In the Cage by Henry James (page 2)

and she then returned to what he had just asked her. “Oh yes, I quite believe you like it–my always being there and our taking things up so familiarly and successfully: if not exactly where we left them,” she laughed, “almost always at least at an interesting point!” He was about to say something in reply to this, but her friendly gaiety was quicker. “You want a great many things in life, a great many comforts and helps and luxuries–you want everything as pleasant as possible. Therefore, so far as it’s in the power of any particular person to contribute to all that–” She had turned her face to him smiling, just thinking.

“Oh see here!” But he was highly amused. “Well, what then?” he enquired as if to humour her.

“Why the particular person must never fail. We must manage it for you somehow.”

He threw back his head, laughing out; he was really exhilarated. “Oh yes, somehow!”

“Well, I think we each do–don’t we?–in one little way and another and according to our limited lights. I’m pleased at any rate, for myself, that you are; for I assure you I’ve done my best.”

“You do better than any one!” He had struck a match for another cigarette, and the flame lighted an instant his responsive finished face, magnifying into a pleasant grimace the kindness with which he paid her this tribute. “You’re awfully clever, you know; cleverer, cleverer, cleverer–!” He had appeared on the point of making some tremendous statement; then suddenly, puffing his cigarette and shifting almost with violence on his seat, he let it altogether fall.

CHAPTER XVII

In spite of this drop, if not just by reason of it, she felt as if Lady Bradeen, all but named out, had popped straight up; and she practically betrayed her consciousness by waiting a little before she rejoined: “Cleverer than who?”

“Well, if I wasn’t afraid you’d think I swagger, I should say–than anybody! If you leave your place there, where shall you go?” he more gravely asked.

“Oh too far for you ever to find me!”

“I’d find you anywhere.”

The tone of this was so still more serious that she had but her one acknowledgement. “I’d do anything for you–I’d do anything for you,” she repeated. She had already, she felt, said it all; so what did anything more, anything less, matter? That was the very reason indeed why she could, with a lighter note, ease him generously of any awkwardness produced by solemnity, either his own or hers. “Of course it must be nice for you to be able to think there are people all about who feel in such a way.”

In immediate appreciation of this, however, he only smoked without looking at her. “But you don’t want to give up your present work?” he at last threw out. “I mean you WILL stay in the post-office?”

“Oh yes; I think I’ve a genius for that.”

“Rather! No one can touch you.” With this he turned more to her again. “But you can get, with a move, greater advantages?”

“I can get in the suburbs cheaper lodgings. I live with my mother. We need some space. There’s a particular place that has other inducements.”

He just hesitated. “Where is it?”

“Oh quite out of YOUR way. You’d never have time.”

“But I tell you I’d go anywhere. Don’t you believe it?”

“Yes, for once or twice. But you’d soon see it wouldn’t do for you.”

He smoked and considered; seemed to stretch himself a little and, with his legs out, surrender himself comfortably. “Well, well, well–I believe everything you say. I take it from you–anything you like–in the most extraordinary way.” It struck her certainly- -and almost without bitterness–that the way in which she was already, as if she had been an old friend, arranging for him and preparing the only magnificence she could muster, was quite the most extraordinary. “Don’t, DON’T go!” he presently went on. “I shall miss you too horribly!”

“So that you just put it to me as a definite request?”–oh how she tried to divest this of all sound of the hardness of bargaining! That ought to have been easy enough, for what was she arranging to get? Before he could answer she had continued: “To be perfectly fair I should tell you I recognise at Cocker’s certain strong attractions. All you people come. I like all the horrors.”

“The horrors?”

“Those you all–you know the set I mean, YOUR set–show me with as good a conscience as if I had no more feeling than a letter-box.”

He looked quite excited at the way she put it. “Oh they don’t know!”

“Don’t know I’m not stupid? No, how should they?”

“Yes, how should they?” said the Captain sympathetically. “But isn’t ‘horrors’ rather strong?”

“What you DO is rather strong!” the girl promptly returned.

“What I do?”

“Your extravagance, your selfishness, your immorality, your crimes,” she pursued, without heeding his expression.

“I SAY!”–her companion showed the queerest stare.

“I like them, as I tell you–I revel in them. But we needn’t go into that,” she quietly went on; “for all I get out of it is the harmless pleasure of knowing. I know, I know, I know!”–she breathed it ever so gently.

“Yes; that’s what has been between us,” he answered much more simply.

She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, and for a moment she did so. “If I do stay because you want it–and I’m rather capable of that–there are two or three things I think you ought to remember. One is, you know, that I’m there sometimes for days and weeks together without your ever coming.”

“Oh I’ll come every day!” he honestly cried.

She was on the point, at this, of imitating with her hand his movement of shortly before; but she checked herself, and there was no want of effect in her soothing substitute. “How can you? How can you?” He had, too manifestly, only to look at it there, in the vulgarly animated gloom, to see that he couldn’t; and at this point, by the mere action of his silence, everything they had so definitely not named, the whole presence round which they had been circling, became part of their reference, settled in solidly between them. It was as if then for a minute they sat and saw it all in each other’s eyes, saw so much that there was no need of a pretext for sounding it at last. “Your danger, your danger–!” Her voice indeed trembled with it, and she could only for the moment again leave it so.

During this moment he leaned back on the bench, meeting her in silence and with a face that grew more strange. It grew so strange that after a further instant she got straight up. She stood there as if their talk were now over, and he just sat and watched her. It was as if now–owing to the third person they had brought in– they must be more careful; so that the most he could finally say was: “That’s where it is!”

“That’s where it is!” the girl as guardedly replied. He sat still, and she added: “I won’t give you up. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”–he appealed, but without moving.

