Loaves and fishes

by Bernard Capes

THE RAVELLED SLEAVE

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

I should like to preface my subject with a Caractère, in the style of La Bruyère, as thus:—

Pamphilus is what the liberal call a reserved man, and the intolerant a secretive. He certainly has an aggravating way of appearing to make Asian mysteries of the commonplaces of life. He traffics in silence as others do in gossip. The “Ha!”, with which he accepts your statement of fact or conjecture, seems to imply on his part both a shrewder than ordinary knowledge of your subject, and a curiosity to study in you the popular view. One feels oddly superficial in his company, and, resentful of the imposition, blunders into self-assertive vulgarities which one knows to be misrepresentations of oneself. Do still waters always run deep? Pamphilus, it would appear, has founded his conduct on the fallacy, as if he had never observed the placid waters of the Rhine slipping over their shallow levels. One finds oneself speculating if, could one but once lay bare, suddenly, the jealous secrets of Pamphilus’s bosom, one would be impressed with anything but their unimportance. Yet, strangely, scepticism and irritation despite, one likes him, and takes pleasure in his company.

Possibly the fact that he cultivates so few friends makes of his lonely preferences a flattery. Then, too, loquacity is not invariably a brimming intellect’s overflow. It is better, on the whole, if one has very little to say, to keep that little in reserve for a rainy day. Too many of us, having the conceit of our inheritance, think that we, also, can feed a multitude on five loaves and a couple of fishes. But we must adulterate largely to do it.

Pamphilus, again, has the winning, persuasive “presence.” He is thirty-three, but still in his physical and mental attributes a big-eyed wondering boy. You can mention to him nothing so ordinary, but his eager “Yes? Yes?” startles you into trying to improve upon your subject with a touch of humour, a flower of observation, for his rare delectation. Is he worth the effort? You don’t know. You don’t know whether or not he wants you to think so, or is really instinctively greedy for the psychologic bonne bouche. He is tall, and spare, and interesting in appearance. In short, he lacks no charm but candour; and I am not sure but that the lack is not a fifth grace. He is, finally, “Valentine,” and the subject of this “Morality.”

It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice, make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened, was the evening paper.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. The characteristic note was, I supposed, in allusion to the paragraph which engaged my attention at the moment. It was headed “The Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

I started, of course; and, in the instant reaction of nerve, flew to an extreme of rudeness.

“Yes,” I drawled; “an interesting case, isn’t it? Supposing it had been a private letter, how long would you have stood before shouting your presence into my ear like that?”

He laughed as he moved away (he had not shouted at all, by the by); then, as he sat down opposite me in the shadow, appeared for the first time to realize my meaning.

“Just long enough to recognize the fact,” he said quietly. “What do you mean by the question?”

Thus rebounding, my own rudeness struck me ashamed. I had no real justification for the insult, anyhow that I could call into evidence.

“O, nothing!” I mumbled awkwardly; “except that you made me almost jump out of my skin.”

It was characteristic of him, and a further puzzle, that in spite of his self-suggested consciousness of superiority he was easily depressed by a snub. We sat for a little in a glowering silence, and perhaps with a mutual sense of injury.

“Yes, an interesting case,” he said at length with an effort. “A trance, isn’t it?”

“Something of the sort,” I replied. “I saw the girl yesterday.”

He looked up interested.

“Yes?”

“She is in a private ward of B—— Hospital. I know the house surgeon. He took me to see her.”

“Well! How does she look?”

“Seen the St. Amaranthe at Tussaud’s—the one whom, as children, we used to call the Sleeping Beauty? Not unlike her: as pretty as wax and as stiff: just breathing, with pale cheeks and her mouth a little open.”

“The fit—I seem to remember—was brought on by some shock, wasn’t it?”

I growled—

“According to report, concealment of birth. I conclude she was put to shame by some rogue, and couldn’t face the music. The child was found, three or four months ago, on a doorstep or somewhere, and traced to her. When the police entered, I suppose she feared the worst, and went off. Odd part is, that the infant itself was intact—as sound as a bell. But all that’s of little interest. It’s the case for me; not the sentiment.”

“Ah?” said Valentine.

He leaned forward, resting his long arms on his knees and gently clicking his fingers together. His eyes were full of an eager light.

“Johnny, I wonder if you could get me a sight of her?”

“Why not?” I answered. I felt that I owed him some atonement. “I’ll ask C—— if you like.”

