said Cynthia curtly.
“Well, what is it?” But she drew very tenderly the girl’s jacket off,
and smoothed her hair with gentle hands.

“I have given Jack up,” said Muriel wearily, “because Edith le
Mentier——” she stopped. “Oh, I can’t explain,” she murmured. “The
words don’t mean anything, but—but, Cynthia, I couldn’t marry a man who
had once loved, or thought he loved, that woman. I could not trust a man
whom I felt was weaker than I. If I had children——” she paused again.
“You see I knew a woman who married, and the man was a dear fellow; but
he had been weak, and the strain was in him—and he was weak again. When
I was engaged to Alec Bruce she said to me, ‘It’s not of so much
importance to avoid bad men—they’re danger signals we aren’t blind
to—but for God’s sake never marry a weak one.’” Muriel caught her
breath with a little dry sob.

“Oh, you little idiot, you little idiot,” cried Cynthia with flashing
eyes. “What’s another woman’s, any woman’s, all other women’s experience
to one’s own heart? Love, and take the consequences—there’s nothing
else; it’s the only thing worth while. Why should you condemn yourself
and Jack to a death in life because of that wretched woman?—besides,
you don’t even know if it’s true! It’s madness, Muriel—madness. He’ll
marry somebody else, and turn out a mere do-nothing, and you’ll wear
your life out in another five years. And it’s all useless, reasonless,
cruel. And then you’ll pray for his soul, and expect me too, perhaps.
But I shan’t! Can’t you see you’re driving him back to her?”

Muriel dragged herself to her feet. “You forget I believe,” she said
very slowly, “in the life of the world to come.” Then covering her face
with her hands she burst into tears.

Cynthia Grant wrote that night to her brother: “I don’t know whether
it’s any use, Geoff, but she’s broken the whole business off between
herself and Jack Hurstly. She’s desperate, but determined. It’s all for
a mere nothing. I cannot understand her; but I won’t let her work
herself to death if I can help it. She was a fool ever to have cared for
him, and more of a fool not to have married him. It would be difficult
to know which we do more harm with, we women, our hearts or our
souls—‘Where a soul may be discerned.’”

But Muriel was on her knees all night praying that he might live and she
might be forgiven.




                              CHAPTER XVI


    “If Winter come, can Spring be far behind!”

IT was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a
black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England
longs for the south of France, and every one who has been out of England
compares it unfavorably with other climates.

Cynthia had left Muriel with a frightful cold and the club accounts, and
had gone out to buy her some violets. They had heard that morning from
Mary Huntly that Jack was recovering, though the fever resulting from
the accident had necessitated sick leave. He would probably have got
Muriel’s letter by now. Cynthia looked longingly at some impossibly
expensive roses, when she heard a man’s voice behind her.

“By Jove! Cynthia!” Her heart leaped from January to June. She turned
her head slightly to face the obtruder—a delicate, fine-looking man
with the eyes of a poet, and a chin which it would do some poets good to
have. It took a moment for them to get over the memory of the last time
they had met. It had begun to rain a little, and people had put up their
umbrellas and pushed on more rapidly than ever.

“What do you want?” he asked, looking from the girl to the window.

“What can you afford?” said Cynthia, laughing. She was wondering what
people wanted to hurry for on such a lovely day.

“I am very rich,” he responded. “Honor bright! I could buy over the
business. I sold my last picture for—I can’t tell you how much, it
might stir up your demon of independence. I’m going to get you the
roses.” In two minutes he came back with them in his hand. “By the way,
you might as well put up your umbrella, mightn’t you, it seems to be
raining?” he said.

“Oh, so it is,” said Cynthia absently. They stood together
uncomfortably, knowing that if no good excuse arose they would have to
part.

“Don’t you think a cup of tea would be nice?” he suggested. Cynthia
nodded her head decisively.

“Yes,” she said, “and muffins.”

“Do you remember,” said her companion, as they turned towards a possible
restaurant “those dear little French cakes and——”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Cynthia sternly, “and I’m not going
to.” Leslie Damores laughed.

“You even forgot,” he said teasingly, “just now that it was raining!”

“I thought you were in France. I didn’t know you were ever coming back
to England again,” said Cynthia a little doubtfully. She noticed that he
had not asked her what she was doing, and it hurt her. She would
volunteer no information. They sat down by a clean table in a warm inner
room; neat-capped maids fluttered here and there; it was very restful
and very English. To the artist who had not been in England for eight
years it was home, and the girl who held the roses in her lap filled in
the picture. He studied her face carefully.

“You’re awfully changed,” he said at last. Cynthia laughed.

“I was twenty-two when I saw you last, and now I am thirty. I was never
one of the dimpling kind that stay young either; as for you—you’re a
man, so it’s different. But”—her voice grew strangely gentle—“you’re
not quite the same, you know, Leslie; fame has come to you, and you look
more of a fighter, and yet not quite so hard.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that youth should be so exacting—with its
impossible whites and blacks—and that the more one roughs it, and the
harder knocks one gets, the more generously shaded it all becomes,” he
said, watching her with keen, eager eyes. She turned her head away and
played restlessly with the flowers in her lap. “It could never change as
much as that,” she thought.

The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid
the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly
soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two
schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia
had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too
afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left
the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped
maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American.
The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the
hour.

“I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before
he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips.
“He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow,
and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I
am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here
is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare
the time—good-bye.”

He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets,
wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding
himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in
London.

Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind,
and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange,
lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise.
This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden
smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a
transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost
repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened,
glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child.
The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself
brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more
by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But
to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice
grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of
health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how
to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of
themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall,
slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of
thirty, pushed her way to the front.

“Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?”
Cynthia nodded shortly.

“Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she
said.

The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door.
It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and
bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages
and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women,
each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to
one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect,
commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She
stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and
recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no
safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary,
purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this
rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew
the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There,
under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of
Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the
veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help.
Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The
stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it
all.

After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back
to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again
carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table.

“’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the
blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy
of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great
blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her.
The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “’E’s all I
’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for
father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother
did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?”

Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the
cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it
was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to
the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an
answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly
Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the
invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for
all who love the little ones.

“Does he suffer much?” she asked.

“’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink,
miss?”

“Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very
bad case.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?”

“I’m afraid not, Carrie.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the
question.

“He may live some time yet.” The girl wrapped the child up in the
blanket; the fierceness in her eyes did not prevent the gentle touches
of her hands.

“I ’ate God, so there! an’ I ’ate the club! an’ I ’ate you and the other
lidy! I ’ate you all!” she cried hoarsely. Then suddenly the anger died
out of her face; she turned hopelessly to the door, pausing irresolutely
she asked again in dull despair, “Then there isn’t hanythink as you can
do?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.” She drew the blanket closer round the child
and passed out into the night.

It was late and Muriel had gone to bed. Cynthia came in and sat down by
her.

“Do you think a man would ever trust a girl a second time?” she asked.

“That would depend, wouldn’t it,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “upon the
girl’s character, and the attitude towards the broken trust, and how
long ago it had happened, and what she had done in the meantime?”

“Do you think it possible if she was different that he would love her
again?” Muriel sighed.

“I would have married Jack,” she said, “if he had been different, but he
was the same. I suppose it all depends on whether one’s power of
detachment is strong enough.”

“You’re very tired, dearest,” said Cynthia, “and I shouldn’t bother you;
but—but I suppose you pray, don’t you?” Muriel smiled; she did not say
she had done nothing else since she had forfeited her life’s happiness.

“Yes, I try to,” she said.

“Then,” said Cynthia, “perhaps you might as well pray for me.
Good-night!”




                              CHAPTER XVII


    “Our mind receives but what it holds—no more.”

PEOPLE whom everybody considers tender-hearted and good-natured do not
like to wake up to the fact that they are neither. It takes a good deal
to wake them up to it, and they are apt to be indignant and incredulous
even then. Gladys had always been considered particularly, gracefully
unselfish. People might think her a little astonishing and
unconventional, but this they put down to her American training; as for
being underhand, cruel and grasping, no one would have dreamed it of
her, and she least of all of herself. Love is a teacher of many lessons,
and tears away all screens; there is no room left for anything but the
real.

Love and pain together are the two world forces for sincerity, and
Gladys’ sincerity was not pleasant to look at. She was possessed with
the one desire—Jack. She wanted him; she hated everything and everybody
else. Right and wrong became two faint, inadequate words; she would have
stopped at nothing to gain her ends.

Even the dramatic instinct which had carried her through emotional
friendships made her attractive and alluring to those to whom she was
utterly indifferent, devout and regular in her religious attendances,
eager and sympathetic over the miseries of the poor, they were all swept
away. She planned, plotted, schemed and lived to meet and win Jack
Hurstly.

For the sake of meeting him she made friends to a far greater extent
with Edith le Mentier. She smiled in tender graciousness upon Alec
Bruce, she treated Sir Arthur Dallerton when she met him with the
greatest interest and respect.

It was through him she learned first that Muriel was not going to India,
second that her engagement with Jack Hurstly was “off,” after that she
ceased to take any interest in him at all. People said it was time she
was married.

It took Jack a long time to realize that Muriel meant what she said. He
wrote again, and it was not till she stopped answering him that he began
to believe her. The key he held to the woman riddle says that “A woman
who goes on saying no is easier to turn than the woman who says
nothing.” India and the old influences of the regiment had undone a good
deal of her training.

Jack told himself he was a fool to have loved her, and agreed with the
world’s verdict that she “really went too far.” In fact the world turned
its back on her. She had had two good marriages in her hand and thrown
them away; her society was a strain; she did unheard-of things; she was
really better in the slums.

Everybody told him he was well out of it, and though he was outwardly
indignant at their judgment it took the edge off his sorrow. He grew
rapidly strong, and hunted more than ever. He was not to be invalided
home, and he had been very badly treated. He looked upon this as virtual
absolution for whatever dissipations he might be led into. Even in the
nineteenth century few men have found a better excuse than “The woman
Thou gavest me.”

One evening as Jack sat smoking in his quarters, wondering lazily what
sort of a drink it would be most possible to enjoy, a knock at the door
aroused him from his thoughts, and gave entrance to a favorite young
subaltern.

“Hullo, Musgrave!—come in!” he said with warmth. “Have a drink?” he
added as the young fellow sank into a chair. Musgrave shook his head.
“Anything up?” Jack asked with surprise.

“Nothing particular,” said Jim Musgrave. “My aunt’s coming out here,
though. I shall have to sit up for her.”

“Oh! I say that’s bad,” said his friend sympathetically.

“She’s going to bring a mighty pretty girl out with her, though, to jam
the powder,” said the nephew irreverently. “The fact of the matter is I
believe it’s for the girl’s sake she’s coming. There’s an awful dearth
going on in London—herds of pretty girls and nothing to gain by it, you
know—I don’t know what England’s coming to—we’re so scarce—they say
the returns after the season are something awful!” Jack laughed grimly.

“I’m one of them,” he said. “I didn’t make myself scarce enough it
seems. Who’s your aunt, by-the-bye? Perhaps I know her.”

“Mrs. Huntly. Her husband was a fellow of ‘ours,’ you know; but he got
on the shelf, and they gave him some appointment at home to hush him
asleep with. We have an awfully short day, haven’t we? And a beastly hot
one!” The young man’s eyes grew wistful, for he loved his profession;
and he had not been out long enough to grow stale, or to have his
ambitions adjust themselves to lower standards. Jack sighed.

“It’s a bit too long for some of us,” he said; and he dutifully thought
of Muriel, till the remembrance of a polo match transformed them both
into enthusiasts, and the talk grew unintelligibly technical.

It was not until Jim Musgrave rose to go back to his own quarters that
Jack remembered to tell him that his aunt was an old friend of his, and
to ask if the pretty girl was her cousin, Miss Travers.

“By Jove, do you know her?” shouted the surprised Jim. Jack nodded.

“Good-night!” he said briefly, and Jim took his dismissal, wondering how
well his friend had known Miss Travers. Jack remembered the look in
Gladys’ eyes, and resolutely pretended that it meant nothing;
nevertheless he was not altogether sorry he was going to see her again.
He told himself it was because she was Muriel’s great friend.

Then he went out to have a final look at the pony; it was necessary that
it should be really fit for to-morrow’s match.




                             CHAPTER XVIII


        “Where will God be absent? In His Face
        Is light, but in His Shadow healing too.”

    “MY DEAR MURIEL,

    “You and I have always been good friends, and though I have
    never said anything to you about your trouble over Jack Hurstly
    it has not been because I have not felt for you. I thought that
    you were very foolish to give him up. Still you were never
    really suited to each other, and it is better to give a thing up
    than to hold on to it too long. I think one of the saddest
    things is to realize how well one can get on without some one
    who seemed so absolutely necessary. Men always reach it soonest,
    for if they can’t attain their ideals they can satisfy their
    instincts, while we women have to rub on between the two and
    dress nicely. My husband wants to see India again—why, I don’t
    know—smells, heat, travel and inferior races, not to mention
    being cut off from everything for months, and I’ve promised to
    accompany him, principally because it’s easier to accept than
    refuse, and Gladys seems so set on it. She has promised to give
    Alec Bruce his answer when she returns. It is positively a last
    flourish, she declares; and between you and me I think she means
    to try once more for the bird in the bush before settling on the
    hand one.

    “It’s rather brutal of me to write of it to you, but though she
    is clever enough and blinds most people I feel certain she cares
    for Jack, and I am a little uncertain as to how he will act when
    he finds it out.

    “If pebbles were as rare, we should most of us prefer them to
    diamonds, I expect, and only a few would say, ‘Ah, but they
    don’t shine!’ How you will shake your head, dear! but, trust me,
    proximity and the hat that suits weigh a good deal more than a
    fine character with most men, and Gladys always chooses her hats
    well. Women of my age are past the time of romance (Edith le
    Mentier would scarcely agree with me). Legitimate romance, at
    any rate—if there is such a thing—is a little worn out, and
    I’m not one of the sort that prefer religion to rouge, yet
    to-night I can’t help confessing the game seems not worth the
    candle. Not much behind, and not much before, and very little
    for the meantime. Still I should marry if I were you. You’ll
    have the compensation of saying ‘Well, that’s done,’ and when
    everything else seems unsubstantial the solid inevitability of
    wife and motherhood keeps one steady. That’s my argument against
    free love—it’s not final enough, and the uncertainties are too
    great. I had rather myself have a broken heart and a settled
    position than a broken heart without one. Perhaps you will
    succeed in avoiding both. Don’t think I’m morbid—probably my
    dinner has disagreed with me. By-the-bye, the doctor says
    there’s something wrong with my lungs—but I don’t believe in
    doctors. Good-bye.

                                                           “MARY.”

Muriel read Mary Huntly’s letter over slowly with sad eyes. There was a
hopeless ring in it, as if the plucky effort to avoid the admission of a
life failure had almost proved too much for her. She had attained most
things that a woman of the world wishes to attain: a good income, a
convenient husband, a boy at Eton, and a fine figure for forty; she was
very popular, even with other women, and she had a most capital cook.

“Leslie Damores and I are going on a bus top to Kew Gardens this
afternoon,” said Cynthia irrelevantly. “And I shall go to tea with him
in the studios to see his new picture; he has called it ‘The Years of
the Locust.’ I should rather like to see what he has made of it.” Muriel
was still puzzling over Mary Huntly’s letter.

“She is so fine,” she said. “It must count for something, her pluck and
dash and the way she faces things; it can’t be all shallow, or all
selfish—and yet it does work death. Look at poor Mary. Her age of
primary things has passed. She has run through most of the thrills, as I
suppose we all do by forty, and now what’s left for her? She has been
keeping yesterday’s manna, and she finds that it has gone bad!” Cynthia
looked interested.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that a great love is the only thing to fill
a woman’s life. I don’t believe that would wear out, would it?”

“I suppose,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “that depends on how one uses it;
one must carry things on to their farthest extent. I mean—it’s stifling
to be satisfied. If we go on far enough we shall come to a vista, and
it’s not till we get to see that things have no end that we are really
beginning at all. It is what you can’t grasp makes life worth living.”
Cynthia listened reluctantly.

“But love,” she said again, “you can grasp that; and it won’t go, will
it?”