“I don’t quite see my way, but I won’t give you up,” she repeated. “There. Good-bye.”

It brought him with a jerk to his feet, tossing away his cigarette. His poor face was flushed. “See here–see here!”

“No, I won’t; but I must leave you now,” she went on as if not hearing him.

“See here–see here!” He tried, from the bench, to take her hand again.

But that definitely settled it for her: this would, after all, be as bad as his asking her to supper. “You mustn’t come with me–no, no!”

He sank back, quite blank, as if she had pushed him. “I mayn’t see you home?”

“No, no; let me go.” He looked almost as if she had struck him, but she didn’t care; and the manner in which she spoke–it was literally as if she were angry–had the force of a command. “Stay where you are!”

“See here–see here!” he nevertheless pleaded.

“I won’t give you up!” she cried once more–this time quite with passion; on which she got away from him as fast as she could and left him staring after her.

CHAPTER XVIII

Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous “plans” that he had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away–the fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that from moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at their lodgings–partly to her embarrassment and partly to her relief–struck up with the landlady an alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a week at Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that degree even that Mr. Mudge himself–habitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too much in things–made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close- packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the Dorset coast.

He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the roof of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time he fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense, his future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying their steps than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency they considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the tea-caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions–these indeed the familiar commodities–that he had now to put into the scales; and his betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at Cocker’s and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait for something–something in the key of the immense discussions that had mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas. Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately to crown the monument.

Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr. Mudge’s mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what they should have gone and have done if they hadn’t been exactly as they were. He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with her own. She liked to be as she was–if it could only have lasted. She could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced against other delights. The people at Ladle’s and at Thrupp’s had THEIR ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear Mr. Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn’t take a bath, or of the bath he might take if he only hadn’t taken something else. He was always with her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more than “hourly,” more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she should do at Chalk Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from the band and the crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with her friend, who reminded her often that they could have only in the thick of it the sense of the money they were getting back. That had little effect on her, for she got back her money by seeing many things, the things of the past year, fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation that transforms melancholy and misery, passion and effort, into experience and knowledge.

She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become there, in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far- away story, a picture of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere, she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual counting of the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in particular, usually fat and in men’s caps and write shoes, whom he could never let alone–not that she cared; it was not the great world, the world of Cocker’s and Ladle’s and Thrupp’s, but it offered an endless field to his faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She had never accepted him so much, never arranged so successfully for making him chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This separate commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great thrift she had quite mastered that of merely spending words enough to keep him imperturbably and continuously going.

He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing–or at any rate not at all showing that he knew–what far other images peopled her mind than the women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show, brought home to her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She wondered sometimes that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period, from the society at Cocker’s. But one evening while their holiday cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his quality as might have made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something that, in all his overflow, he had been able to keep back till other matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he was at last ready to marry–that he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore their waiting was over–it could be a question of a near date. They would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye on a sweet little home. He would take her to see it on their first Sunday.

CHAPTER XIX

His having kept this great news for the last, having had such a card up his sleeve and not floated it out in the current of his chatter and the luxury of their leisure, was one of those incalculable strokes by which he could still affect her; the kind of thing that reminded her of the latent force that had ejected the drunken soldier–an example of the profundity of which his promotion was the proof. She listened a while in silence, on this occasion, to the wafted strains of the music; she took it in as she had not quite done before that her future was now constituted. Mr. Mudge was distinctly her fate; yet at this moment she turned her face quite away from him, showing him so long a mere quarter of her cheek that she at last again heard his voice. He couldn’t see a pair of tears that were partly the reason of her delay to give him the assurance he required; but he expressed at a venture the hope that she had had her fill of Cocker’s.

She was finally able to turn back. “Oh quite. There’s nothing going on. No one comes but the Americans at Thrupp’s, and they don’t do much. They don’t seem to have a secret in the world.”

“Then the extraordinary reason you’ve been giving me for holding on there has ceased to work?”

She thought a moment. “Yes, that one. I’ve seen the thing through–I’ve got them all in my pocket.”

“So you’re ready to come?”

For a little again she made no answer. “No, not yet, all the same. I’ve still got a reason–a different one.”

He looked her all over as if it might have been something she kept in her mouth or her glove or under her jacket–something she was even sitting upon. “Well, I’ll have it, please.”

“I went out the other night and sat in the Park with a gentleman,” she said at last.

Nothing was ever seen like his confidence in her and she wondered a little now why it didn’t irritate her. It only gave her ease and space, as she felt, for telling him the whole truth that no one knew. It had arrived at present at her really wanting to do that, and yet to do it not in the least for Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only for herself. This truth filled out for her there the whole experience about to relinquish, suffused and coloured it as a picture that she should keep and that, describe it as she might, no one but herself would ever really see. Moreover she had no desire whatever to make Mr. Mudge jealous; there would be no amusement in it, for the amusement she had lately known had spoiled her for lower pleasures. There were even no materials for it. The odd thing was how she never doubted that, properly handled, his passion was poisonable; what had happened was that he had cannily selected a partner with no poison to distil. She read then and there that she should never interest herself in anybody as to whom some other sentiment, some superior view, wouldn’t be sure to interfere for him with jealousy. “And what did you get out of that?” he asked with a concern that was not in the least for his honour.

“Nothing but a good chance to promise him I wouldn’t forsake him. He’s one of my customers.”

“Then it’s for him not to forsake YOU.”

“Well, he won’t. It’s all right. But I must just keep on as long as he may want me.”

“Want you to sit with him in the Park?”

“He may want me for that–but I shan’t. I rather liked it, but once, under the circumstances, is enough. I can do better for him in another manner.”

“And what manner, pray?”

“Well, elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?–I SAY!”