II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a backstair reporter, I suppose?”

“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I don’t know which.”

“Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he don’t talk.”

“He won’t talk.”

“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it myself.”

I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes, who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.

She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must keep such a tight rein on?”

The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.

“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the little verjuicy woman.

“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.

He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.

“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t think you can object to my trying.”

And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the patient’s ear.

Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms, though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and, opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside. Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her, awaking.

Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could not see him.

C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic” had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.

“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and remonstrance.

The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more familiar apparition.

“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you got there?”

Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy rapture.

“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured, and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident, there must be no awaking her.

C—— wheeled upon my friend.

“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.

It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if he did not hear it.

“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness. He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded right to pose as a sphinx?

“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”

I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled through it.

“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”

“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off her shoulders.”

“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.

“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears, relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for the moment happened.”

There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to him.

“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”

“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you, that’s all.”

“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”

“Put it out to nurse.”

“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring me to ruin already.”

“Say you’ve adopted it.”

She gave a shrill titter.

“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”

“Well, she has in a measure.”

“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”

“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth their pursuing, and they will drop it.”

The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to play the vicious rocking-horse to it.

III

One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I had not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though it was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.

A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything dripping in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-fronts, submerged in the running pavements, become the very “baseless fabrics of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their glazed roofs, rode each with a shadowy phantom of himself reversed, like an oilskin Jack of Spades. No pedestrian but, like Hamlet, had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping pace with him. The solid ground seemed melted, and the unsubstantial workings of the world revealed. To souls hemmed in by bricks, there are more commonplace, less depressing sights than a wet London viewed from a third story.

There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the sickly pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I leaned out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.

“It has been beaten down, like poor Nanny, by the storm,” he said. “We must tie it to a stick.”

I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows, Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have remained opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and grim I set my lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.

“Are you the stick?”

He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his face.

“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of tying her to you?”

“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”

“Of matrimony?”

“Certainly.”

With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried to whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the tale of a week ago? Well, I haven’t lost the impression of that moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize with your insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”

He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not winning.

“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back to life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims. You will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that good lady which sticks last in my memory.”

Still he did not answer.

“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will put my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You drew an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they consider those things weeds.”

“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”

“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”

I struck my knee viciously with my open palm.

“That was in vile bad taste, Val. I beg your pardon for saying it. But, deuce take it, man! you can’t have come to me, a worldling and an older one, for sympathy in this midsummer madness?”

I was off the table again, going to and fro and apostrophizing him at odd turns.

“Let’s drop parables—and answer plainly, if it’s in you. You don’t exhale sentiment as a rule. Did or did not that touch about ‘poor Nanny’ imply a hint of some confidence put in me?”

“I’ve always considered you my closest friend.”

“Flattered, I’m sure; though I didn’t guess it. You put such conundrums—excuse me—beyond the time of a plain man to guess. Well, I say, I’m flattered, and I’ll take the full privilege. It’s natural you should feel an interest in——by the way, I regret to say I only know her as the Brompton Sleeping Girl.”

“She’s Nanny Nolan.”

“In Miss Nolan, then. A propos, I’ve never yet asked, and mustn’t know, I suppose, the secret of your ‘open sesame’?”

“No, I can’t tell you.”

“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding friendship——”

“It isn’t my secret alone.”

“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in question?”

“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”

He said it with a quiet laugh.

“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You can have stuck at very little in a week.”

I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very solemnly.

“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll ask you frankly: How is she socially?”

“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a mysterious pension.”

“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”

“Verender, I must tell you the girl is without reproach. Socially, it is true, they are in a very limited way. They eke out existence in a number of small directions, even, as you know, hop-picking.”

“I’ve nothing but respect for Miss Nolan’s virtues. I can even appreciate the appeal of her prettiness to a susceptible nature, which I don’t think mine is. Anyhow, I’m no Pharisee to pelt my poor sister of the gutter because she’s fallen in it. That’s beside the question. But it isn’t, to ask what in the name of tragedy induces you, with your wealth, your refinement, your mental and social amiability, to sink all in this investment of a—of a fancy bespoke—there, I can put it no differently.”

“Call it my amiability, Verender. She’s like the centurion’s daughter. There’s something awfully strange, awfully fascinating, after all, in getting into her confidence—in entering behind that broken seal of death.”

