Twos and Threes

by G. B. Stern

PART III

CHAPTER I
“FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS”

Thus, gradually, belief was restored to Stuart, and faith in the vision, and the vision itself. And then came a quickening pride in the thought of Peter, battling through to the same issue; Peter, erect and balanced, with that half-smile of scorn upon her lips; more his mate than ever now, since with equal strength and without bitterness, they could each stand alone, walk alone, guarding strange memories.

Twenty-four hours of squally weather tempted him to put out to sea in his racing yacht. Blown half across the Channel, he met with terrific resistance beating back through a flying scud of wind and spray, all reefs in, and rail deep under water. Nor did he for one second think of relinquishing his hold upon life, nor of adjuring the ocean, in approved fashion, to let him seek oblivion in its coolness.

Reaching home, he slept, and did not dream. Slept sound and hard. The next night he again saw the lovers wandering amid that renewed tranquillity which succeeds tempest. Though the sight of them still stirred him to pain, the taint of envy had departed; and he smiled, as, passing, he caught the inevitable question whispered:

“And when did you first begin to love me, Letty?”

Stuart reflected with amused contempt that the answer could not fail to be: “I think I must have loved you always, dear heart....” He wondered what would happen if he followed the impulse to warn them whither they were straying in their blindness, tell them the use of the shears—then laughed, imagining the reception his harangue would receive: the male muttering: “Some crazy loon!” and drawing closer the girl, who would murmur, her lips against his neck: “He doesn’t know, does he, dearest?”

But though the notion called forth a healthy self-ridicule in the man who didn’t know, a throb within him of common humanity, which he had hitherto believed dormant, was queerly uneasy for all the sightless lovers of all the world, stumbling on towards disillusion. He felt like a diver who from drowning depths had rescued a pearl, brought it up in his hand—“And was looking about for the swine,” finished Stuart’s sense of humour, also reawakened.

Nevertheless, the uneasiness dogged him, and the impatience. The philosophy of the shears was now indisputably his; not from the far-off speculations of a dreamer, but by claim of pain and payment. He had animated theory with blood-sacrifice, so that theory had become a live thing, a truth which he had no right to retain, which must be flung to the world. After that, let the world take it or leave it, as they willed; his part would be done. They would probably leave it.... And again he burnt with a fiery impatience somehow to pierce that thick denseness of spirit overlying mankind like a pall; so that nine-tenths have lost grip of their own lives, and the remaining tenth have too firm a grip on other people’s; and most are unseeingly miserable, but some benumbed in happiness; and all without wings.

Stuart did not feel any vocation for the platform nor the pulpit; neither had he any desire to throw his theories on to paper and thus propagate them among the unenlightened. It struck him that what he needed was a disciple; some young enthusiast who, believing in him devoutly and to the extent of imitation in all things, would also zealously spread his creed by eloquent tongue and by diligent pen. All prophets had their disciples; a disciple was a necessary adjunct to the master. Stuart was inclined to think himself modest in only seeking one fervent youth to squat at his feet. Most of the old Greek philosophers had founded a whole school. Perhaps that would follow in time. Meanwhile, let him but find some intelligent lad, tumultuously unhappy, restless and miserable and knowing not what he craved, and it ought to be a matter of ease to convert him to the Hairpin Vision, the Essential Renunciation, the Necessity of Conflict, and the Art of Ceasing to Suck the Orange before the Orange Runs Dry of Juice.

—From the shadow-side of the hulk against which Stuart leant, enumerating his ethics to the stars, a long-drawn-out sigh quivered through the air; then a low and satisfied grunt; both sounds expressive of the mood in man, when, having reached a fatuity of content too great for words, he has to resort to animal noises in which to relieve his feelings. Stuart strolled round, and stood gazing down at a reclining figure upon the sand, figure which he recognized as one-half of the lovers who had so often shattered his evening calm.

“Where’s Letty?”

“Hullo!” in languorous slumberous surprise. Then, raising a thatch of ruffled auburn hair and an exceedingly flushed face, the young man enquired: “I say, have you got a match on you? I was just thinking there was nothing on earth left for me to want, when I discovered that I couldn’t light up.”

Stuart looked disgusted: was this a thing for a fellow’s star to send a fellow, in answer to fellow’s wish for a disciple? this creature who had nothing left on earth to desire except a match. In silence he proffered his box; it was not worth while to withhold it.

“Letty’s mother had a sick headache to-night,” gurgled Sebastian Levi, in answer to the query first spoken. He was not so richly communicative as a rule; but to-night he was rather beyond himself with a father’s consent just won to his engagement, and several glasses of wine tossed down in celebration thereof; followed by one ecstatic embrace of his betrothed, a rush at fifty miles an hour through the warm sea-scented air, and much solitary starlight imbibed from the dim flat shores of the Haven. So, from drowsy oblivion of his fellow-man, he became suddenly eager and willing to talk:

“We’ve often run out here before, Letty and I. It’s quiet. And it’s only twenty minutes by car. I say, how did you know about Letty? I suppose you must have seen us.”

“I have occasionally noticed an indistinguishable blur or two,” replied Stuart, sitting down upon a black and moss-grown spar, and lighting his own cigarette. “The blur being to-day shrunken to half its size, I subtracted one from two, and asked you where she was. And thus the mystery is explained.”

“That’s a pity. Mishtries should never be explained. Who would have the veil lifted from the immortal mishtry of love? Or would I seek now to know intimately why the gods are so good to me, in giving me my heart’s desire, and all my other desires, and a match for my cigarette into the bargain? Unquestioningly I accept their—benign—partiality——” Sebastian lingered slowly and carefully over the last words, and, safely completed, stretched grateful arms towards the heavens. Then, looking at these same arms rather amazedly, as if in doubt as to what they were doing in that eccentric position, let them drop again. “I love you, Letty!” he murmured to some vision of his radiant imaginings; then brought his gaze earthwards, back to Stuart: “Thanks for the match,” pleasantly.

Stuart shrugged his shoulders: “Lacking the match, there might have been some hope for you; as it is,” he turned away, “—good night.”

“Don’t go,” pleaded Sebastian, unruffled by the other’s abrupt censure. “It was only my nonsense just now; I was working off steam. But I can talk quite soberly if you’ll stop to hear me.”

“You’re not in a fit state to talk at all. You’re thick; plastered with honey and treacle. Your grin is seraphic; your rhapsodies are fatuous. You don’t even resent my abominable rudeness. Why don’t you?”

“Why should I? I like you tremendously. And of course I’m s’raphic. ‘There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest but in his motion like an angel sings still choiring to the young-eyed cherubims!’ That’s what my father was to-night—a young-eyed cherubim. So was her father. So was Letty. She’s accepted me. Her father has accepted me. My father has accepted her. Everybody has accepted everybody, and everybody has gulped down an enormous amount of champagne. Hence Mrs. Johnson’s headache. But I’m glad Letty couldn’t come out to-night—I’ve had too much—I couldn’t stand any more—I’m dizzy. When I say I couldn’t stand any more, I mean it meta—meta——” Sebastian lost the thread of his discourse, repeated solemnly “meta——” ... and then re-found it in a different but equally satisfactory direction: “I met her on the hill between Boscombe and Bournemouth. Our fathers had been neighbours years ago, and fell into each other’s arms. So there’s no family opposition; we needn’t wait interminably for the wedding. My father,—he’s Levi, the big Universal Stores in Holborn—you know—he’s taking me into partnership with a tremendous screw. Which will leave me plenty of time for writing——”

“Writing?”

“I’m a poet,” modestly.

“And what thin trickle of curds-and-whey verse do you imagine can be born in leisure hours, while in unctuous enjoyment of a tremendous screw?”

“Better verse than if I were a starving rhymester, peddling my sweated wares, with chilblains on all my toes. I don’t believe in the uses of adversity?”

“No?”

—“And to-morrow,” spouted Sebastian, unheeding the ironic syllable, “to-morrow I buy her the most wonderful ermine in all the regions of snow, to wrap round her throat when I whirl her by night to this desolate shore. That’s poetry, isn’t it?—when I whirl her by night to this desolate shore!—Lord, man! her throat is softer and whiter than foam ... when she lifts her head to the moonlight—when she lifts her head to look at me—she’s such a little wee thing—then the curve of it makes me delirious ... as perfect as the curve of that wave—look! before it breaks. Her throat——”

“Would you mind,” broke in Stuart very politely, “not talking about throats?”

The lad glanced at him—then quickly away. “I’m sorry,” he jerked out.

“And as for what you are pleased to consider the partiality of the gods towards you,” continued Stuart, goaded to an inexplicable heat of anger; “let me tell you that you merely figure as their sport. I can’t conceive of a greater sign of disfavour than to be thus loaded with gifts. In time you will come to regard the love which has been yours so easily, as a matter of course, as something which has always been there. The wealth that you have gained without effort, will cause you presently to fold fat podgy hands over your smug waistcoat, too richly embroidered for good taste, and give thanks that you are not as other men——”

“You’re wrong there,” interrupted Sebastian, even his placidity giving way beneath this unforeseen attack; “I mean to do a lot of good with my money——”

“And what can be more unpardonably priggish than to do anybody good without doing yourself any harm thereby? It’s like Father Xmas; I never believed in the bountiful generosity of Father Xmas; his sacks were too swollen, and his coat too heavily trimmed—like the waistcoat of your future obesity. Oh, yes, you will be a good man, and a generous man, and a prig, and probably an alderman, and certainly Lord Mayor, and perhaps also High Admiral of Spain. And you’ll forget that Letty’s throat was white as foam, and curved like the curve of a wave,—because Letty will be yours, throat and all, whenever you want her. You’ll never know fun, hard perilous fun, because you’ll never seek peril; you’ll say that you have too many responsibilities, as a husband and a citizen and a philanthropist, to expose yourself unnecessarily. You’ll never be splendidly weary with battle, nor yet know the leanness of spirit which comes from desire unfulfilled, nor will you grow breathless with the exhilaration of a race against your own luck. The best things you are bound to miss forever, my fortunate young friend, because the gods have thought them beyond you—and have sent you instead prosperity, domestic happiness, the course of true love running indecently smooth. And therefore it is that I regard you as damned, body and soul, and you regard me as a lunatic——”

“Not at all, confound your insolence!” Sebastian had sprung to his feet during the tirade. From somnolence to loquacity, and thence to truculence, were easy transitions in his present mood; and not once did the absurdity strike him of this sudden quarrel with a total stranger, on the dim moon-washed sands of the Haven: “not a bit of it. I look upon you merely as one of those meddlesome people who have become embittered by poverty and frustration, and can’t see other people happy. The fox, you’ll remember, said the grapes were sour.”

“Your shot is wide of the mark; as it happens, I’ve only just succeeded in quenching my star, which was most obstreperously luminous. And for the Lord’s sake, spare me fable in argument——”

And thereupon, something queer happened ... Sebastian stepped forward, and seized Stuart in a wrestler’s grip, and attempted to throw him down. In and out of a clear patch of moonlight they swayed, in and out of the black shadow of the hulk, silently, like clockwork marionettes. Their build and strength were about equal, but Stuart was the cooler of the twain, and just held his own, wondering the while what was the exact remark of his that had so infuriated his young opponent. To and fro, in and out of the sharp white moonrays—till, by a slippery dexterous movement, Stuart succeeded in flinging aside Sebastian, who stumbled, and fell, and rose again, covered with a glittering powder of sand, and stood uncertain whether or not to renew the bout. And then it would seem that he saw the other’s features clearly, for the first time; for he exclaimed in quite a different tone from what he had yet used:

“Why, it’s Heron of Balliol, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But how——?” Stuart found it disconcerting, having met and insulted a nameless spirit in ghostland, to be suddenly, and by this same spirit, accosted as Heron of Balliol.

“They pointed you out to me last year, when you came up for the Greek plays. You were the big classical man of your time, weren’t you? They still talk about your double first.”

Stuart looked pleased. “Which was your college?”

“Magdalen. I’m only just down. I say, may I run over again one evening for a talk? My name’s Levi, Sebastian Levi. I’m staying at the Boscombe Hotel.”

“Certainly; delighted; perhaps you’ll introduce your fiancée.” And it was a pity that no one was by to twinkle amusement at the well-bred decorum which had descended upon the antagonists.

“That’s my bungalow, the one that looks like an inverted whale.”

“Don’t you find it dull?”

“Passably. I sail a good bit. Care to join me next time the wind’s foul enough?”

“I’ve never done any sailing; but if I shan’t be in the way——”

“Not at all; you shall be passenger.” Carefully ignoring their fantastic behaviour of a few moments back, they strolled together across the shore, and over the sand-dunes, to where the lamps of Sebastian’s two-seater trembled athwart the road.

“Feel equal to taking the wheel? because if not——”

Sebastian laughed rather shamefacedly. “Oh, I’m not as bad as that. Would you mind starting her?” he climbed to his seat.

Stuart swung the crank. “Here, you’d better take my matches; I’m nearer home than you,” he tossed the box into the moving car.

“Thanks awfully. Good night!”

“Good night.”

As he listened to the dwindling hum of the engine, Stuart let his thoughts wander again to the matter of discipleship. He had marked how swiftly the boy’s sleepy content had been stung to passionate retort; he was responsive, then; and evidently not lacking in brains; altogether of the right stuff. Stuart reflected further that it would be a far more creditable job to drag a convert from a bed of roses than from a ditch of nettles.

And Sebastian, crashing homewards along silent unwinding roads, was conscious of a beating excitement, totally unlike his lulled lotus-dream of the past summer nights. Strange phrases had Heron spoken to him ... “I’ve only just succeeded in quenching my star.” “You will never know the best things of all—the gods thought them beyond you.”... Strange phrases—and no one to warn a lover on the danger of having his brain massaged.

CHAPTER II
FOLLOW-MY-LEADER!

All the next day, Sebastian Levi walked about with a throbbing head, and could not decide if he were suffering from the after-affects of ecstasy, wine, or metaphysics. Certainly his thoughts dwelt most persistently on the third of these, and this even while Letty’s petal-soft lips were quivering, half-shyly, in expectation of his eager kisses. Now he was swept by a flood of rage, recollecting Heron’s contempt of him; now he hated himself for his own Bacchic confidences; then again and yet again he revolved in his mind those few dropped sentences which hinted so arrestingly at a new way of thought—a new way of life. What did the fellow mean by his remark to the effect that he had quenched his star, which was too luminous? Did one then quench a star instead of following it? And why? Why? What result could possible ensue from such an act of madness?...

Sebastian’s father, Ned Levi, was of that species known as the strictly agnostic Jew. He neither went to Synagogue, nor did he keep the picturesque Jewish holidays. He did not tactlessly allude to himself, in company, as “the Chosen of the Lord.” He did not wear enormous flashing diamonds in his shirt-front, nor yet gesticulate over-violently, nor control, spider-fashion, the entire financial affairs of Great Britain. Likewise he ate ham with relish; and so naturally did bacon and eggs form the staple breakfast dish, that the partaking of them was not in the least degree a daily defiance. He was a little unostentatious man, with light-red hair and moustache grizzling untidily to grey, a quiet taste in clothes, and nothing to stamp him Israelite save a slight lift at the bridge of the nose, a kindly concern for the fortunes of even his most distant cousins, and a keenness of business acumen which had led him from a small grocery shop in the East End, to the massive and celebrated stores in High Holborn.

He had married, when his success was already established, a wife very much his superior in birth; a quiet sensible girl, with poverty-stricken parents,—strictly agnostic Christians. The two had vied generously in their readiness to embrace the other’s faith; and ended by leaving the matter for ever unsettled, and marrying at the registrar’s.

Sebastian was brought up very successfully to no religion at all, and an open mind that accepted with equal tolerance his Christian relations of gentle birth, and his more vivid and less reputable Jewish kindred. He was a good-looking lad,—or would have been, had not his auburn hair and dark eyes given him an aspect curiously flamboyant; and amusing,—or would have been, save for what seemed in him a tendency to show off, but was in reality a lack of confidence, an inability to get both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Also, ineradicable result of mixed caste and class, Sebastian held very few neat safely-rooted opinions of his own, and was liable to be dangerously fascinated by daring ideas; especially by ideas that were rather too far off for his attainment, but which held him by a certain remote splendour. He was all response and no initiative. He never got near enough to an idea to perceive its flaws; he never got right through an idea, and beyond it, and so free of it. He strained upwards, and clung on,—or let go, and thudded to the ground. Sometimes, accidentally, he broke things in his fall; and then he sorrowed over them exceedingly; and sickening of his intellectual scrapes, would steep himself in aught that required no assistance of the brain. It was one of these reactions that sent him spinning into the arms of Letty Johnson.

Letty—well, what was Letty? Letty had soft brown hair, which on Sundays was crowned by a hat of one feather. Thus she knew her Sundays. And thus her mother knew how costerdom was differentiated from the rich good taste of prosperous folk who lived in a nice house with a bedroom more than they needed, down Turnham Green way. One feather, and no more. And a velveteen costume in winter. And thin low-necked blouses, winter and summer. And shoes with big pom-poms. And, perhaps, little gilt side-combs, studded with blue stones, perfectly unobtrusive. Thus the outward and visible Letty,—on Sundays. Week-days hardly mattered.

On the table beside Letty’s bed, might be found the Sir Walter Scott birthday-book, a paper novelette, and “Indian Love-lyrics,” by Laurence Hope. Inside Letty’s head existed a quantity of far-fetched romance, the jumbled remnants of a High School education, and an uncertain sort of liking for the company of one Balaam Atkins, bank-clerk, who came very often to Turnham Green for supper.

Round and about Letty, Mrs. Johnson maintained an atmosphere of careful and deliberate laxity. Often the good lady was heard to declare that if Letty cared to go on the stage, no objections would be raised. Letty’s correspondence was always blandly ignored. Letty might spend whole days on the river at Richmond with a ‘jolly party,’ and if she came home after ten o’clock with all of the party dispersed except her immediate companion,—that was only to be expected of twentieth-century youth, remarked Mrs. Johnson to her husband. Indeed, Letty was given far more latitude than she needed, and walked quite placidly in a small area of liberty, wasteful of the wider spaces thrown open by her twentieth-century parents. Just occasionally, when his wife’s vigilance relaxed, Mr. Johnson would forget how tolerant he was, and break out in a row most refreshingly in the style of old-fashioned paterfamilias. But he was always made to atone afterwards for these aberrations, by taking his daughter to a play emphatically ‘for the adult mind only.’ Such performances bored Letty and bewildered her father; but Mrs. Johnson had given forth the watchword of the household: Be Broad-minded! and hers was the ruling spirit.

Therefore, also, Letty took lessons in fencing. “Though I don’t see what she’s to do with it?” said Mrs. Baker doubtfully to Mrs. Johnson.

Letty owned for live stock, a girl-friend, Violet Baker, who had been engaged to a fellow since two-and-a-half years; a Persian kitten; and a younger brother, Luke; she also occasionally remembered a God, imploringly or in gratitude, when the world went very wrong with her, or else very right.

And Letty was exceedingly pretty.

And thus are comprised her total assets. Till, on a summer holiday at Bournemouth, Sebastian Levi came along. Whereat she surrendered to him her all, including the one feather of which he disapproved, including her faint liking for the bank-clerk, and very certainly including her girl-friend’s fellow, who, on Letty’s return to Turnham Green, was to suffer fatally by comparison with the tall pale-faced auburn-haired Sebastian; suffer even unto extinction.

“... Because a man’s star leads him eventually to places too comfortable for the lean spirit to rejoice in....” Sebastian’s musings on metaphysics were interrupted by Letty, as she swung beside him, where he sat upon the garden-roller. None of the other boarders at the Farme would venture near that especial portion of the grounds; it was known as the “little lovers’ solitude.” “Little lovers” the pair had been nicknamed for their apple-green youth. Twenty-two and nineteen; a swing and a garden-roller; blue sky patching the thick green shade; a girl’s voice, hushed for the very breathlessness of love, speaking of white satin ... myrtle-leaves ... Sebastian ought to have been very happy. Yet for him perfection was already chilled to something less of permanence than yesterday’s warm eternities; and:

“Surely, Letty,” he broke in, “you won’t want all that display and fuss when we marry?”

Her head drooped. It was when Sebastian spoke thus loftily, that her father’s favourite remark: “We’re as good as other folk, my girl, if we like to consider other folk as good as us. And that’s logic,” seemed somehow inadequate. She felt that her lover stooped to her with ineffable condescension, and she hastened to sacrifice to him:

“Would you rather I didn’t wear a white frock, Sebastian? Would you rather I wore pink, or—or something quieter?” and she bade a mute farewell to all pretty silent dreams of herself looking like a picture in the “Lady’s Pictorial”; of the gleaming elaborate gown, to be worn afterwards, shorn of its train, at subscription dances and private parties; then dyed black for more matronly whist-drives; filmy veil that should be lain aside and cherished in lavender and memories, perhaps one day shown to her daughter ... Letty sighed, and swung herself faster and faster yet, breaking through the slanting sun-shafts, that slipped together again in her wake, and were broken anew as the board flew back.

“Would you prefer us to have a quiet wedding, Sebastian? with no presents or bridesmaids or cake? Father said something about grand doings and not minding the expense, but——”

He pulled her from the advancing swing into his arms; the narrow seat dangled back empty of occupant.

“Never mind your father, Letty; he doesn’t understand. Our wedding shall be such a tiny one that there will be only just room in it for you and me and the parson; it shall happen in some grey country church, the sun streaming through its windows like youth reviving in an old heart——”

“I call that beautiful,” interrupted Letty softly.

“And you shall wear just whatever you like best. But to me you are prettiest in a certain grass-green cotton frock, and a floppety light-blue hat, because then you look like bluebells in a larch-wood”—thus he caressed her, and teased her, and spoke the romantic nonsense her soul delighted in. And thus she was blissfully content—till Willy Percival rolled his ball into their Paradise zone, and came to fetch it, his mother in apologetic pursuit: “Willy doesn’t know yet where he isn’t wanted,” archly; involving much blushing and dimpling and deprecation on the part of Letty, and a rigid “Not at all” from Sebastian, mightily displeased.

“Can’t you stop these people from buzzing and chaffing?” he demanded irritably, when Mrs. Percival had withdrawn her offspring.

And again Letty beat back a wistful impulse to confide in him how all this was really and truly an essential part of the rose-coloured thrill of “being engaged”; how immensely she gloried in the questions and chaff; how any mention of his name, coupled meaningly with hers, caused her to hold her blossom head inches higher with pride; how like music were her father’s jokes on the subject; how she had been overwhelmed in delicious confusion when the blotting-pad, which was common property at the Farme, was discovered scribbled over and over with the mysterious names: Mrs. S. Levi; Letty Levi; and then, unaccountably: Letty Lovell.

And remembering this, Letty resolved now to unburden herself of a weighty proposition that hitherto she had not dared lay before Sebastian, lest it might rub against an unknown rawness in him. She could never quite disabuse herself of the notion that all Jews, even her splendid lover, are necessarily over-sensitive and forever on the wince. “Because I don’t see how they can ever quite forget that they are Jews,” would have been word-translation of her subconscious thought.

“Sebastian,” she caught hold of a lapel of his coat, and snuggled nearer to him, while the garden-roller gave an ominous lurch, “what do you think about changing your name before we get married? would you mind very much?”

“Rather a bother for nothing,” he rejoined lazily. “But if you’re set on it, darling,—what aristocratic title have you prepared for me?”

“Lovell!” ... breathlessly she hung on his decision, blue-grey eyes fixed attentively on his face. “Sebastian Lovell!” she repeated, dangling the combined effect in front of him, as a child might dangle a toy.

“Think I could live up to it?”

“Now you’re being a naughty boy, and teasing me.—But really, Sebastian, I’ve thought it all over seriously, and I chose ‘Lovell’ because it also begins with an ‘L.’ Of course, they say: change the name and not the letter, change for the worse and not for the better; but I believe that’s only for a girl marrying a man. And, anyhow, superstition is only ignorance. And perhaps—no, let me finish, Sebastian, because I’m awfully in earnest about this,—perhaps your father won’t mind, because Lovell is very like Levi, really; it has the ‘v’ in the middle, and all!”

“I’ll place the consideration of the v-in-the-middle before my venerable parent this very night,” laughed Sebastian. And: “I love you!” he whispered, into the sun-warmed web of her hair. “Letty, you’re adorable; I love you!” seeking by these means to stifle within him a certain sense of disloyalty; which increased, when, on the morning after, she deplored almost tearfully the break-up of the fine weather: “It’s our weather, Sebastian; the weather you told me you loved me in; and it’s got no right to finish so quickly, before you’ve finished telling me.”—But Sebastian was glad of the tempestuous change.... “Care to join me next time the wind’s foul enough?”... He and Stuart set sail together that very afternoon.

They were away for three days. Sebastian had anticipated much stimulating discussion while sailing; his host holding forth, one hand idly resting upon the tiller; himself, the passenger, listening, stretched full length in the lazy sunlight, his pipe in his mouth, the waves lapping gentle accompaniment against the bows of the boat. But Stuart talked very little upon the voyage, and that mostly in curt vigorous language concerning canvas and harbours, and the evil behaviours of the same. He was quite a different being to the eccentric metaphysician of the Haven. Also, though he treated his guest with excellent politeness for the first few hours of companionship, he accepted heartily the boy’s embarrassed offer to “be of assistance” in the management of the boat; and thenceforward plunged him into an existence resembling equally a monkey’s and a cabin-boy’s; involving much perilous swarming, and unknotting, and a process known as ‘reefing’; much battling with drenched ropes and stubborn tiller against obstinate and treacherous winds. A persistently clouded sky overhead; very little to eat, and that uneatable; hard salt breathless days; evenings spent in small water-side inns; Heron exchanging bewildering technicalities with others just arrived in port. Then an uncomfortable lumpy bed, smelling inexplicably of seaweed, and offering but little rest to a stiff and aching body;—“Glad to turn in, eh, Levi?”—decidedly Sebastian was disappointed of the long intimate conversations, explaining riddles which had haunted him ever since his first fantastic meeting with Stuart Heron.

He brought back with him to Bournemouth a great astonishment at being yet alive, hope which he had forfeited many times in each single hour. Also, acute memory of an instant when presence of mind had prompted him to haul at the right sheet in an emergency, and Stuart had favoured him with a sudden curly smile, peculiarly his own, and a brief word of approval. And now Sebastian underwent sensations of weary flatness and depression, inhabiting once more the luxurious suite of rooms engaged by his father at the Boscombe Hotel. He debated all the while what thing he could do to win again that quick smile from Stuart. He wanted that man’s approval—more than aught else he wanted it—would force it somehow, no matter by what extravagance of action. He believed Stuart despised him, and the thought cut like rain-rods in a north-easterly. “If he doesn’t despise me, then why won’t he tell me more about his—his ideas?”

But on no subsequent visit to the Haven, was Stuart to be drawn. “My creed is the wrong sort for an engaged young man; better leave it alone. By the way, you promised that I should see your fiancée.”

“You’ll see her to-morrow, if you’re anywhere about. The whole Menagerie are swarming over in the excursion bus, to view this interesting spot. Letty and her mother and father will be with them. No, not me, thanks; I couldn’t stand three solid hours of the Earwig and the Cabbage-rose.” Sitting on the window-sill of the bungalow, mournfully jabbing tobacco into his pipe, he favoured Stuart with a vivid account of the ‘Menagerie,’ as he chose to term the boarding-house wherein his beloved dwelt.