This was an ejaculation used also by Captain Everard, but oh with what a different sound! “You needn’t ‘say’–there’s nothing to be said. And yet you ought perhaps to know.”

“Certainly I ought. But WHAT–up to now?”

“Why exactly what I told him. That I’d do anything for him.”

“What do you mean by ‘anything’?”

“Everything.”

Mr. Mudge’s immediate comment on this statement was to draw from his pocket a crumpled paper containing the remains of half a pound of “sundries.” These sundries had figured conspicuously in his prospective sketch of their tour, but it was only at the end of three days that they had defined themselves unmistakeably as chocolate-creams. “Have another?–THAT one,” he said. She had another, but not the one he indicated, and then he continued: “What took place afterwards?”

“Afterwards?”

“What did you do when you had told him you’d do everything?”

“I simply came away.”

“Out of the Park?”

“Yes, leaving him there. I didn’t let him follow me.”

“Then what did you let him do?”

“I didn’t let him do anything.”

Mr. Mudge considered an instant. “Then what did you go there for?” His tone was even slightly critical.

“I didn’t quite know at the time. It was simply to be with him, I suppose–just once. He’s in danger, and I wanted him to know I know it. It makes meeting him–at Cocker’s, since it’s that I want to stay on for–more interesting.”

“It makes it mighty interesting for ME!” Mr. Mudge freely declared. “Yet he didn’t follow you?” he asked. “I would!”

“Yes, of course. That was the way you began, you know. You’re awfully inferior to him.”

“Well, my dear, you’re not inferior to anybody. You’ve got a cheek! What’s he in danger of?”

“Of being found out. He’s in love with a lady–and it isn’t right- -and I’ve found him out.”

“That’ll be a look-out for ME!” Mr. Mudge joked. “You mean she has a husband?”

“Never mind what she has! They’re in awful danger, but his is the worst, because he’s in danger from her too.”

“Like me from you–the woman I love? If he’s in the same funk as me–“

“He’s in a worse one. He’s not only afraid of the lady–he’s afraid of other things.”

Mr. Mudge selected another chocolate-cream. “Well, I’m only afraid of one! But how in the world can you help this party?”

“I don’t know–perhaps not at all. But so long as there’s a chance–“

“You won’t come away?”

“No, you’ve got to wait for me.”

Mr. Mudge enjoyed what was in his mouth. “And what will he give you?”

“Give me?”

“If you do help him.”

“Nothing. Nothing in all the wide world.”

“Then what will he give ME?” Mr. Mudge enquired. “I mean for waiting.”

The girl thought a moment; then she got up to walk. “He never heard of you,” she replied.

“You haven’t mentioned me?”

“We never mention anything. What I’ve told you is just what I’ve found out.”

Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the bench, looked up at her; she often preferred to be quiet when he proposed to walk, but now that he seemed to wish to sit she had a desire to move. “But you haven’t told me what HE has found out.”

She considered her lover. “He’d never find YOU, my dear!”

Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her in something of the attitude in which she had last left Captain Everard, but the impression was not the same. “Then where do I come in?”

“You don’t come in at all. That’s just the beauty of it!”–and with this she turned to mingle with the multitude collected round the band. Mr. Mudge presently overtook her and drew her arm into his own with a quiet force that expressed the serenity of possession; in consonance with which it was only when they parted for the night at her door that he referred again to what she had told him.

“Have you seen him since?”

“Since the night in the Park? No, not once.”

“Oh, what a cad!” said Mr. Mudge.

CHAPTER XX

It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again, and on that occasion–the only one of all the series on which hindrance had been so utter–no communication with him proved possible. She had made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also, higher up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was slack and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to something than in happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint Martin’s summer. The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.

He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought better to have kept his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a long time with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their silence. The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out. The only token they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all. This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when that was the sole solution.

Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants struck her as marking a step: they were built so–just in the mere flash–on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she would do for him. The “anything, anything” she had uttered in the Park went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal make-believes, the intense implications of questions and answers and change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having had their moment, a possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they had met for all time–it exerted on their being in presence again an influence so prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk away from him as if she were making an end, she found something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn’t she precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?

It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation, after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend’s withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her the other work. She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them, when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on, between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was re-asserted. What beset her above all, and as she had almost never known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench. It became for an hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit and wait for her. She could almost hear him, through the tick of the sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves of October. Why should such a vision seize her at this particular moment with such a shake? There was a time–from four to five– when she could have cried with happiness and rage.

Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up; she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with little sharp stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal- orders fairly snap while she breathed to herself “It’s the last day–the last day!” The last day of what? She couldn’t have told. All she knew now was that if she WERE out of the cage she wouldn’t in the least have minded, this time, its not yet being dark. She would have gone straight toward Park Chambers and have hung about there till no matter when. She would have waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the day was the last of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for his wishing still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park scarcely let him bring out. “See here–see here!”–the sound of these two words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it they then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She seemed, whatever it was, perfectly to see it now–to see that if she should just chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he would somehow make everything up to her. When the clock struck five she was on the very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill and rapidly getting worse. This announcement was on her lips, and she had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: “I can’t stop–I must go home. If I feel better, later on, I’ll come back. I’m very sorry, but I MUST go.” At that instant Captain Everard once more stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence, the strangest, quickest revolution. He stopped her off without knowing it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt herself saved.