“You’re not an impressionable Johnny—at least, you shouldn’t be. You’ve passed the Rubicon. This child with a child—with Aunt Mim, good Lord! Have you thought of the consequences?”

“Yes; all of them.”

“Of the—pardon me. Do you know who he was?”

“Yes.”

I stared aghast at him—at the deeper blot of gloom from which his voice proceeded.

“And you aren’t afraid—for her; for yourself?”

“You mean, of her relapsing?” he said clearly. “Not when she knows the truth—knows what a poor thing he is.”

“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—yet?”

“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”

“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little stranger?”

“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a very difficult part to play.”

I groaned.

“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”

“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me too.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting statement.”

“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her; and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”

I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose herself, trying to piece that broken time?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “She speaks so little. She is like a little shy ghost—half-materialized—fearful between spirit and matter—very sweet and pathetic.”

With the last word he turned abruptly and strode out of the room. I was not so much astonished at his curt conclusion, as at a certain tell-tale cough which accompanied it.

“O, hang the fellow!” I muttered. “If he’s developed tears in his voice, I give him up.”

IV

One afternoon, accident taking me past the Nolans’ house in the Fulham Road, I was disturbed to hear Valentine’s voice hailing me from the parlour window. It was a little cheap tenement, and a curiously shabby frame to his rather distinguished figure as he stood up eagerly to stop me.

“Come in,” he said. “I want you.”

I demurred, in an instant and instinctive panic.

“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”

“It won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is greater than mine.”

“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace possible. He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and conducting me into the parlour.

It was an impossible room—I may say it at once—quite the typical tawdry boudoir of an ex-coryphée. She was not there, I was relieved to find, in person; but her multiplied presentment simpered and abashed one from a dozen places on walls and mantelpiece. “Claudine” (she might have been a hair-wash, and enjoyed the same sort of popularity) posed, for all the blind purposes of vanity, in the tights and kid boots of a past generation. Looking from queer old daguerreotypes, in skirts like curtailed crinolines; ogling from wreaths, her calves, crossed to display their strength, in disfiguring proportion with the thin bosom above, she seemed to make an outrage of the dear ungainly sanctities which appeal to us, in pegtops and voluminous skirts, from the back parts of our albums. There are certain people who, with the best intention in the world to be held sweet, are unsavoury; and Aunt Mim was one of them. All the more wonder that such fruit could be born of her stock.

For she was certainly attractive, was the girl—pure and pretty and unaffected. I had to own it grudgingly to myself, as I bowed to her, and turned interrogatively to my friend.

He had gone to the back of her chair, where she sat away from the open window. There was some discarded work in her lap, and in her eyes some look of a vague sadness and bewilderment.

“Nanny,” he said softly, “this, Mr. Verender, is my great friend—my counsel out of Court. Will you just do this for me—make him yours, too? Will you try to explain to him, while I go away, what you find it so hard to explain to me—your sense of the something that keeps us apart?”

I made an instant but faint demur. Nanny, as faintly, shook her head.

“O,” he said, “but he will listen to you, I know! Because I am unhappy, and you are unhappy, and I love you so, Nanny, and he is my best friend. Try to explain to him, dear, the difficulty of your case.”

This novel enlargement on our relations, his and mine, vaguely annoyed me.

“Why should there be any?” I put in impatiently. “Our friend can give you great social and other advantages, Miss Nolan. If he is decided on this course—you don’t dislike him, I think—forgive me, I can see no reason for objection on your part.”

She rose, as if scared, to her feet. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Hush!” he said. “Be just to me, and try to tell him.”

He left the room and the house; and I was in two minds about following him. Was ever man put in a more ridiculous position? Yet the look of the girl gave me pause. She seemed to me to be yet only half awake; and indeed, I think, that is something to understate the case.

“Well,” I said stumblingly, as she stood before me. “You heard what he said, Miss Nolan?”

I was not sympathetic. I knew it. Perhaps, having once asserted myself, I might have grown so. But she would not give me the opportunity. In the meantime, I did not feel the less the full force of this mismatch.

She put her hand in a lost way to her forehead.

“I will try,” she said, in a low voice, “because he asked me. There—there was a great trouble—O! it was so far back. I can’t remember it—and then everything went.”

“He is willing, it appears, to take that interval, that trouble, on trust,” I said. “He only asks you, it seems, to repay his confidence. What you are is what he desires. Cannot you consider yourself new-born into his love?” (I positively sneered the word to myself.)