“All that’s best and highest in love you can’t grasp, I think,” replied
Muriel. “It’s because one expects to do that that it hurts. The
invincible thrill of things is only meant as a launching into life.
After that friendship, comradeship, a blending of life to life and heart
to heart becomes unconscious development. Paroxysms aren’t love, and
they have their reaction; but love is beyond and through all, and even
in the most sad and sordid moments gleams and throbs an impossible
possibility! A thing always to strive for, never to attain!” Cynthia
rose and paced the room restlessly.

“Oh, Muriel! Muriel!” she said, “you don’t know——” Then she stopped
short, and went over and kissed her, an unusual demonstration from
Cynthia. “You’re so good,” she said, “and yet somehow so remote from it
all! I think I begin to see now why you didn’t marry Jack. I should have
faced it as you did, but I should have read the letters, talked about
them—and then married him!”

“And been unhappy ever afterwards,” said Muriel softly.

“Yes! but that’s nothing to do with it,” cried Cynthia impatiently. “I
acknowledge no afterwards. I would give myself body and soul to the man
I loved, like Browning’s lady, even if he were the greatest rascal
unhung!”

“That’s a horribly selfish theory!” said Muriel with sudden emphasis,
“and a very dangerous one. You would degrade yourself, hurt the man, and
ruin future generations, simply because of an effervescing passion,
which soon becomes stagnant if you give it time enough. No one can
afford to ignore consequences, least of all a lover. Why is it, do you
suppose, that these girls of mine, living like animals, working like
slaves, suffering like human beings, don’t oftener catch at this
passion-flower of yours, and take the poison of it? Simply because they
are face to face with the consequences. They can’t get away from
themselves, and their life is visible and public. They know what a few
days’ rapture implies—shame, pain, publicity, perhaps starvation. They
know that to cut off your nose spites your face, however you may wish to
make the surrender! You don’t risk a rapid when you see the rocks, only
when the rocks are hidden; the consequences ignored, then the selfish,
hopeless, aimless life gives in to its instincts; and though before the
leap you may have ignored the consequences, it will not prevent the
rocks beneath from grinding your life out after the fall.” She stopped,
her eyes flashing with the intensity of all she meant.

She had given little by little her life over to a problem; one that she
hated, had avoided, and that even now racked her with its misery—but it
absorbed her.

Things cease to be bearable only when life is empty, and to Muriel her
own sorrow, her own heart, had been filled and uplifted by full
renunciative hours. Discontent and leisure walk hand in hand, wandering
disconsolate over a world teeming with openings and opportunities for
energy and power. Then it becomes necessary to invent new games, and
religion runs to melancholia—or Christian science.

“I don’t think Leslie Damores will ever marry me,” said Cynthia slowly.
She looked suddenly older and more careworn. “I—I don’t think I will go
with him this afternoon.”

Muriel put on her things to go to the club. Before she went she threw
her arms around Cynthia.

“Dearest,” she said with glistening eyes, “I don’t know what I should do
without you.”

“Pray more,” said Cynthia shortly. Muriel shook her head.

“If you knew what strength you give, and how bright this all seems to
come back to!”

“Don’t! don’t!” said Cynthia sharply. “For God’s sake go to the club and
leave me alone!”

Muriel went and understood; she knew that it had been necessary to say
those words, and after they were said she could do no more. One can
start a crisis, but one cannot guide it, and it is usually best to get
out of the way. Cynthia sent Leslie Damores away that afternoon, and
faced for the first time in her life the years that the locust had
eaten. Her lover’s picture could not have been more realistic.




                              CHAPTER XIX


        “Only for man; how bitter not to grave
        On his Soul’s palms one fair, good, wise thing
        Just as he grasped it.”
                                 —ROBERT BROWNING.

LESLIE went back to the studio bewildered. She had sent him away without
excuses. He wondered blankly what he was being punished for, and why she
was denied him in the present; and as Kew Gardens, unless one is a
naturalist, is not the place one goes to alone, he sat down before his
picture and thought about her in the past.

He was young and full of ideals when he first met her. He believed in
the possibility of a Galahad, and that all women were exquisitely good,
except a sad few who were picturesquely unfortunate. He had had a good
mother, two beautiful sisters, and he had only seen Paris in a veil. He
met Cynthia in the studios; her glorious red hair and the wonderful way
she looked at him became the key to the universe. After that followed
months of ideal companionship, and on his part at least unprecedented
blindness. Perhaps she loved him for that most of all. Then she told
him. He was horribly startled. He said surprised and terrible things,
and then she looked at him—Oh that wonderful, broken, tragic look!—and
went back to her brother. And he grew older, and wiser, and less
surprised.

He had not meant to find her in London. When he had, and they met again
and yet again, and in fact even from the moment when she had told him
where and how she lived, he had made the great decision.

The locusts should eat no more empty years. If she could forget (_could_
she forget, forgive at least?) that stammering judgment eight years ago,
how happy they would be together! What noble, magnificent work would
they not do—together—and now she had sent him away with no excuse. Had
that self-made barrier of his fallen for another to rise? He smoked hard
and rang the bell. There is always one way of finding out things if a
man has sense and no false pride—to ask. He was going to ask, and he
smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the answer she would give
him—_should_ give him!—if strength and power and purpose went for
anything. The tea-things that were set out for her looked miserable as
only neglected food can look, and the room lost in the gathering
twilight seemed emptily expectant of the guest who had not come.

Leslie Damores cared nothing at all for omens and less for gloom, and
even the fact that he could not find his matches did not evoke a frown.
He was going to see her, and he _meant_ to see her, and he terribly
over-paid the cabman’s fare. How many sullen looks and surly words do we
not owe to the over-generosity of lovers, who appear to think that by
tipping the universe they will earn the reward of Providence in the
shape they most desire? Alas! we human beings are always misplacing our
tips, and then we wonder when the raps that come to us seem to be
misplaced as well!




                               CHAPTER XX


    “God is in all men, but all men are not in God: that is the
    reason why they suffer.”

IT was hot, with that intense silken quiver in the air which turns the
atmosphere into a living creature.

That “certain twilight” moment was already beginning to “cut the glory
from the gray,” and across the Indian garden strolled two figures
scarcely conscious of the breathless life, so interested were they in
each other. Gladys Travers, in a well-fitting gown, a cloud of something
soft that sunk into a shower of lovely curves, led the way through the
trees to a seat.

“I call it a summer-house,” she said. “It sounds so English!”

“Ah!” Jack Hurstly answered half wistfully, “you’ve already begun to
hunger for home. We all have it, you know, and try to call the most
un-English things by familiar names, just to trick ourselves into
thinking—Heaven knows what—that it isn’t quite so far away, I
suppose.”

“It seems hardly possible that we have been here two months,” sighed
Gladys. “And it _was_ so strange to find you here!”

Strange, indeed, Gladys! after the care-succeeding stratagem and
innocent purposeful planning that took you and your good-natured cousin
so straight across India to the station (not so frequently a resort for
English travellers), simply because there this broad-shouldered young
Englishman lived and rode and shot and spoke bitterly of life.

“It was most lucky for me,” he answered honestly; “and I shall miss you
awfully when you go.”

“You are very fond of Mary, aren’t you?” she said looking at the ground.

“Yes, Miss Travers.” Gladys smiled.

“You’re rather stupid, you know,” she said.

“I think it’s you who are rather unkind,” he answered. “And what are you
going to do with Jim?” Gladys frowned; the conversation at that moment
was more interesting without Jim.

“_Do_ with him!” she began indignantly, and then suddenly she laughed
and turned dancing eyes upon her companion. “Do you know,” she cried, “I
haven’t the faintest _idea_ what to do with him! What should you think?”

“He’s a very nice fellow, Miss Gladys.”

“Then shall I marry him?” Captain Hurstly drew a long breath; it was
rather like playing with fire. The sun sunk speedily in the west, and
now in a glowing rose veil plunged behind the hills. Gladys looked up at
him from under her long eyelashes. There was something a little wistful
in her glance.

“Do you _want_ me to marry him, please?” she asked. Jack looked from the
sky to her face; it had caught the glow of the sunset.

“I don’t want you to marry anybody,” he said simply.

“Ah!” said Gladys, and there was a silence—dangerous, electric, full of
unspoken things.

“You knew Muriel?” he said abruptly at last.

“She was a dear friend of mine,” Gladys replied softly.

“_Was!_ Isn’t she now, then?” he questioned. She blushed and looked
away. “Won’t you tell me?” he asked gently.

“I thought she was unjust—very unjust to you!” Gladys murmured. “It
hurt me that she should misunderstand any one.”

“You’re very generous,” he replied gravely. “But how do you know, Miss
Gladys, that she did misjudge me? Perhaps she was right to have nothing
to do with such a poor sort of chap.”

Gladys sprang to her feet, her eyes flashed, and she shook a little, her
voice was low and intense, and Jack, who rose to his feet also and stood
opposite to her, was drawn into the circle of her emotions.

“No! Captain Hurstly. She was wrong—utterly wrong!” the girl cried.
“What are we sheltered, protected darlings, brought up with closed eyes
and within walls, to know of the world and man’s temptations? How dare
we judge who have no standards of comparison? And if we love”—her voice
grew so tender it was like music—“and if we love it is for man’s
redemption, not for the satisfaction of our own, thin, misty ideals! And
it should be the crown of our life to raise the man we love from lower
things, and trust in his love to leave them for ever far behind!” She
moved nervously back to the seat, and turned that she might still half
face him. “I don’t know what I’ve been saying,” she said breathlessly.
“I am afraid it must sound very silly and foolish to you, and
rather—rather uncalled for; but it has always seemed to me that women
like Muriel, who think God’s tools not good enough for them, do a
terrible amount of harm.” Jack took a step forward and looked down at
her.

“If there were more women like you,” he said huskily, “there would be
fewer men—like me, Miss Gladys.” Gladys smiled a little. It was
difficult for her to be serious for long.

“Then,” she said, “it’s certainly a good thing that I’m unique.” . . .

“My dear child! you know perfectly well that this is the most unhealthy
time to be out in. Go in at once and dress for dinner! Really, Jack, I
should have thought you would have known better!”—Mary Huntly shook her
head at him reproachfully. Gladys lifting her eyes up to Jack, with a
mixture of amusement and regret, turned gracefully and passed into the
house. Mary Huntly, for all her sage advice, stayed out in the fast
deepening darkness.

They walked for a little in silence towards the gate. Mary turned over
in her mind what she should say to him. It was hard—extremely
hard—and, worse, it looked disagreeable. She was used to doing
difficult things, but as a rule they had delightful effects. She very
much doubted as a woman of the world whether what she had to say would
have any effect, but as a woman a little beyond the world she knew she
ought to say it.

“My dear boy!” she said as they reached the gate, “that girl doesn’t
ring true.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Huntly?” Jack asked sternly. “Are you talking
of—Miss Gladys?” He made that fatal half instant’s pause before her
name that marks a lover.

“You have made one mistake already in falling in love with a woman too
good for you,” she answered quietly, “don’t make the worse one of
falling in love with a woman—not good enough! Good-night! I think you
had better not come in after dinner this evening.”

Jack would have stayed and insisted on further explanations, for he was
perplexed and angry—there’s nothing that makes a straightforward man so
angry as perplexity—but Jim Musgrave who was going to dine with them
came up, and in a mixture of greetings and farewells he had to go, but
as he went he said very distinctly:—

“Mrs. Huntly, may I come in to-morrow?” Mrs. Huntly saw in a flash it
had been no use.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “What a lot of moths you have in this climate of
yours. Good-night!”

The gorgeous moon, the thin low whisper of the tropic night, the
rustling, murmuring life, which rose from the earth to the low sky
above, seemed something of a new birth to Jack as free from the fetters
of an old love he paused on the brink of a new, and because it was new
imagined there would be no fetters.




                              CHAPTER XXI


    “She crossed his path with her hunting noose, and over him drew
    her net.”

GLADYS was the incarnation of sprightliness; her shimmering green dress
made her look like some beautiful heartless naiad of the woods.

When dinner was over she sang softly to Jim, letting her eyes rest on
him with a light caressing smile. Her own world had turned to paradise.
She was playing with sunbeams on a golden earth. It was impossible for
her to be anything but charming.

Mary was very tired. She sat and talked with her husband about the boy
at Eton; for a while at least she washed her hands of Gladys.

Finally the music stopped. Gladys’ hands sunk into her lap, and Jim
looking at her in an adoring simplicity set about for words which were
not too common to present to his goddess.

“I say” (the invocation seemed a little modern) “that’s an awfully
ripping dress you’ve got on to-night.”

“Do _you_ like it, Jim?” It was impossible for her to help the emphasis.
It had been said of her that if she were left alone in a desert she
would flirt with a camel. Jim would have sold his soul for a compliment,
but could only repeat:—

“Awfully!”

“Are you fond of being a soldier, Jim?” she asked. She was wondering why
Jack Hurstly did not come.

“I think it’s the grandest profession in the world!” he said proudly.
“People don’t do us a bit of justice except when there’s a row on, and
then they praise us for the wrong things. They don’t understand that a
man must be a decent sort of chap to win the respect of his men; and
there are fine chances, you know, that a fellow gets on the frontier to
show what he is made of. To hush up a disturbance or keep a district
quiet, are pretty good pieces of work. I hope you don’t think we’re all
of us brutes or blackguards, Miss Gladys?”

“No, Jim—oh, no!” said Gladys softly. “I think you’re the finest men in
the world, the most chivalrous to women, the strongest and the
gentlest—truest friend and noblest foe!” Jim thought it was too
beautiful for words, also that it was original; but it was not exactly
what he meant, and it put an end to the discussion.

“How does Captain Hurstly get on with his men?” she asked. It was
evident by her tone that she was not much interested in Captain Hurstly.

“Oh, well enough,” said Jim doubtfully. “Only you see he had rather a
bad time with a girl at home, and that rather put him off his work, I
think. He doesn’t seem as interested as he used to be.”

“I don’t believe he cared for her,” said Gladys shortly. If there is
nothing else to do with a clumsy fact, one can ignore it.

“Oh, yes, he did awfully,” said the unconscious Jim. “I never saw a
fellow so cut up before about a girl. She must have been a jolly
decent-looking girl, too—I’ve seen her photograph.”

“Really you’re very rude—you contradicted me flatly,” cried Gladys.

“Oh, but he _did_, you know,” said the over-truthful James. “_I_ didn’t
think she was so awfully fetching, though,” he added hastily, with the
bright hope that jealousy of _him_ might have promoted the frown he saw.
Gladys yawned.

“You’re very dull to-night,” she said, “doing nothing but talk of the
uninteresting love affairs of your uninteresting friends!” Jim flushed
angrily; he was conscious that he had not introduced the subject, but he
was too loyal to say so.

“I’m very sorry, Miss Gladys,” he said; “there’s something I’d much
rather talk about.”

“And that?” said Gladys, lifting unconscious eyelashes with innocent
ease.

“I think you know,” he said with the dignified gravity of extreme youth
over a compliment.

“If you mean me,” said Gladys smiling sweetly, “I think you’re very rude
to call me a ‘thing,’ and it’s horrid bad form to talk about a girl, you
know.” The rest of the evening passed in a pleasant, dangerous fashion.

At parting Jim wore the rose she herself had worn at dinner. It was the
pledge of all dear, impossible things to him; it was the usual
termination of an evening’s episode to her—a gardener would have
accused it of blight.




                              CHAPTER XXII


        “The truth was felt by instinct here—
        Process which saves a world of time.”

DESPERATION, when it does not rave, becomes a calm; and it was with an
almost listless quiet that Cynthia, sitting opposite her brother in his
office, told him she was going away.

He nodded briefly, and went on writing prescriptions. He had not quite
finished his evening’s work. The boy was to deliver them to his
patients. The room was bare and light, with the usual rows of medical
books, long suggestive chair, and the sturdy boy standing near a
forbidding cupboard.

Cynthia’s eyes took in the surroundings as if they had been new to her.

She had argued bitterly with her brother over having no lamp-shades, and
the naked bright skeleton roused in her now a sense of irritation. Would
Geoff never be done, and why was he so little interested in her going
away?

But he had always been a man of one idea, she thought, and what interest
he had was buried in his prescriptions. Ten minutes later he sent off
the boy with a curt order or two, then he turned and looked at his
sister.

“Going away, are you?” he said. He might have been drawing out a shy
child, or encouraging a nervous patient. Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.

“So I told you.”

“Have you thought why, or where, or when?”

“I am going to a place in Somerset on the red Bristol Channel, where
they have mud, and sunsets, and one can be alone.”

