: THE GLORY OF :

CLEMENTINA WING

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

IDOLS

SEPTIMUS

DERELICTS

THE USURPER

WHERE LOVE IS

THE WHITE DOVE

SIMON THE JESTER

A STUDY IN SHADOWS

THE BELOVED VAGABOND

AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA

THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE

THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE

:: THE GLORY OF ::

CLEMENTINA WING

BY

WILLIAM J. LOCKE

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXI

THE BALLANTYNE PRESS TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON

: THE GLORY OF :

CLEMENTINA WING

CHAPTER I

Unless you knew that by taking a few turnings in any direction and walking for five minutes you would inevitably come into one of the great, clashing, shrieking thoroughfares of London, you might think that Romney Place, Chelsea, was situated in some world-forgotten cathedral city. Why it is called a “place,” history does not record. It is simply a street, or double terrace, the quietest, sedatest, most unruffled, most old-maidish street you can imagine. Its primness is painful. It is rigorously closed to organ-grinders and German bands; and itinerant vendors of coal would have as much hope of selling their wares inside the British Museum as of attracting custom in Romney Place by their raucous appeal. Little dogs on leads and lazy Persian cats are its genii loci. It consists of a double row of little Early Victorian houses, each having a basement protected by area railings, an entrance floor reached by a prim little flight of steps, and an upper floor. Three little houses close one end of the street, a sleepy little modern church masks the other. Each house has a tiny back garden which, on the south side, owing to the gradual slope of the ground riverwards, is on a level with the basement floor and thus on a lower level than the street. Some of the houses on this south side are constructed with a studio on the garden level running the whole height of the house. A sloping skylight in the roof admits the precious north light, and a French window leads on to the garden. A gallery runs round the studio, on a level and in communication with the entrance floor; and from this to the ground is a spiral staircase.

From such a gallery did Tommy Burgrave, one November afternoon, look down into the studio of Clementina Wing. She was not alone, as he had expected; for in front of an easel carrying a nearly finished portrait stood the original, a pretty, dainty girl accompanied by a well-dressed, well-fed, bullet-headed, bull-necked, commonplace young man. Clementina, on hearing footsteps, looked up.

“I’m sorry——” he began. “They didn’t tell me——”

“Don’t run away. We’re quite through with the sitting. Come down. This is Mr. Burgrave, a neighbour of mine,” she explained. “Tries to paint, too—Miss Etta Concannon—Captain Hilyard.”

She performed perfunctory introductions. The group lingered round the portrait for a few moments, and then the girl and the young man went away. Clementina scrutinised the picture, sighed, pushed the easel to a corner of the studio and drew up another one into the light. Tommy sat on the model-throne and lit a cigarette.

“Who’s the man?”

“This?” asked Clementina, pointing to the new portrait, that of a stout and comfortable-looking gentleman.

“No. The man with Miss Etta Something. I like the name Etta.”

“He’s engaged to her. I told you his name, Captain Hilyard. He called for her. I don’t like him,” replied Clementina, whose language was abrupt.

“He looks rather a brute—and she’s as pretty as paint. It must be awful hard lines on a girl when she gets hold of a bad lot.”

“You’re right,” she said, gathering up palette and brushes. Then she turned on him. “What are you wasting precious daylight for? Why aren’t you at work?”

“I feel rather limp this afternoon, and want stimulating. So I thought I’d come in. Can I stay?”

“Oh Lord, yes, you can stay,” said Clementina, dabbing a vicious bit of paint on the canvas and stepping back to observe the effect. “Though you limp young men who need stimulating make me tired—as tired,” she added, with another stroke, “as this horrible fat man’s trousers.”

“I don’t see why you need have painted his trousers. Why not have made him half-length?”

“Because he’s the kind of cheesemonger that wants value for his money. If I cut him off at the waist he would think he was cheated. He pays to have his hideous trousers painted, and so I paint them.”

“But you’re an artist, Clementina.”

“I got over the disease long ago,” she replied grimly, still dabbing at the creases of the abominable and unmentionable garments. “A woman of my age and appearance hasn’t any illusions left. If she has, she’s a fool. I paint portraits for money, so that one of these days I may be able to retire from trade and be a lady. Bah! Art! Look at that!”

“Hi! Stop!” laughed Tommy, as soon as the result of the fresh brush-stroke was revealed. “Don’t make the infernal things more hideous than they are already.”

“That’s where I get ‘character,’ ” she said sarcastically. “People like it. They say ‘How rugged! How strong! How expressive!’ Look at the fat, self-satisfied old pig!—and they pay me in guineas where the rest of you high artistic people get shillings. If I had the courage of my convictions and painted him with a snout, they’d pay me in lacs of rupees. Art! Don’t talk of it. I’m sick of it.”

“All right,” said Tommy, calmly puffing away at his cigarette, “I won’t. Art is long and the talk about it is longer, thank God. So it will keep.”

He was a fresh-faced, fair-haired boy of two-and-twenty, and the chartered libertine of Clementina’s exclusive studio. His uncle, Ephraim Quixtus, had married a distant relation of Clementina, so, in a vague way, she was a family connection. To this fact he owed acquaintance with her—indeed, he had known her dimly from boyhood; but his intimacy he owed to a certain charm and candour of youth which found him favour in her not very tolerant eyes.

He sat on the model-throne, clasping his knee, and, wonderingly, admiringly, watched her paint. For all her cynical depreciation of her art, she was a portrait-painter of high rank, possessing the portrait-painter’s magical gift of getting at essentials, of splashing the very soul, miserable or noble, of the subject upon the canvas. She had a rough, brilliant method, direct and uncompromising as her speech. To see her at work was at once Tommy Burgrave’s delight and his despair. Had she been a young and pretty woman, his masculine vanity might have smarted. But Clementina, with her ugliness, gruffness, and untidiness, scarcely ranked as a woman in his disingenuous mind. You couldn’t possibly fall in love with her; no one could ever have fallen in love with her. And she, of course, had never had the remotest idea of falling in love with anybody. To his boyish fancy, Clementina in love was a grotesque conception. Besides, she might be any age. He decided that she must be about fifty. But when you made allowances for her gruffness and eccentricities, you found that she was a good sort—and, there was no doubt about it, she could paint.

Of course, Clementina might have made herself look much younger and more prepossessing, and thereby have pleased the fancy of Tommy Burgrave. As a matter of fact she was only thirty-five. Many a woman with more years and even less foundation of beauty than Clementina flaunts about the world breaking men’s hearts, obfuscating their common sense, and exerting all the bewildering influences of a seductive sex. She only has to do her hair, attend to her skin, and attire herself in more or less becoming raiment. Very little care suffices. Men are ludicrously easy to please in the way of female attractiveness—but they draw the line somewhere. It must be confessed that they drew it at Clementina Wing. Her coarse black hair straggled perpetually in uncared-for strands between fortuitous hair-pins. Her complexion was dark and oily; her nose had never been powdered since its early infancy; and her face, even when she walked abroad, was often disfigured, as it was now, by a smudge of paint. She had heedlessly suffered the invasion of lines and wrinkles. A deep vertical furrow had settled hard between her black, overhanging brows. She had intensified and perpetuated the crow’s-feet between her eyes by a trick, when concentrating her painter’s vision on a sitter, of screwing her face into a monkey’s myriad wrinkles. She dressed, habitually, in any old blouse, any old skirt, any old hat picked up at random in bedroom or studio, and picked up originally, with equal lack of selection, in any miscellaneous emporium of feminine attire. When her figure, which, as women acquaintances would whisper to each other, but never (not daring) to Clementina, had, after all, its possibilities, was hidden by a straight, shapeless, colour-smeared painting-smock, and all of Clementina as God made her that was visible, save her capable hands, was the swarthy face with its harsh contours, its high cheekbones, its unlovely, premature furrows, surmounted by the bedraggled hair that would have disgraced a wigwam, Tommy Burgrave may be pardoned for regarding her less as a woman than a painter of genius who somehow did not happen to be a man.

Presently she laid down palette and brushes and pushed the easel to one side.

“I can’t do any more at it without a model. Besides, it’s getting dark. Ring for tea.”

She threw off her painting-smock, revealing herself in an old brown skirt and a soiled white blouse gaping at the back, and sank with a sigh of relief into a chair. It was good to sit down, she said. She had been standing all day. She would be glad to have some tea. It would take the taste of the trousers out of her mouth.

“If you dislike them so much, why did you rush at them, as soon as those people had gone?”

“To get the girl’s face out of my mind. Look here, mon petit,” she said, turning on him suddenly, “if you ask questions I’ll turn you into the street. I’m tired; give me something to smoke.”

He disinterred a yellow, crumpled packet of French tobacco and cigarette-papers from among a litter on the table, and lit the cigarette for her when she had rolled it.

“I suppose you’re the only woman in London who rolls her own cigarettes.”

“Well?” asked Clementina.

He laughed. “That’s all.”

“It was an idiotic remark,” said Clementina.

The maid brought in tea, and it was Tommy who played host. She softened a little as he waited on her.

“I was meant to be a lady, Tommy, and do nothing. This paint-brush walloping—after all, what is it? What’s the good of painting these fools’ portraits?”

“Each of them is work of genius,” said Tommy.

“Rot and rubbish,” said Clementina. “Let me clear your mind of a lot of foolish nonsense you hear at your high-art tea-parties, where women drivel and talk of their mission in the world. A woman has only one mission; to marry and get babies. Keep that fact in front of you when you’re taking up with any of ’em. Genius! I can’t be a genius for the simple reason that I’m a woman. Did you ever hear of a man-mother? No. It’s a contradiction in terms. So there can’t be a woman-genius.”

“But surely,” Tommy objected, more out of politeness, perhaps, than conviction, for every male creature loves to be conscious of his sex’s superiority. “Surely there was Rosa Bonheur—and—and in your line, Madame Vigée Le Brun.”

“Very pretty,” said Clementina, “but stick them beside Paul Potter and Gainsborough, and what do they look like? Could a woman have painted Paul Potter’s bull?”

“What’s your definition of genius?” asked Tommy, evading the direct question. He had visited The Hague, and stood in rapt wonder before what is perhaps the most essentially masculine bit of painting in the world. Certainly no woman could have painted it.

“Genius,” said Clementina, screwing up her face and looking at the tip of a discoloured thumb, “is the quality the creative spirit assumes as soon as it can liberate itself from the bond of the flesh.”

“Good,” said Tommy. “Did you make up that all at once? It knocks Carlyle’s definition silly. But I don’t see why it doesn’t apply equally to men and women.”

“Woman,” said Clementina, “has always her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit.”

Tommy stared. This was a new conception of woman which he was too young and candid to understand. For him women—or rather that class of the sex that counted for him as women, the mothers and sisters and wives of his friends, the women from whose midst one of these days he would select a wife himself—were very spiritual creatures indeed. That twilight region of their being in which their sex had a home was holy ground before entering which a man must take the shoes from off his feet. He took it for granted that every unmarried woman believed in the stork or gooseberry bush theory of the population of the world. A girl allowed you to kiss her because she was kind and good and altruistic, realising that it gave you considerable pleasure; but as for the girl craving the kiss for the satisfaction of her own needs, that was undreamed of in his ingenuous philosophy. And here was Clementina laying it down as a fundamental axiom that woman has her sex always hanging round the neck of her spirit. He was both mystified and shocked.

“I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about, Clementina,” he said at last, with some severity.

Indeed, how on earth could Clementina know?

“Perhaps I don’t, Tommy,” she said, with ironical meekness, realising the gulf between them and the reverence, which, as the Latin Grammar tells us, is especially due to tender youth. She looked into the fire, a half-smile playing round her grim, unsmiling lips, and there was silence for a few moments. Then she asked, brusquely;

“How’s that uncle of yours?”

“All right,” said Tommy. “I’m dining with him this evening.”

“I hear he has taken to calling himself Dr. Quixtus lately.”