“It’s a ramshackle building stuck among pine-trees, a mile or two out of Bournemouth; and the proprietress—landlady—hostess—whatever you call her, has no more idea than Adam of management. She advertised in the papers, by way of an original start: ‘Charming home-like residence for the summer months; croquet, tennis, and private bathing-hut; terms moderate; run on Bohemian lines!’ That last statement fetched the victims. Such a crew!”

“Which of your prospective family-in-law was attracted by the Bohemian lines?” queried Stuart, enjoying the recital.

It transpired that Mrs. Johnson had caught sight of the advertisement, and had remarked to her husband, one breakfast time, “Matthew, we are getting into a Groove. What we want, what Letty wants, is Bohemian society. The best Bohemians, naturally. Here’s our chance. I’ve heard they take liqueur in their morning tea, instead of milk and sugar, like Christians!” Mr. Johnson had here stated firmly that nothing would induce him to do that; and Letty had further propounded: “whether they’ll like the sort of people we are?” And her father had replied with his favourite remark: “We’re as good as other folks, my girl, if we like to consider other folks as good as us. And that’s logic!”

“So they all came; except the young brother, Luke, who went off on his own,” finished Sebastian, somewhat sulkily. He resented being made to talk, when he so itched to hear what the other had to say. And he believed Stuart was being purposely provoking and reticent.

“And what about the Earwig and the Cabbage-rose?”

“It’s a General and his wife. He’s brown, and about eighty; hobbles and shakes; a shrivelled little chap with beady eyes. She’s enormous and pink, with bulging petals, as if she’d been left out too long in the rain; some of the petals have fallen, and the rest are loose. She skits and sirens, and wears her evening-gowns too low. Now I ask you, Heron, don’t you consider she’s a bad influence for Letty? I do.”

Stuart pondered the matter: “I don’t think you can call a woman a bad influence because her outside petals are falling from her shoulders. However, I’ll have a look to-morrow, and judge for myself.”

But by the morrow he had forgotten the impending intrusion; and it was a mere accident that when the Menagerie trooped noisily on to the little wood and iron jetty, Stuart should just have been at its foot; unroping his skiff from among a welter of palings and steps, anchors and chains and beams, rust-eaten and weed-green. His trousers were rolled thigh-high over his bare legs; he wore an old blue sweater, and a sou’wester protected the back of his neck from the sun. Standing up to his knees in water, he glanced up in some curiosity, mingled in equal proportions with indifference. The various members of the party were easily enough distinguishable by Sebastian’s word-pictures: Here the Earwig and the Cabbage-rose; she in a large leghorn hat, waving a sunshade, and calling to Stuart in shrill tones: “Ferry! Hi, Ferry!” There, Archie Mowbray, the very spit of a Kipling subaltern; avowing, when questioned on the subject, that he ‘had no patience with Kipling.’ Besides him, the untidy girl of his adoration, Ethel Wynne, her blouse agape where it lacked buttons, her fingers stained with nicotine. And—yes, that must be ‘Maddermerzell,’ disturbingly piquante French governess of a small boy, who, Stuart surmised impartially, would in five seconds be headlong in the water, and require saving. And there Mrs. Percival, for eleven months of the year most respectable of British matrons that ever wore a hair-net, now, by some strange seizure of rejuvenescence, making a giggling fool of herself with the doggish husband of another matron, not rejuvenated, and therefore icy of eye. That pretty little maiden in white, with soft hair shadowed to brown beneath her big burnt-straw sun-hat, Stuart had no difficulty in recognizing as Letty, the other ‘little lover’ from the shadow-side of the hulk; Letty, looking demure, as she hugged the secret of how well she knew these shores—by moonlight.

Stuart pushed off vigorously; then, leaning on his oars, looked up again to see if he could pick out Mr. Johnson from among the chattering gesticulating crowd. The Cabbage-rose was still desperately hailing the boat: “Hi! Boy! Ferry! we’re coming with you!”

“Not if I know it,” muttered Stuart; quite determined that the Haven should not see him again till cleared of the Menagerie. Then a graceful figure, auburn-haired and supple, thrust a way to the front of the jetty, and cried, in tones sufficiently supplicating to melt glaciers into torrents:

“Mr. Heron! Oh, Mr. Heron!”

“Aureole Strachey!” With a few powerful strokes, he brought the boat back to the palings, roped it securely, then plunged again into the water, and waded ashore. Aureole flew down the jetty, and met him on the sand:

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you; of all people in the world, you! you who awoke my sleeping—but let’s get away from these gorillas!” indicating with distaste the Cabbage-rose, who was approaching with the evident fell intent of an introduction. “How I hate them all, directly I come again in contact with someone from the old life.” Then, as Stuart drew her hastily in an opposite direction, “Have you—do you know where Oliver can be?” sinking her voice to a whisper.

“Oliver is in America, looking for you.”

“But how silly of him. Why is he looking for me in America? It’s such a big place—it would take him years to find me, even if I were there. And I’m not. I wouldn’t have gone to a place where it would be so difficult to be found.”

Stuart looked puzzled: “But he wrote to me a few days after the—um—episode on the Broads, saying he had returned to the house in Chelsea, hoping you were there; that you had been, and gone again, with all your luggage, and left a note for him——”

“‘Good-bye; I am a pilgrim for the land of freedom!’” quoted Aureole readily. “You told me, don’t you remember, that he would certainly follow me, and that we’d have a perfectly lovely scene together, and that he’d never neglect my individual femininity again. And if he has deserted me, and gone to America, then it’s your fault.” She drooped her full crimson lips reproachfully at Stuart; who, disliking this reminder of his disgraceful machinations, made heated reply:

“He did follow you. If you say you are bound for the Land of Freedom, and then come to Bournemouth, I can hardly be blamed, can I?”

“I—I meant freedom of the soul,” murmured Aureole, and her eyes filled slowly with tears. It had been a shock to hear that her husband was so far away.

Then Stuart began to laugh: “If you will be subtle with Nigger, and talk about Pilgrims and Lands of Freedom, naturally his thoughts lumber off on a wild-goose chase in the direction of the ‘Mayflower’ and ‘Hail Columbia.’” Mentally he substituted ‘wild-duck chase,’ but refrained from being unkind aloud, because Aureole was weeping unrestrainedly now, and he felt compelled to cheer her to the best of his ability. “Never mind. I’ll write to him directly he sends some address, and tell him to come home. Meanwhile, you’re quite comfortable in the menag——at the boarding-house, aren’t you? Or why not move to the hotel? you can use me as Oliver’s banker, till he turns up, you know.”

“I can’t move to any hotel,” she flared at him. “It’s my boarding-house. Mine. And it’s in such a horrid m-m-muddle!”

Stuart sat down on a hillock of sand: “D’you mean to tell me that you were responsible for that advertisement?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to earn his respect; show that I could stand by myself, be free of him and the world and everybody—except Nature. I’m a Pagan.”

“But, my dear child,—no, don’t cry!—Pagans don’t run boarding-houses.”

“It’s a private hotel.”

“Well, even private hotels. Not usually.”

But Aureole felt she had been censured sufficiently by this young man, who had taken such a vivid interest in her wayward personality, when, in London, he had urged her to Norfolk, by a vision of her swaying form: ‘always among reeds’.... And then again had urged her away from Norfolk by much adroit talk on the subject of Ibsen, and pampered souls, and earthquakes. So that from him she had hoped for more sympathetic understanding of her movements and motives:

“I wish you had let us alone. People shouldn’t interfere between a husband and wife. Oliver and I were in perfect harmony before you meddled and sent him to America. And, anyway, what I do now is no business of yours. I’m surrounded by adventurers and harpies, and losing hundreds of pounds a week, if you want to know. And when Oliver arrives, you can tell him of my ruin and misery, and how you gibed at it all; you, whom he thought a staunch and faithful friend!” After which passionate denunciation, which scorched the tears in her eyes to brown points of flame, she walked swiftly away from him, in the direction of the adventurers and harpies awaiting her upon the jetty.

“I believe she’s right,” murmured Stuart. Perhaps he ought not to have tampered with matrimony as he had done. But he was so truly convinced that every married couple ought to be well stirred up at least once a year, to prevent them from setting into a mould. And what is the good of conscientious convictions unless you conscientiously induce others to act up to them?

And anyway, he was hardly to be blamed if Nigger so absurdly misread a cryptic allusion to the land of freedom!

It was the after-dinner hour at the Boscombe Hotel; and Sebastian Levi, pacing up and down the thickly carpeted lounge, listening to the tinkle and silken swish all about him, watching the waiters move to and fro with the coffee-services, threading a deft way between the visitors in evening-dress, felt impatiently that this was all an unreal stage set, as: ‘Curtain rises on hotel lounge, luxuriously furnished; guests grouped about, with natural appearance of animated talk.’ Felt that the only realities lay with a solitary figure, black and wiry against the pale shadow-land of his chosen retreat; Stuart Heron, probably at that moment pacing the ghostly wind-blown shores of the Haven, even as he, Sebastian, now paced in the hot artificial glare of his prison-house—so he termed it!—and wished, in a tumult of divine discontent, that he were now beside Stuart, re-living in talk one of their strenuous battling hours at sea, when every nerve was strained taut to catch the racing tide into harbour.

Sebastian wondered if he wanted to order the car, and drive over to The Farme—and Letty?... Not just yet.... Something trembled on the verge of decisive action....

Suddenly he went quickly from the lounge into the smoking-room:

“Can I speak to you privately, father?”

Mr. Levi, senior, looked his surprise. He was enjoying a late whisky and soda, and a mild political chat with some middle-aged cronies, and rather regretted leaving these amusements.

“Why, yes, my boy,—if it won’t keep till the morning.”

“No, it won’t keep.” Sebastian spoke breathlessly; his hair was ruffled as by many winds; his dark eyes flamed with strange fires, as he noted the numerous podgy somnolent figures showing dimly a-sprawl in the thick smoky atmosphere; ten-thousand-a-year figures!—Sebastian attempted to express his attitude towards them by violently slamming the smoking-room door behind him ... but it was padded, and refused to close otherwise than in a fashion both hushed and respectful; respectful to ten-thousand-a-year within.

“Well, Sebastian, and what is this very important matter that won’t keep? Anything connected with your poor mother’s pearls for Letty? Is that it, you grasping rogue? And what will your sisters say to that, when they are grown-up enough to know that pearls are pearls? hey?” Mr. Levi switched on the lights of their private sitting-room, and took up his stand in front of the empty fireplace. “Hey?” he repeated, quite prepared to yield the pearls. He was fond of little Letty.

Sebastian moved restlessly up and down the room; crossed abruptly to the window and flung it open, knocking over a tall palm on its stand as he did so. The breeze flapped the curtains far out into space. This was better....

“I just wanted to tell you, sir, that your offer of a junior partnership in the business, and fifteen hundred a year to begin with, is an extremely generous one——”

“Go on,” said Mr. Levi, frowning a little. How much more did the young beggar expect, at twenty-two?

“But I don’t want it. I don’t want any allowance. I’d rather be without.”

His father surveyed him during an instant of blank astonishment. The waiter entered with the whisky-and-soda Levi had ordered to be sent up after him, from the smoking-room. He tossed off the remainder of the glassful, and offered his son a drink.

“No, thanks,” coldly. He was anxious for the storm to break upon him, anxious to begin suffering his martyrdom. This dalliance with whisky, therefore, struck him as a needless compromise.

“And what does Miss Letty say to this, hey?” Levi had no idea what was at the bottom of the boy’s startling renunciation of ease and luxury; but he had been warned that young men sometimes pick up odd phases at Oxford—debts or old editions or Hedonism. Sebastian had always been of an excitable and impulsive temperament; a liquid temperament. This phase, whatever it was, would not last long. Mr. Levi twinkled indulgently from the hearthrug:

“What does little Miss Letty say to it all?”

“I—I haven’t told Letty yet.”... What would Stuart say, how would Stuart look, when told of this shattering tribute to his influence?...

“You can’t marry on nothing a year, you know that, don’t you? pretty little Letty-birds need pretty little warm nests built for them.”

“Oh”—the lad twitched impatient shoulders. Stuart had not mentioned how asceticism could be made to work in with love. He must be questioned presently on the subject.

“Don’t be a fool, Sebastian,” advised his father suddenly; “Come, what’s it all about?”

The quick change from levity to kindliness, touched the boy almost to the point of explaining what were the ideals that had induced him to strip himself so dramatically of the world’s goods. And yet—how to put into words that uncomfortable stinging creed which he hated, and which yet held his brain as in a sort of vice, fascinated his thoughts to the exclusion even of Letty? And then that weak longing to impress Heron, prove that he understood his doctrines to the point of sacrifice—damn Heron! perhaps now he would condescend to talk to his disciple, instead of making polite enquiries re Letty’s health. And, finally, that glimpse of an after-dinner hour in the well-furnished, well-warmed, well-appointed smoking-room—conflict of winds carefully shut out—doors that would not bang—waiters who walked noiselessly—conversation on stocks and shares and politics, carefully calculated not to excite the torpid brain.... Oh, Lord! would he grow, or rather dwindle, thus, if he went into his father’s business and accepted chunks of his father’s income? Was he started on that way, the night he had prattled so absurdly of his happiness to Stuart?... Damn Stuart! always the point swung back to that imperturbable gentleman. And how could a fellow explain to Levi, of The Stores, High Holborn, the bewildering and topsy-turvy morality of the shears? Sebastian plunged—fatally:

“It’s just because of myself, father. It isn’t that I feel in the least that I oughtn’t to be enjoying my income because other people have less. But I think—I know I’m better without your money.”

The effect of his speech was electrical. Quite suddenly, Ned Levi began to bellow.

“So that’s it, is it? And I’m to sit here and thank you for the honour, am I? Well, you can go—anywhere; do anything; I don’t care. I’ve done with you. If my money isn’t good enough, you needn’t touch it. Want a purer sort of gold, do you? I knew this was bound to happen some day. That’s what one has a son for.” And still muttering incoherent commands to Sebastian to get out of his sight, the agitated old man himself lumbered from the room, his hand trembling, his grey eyelashes stiff with rage. Sebastian’s unfortunate phrasing had hit his father on a dread quite unsuspected; dread that one day his only son, born to the best of everything, would be ashamed of the way the Levi wealth had been amassed; ashamed of trade; ashamed of his humble parentage.

—“But it seemed to me the boy was all right, when he got engaged to Johnson’s girl. No la-di-da notions about him then. And now he’d rather do without money, than touch mine that was made in honest trade. Suppose he thinks I cheated it out of people’s pockets; sold inferior stuff, and got swollen on it. Well, it don’t matter—it don’t matter...” brooding on to-night’s culmination of all his fears. If his wife had been alive—he could have had it all out with her, all his bitterness and disappointment; and she would have said in her sensible way: “Never mind, Ned; the boy doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’ll come round all right,—he’s a good lad, really.”... But his wife was dead. And his two daughters—he had heard them flippantly remarking to visitors that they were “bringing up dad in the way all parents should go!”—not much consolation to be had from Editha and Ivy. Ned Levi, in his loneliness, wondered if it ever struck the strange hard young people of modern times, how very little fun it was to be a parent.

Sebastian had no idea that his thrice-twisted motives could have been misconstrued by his father to aught so simple as a shrinking from wealth earned in trade. He was even unaware that he had hurt his father—thought he had merely made him angry. He determined, standing on the hotel steps, and letting great gusts of clean air lift the hair from his heated forehead, that both Letty and her father were entitled to hear without delay what he had done. Then, and then only, would he allow himself to tell Stuart—and his heart raced madly for an instant, as it struck him he might still have time to get over to the Haven this very night.

“Do you want the small car, sir?” queried the liveried porter respectfully.

“Yes—no——” Sebastian remembered that a too frequent use of his father’s automobile was hardly compatible with his recent hotly spoken resolutions. He walked a few quick steps along the sea-front ... then returned, and ordered the two-seater. There would be no possibility of reaching the Haven unless he drove. And, after all, “once more doesn’t count.”

—“We needn’t ask who that is!” chirped the Cabbage-rose, when the throbbing of an engine was heard outside the Farme. “I don’t suppose it’s a visitor for us, do you, Mrs. Strachey?”

Letty blushed, and ran to meet Sebastian. A few moments later, with a puzzled air, she fetched in her father from the garden. Sebastian wanted to speak to him. “No, Pups, I don’t a bit know why.” Mrs. Johnson, from a deep-rooted conviction that men could not be trusted to be broad-minded without a woman to guide them, joined the conclave unasked. The quartette had the dining-room to themselves.

... “Decided not to accept your father’s allowance?” repeated Mr. Johnson incredulously. “Why ever not?”

And again the disciple was confronted by the difficulty of explaining the creed of the master, to apparently unsympathetic listeners. He stole a glance at Letty, and felt braced by her answering smile. Her blue eyes were no longer bewildered—they shone at him like stars.

“It’s a man I know,” Sebastian started rather lamely, “who has put me in the way of—well—of thinking rather differently about life. About wealth that isn’t striven for, and—and things one gets too easily.”

“I like argerment,” Mat Johnson put in briskly. “I’m quite a good one for argerment. Now what I say about what you say he says, is this: unless we don’t mind taking things easily from other folk, other folk will take them easily enough from us. And that’s logic.”

“But that would be nothing to do with me; that would be their concern, and their loss of the—oh, of the fun of striving, don’t you see, sir?” Sebastian was afraid he was making out rather a poor case for the defence. “It’s with the effect of easy achievement on me personally that my friend is concerned. He says I’m in danger of growing fat.”

Matthew Johnson, himself inclined to corpulence, took the allusion as a personal affront, and was coldly silent, while Mrs. Johnson interrupted indignantly: “I’m sure you have an elegant figure, Sebastian; hasn’t he, Letty?”

Letty said nothing; only smiled softly, as at some misty golden thought.

“You introduce me to this pal of yours, Levi,” continued Mr. Johnson, recovering his good-humour, and tilting back his chair at the ceiling; “and we’ll tackle the matter together. I daresay he’s young, and maybe I can put him right on one or two bits. And as for you, run back to your dad and tell him you’ve thought better of that fifteen hundred quid a year, and that you’ll pocket it with many thanks. See?” and the note of rising authority on the last syllable drew from Sebastian a quick:

“Yes, I see. But I won’t. That would be rather stupid and inconsistent, wouldn’t it? After I had so definitely refused either to go into the business or accept the cash.”

“Oho! you’ve refused the partnership in the business as well, have you? And how, may I ask, d’you mean to support my daughter when you’re married? Or is your Mightiness going to refuse her too?”

Sebastian held his head very high, as he replied that nothing in the world would induce him to give up Letty.

“And how d’you mean to keep her, eh?” repeated his future father-in-law, stubbornly.

Mrs. Johnson detected trouble brewing; and clinched matters, so she thought, by a brilliant compromise:

“Couldn’t you take half of what your father offers you, Sebastian? I’m sure seven hundred and fifty pounds a year is quite as much as any wife needs to start on. Isn’t it, Letty?”

“Taking half would be exactly the same as taking all,” retorted Sebastian, desperate now of forcing understanding.

“You’re wrong there, my lad. It ’ud be just less than fifteen hundred quid by one half of fifteen hundred quid, which is seven fifty. But there’s to be no halves about this business, mother; d’you mark me, Letty? Are you attendin’, Sebastian Levi? I’m not going to have my girl waitin’ about the best years of her life for a young fool who didn’t know when he was well off. I like your father; we were neighbours once, he and I; and I liked you well enough till now, though not a patch on him. But unless you come to me in a week or two with all these taradiddles biffed out of your head—then biff goes the wedding!” Mr. Johnson rose to his feet, and in time-honoured fashion whacked at the table with his clenched fist. “And meantime you’re not to see so much of her, either. Come along, mother; come along, Letty”; summoning his women-folk from the room, he marched forth. Mrs. Johnson followed meekly; her laborious tolerance shrivelled to nothing at this first hot blast from the actual furnace of ‘advanced ideas.’

Sebastian caught at Letty’s hands, as she passed him—

“Letty?”

“It’s all right, dear; I do understand.”

“Really?” he was surprised at her emphasis.

“Really and truly. Good night ... darling,” scarcely breathing the last word, she slipped out of his arms and vanished. Left him, marvelling....

The car and the road again, and the buffeting masses of wind. Sebastian’s exhilaration, dashed somewhat by his two recent interviews with unresponsive middle-age, whipped itself anew to a tremendous height. For now he was clear of worldly burdens; stripped like a runner for the great race; and with the discovery new upon him of just how easy of accomplishment were the things that had never before entered into the range of normal possibility. The quest of spiritual adventure.... And the Haven rushing nearer and nearer, as sombre patches of pine-gloom, spectral open spaces, tore helter-skelter in the opposite direction. Soon he would be telling Heron—and the older man would flash him that quick curly grin of approval.... Now the flat oozing stretches of mud, and the glimmer of a sluggish tide, far out towards the horizon.—And now all brakes jammed on—the car ceased to hum, and stood immovable, but still vibrating from the reckless pace at which it had been driven.

Sebastian leapt down the sand-banks, on to the beach; found Stuart musing, bare-headed, at the door of the bungalow; evidently quite oblivious of wind and tempest. And now, in actual presence of his idol, a sudden diffidence swept over the boy. This Stuart Heron, while stimulating the most fanatical exploits in others, yet contrived himself to retain an atmosphere entirely ordinary. Flushing scarlet, and rather breathless, Sebastian dashed into his recital:

“I’ve been wanting to tell you, Heron, how immensely I admired your ideas—about renunciation—and all that; how they struck me as fine—and clean ... like star-spaces ... when everybody else is so beastly, and grabs at things, money and—and furniture, the heavy tangible articles that block out the view and the air.... I’m expressing myself horribly badly, I know, but you’ve rather knocked the stuffing out of me lately; just lately, when I was smuggest. And anyway, I don’t want only to jaw; anybody can do that. So I turned it about—your philosophy, creed, religion, whatever you like to call it,—chewed it, and worried over it, and cursed you up and down.... And to-night I chucked up my whole future as it was mapped out for me; told the Guv’nor that I wouldn’t take his fifteen hundred a year; take it, and loll on it as if it were a sofa of cushions. Chucked up my partnership in the business; and, I suppose, all chances of a comfortable marriage just yet. Chucked it all up....”

He stopped. The impetus which had carried him so far, gave out suddenly. He was still a bit dazed as to the actual reasons which had inspired his recent startling performances; was just conscious of a mighty upheaval in his affairs, overwhelming changes starting on the morrow. For the present, tired out, he craved only to hear the surge of praise due to him—

“Chucked it all up,” he pleaded....

Stuart shifted his pipe into the corner of his mouth. His gaze was still bent outwards to the sluggish line of tide on the horizon.

“Rather a theatrical proceeding, surely?”

CHAPTER III
“RUN ON BOHEMIAN LINES!”

Sebastian owned a hundred pounds per annum, bequeathed him by legacy; which sum Stuart had induced him to retain:

“I agree with you it would be far more effective to renounce that as well, and confront the world as the penniless son of the rich Ned Levi. But it isn’t done, my lad; if it were, I shouldn’t be trading in diamonds. Theatricality is only a species of fat. If you strip yourself because it gives opportunity for your dramatic faculties, you’re feeding hard, all the time; feeding on the astounded faces of your friends, on your own ringing accents, on the picturesque contrast of your life as it was yesterday to what it will be to-morrow. You mustn’t be picturesque, Levi, your tawny locks are against you as it is. Your forty bob a week will ensure you a pleasantly mediocre existence in a furnished bed-sitting-room.”

Sebastian looked worried; he wished Stuart would not exhibit so many mental acrobatics. Last week he could have sworn the man was preaching total renunciation of all worldly goods, in order to make the struggle as strenuous as possible. Now he had doubled and twisted again to something entirely different. And beyond all the inconsistencies, Sebastian glimpsed a splendid consistency, a paramount truth, but, as usual, too high up for him to do aught but cling to it by the finger-tips. And seemingly he had blundered already.

“I’ve given up my room at the hotel, and I think I’ll go to the Farme for the rest of August and September,” he announced tentatively; “it’s not expensive, and I shall be near Letty.” He might have added: “and near you.”

—“And it will be quiet for writing,” he continued.

“What do you intend to write?”

“I want to throw your theory of the shears into a book; in fact, all your theories.” Sebastian tried to make the announcement without blushing, and failed miserably.

“Volume of ethical essays? Treatise on metaphysics?—Good Lord, man,”—a horrible thought struck Stuart—“surely you’re not going to butcher me to make a book of minor verse?”

“No, I hardly regard you as a lyrical subject,” retorted Sebastian, with some show of spirit,—he wasn’t always going to let himself be badgered by Heron! “The novel is the best form of literature for wide circulation,—and, after all, we do want the truth to reach the masses. I’ve got the title fixed already: ‘Shears,’ by Sebastian Levi, dedicated to Stuart Heron,—if I may?” with a return to the old shyness.

Stuart offered no active opposition, but he felt doubtful. Perversely, ever since the advent of his keen young disciple, he himself had been less keen. He was not sure now if indeed he wanted a disciple?... It was agony to watch Sebastian doing his stunts—and doing them badly! This Jewish boy was too responsive, too enthusiastic, too flexible altogether; he tempted Stuart to do his worst—and Stuart was uncomfortably aware of just how bad his worst could be. He longed for firmer material against which to pit himself.... And this sent his thoughts flying to Oliver Strachey in America—and to Oliver’s wife in Bournemouth. He felt more guilty over that affair than he cared to acknowledge; and wondered once or twice if he ought not himself to take in hand the muddle at the Menagerie, pending Nigger’s return. So now he enjoined Sebastian to let him know just how chaotic were Aureole’s affairs, morally and financially.

Sebastian had decided to ignore Mr. Johnson’s commands to see less of his daughter. Without previous word to Letty, he arrived at the Farme, in quest of a room, late the following afternoon; and found the place deserted, save in the square-flagged hall, a couple of rather forlorn persons standing beside a pile of dusty luggage.

“We’ve been waiting over half an hour,” explained the plain prim female of the pair; “I sent Mrs. Strachey a card when to expect us, but I suppose it got mislaid in the post. There are no servants anywhere. And Bertie gets such cold feet, travelling,” indicating her pallid young companion. “When I pulled the bell-rope, it came off in my hands. Do you suppose she will charge much for the damage? Is she like that?”

Sebastian’s reassurances were drowned in the hoot of a motor-horn, and a chorus of laughing chatter. Through the wide windows and through the open door, a miscellaneous crowd swarmed into the hall, and paused abruptly at sight of the strangers.

“Aureole, forward please, and serve,” remarked somebody flippant. And Aureole stepped apologetically from the throng, striving to smooth her tawny hair, loosened under the motor-veil.

“You must forgive me; of course I’ve muddled dates again. It’s Mrs. Gilchrist and her husband, isn’t it?”

“No,” contradicted the prim girl, “it’s Miss Fortescue and her brother. I wrote you were to expect us this evening. You are Mrs. Strachey, I suppose?”

“Yes,—but—but you said you couldn’t come till the end of September,” stammered their hostess. Whereupon Miss Fortescue produced Mrs. Strachey’s own letter, bidding them welcome on the fifteenth of August; damning evidence before which the culprit remained merrily unabashed.

“I am a goose! Let’s run round and see where I can put you. It was a shame to let you wait; we were picnicking. Did you ring?... Oh, I see! It doesn’t matter in the least; we’re breaking things all day long here. Mr. Mowbray, do be an angel, and help Ada carry up these trunks; you are so strong.”

Mr. Mowbray, a stolid bronzed young man, evidently in the army, signified his willingness to act as porter. And then Sebastian, who had noted with relief the absence of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson from the party, broke off his conversation with Letty, and, drawing Aureole aside, asked her if she could find him a room anywhere. “Because I’d like to move in at once.”