“There is something stands between us,” she only murmured helplessly.

“He doesn’t admit it for himself,” I insisted irritably. “It might be the ruin of his career, of his position, as foreseen by his friends. I suppose he wishes to assure you that that counts for nothing with him, if by any chance the bar between you lies in your dim consciousness of such a sentiment.”

I had been brutal, I admit it. I can only palliate my behaviour by confessing that it was intended to sound the first note of my moral surrender to the appeal of those poor, pain-troubled eyes. Now, at least, I had got my shaft home. She looked up at me with a light of amazed knowledge in her face.

“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”

I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his ambassador.

“Come; it is no reason at all,” I said. “There is no such thing as a misalliance in love” (I threw this atrocious sop to my own panic). “If only the practical bar between you could be as easily disposed of.”

“The practical bar?”

She turned upon me with a piteous pain in her voice. I had opened a door of release to her, I suppose, and before she could escape shut it again in her face. I was stumbling weakly on an explanation, when suddenly from somewhere above the baby began to wail. Instantly her face assumed the strangest expression—a sort of exalted hardness. She put up her hand, listened a moment, then, without another word, glided from the room. I am ashamed to say that I seized the opportunity to put an instant period to my visit.

I expected to meet Valentine loitering without; but to my relief he did not appear. So I went on my way fuming. What right had the man to try to inveigle me into seeming to sanction his idiotcy by claiming me its advocate? He wanted to buy justification, I suppose. There are certain natures which cannot properly relish their own grief or happiness unless a witness be by to report upon them. Such was Valentine’s, I thought; and the thought did not increase my respect for my friend. I fancied I had already plumbed the shallows of that pretentious reserve, and was angry and half contemptuous that he had so soon revealed himself to me. There was certainly something attractive about the girl; but—well, he had not been the first to discover the fact, and, when all was said, his infatuation showed him a fool in my eyes.

That evening, when I was sitting alone writing, she suddenly stood before me. My first shock of amazement was followed by a glow of fury. I felt that I was being persecuted.

“Well, what is it?” I said harshly.

“I only wanted to tell you,” she said low, panting as if she had run; “I wanted you to tell him that—that I know now what it is. I found out the moment I left you; and I came to say—but you were gone.”

“Well?”

“It is the child, sir.”

“Yes, you are quite right—it is the child.”

No sooner had I said it, than I felt the weight of my self-commitment. Had she discovered—remembered all? Did she conceive the impediment as associated with some scandal attaching to the ineffable Aunt Mim? or was the baby, in her clouded soul, but an unattachable changeling, which had come to disrupt the kind order of things and brand their household with a curse?

“Yes, it is the child,” I said, and leaned my forehead into my hand while I frowned over the problem.

She made no answer. When I looked up at the end of a minute, she was gone.

I started to my feet, and went up and down. I made no attempt to follow. “It is better,” I thought angrily, “to let this stuff ferment in its own way. I could have given no other answer.”

At the twentieth turn I saw Valentine before me, and stopped abruptly.

“Well,” he said; “were you able to get it out of her?”

“What?” I asked defiantly.

“The reason—the impediment, you know?” he answered.

“Sit down, Valentine,” I said. “I will tell you the truth. I hinted that the mésalliance might be her unconscious consideration.”

“She is not so proud,” he said quietly; “though I’m unworthy to buckle her little shoe for her.”

I positively gasped.

“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept mine, when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You put too much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel. Ten minutes ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had discovered the reason—the real one this time.”

“And it was?”

“The baby—no less.”

“What! Does she——?”

“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and when I looked up, she was gone.”

“And you gave her no reply?”

“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”

“Verender! You must come with me!”

“Go with you!”

“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”

He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.

V

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.

“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.

“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”

The fellow lived en prince in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.

“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”

The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.

“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with the swallows.”

“You and—Phillips?” I asked.

“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby to sleep.”

He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused onlooker.

He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as follows:

“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”

I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on together.

“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already my own. Was I right?”

I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”

“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, her dishonour!—that found some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come, and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.

“You told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think? When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up all.”

“The truth?”

“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And Nanny understood at last, and went.”

“Where?”

“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify me with it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”

He hung his head, and spoke very low.

“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit it to the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”

There followed a long interval of silence.

“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.

He laughed.

“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable pension, and settled her,” he said.

Another silence followed.

“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.