The Judge

by Rebecca West

III

More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called that her mother had that morning said something about spending the afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again, "Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible derider.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped. "Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully, putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what they've lost...."

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.

Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river, overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel, weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one need! Ah, but it was now.

If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart. She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight, that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks. She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....

Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet; her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.

His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was, and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as they had always looked on any night.

"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.

"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love you."

Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.

"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till, feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're getting wet! Darling, let us go in."

When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark, and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call me little? I am not little!"

He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going to be of some high kind of glory.

He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists; they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me," was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find that she too was whispering.

"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without touching you. Please ... please...."

Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when, between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her) as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer, soft as the south wind....

But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard, interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage, of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things. Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.

A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity: "Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."

They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.

Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.

"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you ... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy café table; men bent forward on their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.

"Ellen—you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved, that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."

He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.

"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic. I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary women. Vin Ordinaire. Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the spell—you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity, since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover; but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of disloyalty to some fair standard.

He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me! I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"

She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're not miserable, are you?"

"Sometimes. I have been lately."

"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong—and victorious! But why?"

"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."

"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of organisation," she gravely told him.

"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there, and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do, although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers. You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you. Dearest, when can we get married?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a wife?"

He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep two."

She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston say so."

He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"

"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...." She looked down, weighing grave things.

"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."

She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.

"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got. Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls, stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money. Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."

She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?" she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"

"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money. I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge—the same kind of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a person by being with them all the time and loving them very much. Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But, dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to marry me."

"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."

"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am! Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you, how little I deserve you."

"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer, living in a house with you, won't it?"

He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again—for he knew she did not like him to say it!—such a little thing. He remembered, with a sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean. He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi' our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.

Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality, felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white. "What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry. "Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.

It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks, Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house—he rolled his tongue round the loneliness repellently—had neither sent the cheque on to her nor asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of property"—it was evident that he admired such—saw a prospect of getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was," and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.

"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day, looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what—she called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!—I kenned there was not her like under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?" Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here, as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."

Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man. Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money? Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity. Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the world.

Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a rôle. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in gratitude, and found her looking at him.

"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."

The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on her bosom. "I want—I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a religion.

They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr. Gladstone!

Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird, appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen! And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr. Yaverland into the parlour!"

"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a guilty little girl.

Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to marry me."

Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.

Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."

Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!

"Let me marry her soon," he said.

She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."

"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.

She became tragic.

"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you. Obviously you can't stand this climate."

She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well. I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man than anyone has allowed."

They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly, "Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."

"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland—maircy me, what shall I call you now?"

"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."

"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing! Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."

"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly. It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R—Richard, will you take her into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not hear?"

"Ellen dear!"

"Away now!"

"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the best tablecloth after the mending—and there's nothing but cod-roes, and you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away, dear—you'll make Richard feel awkward—"

Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.