That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were again other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the situation could only be expressed by their silence. It was expressed, of a truth, in a larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind of supplication. “Be quiet, be quiet!” they pleaded; and they saw his own reply: “I’ll do whatever you say; I won’t even look at you–see, see!” They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that they wouldn’t look, quite positively wouldn’t. What she was to see was that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton’s end, and surrendered himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved so great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned away before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker’s own counter and appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three orders and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her, considerately abstaining from any glance round to see if she were free. It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop longer than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when he did turn about she could see him time himself–she was freshly taken up–and cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had released. He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor telegrams, and now that he was close to her–for she was close to the counter-clerk–it brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him look at her neighbour and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear it. He asked for a Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to consult one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced, he once more wandered off.

What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was just the aggravation of his “See here!” She felt at this moment strangely and portentously afraid of him–had in her ears the hum of a sense that, should it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her reflexion was the idea that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after all simply to do for him the “anything” she had promised, the “everything” she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge. He might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though indeed his manner didn’t denote that–denoted on the contrary an embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to be helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the other time. Yes, he considered quite probably that he had help rather to offer than to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her free he continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his thumbed Guide it was Mr. Buckton he caught–it was from Mr. Buckton he obtained half-a-crown’s-worth of stamps.

After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a postal-order for ten shillings. What did he want with so many stamps when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a postal-order in a telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and make up one of his telegrams–half a dozen of them–on purpose to prolong his presence. She had so completely stopped looking at him that she could only guess his movements– guess even where his eyes rested. Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she couldn’t keep it up. The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to wonder whether his snatching it in HIS turn mightn’t be the thing she would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism by the frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this time it paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of the sounder.

CHAPTER XXI

It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he possibly might–might all the more easily that there were numberless persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was different and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become possible–she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t simplify–it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams–not now mere pretexts for getting at her–were apparently genuine; yet the conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her, stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had read into it the real essence.

That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. HE might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have returned on purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fear–the result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put away the lesson by this time–he practically proposed supper every time he looked at her. This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that he did. There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite pleading. The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so easily have been–so easily if he hadn’t been so nice. She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days, but, you know, I WOULD stay on.” He struck her as calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was at last, dreadfully, only one.

There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special intention; as to the most marked of which–unless indeed it were the most obscure–she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to her more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting down redundant money– sovereigns not concerned with the little payments he was perpetually making–so that she might give him some sign of helping him to slip them over to her. What was most extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she wouldn’t take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by giving her the supreme chance to show HIM she was respectable. Over the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray sovereigns–a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle–where she knew her ladyship then to be–this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider. It was of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.” The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.

The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them that if he might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power. The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had insisted–she knew how to insist, and he couldn’t put in another hour. There was always a day when she called time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctness–it all bounced out.

CHAPTER XXII

Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of their relation–the happy beautiful untroubled original one, if it could only have been restored–in which the public servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper impersonal basis–for even to an embarrassing representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something–and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she WOULD take the penny. She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives take us. I don’t know much–though I’ve really been interested–about yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take ME–and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good- bye.” And then once more, for the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say–see here!” She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury of this escape she saw more than ever.

He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing, and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated “danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it is–it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or bored you, and just help me, just SAVE me, by getting this off without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom the telegram was addressed–the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”

“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or in the Park, been so alone with him.

“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”

She affixed the stamps in a flash. “She’ll catch the train!” she then declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.

“I don’t know–I hope so. It’s awfully important. So kind of you. Awfully sharp, please.” It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!

There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him: “You’re in trouble?”

“Horrid, horrid–there’s a row!” But they parted, on it, in the next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.

But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything off. He had nothing to send–she was sure he had been wiring all over–and yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but that in his eyes–not a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for him would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why she had been such a fool. “She didn’t come?” she panted.

“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake. We want a telegram.”

“A telegram?”

“One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in it that has to be recovered. Something very, very important, please–we want it immediately.”

He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent answers–how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw, so much her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood. This was vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She wanted no detail, no fact–she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or shame. “When was your telegram? Do you mean you sent it from here?” She tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.

“Oh yes, from here–several weeks ago. Five, six, seven”–he was confused and impatient–“don’t you remember?”

“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the strangest of smiles.

But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger still. “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”

“For a certain time.”

“But how long?”

She thought; she must do the young woman, and she knew exactly what the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t. “Can you give me the date?”

“Oh God, no! It was some time or other in August–toward the end. It was to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”

“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. “You can’t give us anything a little nearer?” Her “little” and her “us” came straight from Paddington. These things were no false note for him–his difficulty absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just the same he would have shown any other prim person.

“I don’t know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just about the time I speak of. It wasn’t delivered, you see. We’ve got to recover it.”

CHAPTER XXIII

She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born joy. “You say ‘about the time you speak of.’ But I don’t think you speak of an exact time–do you?”

He looked splendidly helpless. “That’s just what I want to find out. Don’t you keep the old ones?–can’t you look it up?”

Our young lady–still at Paddington–turned the question over. “It wasn’t delivered?”

“Yes, it WAS; yet, at the same time, don’t you know? it wasn’t.” He just hung back, but he brought it out. “I mean it was intercepted, don’t you know? and there was something in it.” He paused again and, as if to further his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery, even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was almost ghastly and that turned the knife in her tenderness. What must be the pain of it all, of the open gulf and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere hot breath? “We want to get what was in it–to know what it was.”

“I see–I see.” She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when they stared like dead fish. “And you have no clue?”

“Not at all–I’ve the clue I’ve just given you.”

“Oh the last of August?” If she kept it up long enough she would make him really angry.

“Yes, and the address, as I’ve said.”

“Oh the same as last night?”

He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on her quietude, and she was still deliberate. She ranged some papers. “Won’t you look?” he went on.

“I remember your coming,” she replied.

He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him, through her difference, that he was somehow different himself. “You were much quicker then, you know!”

“So were you–you must do me that justice,” she answered with a smile. “But let me see. Wasn’t it Dover?”

