"You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of self-exposure to which the profession you were taking up would commit you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm only taking my cue from you."
"I don't know what I may have said then," replied Miriam, whose steady flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; "I was no doubt already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than it is. One warms it a bit one's self when once one's in. Of course I'm a contortionist and of course there's a hateful side, but don't you see how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of those who are ready to insist on the other side, the grand one, and especially on the sympathy of the person who's ready to insist most and to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for everything?"
"The element—?" Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably exaggerated. "Do you mean your success?"
"I mean what you've so often been eloquent about," she returned with an indulgent shrug—"the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah there's where life can help us," she broke out with a change of tone, "there's where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy and suffering and experience—I don't know what to call 'em! They suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say; they make them appear worth doing." She became radiant a while, as if with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: "I must tell you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!"
He stood there looking at her for a time during which her eyes sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation—the bleared, irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief space of his glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted was something that was not in that thick prospect. What was the meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of "art," this senseless, mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to damnation: what commission after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial, compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things.
An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge. This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery—it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies—that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam's warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself—had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to Saint John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably—the small hours having come—to see what her young charges were "up to." She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was one small spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.
Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.
"Don't let us part so harshly," she said—"with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking—we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure—when you've such a capital one. Try it, try it, my dear friend—you'll see! I wish you the highest promotion and the quickest—every success and every reward. When you've got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been dreadful now."
"Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this," he answered, holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell she had chosen finally to torment him with. "Are you ready to follow up by a definite promise your implied assurance that I've a remedy?"
"A definite promise?" Miriam benignly gazed—it was the perfection of indirectness. "I don't 'imply' that you've a remedy. I declare it on the house-tops. That delightful girl—"