She scrutinized him intently ... then her gaze flickered to Letty.

“Yes. I see. You are feeling the pull—the strain. She is the moon, and you the tide ... it draws and draws ... I understand, Mr. Levi.” She motioned him to follow her up the wooden stairway which rose from the centre of the hall. Miss Fortescue and Bertie had preceded them, and: “This is the rummest boarding-house I’ve ever known,” the latter was heard whispering to his dazed sister, as Aureole and Sebastian approached them.

Not aware of aught unconventional in her reception of the Paying Guest, Aureole stopped on the first landing; and, frowning with a sort of reproach at the various unresponsive doors, said she believed that all those rooms were full.—“You see, I thought you would be Mr. and Mrs. Gilchrist; and then I expected you the day before yesterday.”

“And where would you have put me if I had been Mrs. Gilchrist the day before yesterday?” queried the prim girl from the Midlands, trying to cope with the situation.

“Here,” their hostess ran lightly down a flight of steps branching into a wing of the rambling old building; and displayed an enormous double bedroom. “Perhaps—perhaps you two young men wouldn’t mind sharing?” hopefully. “I should have to put you in an extra washstand, naturally. You can have Mr. Mowbray’s.”

Sebastian, rather enjoying matters, wondered of what other necessities the long-suffering Mowbray was to be deprived. All the same, if he was to write, he would want a room to himself; and this he made clear to Aureole, who looked worried,—and enquired irrelevantly of Miss Fortescue:

—“Would you like a cup of tea in the mornings?” She assumed an expression of portentous gravity, as though she had recollected something: “It’s extra, of course.”

Miss Fortescue agreed: “Oh, of course!” glad to find this symptom of dawning sanity in their most incompetent landlady. “Will you show me my room, please,” she added firmly.

“I suppose you’d better have this one,” said Aureole, very reluctant. “It’s meant for two, ...” she pondered the matter, gazing absently at Sebastian; who, uncertain of the exact plight into which the advertised “Bohemian lines” were about to plunge him, again reiterated his plaintive request for a single room.

Then Aureole dived into her bag, and brought forth a crumpled sheet of paper, which, opened out, proved to be a blend between a map of the house, a time-table, and a fever-chart.

“Let me see: Miss Bruce is leaving on the twenty-second, but Mr. Vyvyan Leclerc comes in on the twenty-first to take her room, so that won’t do.”

Quite obviously it would not do, in more senses than one.

Aureole continued poring over the much-bescribbled, much-erased paper:

“The dairy room is empty for three days; the Lloyds left in a temper over the breakfasts. You could start there, Mr. Levi. And then perhaps for a week or two I could get you a room in a cottage near by—only ten minutes’ walk. And after that, little Verney is away for a week-end; he wouldn’t mind if you slept in his bed as long as you don’t disturb his moralities.”

“His—what?” from Sebastian. The prim girl turned pink.

“His morality plays. He’s mad about them; and has a cardboard model fixed up, with all the puppet characters.—That would bring us to about the beginning of September, wouldn’t it? Oh, well, somebody is sure by then to have lost patience with me, and quitted, and left a room vacant. So that’s all right, isn’t it?” and she raised wistful brown velvet eyes to Sebastian, who replied gravely:

“Mrs. Strachey, you have again mistaken identity. I am a Jew, indeed, but not the Wandering Jew.”

“You’re not satisfied with the arrangements?” disappointed. She puckered her brows yet again over the fever-chart. “Would you mind sleeping in an attic?”

His imagination leapt. “I should like nothing better.”

They all four trooped upstairs to inspect. The Farme was a sprawling mansion of two storeys only. From the second, a narrow twisting staircase, not unlike a ladder, led to what were, once upon a time, granaries.

“This is the best of them,” Aureole threw open a door.

The attic revealed fully satisfied Sebastian’s “theatrical instinct,” as Stuart would have called it. Here his book could be written. Here, in shadowy company of Chatterton and Francis Thompson, he could be Starving-Genius-in-a-Garret; lord of his four walls.

“This will do splendidly, thanks,” he informed Aureole.

“I must get you up a bed from somewhere,” she remarked thoughtfully. “I wonder....”

She said no more. But Sebastian suspected that Mr. Mowbray was doomed.

“And what about my brother?” demanded Miss Fortescue.

Without waiting to hear Bertie’s fate, which he foresaw as hopeless, Sebastian returned to the hotel, and broke the news of his impending departure to his father, who received it in grim silence.

Then he made his usual evening pilgrimage to the Haven, and laid before Stuart his impressions of the state of affairs at the Farme.

It was evident that the management of the boarding-house was proving rather too much for Aureole; and she ran it in a fashion that certainly marked a new and eccentric era in that particular line of business. The boarders were compounded of three separate strata; members from her own social and artistic circle, such as Archie Mowbray, little Verney, and Ethel Wynne, who were there by way of a lark, and to “give Aureole a leg-up”; respectable folk, like the Johnsons and the Fortescues, and others from the Midlands and the suburbs of London, who usually departed after their first day, spreading a report of “heathenish goings-on”; unless they stayed on, because secretly fascinated by the difference between this bizarre establishment and the more usual article. Finally, the Doubtfuls, with profession a trifle misty and laughter a shade too loud. Aureole would fain have rid herself of some of these, but did not quite know how to set about it. She relied on her visitors for sympathy and assistance in a manner that was wholly disarming; would send one to the town for butter, if she ran out of the commodity; beg another to lend his cherished motor-car for the common weal; would relate confidentially how the cook had just left—“so we must put up with a scratch dinner, isn’t it tiresome?” Or, taking a guest for companion on a shopping expedition, would question casually: “Do you like salmon?” and, on receiving an affirmative reply, order eighteen shillings’ worth to be sent immediately to the Farme for lunch. Nor did she think it necessary ever to rise from her slumbers till noon; with the result that breakfast, unsuperintended, resembled a steeplechase more than anything in the world; each person with a separate fad, entering at a separate time, calling for separate food—or sometimes merely grabbing; wandering to and fro from the kitchen; sounding bells,—occasional outbursts of rage, when Aureole’s foggy ideas of quantity had misled her on the near side. Nevertheless, her very helplessness aroused a dormant quality of chivalry in the boarders, so that they put up with an astonishing amount of discomfort and incapacity, flattered to find themselves treated in the spirit of an accidental society house-party. The great amusement was to watch the bewildered entry of new-comers; mark their slow emancipation from the set state of mind which expected to find a framed copy of rules, hours, and terms, on their bedroom wall; expected, indeed, to find a bedroom wall, which rarely existed till Aureole, in collaboration with the fever-chart, would discuss who could with impunity be ejected to make place. Idle to speculate how often Archie Mowbray had travelled with his polo-boots and hair-brushes.

About a week after the advent of Sebastian, chaos reached its supreme height. Aureole, deeply in debt, found the weather too warm for effort, and decided to let things rip. They ripped. A great many problems she solved by simply staying in bed; others, less adjustable, reduced her to the verge of angry tears. Ada, invaluable housemaid, bethought herself to give notice. Aureole would dearly like to have done the same.

“Que diable fais-je donc dans cette galère?” she demanded impatiently of Letty, as they undressed together in the bathing-hut.

“Je ne say pas,” replied Letty, in careful High School French.

“Sir James and Lady Merridik are due this evening. Thank goodness, I’ve got quarters for them, at least. Facing north, to be cool—or was it a south aspect they wanted, because of the cold? He’s an Indian judge, so he’s sure to feel the climate, but I forget which way they feel it. Tant pis!” Aureole slipped into a most becoming bathing-dress, tied a black silk handkerchief round her flaming curls, and lounging against a miscellaneous heap of deck-chairs, wet and dry towels, tumbled garments both masculine and feminine, shrimping-nets, spades, and greengages, she watched Letty, in the earlier stages of disrobing. This wooden bathing-shed, given exclusively for the use of the Farme, was a little separate chaos of its own, a sort of annexe to the major chaos. While some undressed in it, some waited to undress, and some, already undressed and in the water, were awaiting their opportunity to come out till those undressing were in the water, when the first set would dash in and encounter in the doorway those who were waiting to undress. The men of the party were supposed to take their dip earlier, before breakfast, when the sea was iciest, or directly after, and risk apoplexy. But the laggards usually contrived to overlap, and their drippings made the shed untenable before the turn of the ladies. Add to all this a defective latch, which allowed the door to swing open if directly leant against, the demands of the little Percival boy, who throughout the morning was in shrill need of spade or pail or buns or fishing-net; add a large earwig colony inhabiting the chinks between the boards;—and it will be understood that the Farme bathing-shed was hardly a spot to choose for confidential conversation.

Nevertheless, Aureole remarked suddenly: “Why has Mr. Levi quarrelled with his father—and yours?”

Letty bent to tie up her sandals. “Sebastian has given up all his money.”

“Yes. It was a queer thing to do. Why?”

Letty evaded the point: “He doesn’t know I know why.”

“But you do.”

“Yes, I do.”

Willy Percival hammered at the door, which instantly gave way. “Oooo-oo!”—Letty caught up a towel and huddled it close, looking like a water-nymph taken unawares by a mortal.

“Please, may I have my pail?”

Aureole tossed it through the aperture.

“No. The other one. The coloured one.”

“Run away, Billikins, and don’t bother.”

“Aren’t you nearly ready?” came a heartrending chorus from outside, accompanied by the chattering teeth of some blue-faced individual longing to get dry.

“Yes, very nearly, Mr. Fortescue.—Why?” repeated Aureole to Letty, struggling in a chaste attempt to don her red serge white-anchored costume, before letting slip the rest of her garments.

“Because ... but you won’t tell? he doesn’t know I’ve guessed.”

Aureole smiled loftily. “Go on. I don’t tell things. But I’m interested. He’s a curious type.”

“It’s a Test,” whispered Letty, in a hopeless tangle of on and off, scarlet knickers and lawn camisole, and hair in light brown clouds over her shoulders.

“Test? Of your father, you mean?” and Aureole knit her brows.

“No. Of me. You see, he was much richer than us, and I suppose he got it into his head that I loved him for his money and not for himself. So he’s given it all up. When he thinks he has proved me enough, when he sees it makes no difference, he’ll take it back again.”

Letty stood upright now, fully robed for her plunge; and before the speckled little square of looking-glass which hung on the wall, tried to tie her hair into a red and white spotted handkerchief. “When he has proved me enough,” she whispered to her glowing reflection.

Aureole clasped her hands round one shapely knee, and pondered the matter:

“It’s romantic, of course. Ultra-romantic for this century. But then he’s a Renaissance type. Denys l’Auxerrois—have you read Pater? And ... yes, it suits him. I believe you’re right. You have rather a wonderful instinct about matters concerning him, haven’t you? wonderfully simple and direct ... piercing through complexities to the crystalline heart. Now I, I—”

“Aure-ole! Aure-ole! the tide will be too high unless you hurry up. And there are two frozen corpses on your doorstep.” Thus Ethel Wynne, compassionating the shivering spectres of Fortescue and Mowbray.

Aureole, who just had settled into her favourite attitude for lengthy discussion of her peculiar temperament: prone on her back, hands clasped behind her head, scrambled now to her feet, rather annoyed at the interruption.

“It’s their own faults. The arrangement was for the men to bathe directly after breakfast. Come along!” she held out her hand to Letty, and they ran together down the beach.

Sir James and Lady Merridik drove up in a cab that evening, at the hour when the miscellaneous members of the household were gathered in the hall before dinner. A second cab, piled high with luggage, followed up the drive a moment later; Mr. and Mrs. Durward-Jones, their two children, dog, and governess, had weeks ago booked the very first-floor front double bedroom into which Mowbray and the cabman were now lugging Lady Merridik’s multitudinous boxes. Mrs. Durward-Jones meant to have that room; so did Lady Merridik. Lady Merridik was shrill and flippant; Mrs. Durward-Jones deep-toned and abusive. The stairway, congested by boxes, formed the main scene of battle. The clamour was deafening, aided by the performance of Fritz, the waiter, upon the gong, and the barks of the Durward-Jones dog. Finally, both ladies turned to Aureole, demanding what she intended to do in the matter. Glancing wildly about her for a means of escape, Aureole flung herself upon the chest of an apparition whose face was suddenly illumined by the lantern swinging in the porch.

—“Oh, please, please, Mr. Heron, take me away!”

Stuart took her to the theatre, immediately, and without paying the slightest heed to the raging debate. The next morning at breakfast, Lady Merridik appeared, blandly smiling. There was no sign of the Durward-Jones party.

“Always best to let these things adjust themselves by natural means,” remarked Stuart to Aureole.

“Natural means?”

“Survival of the fittest. Now look here, Mrs. Strachey, what about letting me treat the whole Menagerie in the same fashion; sling out all the harpies and adventurers, square the landlord—till how long have you rented the Farme? End of October?—and set detectives on Oliver’s track to bring him home to Chelsea to look after you.”

Aureole shook her head. “It would be no good slinging everyone out; there are dozens more coming in. And they’d all bring lawsuits and breach-of-promise acts against me, because I did let them the rooms.”

“Then I’ll hunt round for a competent manageress, instal her with a salary, and you can leave whenever you like.”

“Do you think I’d touch your money?” she flashed at him proudly.

“But——”

“Besides, I won’t have a horrid prying person here, who will see what a mess everything is in; see that I’ve failed....”

Stuart walked about the empty breakfast-room, hands in his pockets, pondering deeply. Conscience had driven him to reconnoitre, and now the same conscience informed him very clearly that he could not allow his friend’s wife to continue her present burlesque of management, unprotected, accumulating enormous debts. One owed something to one’s pals; Stuart hid a rather special affection for the imperturbable Nigger Strachey. But if Aureole refused to smash the establishment, and refused to have a manageress,—well then, what was he to do?

—“Stay here, and control matters yourself,” suggested Aureole, divining and answering his thoughts. With a mischievous glint beneath her heavy eyelids, she added, “I don’t mind you knowing the worst; after all—you’re responsible!”

And as it really seemed the only solution to the problem, Stuart consented.

Speculation ran riot as to the identity of the mysterious stranger. Later in the day, Aureole introduced him as: “My husband’s friend” without further explanation. The husband’s friend became a scowling and unpopular permanency. He marvelled how he came thus to be saddled with the white elephant of Aureole’s folly; nevertheless, there seemed no way of shaking off the boarding establishment till the 31st of October, or till Oliver’s return. He at once wrote to Oliver, care of the latter’s bank, trusting that there the address would have been forwarded.

Aureole he alternately bullied and consoled, quite in the spirit of a working partner; and she, relying peacefully on his competence, forgave him for missing this excellent opportunity of being in love with her. Almost forgave him.

A couple of rigid old maids disbelieved the “husband’s friend” story, and left at once. Stuart found this annoying. Neither did he like it when the fussy little man from Shropshire pointed out items on his bill incorrectly charged to him: “I do not have a bath every morning, Mr.—ah—Heron.”

Stuart went in search of Aureole. “How many baths has Mr. Kibble had this week?”

“How should I know?” virtuously indignant. “Ask his wife.”

“We’ve put him down six, but he says he has only had one. He must have had more. How does one control these things?”

“Oh, knock off the extra half-crown from the bill, and chance it!” laughed Aureole.

Stuart returned to his fuming interlocutor: “We have decided to believe in your integrity rather than in your cleanliness,” he said suavely, counting out Mr. Kibble’s change. Mr. Kibble left immediately, with his wife and child.

Least of all Stuart liked it when it devolved upon him to give Vyvyan the boot.

“Vyvyan” had booked his room since a considerable time, though letters perpetually postponed the day of his arrival. Somehow or other, his unknown personality had captured the imagination of the female portion of the boarding-house. They gathered from his correspondence with Aureole, that he was comparatively young, unwedded, owned a motor-car, and was at present travelling on the Continent. An attractive list of hints from which to draw deductions. Archie Mowbray and Bertie Fortescue began already to suffer from spasms of jealousy, when Aureole, who since the advent of Stuart was not allowed any more to take her breakfast in bed, read aloud a telegram to say “Vyvyan” might that afternoon be expected.

“At last we shall have a young man in the house,” quoth Ethel Wynne; which was cruel to Mowbray, who loved her; and to eighteen-year-old Bertie. Sebastian could not of course be counted, being manifestly Letty’s property. And Stuart wore a pencil behind his ear, by way of protection, to intimate that he was to be viewed in a business capacity only.

Bertie’s sister entered the breakfast-room, and enquired of everybody how they had slept, and asked everybody with a cold if their cold was better, and passed the salt, and placed herself carefully between her brother and the Ostend-Plage Girl, whom she suspected of sirenic intentions. The Ostend-Plage Girl, who never passed salt, and who wore a soiled creation of white serge and light blue pom-poms, promptly upset the equilibrium of Bertie’s sister, by announcing: “I quite intend to fall in love with Vyvyan, don’t you, Aureole?”

“I believe he is going to mean something,” murmured Aureole.

Stuart grunted.

“What! no mackerel left again?” from the Disagreeable Female, whose name nobody ever seemed to know.

Letty offered hers: “I haven’t touched it yet; do, please, take it. I’m not hungry.” And Mrs. Percival looked archly at Sebastian: “Not hungry? dear me! now I wonder why that is!”

Mrs. Johnson exchanged significant glances with her husband. She had only been able to keep him from an open row with Sebastian, by frequent allusions to Letty’s loss of appetite:—“and what it would be like if you forbade her to see him, Matthew——” “So tactful of the fellow to come and plant himself under the same roof, directly after I’ve told him not to call so often, isn’t it?” but he restrained his smouldering wrath, nevertheless. Letty was his pet, and he hated to see her leaving her food; good food, that he had paid for.

The talk veered round again to Vyvyan; and the Cabbage-rose skittishly proposed making him an apple-pie bed: “We always used to have no end of that sort of fun when I stayed at Lyn House—Lord Burchester’s place, that is.” She broke off her reminiscences to throw the Earwig a solicitous: “Johnny, dearest, is no one looking after you?”

The Earwig mumbled, and spilt the milk. He was a very ancient and decrepit Earwig. And Ethel Wynne, who sat beside him, sprang up with an unnecessarily quick: “Oh, am I in your place? So sorry. Do come here and look after your husband yourself!”

The Ostend-Plage Girl broke into smothered giggles.

“My egg isn’t fresh,” said the Disagreeable Female. And looked relentlessly at Stuart; who afterwards privately relieved his feelings to Sebastian, by a prolonged outburst on the evils of boarding establishments:

“I tell you what, Levi,—it’s a most villainous contrivance of civilization, to pack stray people together under one roof, as you would cats into a home; each little group at table with their separate wine or beer or Apollinaris, not passing the bottle in good fellowship, but sticking labels on it, for its safer preservation. Chance companions are the finest to be had, on the road or at the inn, that I maintain. But this compulsory herding, this miserly meaningless thin-blooded——How’s the book getting on?”

“Nearly half-way through.”

“Rather quick work, isn’t it?”

“I must pelt ahead with it while I’m in the mood. I won’t show it to you till it’s complete, though.”

“Right!” Stuart was glad of the reprieve.

“He’s come!” announced Ethel Wynne, that afternoon. She had sighted a motor-car outside the house. A quiver of excitement thrilled the group gathered for tea under the lime trees, as Aureole walked away to welcome Vyvyan, on the threshold of the hall.

Vyvyan did not at once enter. He had first to seek a room near by for his cousin-once-removed. That is, unless Mrs. Strachey could manage.... No? Ah, well, doubtless they would find something. She had been so ill, the cousin, and had come down to Bournemouth for some fresh air. Mrs. Strachey would excuse him for an hour?... He appeared at dinner, a florid person, with an ingratiating smile under his auburn moustaches, and a debonair manner with the ladies. He was sure he would enjoy his stay at the Farme; had been looking forward to it immensely. A charming fellow; even Bertie’s sister succumbed to his fascinations. But Aureole was curiously frigid. After dinner, Vyvyan ran round to see if his cousin-once-removed were all right; she had been so ill! He was seen taking her for a little walk along the esplanade.

The same evening, Aureole had an earnest confabulation with her partner.

“We can’t have that sort of thing in the house,” with the demure severity of a Quakeress.

“Hang it all! what am I to say to him?”

“Just tell him to go. And to remove his cousin—for the second time.”

“It’s deuced awkward,” growled Stuart.

“Not from one man to another. He’ll understand.”

Then Stuart exploded his wrath: “Comes of comic advertisement! The fellow naturally thought ... Bohemian lines! you see where they lead to!”

Aureole walked away, with her head in the air.

Vyvyan received his congé with protestations of astonishment and regret at having unwittingly offended Mrs. Strachey. His manner at lunch the next day, was tinged with gentle reproach. Aureole wore an apron, and her rebellious hair was gathered into a bun, by way of signifying that her Bohemianism had limits. An air of strain hung over the meal. By the evening, Vyvyan the debonair, Vyvyan, the fairy prince so eagerly awaited, Vyvyan had gone. So had his cousin—twice removed.

CHAPTER IV
IL TROVATORE

Aureole was beset by a fear that her ejection of Vyvyan had somewhat impaired her claims to Bohemianism, as set forth by the advertisement. Wherefore it was one evening that she suddenly bethought herself to invite the ‘Troubadours’ to the Farme.

The Troubadours were a singing quartette who performed thrice weekly in the Pavilion Gardens. Their national costume consisted of a darkly flung cloak, a slouched hat, and a mask; occasionally the cloak was abandoned, showing beneath it a garb of gay-hued tatters: further atmosphere was imparted by a beribboned guitar. Therefore some slight confusion existed as to whether the Troubadours were intended to be grandees of Spain, or else those light-hearted medieval wanderers trolling their ballads of praise to the Kings of France—who usually retaliated by hanging the ballad-monger. Either way, the effect was picturesque enough, on the improvised wooden platform, lit by the few flickering footlights, and encircled by a dark band of trees. The tenor of the quartette possessed a really melodious voice; his songs were mostly of the Arab-Gipsy variety; type that perpetually invite a lady to come forthwith and be wooed in some spot where she is not, preferably a gondola, a caravan or a desert. He presented rather a fine romantic figure, singing thus, head flung back, hazel-green eyes half-closed, voice languorous with passion.

“That man has suffered,” whispered Aureole to Archie Mowbray. Who made reply: “Oh, I dunno. Think he’s a gentleman, then?”

“It’s just possible to suffer without being a gentleman,” with fine scorn. To which Archie protested uneasily: “Oh, I dunno.”

The party from the Farme numbered six: Letty, the Cabbage-rose, Ethel Wynne, and little Verney being also present. Sebastian had retired to find inspiration in the attic, directly after dinner, as was now his wont; he had told Letty he was engaged on the production of a masterpiece of fiction; and she, rejoicing in his genius, had bidden him recite the words by which the book was to be dedicated to her,—which assumption produced an awkward silence.

“There’s plenty of time for that,” he had said at last, feebly. “It may never be published, you know.”

But of course it would be published, cried Letty; and without complaint sacrificed her evenings with him. Though it would have been bliss to have had him here, beside her, in the warm darkness.

A final duet was warbled from the stage, while the tenor of the troupe went among the dim blur of faces in the audience, holding a silver tray, and showering jests and gallantries in return for the shillings that clattered thereon. This necessary part of the performance always sent hot waves of shame surging up Aureole’s neck, for the fancied anguish of soul the man underwent during his pilgrimage of degradation. The jokes were doubtless a poor and threadbare garment to cover naked pride,—Aureole shut her eyes tightly, with the result that her shilling dropped beside the tray and onto the parched grass. The man paused to grope for it, exchanging the while grave witticisms with the donor. Bertram Kyndersley knew no such writhings as Aureole attributed unto him; being indeed mainly concerned with the amount of the evening’s takings, in his capacity of treasurer to the Troubadours.

“Under my feet, perhaps,” remarked Aureole; and Bertram made swift reply: “Impossible, Lady Auburn-hair; they could hardly cover the coin; it would peep out at the edges.”

Whereupon Aureole became extremely friendly with this particular Troubadour, and laughingly bade him serenade her window at dawn, since he could utter such fair impromptus.

“Alas and alack! and in all Hampshire how am I to find my lady’s window?”

“If I let fall that secret, will you let fall your mask?” Aureole looked meaningly at the strip of black velvet which concealed the upper portion of his face.

“Give me but a chance!” And with that the Troubadour passed on, between the benches, and back to the platform.

Aureole began to scribble feverishly on the back of her programme, which she then folded into a note.

“Take this round to the tenor of the quartette,” she commanded little Verney; “hurry up, or they’ll be gone,” for the spectators were already beginning to stir and disperse in the darkness, and the flaming footlights had one by one been extinguished. Verney obediently went. The missive ran as follows:

“Will you not stay your caravan an hour or two, and with your companions, give me the pleasure of your company this evening at my house by the pine trees? Sans cérémonie—for are we not fellow-gipsies on the highway of Art?

“Lady Auburn-hair.

“P.S—Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.”

Tim Jones, Ferdinand Wagge, Billy Dawson, and Bertram Kyndersley, reading this effusion behind their shabby drapery of green baize which did duty for a curtain, were mightily amused at the fellow-gipsies on the highway of Art; and in the hope that the house by the pine trees might at least be productive of decent whisky and cigars, fervidly accepted the invitation.

“S’pose the postscript is her telegraphic address?” hazarded Billy Dawson, knitting his brows. “More like the ’phone number,” from Ferdinand Wagge.

Meanwhile, Aureole, sparkling with the double consciousness of having vindicated her Bohemianism, and at the same time acted in a way which would thoroughly annoy Stuart, was being championed by Letty and the Cabbage-rose, against the disapproval of Archie Mowbray, whose attitude was so consistently characteristic of the British subaltern, as to be almost untrue to life.

“It doesn’t do, y’know. Really, Mrs. Strachey, it’s deuced cheek of me to interfere, but to mix privately with those singing chaps——”

“They’re as good as we are,” flashed Letty. And the Cabbage-rose interpolated: “Of course they are, delightful fellows! It was a splendid idea to invite them; so unconventional; and I do so love their dear little peepy masks. Do, Mr. Verney, go round again and beg them not to change their costumes.”

The good-natured hunchback went, chuckling to himself. On the way home—a taxi and Verney’s motor-car proving sufficient to accommodate their own party in mixed proportion with the four Troubadours—Aureole had time to hope Stuart would be in bed. He was; and so were all the remaining boarders, save Bertie and the Ostend-Plage Girl, who were discovered in the kitchen, drinking champagne and eating dressed crab. This inspired Aureole with a fresh idea:

“Ye must spread your own feast,” she cried, medievally. “Ransack cellars, larders and pantry, and bring forth all ye find. Ho, revellers, to the groaning board!—We’ll make a midnight picnic of it.”

Thereafter, a helter-skelter of laughter and rummaging, and clatter of forks on the flagged floor, and little shrieks of delight from the Cabbage-rose, and an occasional agonized: sh-sh-sh, from Aureole, fearing to wake the more respectable portion of her household; dreading the sudden appearance of Stuart, exquisite in pyjamas and monocle, his face screwed into an expression of formidable politeness; and his tone holding all there was of Archie Mowbray’s insular disapproval, and, in addition, a blend of “my husband’s friend,” a sound man in diamonds, and the Balliol undergraduate,—all of which traits had developed to the entire exclusion of pirate and leprechaun, since he had taken over management of the Farme.

Ferdinand Wagge went solemnly to and fro from the cellar, each time a pair of bottles under his arm. Tim Jones and Ethel Wynne collaborated over the mixing of the mayonnaise salad. And Letty, finding a bowl of cream, suddenly suggested a dish of fruit from the kitchen-garden.