“Yes, Miss Dolman–“

“Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace?”

“Exactly–thank you so awfully much!” He began to hope again. “Then you HAVE it–the other one?”

She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled him. “It was brought by a lady?”

“Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get hold of!” Heavens, what was he going to say?–flooding poor Paddington with wild betrayals! She couldn’t too much, for her joy, dangle him, yet she couldn’t either, for his dignity, warn or control or check him. What she found herself doing was just to treat herself to the middle way. “It was intercepted?”

“It fell into the wrong hands. But there’s something in it,” he continued to blurt out, “that MAY be all right. That is, if it’s wrong, don’t you know? It’s all right if it’s wrong,” he remarkably explained.

What WAS he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the counter- clerk were already interested; no one would have the decency to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him and her general curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her real. “I quite understand,” she said with benevolent, with almost patronising quickness. “The lady has forgotten what she did put.”

“Forgotten most wretchedly, and it’s an immense inconvenience. It has only just been found that it didn’t get there; so that if we could immediately have it–“

“Immediately?”

“Every minute counts. You have,” he pleaded, “surely got them on file?”

“So that you can see it on the spot?”

“Yes, please–this very minute.” The counter rang with his knuckles, with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. “Do, DO hunt it up!” he repeated.

“I dare say we could get it for you,” the girl weetly returned.

“Get it?”–he looked aghast. “When?”

“Probably by to-morrow.”

“Then it isn’t here?”–his face was pitiful.

She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness, and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she couldn’t guess. She was more and more glad she didn’t want to. “It has been sent on.”

“But how do you know if you don’t look?”

She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, quite divine. “It was August 23rd, and we’ve nothing later here than August 27th.”

Something leaped into his face. “27th–23rd? Then you’re sure? You know?”

She felt she scarce knew what–as if she might soon be pounced upon for some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker’s might be supposed to have schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced. Scandal?–it had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard’s wonderful face. Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene–a great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an ALIBI, supplied a link. In this picture she bravely took her place. “It was the 23rd.”

“Then can’t you get it this morning–or some time to-day?”

She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned on her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted. She didn’t care–not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper. With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift–a morsel of blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen. “Have you got a card?” she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington now, and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card out. She gave no glance at the name on it–only turned it to the other side. She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never held him; and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less marked. She wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it across to him.

He fairly glared at it. “Seven, nine, four–“

“Nine, six, one”–she obligingly completed the number. “Is it right?” she smiled.

He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke out in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous exposure. He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sympathy, the blinking young men. “By all the powers–it’s WRONG!” And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the place.

She was left confronted with her habitual critics. “‘If it’s wrong it’s all right!'” she extravagantly quoted to them.

The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. “But how did you know, dear?”

“I remembered, love!”

Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. “And what game is that, miss?”

No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some minutes elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply that it was none of his business.

CHAPTER XXIV

If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up, however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back. Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence. Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind–sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes. This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world. She had been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide–fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial–as to whom she was full of information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the elements of her charming commerce. The City men did in short go in for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker–Lord Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care–whose extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs. Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer–she dealt, as she said, with all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for her–a race even in the dull months–from one set of chambers to another. And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles were perpetually up and down. They were not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn’t tell the difference unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their making-up sooner. These ladies formed the branch of her subject on which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant had ended with an inference or two tending to banish regret for opportunities not embraced. There were indeed tea-gowns that Mrs. Jordan described–but tea-gowns were not the whole of respectability, and it was odd that a clergyman’s widow should sometimes speak as if she almost thought so. She came back, it was true, unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in fact the very moral it all pointed–pointed in strange flashes of the poor woman’s nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend portentous looks, solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The communication itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. “They are, in one way and another,” she often emphasised, “a tower of strength”; and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder why, if they were so in “one way,” they should require to be so in two. She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in. It all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that fate was to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable that she shouldn’t come all at once to the scratch of overwhelming a mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a person a prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye–if it WAS Lord Rye–wouldn’t be “kind” to a nonentity of that sort, even though people quite as good had been.

One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church together; after which–on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement had not included it–they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan’s lodging in the region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of predilection; she was excessively “high,” and had more than once wished to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which, though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them. One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan’s having said to her on the way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for some time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which little required to be added–as if the bearing of such an item on her life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take place at Saint Julian’s. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries–it had never even vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr. Mudge’s form of worship was one of several things–they made up in superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number–that she had long ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together later on. The brown fog was in this hostess’s little parlour, where it acted as a postponement of the question of there being, besides, anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The girl waited till they had had a cup of tea–waited for the announcement that she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself of her formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval, save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat for a speech.

CHAPTER XXV

“I think you must have heard me speak of Mr. Drake?” Mrs. Jordan had never looked so queer, nor her smile so suggestive of a large benevolent bite.

“Mr. Drake? Oh yes; isn’t he a friend of Lord Rye?”

“A great and trusted friend. Almost–I may say–a loved friend.”

Mrs. Jordan’s “almost” had such an oddity that her companion was moved, rather flippantly perhaps, to take it up. “Don’t people as good as love their friends when they I trust them?”

It pulled up a little the eulogist of Mr. Drake. “Well, my dear, I love YOU–“

“But you don’t trust me?” the girl unmercifully asked.

Again Mrs. Jordan paused–still she looked queer. “Yes,” she replied with a certain austerity; “that’s exactly what I’m about to give you rather a remarkable proof of.” The sense of its being remarkable was already so strong that, while she bridled a little, this held her auditor in a momentary muteness of submission. “Mr. Drake has rendered his lordship for several years services that his lordship has highly appreciated and that make it all the more–a– unexpected that they should, perhaps a little suddenly, separate.”