“He’s entitled to do so. He’s a Ph.D. of Heidelberg. I wish you didn’t have your knife into him so much, Clementina. He’s the best and dearest chap in the world. Of course, he’s getting rather elderly and precise. He’ll be forty next birthday, you know——”

“Lord save us,” said Clementina.

“—— but one has to make allowances for that. Anyway,” he added, with a flash of championship, “he’s the most courtly gentleman I’ve ever met.”

“He’s civil enough,” said Clementina. “But if I were his wife, I’m sure I would throw him out of a window.”

Tommy stared again for a moment, and then laughed—more at the idea of the quaint old thing that was Clementina being married than at the picture of his uncle’s grotesque ejectment.

“I don’t think that’s ever likely to happen,” he remarked.

“Nor do I,” said Clementina.

Soon after that Tommy departed as unceremoniously as he had entered. Not that Tommy Burgrave was by nature unceremonious, being a boy of excellent breeding; but no one stood on ceremony with Clementina; the elaborate politeness of the Petit Trianon was out of place in the studio of a lady who would tell you to go to the devil as soon as look at you.

When the door at the end of the gallery closed behind him she gave a sigh of relief, and rolled another cigarette. There are times when the most obstinate woman’s nerves are set on edge, and she craves either solitude or a sympathetic presence. Now, she was very fond of Tommy; but what, save painting and cricket and the young animal’s joy of life, could Tommy understand? She regretted having spoken of sex and spirit to his uncomprehending ears. Generally she held herself and even her unruly tongue under control. But this afternoon she had lost grip. The sitting had strangely affected her, for she had divined, as she had not done on previous occasions, the wistful terror that lurked in the depths of the young girl’s soul—a divination that had been confirmed by the quick look of fear with which she had greeted the bullet-headed young man when he had arrived to escort her home. And Tommy, with his keen young vision, had summed him up in a few words.

She turned on the great lamp suspended in the middle of the studio, and drew the easel containing the girl’s portrait into the light. She gazed at it for a while intently, and then, throwing herself into her chair by the fire, remained there motionless, with parted lips, in the attitude of a woman overwhelmed by memories.

They went back fifteen years, when she was this girl’s age. She had not this girl’s bearing and flower-like grace; but she had her youth and everything in it that stood for the promise of life. She had memories of her mirrored self—quite a dainty slip of a girl in spite of her homely face, her hair wound around a not unshapely head in glossy coils, and her figure set off by delicately fitting clothes. And there was a light in her eyes because a man loved her and she had given all the richness of herself to the man. They were engaged to be married. Yet, for all her tremulous happiness, terror lurked in the depths of her soul. Many a night she awoke, gripped by the nameless fear, unreasonable, absurd; for the man in her eyes was as handsome and debonair as any prince out of a fairy tale. Her mother and father, who were then both alive, came under the spell of the man’s fascinations. He was of good family, fair private income, and was making a position for himself in the higher walks of journalism; a man too of unsullied reputation. A gallant lover, he loved her as in her dreams she had dreamed of being loved. The future held no flaw.

Suddenly, something so grotesque happened as to awaken all her laughter and indignation. Roland Thorne was arrested on a charge of theft. A lady, a stranger, the only other occupant of a railway-carriage in which he happened to be travelling from Plymouth to London, missed some valuable diamonds from a jewel-case beside her on the seat. At Bath she had left the carriage for a minute to buy a novel at the bookstall, leaving the case in the compartment. She brought evidence to prove that the diamonds were there when she left Plymouth and were not there when she arrived at her destination in London. The only person, according to the prosecution, who could have stolen them was Roland Thorne, during her temporary absence at Bath. Thorne treated the matter as a ludicrous annoyance. So did Clementina, as soon as her love and anger gave place to her sense of humour. And so did the magistrate who dismissed the charge, saying that it ought never to have been brought.

With closed eyes, the woman in front of the fire recalled their first long passionate kiss after he had brought the news of his acquittal, and she shivered. She remembered how he had drawn back his handsome head and looked into her eyes.

“You never for one second thought me guilty?”

Something in his gaze checked the cry of scorn at her lips. The nameless terror clutched her heart. She drew herself slowly, gradually, out of his embrace, keeping her widened eyes fixed on him. He stood motionless as she recoiled. The horrible truth dawned on her. He was guilty. She sat on the nearest chair, white-lipped and shaken.

“You? You?”

Whether the man had meant to make the confession, probably he himself did not know. Overwrought nerves may have given way. But there he stood at that moment, self-confessed. In a kind of dream paralysis she heard him make his apologia. He said something of sins of his youth, of blackmail, of large sums of money to be paid, so as to avert ruin; how he had idly touched the jewel-case, without thought of theft, how it had opened easily, how the temptation to slip the case of diamonds into his pocket had been irresistible. His voice seemed a toneless echo, far away. He said many things that she did not hear. Afterwards she had a confused memory that he pleaded for mercy at her hands. He had only yielded in a moment of desperate madness; he would make secret restitution of the diamonds. He threw himself on the ground at her feet and kissed her skirt, but she sat petrified, speechless, stricken to her soul. Then without a word or a sign from her, he went out.

The woman by the fire recalled the anguish of the hour of returning life. It returned with the pain of blood returning to frost-bitten flesh. She loved him with every quivering fibre. No crime or weakness in the world could alter that. Her place was by his side, to champion him through evil, to ward off temptation, to comfort him in his time of need. Her generous nature cried aloud for him, craved to take him into her arms and lay his head against her bosom. She scorned herself for having turned to him a heart of stone, for letting him go broken and desperate into the world. A touch would have changed his hell to heaven, and she had not given it. She rose and stood for a while, this girl of twenty, transfigured, vibrating with a great purpose—the woman of thirty-five remembered (ah God!) the thrill of it. The flames of the sunrise spread through her veins.

In a few minutes she was driving through the busy streets to the man’s chambers; in a few minutes more she reached them. She mounted the stairs. She had no need to ring, as the outer door stood open. She entered. Called:

“Roland, are you here?”

There was no reply. She crossed the hall and went into the sitting-room. There on the floor lay Roland Thorne with a revolver bullet through his head.

CHAPTER II

Such were the memories that overwhelmed Clementina Wing as she sat grim and lonely by the fire.

In the tragedy the girl Clementina perished, and from her ashes arose the phœnix of dingy plumage who had developed into the Clementina of to-day. As soon as she could envisage life again, she plunged into the strenuous art-world of Paris, living solitary, morose, and heedless of external things. The joyousness of the light-hearted crowd into which she was thrown jarred upon her. It was like Bacchanalian revelry at a funeral. She made no friends. Good-natured importunates she drove away with rough usage. The pairs of young men and maidens who flaunted their foolish happiness in places of public resort she regarded with misanthropic eye. She hated them—at one-and-twenty—because they were fools; because they deluded themselves into the belief that the world was rose and blue and gold, whereas she, of her own bitter knowledge, knew it to be drab. And from a drab world what was there more vain than the attempt to extract colour? Beauty left her unmoved because it had no basis in actuality. The dainty rags in which she had been accustomed to garb herself she threw aside with contempt. Sackcloth was the only wear.

It must be remembered that Clementina at this period was young, and that it is only given to youth to plumb the depths of existence. She was young, strong-fibred, desperately conscious of herself. She had left her home rejecting sympathy. To no one could she exhibit the torture of her soul; to no one could she confess the remorse and shame that consumed her. She was a failure in essentials. She had failed the man in his hour of need. She had let him go forth to his death. She, Clementina Wing, was a failure. She, Clementina Wing, was the world. Therefore was the world a failure. She saw life drab. Her vision was infallible. Therefore life was drab. Syllogisms, with the eternal fallacy of youth in their minor premises. Work saved her reason. She went at it feverishly, indefatigably, unremittingly, as only a woman can—and only a woman who has lost sense of values. Her talent was great—in those days she did not scout the suggestion of genius—and by her indomitable pains she acquired the marvellous technique which had brought her fame. The years slipped away. Suddenly she awakened. A picture exhibited in the Salon obtained for her a gold medal, which pleased her mightily. She was not as dead as she had fancied, having still the power to feel the thrill of triumph. Money much more than would satisfy her modest wants jingled in her pockets with a jocund sound. Folks whom she had kept snarlingly at bay whispered honeyed flattery in her ears. Philosophy, which (of a bitter nature) she had cultivated during her period of darkness, enabled her to estimate the flattery at its true value; but no philosophy in the world could do away with the sweetness of it. So it came to pass that on her pleasant road to success, Clementina realised that there was such a thing as light and shade in life as well as in pictures. But though she came out of the underworld a different woman from the one who had sojourned there, she was still a far more different woman from the girl who was flung herself into it headlong. She emerged cynical, rough, dictatorial, eccentric in speech, habits, and attire. As she had emancipated herself from the gloom of remorse and self-torture, so did she emancipate herself from convention. Youth had flown early, and with it the freshness that had given charm to her young face. Lines had come, bones had set, the mouth had hardened. She had lost the trick of personal adornment. Years of loose and casual corseting had ruined her figure. Even were she to preen and primp herself, what man would look at her with favour? As for women, she let them go hang. She was always impatient of the weaknesses, frailties, and vanities of her own sex, especially when they were marked by an outer show of strength. The helpless she had been known to take to her bosom as she would have taken a wounded bird—but her sex as a whole attracted her but little. Women could go hang, because she did not want them. Men could go hang likewise, because they did not want her. Thus dismissing from her horizon all the human race, she found compensation in the freedom so acquired. If she chose to run bareheaded and slipshod into the King’s Road and come back with a lump of beef wrapped in a bloodstained bit of newspaper (as her acquaintance, Mrs. Venables, had caught her doing—“My dear, you never saw such an appalling sight in your life,” she said when reporting the incident, “and she had the impudence to make me shake hands with her—and the hand, my dear, in which she had been holding the beef”)—if she chose to do this, what mattered it to any one of God’s creatures, save perhaps Mrs. Venables’s glove-maker to whom it was an advantage? Her servant had a bad cold, time—the morning light was precious—and the putting on of hat and boots a retarding vanity. If she chose to bring in a shivering ragamuffin from the streets and warm him before the fire and stuff him with the tomato sandwiches and plum-cake set out for a visitor’s tea, who could say her nay? The visitor in revolt against the sight and smell of the ragamuffin, could get up and depart. It was a matter of no concern to Clementina. Eventually folks recognised Clementina’s eccentricity, classed it in the established order of things, ceased to regard it—just as dwellers by a cataract lose the sound of the thunder, and as a human wife ceases to be conscious of the wart on her husband’s nose. To this enviable height of freedom had Clementina risen.

She sat by the fire, overwhelmed by memories. They had been conjured up by the girl with the terror at the back of her eyes; but their mass was no longer crushing. They came over her like a weightless grey cloud that had arisen from some remote past with which she had no concern. She had grown to look upon the tragedy impersonally, as though it were a melodramatic tale written by a young and inexperienced writer, in which the characters were overdrawn and untrue to life. The reading of the tale left her with the impression that Roland Thorne was an unprincipled weakling, Clementina Wing an hysterical little fool.

Presently she rose, rubbed her face hard with both hands, a proceeding which had the effect of spreading the paint smudge into a bright gamboge over her cheeks, pushed the easel aside, and, taking down “Tristram Shandy” from her shelves, read the story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, by way of a change of fiction, till her maid summoned her to her solitary dinner.

Early the next morning, as soon as she had entered the studio and had begun to set her palette, preparatory to the day’s work, Tommy Burgrave appeared on the gallery, with a “Hullo, Clementina!” and ran down the spiral staircase. Clementina paused with a paint tube in her hand.

“Look, my young friend, you don’t live here, you know,” she said coolly.

“I’ll clear out in half a second,” he replied, smiling. “I’m bringing you news. You ought to be very grateful to me. I’ve got you a commission.”

“Who’s the fool?” asked Clementina.

“It isn’t a fool,” said Tommy, buttoning the belt of his Norfolk jacket, as if to brace himself to the encounter. “It’s my uncle.”

“Lord save us!” said Clementina.