“The desire for mud is very modern, and sunsets only happen once a day,”
he replied thoughtfully. “And as for being alone, you couldn’t be in a
better place than London, you know, for that. People can’t stand so much
in the country. However, I daresay a rest would do you good. Mind you
take some books—light ones; and be careful where you go for milk—it’s
disgraceful how they adulterate it in out-of-way places.” He was giving
her time, and observing with keen watching eyes the lines of trouble and
pain marked in Cynthia’s face.

“Geoff!” she cried with a sudden wail in her voice, “I want you! I want
you!” He knew that she did not mean him; but he took her in his arms and
stroked her hair. Cynthia sobbed a little in a hard choked way; she
could not let herself go completely even in a breakdown.

“Shall we go to Paris?” he asked gently. “I have always wanted to study
under the professors there.” He looked around his meagre office-room
peopled with his love, his work, his dreams, to stay there another year
till success lay in his grasp, to win life for his cases, each one
meaning to him what a battle means to a soldier; all that went to make
interest, satisfaction, attainment, must go because a woman
wanted—another man. He did not mince matters, he only repeated the
magnificent lie that rang better than most truths, “I have always hoped
for a chance like this!”

“But you couldn’t leave your practice?” she protested.

“I could get an assistant for a time to take my place. It’s only for six
months or a year, isn’t it?”

“There’s Muriel—Geoff!” she reminded him.

“You told me to get the idea of her out of my head—perhaps six months
or a year will do it,” said Dr. Grant. He was smiling grimly to himself
as he spoke. When a man attempts endurance it makes for something very
fine. When Cynthia looked at him she saw nothing but kind, half-amused
and wholly sympathetic eyes.

“I think it’s splendid you’re so placid,” she said; “I don’t believe you
feel things at all.”

“I feel very much being kept away from my supper after working hard all
day!” he laughed mischievously.

“Oh, you poor, dear thing! I’ll see about it at once!” she cried running
from the room.

The doctor flung open the window wide and stood watching the streaming
crowd in the dusk. The lights seemed alive against the dark masses of
houses—impenetrable, mysterious, holding life-histories—and showing
nothing but blank strong faces to the passers-by.

The doctor believed in no God at all; but when he looked above the
house-tops to the sky, peopled by myriad stars, he felt a moment’s
emotion, a thrill of hope, courage and strength.

God believed in him perhaps, and because he would not draw near with
faith led him by his most unreasonable passion—love of humanity—nearer
than he knew to the divine in humanity.




                             CHAPTER XXIII


    “I am half-sick of shadows.”

MURIEL read Cynthia’s letter wonderingly. It was short, and merely
contained her reasons for leaving Muriel for six months at least. By the
end of that time Leslie Damores would have given her up, and she would
be more fit to take up her life again. Muriel was not to tell him that
she was ever coming back; she was not to overdo herself or live alone,
and above all she must not give him her address. Geoff was going with
her. Muriel sighed and frowned; the sigh was one of loneliness. She had
got so used to companionship—Cynthia’s, and generally her brother in
the evening. It was something to have a man to discuss things with
sensibly even if she never agreed with him. She frowned because it was a
little strange he had not written to say good-bye.

He had got over caring for her that was evident. She was glad of
that—of course she was extremely glad of it. Suddenly she felt tired
and discouraged. The girls had been unresponsive and tiresome in the
Bible-class. She loved Paris; she could see its clean, broad streets
filled with brilliant, rapid life, bright and gay and fresh, alive with
incessant laughter.

It was a damp, foggy evening and the fire smoked. They had such theaters
in Paris, and then the studios! Muriel had studied there for six months
in the pleasantest and easiest fashion. Sometimes the love of her old,
careless radiant life, pleasure and beauty, and the ease of things made
her catch her breath and remember she was twenty-seven, and her eyes
were beautiful, and there was that couple downstairs drunk and
quarrelling again! It was too late for tea, too early for supper, and if
she lit the candle she would have to write letters.

The door-bell clanged, and she heard a man’s voice. For a moment she
thought it was Dr. Grant coming to say good-bye. Her hands wandered
instinctively to her hair. No!—he asked for Cynthia. He must see
her—but she was out. “Then Miss Dallerton”—the girl “would see.” The
blackbeetle’s heavy footsteps paused outside her door. Muriel lit the
candles and poked the fire.

“Yes, I will see Mr. Damores,” she said smiling encouragingly at the
girl.

She felt less depressed because she had already begun to sympathize, and
yet she could not help feeling angry with Leslie Damores.

He stood before her, tall, handsome, eager; she sat down and waited for
him to speak. One of the most extraordinary things about her was her
willingness to wait for somebody else, even her silence was an
invitation.

“Cynthia wouldn’t see me,” he began, almost boyishly. “Won’t you tell me
why, and where she is, Miss Muriel?”

“She has gone away, Mr. Damores, and left us both. It’s a case of double
desertion, isn’t it?” she laughed nervously, for the look in his eyes
was too strongly anxious to make the interview a pleasant one.

“Has she left you a message for me?”

“She does not wish to see you again,” said Muriel gravely. He was quite
silent, with his eyes bent on the carpet.

“Then—and you—do you approve of her decision?” he asked slowly, his
voice so different from his first eager greeting. It was tired and a
little thick. An idea flashed through Muriel’s mind; she leaned forward
suddenly.

“Mr. Damores, do you care for her?” she asked. He squared his shoulders,
and looked back at her steadily, but a little surprised.

“Really, Miss Muriel, I thought—I thought it was pretty obvious!” he
replied.

“Then,” said Muriel, “I think very poorly of you for not wishing to
marry her!”

“But, good Heavens! Miss Dallerton,” he cried, now really astonished, “I
want nothing so much! I came here, if you must know, simply for that
purpose! and I find her—gone—leaving no traces, and, if you will
excuse my saying so, a great deal of confusion behind her!”

“I certainly do feel confusion, not to say chaos,” said Muriel smiling;
“and the worst of it is I can’t possibly explain. However one thing’s
evident, if you want her you must look for her, for I have no address
beyond Paris. She hates writing letters, and it will probably be a month
at least before she writes and gives it to me. Will you wait in London?”
Leslie Damores smiled.

“I might find her in Paris, and I shall not find her here,” he said;
“and when I do find her, I shall bring her back. Good-bye, Miss
Dallerton; I’m glad I didn’t deserve your scolding this time, it looked
as if it was going to be a pretty bad one. Oh, but I was a fool for not
marrying Cynthia eight years ago!” Muriel held out both her hands to
him, her eyes filled with tears.

“I am glad you are going to her,” she said. “I won’t wish you luck,
because there is something so much better that you have got already; but
I can’t help being a little sorry, for she will never come back to me
again!”

“Are you all alone?” he asked.

“There’s my work,” she said; “and the blackbeetle, who is a great friend
of mine, and looks after me very well.”

“Do you remember ‘The Lady of Shalott?’” he asked abruptly. “I always
liked that last line of it, ‘God in His mercy lend her grace.’ Good-bye,
Miss Dallerton.” He was gone, hopeful and strong once more, with the
possibility of satisfaction within his grasp, and Muriel again alone.

“It was all very well for Launcelot to say that,” she thought, “but when
she needed him most she had no loyal knight and true, the Lady of
Shalott, and—and not even God’s grace would make her forget that!” And
Muriel put her arms on the table and cried a little about Jack—at least
she thought it was about Jack, but it was really that Cynthia’s hand was
on what she herself had missed. The woman’s lips that bear no kiss of
love seem formed in vain; even the angels must sigh for them—and not
even the angels satisfy. Yet she had held it all once, and remorse and
passion and pity mocked at her for having thrown life’s gift away.

When the blackbeetle, whose other name was Catherine Mary, appeared
again it was to bring supper, and a message from a poor woman that “She
was taken cruel bad, and would Miss Muriel come to her?” Muriel left her
after a terrible four hours. The fight had given her strength, and the
light in her eyes was wonderful. She had forgotten all about the Lady of
Shalott.




                              CHAPTER XXIV


        “La vie est vaine:
          Un peu d’amour,
        Un peu de haine,
          Et puis—bonjour!”

“REALLY, Mary, it’s absurd to stay away from the picnic! And I simply
can’t go if you won’t. That odious Mrs. Collins makes the most hateful
chaperon, with her ‘Come here, my dear!’ just at the wrong moments.
_Won’t_ you come, Mary?” Gladys, in the most delicate of Dresden
flowered silks, with a huge hat one mass of pale pink roses and black
velvet, looked imploringly at her companion.

She was a girl it was impossible to describe without mentioning her
clothes. One felt if she had worn a yachting suit with gilt buttons she
would have looked pathetic. Mary Huntly took one of the little hands in
hers.

“The truth is, dear—but don’t, please, tell Tom—I had a slight
hæmorrhage this morning. Nothing much, it is true, but these tiresome
lungs will bother me, and I know I ought to keep quiet to-day.”

“You never used to be so fussy about your health, Mary,” exclaimed the
girl petulantly. There is nothing that so torments a brave woman as a
gibe at nervousness. It was true that Mary had conquered her fear, but
she knew it to be something that comes again, and would never while she
lived cease to give up coming. She winced and let the girl’s hand drop;
she had not voice enough to explain. The persistent cruel healthiness of
the girl before her aroused in her a kind of defiance.

“Since you are so keen, dear, I will go,” she said, “but I hope they
won’t expect me to talk!” She laughed huskily.

“Tom is out shooting, isn’t he?” she asked Gladys later as they walked
towards the carriage which was to take them to their destination.

“How funny you are, Mary! You never used to be so interested in Tom’s
movements,” laughed Gladys; “he won’t be back, I don’t suppose, till
long after we are.” An hour later, by a half-ruined temple, under the
shade of great enshrouding trees, Jack Hurstly sitting beside Gladys
asked her a little sharply if her cousin wasn’t very seedy.

“Yes, poor dear!” said Gladys with the wistful, pathetic look that had
helped to draw Mary to the picnic; “and she’s so dreadfully plucky and
determined, I couldn’t persuade her to stay at home with me. I can’t
tell you how anxious it makes me feel!”

Jack’s eyes grew tender over her. Hats of a certain shade cast sincerity
in a becoming glow over an upturned face. He wanted to help her, protect
her, comfort her! His vexation was transferred to Mary. It must be such
a strain to go about with an obstinate, sick woman. Jim Musgrave sat by
his aunt. All the rest had gone off somewhere—a general direction to
which all picnics tend where there is no one to victimize the party with
games. Gladys had promised to go and see an ancient well with Jim, and
she had gone to see it—with Jack Hurstly; only Mrs. Collins and Jim sat
with Mary. Suddenly she put her hand on his arm.

“Jim—take—me—home,” she cried. It was the end of the picnic.




                              CHAPTER XXV


    “God’s Hand touched her unawares.”

WHEN Tom Huntly rode home with a big bag of game after a satisfactory
dinner with a crony it was nearly twelve o’clock. Yet to his surprise
the whole house was lit up, and there was an uneasy sense of motion and
confusion. He dismounted and called for a servant. Suddenly he heard a
woman crying. He let the horse go and walked into the house.

“How can you expect me to go to her? No, I won’t! I won’t! Oh, it’s
horrid! it’s terrible!—just when I was so happy too! No, doctor, go and
sit with her till Tom comes! Oh, my God! . . . Doctor! here he is!”

“Where is my wife?” said Tom Huntly. The words sounded to his ears like
a quotation; it was absurd to suppose they could be his. He did not look
at Gladys, dissolved in frightened tears over the inappropriateness of
the angel Death. The doctor spoke with the unreal cheerfulness of his
profession.

“Another hæmorrhage, Major Huntly. It is over now, but you must expect
to find her a little weak.” Then, as Tom Huntly uncomprehendingly
followed him, “It is my duty to tell you that I consider her case
serious—very.” A nurse stood by the bed fanning her. A sudden
remembrance of the boy’s birth (the boy at Eton) swept over him.

She looked very young, with that old, bright something in her eyes that
the last ten years of the world had managed to dim. She whispered his
name.

“Tom, come a little nearer.” He knelt beside her, and put his arms
around her. They had wasted a lot of time. “I wanted you so—Tom,” she
whispered. “It’s been such a poor sort of thing, hasn’t it? What we
might have been to each other, I mean? But it’s been all my fault, dear.
I never knew a man that could have made me half—so happy. There are not
many women who could say that of their husbands in our—world—are
there, Tom?” She coughed till the slow breath came back. “So you’ll not
worry, Tom?” she gasped.

“Mary—Mary, darling—you won’t leave me and the boy?” It was frightful
this want of time. She smiled bravely.

“I’m so glad you care,” she murmured. “Tell him—Tom—that his mother
says she wants him to be—a gentleman—like his father.” The nurse
stepped forward, but the doctor shook his head.

“There is no need,” he said, but he meant “There is no hope.”

“Ah, Mary! Mary!” She opened her eyes again: she was much too tired to
be frightened of death.

God takes the ignorant, plucky souls who have fought the good fight, not
quite knowing why, very peacefully to Himself.

“I should like,” she gasped, “more air.” The nurse came towards her bed
with the fan in her hand, but before she could reach her a gust of wind
strangely cool and fresh swung the curtains of the window, and Mary
Huntly was dead, having passed from a life which stifled, limited and
kept back all the highest and noblest in her to beyond the horizon where
“Over all this weary world of ours breathes diviner air.” The room was
very quiet and still. The doctor after a few words to the nurse,
engaging her for another case, went off to his quarters.

Gladys composed two heart-broken notes to Jack Hurstly in her sleep, and
Tom Huntly left alone with the body of the woman he loved fought the old
fight with the grimness of things.




                              CHAPTER XXVI


    “And Memory fed the Soul of Love with tears.”

“TOO late!” is a phrase holding the eternal knell of life. It sounds
like a muffled peal even to those who hear it lightly said. To those who
have lived through it, the worst of the battle passes before their eyes
again. Many, perhaps blissfully, miss all that it means. They dare not,
or cannot, face remorse. That they themselves have pulled down their
house about their ears seems to them an infamous impossibility. They
forget all their own cruel words, long neglect and unfair judgment, and
only remember flashes of sunlight which they connect—probably quite
falsely—with themselves. Their “yesterdays look backward with a smile.”

Gladys never realized even as much as a tinge of shame. She cried a
great deal. Mary knew how to manage things so beautifully, and, better
still how to manage Tom. There was a certain heavy awkwardness about Tom
that Gladys didn’t like. It had the effect of putting her in the wrong,
which was, on the face of it, absurd. Also he wouldn’t do what she
wished without coarsely asking “Why.” Altogether, Mary had taken the
edge off a difficulty; and Gladys hated difficulties almost as much as
she did explanations.

It was so dreadfully trying, too—Mary’s dying just then! Another week,
perhaps, and it would not have mattered so much. The thought forced her
to look into the glass. The crying had done no great damage; she would
dress entirely in white. Jack would come round soon after breakfast to
find out how Mary was. Oh, poor Mary!

There was something so bald and primitive and earnest about death;
_whatever_ happened she would not be taken to see the body. She went out
into the dining-room. Suddenly she began to be afraid of meeting Tom.

Tom had passed the night of a thousand years; it comes once or even
twice in a lifetime. He was looking very old and haggard. When Gladys
came into the room he winced as if he had touched a snake. It was a very
awkward meeting. Tom would have gone out of the room and said nothing,
but there was breakfast—and the servants. By-and-bye there was only
breakfast, and Gladys sitting where Mary used to sit. She was thinking
that at least he might have shaved, and wondering if she dared to speak
to him. It was very hot and still.

“Did you know that Mary had had a hæmorrhage before?” he asked in the
dangerously level tones of passion curbed. Gladys burst into tears.

“How can you speak of her in that heartless way, Tom?” she cried. He
gave a queer little sound that might have been a laugh.

“Answer me,” he said. The question was how much did he know, and what
was the safest lie? He saved her the trouble. “Very well, you did know,
then! Now how long has this been going on?”

“It was easy enough to keep it from you, Tom!” she said, with the
brutality of a weak thing cornered. “You never took the trouble to find
out. Poor Mary made me promise not to tell you. She told me first in
England that her temperature rose every night, but that she didn’t
intend to make herself an invalid for that. She said you were the sort
of man who hated invalids.” Tom broke a paper-cutter he had been playing
with on the table. “I don’t know how many hæmorrhages she had—not very
many; certainly not one for a long time——”

“Certainly not one yesterday morning,” he interrupted slowly, a little
pause between each word. “Before you went to the picnic?” Gladys looked
desperately at the paper-cutter. There was something in the psalms about
a green bay-tree that occurred to her, not of course in connection with
herself.