“Separate?” Our young lady was mystified, but she tried to be interested; and she already saw that she had put the saddle on the wrong horse. She had heard something of Mr. Drake, who was a member of his lordship’s circle–the member with whom, apparently, Mrs. Jordan’s avocations had most happened to throw her. She was only a little puzzled at the “separation.” “Well, at any rate,” she smiled, “if they separate as friends–!”

“Oh his lordship takes the greatest interest in Mr. Drake’s future. He’ll do anything for him; he has in fact just done a great deal. There MUST, you know, be changes–!”

“No one knows it better than I,” the girl said. She wished to draw her interlocutress out. “There will be changes enough for me.”

“You’re leaving Cocker’s?”

The ornament of that establishment waited a moment to answer, and then it was indirect. “Tell me what YOU’RE doing.”

“Well, what will you think of it?”

“Why that you’ve found the opening you were always so sure of.”

Mrs. Jordan, on this, appeared to muse with embarrassed intensity. “I was always sure, yes–and yet I often wasn’t!”

“Well, I hope you’re sure now. Sure, I mean, of Mr. Drake.”

“Yes, my dear, I think I may say I AM. I kept him going till I was.”

“Then he’s yours?”

“My very own.”

“How nice! And awfully rich?” our young woman went on.

Mrs. Jordan showed promptly enough that she loved for higher things. “Awfully handsome–six foot two. And he HAS put by.”

“Quite like Mr. Mudge, then!” that gentleman’s friend rather desperately exclaimed.

“Oh not quite!” Mr. Drake’s was ambiguous about it, but the name of Mr. Mudge had evidently given her some sort of stimulus. “He’ll have more opportunity now, at any rate. He’s going to Lady Bradeen.”

“To Lady Bradeen?” This was bewilderment. “‘Going–‘?”

The girl had seen, from the way Mrs. Jordan looked at her, that the effect of the name had been to make her let something out. “Do you know her?”

She floundered, but she found her feet. “Well, you’ll remember I’ve often told you that if you’ve grand clients I have them too.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Jordan; “but the great difference is that you hate yours, whereas I really love mine. DO you know Lady Bradeen?” she pursued.

“Down to the ground! She’s always in and out.”

Mrs. Jordan’s foolish eyes confessed, in fixing themselves on this sketch, to a degree of wonder and even of envy. But she bore up and, with a certain gaiety, “Do you hate HER?” she demanded.

Her visitor’s reply was prompt. “Dear no!–not nearly so much as some of them. She’s too outrageously beautiful.”

Mrs. Jordan continued to gaze. “Outrageously?”

“Well, yes; deliciously.” What was really delicious was Mrs. Jordan’s vagueness. “You don’t know her–you’ve not seen her?” her guest lightly continued.

“No, but I’ve heard a great deal about her.”

“So have I!” our young lady exclaimed.

Jordan looked an instant as if she suspected her good faith, or at least her seriousness. “You know some friend–?”

“Of Lady Bradeen’s? Oh yes–I know one.”

“Only one?”

The girl laughed out. “Only one–but he’s so intimate.”

Mrs. Jordan just hesitated. “He’s a gentleman?”

“Yes, he’s not a lady.”

Her interlocutress appeared to muse. “She’s immensely surrounded.”

“She WILL be–with Mr. Drake!”

Mrs. Jordan’s gaze became strangely fixed. “Is she VERY good- looking?”

“The handsomest person I know.”

Mrs. Jordan continued to brood. “Well, I know some beauties.” Then with her odd jerkiness: “Do you think she looks GOOD?”

“Because that’s not always the case with the good-looking?”–the other took it up. “No, indeed, it isn’t: that’s one thing Cocker’s has taught me. Still, there are some people who have everything. Lady Bradeen, at any rate, has enough: eyes and a nose and a mouth, a complexion, a figure–“

“A figure?” Mrs. Jordan almost broke in.

“A figure, a head of hair!” The girl made a little conscious motion that seemed to let the hair all down, and her companion watched the wonderful show. “But Mr. Drake IS another–?”

“Another?”–Mrs. Jordan’s thoughts had to come back from a distance.

“Of her ladyship’s admirers. He’s ‘going,’ you say, to her?”

At this Mrs. Jordan really faltered. “She has engaged him.”

“Engaged him?”–our young woman was quite at sea.

“In the same capacity as Lord Rye.”

“And was Lord Rye engaged?”

CHAPTER XXVI

Mrs. Jordan looked away from her now–looked, she thought, rather injured and, as if trifled with, even a little angry. The mention of Lady Bradeen had frustrated for a while the convergence of our heroine’s thoughts; but with this impression of her old friend’s combined impatience and diffidence they began again to whirl round her, and continued it till one of them appeared to dart at her, out of the dance, as if with a sharp peck. It came to her with a lively shock, with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake was–could it be possible? With the idea she found herself afresh on the edge of laughter, of a sudden and strange perversity of mirth. Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift image, before her; such a figure as she had seen in open doorways of houses in Cocker’s quarter–majestic, middle- aged, erect, flanked on either side by a footman and taking the name of a visitor. Mr. Drake then verily WAS a person who opened the door! Before she had time, however, to recover from the effect of her evocation, she was offered a vision which quite engulfed it. It was communicated to her somehow that the face with which she had seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, a bit wildly, at something, at anything, that might attenuate criticism. “Lady Bradeen’s re-arranging–she’s going to be married.”

“Married?” The girl echoed it ever so softly, but there it was at last.

“Didn’t you know it?”

She summoned all her sturdiness. “No, she hasn’t told me.”

“And her friends–haven’t they?”

“I haven’t seen any of them lately. I’m not so fortunate as you.”