“Oh, splendid! there are dozens of late raspberries, I saw them this morning. Dark? Never mind; I’ll take my own light,” and laughing at the absurdity of the notion, Aureole snatched a candle, and stepped out into the garden, calling on someone to follow with a plate.

The night was sultry and moonless, as the Troubadour pursued the tremulous flicker of light across the shadowy lawn, and through an archway cut into the wall. Beyond lay an almost solid blackness; only the passage of the candle to reveal on either side pale dangling shapes of apple and pear: the orchard; thence a twisting path that led round the conservatories to the fruit-garden. He paused, opened a glass door ... the answering gush of perfume crept into his veins, heavy as a bee that sways in a foxglove. He had lost sight of the woman’s figure in its gleaming sheath of satin—no, there the prick of candle light, and there Aureole, tempting enough as she swept the flame up and down the line of raspberry canes; hair tumbled duskily against her shining pallor of neck, eyes brilliant with the search; body swaying towards her companion each time she pattered the ripe crimson berries on to the plate.

“Can’t you come nearer? I’ve just dropped two beauties,” reproachfully.

The Troubadour never resisted temptation. He pressed forward between the bushes; slipped an arm round her, murmured a caressing word, had kissed her full on the lips before she was even aware of his movements. With realization, she repelled the man swiftly. Bertram was startled—let her go, a move very much against his principles. The raspberries lay spilt on the earth between them. Scorning to run, she walked by his side, without speaking, back to the house. He was amused, yet slightly indignant, at this unwonted response to his gallantries: “After all, it isn’t as if she were still in her teens!”—and Billy Dawson, observant beggar, would notice the empty plate, and ask sly questions. Aureole, her heart thudding like a drum, and the blood raging at her lips where he had touched them, was wondering how much it all meant to him? What would be the outcome? Furiously angry, all of a sudden, with Oliver, for not being at hand to protect her from this type of outrage; furiously angry at the loss of dignity implied by the bruised stung sensation on her mouth,—mouth which nevertheless would persist in curving dangerously, provocatively, at the corners. ... She laughed aloud, laughed contempt for her husband, defiance at her ‘husband’s friend,’ laughed a welcome to the temperament which had lain too long between lavender.

Encouraged, Bertram kissed her again, quickly, before they quitted the shadows of the orchard and Aureole struck him, for his insolence, but mostly because she wanted to see the hurt pride blaze in his Spanish eyes, and because she hoped he would try and strangle her for the blow. She was avid of sensations this night.

“Oh Lord!” muttered Bertram, rather disconcerted. Then, in tender reproach: “You spill my shillings, Lady Auburn-hair, and you spill the raspberries, and now you spill my blood, which isn’t redder than they—I mean, less red....”

They re-entered the lit hall; Aureole glanced furtively at his mouth, to see if his accusations were justified: an infinitesimal dot of scarlet had welled on the lower lip. But it was she, not he, who had tasted blood....

The next meeting between Aureole and Bertram happened four days later, hot noontide, in one of the declivities of the cliff that sloped so gently to the sea. Bertram did not hesitate an instant at repeating his offence. Sooth to say, he had almost forgotten it was a repetition; had certainly forgotten the reception which had met his previous overtures. He came to Aureole as natural and fresh in gallantry as though she were his first love for the first time seen. That this state of mind could be at all possible, never occurred to the woman, who herself forever playing with emotion, yet most remarkably gave credit to the other party for a fierce, lasting, and genuine passion. Assuming that the man’s interim had been spent in brooding over his dismissal, then what excellent courage, what doggedness of persistence, nay, what true measure of desire he showed in thus returning undaunted to the charge.... Aureole rebelled—continued to rebel—yielded. The Troubadour was surprised by her acquiescence, into fervour keener than he usually displayed in his passing errantry of light love. They met again. And again. Her vanity had been damaged by Stuart’s refusal to ‘come and play.’ If he had responded ever so slightly, ever so harmlessly, instead of viewing her so determinedly in the light of “rather a little fool, but Nigger’s wife, so I s’pose I must do my best for her,”—who knows, she might have kept out of mischief elsewhere; but he had lashed her by his rigid imperturbability to a very demon of defiance. The origin of her severance from Oliver, her initiative in the matter, was for Aureole completely lost in the mists of long-agone; she genuinely viewed herself as a deserted wife, forlorn, neglected, forgotten, her youth wasting to middle-age.... And when a cloaked man, a masked man, comes along, trolling gaily his ballads of love, is one to let him pass for the sake of Oliver, forsooth? or because one is frightened of Stuart Heron?

—“She called you Pierrot, and immediately you were Pierrot!” thus had remarked Bertram’s daughter, Peter, on a certain occasion when he had been endeavouring to explain to her the incident of one Chavvy. Equally, she might now have paraphrased the situation; “She saw you a Troubadour, and immediately you were a Troubadour!” Bertram could no more help responding to suggestion, than mercury to the weather. And he troubadoured most excellently; liked the rôle, with its flavour of ripening vineyards, and southern roads white in the sunshine; snatched intrigues of the court, alternating with the careless give-and-take of wayside kisses. It was picturesque, yet virile; and altogether more suited to his years and girth than had been Pierrot. He basked in Aureole’s admiration; her abstinence from awkward questioning was a divine trait in womankind; she was radiantly attractive in this, her wilful leap towards the sun. Bertram loved her; he was quite sure he did.

And she would not have been Aureole had she not attached all importance to the trappings of her romance: the delicious sense of secrecy and guilt; the elaborate excuses enabling her to retire early to her room; thence to slip out through the low side window, on to the cliff, to the belt of pine trees amidst whose lean and swaying shadows the Troubadour would be waiting to keep tryst, those nights when no performance took place at the Pavilion Gardens. Yet more cunning machinations were required to induce some of the boarding-house party to attend the concerts of the quartette, that she might sit there, among the vague people who had not been held in his arms; and hear him sing for her—yes, for her—his ballads of the tavern and the caravan and the desert.

Once indeed, shattering her sense of his eternal presence, he warbled gaily, as they paced the dark cliff edge:

“Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and south,
But I, fulfilled of my heart’s desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth,
Feed the heart of the night with fire!”

And she cried disappointedly:

“You mean, when summer is over, you will go to your South?”

(South, where all Troubadours live!)

And he, unheeding that Thatch Lane lay on the London and North-Western Railway, gave careless acquiescence. “I never stop long in any one place. We are birds of passage, Lady Auburn-hair, and when summer is over we will sing our songs in other lands.”

We? Our?—so what had been to her a thrilling pastime, he, deluded Troubadour, had actually meant? He had been building dreams of continuing their golden idyll in other lands? Aureole replied, in curiously vibrant tones:

“Once—I struck you—for suggesting—less than that.”

Bertram, still humming, could not remember what was the direful suggestion he had just inadvertently let fall; but supposing it to have been for a caress, as were usually his demands, he merely stated with a mirthless laugh—not caring to risk again the sting of Aureole’s little fingers:

“Then I must continue to exist without,—somehow,” added in a lower tone of pain.

Aureole had since three years been striving to teach Oliver this language, which came so naturally to the man beside her. To “work up a scene” with her husband had held as much—or as little—intoxication, as going to a ball, in a blouse and skirt, at eleven o’clock of a November morning. Aureole had an insatiable greed for ‘powerful’ scenes; she took dalliance seriously, inasmuch as she always saw herself as a coquette with a heart of stone, scratching at hearts of flesh to see how they bled. “I’m a beast!” she that night adjured her image in the looking-glass—since without a looking-glass impassioned monologues sound never very convincing. “Oh, I am a beast. I don’t care a damn for him, and he thinks I do care; he thinks I’m—coming.” During the month of September, the vision of her Troubadour, a lonely swallow to the South, became almost too poignant to be born.

Summer was dropping her days as faintly and imperceptibly as the first faintly yellowing leaves from the trees. A sense of depression, of the closing-down of the year, drifted over the Farme. Some of the visitors were leaving; as entities they did not matter; but as a symbol of evanescence, their departure affected Aureole with profound melancholy. The Troubadour Quartette sang no more of an evening in the Pavilion Gardens. Bertram rented a room in the town, and lingered on; but at any moment, she felt, the call of the South might peal too clearly for him; and then, with or without her, he too would depart.

With or without her.

Climax was heralded by poisoned fish....

Stuart went nearly every day now to his business in High Holborn, returning to Bournemouth in time for dinner in the evening. On a certain Friday, he was met in the hall by the Cabbage-rose, who informed him in sprightly tones:

“We shall be tête-à-tête for dinner to-night, Mr. Heron.”

On the grounds that some things are too bad to be true, Stuart did not at once grasp the prospect:

“Where’s everybody, then?”

“All ill!” announced the Cabbage-rose triumphantly; and some of her evening-dress fell off.

“All?”

“My poor Johnny has been terribly bad, and so has Mrs. Percival. And, if you listen, you will hear Sir James groaning. There was mackerel for breakfast this morning, and it can’t have been quite good. I took a boiled egg, and you, of course, had gone off to town before the fish came, so you see we are sole survivors!” she adjusted a slippery shoulder-strap, and trilled with laughter at the compromising situation.—Then her face fell, as she spied the Disagreeable Female marching down the stairs.

“I’m better. Not well, but better. I’ve had no food and no attention all day, so I trust there’s a substantial dinner. Good evening, Mr. Heron; I wish to complain of the fish we had for breakfast to-day. We’ve all been seriously indisposed. One has to eat mackerel or nothing, because there was only one egg, and naturally we couldn’t all have that,” and here she glared at the Cabbage-rose. “I believe I am voicing the dissatisfaction of all the visitors here, Mr. Heron, when I say that I consider it your duty to be at home during the day to control these matters.—Ah! there is the gong, thank goodness. Even if you are running a second boarding establishment in London, it can hardly warrant neglect of us. Please pass the potatoes. I am bound to say that matters were improved during the fortnight you had entire control.”

Stuart bowed: “You overwhelm me.”

“Mustard, please. And as for Mrs. Strachey, I cannot say she ever struck me as a very competent person; but since she spends her days running about with that very disreputable beach-performer—in my time they blacked their faces, so that one might know they weren’t gentlemen,—she has let everything go to rack and ruin.”

“Oh, but he’s hardly what you’d call a nigger,” put in the Cabbage-rose. “He has one of those nice olive complexions, you know; and he has sung before all the crowned heads of Europe. Certainly, dear Mrs. Strachey is making herself rather conspicuous——”

But the Disagreeable Female continued stonily: “I am purposely calling your attention to the scandal, Mr. Heron, as if she is also deceiving you, who pass yourself off as her husband’s friend——”

“Pardon me, I am her husband’s friend. And both he and I have implicit confidence in Mrs. Strachey’s choice of acquaintances; so that there’s no need at all for scandal. If you’ve any more complaints to make about the food, I shall be pleased to listen.”

The Disagreeable Female, quelled for the moment, merely suggested that Stuart should bring two dozen eggs every day from London, as they seemed to be scarce in Bournemouth “And not fresh. We all like eggs,” and again her eye roamed towards the Cabbage-rose.

But in spite of his championship of Aureole, Stuart’s principles of morality were severely outraged by this account of her flirtation. Defiance of the standing social and domestic code, was in his eyes only permissible to what he termed free-lance adventurers, like himself, Peter, or Sebastian. But Aureole was a wife; and, moreover, his pal’s wife. Running about all day with—an organ-grinder, was it? It would not be too much to state that Heron of Balliol, Heron of Heron & Carr, was genuinely shocked.—“It isn’t done!” Besides which, he had obstinately determined that Aureole should eventually be handed over, as far as possible undamaged, to her husband. He had written several letters to Oliver, at the latter’s bank and office, hoping that either of these would receive an address to which to forward correspondence. Pending his arrival, Aureole must be kept spotless as snow. Very worried at the new development in his responsibilities, Stuart tackled her the following evening:

“How are the invalids? Anybody dead?”

“They’re all up, except Mr. Johnson. He had it worst. Stuart, will I have to pay the doctor for all of them? The old cat says I’m liable.” The old cat was the Disagreeable Female.

“Indeed you are. Why don’t you examine fish when it comes in?”

“I don’t care for the smell. I ... just don’t care for it. And I was out.”

“Where?”

Aureole smiled; a slow mutinous smile. “You grow more like Oliver every day.”

“I hope so,” quoth Stuart virtuously; “he’s a better man than I am. Wouldn’t it be as well to see in future that your guests aren’t poisoned as well as starved?”

“Dear man, it would bore me.”

He strove to be moderate: “Quite so. But you’ve only five weeks still to run here, and confound it, Aureole! surely it’s more fun to get through a stodgy job decently and with credit, than just bungle it. Even if you hate it, it’s more fun.”

“Our ideas of fun differ,” she laughed, impenitent. And then Stuart realized with horror that she was looking remarkably pretty. He knew enough of neurotic women to be assured that they did not sparkle and bloom unless danger was imminent. He did not know enough of them to refrain from making a mistake in his next remark:

“I’ve reason to believe your husband will be here shortly. He won’t be over-pleased to fork out, among other things, for thirteen doctor’s bills on attending thirteen bilious attacks.”

“Damn doctors!” she stamped her foot viciously. “Damn bilious attacks and fish and boarding-houses and husbands and ... and you....” She fled to Bertram, awaiting her among the pines. A soft drizzling moisture filled the air. In the garden she passed Sebastian and Letty, whose mission it seemed to leave themselves lying about to act as goads in critical moments.—“Damn lovers....”

—“Lady Auburn-hair, this is almost our good-bye. In a very few days——”

“You must go? Is that it?” the chill in the air crept into her very soul.

“Not that I must go, but that I must not stay,” parried Bertram, skilfully implying unutterable things. Sooth to say, he was weary of troubadouring.

South ... South ... he on his lonely voyage to the sun; and she remaining to examine fish at the door ... colder drearier days ... Oliver coming back to scold her ... other lovers, two and two and two ... and romance, masked and cloaked, abandoning her for ever?...

“Non ti scordar di me!” he throbbed forth suddenly, in his passionate tenor. “Non ti scordar di me!”

And Aureole replied: “Ask me again, Troubadour, as you asked me once ... and perhaps—perhaps I will come with you.”

After her departure, Bertram still sat on the damp bench beneath the trees, gazing helplessly before him. He found himself pledged, he knew not how, and, ten days hence, he knew not why, to a journey South, he knew not where. He believed he had been guilty of describing, in vivid spirited narrative, some such adventure across the water; because—deuce take it! with the reputation of a troubadour, a traveller, a pedlar of songs, a lover of fair women, a comrade of lords and beggars alike, he could hardly leave acquiescence at a tame: “Yes. Let’s. How jolly,” when she proposed their hazardous plunge together into the unknown. Well, he had still, as result of a successful summer tour, some thirty odd pounds in his pocket, and a store of faithful attachment in his heart. As to their ultimate destiny, when love and the thirty pounds were exhausted,—that was a problem too deep for a mazed troubadour, sitting disconsolately beneath a dripping pine tree. Floating in the vague backwaters of his mind was the supposition that, at worst, he could always take Aureole to Miss Esther Worthing—his sister-in-law—and leave her there. After all, Esther had made Chavvy very welcome. Meanwhile ... Bertram’s inflammable heart had certainly landed him in some awkward situations of late; he didn’t know what women were coming to, when one willy-nilly married you, and another ran away with you! He wondered if it would ever be his lot to meet with a nice modest girl, content with a few kisses and endearments; a girl like his daughter Peter!

—“Lord! I wonder what Peter would say to this mess. When did I promise? What did I ask? I’m hanged if I can remember....”

Stuart came to the conclusion that it was no good plunging into this affair before it had reached its zenith. Just at present there was nothing to get at. It was best as rapidly as possible to hasten the ultimate climax, which he strongly believed would be a romantic elopement, and then, somehow, smash it!

So, in furtherance of these plans, he came to Aureole; and meekly, as though in atonement for his former surliness, placed his sailing-yacht at the disposal of herself and her visitors.

“I’ve brought it over from the Haven, and it’s lying anchored at the foot of the Chine. If at any time you care to use it, old Dan Truefitt will act skipper; he’s perfectly trustworthy; and he has my orders.”

It struck Aureole how delightfully ironical it would be to employ Stuart’s boat—just Stuart’s boat—for the means of transport, when she and Bertram escaped from the old to the new. At present, her chiefest joy in the prospect of the elopement, was in contemplating Stuart’s reception of the tidings. And if the latter should come to him flavoured by the final audacity of his property as the vehicle of sin——!

“Thank you, Stuart,” demurely; “it’s very thoughtful of you; and it’s so difficult, now that the real summer weather is over, to keep everyone amused. We play coon-can, of course. But there’s something more virile about sailing, isn’t there?”

“Much more virile,” he agreed. And wondered if his bait had been swallowed. At all events, he must assume it had. He calculated that the pair would not make their flight by day, both for practical reasons of concealment, and from a sense of atmosphere. On the other hand, Aureole would scarcely wait for the arrival of her ‘gaoler’ from town, by the 7.40 train every evening. Between six and seven, then, the twilight hour, he fixed as the time when two cloaked figures might be expected at the foot of the Chine, where the boat lay at anchor. At this spot, therefore, in the shadow of the cliff, Stuart waited secretly, patiently, every evening between six and seven o’clock. Baldwin demanded frequently why he left the office so early; and confided to Arthur Heron that he believed Stuart to be mixed up in “some affair with a woman.”

—“Would you advise me to move in the matter?”

“No,” replied Uncle Arthur, always inclined to be taciturn.

“Not find out who she is? and call on the female? and attempt to square her?”

“No.”

“Well then, shall I tackle Stuart? Remind him what he owes to the name? Set forth, from experience, how helpless a young fellow can be in the hands of a clever adventuress? Tell him——”

This time the other man answered at greater length: “My God, no.”

And Baldwin left it at that.

“I should say it would be very soon now,” reflected Stuart, on the ninth day of waiting. This he deduced from Aureole’s demeanour; she being quite incapable of restraining herself from inscrutable smiles, eyes dream-laden, spurts of brilliantly hectic conversation, bouts of feverish consideration for others, speech and comment pregnant with triple meanings, and other indications of a swiftly approaching crisis; all of which Stuart found extremely useful. He had no notion of exactly how he was to effect the débâcle, but trusted for his inspiration to that solemn moment when, about to embark, the guilty couple should hear the shuffle of footsteps in the sand, and, turning, gaze into his accusing eyes.... “Is this prophetic sight, or did I ever read about it?” mused Stuart.

He paid Aureole the compliment of not for a moment believing that she was taking her fun all this while in a squalid furtive fashion, attempting to blend outward respectability with hidden romance. No; decidedly she had the courage of her emotional caprices; this had been proved by her prompt flight from Norfolk, directly she had convinced herself that it was necessary for her soul’s development and for the stimulation of Oliver’s after-marriage courtship.—“She’ll burn her boats right enough—little fool!” Stuart muttered; “and I hope it will be to-night.” He was beginning to find his shadowy watches both wearisome and chilly.

“But, sweetheart, I can’t sail a yacht,” cried the Troubadour in despair, when Aureole unfolded her latest scheme.

“You can row, then; and we’ll reef the sails—tie them up in a bundle. It’s a pity ... but yet ... plash of oars on the calm still water....”

Bertram hoped it would indeed be calm still water. He did not care to disturb her imagination by mere facts,—but he had no liking for the sea. He asked if he were expected to row all the way to France, to Provence, golden land of minstrelsy, which she had chosen as their first background for unending and virile scenes of love.

Aureole sighed. “It’s a pity,” she repeated. “However, we’ll row along the coast to Poole, and hire a man, a strange fierce-eyed man, to sail the boat across the Channel. And then, after landing us, he shall sail her back again”—and she added, in a vicious undertone,—“to Stuart Heron!”

To Stuart Heron, crouching far back in an indentation hollowed out of the cliff, the events of that night were swift and improbable as scenes reeled off the film. The white line of wave hissed and broke with exactly that sound; and the twilight had sucked the background of all colour save lifeless greys; clearly etched against the pale sky, rose the mainmast of the boat; beside it, the tall figure of a man stood immovable, wrapped in heavy folds of cloak, his face blurred by the deepening shadows. The white line of wave hissed and broke. Then, quite tiny at first, but gradually growing to life-size, a woman’s figure fled down the winding road of the Chine. The man stepped forward to meet her, held her for a moment silently in his arms, then drew her along the shore to the boat. They gesticulated with sharp little movements. Another figure stole out of hiding; crept towards the couple, whose backs were turned to him. His steps were noiseless on the sand. So that still no sound shattered the picture, save of the white line of wave that monotonously hissed and broke....

All this, Stuart watched with mingled amusement and interest. His was the stealthy shape which might have been a spy among conspirators, a Customs Officer amid smugglers, an Indian with a tomahawk, or the hero to the rescue.

—Then he spoke, casually:

“Going for a sail? Can I be of any use?”

Aureole did not shriek. She swayed slightly, recovered herself, looked at the intruder steadily, and said: “You ... beast!”

He smiled. “Oh, yes, I think the breeze is strong enough.” Then he turned to meet full-face the eyes of—Bertram Kyndersley. “You? the devil!”

Bertram betrayed no surprise at the sudden apparition. He was already a stricken man this night. Aureole’s wishes he had carried out in a dazed mazed sort of fashion, still not sure how he came to be involved in this medieval escapade. He had eloped before; but sensibly,—never like this. He was just aware that for one who had troubadoured not wisely but too well, there were no honourable means of withdrawal. Wondering whether for the rest of his life he would be doomed to carry a guitar, without its case, exposed to the mockery of all men; whether, once at sea, he would ever again be able to induce a demoniacal boat shorewards; whether his little store of gold would vanish in a single night, and leave him a beggar in Provence; wondering all this, he yet acquiesced to his fate; and even, when the string was pulled, said: “Lady Auburn-hair,” passionately, and added a few lyrical snatches expressive of his enamoured condition.

So that Stuart Heron, from whom he remembered once borrowing ten pounds in the garden of Bloemfontein, now took his place quite naturally as part of the scenery imported by Aureole; for what purpose Bertram knew not, and cared not; while things were happening to him, they might as well happen one way as another. And when Stuart, having unroped the boat, said: “Would you mind sitting to windward, Mr. Kyndersley?” then he obediently sat in the spot indicated, beside Aureole; and alternately watched Stuart in a deft manipulation of sheets, and the waves that split in a white lather of fury along the bows.

“Not the weather I’d have chosen to take you for a pleasure-trip,” remarked the skipper to his passengers, when he had finally got her running with dangerous speed before the wind. “However——” he shrugged his shoulders, implying it was their choice, not his.

Presently a silence fell upon Bertram, different from the numb passivity of his bearing hitherto; a more pregnant sort of silence, eloquent of a thousand words unspoken....

“Care to smoke?” enquired Stuart, with brutal courtesy. He made fast the sheet, and lit a cigarette. Then, ruthlessly, held the shielded flame for Bertram; that instant of light showed him—many things! All his previous indignation with Aureole was now shifted to Aureole’s partner in crime: Bertram Kyndersley—who was a father—Peter’s father—Why, the man must be an arrant scoundrel! Aureole, Stuart observed thankfully, dumb with scorn and hatred and apprehension, was yet being spared the worst; she was a good sailor. Hitherto she had bravely maintained the pretence that this was merely a delightful half-hour’s excursion on the water; but now she leant forward, and demanded tensely:

“What are you going to do with us?”

“Where were you bound for?” replied Stuart.

“Does that matter ... now?”—a guitar slid suddenly between them, fallen from a limp hand, and bounded against the rail.

Stuart said, eyes fixed upon the slant of the sail: “This man has a wife.” His speech was bound to be curt, for the increasing wind broke up every sentence as it fell from the salt-stiff lips, and tossed the words sportively hither and thither.

“This man has a wife.”

“It’s not true!” cried Aureole.

And Bertram muttered something about “man to man” and “code of honour”—

“Oh, honour!” Stuart did some malicious act which caused the bows to dip slowly into the trough of a wave, then suddenly rear, and roll over sideways with a lurch; “why should I be bound in honour to uphold you in your dishonourable acts, because you happen to be of my sex? Where’s your honour where Chavvy is concerned? little Chavvy, yours by right of England’s sacred laws, and by her unwavering love! It’s men like you,” continued Stuart Heron, “who wreck the sanctity of the home and violate the sanctity of the heart”—seeing that Bertram was perforce not attending to his eloquent harangue, he addressed himself to Aureole: “I’ve told you the truth, Aureole; and I can prove it to be the truth. You’ve come into his arms only over the body of another woman. Even now, she’s waiting patiently for his return; she—damn! the wind’s changed!” ... and only just in time the sheet was unlashed and pulled in.... “About ship!” he roared. Aureole obeyed instantly; but Bertram, not at home in nautical phraseology, had to be lugged forcibly from the drenched scuppers.

Stuart went on: “And, in the same way, brutally, remorselessly, he would desert you, when he got tired of the episode; and you would be stranded, an outcast from respectability, a derelict of life, without a single fighting weapon left; your looks raddled and faded”—he felt he might as well pile it on while he was about it,—“no money, no hope, your husband alienated, your faith shattered,—all for the sake of a man who should be labelled dangerous! for everyone with whom he comes in contact, to see and beware!”

A ray of moon pierced the drifting clouds, and showed him Aureole, huddled on the seat, a woebegone little figure, with wisps of soaked veil and hair blown flat on to her pinched white face; not a trace left of the flare and defiant glow with which she had started on her pursuit of love à la troubadour. And he became suddenly human, and very sorry for her, and rather embarrassed at his former rant and rhetoric.

“Never mind, dear; we’re tacking landwards now; and not a soul need ever know the facts of this. If anyone asks, you’ve been for a spin with a tomfool skipper who didn’t know dirty weather when he saw it. I expect Mr. Kyndersley can be trusted to keep his mouth shut,” with a scathing glance at the second of the romantic pair, who, at the moment, was emphatically not fulfilling these expectations.

They landed at the same spot where they had previously embarked. Stuart was eager to get Aureole home; he saw she was on the verge of a breakdown; and recognizing perhaps the new note of solicitude and pity in his tones, she seemed to cling to him. Without a word of farewell, they left Bertram standing on the shore; carrying in one hand a smashed guitar, with the other hand striving to gather closer about his shivering figure, the sodden folds of his cloak. It was not till his two companions were finally gulped by the darkness, as they passed up the winding road of the Chine, that his bewildered consciousness was slowly illumined by recognition of his freedom.

“Did you have any luggage?” Stuart demanded of Aureole, as he supported her up the drive of the Farme.

“No—yes; only a small bag; it’s still in the boat.”

“Then what——?”

“Bertram was going to buy me all I wanted.”

Stuart wondered if his ten-pound note, as well as his boat, was to have been pressed into service for the elopement.

They found the hall deserted; from behind the dining-room door could be heard sounds indicative of dinner progressing within.

“Excellent; nobody need see you; go up to your room, and put on something dry; and I’ll have hot soup sent up to you, and tell them to light you a fire.”

Aureole bestowed on him a wan smile of gratitude, and droopingly went upstairs. Stuart gave the necessary orders; then, not caring either to join the rest of the company, or change his wet clothes, remained fidgeting restlessly about the hall. Like Bertram, he was feeling “strangely disturbed in his innards,” though from different causes. Bertram ... how diabolically the man’s eyes, in spite of the puffiness beneath, had recalled Peter’s.... “Infernal old reprobate!” muttered Stuart; “one would think he might have a sense of decency, with a grown-up daughter.”

Peter ... Stuart swore softly as he meandered from staircase to window, from dining-room door to front door.

Presently the latter opened, and Oliver Strachey walked in.