“No, she never said so. She wanted particularly to go to the picnic; she
said (who was it that said women are no inventors?) that she would be so
dull without you. I tried to persuade her not to go, but she would——”

“I wonder,” said Tom meditatively, “how many lies you have been telling
me? Don’t get angry, it really isn’t worth while, and it doesn’t matter
in the least, you know, only you had better save some for your old age.
You can pack your things, as we are going home next week.” He rose
drearily from the table and made his way out of the room; he cared so
very little about anything.

He felt as physically tired as after a forced march. An endless expanse
of days and months and years passed before his eyes—there seemed so
much time now.

Suddenly he thought of the boy!—Mary’s boy and his. He straightened
himself up; there was still somebody left to do that for. For Mary’s
sake he would devote himself to the boy; it was tremendously worth
while. He sat down and painstakingly wrote a letter that made his own
tears come and the boy’s when he read it, and drew the two together as
nothing but sorrow and loneliness and love can ever do. It followed so
naturally and plainly that if Mary wanted her son to be like his father,
the father must try to be a better sort of chap. Remorse receded, and
took with it the burden of hopelessness.




                             CHAPTER XXVII


        “She was beautiful, and therefore to be wooed:
        She was a woman, and therefore to be won.”

GLADYS went into the garden, where it was coolest and shadiest, and sat,
a lovely and pathetic figure, leaning, it is true, against a cushion
with her listless hands in her lap.

So Captain Hurstly found her. She had written the little heart-broken
note, and she rose to meet him with quivering lips.

“Oh, Jack, Jack!” she murmured—in an abandonment of grief Christian
names fall so naturally, and it sounded very sweet to Jack—“how good of
you to come!”

“Good of me?”—he held both her hands; she had given them to him
unconsciously—“I think it was awfully sweet of you to see me—I’m so
sorry, dear—so sorry!” The tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked
very pretty when she cried, and it was very difficult not to kiss her.

“Mary was everything I had in the world,” she said withdrawing her hands
with a swift blush, and sinking back on the cushions again—“mother,
sister, friend. And Tom—Tom has been so brutal to me Oh, what shall I
do, what shall I do!”

“Tom brutal to you?”

“Yes! he hates me. I’m sure I don’t know why. Perhaps he feels now he
might have done more for Mary. She told me often how terribly lonely she
was before I came to her. We are to go back to England next week, and I
know too well what that means!”

“What does it mean?” he asked looking at her long and carefully, the
white dress that fell away from the little fair throat, the pathetic
quiver of the dainty mouth, the hopeless, hunted look in the big dark
eyes.

“Oh, I can’t tell you!” she cried with a sudden gasp. “Don’t—don’t ask
me!”

“I must know,” he said firmly; “tell me, please.” The color swept over
her cheeks, her eyes faltered and fell before his, her hands trembled in
her lap.

“Tom wants me to marry,” she said at last, “a man I can never—love.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Go away!” she cried piteously.
“Isn’t it hard enough already without making me tell—you!” She gasped
the word containing her passionate heart. She was in earnest now, that
was why she hid her face; she knew that she would not be so pretty.

The word that fell in the hot still morning lived ever afterwards in
Jack’s mind with the heavy scent of tropical flowers, the restless
quiver of the air, and the sharp metallic stroke of a coppersmith’s beak
near by. She was unhappy, and pretty, and clinging—and she loved him.
Had he any right to make her love him so, and then leave her to a bitter
and miserable marriage? So pity spoke, and the beauty of the girl’s
lithe form, the curl of hair just escaping the uplifted hand, the
delicate scent she used, the whole scene with its setting of the old hot
Indian garden spoke to passion. And when pity and passion speak at the
same moment, reason, sense, and self-control fade fast away. He took her
hands from her face; she looked at him as a startled child would look;
he felt the beating of her heart; he drew her closer to him, and she
made no resistance.

“Gladys, Gladys, will you be happy with _me_, darling?” he asked her.

“Oh, Jack!” she cried, “you never even asked me—if I loved you!”

An hour later, radiant, triumphant, cruel, Gladys stood before Tom
Huntly.

“I am not going back to England with you,” she said. “I am going to
marry Jack Hurstly. I shall stay with Mrs. Collins till the wedding, and
come home with Jack, for good.” Tom Huntly looked at her, alive and
young! and upstairs lay the body of his wife, and the girl could be so
happy!

“Are you quite heartless?” he asked wearily. The insolence of her joy
turned to weak self-pity, and she began to cry again.

“Oh, poor, poor Mary!” she sobbed. “She _so_ wanted to help me choose my
trousseau!” Tom left the room, shutting the door after him.

Jack went back to his quarters. He wondered why the scent she wore
seemed so familiar. He remembered at last that Edith le Mentier had used
it too, and he remembered at the same time with equal irrelevancy that
Muriel never used scent.

That evening he had a long talk with Tom Huntly. His friendship with
Mary had been a deep and real one, and he thought Gladys must have been
mistaken about Tom’s brutality. He was not that sort of man; and he
thought Tom was equally mistaken when he said rather doubtfully, “I hope
you will be happy with Gladys; she’s not half up to the form of that
other girl of yours.”

Any reference to Muriel was peculiarly irritating to him just now.

It also seemed that people who knew Gladys very well did not appreciate
her so deeply as people who knew her slightly—a trait which is
certainly a trifle unfortunate in a man’s future wife. But he had burned
his boats, and he remembered how pretty she was, and tried to think it
very natural that the day after his engagement he should find his
_fiancée_ playing love-songs on the piano to her very distant
connection, Jim Musgrave.




                             CHAPTER XXVIII


    “Is she not pure gold, my mistress?”

JIM looked at his uncle and said nothing. The two men were smoking on
the piazza. It was late evening, the day before Major Huntly was to sail
for England. He had just mentioned Gladys’ engagement, and found that
his nephew knew nothing about it. Jim grew rather white, and the two
puffed steadily at their pipes again.

“She ought to have told you,” said his uncle at last. “Does it make a
lot of difference?”

“Yes,” said Jim laconically.

“I don’t want to bother you, old fellow, but I think I ought to know did
she give you any reason to think——” Jim shook his head.

“No—I was simply—a fool,” he said shortly; and then he added with a
rather bitter smile “she wasn’t.”

“But now, you know,” said his uncle, “you’ll shake it off, I hope;
there’s as good fish in the sea, you know, as ever came out of it.”

“And they can stay there,” said Jim.

“But you don’t mean you still care for her?”

“Yes, sir, I always shall—whatever she does!”

The night was radiant. Full in the starlit sky the moon poured forth a
clear stream of light, bringing out the colors of the world thinly, not
as the sun does, but with a strange, mystic richness all her own. The
two men had not poetic temperaments. Nights and moons and stars were
much alike to them, and they were not thinking just then so much of each
other’s sorrows, chiefly of their own. Yet there was a very warm feeling
of sympathy between them, and they sat for some time longer smoking in
silent fellowship. At last Jim rose to his feet.

“I shall be on duty to-morrow, sir,” he said, “so I’m afraid I shan’t
see you again. You’ll drop me a line when you’ve reached home, and tell
me how you find the little chap?”

“Yes, Jim. I say, old fellow, I wish Mary was here to-night, she’d know
what to say to you. I’m afraid I shall only make a mull of it—you’ve
faced your guns pluckily about Gladys—don’t take it too hard; and if I
could do any good at seeing your colonel about getting you some shooting
leave——”

“Thank you, sir,” Jim interrupted; “it’s awfully good of you. I think
perhaps there’s an opening for me to go to the front again, a fellow of
‘ours’ is taken with enteric out there. I’ll get along all right—and
you know what I feel about aunt Mary. She was too good a woman to make
me lose my faith in them, and it wasn’t Gladys’ fault, sir—it was all
mine. You won’t blame her, will you?”

“Oh, I won’t blame her,” said his uncle shortly—“good-bye.”

“Good-bye, sir,” and Jim, sternly setting his shoulders with all an
Englishman’s passionate determination to suppress his emotion, passed
out into the night.

It was the same beautiful world when earlier in the evening he had
enjoyed a talk with his lady-love, and had said that he thought the
world was really “an awfully jolly place.”

He would believe no wrong of her now—it is love’s creed for the
young—only the world was a beastly hole—that was all; and it was hard
lines on a chap to have to come into it whether he would or no. His
grief rushed him into metaphysics, an unknown quality to Jim, and he
felt more himself again when he had applied for leave—and got it—to be
sent to one of the most unhealthy parts of India where there was a
little row on.




                              CHAPTER XXIX


    “What matter how little the door, if it only lets you in!”

PARIS, always in a glitter, struck both Cynthia and Geoffrey as being
almost too emphatically the same.

They separated after the dear, delicious lightness of the earliest
French meal, one to go to the studios and try to get a skilled but
unpractised hand in again, the other whimsically to the lecture-rooms,
an atmosphere congenial, but thin and uncolored to one fresh from the
active fight. So the first week passed, and quite unconsciously they
began to imbibe the gay French surface, the triumphant shrug at the
disagreeable, the bright intensity of the absorbing present. It was not
that they forgot or felt less, but as if straight from the seriousness
of the downstairs rooms they had strayed into the nursery and were
playing at being children again. It was one morning on her way to the
studio that Cynthia met an old acquaintance of hers, an emphatic
American girl, who exclaimed in the arresting tones of her
countrywomen:—

“Why, Cynthia Grant, is that you!” Cynthia turned smiling.

“Millicent!” she said, “in Paris?”

“Why, certainly,” laughed Millicent gayly; “didn’t you know I was
married. I couldn’t keep it up any longer. You remember Clifton Perval?
He was that set! I _had_ to give in to him! But come right away home
with me, Cynthia; I’ve the most perfectly lovely flat you ever saw!”
Cynthia felt suddenly human.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll give myself a holiday. So you are actually
_living_ in Paris. You always wanted to, didn’t you?”

“_Want_ to? I was just crazy. But I let my husband know I’d be planted
_here_ or nowhere! So we just came. Launcelot will be just as pleased to
see us——”

“Who is Launcelot?” laughed her friend.

“My little boy. Why, didn’t I tell you?” Her bright, keen face clouded a
little. “Yes, I’ve got a child.” She paused flatly, and then fell back
with ready gush on an easier line. “Don’t you think Launcelot a real
pretty name? I told Clifton I’d take nothing common. No William-George
effects for me! So his name is Launcelot Cummins Perval. Cummins was my
name, you remember, before I married. Oh, here we are. Now isn’t it a
charming location? It’s so sweet and central.” Cynthia nodded.

They were taken up almost to the top of a high building. The flat was
evidently small and inexpensive. As they entered Cynthia was struck with
the effect of an aggressive effort to conceal. Everything seemed
unnaturally placed so as to hide something else, and to block views.
There were a quantity of unnecessary things, and some very bad pictures.
Millicent had never had much art though she had a great deal of talent,
but the talent had deteriorated and the art vanished.

Sitting on the floor, his head a mass of dark curls, with wide, blue,
astonished eyes, was a little fellow of about six, in quaint, tight
black velvet trousers. He looked at his mother wistfully.

“You said he would come back,” he exclaimed sorrowfully; “but he hasn’t
for hours and hours!”

“Why, Launcelot, how silly you are,” cried his mother; “come here, right
away, and shake hands with this lady. Aren’t you _glad_ to see mother
come home so soon?”

The child rose obediently and advanced towards Cynthia. His eyes were
heavy with the difficulty to express his thoughts, his eyebrows were
knitted painfully. Cynthia’s eyes grew tender as they met his.

“What have you lost, sonnie?” she asked gently.

“Oh, it’s Tony that’s goned away,” he began eagerly.

“The child’s bird escaped out of the window this morning,” his mother
explained contemptuously; “Marie opened the cage, or something. The
thing squealed awfully; it’s rather a relief. Now, Launcelot, you go
back to your bricks, and mother will give you some candy by-and-bye.”
But Cynthia held the child’s hand.

“I want to hear about Tony,” she said firmly. The boy’s eyes were full
of tears, but he controlled himself manfully.

“If God has taken him,” he said, “I think it’s very selfish. God has
birds and birds, and I only had Tony.”

“Why, Launcelot Perval,” exclaimed his mother in shocked tones,
“whatever do you mean? You’re a very naughty boy to talk so; mother’ll
have to punish you if you say such things.” The boy ignored his mother.
She might have been an intrusive fly. He brushed her away. Cynthia
understood.

“But perhaps God didn’t take him,” she suggested thoughtfully. The boy’s
face brightened, but clouded again.

“He lives in the sky,” he said; “and that’s where Tony went. He must
have flown straight to God, and I think God _ought_ to have sent him
back,” his lips quivered again. “I’ve waited hours and hours,” he
repeated mournfully.

“God has got such a lot of things to do,” she said, “perhaps He will
send him back to-morrow. Don’t you think you could wait till to-morrow,
Launcelot?”

“Why, really, Cynthia,” laughed her friend, “I can’t let you encourage
the child in such notions. Now, look here, Launcelot, if you will be a
good boy, and not worry any more, I’ll ask papa to buy you another
Tony.” She was a good-natured woman, but she missed the point.

“Oh, but there isn’t another Tony,” he said looking at his mother
reproachfully; “there aren’t two mes nor two Gods, mama?”

“Oh, do be quiet, Launcelot,” she cried falling back on the dense weapon
of her authority; “of course there aren’t two Gods. I shall send for
Marie to take you away!”

This threat closed the discussion. The child went back to the window,
and gazed wistfully at the roofs, still wondering at his unanswered
prayer.

Millicent showed Cynthia her flat. Cynthia began to understand the
pathetic concealments. They were very poor.

“We manage to have good times, though,” Millicent explained. “We get
around and see things. Men don’t like women being _too_ economical, and
I don’t believe in it myself. They just spend and spend, and then make a
row over the bills. I don’t see why we shouldn’t spend too; it don’t
make much more of a row, for they put it down to us anyway! But it’s
very unfortunate our having that child!” She cast an impatient glance at
the little fellow in his odd-shaped, out-grown clothes. “Sometimes I
positively don’t know which way to turn. His father and I don’t know
what to make of him—he’s that funny! It doesn’t rightly seem as if he
was our child!”

“He’s a dear little fellow,” said Cynthia pityingly; “I wish you would
let me take him home for this afternoon, I would bring him back at
bedtime. I shall be all alone.”

“Why, that’s real sweet of you, Cynthia,” said Mrs. Perval. “Clifton and
I want so much to have a nice afternoon with some French friends of
ours—Monsieur le Comte de Mouselle and his sister. He’s the most
perfectly charming man. Do you know him?” Cynthia shook her head.
Millicent tittered. “He’s just wild about _me_,” she said, “but of
course I know how to deal with him. _They_ can’t take me in, you bet!
but I’ll be real pleased,” she added, seeing Cynthia’s attention wander,
“to let you have Launcelot for this afternoon as soon as Marie can get
him ready.” Ten minutes later the two left the flat. Mrs. Perval, her
hands on her hips, talking to them as they went.

“Now, Launcelot, be sure you’re a good boy, and mind what you say.
Cynthia, don’t let him worry you—please. I’ll be _real_ pleased to see
your brother again, Cynthia. Give him my love, and tell him——”

Whatever she was to tell him was lost on the way downstairs. Cynthia and
the boy felt suddenly free, their eyes sparkled, they clasped each
other’s hands tightly—the world lay before them, the great glittering
Paris world, rich with delights. A French-woman with bright, bright eyes
passed them. The boy pressed a little closer to Cynthia.

“The streets roar so,” he said fearfully. “Do you think it’s at all
likely there’s any lions about?”

“They are always careful to shut them up,” Cynthia explained, “when boys
go out with friends.”

They had a wonderful lunch and lots of marvellous French cakes, and if
there were any lions they remembered that “friends” didn’t like them,
and kept within bounds. Cynthia felt for the first time that she could
breathe without it hurting her. To be alive and separate is so terrible
to love. The child’s hand in hers made her look past herself into a
world more beautiful and infinitely higher than her dreams.




                              CHAPTER XXX


    “Oh; the light, light love that has wings to fly!”

DR. GRANT had not found the wrench of parting much easier than his
sister, but, like many people with deep emotions, he had found room
enough to keep his unhappiness apart from his everyday work and
appearance, and to take a certain amount of placid enjoyment out of his
new mode of living. The difficulty was in completely deceiving Cynthia
by the constant holiday aspect she expected of him. Sometimes the shadow
fell between them, and they would be silent and apart, then both would
bitterly blame themselves, pity each other, and rush back into the
holiday aspect again. They would have been far happier if they had been
less reserved.