Mrs. Jordan gathered herself. “Then you haven’t even heard of Lord Bradeen’s death?”

Her comrade, unable for a moment to speak, gave a slow headshake. “You know it from Mr. Drake?” It was better surely not to learn things at all than to learn them by the butler.

“She tells him everything.”

“And he tells YOU–I see.” Our young lady got up; recovering her muff and her gloves she smiled. “Well, I haven’t unfortunately any Mr. Drake. I congratulate you with all my heart. Even without your sort of assistance, however, there’s a trifle here and there that I do pick up. I gather that if she’s to marry any one it must quite necessarily be my friend.”

Mrs. Jordan was now also on her feet. “Is Captain Everard your friend?”

The girl considered, drawing on a glove. “I saw, at one time, an immense deal of him.”

Mrs. Jordan looked hard at the glove, but she hadn’t after all waited for that to be sorry it wasn’t cleaner. “What time was that?”

“It must have been the time you were seeing so much of Mr. Drake.” She had now fairly taken it in: the distinguished person Mrs. Jordan was to marry would answer bells and put on coals and superintend, at least, the cleaning of boots for the other distinguished person whom she might–well, whom she might have had, if she had wished, so much more to say to. “Good-bye,” she added; “good-bye.”

Mrs. Jordan, however, again taking her muff from her, turned it over, brushed it off and thoughtfully peeped into it. “Tell me this before you go. You spoke just now of your own changes. Do you mean that Mr. Mudge–?”

“Mr. Mudge has had great patience with me–he has brought me at last to the point. We’re to be married next month and have a nice little home. But he’s only a grocer, you know”–the girl met her friend’s intent eyes–“so that I’m afraid that, with the set you’ve got into, you won’t see your way to keep up our friendship.”

Mrs. Jordan for a moment made no answer to this; she only held the muff up to her face, after which she gave it back. “You don’t like it. I see, I see.”

To her guest’s astonishment there were tears now in her eyes. “I don’t like what?” the girl asked.

“Why my engagement. Only, with your great cleverness,” the poor lady quavered out, “you put it in your own way. I mean that you’ll cool off. You already have–!” And on this, the next instant, her tears began to flow. She succumbed to them and collapsed; she sank down again, burying her face and trying to smother her sobs.

Her young friend stood there, still in some rigour, but taken much by surprise even if not yet fully moved to pity. “I don’t put anything in any ‘way,’ and I’m very glad you’re suited. Only, you know, you did put to me so splendidly what, even for me, if I had listened to you, it might lead to.”

Mrs. Jordan kept up a mild thin weak wail; then, drying her eyes, as feebly considered this reminder. “It has led to my not starving!” she faintly gasped.

Our young lady, at this, dropped into the place beside her, and now, in a rush, the small silly misery was clear. She took her hand as a sign of pitying it, then, after another instant, confirmed this expression with a consoling kiss. They sat there together; they looked out, hand in hand, into the damp dusky shabby little room and into the future, of no such very different suggestion, at last accepted by each. There was no definite utterance, on either side, of Mr. Drake’s position in the great world, but the temporary collapse of his prospective bride threw all further necessary light; and what our heroine saw and felt for in the whole business was the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and delusions and her own return to reality. Reality, for the poor things they both were, could only be ugliness and obscurity, could never be the escape, the rise. She pressed her friend–she had tact enough for that–with no other personal question, brought on no need of further revelations, only just continued to hold and comfort her and to acknowledge by stiff little forbearances the common element in their fate. She felt indeed magnanimous in such matters; since if it was very well, for condolence or reassurance, to suppress just then invidious shrinkings, she yet by no means saw herself sitting down, as she might say, to the same table with Mr. Drake. There would luckily, to all appearance, be little question of tables; and the circumstance that, on their peculiar lines, her friend’s interests would still attach themselves to Mayfair flung over Chalk Farm the first radiance it had shown. Where was one’s pride and one’s passion when the real way to judge of one’s luck was by making not the wrong but the right comparison? Before she had again gathered herself to go she felt very small and cautious and thankful. “We shall have our own house,” she said, “and you must come very soon and let me show it you.”

“WE shall have our own too,” Mrs. Jordan replied; “for, don’t you know? he makes it a condition that he sleeps out?”

“A condition?”–the girl felt out of it.

“For any new position. It was on that he parted with Lord Rye. His lordship can’t meet it. So Mr. Drake has given him up.”

“And all for you?”–our young woman put it as cheerfully as possible.

“For me and Lady Bradeen. Her ladyship’s too glad to get him at any price. Lord Rye, out of interest in us, has in fact quite MADE her take him. So, as I tell you, he will have his own establishment.”

Mrs. Jordan, in the elation of it, had begun to revive; but there was nevertheless between them rather a conscious pause–a pause in which neither visitor nor hostess brought out a hope or an invitation. It expressed in the last resort that, in spite of submission and sympathy, they could now after all only look at each other across the social gulf. They remained together as if it would be indeed their last chance, still sitting, though awkwardly, quite close, and feeling also–and this most unmistakeably–that there was one thing more to go into. By the time it came to the surface, moreover, our young friend had recognised the whole of the main truth, from which she even drew again a slight irritation. It was not the main truth perhaps that most signified; but after her momentary effort, her embarrassment and her tears Mrs. Jordan had begun to sound afresh–and even without speaking–the note of a social connexion. She hadn’t really let go of it that she was marrying into society. Well, it was a harmless compensation, and it was all the prospective bride of Mr. Mudge had to leave with her.

CHAPTER XXVII

This young lady at last rose again, but she lingered before going. “And has Captain Everard nothing to say to it?”

“To what, dear?”

“Why, to such questions–the domestic arrangements, things in the house.”