“I thought I would give you a surprise,” said Tommy.

Clementina shrugged her shoulders and went on squeezing paint out of tubes.

“He must have softening of the brain.”

“Why?”

“First for wanting to have his portrait painted at all, and secondly for thinking of coming to me. Go back and tell him I’m not a caricaturist.”

Tommy planted a painting-stool in the middle of the floor and sat upon it, with legs apart.

“Let us talk business, Clementina. In the first place, he has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want his portrait painted, bless you. It’s the other prehistoric fossils he foregathers with. I met chunks of them at dinner last night. They belong to the Anthropological Society, you know, they fool around with antediluvian stones and bones and bits of iron—and my uncle’s president. They want to have his portrait to hang up in the cave where they meet. They were talking about it at my end of the table. They didn’t know what painter to go to, so they consulted me. My uncle had introduced me as an artist, you know, and they looked on me as a sort of young prophet. I asked them how much they were prepared to give. They said about five hundred pounds—they evidently have a lot of money to throw about—one of them, all over gold chains and rings, seemed to perspire money, looked like a bucket-shop keeper. I think it’s he who is presenting the Society with the portrait. Anyway that’s about your figure, so I said there was only one person to paint my uncle and that was Clementina Wing. It struck them as a brilliant idea, and the end of it was that they told my uncle and requested me to sound you on the matter. I’ve sounded.”

She looked at his confident boyish face, and uttered a grim sound, halfway between a laugh and a sniff, which was her nearest approach to exhibition of mirth, and might have betokened amusement or pity or contempt or any two of these taken together or the three combined. Then she turned away and, screwing up her eyes, looked out for a few moments into the sodden back garden.

“Did you ever hear of a barber refusing to shave a man because he didn’t like the shape of his whiskers?”

“Only one,” said Tommy, “and he cut the man’s throat from ear to ear with the razor.”

He laughed loud at his own jest, and, going up to the window where Clementina stood with her back to him, laid a hand on her shoulder.

“That means you’ll do it.”

“Guineas, not pounds,” said Clementina, facing him. “Five hundred guineas. I couldn’t endure Ephraim Quixtus for less.”

“Leave it to me, I’ll fix it up. So long.” He ran up the spiral staircase, in high good-humour. On the gallery he paused and leaned over the balustrade.

“I say, Clementina, if the ugly young man calls to-day for that pretty Miss Etta, and you want any murdering done, send for me.”

She looked up at him smiling down upon her, gay and handsome, so rich in his springtide, and she obeyed a sudden impulse.

“Come down, Tommy.”

When he had descended she unhooked from the wall over the fireplace a Della Robbia plaque—a child’s white head against a background of yellow and blue—a cherished possession—and thrust it into Tommy’s arms. He stared at her, but clutched the precious thing tight for fear of dropping it.

“Take it. You can give it as a wedding present to your wife when you have one. I want you to have it.”

He stammered, overwhelmed by her magnificent and unprecedented generosity. He could not accept the plaque. It was too priceless a gift.

“That’s why I give it to you, you silly young idiot,” she cried impatiently. “Do you think I’d give you a pair of embroidered braces or a hymn-book? Take it and go.”

What Tommy did then, nine hundred and ninety-nine young men out of a thousand would not have done. He held out his hand—“Rubbish,” said Clementina; but she held out hers—he gripped it, swung her to him and gave her a good, full, sounding, honest kiss. Then, holding the thing of beauty against his heart he leaped up the stairs and disappeared, with an exultant “Good-bye,” through the door.

A dark flush rose on the kissed spot on Clementina’s cheek. Softness crept into her hard eyes. She looked at the vacant place on the wall where the cherished thing of beauty had hung. By some queer optical illusion it appeared even brighter than before.

Tommy, being a young man of energy and enthusiasm with modern notions as to the reckoning of time, rushed the Anthropologists, who were accustomed to reckon time by epochs instead of minutes, off their leisurely feet. His uncle had said words of protest at this indecent haste; “My dear Tommy, if you were more of a reflective human being and less of a whirlwind, it would frequently add to your peace and comfort.” But Tommy triumphed. Within a very short period everything was settled, the formal letters had been exchanged, and Ephraim Quixtus found himself paying a visit, in a new character, to Clementina Wing.

She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled nothing so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture was the stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of Tomkins, Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a corner stood a spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff. The room afforded Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except when she received puzzled visitors she rarely sat in it from one year’s end to the other.

“I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he bent over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s prehistoric man getting on?”

“As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”

Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a sallow complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on the crown of his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant moustache gave his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick eye noted it at once. She screwed up her face and watched him.

“I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were clean shaven,” she said brusquely.

“I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”

“Why not?”

He started in alarm.

“I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the guise in which he presided over them.”

“Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a touch of irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”

“Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff Sheraton chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since we last met, Clementina. You are famous. I wonder what it feels like to be a celebrity.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “In my case it feels like leading apes in hell. By the way, when did I last see you?”

“It was at poor Angela’s funeral, five years ago.”

“So it was,” said Clementina.

There was a short silence. Angela was his dead wife and her distant relation.

“What has become of Will Hammersley?” she asked suddenly. “He has given up writing to me.”

“Still in Shanghai, I think. He went out, you know, to take over the China branch of his firm—just before Angela’s death, wasn’t it? It’s a couple of years or more since I have heard from him.”

“That’s strange; he was an intimate friend of yours,” said Clementina.

“The only intimate friend I’ve ever had in my life. We were at school and at Cambridge together. Somehow, although I have many acquaintances and, so to speak, friends, yet I’ve never formed the intimacies that most men have. I suppose,” he added, with a sweet smile, “it’s because I’m rather a dry stick.”

“You’re ten years older than your age,” said Clementina, frankly. “You want shaking up. It’s a pity Will Hammersley isn’t here. He used to do you a lot of good.”

“I’m glad you think so much of Hammersley,” said Quixtus.

“I don’t think much of most people, do I?” she said. “But Hammersley was a friend in need. He was to me, at any rate.”

“Are you still fond of Sterne?” he asked. “I think you are the only woman who ever was.”

She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking,” he said, in his quiet, courtly way, “that we have many bonds of sympathy, after all; Angela, Hammersley, Sterne, and my scapegrace nephew, Tommy.”

“Tommy is a good boy,” said Clementina, “and he’ll learn to paint some day.”

“I must thank you for your very great kindness to him.”

“Bosh!” said Clementina.

“It’s a great thing for a young fellow—wild and impulsive like Tommy—to have a good friend in a woman older than himself.”

“If you think, my good man,” snapped Clementina, reverting to her ordinary manner, “that I look after his morals, you are very much mistaken. What has it got to do with me if he kisses models and takes them out to dinner in Soho?”

The lingering Eve in her resented the suggestion of a maternal attitude towards the boy. After all, she was not five-and-fifty; she was younger, five years younger than the stick of an uncle who was talking to her as if he had stepped out of the pages of a Sunday-school prize.

“He never tells me of the models,” replied Quixtus, “and I’m very glad he tells you. It shows there is no harm in it.”

“Let us talk sense,” said Clementina, “and not waste time. You’ve come to me to have your portrait painted. I’ve been looking at you. I think a half-length, sitting down, would be the best—unless you want to stand up in evening-dress behind a table, with presidential gold chains and badges of office and hammers and water-bottles——”

“Heaven forbid!” cried Quixtus, who was as modest a man as ever stepped. “What you suggest will quite do.”

“I suppose you will wear that frock-coat and turn-down collar? Don’t you ever wear a narrow black tie?”

“My dear Clementina,” he cried horrified, “I may not be the latest thing in dandyism, but I’ve no desire to look like a Scotch deacon in his Sunday clothes.”

“Vanity again,” said Clementina. “I could have got something much better out of you in a narrow black tie. Still, I daresay I’ll manage—though what your bone-digging friends want with a portrait of you at all for, I’m blest if I can understand.”

With which gracious remark she dismissed him, after having arranged a date for the first sitting.

“A poor creature,” muttered Clementina, when the door closed behind him.

The poor creature, however, walked smartly homewards through the murky November evening, perfectly contented with God and man—even with Clementina herself. In this well-ordered world, even the tongue of an eccentric woman must serve some divine purpose. He mused whimsically on the purpose. Well, at any rate, she belonged to a dear and regretted past, which without throwing an absolute glamour around Clementina still shed upon her its softening rays. His thoughts were peculiarly retrospective this evening. It was a Tuesday, and his Tuesday nights for some years had been devoted to a secret and sacred gathering of pale ghosts. His Tuesday nights were mysteries to all his friends. When pressed for the reason of this perennial weekly engagement, he would say vaguely; “It’s a club to which I belong.” But what was the nature of the club, what the grim and ghastly penalty if he skipped a meeting, those were questions which he left, with a certain innocent mirth, to the conjecture of the curious.

The evening was fine, with a touch of shrewdness in the air. He found himself in the exhilarated frame of mind which is consonant with brisk walking. He looked at his watch. He could easily reach Russell Square by seven o’clock. He timed his walk exactly. It was five minutes to seven when he let himself in by his latchkey. The parlour-maid, emerging from the dining-room, met him in the hall and helped him off with his coat.

“The gentlemen have come, sir.”

“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus, self-reproachfully.

“They’re before their time. It isn’t seven yet, sir,” said the parlour-maid, flinging the blame upon the gentlemen. In speaking of them she had just the slightest little supercilious tilt of the nose.

Quixtus waited until she had retired, then, drawing something from his own pocket, he put something into the pocket of each of three greatcoats that hung in the hall. After that he ran upstairs into the drawing-room. Three men rose to receive him.

“How do you do, Huckaby? So glad to see you, Vandermeer. My dear Billiter.”

He apologised for being late. They murmured excuses for being early. Quixtus asked leave to wash his hands, went out and returned rubbing them, as though in anticipation of enjoyment. Two of the men standing in front of the fire made way for him. He thrust them back courteously.

“No, no, I’m warm. Been walking for miles. I’ve not seen an evening paper. What’s the news?”

Quixtus never saw an evening paper on Tuesdays. The question was a time-honoured opening to the kindly game he played with his guests.

Now there is a reason for most things, even for a parlour-maid’s tilt of the nose. The personal appearance of the guests would have tilted the nose of any self-respecting parlour-maid in Russell Square. They were a strange trio. All were shabby and out-at-elbows. All wore the insecure, apologetic collar which is one of the most curious badges of the down-at-heel. All bore on their faces the signs of privation and suffering; Huckaby, lantern-jawed, black-bearded and watery-eyed; Vandermeer, small, decrepit, pinched of feature, with crisp, sparse red hair and the bright eyes of a hungry wolf; Billiter, the flabby remains of a heavily built florid man, with a black moustache turning grey. They were ghosts of the past, who once a week came back to the plentiful earth, lived for a few brief hours in the land that had been their heritage, talked of the things they had once loved, and went forth (so Quixtus hoped) cheered and comforted for their next week’s wandering on the banks of Acheron. Once a week they sat at a friend’s table and ate generous food, drank generous wine, and accepted help from a friend’s generous hand. Help they all needed, and like desperate men would snatch it from any hand held out to them. Huckaby had been a successful coach at Cambridge; Vandermeer, who had forsaken early in life a banking office for the Temple of Literary Fame, had starved for years on free-lance journalism; Billiter, of Rugby and Oxford, had run through a fortune. All waste products of the world’s factory. Among the many things they had in common was an unquenchable thirst, which they dissimulated in Russell Square; but they made up for it by patronising their host. When a beneficiary is humble he is either deserving or has touched the lowest depths of degradation.

Quixtus presided happily at the meal. With strangers he was shy and diffident; but here he was at his ease, among old friends none the less valued because they had fallen by the wayside. Into the reason of their fall it did not concern him to inquire. All that mattered was their obvious affection and the obvious brightness that fortune had enabled him to shed on their lives.

“I wonder,” said he, with one of his sudden smiles, “I wonder if you fellows know how I prize these evenings of ours.”

“They’re Attic Symposia,” said Huckaby.