It was about six when Geoff, returning to their apartments, heard the
noise of talk and merry laughter in his sister’s room. He opened the
door hastily to find Cynthia on her knees before the fire roasting
chestnuts with a curly-headed youngster, who laughed the more at his
appearance, as if it were a part of the game.

“This is the Knight Sir Launcelot,” said Cynthia gravely, waving her
hand towards the boy. “Launcelot—the King!” Launcelot nodded.

“I always ’spected him,” he said earnestly, “and now God must have sent
him instead of Tony. Do you think kings are nicer than birds?” he added
anxiously to Cynthia.

“Not most of them,” said Cynthia preparing to shell a hot chestnut; “but
mine’s a very nice king, as nice as any bird I should think.”

“Things when they’re _very_ nice fly away,” puzzled the thoughtful
knight; “if kings _was_ as nice as birds they might fly too!” He drew
down his brows and gazed at the solid and substantial doctor. “But
you—you don’t look as if you was a very flying person,” he finished
triumphantly. “Would you like a chestnut?” The doctor accepted one with
enthusiasm, and Launcelot, the king and the woman with red hair spent a
charming and exciting evening.

They only parted at bedtime at his mother’s door on the express
understanding that he was to come again the next day, and that knights
never even under the hardest circumstances cried, and that last, but not
least, the coal-black charger with a stiff neck under the king’s coat
transported thither from a fairy shop must be shown without delay to
Marie, daddy and the cook. These facts being grasped the worst was over,
and the knight, strewing wet kisses in his wake, was borne away to bed,
leaving his volatile mother expressing shrill-voiced thanks to Cynthia
and Geoff. The streets seemed ten times brighter and less chilly to the
doctor and his sister, and they went to a screaming French farce for the
rest of the evening, and felt much the better for it. In fact they even
forgot for a while their determination to enjoy themselves.

After this it became the custom for Launcelot to go to Cynthia every
afternoon and stay with her till evening. Millicent was always grateful,
but frequently hurried—more hurried even than an American woman in
Paris generally is. She did not refer again to the charming Count and
his sister, but one day she told Cynthia that “Clifton had gone away.”

“For how long?” asked Cynthia quietly. Millicent stared, then she sat
down and laughed. She laughed for a long while, but not very merrily.
Finally she explained with a blank terseness.

“He’s just quit; he’s gone! he’s left me. Don’t stand there and stare,
Cynthia. Sit down. We didn’t have a very good time together.” She
continued pacing restlessly up and down the little tawdry room. “He was
always the sort of man that wanted a good time, and we didn’t have much
money. After the child came, you know, it was worse than ever. I wasn’t
going to play the door-mat to Clifton, but I did my best to make it
pretty.” She looked at the little concealments, ragged and thin in the
heartless Paris sunshine, and they looked more pathetic than ever. “And
I dressed real well, but there wasn’t any keeping him. He only told me I
was ruining him with dressmakers’ bills, though he knew I make the most
of my own clothes! Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so cock-sure about
Paris. In America there’d have been something to keep him back, but
there’s nothing to keep one back in Paris. Things look as innocent and
pretty——” her voice broke; “but they aren’t, Cynthia—they’re real
mean! they’re real mean!” Cynthia sat silently gazing at the carpet. The
nervous, breaking voice, the frightened, restless figure were not lost
upon her. They seemed familiar somehow, quite as if she had seen them
before; and the ring of pain in the most meagre phrase “But they
aren’t—they’re real mean! they’re real mean!” voiced a feeling that had
once been part of her without a voice. She waited for the inevitable
sequel. It came in a burst of hysterical sobs. “He left me a note,
Cynthia—Clifton did—he said I should know where to look for
consolation!”

“The brute!” cried Cynthia. Millicent laughed.

“Well! don’t you know they’re all that way when a man is tired. Nothing
will keep him; and then he wants to throw a sop to something, maybe he
thinks it’s his conscience, so he invents another man for the woman he’s
left—if—if there isn’t one already.”

“Millicent,” Cynthia stood up, and took the pretty, heavily ringed hand
in hers, “do you think the second man will bring you anything better
than the first? He never does—the only difference is he leaves you
worse. Stick to your art and Launcelot!” Millicent tore her hands away.

“Pshaw! you’re always talking about the child—I hate him!—there!—I
hate him! I hated the pain, I hated being put aside, I hated having to
spend my time on him—maybe if he hadn’t come Clifton would have been
different; maybe other things would have been different too! As for my
art, as you call it, what is art to a woman? Why, it’s nothing! you know
it, Cynthia. If Leslie Damores hadn’t played the fool——”

“Hush!” Cynthia stammered in a piteous attempt to hide the pain of his
name.

“Well, then! If a man wanted you, I’d like to know what pictures would
mean? Pictures! I may be weak and silly—I know I am—I loved my
husband. Yes! I did! I know I did. But if I can’t have him, I must have
somebody. And you want me—to paint! Well! I’ll tell you. I wanted to
please Clifton—so I painted. Now the Count doesn’t like the folks I mix
with——” she bridled perceptibly, and Cynthia felt sick, “so I won’t
paint any more.”

She looked at the clock. Cynthia gazed at her desperately; she heard
Launcelot’s voice in the next room. She had taught him “Sir Galahad,”
and his voice rose in a triumphant shout at the last words, “All arm’d I
ride, whate’er betide, until I find the Holy Grail!”

“What are you going to do with the child?” she asked wearily. Millicent
flushed. No woman is without the saving grace of feeling, through some
chord, a touch of shame.

“The Count,” she said, “says he’ll send him to school; he’s very kind.”

“Very,” said Cynthia dryly. “He will send him to a French school, where
he will grow into a second Count—it’s very kind of him. Millicent, if
you have no other plan, will you give him to me?”

“To you!” said Millicent—“to you?” She was astonished. She was, after
all, his mother, and even where motherhood brings no love it keeps its
sense of property. “Why, Cynthia, I don’t know as I _can_; you see,
after all, I’m his mother! It’s very kind of you, Cynthia—but——” She
looked again at the clock.

“Look here!” said Cynthia suddenly, “I’m not going without the boy. You
had better make up your mind to give him to me. You don’t want to ruin
his life as well as your own, and if you don’t let me have him——”
Cynthia’s eyes flashed. “He will be more in your way than ever now. I
shall stay and—explain—to the Count!” she finished grimly. Millicent
turned white.

“Oh, go!” she said. “For Heaven’s sake go, and take the boy with you. I
suppose you don’t know what people will say! I suppose it doesn’t matter
to you that we all know why Leslie Damores didn’t marry you. I
suppose——”

“Oh, Lady Beautiful!”—the knight stood looking from one to the other at
the door—“Lady Beautiful, do you know where it is?”

“Where what is, my darling?”

“The Holy Grail,” said the knight wrinkling his brows. “I don’t know
where to find it.” Cynthia took his hand.

“Let’s go and look for it,” she said; “it isn’t here.”

She hesitated, but Millicent stood at the window with her back to them.
She put her hands to her hair and replaced a pin. Cynthia turned with
the boy, and together they left the little tawdry flat for the last
time; left the strange, sad life with its shattered opportunities and
sordid concealments; left his mother standing by the window waiting for
the Count.




                              CHAPTER XXXI


        “Where He stands,—the Arch Fear
        In a visible form.”

    “IT is absolutely necessary you should come to me at once. I am
    extremely ill.

                                                      “YOUR UNCLE.”

This brief but characteristic epistle rung in Muriel’s head as she left
the club for the night. It was a trying time to leave the work. She had
almost a settlement now of new helpers, men and women, all under her
headship, devoted and earnest workers, but needing direction, and a
firm, experienced hand. Cyril Johnstone had volunteered to come to her.
Association with her having convinced him that she was neither
light-minded nor superficial, and that in spite of his exalted office he
still had something to learn from a woman. Captain Hurstly having
withdrawn his liberal subscription, the club-work in his parish had
fallen through, and the old, broad-minded, empty-headed vicar could jog
on in peace to his grave with a sly chuckle or two at the fizzling out
of modern efforts.

Meanwhile honest hard work and the buffeting experience of the
working-man had opened the young curate’s mind and sobered his heart,
and there is no such worker in any cause as the disciplined enthusiast.

Muriel was happier about her work than she had ever been. It was only
right, according to her ethics, that as satisfaction dawned the new call
should come. She did not know what her uncle’s illness meant, but she
settled work for the next few weeks, had a final talk with her new
associate, and putting on what she called her society dress drove off in
a hansom to her uncle’s. She found him in the comfortable stage of a
dressing-gown and hot chocolate. He closed his eyes as she entered the
room.

“Muriel, is that you?”

“Yes, dear; I came at once.”

“If you had not come it would have been too late! Muriel shut the door!”
Muriel shut the door. The room was very warm, and the bright winter
sunshine lit up the gold in her hair, and brought out the smile which
was always latent in her eyes. She sat down by him and took his hand.

“Have they made your chocolate nicely?” she asked.

“Never! Of course they haven’t. I am infamously neglected. My slightest
wish is thwarted. I am not master in my own house, Muriel! That is why I
sent for you. You at least, before you became so selfish and absorbed in
your own pleasure, knew how to look after my comfort. The doctor says I
must on no account move. I suffer agonies from my foot, and if anything
was to upset me the gout might fly to my heart! Yet though I have spoken
about it again and again, they _will_ leave skin on my hot milk!”

“Shall I make you some more chocolate, and boil the milk myself?” asked
Muriel smiling. He growled an affirmative. And Muriel, chatting brightly
about his favorite topics, made him fresh chocolate, and lightened the
room by certain little readjustments of flowers, books and cushions that
the eyes of the most diligent of servants always just miss over, as if
to prove that self-help smiles after all.

Sir Arthur Dallerton had aged terribly. Death’s hand rested upon so much
that was mortal. It is only in such cases that death is dreadful.
Muriel, who had so often seen it, thought she had never seen it more
sadly, for in his eyes was the haunting fear from which there is no
escape. Later on in the evening he called her to him. She had been
singing over some old Scotch airs. She came and sat on a footstool at
his feet, with her head on his knee. He liked to stroke her hair and
hold her hand; it gave him a sense of peace and security.

“Muriel,” he said, “do you think there is any chance of—anything
happening to me?” The verb “to die” is terrible to some people. Sir
Arthur Dallerton preferred the evasion of something happening.

“Why, no, dear; what should—happen?” said Muriel smiling. “Things—sad
things might cease to happen for you; but that would be beautiful,
wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, Muriel, I don’t want to die! I am afraid! afraid!” His voice rose
almost to a scream. She stroked his hand and soothed him as if he were a
frightened child.

“There, there, dear heart! it won’t hurt you, see; there isn’t any
death, or anything to be afraid of, surely! Only light, peace and rest,
dear uncle, and all the beautiful, lovely things of earth quite free,
and nothing to hurt any more!”

“Oh, Muriel, child, do you think I shall see people whom I’ve come
across in life? Oh, it’s awful!” The poor, silly, selfish life, held
hopelessly before his eyes by the Inexorable Reality, made him catch his
breath. The girl’s heart sank, but she spoke with firm assurance.

“We shall meet nothing that we can’t bear—nothing that is too hard for
us—for God is just as strong to save after death as before.”

“But if there isn’t any God, if there’s only an awful grave? Oh, Muriel,
it’s a dreadful thing to be an old man!” He shivered from head to foot,
and she nestled closer to his side.

“The body dies, and never feels anything; it’s just a sleep, and it will
never dream, or wake, or fret and trouble any more, and we believe that
the spirit is safer without it, and close to God,” she murmured.

“I’m not so sure of that,” said her uncle sharply. “Some spirits can’t
help it. They’re no better than they should be, and what do you think
happens to them?”

The blind cannot see. It is a scientific fact and a living reality; the
nearest they can reach to sight is to feel that they do not see as much
as they might see, and they dim that view by the cry of the eternally
inadequate “I can’t help it.”

Muriel pressed her lips to the poor human hand.

“Dear uncle, such spirits must be made as well as they ought to be. We
must trust God for the method, for we can’t know what is best; but I am
quite sure God meant us all for His, and if we hold fast to that we
shall grow like Him in time, and He will give us time, for there is all
eternity for us to go on being good in if we have made the start.”

“You’ll never leave me, Muriel? Promise you will never leave me!” There
was a moment’s pause, while she looked into the fire and watched the
red-hot coal grow black and drop to ashes in the grate.

“I’ll never leave you, dear,” she said at last. “And you won’t be afraid
any more?” she questioned. “I shall sleep right in the next room to you
if you want me. You won’t be afraid?”

“No, child! It’s been very lonely without you, and they’re very
thoughtless about my chocolate. But you don’t think there’s any—hell,
do you?”

“Oh, no, dear; I am quite sure there’s not. Now don’t you think I’d
better ring for Thomas to carry you to bed, and I’ll see that the cook
does your broth nicely.”

“You may if you like,” he said grudgingly; “and mind you come to bed
early, and come to me the moment I call you.”

“Yes, dear, I will,” and she kissed him gently.

“You’re a good child,” he murmured sleepily. Just as she closed the door
he called her back. “Muriel!”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Are you sure about what you just mentioned, you know?”

“There’s nothing in all the world or out of it but God, be very sure,”
she said with the passionate certainty of her faith.

He was not quite certain whether he liked that very much better either.
But his broth was just as he wished that evening, and he did not call
her in the night for he passed away peacefully in his sleep. And there
was no dark left but his own soul, and even that with the hope of light
in it passed into the eternal.




                             CHAPTER XXXII


        “This cold, clay clod was man’s heart:
        Crumble it, and what comes next?—Is it God?”

MURIEL woke up to a new poverty and an extra ten thousand a year. The
latter scarcely passed through her mind, but the former made her
terribly lonely. Now there seemed nothing left, and the world a vast
cold place void of personality.

She repeated three times over during a hurried, lonely breakfast that
she had her work, and the post brought her two letters, one with
Cynthia’s Paris address, the other in a handwriting that drew all the
blood to her heart. She put it aside and read Cynthia’s. It told of her
work and of Launcelot. The tone was softer than usual. Muriel was
scarcely surprised when she read “Launcelot says his prayers every
evening, and always goes to church on Sundays. So I do, too. His soul
wants nourishment as well as his body, and I promised to take care of
him. The other night Geoff took him to bed, and when I went up to look
at them they were kneeling side by side looking out of the window.
Launcelot has an idea that the Holy Grail is in one of the stars, and he
is always looking for it. You have found it, Muriel, dear, and I am
beginning to believe that some day I may find it too.” She did not
mention Leslie Damores; evidently he had not discovered her yet. Muriel
hesitated to send him Cynthia’s address; she believed it better for them
both to wait.

Finally she took up the second letter. “Will you forgive me for writing
to you? Gladys and I are married. We have left India for good, which
means my profession dropped, you understand; but Gladys says there is no
one to dress for in India. You’ll think it awful cheek on my part, but
she’s very young yet, and you used to have a tremendous influence over
her. I suppose you couldn’t drop in now and then and give her a hint or
two? I should like to see you awfully.—JACK.”

Muriel carefully put the letter on a table, and sat with her hands on
her lap gazing steadfastly into the fire. She saw three things, and she
saw them plainly. One was that Jack did not love his wife, another that
she, Muriel, had hardly forgiven Gladys, and thirdly that Jack would
like to see her awfully. There was a dim, shadowy fourth, but this she
brushed angrily away; it hinted that there was more sunlight in the room
than before she had read the letter.

Finally she drifted into a compromise it would do no harm to see Gladys.
She wrote telling her of her loss and inviting her to tea the following
week. She was very nervous when the afternoon came, and paced restlessly
up and down the long reception room in her heavy black dress vexed with
her expectancy, listening to the noises in the street. The sharp jingle
of a hansom passing, hesitating, stopping, brought her to a chair.

Then came the sound of an electric bell, and a minute later the door
swung open and a footman announced “Captain Hurstly, miss.”

Muriel looked at him inquiringly. She did not appear in the least
nervous now, for natures that tremble at a hindrance rise triumphantly
to meet a calamity, and in a moment she realized that his presence was
fully that.

“Gladys couldn’t come at the last minute, and I did want to see you so,
Muriel,” he explained. He pleaded as he had always done, and he was just
as handsome. She let these things have full weight with her before she
spoke.