“How can he, with any authority, when nothing in the house is his?”

“Not his?” The girl wondered, perfectly conscious of the appearance she thus conferred on Mrs. Jordan of knowing, in comparison with herself, so tremendously much about it. Well, there were things she wanted so to get at that she was willing at last, though it hurt her, to pay for them with humiliation. “Why are they not his?”

“Don’t you know, dear, that he has nothing?”

“Nothing?” It was hard to see him in such a light, but Mrs. Jordan’s power to answer for it had a superiority that began, on the spot, to grow. “Isn’t he rich?”

Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked both generally and particularly, informed. “It depends upon what you call–! Not at any rate in the least as she is. What does he bring? Think what she has. And then, love, his debts.”

“His debts?” His young friend was fairly betrayed into helpless innocence. She could struggle a little, but she had to let herself go; and if she had spoken frankly she would have said: “Do tell me, for I don’t know so much about him as THAT!” As she didn’t speak frankly she only said: “His debts are nothing–when she so adores him.”

Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only take it all. That was what it had come to: his having sat with her there on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put his hand on her, making her know what he would have said if permitted; his having returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with supplicating eyes and a fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and pedantic, helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition, only answered him, yet supplicating back, through the bars of the cage,–all simply that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only through Mrs. Jordan, who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him through Lady Bradeen. “She adores him–but of course that wasn’t all there was about it.”

The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. “What was there else about it?”

“Why, don’t you know?”–Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. “Of course I know she would never let him alone.”

“How COULD she–fancy!–when he had so compromised her?”

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the younger pair of lips. “HAD he so–?”

“Why, don’t you know the scandal?”

Our heroine thought, recollected there was something, whatever it was, that she knew after all much more of than Mrs. Jordan. She saw him again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegram–she saw him as she had seen him leave the shop. She perched herself a moment on this. “Oh there was nothing public.”

“Not exactly public–no. But there was an awful scare and an awful row. It was all on the very point of coming out. Something was lost–something was found.”

“Ah yes,” the girl replied, smiling as if with the revival of a blurred memory; “something was found.”

“It all got about–and there was a point at which Lord Bradeen had to act.”

“Had to–yes. But he didn’t.”

Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it. “No, he didn’t. And then, luckily for them, he died.”

“I didn’t know about his death,” her companion said.

“It was nine weeks ago, and most sudden. It has given them a prompt chance.”

“To get married?”–this was a wonder–“within nine weeks?”

“Oh not immediately, but–in all the circumstances–very quietly and, I assure you, very soon. Every preparation’s made. Above all she holds him.”

“Oh yes, she holds him!” our young friend threw off. She had this before her again a minute; then she continued: “You mean through his having made her talked about?”

“Yes, but not only that. She has still another pull.”

“Another?”

Mrs. Jordan hesitated. “Why, he was IN something.”

Her comrade wondered. “In what?”

“I don’t know. Something bad. As I tell you, something was found.”

The girl stared. “Well?”

“It would have been very bad for him. But, she helped him some way–she recovered it, got hold of it. It’s even said she stole it!”

Our young woman considered afresh. “Why it was what was found that precisely saved him.”

Mrs. Jordan, however, was positive. “I beg your pardon. I happen to know.”

Her disciple faltered but an instant. “Do you mean through Mr. Drake? Do they tell him these things?”

“A good servant,” said Mrs. Jordan, now thoroughly superior and proportionately sententious, “doesn’t need to be told! Her ladyship saved–as a woman so often saves!–the man she loves.”

This time our heroine took longer to recover herself, but she found a voice at last. “Ah well–of course I don’t know! The great thing was that he got off. They seem then, in a manner,” she added, “to have done a great deal for each other.”

“Well, it’s she that has done most. She has him tight.”

“I see, I see. Good-bye.” The women had already embraced, and this was not repeated; but Mrs. Jordan went down with her guest to the door of the house. Here again the younger lingered, reverting, though three or four other remarks had on the way passed between them, to Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. “Did you mean just now that if she hadn’t saved him, as you call it, she wouldn’t hold him so tight?”

“Well, I dare say.” Mrs. Jordan, on the doorstep, smiled with a reflexion that had come to her; she took one of her big bites of the brown gloom. “Men always dislike one when they’ve done one an injury.”

“But what injury had he done her?”

“The one I’ve mentioned. He MUST marry her, you know.”

“And didn’t he want to?”

“Not before.”

“Not before she recovered the telegram?”

Mrs. Jordan was pulled up a little. “Was it a telegram?”

The girl hesitated. “I thought you said so. I mean whatever it was.”

“Yes, whatever it was, I don’t think she saw THAT.”

“So she just nailed him?”

“She just nailed him.” The departing friend was now at the bottom of the little flight of steps; the other was at the top, with a certain thickness of fog. “And when am I to think of you in your little home?–next month?” asked the voice from the top.

“At the very latest. And when am I to think of you in yours?”

“Oh even sooner. I feel, after so much talk with you about it, as if I were already there!” Then “GOOD-bye!” came out of the fog.

“Good-BYE!” went into it. Our young lady went into it also, in the opposed quarter, and presently, after a few sightless turns, came out on the Paddington canal. Distinguishing vaguely what the low parapet enclosed she stopped close to it and stood a while very intently, but perhaps still sightlessly, looking down on it. A policeman; while she remained, strolled past her; then, going his way a little further and half lost in the atmosphere, paused and watched her. But she was quite unaware–she was full of her thoughts. They were too numerous to find a place just here, but two of the number may at least be mentioned. One of these was that, decidedly, her little home must be not for next month, but for next week; the other, which came indeed as she resumed her walk and went her way, was that it was strange such a matter should be at last settled for her by Mr. Drake