“Hullo, Nigger!”

“Hullo. Where’s my wife?”

“In her room,” replied Stuart, with deep inner thankfulness that this should be so.

“Which room?” Oliver prepared to mount.

“First floor, second on the left. And go easy; she’s a bit nervous to-night; I took her for a sail, and it upset her.”

“So I should think; in this weather. What a crazy old slogger you are! Your first letter was forwarded to me ages ago; so, knowing Aureole was all right with you, I stopped on in New York, and did some business.”

“Um.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Second door on the left.”

Oliver ran up the stairs, two at a time, and vanished.

“Nice old mess-up it might have been, but for me,” reflected Stuart complacently. “And I wonder if that’s going to be something on my credit side of the ledger, at last. Who pulled ’em out?—little Tommy Stout!”

—But who put ’em in?... Stuart remembered suddenly his debit account; and ceased to crow.

---

A sad little Pierrette crouched in front of the fire. Pierrot had gone away. Would he ever come back? Pierrette had waited so long.

The wind lashed and sobbed at the windows. Up the street crept the solitary figure of a man. Outside the house he paused, cast away a phantom cloak and mask—(oh, the infinite relief!) and donned a phantom skull cap and white frill. Metamorphosis easily effected.

Pierrette opened to the knock at the door. And, with a cry of joy, held out both hands to welcome in the truant.

“I knew you would come home, Pierrot,” quoth Chavvy.

CHAPTER V
WORSHIPPERS ALL

The end of September saw the Johnsons back again in their Turnham Green residence, named, somewhat misleadingly: “Town House.” Thus it was an easy matter for Mr. Johnson to say, wherever he might chance to spend his summer holidays: “Mother, this time next week we’ll be in our Town House!” airily creating out of his harmless little vanity, a whole host of shooting-boxes, country mansions, river bungalows, and Riviera villas. Mrs. Johnson would smile tolerantly; she encouraged originality, even in her husband.

Sebastian Levi took a room near by, where he wrote the final chapters of his book, and impatiently awaited the return of Stuart from Bournemouth, that the whole might receive his sanction and benediction. A fortnight afterwards, and he was summoned one evening to Carlton House Terrace; and in an apartment which was curiously ordinary for the shrine of so exalted a being, found Stuart sprawling in a low shabby arm-chair, and poking at the smouldering coals with his foot.

“Hullo, Levi, how’s—let me see, I’ve forgotten the name——”

“‘Shears,’” supplemented Sebastian excitedly; “I’ve got it with me.”

“No, you ardent flame-headed lover. Letty. How’s Letty?”

“Letty’s all right, except the days when she has to starve herself to make her father receive me. I say, Heron,” looking about him, “what a queer sort of room—for you.”

“What’s queer about it?”

“Well, mainly that it isn’t queer at all, I suppose; it might be anybody’s study.” And Sebastian thought with a smothered sigh, of the suite of apartments he had renounced in his father’s house in Hampstead. He had attained so exactly the effects his artistic eye desired, beautiful subdued effects of lighting and drapery. Editha and Ivy had been nothing like as successful in their more blatant furnishings.

“What do chairs and tables matter?” queried Stuart calmly.

“But don’t you want to impress your personality——?”

“On a firescreen? no, I’d choose something softer than that.” But though a gleam in Stuart’s eye betokened plainly what was the “something softer” he had chosen, Sebastian, turning over the leaves of his precious manuscript, and awaiting a desirable opening to introduce it into the conversation, noticed nothing.

“How’s the Menagerie? Have you left it to muddle on by itself?”

“No; Mr. Strachey returned from America last week, and I resigned management. I don’t think he was keen on bearing the burden, but they’ve only got the place for a month still.”

“Is Aureole very fond of him?” Sebastian wondered in a fever of impatience when Stuart was going to ask him about “Shears.”

Stuart smiled, as at some secret joke. “Just at present she’s the very model of a meek and devoted wife.” Then, at last, held out his hand towards the bundle on Sebastian’s knees. “Finished? Let’s have a look?”

“No—I say—if it won’t bother you——” But Stuart was already at the first page, on which was inscribed the dedication:

“To
Stuart Heron
In thanks
For all that he took from me
And all that he gave to me.”

He threw the young author an embarrassed look. “I don’t know, really, that I did take anything; you flung down,—that’s rather different.”

“I’m flinging down now—this book!” cried Sebastian, much happier than his companion when emotion was to the fore. “It’s yours, every line of it; your thoughts, your creed, your visions and ideals. It’s—well, I owed you something really big, and this was the best I could do. The very best.” His tone pleaded, but at the same time boasted his achievement.

Stuart began to read. Presently it dawned upon him that this was a very bad book. The style, at first, held recollections of Sebastian’s Oxford days; it echoed, somewhat pretentiously, the polished laboured phrasing of Walter Pater. Then, uncertainly, it began to jerk and flicker; to pass from one key into another; to offend by a great many flaunting passages of which the writer was obviously proudest. It soon became apparent that the hero, a flashy young man in the worst possible taste, was intended for a loving presentment of Stuart himself, drawn by a blind worshipper, and consequently now giving the writhing original a few of the most poignant moments he had ever thought to endure.

“My God!” he muttered once or twice.

Moreover, Sebastian had apparently just fallen short of the main idea—idea of the Shears and the Hairpin Vision; glimpsed it at moments and then lost it again, so that it carried no conviction, and was merely far-fetched and misty.

In short, when he had turned twenty pages, Stuart would have given much never to have owned a creed, nor yet a disciple; that he should live to see the one so perverted, and the other sitting opposite him with dumbly questioning gaze. “Well? ... well? ...” it seemed to say.

Stuart laid aside the scribbled-over sheets. “I can’t possibly go on reading while you sit there and hang out your tongue at me, Levi; I’m not strong-minded enough. You’d better leave the book behind for me to finish.”

And so, cravenly, he postponed the evil hour of criticism. And afterwards wrote a letter which was a diplomatic miracle; ending:

—“You will understand that the book and all it contains has affected me more profoundly than I can express in words—just yet. Perhaps when it is published, and I can get a better perspective, I shall be able to say more of what I feel....”

Not having seen the vicious contortions of Stuart’s features as he penned these sentences, Sebastian was for the nonce satisfied.—“When it is published”—how devoutly he longed for this consummation of his labours. To lay at Stuart’s feet a pile of scribbled paper was comparatively nothing; but to be the means of spreading the master’s word throughout the British Isles, in a bound volume of sturdy print, containing the master’s name at the beginning, for all to reverence and comment upon,—this, surely, was a worthy tribute, sufficient to win the “well done!” that the disciple so burningly coveted. Sebastian’s desire to publish was completely unselfish; he was proud of his book only inasmuch as it reflected Stuart; thirsted for fame merely that the rays might fall on Stuart’s head. The utmost he wished for himself was sufficient recognition of the Vision Splendid, that men might say, men and his father and the Johnsons: “I thought young Levi mad at the time, to have chucked such excellent worldly prospects; but now I marvel how right he was, how much clearer was his sight than ours, how quickly responsive was his soul to what has taken us three-hundred-and-sixteen pages of solid reading to recognize!”... He could not quite hear Mr. Johnson uttering these precise words, but a homely vernacular would be forgiven for the sake of lofty sentiment. At present Sebastian was only received at Town House on sufferance; and trifling matters, such as the parlour left empty for him and Letty during four hours or so, were not arranged as willingly as might have been the case had the young man still been in possession of his fifteen hundred a year. Letty herself, however, compensated him richly for her parents’ unkindness. She grew ever prettier, ever more yielding, ever more necessary for Sebastian’s peace of mind and body. Ned Levi’s humble birth and ancestry had implanted a strain in the boy which found curious pleasure in his fiancée’s slightly common turn of phrase, her occasional lack of refinement in taste and clothes, her childish unpretentious longings, her tiny little vulgarisms. These were never sufficiently strident to jar him; they merely gave him a sense of returning to rest after a long journey; cessation of a cry in him that no riches or dissipations or intellectual strivings could ever thus lull to silence. Moreover, Letty clung to him; and he knew she believed herself clinging to a rock; supposition soothing to his own inner doubts.

The one thing in her that puzzled him was her continual reference to a near future when, as a matter of course, they should be as wealthy as before his renunciation of wealth. It could not be that she depended for this on his book, which, he had explained to her many times, was not a money-making proposition. And once, when he had laughingly asked if she proposed robbing Aladdin’s Cave or the Bank of England, for the fulfilment of her plans, she laid both hands on his shoulders, and demanded wistfully:

“Aren’t you sure yet, Sebastian?”

“Sure of what, sweetheart?”

She sighed, and turned away her head. Perhaps he had decided for a year-long test; if so, she must just be patient.—The door opened to admit Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Baker, mother of that Violet who even now contemplated breaking off her engagement because Letty’s Sebastian had ‘a lovely mouth and jaw,’ and her own Ernie a receding chin. But Mrs. Baker bore no malice for this; her nature was soft as sponge, and formless as the garments which dripped and cascaded from indiscriminately outjutting portions of her figure; garments without end or beginning; rather dirty garments, of a period unknown to history.

“Disturbin’ your billing and cooing, are we?” she cried genially; “there, it’s a shame! But I only wanted to be introduced to your friend, Letty, my dear.” She beamed on Sebastian, noted at once that he was a Jew, and kindly resolved not to mention the fact that her late husband had been a parson. Then she changed her mind, and instead of tactfully skirting the subject of Sebastian’s misfortune—which, poor boy, was probably an accident and not his fault—she decided to refer to It exactly as if It didn’t matter, and thus put him entirely at his ease. So she started:

“And where are these young folk going to have the knot tied, Frances Johnson? At a registrar’s, I suppose,—as it can’t be done in Church. So nice ... dear things ...” wheezily.

Letty and her mother looked at one another. “Now that’s funny!” exclaimed Mrs. Johnson; “I never thought of that.”

“Thought of what?” asked Sebastian.

“Why, that you couldn’t be married in a church.”

“But a Synagogue is a sweet place,” put in Mrs. Baker; “though of course it wouldn’t do for Letty. But I’m sure the Hebrew ceremony is beautiful, even if one can’t understand a word of it, because they pronounce it upside down, don’t they? I remember going once to see a Jewish girl we knew get married; such a good-looking girl ... dear thing ... Laura Silberstein; did you know her, Mr.——?”

“Levi,” supplemented Sebastian gravely, wishing it had been something worse.

“And I remember too that the white flowers and the satin tent and that lovely singing made me feel—I told Mr. Baker afterwards—quite as religious and miserable as if I’d been to one of our own weddings. And he had no objection at all, and said I might certainly go again every time the younger sisters married; there were eight Silberstein girls, you see. And he told me to take Violet next time. Mr. Baker liked us always to be nice to Jews; he was very particular about that.”

Sebastian had a happy moment picturing Mr. Baker being particular about it. He was sorry Mr. Baker was dead.

“And did the other seven poor girls get married?” Letty enquired earnestly, very sorry for them because they could not all or any marry Sebastian.

“Only one; Pearl, the youngest; and she married a High Church gentleman, and got quickly baptised, and it was held at St. George’s, Hanover Square. And that time,” Mrs. Baker concluded triumphantly, “my husband would not let me attend. He said Jews were delightful and clever people in their faith, but disapproved of them marrying out of it.”

... Then she realized the horror of her mistake.

Letty slipped her fingers into Sebastian’s arm, and looked defiantly at the purpling Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Johnson said hurriedly:

“Of course they are quite wonderfully clever; such a head for business. That’s why we’re so sorry, Sebastian, that you gave up your partnership at the Stores.”

“What is Mr. Levi doing then?” queried Mrs. Baker faintly. And Letty trumpeted forth that Sebastian had written a book.

“Oh, but then he must have quite wonderful brains; now I like that; yes, I like people to have brains... dear things ...” and Mrs. Baker nodded and smiled several times to show her tolerance, while, in the same key, Mrs. Johnson carried on:

“Yes, I must say that personally I don’t object to even a woman with a man’s brain; we hear a lot about it spoiling her charm, but I think a girl can be both feminine and intellectual, don’t you, Milly?”

Mrs. Baker said: “Yes, indeed, and sporting too. They say that hockey is bad for the figure, but I like a fine open-air girl ... dear healthy things. Though of course I admire the dainty type as well, and the clever woman who wears glasses.”

And Mrs. Johnson wound up this display of the boundless broadness of mind existing among Turnham Green matrons, by a magnificent declaration that she believed a girl could be brainy without wearing glasses! There is no knowing to what Rabelaisian extent the conversation might have widened, had not Luke burst in, with a gruff demand for tea; and dragging in his wake the fifteen-year-old flapper from the boarding-house next door:

—“Don’t look at me, Mrs. J. I’m sky blue with cold; this horrid kid kept me standing hours and hours listening to a stupid old man on a tub at a street-corner. I declare, I wish I’d gone biking with Tommy Cox; he asked me to come on his carrier.”

“Pity you didn’t, then,” growled Luke, eyes fixed on Sebastian.

Jinny tossed back the curly brown hair which lapped her shoulders; an enormous black bow stood out pertly from the nape of her neck. She wore a blue woolly tam-o’-shanter, a string of green glass beads round her bare throat, a striped flannel shirt, a green serge skirt, very short to show her high brown boots, and a brooch of her school badge and motto.

“I say, may I stop to tea?” she asked of Mrs. Johnson, ignoring Luke.

“Certainly, Jinny; it won’t be ready till five o’clock,—but some of us can wait in the dining-room.”

Mrs. Baker instantly apprehended Mrs. Johnson’s sympathetic intentions towards Letty and Sebastian, and with great alacrity went to the door.

“Come on, Jinny, dear; how’s your mother, this sudden cold snap? ... ah, bless them ... sweet things ... young things ...” this last in a diminishing purr of benediction.

“Oh, she’s all right, thanks. Not much sense in going in to tea till tea’s there, is it?—Oh, I see! All right!” Jinny grinned at Letty, and followed in the wake of the two ladies. “Come along, Luke.”

“In a minute.” Luke had planted himself on the parlour sofa, with the obvious intention not to budge.

“Now, you boss-eyed mule. They want to be alone together; they don’t want you.” Jinny conveyed to him their probable intentions when quit of the crowd, by an expressive pantomime of eating with spoons.

“Shut it! We’re not all such babies for jam.”

“I didn’t say a word about jam,” exasperated by his denseness. “And I’m jolly sure I shan’t come to tea with you again.”

Luke growled something inarticulate; and Jinny, head high in air, marched out and banged the door. Luke’s coolness hurt her sometimes. She wore his ring on the third finger of her left hand—a ring from an expensive cracker,—and he escorted her to school every morning, on the way to his own; not infrequently he carried her satchel; when both their machines were in repair, they biked; but this was not often. He was a year older than she; a hobbledehoy youth of sixteen; rather spotty about the face; and with a taste in ties, that, starting in a bout of violent enthusiasm, had suddenly stopped, before it emerged from the crude-colour stages to something really tasteful. He was surly in the company of ladies; and when his mother spoke to him, always mumbled his replies; though it was owing to her advanced views that on his sixteenth birthday he was given a latchkey: “Show the boy he’s free to come and go about the house as he likes, Matthew, and he’ll never break out as he would if he was too much kept in.” But as Mat Johnson could not be prevailed upon at the same time to raise his son’s pocket-money to more than sixpence a week, there seemed indeed very small chance for Luke to break out. Once or twice he had hung about at the end of his street till the house was locked up at half-past ten, for the pride of letting himself in at five-and-twenty to eleven; but that was all. Dating from his sister’s engagement, however, a subtle change had passed over him; he was seen to read, instead of the cricket or football papers he had been wont to patronize, a two-sheet Socialist rag, named, with misleading mildness: “Mine and Yours,”—and containing mostly threatening references to “Yours.” Also, though he rarely spoke to Sebastian, he evinced a dogged preference for that young gentleman’s company; and very often, as now, would sit in gloomy silence in the same room as the twain; and refuse to move till Letty actually ordered him forth. She hated doing this, as it looked as if she “wanted Sebastian alone,” which in its turn rather looked as if she “wanted Sebastian to kiss her.” Which she did. But it was inconsiderate of Luke to force her to the tacit admission.

“Can you make out why he’s so odd with Sebastian, mother?”

“Letty, dear,” solemnly, “have I ever tried to force my children’s confidence? Everything they tell me is of their own free will,”—and indeed, it was extremely little.

The tea-bell freed the couple in the parlour from the infliction of Luke’s scrutiny. Jinny ignored her chum throughout tea, by way of punishment for his defection. And when the last rock-cake had been consumed, declared she had to be going: “I’ve got piles of arith., and a four-page comp. for Monday, and Ma won’t let me work Sundays because of the old tabby-cats in the house and what they’ll say. Good-bye, Mrs. J. I’ve had a scrumptious tea.”

Luke followed her into the hall.

“You’d better run along back to the parlour,” she informed him crushingly.

“Why?”

“You seem to find the Levi man better company than me.”

“Jinny, I like you better than any other girl”; he fumbled for her hand. Since months he had tried to substitute ‘love’ for ‘like,’ but somehow Jinny made it so hard for a fellow; she was always laughing or snubbing him.

“Thanks; I’m honoured.”

Luke kicked the umbrella-stand. “One must be polite—the Guvnor’s such a beast to him—and he’s going to be my brother-in-law.... I don’t care a hang about him, really.”

“Who would you like best for Letty’s sister-in-law?” Jinny demanded, casually swinging her bulging satchel of books.

“Who would I like for Letty’s sister-in-law?”

Jinny waited a bit. “Well—slowcoach?”

“I don’t see what on earth you mean,” he said, pondering the matter. And he hadn’t found her hand yet.

“Bright boy!” she taunted him, and leaping the three steps, tore up the three of the next house, and vanished through the open front door.

An hour afterwards, Luke said: “Oh!” It had dawned upon him.

That evening, before retiring to bed, he banged at Letty’s door, and, not waiting for permission, slouched into her room. Quickly she covered up some mysterious occupation at the writing-table.

“Hullo, what’s up?”

“Nothing.” Luke stood by the mantelpiece, and closely examined likenesses of Violet Baker, Michael Mordkin, and Sebastian. Letty, really alarmed by his uncanny behaviour, came up behind him, and slipped an arm around his shoulders. “What is it, old boy?”

“Nothing.”

“Luke, have you been betting?”

“Not such a fool.”

She waited, head snuggled against his arm. Presently he said, with great difficulty: “That fellow of yours, Letty——”

“Sebastian?”

“Haven’t got more than one, have you?”

“Of course not,” indignantly she straightened herself. And he blurted out:

“Look here—did he really—I mean, why was he such an ass about his money?”

Letty re-seated herself at the writing-table, and propping her short round little chin on her hands, smiled pensively down at the blotting-paper, and made no reply.

“Do you know what made him do it?” Luke persisted.

“How should I?”

But he seemed unable to leave the subject, now he had embarked upon it. “You don’t seem to mind much.”

“I don’t mind one bit.”

“Pater’s mad about it. He’s always thinking of money.” Luke, having to provide neither for the household nor yet for himself, was duly contemptuous. “But I’ve never met a fellow who chucked away a fortune—till now,” he muttered, sitting astride of the writing-table. His sister peered mischievously up into his face:

“You like Sebastian, don’t you, Luke?”

“Oh, I dunno about liking him,” hastily; “I think he’s a bit off his chump, that’s all.” But as the rustics gaped and marvelled at the lunacy of Don Quixote, so hobbledehoy regarded with bewildered admiration his future brother-in-law.

“—But as long as you’re not crying your eyes red over it all——”

“What would you have done, if I had been, Luke?” Letty enjoyed teasing her wretched young brother.

“Oh ... spoken to him, I suppose,” edging towards the door. “’Night, Letty.”

“Luke, supposing he was—oh, just playing a game; and one day came and said: ‘I’m as rich as I was before!’”

“Wouldn’t build on that if I were you. Chaps don’t play those silly sort of games. Good night.”

And: “I know why, right enough,” reflected Luke, in the passage; “but I wasn’t going to tell her. By gum, though! fancy a fellow actually doing it....”

In Luke’s pocket, a column of “Mine and Yours,” marked in red pencil, discoursed eloquently on the Utopian conditions to be attained by mankind, when those unfairly in possession of unearned increment, should voluntarily fling their wealth into a common pool, that it might be divided into equal shares for all. The discourse wound up, with unconscious humour, by the remark:—“But alas! only we who are willing to share our sixpences have as yet seen the light; those with pounds weighing down their pockets, turn their faces stubbornly away. And we labour on....”

Luke re-read all this, carefully; hallucination pointing with her forefinger along the printed lines.—“By gum!” he muttered again. And his eyes were those of a disciple who has at length sighted the master....

CHAPTER VI
“TO TEST HER LOVE”

“Of course I know why,” reflected Letty; “but I wasn’t going to tell him.”

But it was the need to express the joyous and amazing romance of this which Sebastian had done, and the rejection of each confidant in turn as “not able to understand,” that had prompted Letty to cover so many sheets of paper with her round schoolgirlish handwriting, and to head these scrawlings with the title: “To Test Her Love,” A Story. By Lettice Johnson.

The hero of her tale, one Geoffrey Challoner of Challoner Park, becomes enamoured of Mavice, a village maiden; and is goaded by the sneers of his wicked cousin Jasper (—“You fool! she loves you only because you are the Lord Geoffrey!”—) into putting her love to the test by pretending to the discovery of hidden papers whereby Jasper (of the younger branch of the family) is proved master of Challoner Park in his stead, and he a mere pauper. Affairs at this juncture grow complicated; as Mavice, unshaken in her love for Geoffrey, is yet forced to jilt him, without giving a reason, in favour of Jasper, who most unfortunately holds in his power the honour of Cyril, Mavice’s younger brother, a weakling and a craven. With a bitter: “You were right, Jasper; and I a fool to think any girl, even the fairest, free from worldly motives!” Geoffrey departs for the populous Bush, leaving Jasper in unlawful possession of Challoner Park and Mavice’s broken heart.

Letty was now engaged in a general clearing-up and adjustment of the circumstances of her novelette. Mavice and Geoffrey must be brought together; and the heroine must have occasion to vow, with brimming eyes: “Love you though you are poor, Geoffrey?—I would love you if you came to me scorned by the whole world,—old and ugly and in rags. Geoffrey, you believe me, don’t you?” Then his great speech, beginning: “Oh, my darling, how could I ever doubt that your love would stand the test....” Letty scribbled the subsequent scene, her cheeks aflame, her fingers trembling so that it was a matter of difficulty to guide the pencil. One day, yes, one day, Sebastian would come to her, and say: “Oh, my darling, how could I ever doubt...?”

She had never before experienced the fascination of setting on paper, fragments of her own life, of glorifying characters with whom she had actually come in contact. To be sure, Luke had needed a little doctoring before he was altogether fit to take his place as Cyril Derincourt; but Sebastian accorded so perfectly with the Lord Geoffrey, that Letty was able to derive more voluptuous pleasure from the impassioned duets of her fancy, than ever from those actually enacted. Sebastian in the flesh was sometimes a little too fervent, too realistic even, for timid girlhood; or else incomprehensibly remote; but Geoffrey never by any chance made a remark that Mavice could not entirely understand. So Letty wrote with her heart, unhampered by literary standards, literary judgment; knowing naught of those over-intellectualized circles wherein Geoffrey and Mavice, Jasper and Cyril, and the alluring adventuress Esmée de Courcy (lately added), would meet with laughter and contempt. Letty wrote on, her evenings stabbed through and through by this secret excitement,—till, reading over the completed story, it struck her, with happy surprise, as not a whit less convincing or enthralling than all those other tales which had fed her imagination since flapper days: the “White Heather” Novelette Series; the “Silver Chimes” Complete Novel, published every Tuesday; the Myrtle Library; the Pink-and-Blue Boudoir Supplement; fiction in coloured paper covers, stacked, crumpled and torn, behind her bed-valance.

“I wonder,” brooded Letty, as she affixed a wobbling signature to the manuscript, “if Sebastian would be pleased to see me in print....”

To her, the be-all and end-all of literature was to “get into print”; written stuff was of absolutely no value otherwise. This secret of hers was swelling rather too big to be borne alone; Violet Baker was, under many vows, admitted to Letty’s confidence. Violet was shorthand-typist to a firm of solicitors, and volunteered to type, in her spare moments, “To Test Her Love,” which she considered a veritable masterpiece.

“What made you think of it, I don’t know?”—And on this point Letty continued to keep silence. Her sole fear was that her achievement would mysteriously rob her of feminine charm; place her in the same category as those “clever girls,” “gifted women,” “the kind men don’t like.” In which case, Letty decided, her talent should at once, definitely, and for ever, be abandoned.

Finally, after much deliberation of choice, the type-script was dispatched to the Editress of “Silver Chimes.” After a little delay, came a letter offering five guineas for full and complete rights in the fortunes of Geoffrey, Mavice, Cyril, Esmée, and Jasper.

“That means they’re going to print it!” Letty flew across the road to Violet Baker.

“Vi, they’re going to print it!”

Her tidings were not received with the acclamation she expected. “Oh, everything’s all right for you,” came muffled from the depths of a damp pocket-handkerchief.

“Toothache?” queried Letty sympathetically.

“No, Ernie.”

“Not—not dead?”

... Presently Letty, her joy somewhat damped, went tiptoeing back to Town House. It seemed appropriate to tiptoe, for though Ernie was not dead, Violet had sent him about his business. The frequent comparison between his profile and Sebastian’s, his manners and Sebastian’s, Sebastian’s ‘romantic air’—and Ernie’s, had done their fell work. And now for Letty to come rushing in with Fame in a typewritten oblong envelope, and because of it expect Violet to go capering round the dining-room,—well, it was rather too much to ask even of Real Friendship.

“You jolly well get everything,” complained Violet bitterly; “you’ve got the looks, and all the fuss made over you, and a fellow who can say all the speeches, and now you’ve got this too. And I was idiot enough to type it for you, and give old Tomkyns the page about where Jasper plots with Esmée de Courcy, instead of a letter about somebody’s insurances, and he hopping mad. You get everything.” Violet again immersed herself in the handkerchief, and Letty departed, very, very sorry, but rather resentful that having ‘everything’ she should therefore have to do without Violet. “But I understand about Ernie,” she mused, sitting down to reply to the Editress. If Sebastian had not come along, would not she, Letty, with all her advantages and prettiness, probably have drifted into a sort of engagement with Balaam Atkins? very much of the Ernie type, but older, and with slightly more jut to his jaw. And then they would all have been cosy together, and even Luke would probably not have snubbed Jinny so frequently as he did now. The advent of Sebastian had completely demoralized this corner of Turnham Green.

With an effort, Letty managed to keep the secret of her letter from the family; she wanted Sebastian to be the first to hear about it. Three days later, at tea-time, she spied him walking dejectedly up the road. She was alone in the dining-room; her mother was out, and Luke not yet home from school.

“Hurrah! we can have tea together, just us two; what a darling you are to come to-day,—and I’ve got something too frightfully exciting to tell you ... your hands are frozen; why don’t you wear gloves, you bad boy?” joyfully she welcomed him, chafed his cold fingers with her warm palms, hung about him like a solicitous kitten. But still he didn’t speak. And, just on the verge of pouring forth her great news, Letty stopped, struck by the tragedy in his face.

“Oh, what is it?” she cried piteously.

“They’ve rejected it.”

Then the pall descended upon her also. The Book. They had rejected it. There was no more to be said. And for the second time she was baffled of an elated audience for her own triumph. How dared she presume tell him of a tale accepted, when his great work had been refused.

“The beasts!” she cried, with quivering lips.