“Won’t you sit down, Captain Hurstly; they will bring tea in a minute. I
am sorry your wife could not come.”

Jack looked at her with eloquent, grieved eyes, but she meeting them saw
the coward in his soul, and her face hardened. He had not cared enough
for her to remain unmarried, merely enough to desire a flirtation after
marriage. She had not slept properly for three nights after she received
his letter. He was the first to find the silence uncomfortable.

“I am not sorry she could not come,” he said with a tender inflection;
“I wanted to see you alone. It is a long while since I have seen you,
Muriel. To me it seems desperately long, and yet you have not changed at
all.”

“You are mistaken, Captain Hurstly; I have changed a great deal. You
also have altered considerably.” Muriel’s tone was convincing even to
herself; she was beginning to believe she could after all bear it.

“It is true I have altered,” he replied. “You alone might know how
terribly, but I suppose it is never wise to follow a wrong by a folly.
Only one can’t help oneself when one’s world, all that one has ever
cared for, tumbles about one’s ears. Oh, Muriel, how could you do it!
how could you do it!” He was intensely in earnest; he could always be
that at the very shortest notice. He stood in front of her looking down
with the same passionate blue eyes which used to stir her heart, and yet
when he met hers it did not seem as if he was looking down.

“If you have come to open a question forever closed between us, Captain
Hurstly, and which your own honor and good sense should know to be
doubly closed by your marriage, I must ask you to excuse me. I did not
invite your wife to tea as a permission for you to insult me.”

“You are right,” he said looking at her with frank admiration; “you are
always right, Muriel, without you I have forgotten how to be. Forgive
me, I did not come here to upbraid you for ruining my life——”

“I should think not, indeed,” Muriel interrupted scornfully.

“But to ask you to help me about Gladys. Are you my friend enough to
wish to do that—Muriel?” She flushed painfully.

“I should like to help you,” she said in a low voice.

“It’s simply that she won’t understand the danger of flirting with other
men—every and any other man apparently,” he explained; “and I don’t
want my wife to be a second Edith le Mentier.” There was a pause; his
illustration was unfortunate.

“You give her no cause to complain of you by your attention to
the—first Mrs. le Mentier?” she could not forbear to ask.

“Muriel!” he cried. The protest was too vehement to be convincing. She
rose and held out her hand.

“I will do all I can for your wife, Captain Hurstly—I am afraid it will
be little enough—on one condition”—he waited anxiously—“that you will
not attempt to see me again.”

“You really mean it?” He spoke slowly, intensely. She never knew
afterwards how she kept her hands from trembling.

“You have singularly forgotten the little you knew of me if you think I
do not mean what I say, Captain Hurstly.” She turned wearily to the
door. He compared her in his mind with Edith le Mentier. Muriel was
telling him to go away. She had told him to come back. Gladys was only a
shadow in his life, a chained shadow; he did not even think of her at
this moment. He had never depended on principles or considered
consequences.

“Good-bye, then, Muriel,” he said. “I suppose I must thank you for your
promise, though its condition is terrible to me. You don’t know what you
may be driving me to!”

“Oh, I’m not driving you,” cried Muriel desperately, the weakness of his
nature dawning more fully on her; “drive yourself, Captain
Hurstly—drive yourself!”

So he went, and was driven by some passion of irresponsibility from
Muriel to Edith le Mentier. He found her in.

For Muriel there was just earth—weak earth—where her ideal had once
made heaven for her.

It is not often we are brought into such sharp contact with our broken
idols; if it were we should cease to make new ones—and that would be a
loss.

Muriel stood face to face with the knowledge that she had been a fool—a
girl with a dream—lie—hugged to her heart: and God help women who have
to realize such dreams in the daylight of facts.

All she could find to say was that he was absolutely dead; she had not
risen yet to see her deliverance. If the world had been empty before,
now it was a blank. Those who die leave a sense of loss, but to know
that one we loved has never lived is the greatest and most tragic
emptiness of all. Muriel saw failure written over her heart. There was
only one thing left: she fell on her knees and offered up her failure.
So love passed away from her, but it left her on her knees.




                             CHAPTER XXXIII


    “The black moments at end, the elements change.”

IT was early, and the sunlight with sharp shadows had a chilly and
almost stage effect. The sky was dazzling over Notre Dame. Geoffrey
Grant sat in the great church, watching the sunbeams catch up and
glorify the dust. Worshippers and sightseers slipped in and out, and
many candles gleamed.

The thought of Muriel had driven him there; and now he was alone with
it, he thought half cynically how many had been driven there from the
effects of unhappy love affairs, only they had called it aspiration. He
at least was honest with himself; he knew it was Muriel.

In his early youth he had been embittered by a girl. It was the usual
story of love and no money, and the girl had chosen not to wait. When
success and good fortune came to him, he was indifferent to it. He
treated all women with a sort of good-natured contempt, thinking them
creatures of diseased nerves and hysterical affections. Necessary evils
distinctly, but of the two perhaps more evil than necessary. His sister
had been the one exception; he almost worshipped her. Then came her
story. A crisis which he had passed through, by an extraordinary power,
but once faced, he had resolutely killed, and hidden all traces of the
past. His sister never knew what agony she had brought into his life.
She believed that his perceptions were blunted, instead they were too
delicate to be obvious; he had encased them in reserve, and bore without
wincing because the worst pain stings into silence. Muriel had been a
revelation to him, her gaiety was so spontaneous, her brightness so
infectious. She had thrown her life, all dusty and human, into the glory
of the sunbeam, and she was strong. He had watched her with Jack
Hurstly, and he watched her afterwards. As a doctor her magnificent
healthiness appealed to him. He could not imagine her having nervous
prostration; as a man he marvelled at her. She knew that he loved her,
yet she could look him straight in the eyes and be frankly friendly.

It had become the purpose of his life to strengthen their friendship
into something more. For a long while he had struggled against it, but
it was a passion that found grace with his whole nature; and, when he
had come to the conclusion that strength lay in submission, Cynthia
needed him, and he laid down his love and his work to face the Arch Fear
of his life. If Cynthia should fail!

The last month had worn lines in his face, and his keen eyes in repose
looked sadder than ever. He had fought, and the worst was over; he had
watched and fenced, waited and listened, seized opportunities, avoided
dangers, guided and guarded, and slaved that Cynthia should be safe and
ignorant of his efforts. He had felt happier when Launcelot came, and
this afternoon had left her with a mind at rest.

The figure of a woman with a child in her arms attracted him. She had
evidently come a long way; she was tired and footsore, and very poorly
dressed. He watched her buy a candle for the Virgin’s shrine and kneel
there till overcome with weariness, she slept, her head against a
pillar, but even though she slept she clasped the child. He felt less
impatience than usual with the wasteful, senseless candle-buying, and
the love, the unconscious love of motherhood, and all things beautiful
touched him closely. After all, he wondered, there was something
strangely more than human in women who could give so much as Muriel and
that mother. No physical passion could explain it all—it was so
selfless, so extraordinary, so unnatural in another mood he might have
called it, but here and now “supernatural” seemed the more fitting word.
The baby stirred in its sleep, and the mother’s eyes opened watchfully.
She changed its position to a more comfortable one in her arms, then she
made the sign of the Cross on its forehead, and crossing herself rose to
her feet and left the church. The doctor rose too, and then, moved by an
emotion he could never account for knelt and prayed. He smiled a little
whimsically to himself. “Why, I believe I am becoming a Christian,” he
thought. But he had not changed; he was only beginning to see what all
along the tremendous struggle of his life had been making him. People
who are so much better than their creeds often wake up to find their
creeds are higher than they dreamed.




                             CHAPTER XXXIV


    “I shall clasp thee again: and with God be the rest!”

HE had found her! He repeated breathlessly to himself the one great
fact. Leslie Damores had searched all their old haunts in Paris, had
wandered and waited and watched, and now at last found her in a great
class-room of French students. He had come as a special favor to the
master in whose studio they worked, and he could not signal her out for
more than a word, but by a clever clumsiness he knocked over her
drawing-board. As he picked it up and gave it to her all the great
unspoken things passed between them. It proved the mocking inadequacy of
words that all he could say was “When may I see you?” and that she could
only answer “After the class.” The first blessed moment had gone,
general criticisms had to be given, and French and English art
discussed. An hour passed interminably; he could not always stand where
the glint of red gold hair made of the studio a new heaven and a new
earth. Then in a blessed skirmish of conflicting drawing-boards and
parting chatter the class broke up, and somehow the master and the pupil
found themselves once more in the streets of Paris, or the new
Jerusalem. There was at that moment ridiculously little in a name. Their
thoughts were only a happy chaos, and he could do nothing but repeat the
only fact that mattered.

“I have found you at last,” he said.

“I don’t believe you ought to have looked for me,” she replied gravely,
for she was afraid.

“What made you run away, Cynthia?” he asked. She could give him any
reason but the right one. She chose to deny the charge.

“I didn’t run away,” she said; “I merely wanted to come to Paris.”

“Then why shouldn’t I look for you?” cried Leslie triumphantly; “I
merely wanted to come too.”

“I don’t know where we are going to,” said Cynthia, looking at him to
see if he was much altered.

“I don’t think it in the least matters providing we go there together,”
laughed Damores. “As it happens, here’s a cemetery; shall we go in and
look at the tombstones?” Cynthia laughed as well. It was too absurd to
think of death. There were lines in his face; he must have missed her a
good deal. They went into the cemetery together. A husband who had come
to put some flowers on the grave of his dead wife thought them
heartless. They were not heartless, they were only too happy to remember
they had hearts at all.

“Now you have come, what are you going to do?” she asked at last. She
could not meet his eyes now; the things they meant cried too loudly for
an answer.

“I am going to marry you,” he replied smiling, “if you’ll let me. I
don’t think anything else matters just at present.” Cynthia felt the
color in great rebellious waves sweep over her face. She looked with
unseeing eyes at the wreaths of absurdly artificial flowers.

“Do you fully realize what that means, Leslie?” she asked. “Can you face
everything—everything?”

“Everything! everything!” said Leslie quietly, “with you; without you I
cannot live my life. You are the best of everything I do. You never came
to see my picture—it would have told you all. Once I made a tremendous
mistake. It seems a crime when I look back. There is only one thing that
can ever wipe it out. Cynthia, is it too late to ask you to be my wife,
and overlook the past?” She could not speak, her heart thundered, and
seemed to shake the ground she stood on.

God had given her a tremendous reward, a gift unspeakable after she had
renounced what had been to her the very hope of joy, and from the lips
of the man she loved pardon and oblivion swept her sin into the free,
pure waters of love. She lifted up her eyes to him that he might read
there all her heart and soul his eternally and for ever. For a long
while silence came down and covered them. They turned at last, and
slowly and without speaking left the place of tombs—the acre of God’s
sleeping ones. The man who had been stung by their laughter, seeing
their faces again, recalled his injury. “After all,” he thought, “they
had their business here.” And he was right, for love and death live in
no separate houses.




                              CHAPTER XXXV


        “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”
                           —ROBERT BROWNING.

GLADYS was desperately unhappy. She had got what she wanted, and that,
unfortunately, is frequently what follows. The unscrupulous get much,
but they lose more; and Gladys, who had won her heart’s desire, sitting
in a beautifully furnished room before the photograph of the husband she
adored, was weeping bitterly. From the first day of their marriage jars
had arisen. He was hopelessly selfish about his personal comforts, but
he had a certain tremendous code of honor of the sort that abhors a lie
and connives at a betrayal. Gladys was given to frequent fibbing. He had
been disgusted, and had not hidden it; she had been spiteful and
pointedly malicious. Little bitter unspoken things rose up as their eyes
met. Their honeymoon had not been a success. (An exacting woman and a
selfish man should avoid honeymoons.)

Their home-coming was scarcely more so. They were both very extravagant
in different directions, and they had no patience for each other’s
extravagances and no self-denial for their own; they were weak and
obstinate over trifles. Gladys was extremely demonstrative and fond of
talking; Jack cared very little for outward expressions of feeling, and
preferred women who could hold their tongues. He was perfectly frank,
and paid all his compliments to other women. Gladys lived on admiration,
and if she could not get it from the man who ought to give it to her,
she would try to draw it from the man who would. She found this very
easy. A good many of her husband’s brother officers admired her, and one
of them, a Major Kennedy, frequently told her so.

She was crying bitterly now over a note that lay on her lap. It was an
invitation to a dinner from Edith le Mentier to meet Major Kennedy. It
mentioned her husband in a way that brought the angry color to her
cheeks. She was beginning to understand, and the tears dried. She
thought of what Major Kennedy had said of the way to treat husbands:
“Give ’em a little wholesome indifference, and look round you; that’s
the way to whistle ’em back!”

After all, a woman might have a good deal of fun without any harm coming
from it. Lots of married women did. Look at Edith le Mentier for
instance—hateful thing! Yet no one could doubt that her husband was
devoted to her—and other women’s husbands too! Her eyes flashed as she
thought of Jack. She stamped her foot. “I’ll pay them both out!” she
cried, and she accepted Edith le Mentier’s “delightful invitation.”

Muriel called on Mrs. Hurstly later in the season. There was a moment’s
silence as the two women met. The room so daintily and beautifully
furnished seemed filled with memories. Their eyes were drawn together to
the photograph of Jack Hurstly in uniform. It was a curious coincidence
that he had given to his wife the very photograph Muriel had returned to
him. It was the only copy. Muriel withdrew her hand and sat down with
her back to the photograph.

“And are you going to live in London?” she asked Gladys, studying the
girl’s face, the defiant sad eyes and peevish mouth, the fretful
restlessness of the dainty figure. Pity was killing the last traces of
her disappointment in her. Gladys returned her gaze curiously; she was
thinking how becoming black was to Muriel.

“Oh, yes!” she said; “I suppose we shall practically live here. I hate
the country, you know, except for house-parties, and Jack’s estate is
particularly dreary, I think. I hate ‘estates,’ they’re like
appropriated pews, one always wants to sit somewhere else! Have you
given up your club craze yet? Your uncle’s death must have made a lot of
difference to you?” Muriel smiled.

“If you mean am I horribly rich? I’ll admit it, but it will make the
‘club craze’ flourish more than ever, I expect. I have bought up three
houses in Stepney and turned them into one for a settlement of workers.
I am making arrangements now to enlarge the club, and in two or three
weeks I shall go back to it.” There was a slight pause. Gladys played
with some violets in a stand. “Are you quite happy?” said Muriel at last
very gently. “I hope, dear, you are quite happy?” It appeared to Gladys
absurd to suppose she could possibly mean it, yet the tone sounded
sincere.

“Happy?—of course we are! Why we have only been married a few months,
and Jack has discovered I wear my own hair and keep my own complexion,
and I am reassured as to the harmlessness of his habits and the extent
of his income. What more can one ask?”

“Those in themselves might add to your unhappiness if you were so
already, but they could scarcely succeed in _making_ you happy, I am
afraid,” said Muriel quietly.

“Wouldn’t _you_ be happy with—Jack?” questioned Gladys. Sorrow, if it
doesn’t increase tenderness, tends to brutality. Muriel met her eyes
calmly.

“No,” she said slowly, “I do not think I should be quite happy—with
Jack.” She did not refer to their broken engagement. Gladys expected her
to, and was touched.

“It was horrid of me to say that,” she said, “if you still care for him,
and rude of me if you don’t.”

“I don’t think you either rude or horrid,” said Muriel quietly, “only
not quite happy. I am very sorry for you, dear, because, though I don’t
care for Jack as I did, he made me very miserable once.” Gladys pulled
two violets to pieces on her lap. Muriel shivered; she hated wanton
destruction of anything, and she loved flowers.

“I have behaved very badly to you,” said Gladys at last in a low voice.
“It was I that helped Edith le Mentier make trouble between you and
Jack.”

“You loved him so?” asked Muriel gently. Gladys burst into tears.

“I don’t know why you should treat me like this,” she sobbed, “for I did
my best to ruin your life, and I would again to get—Jack!” Muriel took
her in her arms; all her old love and pity returned to her.

“It would make no difference to me if you did,” said Muriel; “I should
only be sorry for you. Tell me what’s the matter?”

“He doesn’t care! he doesn’t care!” she wailed. “I don’t believe he ever
did, and now he’s gone back to that hateful woman again. Why shouldn’t
_I_ amuse myself if I want to? He doesn’t love me, and—and other people
do!” Muriel’s face grew stern with pain. If she had wished for revenge
it was at her feet, but with all her soul she sorrowed for the wreckage
of two lives.