“I’ve been thinking of a series of articles on them, after the manner of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,” said Vandermeer.

“They would quite bear it,” Huckaby agreed. “I think we get better talk here than anywhere else I know. I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,”—he rolled out the alliterative phrase with great sonority—“and I know the talk in the Combination Room; but it’s pedantic—pedantic. Not ripe and mellow like ours.”

“I’m not a brainy chap like you others,” said Billiter, wiping his dragoon’s moustache, “but I like to have my mind improved, now and then.”

“Do you know the Noctes, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus. “Of course you do. What do you think of them?”

“I suppose you like them,” replied Huckaby, “because you are an essentially scientific and not a literary man. But I think them dull.”

“I don’t call them dull,” Quixtus argued, “but to my mind they’re pretentious. I don’t like their sham heartiness, their slap-on-the-back-and-how-are-you-old-fellow tone, their impossible Pantagruelian banquets——”

The hungry wolf’s face of Vandermeer lit up. “That’s what I like about them—the capons—the pies—the cockaleeky—the haggises——”

“I remember a supper-party at Oxford,” said Billiter, “when there was a haggis, and one chap who was awfully tight insisted that a haggis ought to be turned like an omelette or tossed like a pancake. He tossed it. My God! You never saw such a thing in your life!”

So they all talked according to the several necessities of their natures, and at last Quixtus informed his guests that he was to sit for his portrait to Miss Clementina Wing.

“I believe she is really quite capable,” said Huckaby, judicially, stroking his straggling beard.

“I know her,” cried Vandermeer. “A most charming woman.”

Quixtus raised his eyebrows.

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said he. “She is a sort of distant connection of mine by marriage.”

“I interviewed her,” said Vandermeer.

“Good Lord!” The exclamation on the part of Quixtus was inaudible.

“I was doing a series of articles—very important articles,” said Vandermeer, with an assertive glance around the table, “on Women Workers of To-day, and of course Miss Clementina Wing came into it. I called and put the matter before her.”

He paused dramatically.

“And then?” asked Quixtus amused.

“We went out to lunch in a restaurant and she gave me all the material necessary for my article. A most charming woman, who I think will do you justice, Quixtus.”

When his friends had gone, each, by the way, diving furtive and searching hands into their great-coat pockets, as soon as they had been helped into these garments by the butler—and here, by the way also, be it stated that, no matter how sultry the breath of summer or how frigid that of fortune, they never failed to bring overcoats to hang, for all the world like children’s stockings for Santa Claus, on the familiar pegs—when his friends were gone, Quixtus, who had an elementary sense of humour, failed entirely to see an expansive and notoriety-seeking Clementina lunching tête-à-tête at the Carlton or the Savoy with Theodore Vandermeer. In point of fact, he fell asleep smiling at the picture.

The next day, while he was at breakfast—he breakfasted rather late—Tommy Burgrave was announced. Tommy, who had already eaten with the appetite of youth, immediately after his cold bath, declined to join his uncle in a meal, but for the sake of sociability trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while Quixtus feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dry toast. When his barmecide meal was over, Tommy came to the business of the day. For some inexplicable, unconjecturable reason his monthly allowance had gone, disappeared, vanished into the Ewigkeit. What in the world was he to do?

Now it must be explained that Tommy Burgrave was an orphan, the son of Ephraim Quixtus’s only sister, and his whole personal estate a sum of money invested in a mortgage which brought him in fifty pounds a year. On fifty pounds a year a young man cannot lead the plenteous life as far as food and raiment are concerned, rent a studio (even though it be a converted first-floor back, as Tommy’s was) and a bedroom in Romney Place, travel (even on a bicycle, as Tommy did) about England, and entertain ladies to dinner at restaurants—even though the ladies may be only models, and the restaurants in Soho. He must have other financial support. This other financial support came to him in the guise of a generous allowance from his uncle. But as the generosity of his instincts—and who in the world would be a cynic, animated blight, curmudgeon enough to check the generous instincts of youth?—as, I say, the generosity of his instincts outran the generosity of his allowance, towards the end of every month Tommy found himself in a most naturally inexplicable position. At the end of the month, therefore, Tommy came to Russell Square and trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while his uncle feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dried toast, and, at the end of his barmecide feast, came to business.

On the satisfactory conclusion thereof (and it had never been known to be otherwise) Tommy lit a cigar—he liked his uncle’s cigars.

“Well,” said he, “what do you think of Clementina?”

“I think,” said Quixtus, with a faint luminosity lighting his china-blue eyes, “I think that Clementina, being an artist, is a problem. But if she weren’t an artist and in a different class of life, she would be a model old family servant in a great house in which the family, by no chance whatever, resided.”

Tommy laughed. “It seemed tremendously funny to bring you two together.”

Quixtus smiled indulgently. “So it was a practical joke on your part?”

“Oh no!” cried Tommy, flaring up. “You mustn’t think that. There’s only one painter living who has, her power—and I’m one of the people who know it—and I wanted her to paint you. Besides, she is a thorough good sort—through and through.”

“My dear boy, I was only jesting,” said Quixtus, touched by his earnestness. “I know that not only are you a devotee—and very rightly so—of Clementina—but that she is a very great painter.”

“All the same,” said Tommy, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’m afraid that you’re in for an awful time.”

“I’m afraid so, too,” said Quixtus, whimsically, “but I’ll get through it somehow.”

He did get through it; but it was only “somehow.” This quiet, courtly, dreamy gentleman irritated Clementina as he had irritated her years ago. He was a learned man; that went without saying; but he was a fool all the same, and Clementina had not trained herself to suffer fools gladly. The portrait became her despair. The man had no character. There was nothing beneath the surface of those china-blue eyes. She was afraid, she said, of getting on the canvas the portrait of a congenital idiot. His attitude towards life—the dilettante attitude which she as a worker despised—made her impatient. By profession he was a solicitor, head of the old-fashioned firm of Quixtus and Son; but, on his open avowal, he neglected the business, leaving it all in the hands of his partner.

“He’ll do you, sure as a gun,” said Clementina.

Quixtus smiled. “My father trusted him implicitly, and so do I.”

“A man or a woman’s a fool to trust anybody,” said Clementina.

“I’ve trusted everybody around me all my life, and no one has done me any harm, and therefore I’m a happy man.”

“Rubbish,” said Clementina. “Any fraud gets the better of you. What about your German friend Tommy was telling me of?”

This was a sore point. A most innocent, spectacled, bearded, but obviously poverty-stricken German had called on him a few weeks before with a collection of flint instruments for sale, which he alleged to have come from the valley of the Weser, near Hameln. They were of shapes and peculiarities which he had not met with before, and, after a cursory and admiring examination, he had given the starving Teuton twice as much as he had asked for the collection, and sent him on his way rejoicing. With a brother palæontologist summoned in haste he had proceeded to a minute scrutiny of his treasures. They were impudent forgeries.

“I told Tommy in confidence. He ought not to have repeated the story,” he said, with dignity.

“Which shows,” said Clementina, pausing so as to make her point and an important brush-stroke—“which shows that you can’t even trust Tommy.”

On another occasion he referred to Vandermeer’s famous interview.

“You know a friend of mine, Vandermeer,” said he.

Clementina shook her head.

“Never heard the name.”

He explained. Vandermeer was a journalist. He had interviewed her and lunched with her at a restaurant.

Clementina could not remember. At last her knitted brow cleared.

“Good lord, do you mean a half-starved, foxy-faced man with his toes through his boots?”

“The portrait is unflattering,” said he, “but I’m afraid there’s a kind of resemblance.”

“He looked so hungry and was so hungry—he told me—that I took him to the ham-and-beef shop round the corner and stuffed his head with copy while he stuffed himself with ham and beef. To say that he lunched with me at a restaurant is infernal impudence.”

“Poor fellow,” said Quixtus. “He has to live rather fatly in imagination so as to make up for the meagreness of his living in reality. It’s only human nature.”

“Bah,” said Clementina, “I believe you’d find human nature in the devil.”

Quixtus smiled one of his sweet smiles.

“I find it in you, Clementina,” he said.

Thus it may be perceived that the sittings were not marked by the usual amenities of the studio. The natures of the two were antagonistic. He shrank from her downrightness; she disdained his ineffectuality. Each bore with the other for the sake of past associations; but each drew a breath of relief when freed from the presence of the other. Although he was a man of wide culture beyond the bounds of his own particular subject, and could talk well in a half-humorous, half-pedantic manner, her influence often kept him as dumb as a mummy. This irritated Clementina still further. She wanted him to talk, to show some animation, so that she could seize upon something to put upon the dismaying canvas. She talked nonsense, in order to stimulate him.

“To live in the past as you do without any regard for the present is as worthless as to go to bed in a darkened room and stay there for the rest of your life. It’s the existence of a mole, not of a man.”

He indicated, with a wave of the hand, a Siennese predella on the wall. “You go to the past.”

“For its lessons,” said Clementina. “Because the Old Masters can teach me things. How on earth do you think I should be able to paint you if it hadn’t been for Velasquez? To say nothing of the æsthetic side. But you only go to the past to satisfy an idle curiosity.”

“Perhaps I do, perhaps I do,” he assented, mildly. “A knowledge of the process by which a prehistoric lady fashioned her petticoat out of skins by means of a flint needle and reindeer sinews would be of no value to Worth or Paquin. But it soothes me personally to contemplate the intimacies of the toilette of the prehistoric lady.”

“I call that abnormal,” said Clementina, “and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

Meanwhile, in spite of her half-comic despair, the portrait progressed. She had seized, at any rate, the man’s air of intellectuality, of aloofness from the practical affairs of life. Unconsciously she had invested the face with a spirituality which had eluded her conscious analysis. The artist had worked with the inner vision, as the artist always does when he produces a great work. For the great work of an artist is not that before which he stands, and, sighing, says; “This is fair, but how far away from my dreams!” That is the popular fallacy. The great work is that which, when he regards it on completion, causes him to say in humble admiration and modest stupefaction: “How on earth did the dull clod that is I manage to do it?” For he does not know how he accomplished it. When a man is conscious of every step he takes in the execution of a work of art, he is obeying the letter and not the spirit; he is a juggler with formulas; and formulas, being mere analytical results, have no place in that glorious synthesis which is creation—either of a world or a flower or a poem. Clementina, to her astonishment, regarded the portrait of Ephraim Quixtus, and, like the First Creator regarding His work, saw that it was good.

“I should never have believed it,” she said.

“What?” asked Quixtus.

“That I should have got all this out of you,” said Clementina.

CHAPTER III

We have heard much of a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. We know that he was perfect and upright, feared God, and eschewed evil; and we are told how, on a disastrous afternoon, messenger after messenger came to him to announce one calamity after the other, culminating in the annihilation of his entire family, and how the final scorbutic affliction came shortly afterwards, the anti-climax, it must be confessed, of his woes, which drove the patient man to open his mouth and curse his day. Between Job and Dr. Quixtus I doubt whether the like avalanche of disasters, Pelion on Ossa and Kinchinjunga on Pelion of misfortunes, ever came thundering down on the head of an upright and evil-eschewing human creature.