“Don’t be silly, Letty!” but whatever consolation she had attempted would have been wrong. He was in that mood. “Of course, they can’t take everything that gets offered to them. My stuff’s not good enough, that’s all. They—they wrote it wasn’t good enough,” he finished, asking again for that sympathy which he flung back when it came. He had been divided by the pride which bade him keep his shame to himself, and a childish longing for solace and encouragement and the presence of someone who believed in him. Not sure yet which need was the stronger, he announced his defeat casually, as though it hardly affected him, hotly resented Letty’s correct assumption that his world lay shattered; and then, almost boasting the humiliation, showed her a note from the publisher’s reader, who had kindly taken the trouble to point out how and why his work was not marketable, instead of merely enclosing the formal slip: “—unable to make an offer.” “You fail to convince,” was the phrase which left most sting.

“So you see I’m a failure, Letty. Not a publisher will look at the book. This fellow knows what he’s talking about.” Sebastian refused the muffins she tendered him.

“You mean—it will never get into print, you don’t think?”

“Never. But it isn’t that; it’s—Heron.”

“Your friend?” She remembered the two had been a great deal together, at the Farme.

He nodded, too full of bitterness to speak. Why was it that all his burnt-offerings, like Cain’s, were doomed to be beaten, sullen fumes, along the earth, instead of mounting in steady columns of smoke, upwards to their destination? That he might be worshipping false gods, did not for a moment present itself as a possible solution; Sebastian’s loyalty was convinced the sacrifices were at fault, not the altar. The book was Stuart’s book, for Stuart, of Stuart, to Stuart,—the whole declension. The author had sweated his share, and now the publishers withheld theirs, and all the accomplished labour was in vain. It was maddening—

“I wanted it out!” Sebastian broke out, aloud.

“He wanted it in print, of course he did,” passionately Letty shared his mutinous sorrow. And when he had gone, and she was in her room, changing into an evening blouse, she fingered the letter she had not had the courage to show him; all her joy gone from the anticipation of her story in print, since thus it would only serve to point a contrast.

“I’ve half a mind not to send it,” picking up that other letter into which was folded her eager acceptance of the five-guinea offer.

“I wish it was him instead of me,” wistfully. For one does not lightly say ‘no’ to an Editress of “Silver Chimes”; not if one is Letty Johnson.

She stood uncertain, an envelope in either hand....

“Supposing.... After all, it was his idea and not mine, about pretending to be poor, and all that.... Almost, really, it’s as if I’d stolen it. Then supposing....”

Supposing what? That she should put his name, instead of hers, to the novelette? That she should surprise him by showing him a story by Sebastian Levi, in print, as he so much wanted to be? Just to make up for that other disappointment. Well, supposing you did, Letty? Nobody need ever know that Sebastian hadn’t written it, except Violet Baker; and she could be pledged to silence.

“I will!” resolved Letty, her grey-blue eyes clouded to seriousness beneath the tumbling fringe of her hair. “I’ll go and see the Editress myself.”

This was rather a tremendous undertaking. But the notion of being in a position to offer Sebastian the very thing he deemed lost to his desire, so inflated Letty’s courage, that she hardly faltered when the next day seeking an interview with—“your real friend and cousin, the Editress,” as the energetic little woman signed “Cousin Belle’s Chat with Her Girls,” which appeared every week on the last page of “Silver Chimes.”

—“You want to publish your little tale with a nom-de-plume? Why, certainly. We have one lady who always writes for us under the name: Joyella; and My Girls like her touch immensely.”

Letty groped in vain after some association of ideas between “Joyella” and a sale-of-underwear catalogue that she had seen in her mother’s hand that morning. Then gave up the search, and listened to what the Editress was saying in praise of “To Test Her Love.”

“We’ll have to alter it in several places, of course; you’ve had no experience, I can see that; but what we liked about your characters, Miss Johnson, was that you wrote as if you felt them. My girls always know the difference. And that’s why, when a high-class authoress comes along with her nose in the air and offers to scribble me something in her spare time, I know it will be no good. I tell her so, straight out. One can’t write for My Girls with one’s nose in the air. They recognize sincerity when they see it. You’ve got the sincere touch, Miss Johnson; My Girls are sure to take to you.” She brought forth her Girls as if they were a compact little jury; she herself the judge; and Letty, or Joyella, or the authoress writing with nose in air, the prisoners on trial.

“Now, under what name do you want us to publish?” Miss Symes drew her pencil through Lettice Johnson, and looked up from the manuscript, with an encouraging smile. Every line and angle and inflection proclaimed her as orthodox Church of England. It was rather a bad moment for Letty.

“Sebastian——” she paused. Miss Symes wrote it down. “Yes?” with pencil poised.

Almost, now, at the eleventh hour, Letty said “Lovell,” and spoilt everything....

“Sebastian Levi,” in a whisper.

“Sebastian——? I beg your pardon, I didn’t catch it?”

Desperately, Letty repeated “Levi,” in tones that nervousness had rendered far louder and more resonant than she had intended them.

Still showing her teeth, though the brightness had departed from her smile, the Editress added “Levi.” Then put down the pencil.

“Forgive me, but does that strike you as a very attractive pseudonym? Have you a special reason?”

“It was my mother’s name—before she married——.” Letty felt the eyes of My Girls, that terrible army of girls taking in “Silver Chimes” regularly every Tuesday, fixed upon her in scornful disapproval. Their imaginary stare quite obliterated all conscientious pangs concerning Mrs. Johnson, who, despite broadmindedness, might quite conceivably have resented being thus publicly branded an Israelite.

Miss Symes made an ineffectual effort to convert Letty to “Beryl Hope Feversham,” invented by herself for the next “Silver Chimes” contributor in search of a pleasant sounding nom-de-plume. But Letty clung to the thought of Sebastian’s ecstasy, seeing his name above the published novelette, and remained obdurate.

“To Test Her Love,” by Sebastian Levi, was to be published three weeks hence; November the twenty-second fixed as the important date.

And on Tuesday, November the twenty-second, Letty dashed down the road before breakfast, to the little newspaper shop at the corner, and bought three copies of the journal in the bright mauve cover, wreathed about with silver bells swung in diverse directions by a fantastic wind; in and out of the bells were threaded the words: “To Test Her Love,” by Sebastian Levi; in the centre of the page was inset a medallion, containing presentments of Geoffrey with blazing eyes confronting Mavice with bowed head, who was supported by a malignant Jasper; Cyril skulking on the extreme left of the picture, and Esmée de Courcy triumphant on the extreme right. Beneath this pleasing illustration stood the letter-press: “Mavice! speak! Are you indeed engaged to him, or shall I strike him down as a liar?” (see page 23).

Letty bore her treasures home, secreted in her muff; Sebastian was to be the first to see; she had arranged to meet him for a walk and tea that very afternoon. But one copy of “Silver Chimes” she slipped into an envelope, sought a name among the h’s in the telephone book, addressed the envelope to: “Stuart Heron, Esq., Heron, Heron & Carr, High Holborn,” and posted it forthwith. She knew the beautiful friendship which existed between the two men,—“like me and Violet, before she turned so horrid—oh well, I s’pose she’s miserable, and can’t help it, but still,”—knew also that when Sebastian was shown the current issue of “Silver Chimes” his first thought would be to exhibit it to Stuart, just as his first disappointment when the book was refused, was on Stuart’s account. Letty wanted to be able to state she had forestalled him—“Mr. Heron is perhaps reading it now, this very minute,—and oh, Sebastian! what do you think he’ll say?”

Her day passed in a dreamy mauve-hued blur, with a clangour of bells in the air. At four o’clock Letty donned her new winter costume of royal-blue velveteen, her golden fox-furs, and a blue plush picture-hat; and again with something tightly clasped inside her muff, almost danced out of the house into the drizzling gloam beyond. Sebastian was waiting for her where the No. 9 ’buses stop on their way to Richmond. His plan was to walk across the Park, and have a late tea at some window overlooking the pale mist-sodden river. Letty would have preferred a cosier programme; she assented, reluctantly, to the top of the ’bus, “if you promise to keep the umbrella held over my hat, Sebastian,”—but cancelled the walk across Richmond Park: “Horrid, in the dark, with the leaves all messy and slippery, and the trees like ghosts——”

—“And the world smelling damp, and reeking damp, and dripping damp, and we the only people warm in it! Why, Letty, you’d enjoy it!”

“But we shouldn’t be warm.”

“We would, if I held you close enough; Letty....”

“But my shoes!” she showed him her footgear, to prove the impossibility of his proposals. All this under the pallid stream of light from the lamp-post, at the corner where they lingered for their ’bus.

“Will I never teach you not to wear pneumonia-soles, you little vanity-child?” sighed Sebastian. But the lifted folds of the skirt had afforded a pleasant glimpse, nevertheless; and he wished he could afford the privacy of a taxi, that he might caress her rounded slenderness at will. It was noble, but inconvenient, to be forever short of cash. However, they were the only passengers on the outside of their lurching chariot; and afterwards the only two in the snug brightly lit tea-room which formed one of a labyrinthine cluster underground, each holding four rose-tiled tables, and a rose-gowned waitress. The latter took Sebastian’s order, and vanished.

“Now...” thought Letty—and produced “Silver Chimes.” Without a word of comment, so fraught was the moment with tense expectation, she pushed the copy across the table. Sebastian picked it up, wondering, and read aloud: “‘To Test Her Love,’ by Sebastian Levi...? Why, w-w-what on earth——?” he stammered. His eye fell on the illustration; then in silent bewilderment he flicked over a few of the pages. Letty watched him, her fingers curled tightly round the edge of the table. The lines of his mouth hardened. He spoke harshly:

“Is it a joke? Who put my name to this drivel?”

And the dancing joy in her eyes was quenched in a rush of tears. As before from anticipation, so now from disappointment, she remained mute.

“Answer me, Letty? Who put my name to this?”

“I did,” almost inaudibly.... But why was he so cross? Was it that his integrity recoiled from the notion of claiming credit for work not his own? Yes, it must be that. For the moment, she had forgotten his use of the term: drivel.

“But it is yours, really and truly, Sebastian. The idea is yours, all about the Test, and pretending not to be rich, and everything. I’d never have thought of it. I only did the writing part because—because you were so busy with your book. But it’s quite, quite fair that your name should be on the cover.”

“You wrote this?”

“Yes.” A tinge of pride in her assent. Had not the Editress said the tale was good? “Yes, indeed I did. Are you surprised?”

(Or was he already beginning to think her unwomanly?)

The waitress appeared with the tea-things, which she rattled down on the table. Sebastian buried himself anew in the histories of Geoffrey and Mavice, while Letty poured out the tea, and nibbled at a cress sandwich; furtively gleaming at him from under her eyelashes.

“Aren’t you hungry, Sebastian?”

He made no reply; went on reading. He had as a boy devoured a great many “penny dreadfuls” of the blood-and-thunder type; but this was his first experience of girls’ cheap sentimental fiction. It was a revelation. Now he understood one or two curious ingredients which had hitherto always puzzled him in the composition of Letty.—But what did she mean by saying that his was the original idea of Lord Geoffrey Challoner’s utterly inane proceedings? Then, slowly, that dawned on him as well. He shoved aside “Silver Chimes,” so that it fell on the dusty floor.

“Letty, did you think it was by way of a test, a test of you, that I gave up my income?”

“Wasn’t it?”

“My God, no!”

“Then why——”

“You wouldn’t understand why,” grimly; “it won’t translate into novelette terms.”

Letty stretched out her hand for a cream-cake, pink and chocolate. It fell from her shaking fingers on to her skirt. She gazed hopelessly at the stain. It was all of a piece with this hateful afternoon, to spoil every one of her illusions, and her new costume into the bargain.

“I expect my hat’s all spotted by the rain, too,” she reflected dreamily. And he had called her story “drivel.”... With a quick spurt of anger at his lofty denunciation, Letty cried:

“The Editress said I had the sincere touch, so there!”

He saw how he had hurt her, and was sorry; but felt at the same time the futility of attempting to explain the cause of his annoyance.

“Oh, well—eat up your cakes, dear; I don’t suppose anyone who matters will ever buy this particular rag. Lord, though,” half under his breath, “if Stuart had seen it!”

“I sent him a copy this morning,” Letty threw out defiantly. She was in the naughty mood of a child, who, seeking to please most, has somehow only earned a scolding, and is in consequence rightly sore and resentful.

... In the ghastly silence which followed her announcement, another party entered the room, and noisily disposed themselves at the adjoining table. The waitress entered to take their order, and Sebastian beckoned her to bring him his bill. The homeward journey was accomplished by train, in a moist overfull compartment, where Sebastian had to give up his seat to a lady, and Letty sat huddled in a corner, frightened at the dire effect of her action, and repeating to herself again and again: “I don’t care; he’s hateful; I don’t care a bit.”

Still without a word, beyond a brief “good night,” he left her at the gate of Town House, and set out for Carlton House Terrace. He had little doubt as to what sort of a ribald reception awaited him there. Not much mercy to be expected from Stuart. All Sebastian’s most sensitive portions were already screaming and wincing in protest. He had so desired to present Stuart with a dignified bound volume, setting forth in fervent but lucid phrasing, an abstract ideal,—and now, instead, this unspeakable novelette! The incident was grotesque; it had degraded to farce all his high aspirations. It was no good shirking his visit; the matter had to be explained. Sebastian walked ever faster, in mingled exasperation and dread. Arrived at his destination, he was shown into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Heron, Stuart, Mr. Arthur Heron, and a pretty flapper in white, whom he had met once before at the house, were assembled, before dinner. Stuart was lounging in front of the fire-place, and evidently engaged in chaffing the child, when Sebastian was announced.

—“You see, Babs, by your passionate public assertions that I was your idea of a perfect gentleman, you very definitely proved yourself no lady. One isn’t passionate, in society. I really don’t know, after this, what we can do with you! what do you think, mother?... Hullo, Levi!” he bestowed on the new-comer a slow fiendish smile that confirmed Sebastian’s worst anticipations. Babs at once enlisted his sympathies in her cause:

“Mr. Levi, I heard someone, at a party, saying a horrid thing about Stuart; and of course I stuck up for him. And now he says I’ve committed a breach of etiquette, and the Queen, when she gets to hear of it, will strike my name from the presentation lists, the year after next. Do say it isn’t true!”

“My dear, you really ought to be accustomed by now to your cousin’s teasing.—You’ll dine with us, of course, Mr. Levi?” Mrs. Heron extended a thin ringed hand, smiling graciously. She looked very handsome, in her low-necked black gown, and her single row of wonderful pearls.

“I’m afraid it’s impossible.” Sebastian longed for these invitations, but invariably, by some perverse twitch of the nerves, refused them when they came. He and Stuart went into the latter’s study. Conspicuous on the table lay a booklet bound in a mauve paper cover, wreathed about with silver bells.

“I haven’t quite finished your story yet,” said Stuart, caressing it lovingly; “it has made me a very happy man, Levi!”

“And me a deuced miserable one,” growled Sebastian, flinging himself into an arm-chair.

“That, my lad, is because you have caused Esmée de Courcy to appear at noon, in Regent Street, wearing a décolletée toilet of yellow sequins. Such riotous rollicking literary excesses are bound to result in your present reaction of soul.”

“Oh, shut up!” miserably. Stuart was sitting on the table, the novelette on his knees. Leaning forward, Sebastian snatched it away, and flung it into the fire.

“There are thousands more on the market,” chortled Stuart; “I intend to forward a copy to Magdalen; for an original exploit of one of Oxford’s sons, I think it deserves to stand in the College chronicles.”

Sebastian writhed. “Don’t be indecent, Heron,” in a feeble appeal to the other’s better nature. An appeal totally unfruitful of results.

“Surely, Levi, you didn’t send me your masterpiece in the erroneous supposition that I would take it up tenderly and treat it with care?”

“I didn’t send it to you at all.”

“No, I guessed you hadn’t sufficient guts for that! Whom have I to thank, then, for my moments of rich ripe pleasure?”

“Letty.”

“God bless Letty. Did she write it, by the way?”

“You—you didn’t think I wrote it, did you? Heron, you didn’t?” Sebastian’s dark mournful eyes implored satisfaction on this one point, at least.

“As a matter of fact, it’s not at all unlike your style.”

“What the Hell do you mean by that?” Sebastian sprang to his feet, knocking his shins against the brass coal-box. “My book——”

—“Is no book, any more than Letty’s maiden effort is a book. They’re both—what shall I call ’em?—Gory Exhibitions!” And having his victim completely down and at his mercy, Stuart proceeded forthwith to pummel him; showing thereby—despite Babs’ defence—a most lamentable lack of all gentlemanly instincts. But he had not forgiven his disciple for butchering his ideas; nor for sickening him with his own creed, as had been the case ever since Sebastian’s over-enthusiastic conversion.

—“You both write in blood, instead of in ink; upon my word, your style is like a pirate’s oath. No attempt at restraint or form. Form’s everything—colour nothing. One should write from the vantage-point of a god,—at least of a judge; aloof, impersonal, detached. But you take a bath every time, in what you’re pleased to call your inspiration: wallow, and splash, and breathe heavily, and yelp in your ecstasies, and wriggle in your agonies, all over the pages. I even suspect you of putting things down for the ‘sheer joy’ of unburdening yourself. And there we have the greatest evil. A book should be thought, crystallized into truth, hard as rock, stripped of all extraneous fungus, and with some clear purpose to serve in publication, whether of good or evil. But if you must have your attacks of luxurious hysteria,—for Heaven’s sake, man, keep ’em private. Suppress them. Suppress the ‘Sprawls of Sebastian’—‘Sebastian Spills Himself,’ as the stuff shouts to be called.”

“You needn’t worry any further,” Sebastian said, with very stiff lips, and a weary battered bewilderment as to what he had done, that ever since a certain night of August he should be exposed to these onslaughts; “because the book’s been refused.”

“Excellent!”

“And it was for you—not at all for the ‘sheer joy of unburdening,’—just for you....” But Sebastian kept these reflections to himself. And Stuart continued consolingly:

“But Letty’s story is no better than yours, for all that; it’s equally highly coloured and shapeless, but in a more marketable key.”

“Thank you.”

“Dear old man, don’t gaze at me as if I had you on the rack. I’m trying to help you. I suppose you’ve behaved like a brute to the little girl, over this business?”

“I’m going to break with her, that’s all!” suddenly Sebastian recovered from the temporary paralysis of speech, and, striding about the room, vehemently poured forth his determination: “Yes, I am. We’re not made for each other. She doesn’t understand—anything. And I get hopeless over stupidity; it numbs me. She shouldn’t have done this thing and even now she can’t see why. She doesn’t see why I gave up living at home—nor why the book meant so much to me. It won’t do—it would never do—it must end now, now!... I’m like you, Heron, I must be free of everything, especially of love, the warm, clinging, hampering fingers of love; I’m growing more and more like you——”

“Nonsense; you can’t possibly grow like me, because I’m not there; not permanently. You can grow like your father, or the Albert Memorial, anything fixed and solid,—but you can’t grow like the spot where I stood a minute ago before I began to run.”

“I’m going to break with Letty,” Sebastian repeated doggedly.

“And you think you’re doing a fine thing by it?” Stuart twisted round on the table, and scornfully eyed his young prototype. “It’s rather easy, isn’t it, to break off with love because just at this moment you happen to be fed up with it. There’s no merit in that,—merely self-indulgence again. But try breaking-off with love when you want it most, when it’s fairest, most devilishly alive. Try breaking off, not because you’re annoyed with the girl, childishly pettishly annoyed,—but for the sake of keeping love unsated, and the memory of love like a sword-blade. Break off with love, because self-denial maintaineth the soul lean, and whetteth desire, and—oh, because if you can do that, and also guard your tongue from overmuch cursing when directly afterwards a smug couple dog your footsteps wherever you walk, and perform for your benefit,—then there’s very little else can affect you, ever. You’re master, then. At the height is the time to break with any credit, my lad, not half-way down the slope.”

Sebastian broke in: “But that’s cruel—inhuman—as a god might behave. No man alive would do it.” His heart was beating thickly; he could not tell why.

“Think not?” Stuart rose, stood against the chimney-piece, dropping the ash of his cigarette into the fire. And he said slowly: “I never told you about Peter, did I?”...

Sebastian stormed out of the room, down the stairs, into the hall. The dinner-gong was drowning the house in sound. The postman had just thundered at the door. Sebastian wanted to get away—away from this new brutality of idea which terrified him because he knew it would ultimately overtake him. It was revolting ... revolting, he repeated, smashing behind him the iron gates of the drive,—this deliberate murder of love to which Stuart had just confessed. Revolting in the same way as would have been the sight of a monk engaged in self-laceration. There was nothing splendid about it,—no, nothing at all! between clenched teeth Sebastian thus informed the wet glittering pavements.

And he was going back to Letty, straight back, driven by the fear of what he might have been induced to do to her ... if he were not quite determined to the contrary.

Back to Letty. The Johnsons’ maid, opening the door to him, said: “Miss Letty’s just going to bed, sir, she’s not very well.”—And there she was, on the stairs, dragging her feet a little, as if tired out.

“Letty!”

She came down to him then, and laid her arms against his breast; and he bowed his head on to the soft warm skin of them, murmuring that he was sorry—so sorry——

“I hoped you’d be pleased, Sebastian. I thought you wanted to get into print. I did so hope you’d be pleased.”

“I’m a beast, Letty.—No, don’t move, darling—not for a minute—let me go on telling you—I’m a surly ungrateful brute ... but I love you——”

She raised her lips for his kiss.

---

Stuart, following Sebastian’s headlong rush from the room, reached the hall just as the heavy oak doors crashed behind his impetuous young devot. Shrugging his shoulders, the master of the house turned to enter the dining-room; the butler waylaid him, offering a letter on a silver tray:

“The post has just come in, sir.”

It seemed to Stuart that once before he had stood, as he stood now, with the echoes of the dinner-gong still vibrating through the hall, and in his hand an envelope, addressed in just this same thin pointed writing.... He drew forth the white and silver of a wedding invitation:

“Madame Marcel des Essarts requests the pleasure of Mr. Stuart Heron’s company at the marriage of her granddaughter Merle with Jean Raoul Théodore, Comte de Cler, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and afterwards at 63 Lancaster Gate.”

—So Merle was to be married. He had almost forgotten Merle; that exquisite little lady whom for a while he and Peter had taught to become a child and a pirate and a romp; whom they had crinkled out of serene composure into delicious laughter; whom they had dragged from an atmosphere of hothouse vigilance into the keen airs and fleet sweet liberty. Stuart speculated as to whether, after this lapse of time, aught remained in Merle of his influence. One spot rubbed forever bare of the polish, perhaps; one nerve that would always be restless; one memory that could just occasionally sting her from content. He would go to Merle’s wedding, if only to see what sort of a fellow was this Jean Raoul Théodore, Comte de Cler.—“Sure to be a stumor ...” it was a queer thing, but Stuart suspected most men to be stumors, who gathered up his litter of orange-peel.

“I wonder if I did her any good?”...

Mrs. Heron came out of the drawing-room, her hand on Arthur Heron’s arm; Babs following.

“Just think, Stuart: Merle des Essarts is going to be married.” They passed into the dining-room. “I’ve just had the invitation. I believe that Madame des Essarts and I are not on particularly good terms; she neither came to my last big At Home, nor answered the card, nor called afterwards. However.... This Comte de Cler is a most distinguished man. A diplomat. I know him slightly. Much older than the girl, of course; but such charming manners. Isn’t it suitable?”

She asked the question rather anxiously, not quite sure if the son of the house of Heron had not once himself deigned to cast an eye towards la maison des Essarts.

“Merle would be a delightful acquisition in the highest ambassadorial circles,” Stuart assented warmly.

But he still suspected Jean de Cler of being a stumor.

CHAPTER VII
JOHNSONESE

Luke was with Jinny at the cake-shop.

“Have another?” said Jinny.

He hesitated. It was her birthday, and she had been tipped, and was treating him. This would have seemed a natural proceeding a year ago, when he would have crammed himself to the utmost limits of her capital. But Luke was growing up; and though not sufficient of a man to forbid the lady to pay, was yet not sufficient of a boy unquestioningly to accept the fifth cream bun. Therefore he compromised with himself: he would ask her to state exactly her financial position; if it exceeded half a crown, he would eat that bun, and be damned to delicate considerations and social etiquette. But if less—

“How much cash have you got, Jinny?”

“Four and six,” promptly; “half a crown from Uncle Will, and two bob from old Simmons. But of course you’ve already eaten some of that.”

“Well, and so’ve you.”

“I’ve only had three, three twopennies—that’s sixpence; you’ve had four.”

“The shortcake’s a penny.”

“Sevenpence, then. And a lemonade each. And two—three sticks of chocolate cream;” Jinny did rapid mental calculations—she was top of her form in arithmetic—and announced two and elevenpence as still remaining from her four and six, after expenses were deducted. Whereat Luke, much relieved, took his fifth cake, satisfied that he had solved the difficulty in fashion befitting a man of the world.

“We’re going to invite you to our Christmas dinner,” he remarked, his mouth full.

“How topping! Who else?”

“The old Baker woman, and Vi. Balaam Atkins,—he’s mashed on Letty, you know. Granpa and Aunt Lou—Granpa’s good for a present, anyway. Oh, and your precious Tommy Cox!”

“Hurrah! He’s spiffing fun. Ever heard him imitate turkeys gobbling?”

“No, and I don’t want to. And I don’t suppose he’d find it difficult. He’s to be lugged in for Vi Baker; she’s supposed to have a broken heart, or some such tommy-rot——”

“And your mother thinks that Tommy’s rot will cheer her up?” Jinny exploded into giggles at her own wit; “I say, Luke, did you hear? I said——”

“Oh, keep your hair on! I don’t want to hear it again.”

“Sour grapes! you wouldn’t have thought of it yourself. But won’t Letty’s fellow be there?”

“Sebastian? Oh, rather; didn’t I count him? I say,” Luke leant forward confidentially across the rickety green tin table, “you know how snarky Pater was about him? Well, two mornings ago he had a letter from old Levi—I heard him tell Mater about it—and ever since, he’s simply oiled himself all over Sebastian. And I believe he’s come to see him this afternoon.”

“Who’s come to see who, stupid?”

“Old Levi. He’s frightfully rich. Come to see Pater.”

“Then why isn’t Sebastian frightfully rich? Has he quarrelled with his dad?”

“Secret,” said Luke shortly. “Come along, let’s be off.”

“No—wait—tell me, Luke. Do. I won’t tell, honest Injun. You might, Luke, because it’s my birthday.”

“As if that was a reason,” scorning her femininity. “Besides, you’ll blab.”

“No, I won’t.” And she added: “You might tell me, Luke,—I’m paying for your tea.”

Luke was not offended; indeed, he thought she had put forth a fairly strong argument.

“Well, when he got sort of engaged to Letty, his Guv’nor was going to make him partner at the Stores, and start him on fifteen hundred quid a year.” He repeated the sum impressively. And Jinny gasped:

“My hat!”

“He’s chucked it,” finished Luke, still more impressively.

“My hat! Whatever for?”

“Because he’s a Socialist.”

“What difference does that make?”

Luke embarked on an explanation of the first principles underlying the code of equality; threw in a few cutting sentences regarding the palpable unfairness of “one law for the rich and another for the poor”; and wound up by reading his companion a column from the current issue of “Mine and Yours.”

“But that’s all balmy bosh,” was Jinny’s comment.

“Is it?” huffily. “As it happens, I’m a Socialist myself.”

“You are? Crumbs! Why?”