“I don’t think you are quite yourself,” she said. “If you love Jack, you
know he is the only other person there is. He must have cared for you as
well, or he wouldn’t have married you, dear. So put the other people
quite away, and smile, and wear your prettiest clothes. You will find
Mrs. le Mentier quite a secondary consideration. Why, she isn’t even
pretty! Jack only goes to see her because you won’t be nice to him. Now
have you been quite nice to him? Given up yourself in all the little
ways, that he might give himself up to you in the great ways? Remember
men are like children: you must put their toys away, and bring them out
again at the right times, and not fret them about unnecessary things.
Now, put on some of the dear violets and come home to tea with me!”
Gladys looked at her suspiciously. Muriel laughed. “There’s nothing I
want to get out of you!” she cried; “and you are no use to me whatever.
_Now_, will you come?” Gladys had the grace to blush; an impulse to
trust the girl she had wronged moved her. She gave her a letter to read
and went out of the room to get her things on. Muriel read the letter
standing, then she went to the window and sat down.

She felt very tired. It is not so much of a surprise to find the
outwardly barbarous with angel hearts, as to see the delicate and
finished products of a noble civilization inwardly corrupt. The letter
was from Major Kennedy. There are times when conditional immortality
seems the only safeguard of heaven. Muriel felt too miserable almost to
breathe. There come moments in the brightest lives of blank depression.
The greatest effort she ever made was to take Gladys back to tea with
her. That evening Jack Hurstly dined at home, and his wife burned an
unanswered letter.




                             CHAPTER XXXVI


    “There is still sun on the wall.”

“SO Launcelot is to go to school, and Cynthia is to be married, and you
are to be left all alone?” asked Muriel smiling as she handed Geoff a
cup of tea. She had handed him a good many cups of tea since he had been
back in England.

“I am to be left all alone,” repeated the doctor, looking at her
steadily.

“I have been practically alone ever since I can remember,” said Muriel
suddenly, “but I have seldom been lonely. In fact I often think it is
only the people who don’t live alone who _are_ lonely. They are always
trying to be understood, to break through barriers and live on a common
level, and there’s no such chance, for the more one shares the little
things the more pitilessly isolated the big things make us. It is so
dreadfully inadequate that tantalizing partial help one gets from
others.”

“There I think you are wrong,” he said looking quietly across at her.
“It’s the whole loaf theory you’re defending. You might just as well say
a man had better have no legs than one, or could be as active without a
crutch as with one, simply because he can’t be very active anyway. We
all want what help we can get, and it is not the least necessary for
people to understand us to help us. Children are the greatest help.
People who know that we want the moon may be wise enough to tell us it
is only a worn-out world of rocks, but people who can’t fathom our
desires can still help us by telling us it is beautiful. It is one of
the first lessons doctors learn to help patients to help themselves. In
fact it is the greatest good we or anybody else can do.”

“Yet you don’t say that the most ignorant doctors are the best?” she
prevaricated.

“No! because sympathy of that kind without knowledge is sympathy without
a backbone. Physical cases require the definite as a foundation, but
when one deals with the invisible, love comes first, not knowledge.
Ignorant mothers mean more to their children than thoughtful scholars
could—even if they do slap them occasionally. A man or woman without a
home, if they have no jars and frets, must miss the influence of it, and
feel the horrible loneliness of life.” He so intensely meant what he
said that Muriel felt she had been flippant, and yet his seriousness
made her long to be more so.

“Birds who sit on telegraph wires, and can fly away from the line of
communication whenever they want to, are more to my liking,” she said.

“You forget that the birds have nests,” suggested the doctor smiling.

“And you that we don’t have wings,” sighed Muriel. “And we can’t change
our mates every spring; when we choose we choose for life, expecting the
better—and getting the worst!”

“Not always,” said Geoff quietly.

Muriel felt angry; she could not tell why. She had never talked in this
strain before; she felt vicious with the universe, and its
representative opposite her made her worse; besides she had just been to
see Gladys.

“If there was an alternative we would take it,” she said. “But half of
us women are brought up in such a lackadaisical way that there’s no use
for us. When we have brains and opportunity we are generally physically
handicapped. People don’t cut the woman who works now—they shrug their
shoulders at her, and that’s worse! As for resources (they advise
resources, you know, after one’s reached twenty-six), they are an outlet
for wasted powers, a puny outlet, a mere compromise with failure! Oh!
I’ve seen it again and again, dozens of times, capable, efficient girls
brought up to be perfectly, daintily useless! After the schoolroom is
over they get a dress allowance—and practise on the piano. Their heads
must be full of something, so then come the rubbish—heaps of life,
silly curates, silly extravagances, or piteously futile old maidhood!
They keep us from being trained for anything else because they want us
to marry, but all the other trainings help towards that the more one
learns the more fit one is to teach. Self-reliance, good judgment and a
sense of proportion are not out of place in a wife, and motherhood is
only a word without them.” The doctor laughed.

“Train your enterprising exceptions,” he said; “perhaps in time they’ll
give the average woman a lift, but I don’t go all the way with you by
any means. You over-estimate women because of one or two women you have
met who stand mentally above their race. Average women at present
haven’t brains enough to seize opportunities or to apply sensible
educations. Domesticities or resources, and a silly curate or two, are
just what they can appreciate, and good, solid hard work what they wish
to avoid. I don’t say women lack brains, but as a rule they lack depth
and continuity. They have very little of the mental soundness, even the
clever ones, that the average man has as a matter of course. They don’t
concentrate, and they’re altogether too personal to make much headway in
the professions. You needn’t look as if you wished to annihilate me,
Miss Muriel—I’ve no doubt you could—but I believe it to be a fact that
women as a whole haven’t got physical or intellectual stamina enough for
public life, and all the education and opportunities in the world will
never give it to them!”

“But we’re only beginning,” cried Muriel. “See how far we’ve got
already.”

“That’s the worst argument you have got against you,” said the doctor
smiling. “You are _too_ quick to be natural; you work in spurts with
reactions—growth, _real_ growth, is a much slower affair. But even
granting you that you have been kept back, you simply can’t be _more_
mentally than you have physical strength for, and as long as you are
labelled women, you’ll be labelled _weak_.” Muriel laughed.

“You sound so horribly sensible,” she said, “and you leave us no power!”

“Ah! there you’re mistaken,” said the doctor. “All your strength (and
Heaven knows you’ve got enough!) lies in weakness! When we come to the
bottom of it, emotion rules the world, and woman is queen of the
emotions.”

“Oh, doctor! doctor!” cried Muriel with uplifted hands. “Principles!
principles!” Geoff smiled grimly.

“Ah! principles,” he said; “they are very good things for theories, and
they act as a drug on the passions—but sometimes they don’t act!
Good-bye, Miss Muriel, my principles warn me of my office hour.”

Muriel let him go willingly. She felt absurd, snubbed, dissatisfied. She
wanted some one to look at her as Jack had looked, with those adoring,
humble eyes, and to listen to her as Jack had listened passionately
sympathetic, and ready to agree with her that two blacks make the
loveliest white in the world. She hated herself for being so rubbed up
the wrong way; and in one breath accused Dr. Grant of being rude, and
herself of being ridiculous. Finally she decided that neither of these
things had anything to do with it, but that she was upset about Gladys.




                             CHAPTER XXXVII


    “The Devil drove the woman out of Paradise; but not even the
    Devil could drive Paradise out of the woman.”

                                                 —GEORGE MACDONALD.

“THE worst of being unusual,” said Edith le Mentier to Jack as he talked
with her under the cover of loud, unmeaning drawing-room music,
“is—that’s it’s so common. Really you know it’s ridiculous running
away. Everybody does it!”

“Still you know one can’t come back again—one’s got to count the cost,”
he said looking at her anxiously.

She had made him think he cared a good deal for her, and she cared
desperately for him. He did not realize how much—it was her greatest
victory that he didn’t. She trembled at even feeling his eyes on her,
his presence near her.

“I feel such a brute,” he said, “leaving Gladys.”

“Brutes can’t live with fools,” said Edith le Mentier. “I like—brutes,”
she added under her breath. Then she looked at him. “I don’t see the
necessity for you to leave—Gladys,” she said.

The music stopped with a crash. The hostess cried, “Oh, how delicious!
Thank you! And _which_ of the dear old masters was that?” The
conversation leaped joyously into freedom.

Jack felt the room and the plants and the beautiful dresses whirl round
him like a dream.

“But,” he said, “I’m not that sort of a man.” He had risen to the very
height of his standard. Edith understood instantly.

“I mean,” she said gently and sadly, “we might never see each other
again.”

“Edith! Edith!” he said; “not that, my darling!”

“Remember where you are,” she said in an undertone. “They’re going to
ask me to sing,” she added. “Come to me to-morrow.”

“I wish you would tell me if you mean to trust me!” he pleaded.

She shrugged her shoulders; they were very pretty ones; then she sang.
They had nothing there she knew but Gounod’s “There is a green hill far
away.” And so she sang that. She sang it beautifully.

Gladys was sitting up for him, she had had a headache and could not
accompany him. She always had a headache if there was the chance of her
meeting Edith le Mentier. She had dressed very sweetly to welcome him,
and looked very young and pathetic. It was so late that he scolded her
for sitting up for him, but she told him she had something special to
say, and took him into the library, shutting the door. The fire gleamed
cheerily, and Jack, as he leaned back in a big arm-chair, and looked at
the pretty, eager face opposite him, felt more of a brute than ever.

“I have had Muriel with me all the afternoon,” she began nervously, “and
she made me promise to talk it all over frankly with you. She’s been so
good to me, Jack!—and I told her that I would——” She hesitated, and
looked at the fire.

He could see that her lips trembled, and a sudden longing to take her in
his arms and comfort her came over him, as he had done one short year
ago in the Indian garden. But he did not—it was some time since he had
done so. And there was this evening’s terrible barrier in between.

“Do you know, Jack, we haven’t been married quite a year, and yet we
aren’t very happy, are we? I’m afraid I have been terribly to blame,
Jack. I wanted to tell you so long ago, but you didn’t—didn’t seem to
care a bit. Then you began to see such a lot of that horrible woman, and
I hated that, and I thought I hated you! People told me I ought to amuse
myself, and that there were other men besides neglectful husbands—and
Major Kennedy, he’s a great friend of yours, and he came so often to the
house—and you never seemed to care. Indeed, I don’t believe you ever
took the trouble to find out, and I was very miserable and silly! I
daresay being miserable should have made me wise, but you were the
highest thing I loved, and _still_ love, Jack, and you didn’t care!” She
paused a moment, catching her breath, and he grew white in a sudden
agony of fear and pain.

He had lived with this woman—she was his wife! He had married her a
young, untried girl, and he had given her the key to all the dangers,
and left her to face them alone. He dared not interrupt her, and so he
waited, fearing each heavy, silent moment as it passed.

“I wanted love, and he—he said he loved me, Jack! Ah! don’t speak! I
was a fool and worse! but indeed I didn’t understand, and then—Muriel
came,”—he drew in a deep breath, it might have been a sob of
relief,—“and I tried to be different. Do you remember that night, two
weeks ago, when you came in late and I kissed you, and you—laughed at
me? Oh, Jack, how it hurt me! And then the next day he told me he would
sell his soul for a kiss. Perhaps he didn’t mean anything, but you had
gone to tea with Edith le Mentier, and I—let him, Jack!” He started
forward, but she stopped him by a gesture. “Wait till I finish, please,”
she said. “Then I understood, and I sent him away, and cried all the
afternoon. He wanted me to run away with him, and I was weak and
frightened. I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for
Muriel. You said I wasn’t truthful, so I want to be quite truthful now.
I think if it hadn’t been for Muriel I should have gone. I wanted to
hurt your pride if I couldn’t win your love; but Muriel stood by me, and
wouldn’t let me go. She told me what to say to Major Kennedy. I’m not
sure—but I believe she said something to him herself—anyway he went
off somewhere at once. Oh, Jack, _can’t_ you love me! can you ever be
good to me again?” She lifted up her arms towards him, with the tears
rolling down her cheeks. She was weak and irresolute, vain and foolish,
but he had done nothing to help her, yet she had gone through what had
defeated him, and she was asking him whether he could forgive her! “I
loved you, Jack,” she cried piteously; “I loved you all the time! And
it’s all over now for ever and ever!” The color rushed into her face and
a new look came into her eyes—a look he did not understand.

“Why do you say it’s all over?” he asked dully. “It may happen again.”

“It will never come again,” she said, “because—oh, Jack, I—I’m afraid,
but I’m very glad too—it’s always so wonderful, and don’t you
understand?” she covered her face with her hands, “I am going to be—the
mother of your child!” At last it came to him, and for ever killed the
irresponsibility of love’s selfishness. He took her now in his arms, he
dared to do so, because now for him too the other was all over. She was
helpless and clinging, she was his wife, and she was going into the
valley of the shadow of death because she loved him. “Oh, Jack, will you
forgive?”

“Forgive you!” he cried, and tried to explain to her how sorry he was,
how much to blame, and how glad at last that they both of them
understood, and how now it would all be different—so wonderfully
different! But he did not tell her about Edith le Mentier.

When she was safe in bed he wrote to the other woman, and hurt her very
bitterly. The other woman, for all her faults, is very often brave, and
Edith le Mentier suffered horribly; but she bore the great defeat, and
was only a very little irritable the next morning. She did not sing
Gounod’s song again; she said it was scarcely suitable.

She always shrugged her shoulders and smiled when people mentioned
Jack’s wife, and when they spoke of him she said “Poor fellow!”

Who could tell that those were the figures of the sum called tragedy?
Not the tragedy of the true-hearted who see through pain the vista of
glory, but that inordinate agony which because it is so solely selfish
eats into the heart that bears it, and for the vista substitutes a
_cul-de-sac_.

Jack and Gladys went to his estate in the country, where they spent some
bad hours, and learned lessons of tolerance. It was, fortunately for
Jack, the hunting season, and he rode hard to hounds. Gladys cultivated
the country people, read a great deal, and took an intelligent interest
in Jack’s “runs.” At the end of the time they could live together quite
comfortably, and avoided the unendurable with the ready forbearance of
quite long married people. The knowing what to avoid is the key to most
things, though it is often difficult to turn.

A son was born to them, making Jack a proud father, and consequently a
good husband. And Gladys found a life more engrossing than her own. She
wrote and asked Muriel to stand godmother.




                            CHAPTER XXXVIII


    “Life’s business being just the terrible choice.”

THERE was trouble at Shindies Alley, not that there was anything unusual
in that! For it was a place where trouble was the commonplace, and what
the comfortable call tragedy almost a nursery rule. Only the trouble was
worse than usual, amounting to the prospect of the police and a possible
murder case in the papers. “Rough Tom” being not quite so drunk as usual
had beaten his wife nearly to death, a thing he had done before, but
never quite so effectually. It was better, the neighbors thought, to
send a boy to the doctor’s, he and the lady at the club had been there
before. This time the doctor arrived first. “Rough Tom” was off, no one
of course knew where. All denied any knowledge of him, though exultingly
willing to report any unnecessary and loathsome details of the row. The
doctor dismissed the crowd curtly. They vanished silently into dark
holes and corners.

It was a cold night. The children sharing the den where their mother lay
cursing and groaning cried dismally. They also cried loudly; it seemed
worth while with both a row and a doctor. Geoff despatched them to a
neighbor’s across the passage, and examined the woman by a guttering
candle. She swore horribly, but she was too much engrossed with pain to
be afraid; she was also anxious to explain that it was not her man’s
fault but another woman’s, whom she called by a variety of names. She
was too ill to be moved, and the doctor began with steady gentleness to
dress the wounds. He needed a nurse, but he had no time to send for one.
The case was urgent. We fight as earnestly for the most apparently
useless lives as for the dearest, yet we cannot believe that God has as
high a respect for the ultimate fate of the crushed soul’s life as we
have to keep breath in a ruined body.

It was the doctor’s profession, but it was that least of all that made
him fight for her. He looked up and saw Muriel at the door. He felt
intensely angry that she should know such a place existed.

“I should advise you to go away,” he said coldly. Muriel looked up for a
moment, simply astonished, then she advanced towards him and the heap of
rags.

“I am going to help you,” she said.

“You are only in the way,” he replied grimly, not raising his eyes from
the patient. “I want a nurse, not—a young lady.” The last words might
have been an insult. She flushed angrily.