The tale of these successive misfortunes can only be briefly narrated; for to examine in detail the train of circumstances which led up to them, and the intricate nexus of human motive in which they were complicated would be foreign to the purpose of this chronicle. Except passively or negatively, perhaps, Quixtus had no hand in their happening. As in the case of Job the thunderbolts fell from a cloudless sky. His moral character was blameless, his position as assured, his life as happy as the patriarch’s. He had done no man harm all his days, and he had no cause to fear evil from any quarter. A tithe or more of his goods he gave in generous charity; and not only did he not proclaim the fact aloud like the Pharisee, but never mentioned the matter to himself—for the simple reason that keeping no accounts of his expenditure he had not the remotest notion of the amount of his eleemosynary expenses. You would have far to go to meet a man more free from petty-mindedness or vanity than Ephraim Quixtus. He was mild, urbane, and for all his scholarly reading, palæolithic knowledge, and wide travel, singularly modest. If you contradicted him, instead of asserting himself, as most men do, with increased vigour, he forthwith put back to find, if possible, the flaw in his own argument. When complimented on his undoubted attainments, he always sought to depreciate them. The achievement of others, even in his own special department of learning, moved his generous admiration. Yet he had one extraordinary vanity—which made him fall short of the perfection of his prototype in the land of Uz—the doctorial title which he possessed by virtue of his Ph.D. degree from the University of Heidelberg. Through signing his articles in learned publications “Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D.,” his brethren among the learned who rent him respectfully to pieces in other learned publications, invariably alluded to him as Dr. Quixtus. Through being thus styled by his brethren both in print and conversation, he began to give his name as Dr. Quixtus to the stentorian functionary at the doors of banquets and receptions of the learned, and derived infinite gratification from hearing it loudly proclaimed to all assembled. From that to announcing himself as “Dr. Quixtus” to the parlour-maid or butler in the homes of the worldly was but a step.

Now it may be questioned whether on the rolls kept by the Incorporated Law Society there is a solicitor who would style himself Doctor. It would be as foreign to the ordinary solicitor’s notions of professional propriety as to interview his clients in a surplice. The title does not suggest a solicitor—any more than Quixtus himself did in person. He was a stranger, an anomaly, a changeling in the Corporation. He ought never to have been a solicitor. He was a very bad solicitor—and that was what the judge said, among other things of a devastating nature, when he was giving evidence at a certain memorable trial, which took place not long after he had re-entered the stormy horizon of Clementina Wing, and his portrait had been hung above the presidential chair of the Anthropological Society.

It is but justice to say that Quixtus was a solicitor not by choice but by inheritance and filial affection. His father had an old-fashioned lucrative family practice, into which, as it was his father’s earnest desire, his kindly nature allowed him to drift. When his father died suddenly, almost as soon as his articles were completed and he was admitted into partnership, he stared in dismay at the prospect before him. He could no more draw up a conveyance of land, or administer a bankrupt estate, or prepare a brief for a barrister, than he could have steered an Atlantic liner into New York Harbour. And he had not the faintest desire to know how to draw up a conveyance or administer an estate. Beyond acquiring from text-books the bare information requisite for the passing of his examinations, he had never attempted to probe deeper into the machinery of the law. His mind attributed far greater importance to the sharp flint instruments wherewith primitive men settled their quarrels by whanging each other over the head than to the miserable instruments on parchment which adjusted the sordid wrangles of the present generation. By entering the profession he had merely gratified a paternal whim. There had been a “Quixtus and Son” in Lincoln’s Inn for a hundred years, and it was the dearest wish of the old man’s heart that “Quixtus and Son” should remain there in sæcula sæculorum. While his father was alive Ephraim had scarcely thought of this desirable continuity. But his father dead, it behoved him to see piously to its establishment.

The irksome part of the matter was that he had no financial reason for proceeding with an abominated profession. As hunger drives the wolves abroad, according to François Villon, so might hunger have driven him from his palæolithic forest. But there was no chance of his being hungry. Not only did his father and his mother each leave him a comfortable fortune, but he was the declared heir of an uncle, his father’s elder brother, who possessed large estates in Devonshire, and had impressed Ephraim from his boyhood up as one in advanced and palsied old age.

Yet “Quixtus and Son” had to be carried on. How? He consulted the confidential clerk, Marrable, who had been in the office since boyhood. Marrable at once suggested a solution of the difficulty which almost caused Ephraim to throw himself into his arms for joy. It was wonderful! It was immense! Quixtus welcomed it as Henry VIII. welcomed Cromwell’s suggestion for getting rid of Queen Katherine. The solution was nothing less than that Ephraim should take him into partnership on generous terms. The deed of partnership was drawn up and signed, and Quixtus entered upon a series of happy and prosperous years. He attended the office occasionally, signed letters and interviewed old family clients, whom he entertained with instructive though irrelevant gossip until they went away comforted. When they insisted on business advice instead of comfort, he rang the bell, and Marrable appeared like a djinn out of a bottle. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could work more satisfactorily. Not only did clients find their affairs thoroughly looked after, but they were flattered at having bestowed upon them the concentrated legal acumen and experience of the firm. You may say that, as a solicitor, Quixtus was a humbug; that he ought never to have accepted the position. But show me a man who has never done that which he ought not to have done, and you will show me either an irresponsible idiot or an angel masquerading in mortal vesture. I have my doubts whether Job himself before his trials was quite as perfect as he is made out to be. Quixtus was neither idiot nor angel. At the most he was a scholarly ineffectual gentleman of comfortable means, forced by filial tenderness into a distasteful and bewildering pursuit. He had neither the hard-heartedness to kill the one, nor the strength of will to devote himself to the mastery of the other. He compromised, you may say, with the devil. Well, the devil is notoriously insidious, and Quixtus was entirely unconscious of subscribing to a bargain. At any rate, the devil had a hand in his undoing and appointed a zealous agent of iniquity in the person of Mr. Samuel Marrable.

When Quixtus went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields one morning and found, instead of his partner, a letter from him stating that he had gone abroad and would remain there without an address for an indefinite time, Quixtus was surprised. When he had summoned the managing clerk and together they had opened Marrable’s safe, both he and the clerk were bewildered; and after he had spent an hour or two with a chartered accountant, for whom he had hurriedly telephoned, he grew sick from horror and amazement. Later in the day he heard through the police that a warrant was out for Samuel Marrable’s arrest. In the course of time he learned that Samuel Marrable had done everything that a solicitor should not do. He had misappropriated trust-funds; he had made away with bearer-bonds; he had falsified accounts; he had forged transfers; he had speculated in wild-cat concerns; he had become the dupe of a gang of company promoters known throughout the City as “Gehenna Unlimited.” He had robbed the widow; he had robbed the orphan; he had robbed the firm; he had robbed with impunity for many years; but when, in desperation, he had tried to rob “Gehenna Unlimited,” they were too much for him. So Samuel Marrable had fled the country.

Thus fell the first thunderbolt. Quixtus saw the fair repute of “Quixtus and Son” shattered in an instant, his own name tarnished, himself—and this was the most cruel part of the matter—betrayed and fooled by the man in whom he had placed his boundless trust. Marrable, whom he had known since he was a child of five; with whom he had gone to pantomimes, exhibitions, and such like junketings when he was a boy; who had first guided his reluctant feet through the mazes of the law; who had stood with him by his father’s death-bed; who was bound to him by all the intimacies of a lifetime; on whose devotion he had counted as unquestioningly as a child on his mother’s love—Marrable to be a rogue and a rascal, not a man at his wits’ end yielding to a sudden temptation, but a deliberate, systematic villain—it was all but unthinkable. Yet here were irrefragable proofs, as the law took its course. And all through the nightmare time that followed until the trial—for the poor fugitive was soon hunted down and haled back to London—when his days were spent in helpless examination of confusing figures and bewildering transactions, the insoluble human problem was uppermost in his mind. How could the man have done these things? Marrable had sobbed over his father’s grave and had put his arm affectionately round his shoulders and led him away to the mourning coach. Marrable had stood with him by another open grave, that of his dead wife, and had comforted him with affectionate sympathy. To the very end not a sinister look had appeared in his honest, capable eyes. On the very day of his flight he had lunched with Quixtus in the Savoy grill-room. He had laughed and jested and told Quixtus a funny story or two. When they parted:

“Shall I see you at the office this afternoon? No? Well good-bye, Ephraim. God bless you.”

He had smiled and waved a cheery hand. How could a man shower upon another his tears, his sympathy, his laughter, his implied loyalty, his blessings, and all the time be a treacherous scoundrel working his ruin? All his knowledge of Prehistoric Man would not answer the question.

“I wonder whether there are many people in the world like Marrable?” he questioned.

And from that moment he began to look at all clear-eyed honest folk and speculate, in a dreary way, whether they were like Marrable.

The family honour being imperilled, duty summoned him to an interview with Matthew Quixtus, his father’s elder brother, the head of the family, and owner of a large estate at Croxton, in Devonshire, and other vast possessions. He paid him a week-end visit. The old man, nearly ninety, received him with every mark of courtesy. He went out of his way to pay deference to him as a man of high position in the learned world. Instead of the “Mr. Ephraim,” which had been his designation in the house ever since the “Master Ephraim” had been dropped in the dim past, it was pointedly as “Dr. Quixtus” that butler and coachman and the rest of the household heard him referred to. Quixtus, who had always regarded his uncle as a fiery ancient, hot with family pride and quick to quarrel on the point of honour, was greatly relieved by his unexpected suavity of demeanour. He listened to his nephew’s account of the great betrayal with a kindly smile, and wasted upon him bottles of the precious ‘54 port which the butler, with appropriate ritual, only brought up for the Inner Brotherhood of Dionysus. On all previous occasions, Ephraim, at whose deplorably uncultivated palate the old man had shrugged pitying shoulders, had been treated to an unconsidered vintage put upon the table after dinner rather as a convention than (in the host’s opinion) as a liquid fit for human throttle. He was sympathetic over the disaster and alluded to Marrable in picturesquely old-world terms of depreciation.

“It’ll cost you a pretty penny, one way or the other,” said he.

“I shall have to make good the losses. I dare say I can make arrangements extending over a period of years.”

“Fly kites, eh? Well, I shan’t live for ever. But I’m not dead yet. By George, sir, no!” and his poor old hand shook pitifully as he raised his glass to his lips. “My grandfather—your great grandfather lived to be a hundred and four.”

“It will be a matter of pride and delight to all who know you,” said Quixtus smiling and bowing, glass in hand, across the table, “if you champion the modern world and surpass him in longevity.”

“The property will come in very handy though, won’t it?” asked the old man.

“I confess,” said Quixtus, “that, if I pay the liabilities out of my own resources, I may be somewhat embarrassed.”

“And what will you do with yourself when you’ve shut up the shop?”

“I shall devote myself more closely to my favourite pursuits.”

The old man nodded and finished his glass of port.

“A damned gentlemanly occupation,” said he, “without any confounded modern commercialism about it.”

Quixtus was pleased. Hitherto his uncle had not regarded his anthropological studies with too sympathetic an eye. He had lived, all his life, a country gentleman, looking shrewdly after his estates, building cottages, draining fields, riding to hounds and shooting all things that were to be shot in their season. In science and scholarship he took no interest. It was therefore all the more gratifying to Quixtus to hear his studious scheme of life so heartily commended. The end of the visit was marked by the same amenity as the beginning, and Quixtus returned to town somewhat strengthened for the ordeal that lay before him.

Up to the time of the trial he had met with nothing but the kindly sympathy of friends and the courteous addressing of those with whom he came into business relations. His first battering against the sharp and merciless edges of the world took place in open court. He stood in the witness-box a lone, piteous spectacle, a Saint Sebastian among witnesses, unsaved by miraculous interposition, like the lucky Sebastian, from personal discomfort. That he was an upright sensitive gentleman mattered nothing to judge and counsel; just as the fact of Sebastian’s being a goodly and gallant youth did not affect his would-be executioners. At every barb shot at him by judge and counsel he quivered visibly. They were within their rights. In their opinion, he deserved to quiver. At the back of their legal minds they were all kindly gentlemen, and out of court had human minds like yours and mine—but in their legal minds, Judge, Counsel for the Prosecution, Counsel for the Defence, all considered Quixtus a fortunate man in being in the witness-box at all; he ought to have been in the dock. There had never been such fantastically culpable negligence. He did not know this; he had not inquired into that; such a transaction he had just been aware of but never understood; he had not examined the documents in question. Everything brought him by Marrable for signature, he signed as a matter of course, without looking at it.

“If Mr. Marrable had brought you a cheque for £20,000 drawn in his favour on your own private bankers, would you have signed it?” asked Counsel.

“Certainly,” said Quixtus.

“Why?”

“I should not have looked at it.”

“But supposing the writing on the cheque had, as it were, leaped to your eyes?”

“I should have taken it for granted that it had to do with the legitimate business of the firm.”