Luke fumbled in vain for words with which to express the queer gleam which had penetrated the murkiness of his schoolboy soul; soul hitherto stamped solely with football scores, surliness, and Jinny; with cheap cigarettes and brandyballs; canings, ink, and the “usual beastliness” of everything. Thereunto had lately to be added the astounding novelty of someone who sacrificed material advantages for the sake of an abstract idea; and the blended beauty and absurdity of the proceeding had uplifted Luke to a queer sense of gladness that such a miracle should actually take place within his ken; had even inspired him with an inarticulate desire to imitate ... somehow. His shyness had never permitted him to confide in Sebastian; otherwise he might have received another shock on hearing that in this case Socialism was not the motive of renunciation. Sebastian, for his part, might have found some difficulty in translating into Johnsonese the twisted asceticism of Stuart Heron.

But Luke only dogged in boorish silence his sister’s betrothed. And Sebastian thought his future brother-in-law rather an uncouth lad, with whom he could never have anything in common.

In the meantime, Luke realized the impossibility of laying before Jinny the wonder of a share-and-share-alike community, while she was very importantly calling for the bill, and clinking her coins on to the table; especially as he had absently overstepped his self-imposed limit, and eaten twopence off the half-crown.

“Come on!” cried Jinny, catching up her hockey-stick, and marching out of the shop. She had played in a match that afternoon, and won it, three goals to one. And, re-living her victory, she had forgotten all about Luke’s recent outburst. He followed her into the High Street, and thence round the corner into the quiet road running at right angles, and ending abruptly in a high wall which shut off the railway embankment. Luke slouched past the gate of Town House.

“Hi!” shouted Jinny, who had halted at the boarding establishment next door; “have you eaten so much as to forget your own address, fathead?”

“No ... walk with me as far as the wall, Jinny?”

“Why ever?”

“Oh, I dunno; needn’t if you don’t want to.”

She yielded. The constant vituperations with which she adorned her speech, were merely used in defence, as the porcupine shoots its quills. She laboured under a fifteen-year-old delusion that rudeness is the equivalent of wit. But she was very fond of Luke. In fact, in spite of her many assertions to the contrary, her inmost heart preferred him to the redoubtable Tommy Cox.

“Well, what now?” she demanded, in softer tones than usual, as they leant up against the wall.

He looked at her; her curls were tumbled about her neck; her face was a warm blur through the humid mists of a late afternoon in December. Sebastian had been especially devoted to Letty during the last fortnight, and the prevailing atmosphere of sentiment and tenderness had infected Luke. He felt now that he wanted something more of his girl than repartee.... Suddenly he plunged forward; his lips missed her mouth, but landed somewhere in the dim hollow of her throat.

... “Jinny!”

A train thundered along the bank overhead, shook the wall, passed in a rush of light, leaving in its wake a long-drawn-out plaintive whistle....

Then Jinny pulled herself away: “Oh, crumbs! don’t be sloppy!” she cried, and ran swiftly down the road, clattering her hockey-stick along the pavement.

Luke, for very shame, remained rooted to the spot long after he had heard the door of number twenty-seven bang behind her.

---

Mr. Johnson saw his guest off at the front door. Then, with the air of a man completely satisfied, went into the parlour to report to his wife.

“Did you ask him if he wanted tea, Matthew?”

Her husband smiled broadly. “He had a drink and a cigar, my dear.”

“One of your good cigars?”

Mr. Johnson nodded; and she knew therefore that all was well, and that she might safely ask questions. “What did he say about Sebastian? Did he tell you the reason——?”

“That he did.”

“Well?”

“Ned Levi told me in confidence, Frances.”

“Well?” brushing aside this trifling objection.

“There is nothing to prevent a public engagement as soon as ever you like,” said Mr. Johnson with dignity; “and nothing to prevent ’em getting married as soon as they like. I don’t know what we’ve been waiting for.”

“We’ve been waiting for your consent, Mat,” gently.

“They have it; oh, they have it.” Mr. Johnson’s voice blessed the absent pair.

“And what does Sebastian’s father say about Sebastian not taking his money?” asked Mrs. Johnson, returning to the charge.

And having let five minutes elapse since his promise of secrecy, Mr. Johnson felt he might now with honour let the cat out of the bag:

“The cub got it into his head, at Oxford or some such place, that he wouldn’t take money that had been made in trade. It may be that some other young snob told him that the Stores swindled pence out of people’s pockets. Comes of sending your son to Oxford. And you wanted Luke to go there.”

“I believe it’s a good place in its way, Mat,” Mrs. Johnson said, tolerating Oxford.

“Ned Levi thinks the boy can’t fail to come round all right when he’s married to a sensible girl. That’s why he’s anxious to hurry on the wedding.”

“But meanwhile they can’t live on nothing, Mat. They can’t live on Sebastian’s hundred a year.”

“I’m allowing ’em four hundred a year, just to keep ’em going.”

“But—Matthew——” Mrs. Johnson was completely astounded at her husband’s sudden magnificent disposal of half his income.

He winked at her; a slow and prodigious wink: “Ned Levi’s money, my dear; every cent of it. But not a word to Sebastian.”

Thus the plot stood revealed.

“I’m a great one for argerment,” continued Mr. Johnson; “and I said to him: ‘Levi’ I said, him and me being old pals, ‘Levi’ I said, ‘trade’s as good as any profession if we in trade like to consider any profession as good as us; and that’s logic. But since your jackanapes seems set against takin’ trade-money, what’s to prevent him refusing mine?’ Eh? That’s what I said.”

“And what is, Mat?”

“What is what?”

“To prevent him refusing yours?”

“It won’t be mine. It’ll be Ned Levi’s.”

“Yes, but what’s to prevent Sebastian refusing it, whoever of you it comes from?”

But Mr. Johnson seemed to think Sebastian was already “coming round.”

“I’ve noticed him different since a couple of weeks. More easy-like and anxious to please. Only he’s too proud to go galloping straight back to the Stores and say: ‘Please, sir, I was an ass, give me my partnership and fifteen hundred per annum.’ He’ll say it by degrees. And half of the whole boiling is his when Ned dies. Not but that Ned’s as young as I am, but he looks tired and worn, poor fellow; sort of wistful round the eyes when he said: ‘Johnson, it isn’t your dowry to your daughter he’ll object to; it’s only my help he won’t take; so it must reach him through a back door.’ But Sebastian Levi’s a good match for our girl, Frances, even if he’s gone temporary mad; now that I know his father’s not set against him, as I was afraid.”

Mrs. Johnson began: “I was wondering——” and relapsed into silence.

He encouraged her: “Speak up, old lady.”

“Whether we mightn’t announce the wedding officially at our Christmas dinner. Half the people don’t even know Letty’s engaged.”

“Have it your own way.”

“Yes, but I was wondering——”

“You’ll hurt yourself with wondering so much,” remarked Mr. Johnson facetiously.

“About inviting Mr. Levi. You see, he’s a Jew.”

“What of it? I don’t mind.”

“Nor do I. But does one, to a Christmas dinner?”

“Why not?... Oh! Ah!...” slowly in Mr. Johnson’s brain, an atmosphere of holly, plum-pudding, gifts, and jocularity, cleared away, to reveal for an instant the event for which the festival stood as symbol.

“Ah. Um.”

Mrs. Johnson folded up her work. “I’m going over to consult Millicent Baker; she knows more about Jews than we. I shouldn’t like to do the wrong thing about it, and hurt his feelings.”

Mrs. Baker, when the problem was formally laid before her, delivered judgment against. “He might not be able to eat the food. If it isn’t cooked Kosher. Of course, if you want to put yourself out——”

“I couldn’t possibly ask that much of Cook. When we’re twelve sitting down as it is. And I don’t think my father would care about a—what do you call it?—Kosher plum-pudding. It doesn’t sound convivial, does it?” doubtfully.

“And yet, Sebastian’s father has a right to be present, hasn’t he? Even if it makes extra trouble.” Mrs. Baker hovered uncertainly; the rich Ned Levi, she knew, was a widower; Mr. Baker had been in his grave since fourteen years.

“What I’m most afraid of,” Mrs. Johnson confessed, “is that he’ll feel bound to ask us back to one of his religious festivals,—that funny one where the Jews go up on the roof and eat pineapple.”

“Dear things,” murmured Mrs. Baker.

“I approve highly of all these picturesque customs,” explained the other lady, painstakingly. “But not for myself. Pineapple in large quantities disagrees with me. Especially the tinned kind. And I believe they have to sit cross-legged.”

Then Mrs. Baker, who on questions of etiquette was really invaluable, suggested the brilliant compromise that Mr. Levi, senior, should be invited to dine at Town House on Boxing Day.—“Or on the day after Boxing Day, to make it quite safe.”

“That wouldn’t be Christmas, really Christmas, at all any more, would it?” Considerably easier in her mind, now that the vexed question was settled, Mrs. Johnson returned home again; having first arranged that on the occasion of Mr. Levi’s visit, Mrs. Baker should “just drop in,” and aid in his entertainment, on the strength of her experience at Laura Silberstein’s wedding.

---

Letty stopped in front of a giant notice-board, which signified: “To Be Let Or Sold.”

“Want to shee inside dat house,” she announced, in coaxing baby language. “Oo, please, Sebastian, want to shee inside.” She tugged imperiously at his hand.

Behind the murky strip of garden, black windows glimmered faintly in a spectral building.

“Darling baby,” Sebastian replied, responding to her whim, “don’t you know that a big bogey-man lives behind that door, and you’ll hear his bones rattle through the letter-box?”

But Letty only tugged the harder, up the damp gravel path. “One can never tell,” stopping and facing him, her blue eyes very serious, her soft curls clinging to cheek and forehead, in little wet tendrils, “how soon we may want a house, now that father has grown nice to you.”

She might equally well have said: “Now that you’ve grown nice to me.” For never had she and Sebastian been so happy together, not even in their first days of courtship, as since their quarrel and reconciliation a fortnight ago. He no longer oppressed her with his moody fits, nor snubbed her when she strove to intrude on his remoteness; he even let her minister to one of his headaches, to her great content; moreover, he seemed possessed by a real lover’s craving for her constant companionship; and the note in his voice when he spoke her name, filled her with a tremulous wish to cry and laugh, both at the same time.

—How could she know he was being hounded day and night by an idea, and that he was striving to place her between the idea and himself? striving to stifle his eyes and ears with her, to cram himself with her, to the exclusion of all else. How should she guess that he dared not love her little, lest her presence should prove too feeble for its purpose; dared not love her much, because of the hard bite in a man’s voice saying: “At the height is the time to cut with any credit, my lad!”... Why, then the more he loaded Letty with his tenderness, the nearer he brought their passion to the height where——But he dared not love her less, nor yet more.

Sebastian had not been near Stuart, since the latter had, hornet-wise, stung his brain to a veritable madness of thought. Stung, and stung again, and left the sting within. Sebastian hated Stuart,—and Lord! how one could hate a man who was capable of such ruthless brutality as to treat love like some luxuriant but dangerous growth; cut it away for the sake of ... of what? This was where Sebastian always lost the idea; could sense it, indeed, far-off, taunting him for his lack of understanding:

“You’re not big enough. Not big enough.”

“He’s not human. Not human,” the boy would shout in reply.

He had perpetual nightmares of killing Stuart; actually hacking at him with a knife; searching for some vulnerable spot. But the blade would rebound against a hard invisible resistance.... The nightmare recurred again and again, tiring Sebastian, wearing him to tatters, with its frenzied futility.

—“Ooo! light a match, Sebastian; it’s so dark,” cried Letty, as the front door yielded to her timid pressure.

The blue flicker betrayed the interior of the house as quite new, smelling strongly of paint, completely devoid of furniture; the walls unpapered; the floors sonorous to the tramp of feet. Some boards and pails lying about, and a candle-end stuck into a bottle on the chimney-piece, betokened that the workmen were still employed there during the daytime.

“Well?” said Sebastian, watching with considerable amusement, as Letty, candle in hand, peeped into all the bare echoing apartments, evidently seeing in them far more than was apparent to the male eye. “Will it do for us? Which is to be my study?”

Solemnly she led him into what might have been a fair-sized cupboard.

“I protest!” cried Sebastian wrathfully. “You’re just a tyrant. This shall be my study.” And he planted himself firmly in the very largest room of all.

“The drawing-room, of course,” Letty contradicted, her voice holding vistas of many ‘At Home days.’ “And I can’t have your dirty boots all over the pink carpet. Oh, Sebastian, let’s pretend, a bit in each room, that we’re already living here; just to see what you’re like in a house of your own.”

They began their game in a phantom-ridden dining-room; at an imaginary breakfast-table.

“Lettice,” angrily, “this is the fifth bill I’ve had for rose chintz. You’ve had enough rose chintz to make a canopy for Hampstead Heath.”

“Oh, Sebastian, and I’ve only covered three tiny little cushions for your study. I do think you’re ungrateful.”

“I’ve told you sixty times I won’t have cushions in my study.”

“I’m only trying to make you comfortable.”

... A Vision, fading into the cold blue frosts that lay beyond comfort or cushions.... He had chosen. Not for him, the Vision. Another man had been stronger, pursued it and held it....

“Now you’re working hard at your desk,” commanded Letty, passing into the room behind. “And I come in and disturb you. I want to test your temper.”

“Seek not to know what the gods have in their mercy hidden,” laughed Sebastian, giving her the candle; she went into the passage, and shut the door on him; for an instant he was alone in the thick blackness.

... But he liked these stark naked rooms with their wide wash of window. What sort of an appearance would they present when furnished in a blend of Johnsonese and his own æstheticism? Letty, he knew, liked cheerful colours and a litter of knick-knacks—hateful word, knick-knacks—one would fall over them—they stood on rickety tables. He was beginning also to dislike his own previous notions about schemes and harmonies of decoration. They spread a cloying smoothness over his mind, fretting for harsher salter relief.... The idea was catching him again, here in the draughty dark.... In a panic he stumbled to the door, calling out her name: “Letty! Letty!”...

She entered with the candle:

“Darling, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but dinner is getting cold on the table. Sarah rang the gong three times,” reproachfully.

He remembered the game, then; and with an affectation of irritability, consigned Sarah and the gong both to the devil.

“Sebastian, you really must not use such language, even if you are busy.” She came up behind him, and put her arms round his neck. “Say you’re sorry!”

“You’ve smudged the page.”

“Say you’re sorry!”

—The game led them upstairs, to the bedrooms.

“Now it’s my turn to be inside,” suggested Letty. “You’ve come home late, oh, horribly late; and I’ve been waiting up for you.”

“I seem to have a pretty rotten character altogether in this show,” Sebastian objected. “What about you coming home late?”

“Wives don’t,” said Letty and a lovely colour flooded her face at the word she had unwittingly let slip.

He smiled. “Don’t they? All right, then we’ll both be coming home late; I refuse to be a prodigal, for you to bully me. We’ve been out together, Letty darling, and you’re dead tired; I think I have to carry you upstairs.” He strode ahead, and placed the candle on the window-sill of the front first-floor room. Then, his hands free, returned for his burden.

“Sebastian, you’re crushing me....”

“Let me undress you, you sleepy baby. Sit down while I pull the combs out of your hair ... what soft light masses ... like burying one’s hands in a snow-drift only it’s warm ... warm. Did you enjoy yourself, dancing with me to-night?”

“It was glorious; I’d rather waltz with you than anyone, Sebastian.”

“Even though I’m only your husband?”

A hush. While the spearhead of flame spun fantastic humped shadows over the ceiling.

... “What are you doing?” her voice was low as a lullaby.

“Taking off your absurd shoes, sweet. No, you’re not to do a thing for yourself; what am I here for?”

“To love me,” she murmured.

“To love you, Letty? Oh, Letty, it’s good to come home like this, to our own house. Drowsy little girl, you can shut your eyes now—now——”

—And now the room had miraculously furnished itself; long mirrors reflecting the silver on the toilet-table; great dark flowers patterned on the walls; in a recess, the shadowy blue gleam of a satin quilt, the twinkle of brass knobs.... The whole drear abode seemed suddenly astir with movement, as though their duet had quickened to life each chamber as they passed through. Somebody was singing overhead—empty hearths had burst into a glow—footsteps ran up and down the lit stairs—

“Letty!”

... Gone, that bleak vision which had tormented him. Vision which sometimes took the shape of a lean figure running, always running, against the wind. Triumphantly Sebastian recognized that it had lost its power with him; he had succeeded in shutting it out—shutting it out, please God, for always....

“Letty! Letty!”

Her name was the talisman; and her fragrance....

—“Sebastian dear, it’s time to go home, isn’t it? I’m just a wee bit cold.”

So they left behind them the empty house; and very close together, walked back to Turnham Green. As they drew near the gate of Town House, a familiar figure loomed in sight from the opposite direction.

“Hullo, Luke; been climbing the railway bank again?”

“No,” disgustedly; he had forsworn these childish pastimes fully two years ago. “I was just hanging about. Mater’s gone over to the Baker woman; I saw her cross the road.”

“Here she is,” cried Letty, as Mrs. Johnson joined them, with a cheery: “Well, children, had a nice afternoon, all of you? Coming in to have a bit of supper with us, Sebastian?”

He hesitated. “Mr. Johnson——”

“He’ll be delighted,” his wife promised. And indeed, Mr. Johnson’s amiability over the roast mutton was a thing to be remembered. The visit of Mr. Levi, senior, was not mentioned; but the marvelling lovers were informed they might fix their wedding-day for the near future, and formally announce the date at dinner on Christmas Day.

“Four o’clock,” Mrs. Johnson reminded Sebastian. “We always start dinner at four on Christmas day, and go on just as long as ever we like.”

“And don’t you take much breakfast, my boy,” put in Mr. Johnson; “just nibble at a bit o’ dry toast. For I warn you, you’ll need every bit of your appetite later on.”

CHAPTER VIII
THE DISCIPLE

“Christmas comes but once a year,
When it comes it brings good cheer!”

Granpa Cubitt’s sally was received with hearty cheers. And Luke whispered to Jinny: “He’s only starting now; you don’t know Granpa. He can make verses about anybody, jump up and make ’em. You’ll see.”

“Does it, though?” questioned Tommy Cox, à propos of Christmas and good cheer. The invited guests, complete in number, had been waiting in the drawing-room since five minutes to four,—and now it was eight minutes past, and no dinner had as yet been announced. “I tell you what,” continued Tommy disconsolately; “I believe Mrs. J. has humbugged us over turkey and plum-pudding; and brought us all here to starve us to death, just to show there’s no ill-feeling. Oooo! Muvver! Don’t want to be a skelington!” And he plumped himself down on the sofa, and with knuckles screwed into his eyes, pretended to floods of bitter weeping.

Granpa whispered to Letty: “What is that young man’s name, my dear?”

“Tommy Cox, Granpa.”

Rising to his feet, Granpa pointed with one finger towards the blubbering youth; and, lifting the other hand to enjoin silence, delivered himself of his first impromptu of the evening:

“Little Tommy Cox-o
Crying for his Oxo!
What shall we give him?
A Xmas box-o!”

“Now then, you young ladies, there’s a chance for you!”

Amid shouts of laughter, and “Bravo, Granpa!” Jinny ran forward, and with all her strength, smote Tommy upon the ear.

“A Xmas box-o!” she chanted triumphantly. And was only delivered from Tommy’s vengeance, by the timely appearance of Mrs. Johnson in the doorway. With quiet exaltation, she trumpeted forth the single word:

“Dinner.”

At once a hush fell upon the company. A hush of relief and expectation and a sense of the solemn rite unto which they were summoned. Mr. Johnson led the way to the dining-room, Aunt Lou panting upon his arm. Granpa followed with Mrs. Baker; and there ensued a real difficulty in getting them past the threshold, above which dangled a large bunch of mistletoe. Mrs. Johnson had purposely thrown the two together, as Milly Baker never took offence at a bit of fun, “and really, with father, you never know what he’ll be up to!” The next pair, Tommy Cox and Vi Baker, were a carefully-thought-out blend of merriment and sorrow; Vi had taken to drooping her head and refusing comfort, since she had given Ernie the chuck, and—“If Tommy can’t cheer her up, I don’t know who can!” reflected the hostess of the occasion. Sebastian and Letty were coupled as a matter of course; and Luke and Jinny. Mrs. Johnson herself brought up the rear with Balaam Atkins, who under a neatly dressed and well-bred exterior, concealed a heart that still beat faithfully for Letty. He did not know yet that she was formally betrothed to another; and Mrs. Johnson was sorry for him, aware that the blow would descend within the hour; she determined to make it her business that he should eat a good meal, believing that trouble always falls hardest on an empty stomach.

A thrill and a gasp ran round the assembly at first sight of the festive board, decorated profusely with holly and evergreens, and connected with the chandelier by trails of smilax. Red and blue and green crackers glittered in upright threes, like small bivouac fires; or lay scattered flat between the plentiful dishes of almonds and raisins and chocolates. On every lady’s name-card, Letty had tastefully painted a spray of holly, with a suitable sentiment attached; and on every gentleman’s, a robin redbreast. The glistening napkins were folded into boat-shapes, each beside a formidable array of glasses and tumblers, expressive of much conviviality to come. A miniature fir tree occupied the proud position of centre-piece, gaily bedecked with flags. Mrs. Johnson had spent much care and time on the arrangement of her table, and wore an expression of majestic geniality while her guests applauded, and, still with that touch of awe upon them, slid into their appointed places.

The soup was brought in, and doled out. Then arose a squeal from Jinny:

“Oo-er! my shoe!” she had been attempting to attract the attention of Luke, who, through some shuffling of seats, sat opposite instead of beside her. In an instant, Tommy Cox was underneath the table, disporting himself mightily among the slippers easily detachable, and continually bringing one up in his mouth, for Jinny’s inspection—“No, Tommy, no; mine’s a bronze one; that’s Vi’s!” And giggles from a rapidly brightening Violet Baker: “Well, I never! You have a sauce! Put it back where you found it, this very minute.”

Granpa cleared his throat impressively:

“Young man, you are much too bold,
You’ll have the lady catching cold!”

“How you do it, all of a sudden like that, beats me,” said Mrs. Baker admiringly. “Why, you’re quite a poet.”

Bang! went the first cracker, between Aunt Lou and her brother-in-law Mr. Johnson. And “Hooray!” cried Luke and Jinny in unison, taking this for permission to demolish the bivouacs, and start pulling across the table.

“Not till dessert, Luke. Put those crackers back at once. Matthew, I’m ashamed of you, setting such an example.”

“I can’t wait! I can’t wait!” bellowed Tommy the Humorist, holding a cracker to each eye, and squinting through, to find out what was inside.

“There’s beef for whoever wants it,” announced the carver, flourishing the knife over a prime large turkey.

Half-way through his portion of the bird—and a well-heaped-up portion too,—Granpa thought it about time that Sebastian and Letty should be brought into prominence. Enjoining silence, as he always did before casting his pearls, he sipped his claret, coughed and choked several times, waggled an arch and shining head, and spouted:

“I can see a red-haired lover
Who’s squeezing his best girl’s hand under the table cover.
I do not think I’ve need to name him,
And all I can say is: I don’t blame him.”

“Granpa! how can you?” cried Letty, confused and blushing; “I wasn’t,—I mean, he wasn’t.”

“Bless them ... dear innocent things ...” murmured Mrs. Baker, smoothing down the front of her prune-coloured silk wrappings and excrescences and fermentations. She was fearfully and wonderfully clad, this Xmas Day. Aunt Lou eyed her with suspicion. Aunt Lou considered Granpa not too old to make an old fool of himself. She was the only spinster daughter, a rosy bouncing lady, who wasn’t likely to stand a stepmother being put over her.

Sebastian laughed hilariously at Granpa’s joke; and continued laughing, even after the general mirth had died down. Letty thought she’d never seen him so lively; no, nor yet so handsome, dark eyes flaming in a dead-white face, lips wine-red and feverish, hair a ruffled auburn halo. “He’s like a god; he’s glorious,” thought Letty; and turned, girl-like, to Balaam Atkins on her other side, that she might compare him disparagingly with Sebastian.

Mr. Atkins murmured: “I don’t blame him either, Miss Letty,”—and suddenly she felt sorry for her discarded swain, who really was just the sort of man to have made her happy, with his neat normal ideas, and neat clothes, and neat bank-balance, and neat fair features. Sebastian might have resembled a god, but Balaam Atkins was simply a cut-out model of a good husband ... and did not contrast so very unfavourably after all.

With the entrance of the lit plum pudding, flanked on one side by the mince-pies, on the other by a very yellow trifle (not free from a faint suspicion of Bird’s custard powder), the last traces of restraint disappeared from the party. Jinny, quite forgetting such everyday things as manners, quite forgetting she wore her best pink dress with the Irish lace collar, sprang on to her chair, waved her spoon, and clamoured to be served first, before the leaping fires went out. Indulgently, because she was the youngest present, her wish was granted.

“Greedy pig!” cried Luke. And: “Jea-lous!” sang back Jinny, emulating the fire-eater’s celebrated act.

A few minutes later: “Mrs. Baker’s got the twins!” shrieked Tommy Cox, in an ecstasy of delight, snatching from that lady’s plate the linked china dolls, and dangling them aloft for the world to see.

“I believe she did it on purpose,” muttered Aunt Lou disgustedly. While Granpa chanted amorously to his giggling wriggling neighbour:

“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, Baker’s twins!
It ain’t no use tryin’ to gobble up your sins!
We all can spot ’em,
And wonder how you got ’em!”

“Father!!!” Mrs. Johnson had overheard, and was shocked beyond measure at her wicked old parent.

Jinny had the wedding-ring; and would much have preferred the threepenny-bit, which fell to Mr. Johnson’s share; wiping and pocketing the coin, he remarked waggishly that it would help pay for this dinner, which, as it was, had left him a Ruined Man. And then Aunt Lou took offence, and said there were plenty of invitations just as good that she and her father might have accepted if they’d known Matthew grudged them a morsel of bird and a fragment of pudding; and even if he only said it in fun, it wasn’t at all funny to make one’s guests feel uncomfortable, especially at Yuletide, which ought to be a season of peace-on-earth goodwill-to-men. Then Mr. Johnson apologized; and Aunt Lou, softened, wept a little, was pressed to a second helping of plum-pudding, and all was harmony again.

Violet Baker had found the old maid’s thimble under her spoon, but managed to conceal it; Tommy Cox was being very attentive, and there was no sense in putting him off from the start, so to speak.

At last, when the pudding-plates were removed, and replaced by mounds of oranges and figs and dates; when port gleamed duskily in every glass, and the nut-crackers were freely circulating, Mrs. Johnson gave the anxiously awaited signal for the crackers to be pulled. Then indeed, pandemonium reached its height; then indeed, every head, old and young, was drunkenly crowned by paper cap or bonnet; and: bang! bang! bang! the squibs exploded up and down the table. The cloth was one glittering litter of green and red transparency, all mixed up with the orange-peel and silver paper. Luke and Jinny had each a musical instrument at their lips, and squeaked and squawked ceaselessly, their cheeks blown out and purple with the exertion. Vi Baker and Tommy Cox had their heads very close together over a finger-bowl, in which they were experimenting with those Japanese puzzles that open out in water; his arm was around her waist; and she, transported by the hectic screaming excitement of Xmas, was content to leave it there. Granpa, who had donned a rakish gilt crown, between whose spikes one could glimpse the gas-light reflected in the naked polish of his cranium, was busy making a collection of mottoes, riddles and sentimental verse, from the crackers, and reading them aloud. From the kitchen below, quavered the third repetition of “Good King Wenceslas.” Balaam Atkins whispered to Letty, in a tone pregnant of mournful meaning: “I wonder—if I might venture—to ask you—to pull with me, Miss Letty?”—Then, utterly abashed, realized what construction might have been put upon his innocent demand; and dropped the cracker, and went down after it, and remained obliterated for quite a period of time. And Mrs. Baker, wearing a washer-woman’s bonnet, which had an air strangely and horribly appropriate, was dancing,—yes, actually dancing, with Aunt Lou Cubitt; all enmity forgotten in the sudden discovery that forty years ago they had met at the same terpsichorean school, where little girls in frilled pantaloons learnt to jig and reel and polka.—And: “Do you remember the Bluebell Schottische?” cried Aunt Lou; which led to the pleasing exhibition just mentioned, of two middle-aged ladies gathering up their skirts, and prancing and twirling down the narrow space of the room between the wall and the row of chairs.