“I can hold her for you,” she said; “I am not afraid.” It was necessary
to have some help.

“You will faint?” he questioned incredulously.

“No, Dr. Grant, I shall not!” said Muriel. He knew by her tone that she
was very angry.

“Well, then, don’t waste any more time,” was his only reply.

In another moment she was down on her knees, obeying short, imperious
orders. Dr. Grant never left much to the initiative of his nurses. The
sight was almost more repulsive than she could bear. She wanted to cover
her face with her hands instead of using them on the awful crushed form.
She wanted to scream at the woman’s pain, to rage at the doctor’s
cruelty, to fly from this whole world of constant reiterated woe; but
she was far too angry even to let her hands tremble. At last she felt
that her strength was going; she turned white, cold perspiration stood
on her forehead. The doctor glanced at her sharply, and then—he
laughed. The hot blood rushed to her heart; she grew rigid now, but not
with fear; the noise in her ears ceased. She heard every word he said,
anticipated every need, and had not reached the limit of her strength
when the doctor released her.

“The morphia will keep her quiet till morning,” he said. “You’d better
go home.”

“Will she live?” she asked him.

“Unfortunately—yes,” said Geoff. “Women of that sort generally do—to
be beaten again!” They went in silence to the door. Muriel was quite
certain now that she disliked him.

Geoff left a few parting directions to a reluctant, but almost entirely
sober, neighbor. When they were in the street Muriel waited for him to
explain; but he did not explain. It was a habit of his not to, possibly
owing to his professional desire to steer clear of the definite. Muriel
was too astonished, hurt and indignant to remain silent for long. She
stopped.

“Good-night, Dr. Grant,” she said with an icy formality. The doctor’s
eyes twinkled.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. She looked at him with a searching angry
glance.

“Your manner has not pleased me to-night,” she replied quietly; “I
should prefer to return alone.”

“I am sorry if I have displeased you, Miss Dallerton,” said Geoff with
his mouth ominously twitching. Was it imaginable that she couldn’t see
he wanted to kiss her? As she stood there, aggrieved, defiant, serious,
her eyes like two points of light under her heavy hair, the bright color
in her cheeks, the whole daring absurdity of _her_ seriously facing life
there in a horrible alley instead of the delicate luxury of a West-End
drawing-room, he could have laughed at the inappropriateness of it.
“It’s too cold for an apology,” he ventured more gravely. “I will see
you about this later, if I may. Please let me see you home first.”

She did not want to seem girlishly tempestuous, so she assented to his
last request, but in bitter silence walked with him to the club. She did
not give him her hand as he said “Good-night.” She wanted tremendously
to refuse to allow him to call, to cut short their acquaintance, to
never set eyes on him again. But she felt an absurd desire to cry
brought on by the physical strain of the past two hours, so that she
said nothing.

Yet when she was in her room she would not cry. She forced the tears
back, and remembered how he had laughed at her! The utter careless
brutality of his whole behavior! And Cynthia could be so foolish as to
imagine he cared for her! She herself had never for an instant dreamed
it—she refused to admit it—it was impossible! It never occurred to her
in the least that Geoff had been trying to rouse her courage through
opposition, and to control his own too tender feelings by a mask of
rudeness. Even if it had occurred to her she would probably have been
just as angry, for what she was really indignant with was his strength
and her weakness, and she could find no excuses for that.




                             CHAPTER XXXIX


                         “The best
        Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.”

THE studio lamps made cheerful colors in the right places, and Cynthia
feeling the world as far as she was concerned in her lap, in the shape
of a baby boy, round and fair with undecided features, felt that life
had brought its own rewards, richly, wonderfully. She was almost afraid,
she was so happy, with the fear of those who have gone into the
darkness, and dreamt only of the light. Leslie Damores was painting her
again, but the face was different. It was called “Motherhood,” and it
told of the great need satisfied. Muriel was coming in to see the
picture. The studio door opened and a woman come into the room; she was
little, and French, and beautifully dressed. She advanced towards
Cynthia with a little cry; then she laughed.

“Why, Cynthia, you’ve got a baby! I told them to let me come right up. I
was an old friend, and I just had to come. Oh, there’s your husband!”
She turned with another rapid laugh towards Leslie. He was looking
bravely at his wife, whose face was strained and anxious; the woman
seemed evidently nervous too.

“Well, you’re very silent you two,” she cried defiantly.

“What do you want?” said Cynthia coldly. “I thought you had gone away.”

“And so I did, and I’ve come back. Clifton died, and I married again.
Did you know it?—an American too—and he didn’t give me any peace till
I promised to get Launcelot. We Americans seem to have such horrid
consciences.”

“You never had, had you?” said Cynthia quietly. The woman looked angry,
then she laughed.

“Well, I guess you’re about right—I never had much trouble that way;
but when Sam Hicks wanted Launcelot I felt it would be right sweet to
take him back with us to America, and I had the greatest time finding
your address. You’re fixed up real genteel, Mr. Damores; I should think
you must have made painting pay. And is that Cynthia’s picture? How
perfectly lovely!”

“Mrs. Hicks,” said Cynthia slowly—“I think I understood you to say that
was your husband’s name—when you let me take Launcelot three years ago
I had no idea you would ever claim him again. He has just gone to school
here in England. He is very happy——” Cynthia’s voice broke. “Oh, why
do you want him again?” she cried—“it’s cruel.”

“I am going to have my boy,” said Mrs. Hicks raising her voice. “I tell
you——”

“A moment,” Leslie Damores broke in. “You were last heard of running
away with a French Count. Do you think you are a fit person to take care
of a child?”

“Why, how dare you?” she cried, facing him with frightened rage; “I
declare I never heard the like! I’ll have you up for libel, Mr. Leslie
Damores; and, as for you, Mrs. Leslie Damores——”

“I am speaking for my wife, and you may speak to me,” said Leslie,
“otherwise you leave the room.” Mrs. Hicks began to cry.

“And to think that I am respectably married and everything. But that’s
what it is, a poor woman must always suffer for her mistakes, while as
for you—you can have as many of them as you like, and you’re none the
worse for them!” She stopped again; their silence checked her, she felt
hushed by their quiet contempt; and yet, angrier than ever, “I’m the
boy’s mother,” she said turning to Cynthia; “how would you like to have
your child taken from you?” Cynthia looked helplessly at her husband;
the woman had touched the right plea; she was the boy’s mother.

“You shall see Launcelot to-morrow, Mrs. Hicks,” said Leslie, “and by
that time I shall have inquired into your case, and if your assertions
are true as to your husband and his means of support we will consider
the matter. Meanwhile there is nothing more to be said, and if you will
allow me I will take you downstairs.”

Mrs. Hicks looked spitefully at Cynthia, but Leslie’s face checked
her—the baby had begun to cry. She flung up her head and left the room.
The baby had gone, and Cynthia was crying alone in the studio when he
came back. He took her in his arms.

“Oh, Leslie,” she moaned, “he meant everything to us, dear little
fellow. Do you remember he made me good again, and he found you for me?
Leslie, I can’t let him go back to her. She left him so cruelly. He is
mine, darling—tell me I needn’t let him go—he’s such a delicate little
fellow. Oh, I can’t! I can’t!” He stroked her hair; she had never cried
since her marriage.

“Dearest, we will leave it to him. She is his mother—we mustn’t forget
that. She has some claim on him, after all.”

“You could threaten to tell her husband about—about the Count,” she
whispered.

“Oh, no, no, no,” said Leslie gently.

“I didn’t mean it, dear—I didn’t mean it,” she sobbed afresh.

“I will go and bring Launcelot,” he said.

“Isn’t that baby crying?” It was not baby crying, but she turned and
fled upstairs.

“After all,” said Leslie thoughtfully, “she’s not Launcelot’s mother.”
Then he went out.

Muriel came in to find the studio empty of everything but the great
picture of “Motherhood.” The woman holding Paradise in her arms stung
her to the quick with her expression of ineffable content. She was not
looking at the child in her arms. She was holding it too close to need
the reassurance of a glance; she was looking across the child with all
the loves in her eyes, steady and beautiful and bright, eyes too happy
to smile. Muriel knew suddenly that it was the way Cynthia looked at her
husband. She did not wish to see them then, so slowly she let the
curtain down before the picture and crept softly out of the room. But
the woman’s eyes followed her home, and when she was in the club and
back in her room she saw them still. They seemed to have a quiet wonder
in them that any woman could ever dream that there was any other
happiness than that.

“Something is surely wrong when one begins to count up one’s blessings,”
said Muriel. “My life is full—full of everything I want!” But as she
looked defiantly in the glass she saw she had not got the woman’s look
in her eyes.

Launcelot and Leslie walked hand in hand very solemnly home through the
streets of London. Leslie had been trying to explain. Launcelot’s little
face was very white, but he would not cry.

“Do you think—do you think I ought to leave you and Lady Beautiful
and—and baby?” he asked wistfully.

“She is your mother, dear boy, and she wants you very much,” said Leslie
reproaching himself for the coldness in his voice.

“And are mothers everything?”

“Mothers are a very great deal, old fellow. You see you belong to
them—you’re their very own.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said the little fellow wearily. “Baby is Lady
Beautiful’s very own, and so are you, but I’m not to be any more.” There
was a quiver in his voice. Leslie pressed his little hand, he felt too
much to speak. “My mother didn’t want me very much for her very own
before, did she? You see she gave me to Lady Beautiful.”

“She wants you now,” said Damores hoarsely. They were very near home.

“I—I don’t think I want her very much, you know,” said Launcelot
wistfully. “But they didn’t give me any choice, did they, when they made
me belong to her?”

“I think they thought she needed you; you see she has no one else but a
new husband,” Leslie explained.

“Then I must go,” said Launcelot as Leslie opened the door, “because you
see a new husband can’t be much, and a boy who belongs to you must mean
more, I should think.”

“I am quite sure that a boy who belongs to you means much more,” said
Leslie kissing him.

So it was all settled before Launcelot ever saw Lady Beautiful. They
looked a little nervously at each other as the door opened and they saw
her sitting by the fire. She sprang up with a little sudden cry and her
arms held out to him. He had been to school and knew that fellows never
cry, but he had only just learnt it—and he forgot. Leslie watched them
for a moment sobbing in each other’s arms. The tenderness and pity from
her new rich store made her seem more wonderful than ever to him. His
heart ached at their grief, but the woman’s assertions were true—the
child must go. The inevitable had to him a consolation. He went and
smoked hard in the studio. To Cynthia it was a cage, and she struggled
in vain against the bars, crying over Launcelot as he slept at last,
with troubled breathing from his late sobs. But when the baby cried she
went to it again. The next morning Mrs. Hicks appeared. She was
nervously anxious to please. She called Launcelot by all the
affectionate names she could think of, but he only looked at her with
half-frightened, wondering eyes.

“And now Launcelot will come with mother?” she asked at last. He looked
wistfully back at Cynthia and her husband, his heart breaking. Parting
with the baby had been gone through upstairs. He had cried till he could
cry no more, so he only looked at them.

“I would rather belong to you, Lady Beautiful,” he whispered, as she put
her arms about him, “much, much rather belong to you.”

She watched him walk with his mother down the street, her face pressed
to the panes. When he reached the corner he turned and waved back to
her. His mother gave his arm a little pull, and he did not turn again.
It was the last time Cynthia ever saw him. He went out of her life as
suddenly and strangely as he had entered it; but in the meantime the
broken thread had been joined together again, the dreams she had
resolutely crushed had blossomed in a garden of reality, and the great
power of love had filled up what had been the emptiness and desolation
of her soul.




                               CHAPTER XL


    “How Love is the only good in the world.”

“NOW I have come to make my apologies, Miss Dallerton,” said the doctor
in a cheery voice.

It was a cold day, and he looked aggressively warm and reassuring. He
never needed to be made allowances for, and Muriel could never quite
forgive him that. She had made so many allowances for Jack.

“I’m afraid you thought me a little short with you the other day—in
fact, you were so displeased you had half a mind to walk through Stepney
by yourself—now, hadn’t you?” he asked smiling.

“You were very rude to me the other day, Dr. Grant, and though you seem
to take my forgiveness for granted, you have not yet given me any
explanation.” The doctor laughed, but his eyes grew colder.

“Well!” he said, “so you won’t forgive me without?” Muriel frowned.

“If you have a reason I should like to hear it,” she suggested.

The doctor walked once or twice up and down the room. She watched him
unwillingly; he had the most splendid shoulders; she did not think he
could be more than thirty-six. Then he stopped before her chair and
looked at her very gravely. He was so tall that she felt at a
disadvantage; some instinct made her rise too, and they stood there face
to face, their eyes doing battle. She looked away at last.

“Well?” she questioned. She was conscious that her breath was coming
quickly, and she thanked Heaven she didn’t blush easily.

“I was short to you,” said the doctor deliberately, “because it seemed
to me the only way of getting help from you. If I hadn’t made you
thoroughly angry you would probably have fainted.”

“I should not have fainted,” she said, her eyes flashing fiercely. She
knew she was not speaking the truth, but it was too desperately
difficult. If she submitted in one thing, where would they stop? She was
beginning to lose her self-control and her sense of proportion at the
same time. It is dangerous for a man to lose both, but it is fatal to a
woman to lose either.

“There was another reason,” said the doctor slowly. Muriel was silent.
“Do you want to hear it?”

“If——” she began icily. “Yes, I may as well hear it,” she finished in
confusion. She did not want him to think she cared enough to be angry.

“I love you!” he said with the same quiet deliberation and a pause
between each word, “and it was a little difficult to let you help in any
other way.”

The room grew suddenly tense; each breath was a terrible sword which
shook the universe; there seemed an awful conspiracy in the room to win
some concession; the very chairs and table seemed to wait and listen. A
hand-organ in the street clanged them back into facts again. The doctor,
still looking at her, picked up a paper-knife; Muriel sank back into the
chair. There seemed nothing left in the world to say, but she felt as if
there might be if he would only keep still a moment.

“I am very sorry,” she said at last, and then she could have bitten her
tongue out, it sounded so commonplace. She noticed that he was looking
suddenly very tired, but he smiled with grave eyes.

“I knew you would be,” he said, “and I must go and make some calls. But
you do understand now, don’t you?”

“I suppose I do,” said Muriel; “but are you going away?” He almost
laughed at her thoughtlessness.

“Well! yes, Miss Dallerton,” he said; “I think I must go now.”

Muriel rose to her feet, and a great wave of desolation swept over her.
She stood there alone, and before her eyes passed the vision of those
who had left her—Alec—Jack—Cynthia—her uncle. All with their
different lives, their different circles. And now he was going, the
friend who had made life and her work, her youth and her beauty so
excellently well worth while—with whom she had argued, quarrelled and
discussed—and he was leaving her. All of a sudden she knew she could
not bear it—that she, too, needed help and comfort and sympathy—that
though one may give all and prosper, yet it is blessed to receive as
well. And then he looked so tired. He was waiting for her to dismiss
him, and he could not understand why she was keeping him.

“I don’t want you to go,” said Muriel at last. “I’m sure I need you
more—more than the other patients, only you must learn to ask questions
and not to make assertions only if you want me to be a satisfactory
case!”

“What made you say that you were sorry?” he asked her after a long,
wonderful pause.

“I was sorry,” she laughed at him, “that you didn’t tell me so before!”

                 *        *        *        *        *

When Jack heard of her marriage he shrugged his shoulders. “I always
thought she would run _amôk_ on some sort of a professional chap, but I
rather thought it would be a parson,” he said, and thought how much
better she might have done for herself if she had only known when she
had a good thing.

“I thought she was cut out for an old maid,” Edith le Mentier told her
friends; “but those sort of women generally marry and have fourteen
children.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

It mattered very little to Muriel what was said. She looked at things
now with the eyes of the woman in Damores’ picture; and she and Geoff
having found so much for themselves were the more anxious to give their
sunshine to the world. They believed that the purposes of love, in human
and material things, were the channels through which the spirit finds
soaring room—never apart from earth, but ever nearer heaven.

Their one need left was to join the gospel of example, which is simply
loving everything for love’s sake, whether it visibly love back or no.
To acquaintances they seemed to have positively left the world, but they
themselves knew that they had found the true one.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Transcriber’s Notes:

A few obvious punctuation and typesetting errors have been corrected
without note. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been
employed.

A cover has been created for this ebook and is placed in the public
domain.

[End of _Life, the Interpreter_ by Phyllis Bottome]





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