“If that is the case,” remarked the judge, “I don’t think that men like you ought to be allowed to go about loose.”

Whereat there arose laughter in court, and sudden, hellish hatred of judges in the heart of Quixtus.

“Can you give the court any reason why you drifted into such criminal carelessness?” asked Counsel.

“It never entered my head to doubt my partner’s integrity.”

“Do you carry this childlike faith in human nature into all departments of life?”

“Up to now I have had no reason to distrust my fellow creatures.”

“I congratulate you as a solicitor on having had a unique experience,” said the judge acidly.

Counsel continued. “I put it to you—suppose two or three plausible strangers told you a glittering tale, and one asked you to entrust him with a hundred pounds to show your confidence in him—would you do it?”

“I am not in the habit of consorting with vulgar strangers,” retorted Quixtus, with twitching lip.

“Which means that you are too learned and lofty a person to deal with the common clay of this low world?”

“I cannot deal with you,” said Quixtus.

Counsel grew red and angry, as there was laughter in which the judge joined.

“The witness,” said the latter, “is not quite such a fool as he would give us to imagine, Mr. Smithers.”

Thus the only blow that Quixtus could give was turned against him. Also, Counsel, smarting under the hit, mishandled him severely, so that at the end of his examination he stepped down from the witness-box, less a man than a sentient bruise. He remained in court till the very end, deathly pale, pain in his eyes, and his mouth drawn into the lines of that of a child about to cry. The trial proceeded. There was no doubt of the guilt of the miserable wretch in the dock. The judge summed up, and it was then that he said the devastating things about Quixtus that inflamed his newly born hatred of judges to such an extent that it thenceforth blackened his candid and benevolent soul. The jury gave their verdict without retiring, and Marrable, at the age of sixty, was condemned to seven years’ penal servitude.

Quixtus left the court dazed and broken. He was met in the corridor by Tommy, who gripped him by the arm, led him down into the street and put him into a cab. He had not been in court, being a boy of delicate feelings.

“You must buck up, you know,” he said to the silent, grey-faced man beside him. “It will all come right. What you want now is a jolly stiff brandy-and-soda.”

Quixtus smiled faintly. “I think I do,” said he.

A few minutes later Tommy superintended the taking of his prescription in the dining-room in Russell Square, and eyed Quixtus triumphantly as he set down the empty glass.

“There! That’ll set you straight. There’s nothing like it.”

Quixtus held out his hand. “You’re a good boy, Tommy. Thanks for taking care of me. I’ll be all right now.”

“Don’t you think I might be of some use if I stayed? It’s a bit lonesome here.”

“I have a big box of stuff from the valley of the Dordogne, which I haven’t opened yet,” said Quixtus. “I was saving it up for this evening, so I shan’t be lonesome.”

“Well be sure to have a good dinner and a bottle of fizz,” said Tommy. After which sage counsel he went reluctantly away.

Just as Clementina was sitting down to dinner Tommy rushed in with a crumpled evening newspaper in his hand, incoherent with rage. Had she seen the full report? What did she think of it? How dared they say such things of a high-minded honourable gentleman? Counsel on both sides were a disgrace to the bar, the judge a blot on the bench. They ought not to be allowed to cumber the earth. They ought to be shot on sight. Out West they would never have left the court alive. Had he lived in a simpler age, or in a more primitive society, the young Paladin would have gone forth and slaughtered them in the bosom of their families. Fortunately, all he could do by way of wreaking his vengeance was to tear the newspaper in half, throw it on the floor, and stamp on it.

“Feel better?” asked Clementina, who had listened to his heroics rather sourly. “If so, sit down and have some food.”

But Tommy declined nourishment. He was too sore to eat. His young spirit revolted against the injustice of the world. It clamoured for sympathy.

“Say you think it damnable.”

“Anything to do with the law is always damnable,” said Clementina. “You shouldn’t put yourself within its clutches. Please pass me the potatoes.”

Tommy handed her the dish. “I believe you’re as hard as nails, Clementina.”

“All right, believe it,” she replied grimly. And she would not say more, for in what she thought was her heart she agreed with the judge.

CHAPTER IV

Quixtus was still bowing his head over the dishonoured grave of “Quixtus and Son” when the second thunderbolt fell. The public disgrace drove a temperamentally hermit-like nature into more rigid seclusion. He resigned his presidency of the Anthropological Society. The Council met and unanimously refused to accept his resignation. They wrote in such terms that he could not do otherwise than yield. But he gave up his attendance at their meetings. To a man, his friends among the learned professed their sympathy. It hurt rather than healed. Those who wrote received courteous and formal replies. Those who knocked at his door were refused admittance. Even Clementina, repenting of her harshness and pitying the lonely and helpless man, pinned on a shameless thing that had once resembled a hat, and went up by omnibus to Russell Square, only to find the door closed against her. The woman thus scorned became the fury which, according to the poet, is unknown in Hades. She expressed her opinion of Quixtus pretty freely. But Quixtus shrank from her as he shrank from every one, as he even shrank from his own servants. These he dismissed, with the exception of Mrs. Pennycook, his housekeeper, who, since the death of his wife had held a high position of trust in his household, and a vague female of humble and heterogeneous appearance who lived out, and had the air of apologising for inability to squeeze through the wall when he passed by. In view of he knew not what changes in his immediate financial circumstances, economy, he said, was desirable. He also shut up the greater part of the big house, finding a dim sort of pleasure in such retrenchment. He lived in his museum at the back, ate his meals in the little dark room at the head of the kitchen stairs, and changed his luxurious bedroom for a murky, cheerless little chamber adjoining the museum. When a man takes misery for a bride he may be forgiven for exaggeration in his early transports.

Only on Tuesday nights did he throw open dining-room and drawing-room, where he received Huckaby, Vandermeer, and Billiter as in the past. To them his smile and his old self were given. Indeed he found a newer sympathy with them. He, even as they, had been the victim of outrageous fortune. He, too, had suffered from the treachery of man and the insolence of office. The three found an extra guerdon in their great-coat pockets.

There were times, however, when the museum grew wearisome through familiarity, when he found no novelty in the Quaternary skull from Silesia, or the engraved reindeers on the neolithic axe-heads, or the necklet of the lady of the bronze age; when he craved things nearer to his own time which could give him some message of modernity. On such occasions he would either walk abroad, or if the weather were foul, take a childish pleasure in exploring the sealed chambers of the house. For, shut up a room, exclude from it the light of day, cover the furniture with dust-sheets till you get the semblance of a morgue of strange beasts, forget it for a while, and, on re-entering it, you will have all the elements of mystery which gradually and agreeably give place to little pleasant shocks of discovery of the familiar. The neglected pictures that have hung on the walls, the huddled knick-knacks on a table, the heap of books on the floor, all have messages of gentle reproach. A newspaper of years ago, wrapped round a cushion, once opened by eager hands and containing in its headlines world-shaking news (now so stale and forgotten) is a pathetic object. In drawers are garments out of date, preserved heaven knows why, keepsakes worked by fair hands, unused but negligently treasured, faded curtains which will never be rehung—a thousand old stimulating things, down to ends of sealing-wax and carefully rolled bits of twine. And some drawers are empty, and from them rises the odour of lavender poignant with memories of the things that are no more.

It was a large, old-fashioned house which had been his father’s before him, in which he had been born; and it was full of memories. In the recess of a dark cupboard in one of the attics he found a glass jar, which had escaped the vigilance or commanded the respect of generations of housemaids, covered with a parchment on which was written in his mother’s hand, “Damson Jam.” His mother had died a quarter of a century ago.

An old hair-trunk in the corner of the box-room, such a hair trunk as the boldest man during Quixtus’s lifetime would have shrunk from having attached to him on his travels, contained correspondence of his grandfather’s and old daguerreotypes and photographs of stiff, staring, faded people long since gone to a (let us hope) more becomingly attired world. There was a miniature on ivory, villainously painted, of a chubby red-cheeked child, and on the back was written “My Son Mathew, aged two years and six months.” Could the shrivelled, myriad-wrinkled, palsied old man whom Ephraim had visited but a short while since ever have remotely resembled this? The hair-trunk also contained a pistol with a label “Carried by my father at Waterloo.” That was the old gentleman who had lived to a hundred and four. Why had this relic of family honour remained hidden all his life?

The more he searched into odd corners the more did his discoveries stimulate his interest. Of his own life he found records in unexpected places. A bundle of school-reports. He opened it at random, and his eye fell upon the Headmaster’s Report at the foot of a sheet; “Studious but unpractical. It seems impossible to arouse in him a sense of ambition, or even of the responsibilities of life.” He smiled somewhat wistfully and put the bundle in his pocket with a view to the further acquisition of self-knowledge. A set of Cambridge college bills tied with red tape, a broken microscope, a case of geometrical drawing instruments, a manuscript book of early poems, mimetic echoes of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Swinburne, who were all clamouring together in his brain, his college blazer, much moth-eaten, his Heidelberg student’s cap, ditto. . . . Ah! qu’ils sont loin ces jours si regrettés! . . .

Of his wife, too, there were almost forgotten relics. An oak chest opened unexpectedly disclosed a pair of little pink satin slippers standing wistfully on the top of the tissue paper that protected the dresses beneath. The key was in the lock. He closed the lid reverently, locked the chest, and put the key in his pocket. They had had together five years of placid happiness. She was a sweet, white-winged soul— Angela. Her little boudoir on the second floor had not been used since her death, and was much as she had left it. Only the dust-sheets and the gloom invested it in a more ghostly atmosphere than other less sacred chambers. Her work-basket stood by the window. He opened it and found it still contained a reel of thread and a needle-case stuck full of rusty needles. On the wall hung an enlarged portrait of himself at the age of thirty—he was not quite so lantern-jawed then, and his hair was thicker on the top. A water-colour sketch of Angela hung over the oak bureau, at which she used to write her dinner-notes and puzzle her pretty head over household accounts. He drew up the blind so as to see the picture more clearly. Yes. It was like her. Dark-haired, fragile, with liquid brown eyes. There was just that dimple in her chin. . . . He remembered it so well; but, strangely, it had played no part in his customary mental picture of her. In the rediscovery of the dimple he found a vague melancholy pleasure. . . . Idly he drew down the slanting lids of the bureau, and pulled out the long narrow drawers that supported it underneath. The interior was empty. He recollected now that he had cleared it of its contents when settling Angela’s affairs after her death. He thrust up the slanting lid, pushed back the long right-hand drawer, pushed the left hand one. It stuck. He tried to ease it in, but it was jammed. He pulled it out with a jerk, and found that the cause of the jam was a letter flat against the end of the drawer with a corner turned over the edge. He took out the letter, closed the drawers, and smiled sadly, glad to have discovered a new relic of Angela in the bureau—probably a gossiping note from a friend, perhaps one from himself. He went to the light of the window.

“My adored heart’s dearest and most beloved angel”—so the letter began. He scanned the words bewildered. Certainly in his wildest dreams he had never imagined such a form of address. Besides, the handwriting was not his. He turned the sheet rapidly and glanced at the end; “God! How I love you. Will.”

Will? Will Hammersley. It was Will Hammersley’s handwriting. What did it mean? He paused for a few moments, breathing hard, looking with blind eyes through the window over the square. At last he read the letter. Then he thrust it, a crumpled ball, into his pocket and reeled out of the room like a drunken man, down the stairs of the lonely house, and flung himself into a chair in his museum, where he sat for hours staring before him, paralysed with an awful dismay.

At five o’clock his housekeeper entered with the tea-things. He did not want tea. At seven she came again into the large dark room lit only by the red glow of the fire.

“The gentlemen are here, sir.”

It was a Tuesday evening. He had forgotten.

He stumbled to his feet.

“All right,” he said.

Then he shivered, feeling a deadly sickness of soul. No, he could not meet his fellow creatures to-night.

“Give them my compliments and apologies, and say I am unwell and unable to dine with them this evening. See that they have all they want, as usual.”