“I used to be light as a fairy,” panted Mrs. Baker, regaining her seat.

Mr. and Mrs. Johnson exchanged a mute dialogue of glances, which might be curtly translated as: “When?” “Now.” And Mr. Johnson, glass in hand, rose to his feet.

“Speech! Speech!” cried Tommy Cox, thumping on the table.

“Ladies and gentlemen—and friends,” began Mr. Johnson, making a fine distinction. “I must hurry up with what I’m going to say, because I can see the gas is goin’ down, and I haven’t got a penny for the metre—leave alone for the meat!” Here he made a great show of being terrified of Aunt Lou’s disapproval; but she, mellowed by port, merely smiled benignly; and he went on: “And I wouldn’t like to talk to you in the dark, my friends, and lose sight of your beaming faces wreathed in happy smiles, as my pal Will Shakespeare once said,—or was it Granpa Cubitt? ’Pon my word, I’m getting mixed with all these poets.”

Whereat there was great applause, and Granpa was patted vigorously on the back.

“Who has added so richly to the evening’s entertainment,” said Mr. Johnson, in an inspired sentence all by itself. Then he recommenced:

“I think I can say, in which my wife joins me,” (cheers) “that nowhere in England, no, nor yet anywhere else, has a merrier party sat round any table, nor had a merrier Xmas.” (Chorus of assent.) “So may you all enjoy the best of luck till we meet over our next plum-pudding.”

—A groan from Jinny, to whom the thought was agony. And, amid the cheering and tattoo of feet which followed the host’s oratory, Balaam Atkins, suddenly coming to the fore, begged to propose a toast to The Ladies. Leave being vociferously given, he gave utterance, in precise, rather lugubrious tones, to the following rollicking bit of sentiment:

“Your eyes!
My eyes!
Your lips!
My lips!
Our eyes have met!
Our lip—not yet!
Here’s hoping!”

Then he sat down again.

“Here’s hoping!” cried Tommy Cox, clinking glasses with Vi Baker, and then with every other lady present. The rest of the gentlemen gallantly followed suit.

Mr. Johnson had remained on his feet, to intimate that he had not yet finished what he had to say. A meaning smile signified that something of importance lay behind his silence. So, by unanimous consent, voices were hushed to allow him to proceed.

“I am profiting of the festive occasion,” spoke Mr. Johnson, “and may I be propheting truly” (interval for laughter; and for the pun to be explained to Aunt Lou, who was almost asleep), “to make an announcement that to some of you will be a surprise, and to some won’t. It’s this: Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to fill your glasses and drink to the engagement of my only daughter with Mr. Sebastian Levi, here present.”

The enthusiasm was tremendous. Vi Baker came round the table to embrace her friend; Aunt Lou collapsed from sheer astonishment, and was heard vociferating that she had never dreamt of such a thing. Granpa composed an appropriate rhyme—threw it off with no trouble at all—which was forever lost to the world, because Jinny and Tommy Cox were relieving their overcharged feelings in a prolonged bout of hip-pip-pip-hurrahs! And Balaam Atkins took the news like the gentleman he was, and with a terrific effort, managed to ejaculate: “I hope you will be very, very happy, Miss Letty.” But Letty unfortunately did not hear him, in the general hubbub surrounding her.

“Before calling on my future son-in-law for a reply,” shouted Mr. Johnson, over the tumult, “I want to make him a little Christmas-box. I want to make it here, in front of you all. It’s the custom of the country, and I speak of the best country in the world, which is England” (“Rule Britannia!” yelled Tommy), “that the lady shall name the day. Well, I’m going to reverse that process. I’m a bold man, and I’m going to give Mrs. Grundy a rouser. Me and my wife and my daughter are going to sit mum, while the bridegroom now fixes the date of the wedding. It may be that he’ll say in a month; or it may be that he’ll get scared of the noose of matrimony—or shall I call it the noose-ance?” (loud laughter) “and plead for six months’ extension of liberty. Or it may be he’ll say to-morrow,—one never can tell with these fiery-headed young chaps how much delay they can stand!” (more laughter) “I just hope he’ll remember that young ladies need a little time to get together their frillies,—at least, so I’ve been told.” (“Go on! as if you didn’t know!” from Mrs. Baker, rather over-excited.) “Sebastian, my boy, it’s up to you.” Mr. Johnson sat down.

Amid acclamation, Sebastian was hauled to his feet. Letty gave his hand an encouraging squeeze.

“For he’s a jolly good fel-low!”

started Tommy Cox; in a burst of gruff enthusiasm, Luke joined in; and then the rest of the company.

“—And so say all of us!”

... They were silent now, waiting for Sebastian.

Past the heat and the uproar and the odour of food, past the coarse laughter and good-humoured jokes, the grinning capped faces, and the disorderly table, Sebastian glimpsed it clearly, his Vision ... never before as clearly: a lean stripped figure, striving, battling, forcing itself against the rushing winds of earth; hands clenched, jaw pushed forward ... yes, surely it was Stuart’s face he saw!

—These others should share the vision with him. He was about to sacrifice to it—these others should understand why. He knew now to what point he had been goaded through all the sweetness of the past weeks, through all the gabble and gobble of the past hour. He knew. He wasn’t going to flinch. Boring a hole in the wind with the thrust of one’s own body.... If Stuart could do it, he could.

The first notes of his voice startled his hearers; it seemed pitched somehow in the wrong key; neither jocular nor embarrassed:

“I can’t fix a day for the wedding, as Mr. Johnson has asked me to. I—there won’t be a wedding. My engagement with Letty is broken off.”

—Suddenly he wanted to laugh. Granpa’s face, just opposite, looked so funny in its dropped amazement, the gilt crown at a crooked angle on the shining poll.... Everyone’s face was funny—staring—staring—round eyes and open mouths wherever he looked—like waxworks. Letty ... well, Letty was beside him. He need not see her unless he turned his head....

“You all think me quite mad,” Sebastian went on, after a pause. “Well, and I think you mad, all of you. I’ve been thinking so all through dinner. Because you can’t see anything beyond the dining-room table, and what’s on it. If I married Letty, I should have to sit for the rest of my life at a dining-room table, looking at the food. It would be warm and comfortable and satisfying, and in time I should grow as mad as you. I very nearly did. But I’m sane now—and I’m bitten with the horror of getting all one wants, and going on getting it, and not wanting any more. Giving up Letty now, I shall want her my whole life long ... for I love her—do you understand that? Of course, you think one shouldn’t speak of love except to be funny about it—but you’ve got to realize that I love her, every bit of her; that I love her, and I’m giving her up—and oh, God! how it hurts.... How good that it should hurt....”

He bowed his face on to his hands, unable for an instant to grapple with the swift salt cruelty of self-torment. From beside him, came the sound of soft weeping. There was to be no splendid help from Letty, in his renunciation; quite simply, she laid her head down on her arms and sobbed, because she didn’t know what was the matter with Sebastian,—oh, what was the matter with him, that he should be so unkind?

Luke was gazing, wide-eyed, mouth gaping; he had not understood a single word of Sebastian’s discourse, but, nevertheless, his soul was one flame of admiration. A half-fearful hope of happiness was stiffening the limp spirit of Balaam Atkins. But Mr. Johnson, on whose brow a ponderous wrath had gathered, burst out, almost apoplectic with rage:

“Let me tell you, sir, that if you’re not a lunatic, you’re a blackguard. You’re behaving like a blackguard!”

Sebastian raised his head: “I’ve told you that I want her,” he cried fiercely; “is that behaving like a blackguard, not to take what you want?—But you’re thick, every one of you; thick with food and drink. Can’t you get clear of your flesh for a moment, and get a grip of—of—— Look here, this is neither my creed nor my credit: it’s another man’s ... he’s done it, I tell you—stripped himself of love, because it’s better to desire than to possess. If you’re strong enough.... If you’re strong enough. I gave up my solid income, and my solid position in the world,—didn’t that show you I must have had some keener leaner ideal than just welfare? Or did you merely think me possessed?... But it’s splendid, I tell you, to be possessed; possessed by the truth; driven by it—hounded—tortured—till you cast away all goods, all ties,—run a race against your own luck—outstrip your own luck—just for the fun of it—throw off the bondage ... bondage of great deeds....”

He was repeating Stuart’s catch-phrases now; flinging them out mechanically, hoping they would sting some blind understanding, where his own eloquence had failed.

And then his mood changed, as he discovered it didn’t matter if these people understood or not; he had done his part; done what Stuart Heron had done before him: cut away love....

—“That the memory of love shall be like a sword-blade,” he muttered half-aloud; but the words meant nothing—they tasted dry. Letty’s sobs were each a separate pang in his heart. The Vision, having spurred him to the culminating burst of exaltation, now deserted him altogether. He did not know any more for what strange reasons he had performed this strange act. But since the master knew, that was sufficient; the disciple was content to follow blindly. He would go now and lay his shattered world as a tribute at Stuart’s feet ... where he had already laid his father’s disappointment ... his own ambitions. His shattered world at Stuart’s feet.

He pushed back his chair, and stumbled to the door. Nobody tried to stop him. He had paralysed the happy Christmas party, so that no sound broke through the leaden silence ... even Letty was quiet now. Sebastian groped among the overcoats hanging from the hall rack—so many overcoats—he was quite incapable of recognizing his own. Did it matter, after all? But still he took down first one and then another from their pegs, and replaced them, stifled by the musty folds. A wreath of holly, which encircled the mirror set in the rack, tumbled to the ground. Sebastian picked it up, stood in a dazed fashion, the thorns pricking his fingers: was there no end to the damage he was doing these people’s Yule?

Mrs. Johnson led her weeping daughter from the dining-room, and up the stairs. They passed Sebastian as if he did not exist.

... “Oh, mother, how could he, in front of them all, say that he didn’t love me any more?”...

So much for Letty’s comprehension of motive. Sebastian laughed hysterically, and banged the hall door behind him. Half-way up the road, he looked back, and saw Luke signalling to him from the gate. He went on. Could not be bothered with the boy. Stuart—he was going to Stuart.

Disappointedly, Luke turned back into the house. On the threshold he was met by Jinny:

“Everybody’s so horrid. Wasn’t he a beast to spoil all our fun? Luke, do let’s get away from everybody for a bit, till they’ve calmed down. I’ve bagged some chocs from the table.” She displayed them, moist and brown, clenched in her hot hands. She looked very pretty, in her bright pink dress and coral beads. Luke surveyed her a moment. Then he said:

“I don’t want any chocs. And I’m not ever going to see you again, Jinny, old girl. At least, not if I can help it”; he remembered the proximity of her dwelling.

Jinny dropped her spoils; and, crimson with anger and surprise, gasped out:

“Well I never! You potty too!”

“No,” retorted Luke, kicking with his foot against the top step, “I’m not potty, and nor’s he. You girls don’t understand, that’s all. There are things we can do better without you. Things!” he repeated darkly, wondering the while what they were. “Girls are soft——”

“We’re not soft. Soft yourself!”

“I don’t mean that sort of soft. And the more we care for you, the finer it is of us to break with you.” He had grasped this much from Sebastian’s outburst. “So you see, Jinny——”

But Jinny was neither as submissive as Letty, nor as responsive as Peter, under similar treatment.

“Break with me, indeed!” tossing her curls indignantly, while the big pink satin bow at the nape of her neck, perked out in aggressive sympathy; “well, you have got a cheek on you, Luke Johnson. Got to be on with a girl before you’re off with her, I’ve always heard. And you were never on with me, that I’m jolly well sure. No, nor likely to be,—a great gawky lumpy-faced boy!”

She picked up her coat, which was lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the hall-stand, and flouncing past her stricken sweetheart, marched down the four steps of Town House, and up the four steps of Arcadia, next door.

—Luke made a sudden forward dive over the stone parapet that divided them, and caught Jinny awkwardly by her skirt:

“Let me go!” she twisted round, that he might not see the tears which scalded her eyes.

“Jinny,” his voice was low; “it’s—I was only joking, y’know. It’s all right about the panto to-morrow, isn’t it?”

“Not so sure.”

“Jinny!”

“Oh,—I suppose so!” she detached herself from his grasp, and vanished indoors.

Luke had not been able to pull it off, after all. Not quite.

CHAPTER IX
THE MASTER

“Mr. Heron is dressing, sir.” The butler at Careton House Terrace looked with some disfavour at the dishevelled wild-eyed young man, who at 7 p.m. on Christmas Day, rang such frenzied peals at the bell, and asked for the son of the house, in such strange husky tones. It wasn’t usual; and the butler’s reply contained a tinge of severity mingled with its formal respect.

“I’ll go up to him.” Brushing past the astonished retainer, Sebastian rushed up the two flights of stairs; and, without knocking, entered Stuart’s bedroom.

Stuart, in evening-dress, was standing before the mirror, and polishing his eyeglass. “You, Levi? Why, what’s the matter?”

Sebastian stood just within the door, limbs and tongue alike paralysed of movement. There was so much—so much he had need to say to Stuart: the words buzzed and beat in his brain like swarms of hornets. All through his headlong passage through the deserted streets, he had been working up and up to this moment. He wanted to shout what he had done, and how he had done it; he wanted to assure Stuart over and over again that he regretted nothing, no, not even Letty; that he was grateful to the master for rescuing him from happiness, pointing out to him the cold path among the stars.... Stars? but they weren’t cold; they were throbbing hot—green and blue and red—like the glistening paper that was wrapped around a cracker ... and they were jigging and squibbing and somersaulting in front of his eyes—tumbling wheeling stars ... or were they sobs? Ridiculous! one couldn’t see sobs.... Somebody had been sobbing lately, he knew....

He took an uncertain step forward, held out his hands towards Stuart,—then reeled over into a chair, head dropped on to his arms.... He had to thank Stuart—was thanking him now—heard his own voice babbling the phrase over and over again.... “Curse you.... Curse you....”

He had not meant to say it. He had meant to say exactly the contrary: “I’ve done what you once did; you showed me the way; you——” But things were happening to him now totally beyond his own volition. The exultation of his deed accomplished transported him, maddened him, to strange contortions of speech, outside all reason:

“Curse you.... Curse you....”

In silence Stuart stood looking down upon the boy. He guessed what had happened; had anticipated, ever since their last conversation, that Sebastian would come bursting in upon him, to relate that he had smashed with Letty. It was better so; the two would never have understood each other rightly. And yet—wasn’t it a pity, after all, to have destroyed an idyll? A sudden remorse swept over Stuart; and with it, an awful desolation of uncertainty: What had he been doing with other people’s lives?... His metaphysics dropped away from under his feet, leaving him treading upon a void. For one wont to be so quietly sanely self-confident, the sensation was horrible. He could not remain any longer where he was, in the same room with ... with the wreckage. Stuart left Sebastian; went slowly down, and into his study. He was entertaining a large party of family and friends that evening at the Carlton; was already due at the Restaurant; felt disinclined to start. He strolled to the window, and looked out; the street wore that blank forlorn look which falls upon chimney-top and pavement on Christmas Day. Only once before had Stuart been so utterly miserable, so incomplete in himself, clutching for some outside reassurance that he existed at all; he had gone to Merle then, and laid his head in her lap, and she had asked no questions. But now Merle was on her honeymoon in France. And, besides, it was not Merle he wanted....

He crossed the room to the telephone. Was there any reason why he should not get what he wanted most? Only his theory—slippery ball on the summit of which he had insecurely balanced himself. It would be rather fun to jump off his own theory, and kick it away, hear it go bounding and bouncing on its course! Great fun! argued leprechaun.

—“Trunk. 904 Thatch Lane.”

It took some time before the connection was established. Stuart sat on the arm of a chair, and looked hard at the receiver. Presently the whir of the bell shrilled in his ear. It startled him, even though he was waiting for it so intently.

“Hello!”

... “Hello!” Evidently the maid at Bloemfontein.

“Can I speak to Miss Kyndersley, please?”

It never struck him that she might be out. She would not be out. That sort of thing had always happened right for him and Peter.

“Yes, sir. What name?”

“No name.”

After a pause, Peter’s voice:

“Hello!”

“Hello—Peter!”

She knew at once. He could tell that by the silence. That was like Peter; she would not reply till in control of her tumbled feelings.

At last: “A Merry Christmas to you, Stuart!”

Her mocking accent, in a vivid flash of memory, brought her image to his mind, as he had first seen her: Cavalier poise of the head; boyish figure wrapped close in a bronze cloak, shimmering gold where the light caught it, umber in its shadowy folds; a tingle about her movements, as of some hazardous quest in the air. His master-maid!... And what had he to do with loneliness now?

—“Peter, I want to take you home from Euston to Thatch Lane—to-night—at once. May I?”

A low gurgle of laughter:

“But, dear, I’m due in ten minutes at the Lorrimers’. They have a party.”

“And I’m due since half an hour at the Carlton. I have a party. Peter ... will you come?”

“To your party?”

“No. My God, no. Baldwin will look after all that. To Euston?” Silence again.... He was sure she had gone away from the receiver:

“Peter! Peter! Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come?”

“Yes, Stuart.”

Quarter of an hour later, and his car was whirling him through the grim portals of Euston Station. The grey fogs clung thicker than ever about the great outer hall. The porters moved about like hobgoblins in a dream. Speechless and voiceless they all seemed, and yet the vaulted roof echoed and re-echoed with ceaseless hollow shouts. By dint of enquiries, Stuart found out that the 5.17 from Leaford, four stations further down the line than Thatch Lane, due at Euston since 6.20, had probably not yet started on its languid career, and need certainly not be expected at Euston till somewhere in the environment of nine o’clock. The giant clock pointed with its hands to three minutes past eight.

“That ull be the next h’in from Thatch Lane, sir. We’re bound to be a bit h’unpunctual Christmas-time. There’s the mails, sir. And people leavin’ their ’omes. An’ it’s a bit thick on the line further down, maybe. Thank you, sir.”

Throughout his life, Stuart vowed he did ample penance for his crowded sins, by this interminable period of waiting. He had forgotten now all about Sebastian; all about his remorse; the blanket of desolation had lifted from his spirit. He was merely one concentrated throb of impatience. Occasionally he dogged station-masters or signals, in the hope that these might be induced to render up their prey. Their prey was the 5.17 from Leaford. But they were immutable. Once he worked, feverishly, at an automatic machine, inducing it to yield box after box of matches, in order to feel that he could, of his own accord, make something move, even clockwork. Ghostly trucks clanked up and down the platforms; drifting wraiths asked him if he knew when and where impossible trains started for impossible places; he strove to give them all the help in his power, in order to placate the dark gods of Euston.

At twenty-five minutes past nine, the red eye of an engine glimmered far down the stretching parallels of steel; and Stuart was informed that this, in all probability, was the Leaford 5.17. Not even now would the porter commit himself to a certainty; this was the season when freakish spirits controlled the great terminus.

The linked cubes of light drew up beside the platform; doors opened, and people tumbled forth, an ever thickening crowd.

—Then Stuart saw Peter. She was walking swiftly in his direction. He moved forward to meet her. Silently, side by side, they went on to the barrier.

“We must see at once about your train to Thatch Lane,” said Stuart at last, in strictly matter-of-fact tones.

She replied gravely: “Yes, we mustn’t miss it on any account.” But her lips twitched a little at the corners.

Stuart’s star, evidently again in working order, manœuvred that the 7.41 to Leaford, stopping at Thatch Lane, should be girding its loins for departure, just as the pair strolled on to number four platform. They found an empty first-class compartment. The train still lingered; the guard seemed loth to wave his green flag; toyed with it, instead, and exchanged light badinage with the stoker. Stuart felt incapable of uttering a word till they were actually moving. Only the gathering speed could put an end to this intolerable strain. He examined the coloured photographs above the seats. The engine breathed heavily, crawled a couple of inches.... Stuart’s nerves jumped with relief!... then the 7.41 settled again into comfortable lethargy. It was only twenty to ten.

“Are you most interested in cathedrals or waterfalls?” came Peter’s cool voice, from the corner where she had ensconced herself. Stuart continued a dogged interest in the photographs. Cool?—he knew she was aflame, even as he. But they could both maintain their imperturbability ... for a few moments still.

After a little more coy reluctance, the engine decided firmly that this really wouldn’t do! and with a jolt and a shiver, tore headlong from the temptations of Euston, into the spectral beyond.

Stuart turned and looked at Peter.... She held out her hand:

“Give me a cigarette.”

Grimly he obeyed; and even shielded the match for her. Twice, deliberately, she inhaled, and puffed out the smoke. Then their eyes met again.... She rose, and through the partially open window, tossed the remainder of her cigarette. It fell away in a shower of sparks. Her action snapped the invisible rod which was holding them apart.... He crushed her against him. They rocked slightly with the motion of the train. Then, slowly, he loosened his grip. Her head fell back, so that her eyes were half-veiled by their lids. And he stammered:

“Your throat is as white as foam ... and curved ... like the curve of a wave!” From some dim memory the phrase had leapt into his mind, and he spoke it.

“Peter, I love you.”

“The love of a leprechaun?”

“No. The love of a man. A quite ordinary man.... Will you marry me, Peter?” he knelt crouching beside her, where she bent down to him from her seat.

“Peter, I shall always love you ... now and for ever and for all time. I want you near me, in my house, close up to me, bearing my name. My wife ... damn you, don’t laugh! I’m not pretending—I am an ordinary man. I refuse to be treated any longer as a freak. I want to go on a honeymoon with you, Peter, to Paris and Italy, where all nice people go. I want to be just happy. No; I want you to be happy. I’ll buy you a ring, and introduce you to my mother, and furnish a house with you, and give dinner-parties, and——”

“Stuart, are you mad?” she cried, aghast. For Stuart to behave so sanely was indeed a most alarming sign of madness in him.

“Will you marry me, Peter?”

“I might as well put on a hair-shirt for the rest of my existence.” Then she looked down at the round dark head tilted back on to her lap; met his elfish, yet strangely tender smile; and, with a tightening of love which was almost painful in its intensity, tried to fix the moment—this moment within sight and sound of him—to stand for the blank moment which she knew lay inevitably ahead of her. The girl had no illusions as to the fate of those who link their happiness with something not quite human. The last six months had taught her. The memory of them was like black seas rolling foamless on to a dark shore. When the next theory seized him....

Politely she enquired after the last.

“I’ve rolled it down the hill,” Stuart confessed. “But I’ve had enormous fun with it. I’ve sacrificed to it, and I’ve argued against it—that was with Aureole and Ber——” he stopped just in time, and hastily covered his blunder: “and I’ve dangled it in front of a disciple, and I’ve treated it like a football. Really, a theory is a most excellent occupation!” And then he told her about Letty and Sebastian.

Peter listened thoughtfully:

“So they’ve broken away from each other, just as we did?”

“Something like that. I don’t expect they accomplished it as cleanly. Sebastian’s methods are inclined to be messy or theatrical. In fact, it was he who managed to put me off my ideas; he overdid them so disgracefully. And I doubt if he ever took a firm and logical grasp of them.”

“Then why—oh, Stuart, why didn’t you leave him alone?”

Stuart knitted his brows. “It was a good theory,” he said, in much the same tone as the Mad Hatter once pleaded: “It was the best butter!”

“But you’ve doubled back on it now.”

“Exactly. So somebody’s got to prove it, if I don’t. Hang it! one can’t leave theories lying loose about the world.”

“I’m thinking of Letty,” said Peter softly, flooded by pity for the girl now groping helplessly after her mate, not understanding why she had been deprived of him. She, Peter, had understood at the time—it hadn’t been so hard for her. “Oh, poor Letty ... poor little lovers....”

Stuart interrupted, rather uneasily: “She’ll marry a bank clerk, and be grateful to me for the rest of her life. Really and truly, Peter, I was trying to help them. They’d have been so miserable together. People who are blind, must be helped.”

—The train drew up with a jerk at a station. Bewildered by this abrupt cessation to the speed at which they had been hurled through streaming space, Stuart scrambled to his feet. Grey fretting ghost-figures hurried past their window. He watched them, himself dreamily calm; it was inconceivable that anything from the outer world could break through the enchantment which held their compartment aloof and inviolate from all intrusion. Nevertheless, an intrepid hand suddenly clutched at the door-handle, turned it sharply, called to someone behind: “Plenty of room in here!”—And, before any preventive measures could be taken, two large women collapsed on the seat opposite Stuart and Peter.... And the train rushed on.

Stuart’s lips moved. If it were in prayer, then it was prayer of a very perverted form.

And Peter wondered, despairingly, if these were real females, or grotesque fiends sent by the night to torment them. They seemed to her fancy, preternaturally enormous. As never before, she craved now the bruise of Stuart’s lips, hard as iron; the lean, strong grip of his hands; tangible reassurance that he had indeed come back to her. If she could hold him as though he were a child, his head in the crook of her arm, if she could soothe those restless quick-moving limbs of his to a lulled content.... She glanced hopelessly at the two large women eating belated mince-pies from a paper bag. Then, in a low voice, asked Stuart if he had been present at Merle’s wedding. She had read accounts of it in the papers; it had been a magnificent function.

“Yes, I was there; so was the whole diplomatic world, ministerial, ambassadorial——”

“Never mind. Tell me about Jean de Cler.”

“He’s the right sort, I think,” Stuart granted handsomely. “Grey at the temples, distinguished, chivalrous; with that inborn ease of manner which marks the blue blood of the ‘ancien régime’—or something of the kind. He evidently adores Merle, and will spend his life cherishing her.”

“And she? Does she want to be cherished?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “She can’t help liking him—very much, I should say. And she’ll be in the milieu which suits her best. Probably she’ll think of us sometimes, and be tormented—but she was never quite a pirate, you know; she only wore the costume. The wedding-dress suited her better; I’ve never seen anyone look so beautiful.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“For one second I pressed near enough to offer my congratulations.”

“In what form?”

“I said: ‘There was once a pig, Merle, who lived in a sty in Cornwall.’ And she smiled.—‘There were once two girls, Stuart, who sat in a trough that belonged to a pig who lived in a sty in Cornwall.’ Then Madame des Essarts wafted me out of the way; I believe she regards me as an unhealthy influence.”

... “There were once two girls, Stuart——” Peter understood why Merle had made no sign, had not invited her to the wedding. The jewel had definitely accepted her casket lined with pink; dared not risk the raising of the lid....

The large women had been listening with absorbed interest to the account of the wedding. Now, as the train slowed up again at the station before Thatch Lane, they gathered together their belongings, and departed.

For the two in their cramped galloping space of light, the circle of enchantment joined again as though it had never been snapped. The humid night whirled past their window. Stuart bent towards the girl; took her in his arms: “Lie still, dear,” ... and for the second time Peter lay still; mind and body and soul, still.

And, sighing, she wished this journey were already over—that already she were lying in bed—already asleep—and already waking at dawn to the knowledge of a world which again held Stuart.

There had been another dawn....

---

—“Because he did it ...” murmured the disciple.

THE END

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A STRIKING NOVEL