“Very good, sir—but yourself? I’m sorry you are ill, sir. What can I bring you?”

“Nothing,” said Quixtus harshly. “Nothing. And please don’t trouble me any more.”

Mrs. Pennycook regarded him in some astonishment, not having heard him speak in such a tone before. Probably no one else had, since he had learned to speak.

“If you’re not better in the morning, sir, I might fetch the doctor.”

He turned in his chair. “Go. I tell you. Go. Leave me alone.”

Later he rose and switched on the light and, mechanically descending to the hall, like a sleep-walker, deposited his usual largesse in the pockets of the three seedy, familiar overcoats. Then he went up to his museum again. The effort, however, had cleared his mind. He reflected. He had not been very well of late. There were such things as hallucinations, to which men broken down by mental strain were subject. Let him read the letter through once more. He took the crumpled paper from his pocket, smoothed it out and read. No. There was no delusion. The whole story was there—the treachery, the faithlessness, the guilty passion that gloried in its repeated consummation. His wife Angela, his friend Will Hammersley—the only woman and the only man he had ever loved. A sudden memory smote him. He had entrusted her to Hammersley’s keeping times out of number.

“My God!” said he, beating his forehead with a clenched fist. “My God!”

And so fell the second thunderbolt.

Towards midnight there came a heavy knocking at his door. Startled by the unusual sound he cried:

“What’s that? Who’s there?”

The door opened and Eustace Huckaby lurched solemnly into the room. His ruffled hair stood up on end like a cockatoo’s crest, and his watery eyes glistened. He pulled his straggling beard.

“Sorry ole’ man to hear you’re seedy. Came to know—how—getting on.”

Quixtus rose, a new sternness on his face, and confronted the intruder.

“Huckaby, you’re drunk.”

Huckaby laughed and waved a protesting hand, thereby nearly losing his balance.

“No,” said he. “Rid’klous. I’m not drunk. Other fellows are—drunk ash owls—tha’s why—couldn’t come see you. They’re not qui’ sort of men been acushtomed to assochate with—I’m—University man—like you, Quishtus—sometime Fellow Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—I first gave motto for club—didn’t I? Procul, O procul este profani—tha’s Latin. Other two lobsters don’t know word of Latin—ignorant as lobsters—lobsters—tha’s wha’ I call ’em.” He lurched heavily into a chair. “Awful thirsty. Got a drink, old f’la?”

“No,” said Quixtus. “I haven’t. And if I had, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

The reprobate pondered darkly over the announcement. Then he hiccoughed, and his face brightened.

“Look here, dear old frien’——”

Quixtus interrupted him.

“Do you mean to tell me those other men are drunk too?”

“As owls—you go down—see ’em.”

He threw back his head and broke out into sudden shrill laughter. Then, checking himself, he said with an awful gravity;

“I beg your pardon, Quishtus. Their conduc’s disgrace—humanity.”

“You three have dined in this house once a week for years, and no one has left it the worse for liquor. And now, the first time I leave you to yourselves—I was really not able to join you to-night—you take advantage of my absence, and——”

Huckaby staggered to his feet and tried to lay his hand on Quixtus’s shoulder. Having recovered himself, he put it on top of a case of prehistoric implements.

“Tha’s just what I want—explain to you. They’re lobsters, dear ole’ friend—just lobsters—all claw and belly and no heart. I’m a University man like you. Corpush Christi College, Cambridge—They’re not friends of yours. They’re lobsters. Ruddy lobsters. I’m not drunk you know. I’m all right. I’m telling you——”

Quixtus took him by the arm. “I think you had better go away, Huckaby.”

“No. Send other fellows away. I’m your frien’,” said he, pointing a shaky forefinger. “I want to tell you. I’m a University man and so are you, and I don’t care how much you made out of it. You’re all right, Quishtus. I’m your frien’. Other lobsters said at dinner that if justice were done you’d be in quod.”

Quixtus took the gaunt sot by the shoulders and shook him.

“What the devil do you mean?”

“Don’t, don’t—don’t upset good dinner,” said Huckaby wriggling away. “You won’t believe I’m your friend. Van and Billiter say you were in with Parable—Paramour—wha’s his name? all the time, and it’s just your rosy luck that you weren’t doing time too. Now I don’t care if you did stand in with Parachute—‘tisn’t my business. But I’ll stan’ by you. I, Eustace Huckaby, Master of Arts, sometime Fellow of Corpush Christi College, Cambridge. There’sh my hand.”

He extended it, but Quixtus regarded it not.

“The three of you have not contented yourselves with getting drunk, but you’ve been slandering me behind my back—foully slandering me.”

He went to the door and flung it open.

“I think it’s time, Huckaby, that we joined the others.”

Huckaby shambled down the stairs, murmuring of lobsters and parables, and turning every now and then to assure his host that adverse circumstances made no difference to his imperishable affection; and so they reached the dining-room. Huckaby had spoken truly. Billiter was sprawling back in his chair, his coat and waistcoat covered with cigar-ash; his bald head was crowned by the truncated cone of a candle-shade (a jest of Huckaby’s) which gave him an appearance that would have been comic to a casual observer, but to Quixtus was peculiarly obscene. His dazed eyes were fixed stupidly on Vandermeer who, the picture of woe, was weeping bitterly because he had no one to love him. At the sight of Quixtus, Billiter made an effort to rise, but fell back heavily on to his seat, the candle-shade falling likewise. He muttered hoarsely and incoherently that it was the confounded gout again in his ankles. Then he expressed a desire to slumber. Vandermeer raised a maudlin face.

“No one to love me,” he whined, and tried to pour from an empty decanter; it slipped from his hand and broke a glass. “Not even a drop of consolation left,” he said.

“Disgrashful, isn’t it?” said Huckaby with a hiccough.

Quixtus eyed them with disgust. Humanity was revolting. He turned to Huckaby and said with a shudder; “For God’s sake, take them away.”

Huckaby summed them up with an unsteady but practised eye. “Can’t walk. Ruddy lobsters. Must have cabs.”

Quixtus went to the street-door and whistled up a couple of four-wheelers from the rank; and eventually, by the aid of Huckaby and the cabmen whom he had to bribe heavily to drive the wretches home, they were deposited in some sort of sitting posture each in a separate vehicle. As soon as the sound of the departing wheels died away, Quixtus held out Huckaby’s overcoat.

“You’re sober enough to walk,” said he, helping him on with it. “Good-night.”

Huckaby turned on the doorstep.

“Want you to remember—don’t care damn what a frien’ has done—ever want help, come to me, sometime Fellow of Corp——”

Quixtus closed the street door in his face and heard no more. These were his friends; these the men who had lived on his bounty, who, for years, for what they could get, had controlled their knavery, their hypocrisy. These were the men for whom he had striven, these sots, these dogs, these vulgar-hearted, slandering knaves! His very soul was sick. He paused at the dining-room door and for a moment looked at the scene of the debauch. Wine and coffee were spilled; glasses broken; a lighted stump of cigar had burned a great brown hole in the tablecloth. He grimly imagined the tipsy scene. If he had been with them, there would have been smug faces, deprecating hands upheld at the second round of the port, talk on art, literature, religion, and what-not, and, at parting, whispered blessings and fervent hand-shakes; and all the time there would have been slanderous venom in their hearts, and the raging beast of drink within them cursing him for his repressing presence.

“The canting rogues,” he murmured as he went back to his museum. “The canting rogues!”

He thrust his hands, in a gesture of anger and disgust, deep into his jacket-pockets. His knuckles came against the crumpled letter. He turned faint and clung to the newel-post on the landing for support. The smaller treachery coming close before his eyes had for the time eclipsed the greater.

“My God,” he said, “is all the world against me?”

Unfortunately there was a thunderbolt or two yet to fall.

CHAPTER V

To my nephew Ephraim for his soul’s good I bequeath my cellar of wine which I adjure him to drink with care, thought, diligence, and appreciation, being convinced that a sound judge of wine is, or is on the way to becoming what my nephew is not, a judge of men and affairs.”

Quixtus stared at the ironical words written in Mathew Quixtus’s sharp precise handwriting, and turned with a grey face to the lawyer who had pointed them out.

“Is that the only reference to me in the will, Mr. Henslow?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, yes, Dr. Quixtus. You can see for yourself.” He handed Quixtus the document.

Mathew Quixtus had bequeathed large sums of money to charities, smaller sums to old servants, the wine to Ephraim, and the residue of his estate to a Quixtus unknown to Ephraim, save by hearsay, who had settled thirty years before in New York. Even Tommy Burgrave, with whom he had been on good terms, was not mentioned. But he had quarrelled years before with his niece, Tommy’s mother, for making an impecunious marriage, and, to do him justice, had never promised the boy anything. The will was dated a few weeks back, and had been witnessed by the butler and the coachman.

“I should like you to understand, Dr. Quixtus,” said Henslow, “that until we found that envelope I had no idea that your uncle had made a fresh will. I came here with the old one in my hand, which I drew up and which has been in my office-safe for fifteen years. Under that, I need not tell you, you were, with the exception of a few trifling legacies, the sole legatee. I am deeply grieved.”

“Let me see that date again,” said Quixtus.

He pressed his hands to his eyes and thought. It was the day before his arrival on his last visit.

The telegram announcing Mathew Quixtus’s sudden death had brought a gleam of light into a soul which for a week had been black with misery. It awakened him to a sense of outer things. A sincere affection for the old man had been a lifelong habit. It was a shock to realise that he was no longer alive. Besides having always unconsciously taken a child’s view of death, he felt genuinely sorry, for his uncle’s sake, that he should have died. Impulses of pity, tenderness, regret, stirred in his deadened heart. He forthwith set out for Devonshire, and when he arrived at Croxton, stood over the pinched waxen face till the tears came into his eyes.

He had summoned Tommy Burgrave, the only other member of the family in England, but Tommy had not been able to attend. He had caught cold while painting in the open air, and was in bed with a slight attack of congestion of the lungs. Quixtus was alone in the great house. With the aid of Henslow he made the funeral arrangements. The old man was laid to rest in the quiet churchyard of Croxton. Half the county came to pay their tribute to his memory, and shook Quixtus by the hand. Then he came back to the house, and in the presence of one or two of the old servants, the will was read.

It had been dated the day before his arrival on his last visit. The thing had been written and signed and witnessed and sealed, and was lying in that locked drawer in the library all the time that the old man was welcoming him, flattering him, showing him deference. All the suavity and deference had been mockery. The old man had made him a notorious geck and gull.

His pale blue eyes hardened, and he turned an expressionless face to the lawyer.

“I’m afraid it would not be possible,” said Henslow, “to have the will set aside on the ground of, say—senility—on the part of the testator.”

“My uncle had every faculty at its keenest when he wrote it,” said Quixtus, “including that of merciless cruelty.”

“It was a heartless jest,” the lawyer agreed.

“If you will do me a service, Mr. Henslow, you might be kind enough to instruct one of the servants to pack up my bag and forward it to my London address. I am going now to the railway station.”

The lawyer looked at his watch and put out a detaining hand.

“There’s not a decent train for two or three hours.”

“I would rather,” said Quixtus, “ride a tortoise home than stay in this house another moment.”

He walked out of the room and out of the house, and after waiting at the station whence he despatched a telegram to his housekeeper, who was not expecting him back for two or three days, took the first train—a slow one—to London.

In his corner of the railway carriage the much-afflicted man sat motionless, brooding. Everything had happened that could shake to its foundations a man’s faith in humanity, and swallow it up in abysmal darkness. Suddenly, as though by a prearranged design—as we know was the case with his forerunner in the land of Uz—cataclysm after cataclysm had revealed to him the essential baseness, treachery, cruelty of mankind. For in his eyes these were proved to be essential qualities. Had they not been revealed to him, not by fitful gleams, but in one steady lurid glare, in the nature of those who had been nearest to him in the world—Angela, Will Hammersley, Marrable, Huckaby, Vandermeer, Billiter, Mathew Quixtus? If the same hell-streak ran through the souls of these, surely it must run through the souls of all the sons and daughters of Adam. Now here came the great puzzle. Why should he, Ephraim Quixtus, (as far as he could tell) vary from the unkindly race of man? Why hitherto had baseness, treachery, and cruelty been as foreign to his nature as an overpowering inclination towards arson or homicide? Why had he been unequipped with these qualities which appeared to serve mortals as weapons wherewith to fight the common battle of life? The why, he could not tell. That he had them not, was obvious. That he had gone to the wall through lack of them was obvious, too. Instead of the dagger of baseness, the sword of cruelty, the shield of treachery, all finely tempered implements of war, he had been fighting with the wooden lath of virtue and the brawn-buckler of trust. Armed as he should have been, he would have out-manœuvred Marrable at his own game, kept his wife in chaste and wholesome terror of his jealousy, sent Huckaby and Company long since to the limbo where they belonged, deluded his uncle into the belief that he was a devil of a fellow, and now be standing with flapping wings and crowing voice triumphant on this dunghill of a world. But he had been hopelessly outmatched. Whoever had taken upon himself the responsibility of equipping him for the battle of life had been guilty of incredible negligence. But on whom could he call to remedy this defect? Men called on the Unknown God to make them good; but it would be idiotic as well as blasphemous to call on Him to make one bad. How, then, were the essential qualities of baseness, treachery, and cruelty to be captured and brought into his armoury? Perhaps the Devil might help. But we are so matter-of-fact and scientific in these days that even the simple soul of Quixtus could not quite believe in his existence. If he had lived in the Middle Ages (so in scholarly gloom ran his fancy) he could have drawn circles and pentagrams and things on the floor, and uttered the incantations, and all the hierarchy of hell would have been at his command, Satanas, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus, Samael, Asael, Beelzebub, Azazel, Macathiel. . . . Quixtus rather leaned towards Macathiel—the name suggested a merciless, bowelless, high-cheek-boned devil in a kilt——

Impatiently he shook his thoughts free from the fantastic channel into which they had wandered and brought them back into the ever-thickening slough of his soul. The train lumbered on, stopping at pretty wayside stations where fresh-faced folk with awkward gait and soft deep voices clattered cheerily past Quixtus’s windows on their way to or from the third-class carriages, or at the noisier, bustling stations of large towns. Now and then a well-dressed traveller invaded his solitude for a short distance. But Quixtus sat in his remote corner seeing, hearing nothing, brooding on the baseness, treachery, and cruelty of mankind. He had come to the end of love, the end of trust, the end of friendship. When the shapes of those who were still loyal to him flitted across his darkened fancy he cursed them in his heart. They were as corrupt as the rest. That they had not been found out in their villainy only proved a thicker mask of hypocrisy. He had finished with them all. If he had been a more choleric man gifted with the power of picturesque vehemence of language he might have outrivalled Timon of Athens in the denunciations of his fellows. It must be a relief to any one in such a frame of mind to stand up and, with violent gestures, express his views in terms of sciatica, itches, blains, leprosy, venomed worms and ulcerous sores, and to call upon the blessed breeding sun to draw from the earth rotten humidity, and below his sister’s orb to infect the air. He knows exactly what he feels, gives it full artistic expression, and finds himself all the better for it. But Quixtus, inarticulate, had no such comfort. Indeed, he could hardly have expressed the welter of horror, hate, and misery that was his moral being, in any form of speech whatever. As the train rumbled on, the phrase “Evil be thou my good” wove itself into the rhythm of the machinery. He let it sing dully and stupidly in his ears, and his mind worked subconsciously back to Macathiel.

As yet he had imagined no future attitude towards life. His soul was in a state of negation. The insistent invocation of Evil was but a catchword, irritating his brain and having no real significance. At the most he envisaged the future as a period of inactive misanthropy and suspicion. He had as yet no stirrings to action. On the other hand, he did not, like Job, after the first series of afflictions, rend his clothes, shave his head, and bear his reverses with pious resignation.

The train arrived an hour late, as slow trains are apt to do, and it was nearly half-past eleven when he reached his house in Russell Square. He opened the door with his latchkey. The hall was dark, contrary to custom. He switched on the light, and, turning, saw that the letter-box had not been cleared. Mechanically he took out the letters, and beneath the hall lamp glanced at the outside of the envelopes. Among them was the telegram he had sent from Devonshire.

Even a man wallowing in the deepest abysses of spiritual misery needs food; and when he finds that a telegram ordering supper (for his return was unexpected) has not been opened, he may be pardoned purely material disappointment and irritation. Mrs. Pennycook, the housekeeper, must have profited by his absence to take a holiday. But what business had she to take a holiday and leave the house uncared for at that time of night? For, if she had returned, she would have lit the hall-light, and cleared the letter-box. He resigned himself peevishly to the prospect of a biscuit and a whisky-and-soda in the little back room where he ate his meals.

He strode down the passage to the head of the kitchen stairs and opened the study door. A glare of light met his eyes, and a moment afterwards something else. This was Mrs. Pennycook in an armchair, sleeping a bedraggled sleep with two empty quart bottles of champagne and an empty bottle of whisky by her side. He shook her hard by the shoulders; but beyond stertorous and jerky breaths the blissful lady showed no signs of animation.

It was then that a constricting thread snapped in Quixtus’s brain. It was then, as if by a trick of magic, that all the vaguely billowing horrors, disillusions, disgusts, resentments and hatreds co-ordinated themselves into a scheme of fierce vividness.

Just as the boils made Job, who had borne the annihilation of his family with equanimity, open his mouth and curse his day, so did a drunken servant, who neglected to give him his supper, awaken Ephraim Quixtus to the glorious thrill of a remorseless, relentless malignity.

He threw up his hands and laughed aloud, peals of unearthly laughter that woke the echoes of the empty house, that woke the canary in its cage by the window, causing it to utter a few protesting “cheeps,” that arrested the policeman on his beat outside, that did everything human laughter in the way of noise can do, even stimulating the blissful lady to open half a glazed eye for the fraction of a second. After his paroxysm had subsided, he looked at the woman for a moment, and then with an air of peculiar malevolence took a sheet of note-paper from a small writing-table beneath the canary’s cage and wrote on it:

“Let me never see your face again.—E. Q.”

This, by the aid of a hairpin that had fallen into her lap, he pinned to her apron. Then, with another laugh, he left her beneath the glare of the light, and went out into the street. He was thrilled, like a drunken man, with a new sense of life. Years had fallen from his shoulders. He had solved the riddle of the world. Baseness, treachery, cruelty, he felt them pulsating in his heart with a maddening joy of existence. Evil was his good. He was no longer even a base, treacherous, cruel man. He was a devil incarnate. The long exultant years in front of him would be spent in deeds of shame and crime and unprecedented wickedness. If there was a throne to be waded to through slaughter, through slaughter would he wade to it. He would shut the gates of Mercy on mankind. He held out both hands in front of him with stiffened outspread fingers. If only there was a human throat between them, how they would close around it, how he would gloat over the dying agony! Caligula was the man for him. He regretted his untimely death. What a colleague could have been made of the fiend who wished that the whole human race had one neck so that it could be severed at one blow!

He had reached this stage in his exultant reflections when he found himself outside a restaurant which he had never entered, at the Oxford Street end of the Tottenham Court Road. He remembered that he was hungry; that a new-born spirit of wickedness must be fed. He went in, unconscious of the company or the surroundings, and ordered supper. The waiter said that it was nearly closing time. Quixtus called for a plate of cold beef and a whisky-and-soda. He devoured the meat ravenously, forgetful of the bread by his side, and drank the drink at a gulp. Having lit a cigar, he threw half a sovereign on the table and walked out. He walked along the streets heedless of direction, down Shaftesbury Avenue, across Piccadilly Circus blazing with light, through Leicester Square, along the still hurrying Strand to Fleet Street noiseless and empty, his brain on fire, weaving exquisite fabrics of devilry. Suddenly he halted on a glorious thought. Why should he not begin there and then? The whole of London, with its crime and sin and rottenness, lay before him. He retraced his steps back to the Babylon of the West. What could he do? Where could he find adequate wickedness? When he reached Charing Cross again it was dark and deserted. A square mile of London has every night about an hour of tearing, surging, hectic life. Then all of a sudden the thousands of folk are swept away to the four comers of the mighty city, and all is still. A woman, as Quixtus passed, quickened her pace and murmured words. Here was a partner in wickedness to his hand. But the flesh of the delicately fibred man revolted simultaneously with the thought. No. That did not come within his scheme of wickedness. He slipped a coin into the woman’s palm, because she looked so forlorn, and went his way. She was useless for his purpose. What he sought was some occasion for pitilessness, for doing evil to his fellow creatures. A fine rain began to fall; but he heeded it not, burning with the sense of adventure. A reminiscence of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde crossed his mind. Hyde, like Caligula, was also the man for him. Didn’t he once throw a child down in a lonely street and stamp on it?

He walked and walked through the now silent places, and the more he walked the less opening for wickedness did he see. The potentialities of Babylon appeared to him overrated. After a wide and aimless détour he found himself again at Charing Cross. He struck down Whitehall. But in Whitehall and Parliament Street, the stately palaces on either side, vast museums of an Empire’s decorum, forbade the suggestion of wickedness. The belated omnibuses and cabs that passed along were invested with a momentary hush of respectability. He turned up the Thames Embankment and saw the mass of the great buildings with here and there patches of lighted windows showing above the tree-tops of the gardens, the benches below filled with huddled sodden shapes of human misery, the broad silent thoroughfares, the parapet, the dimly flowing river below—a black mirror marked by streaks of light, reflections from lamps on parapet and bridges, the low-lying wharves on the opposite side swallowed up in blackness—and no attractive wickedness was apparent; nor was there any on the great bridge, disturbed only by the slow waggons mountains high bringing food for the insatiable multitude of London, and lumbering on in endless trail with an impressive fatefulness; nor even at the coffee-stall at the corner of the Waterloo Bridge Road, its damp little swarm of frequenters clustering to it like bees, their faces illuminated by the segment of light cast by the reflector at the back of the stall, all harmlessly drinking cocoa or wistfully watching others drink it. For a moment he thought of joining the swarm, as some of the faces looked alluringly vile; but the inbred instinct of fastidiousness made him pass it by. He plunged into the unsavoury streets beyond. They were still and ghostly. All things diabolical could no doubt be found behind those silent windows; but at two o’clock in the morning sin is generally asleep, and sleeping sin and sleeping virtue are as alike as two pins. Meanwhile the fine rain fell unceasingly, and the Earnest Seeker after Wickedness began to feel wet and chilly.

This is a degenerate age. A couple of centuries ago Quixtus could have manned a ship with cut-throats, hoisted the skull and cross-bones, and become the Terror of the Seas. Or, at a more recent date, if he had been a Corsican he could have taken his gun and gone into the maquis and declared war on the island. If he had lived in the fourteenth century he could have become a condottiere after the fashion of the gentle Duke Guarnieri, who, wearing on his breast a silver badge with the inscription “The Enemy of God, of Pity, and of Mercy,” gained for himself enviable unpopularity in Northern Italy. As a Malay, he could have taken a queerly curving, businesslike knife and run amuck, to his great personal satisfaction. In prehistoric times, he could have sat for a couple of delicious months in a cave, polishing and sharpening a beautiful axe-head, and, having fitted it to its haft, have gone forth and (probably skulking behind trees so as to get his victims in the rear) have had as gorgeous a time as was given to prehistoric man to imagine. But nowadays, who can do these delightful, vindictive, and misanthropical things with any feeling of security? If Quixtus, obeying a logically developed impulse; had slaughtered a young man in evening dress in Piccadilly, he most indubitably would have been hung, to say nothing of being subjected to all the sordid procedure of a trial for murder.

Nor is this all. Owing to some flaw in our system of education, Quixtus had not been trained to deeds of violence; no one had even set before him the theoretical philosophy of the subject. You may argue, I am aware, that we use other weapons now than the cutlass of the pirate or the stone-axe of the quaternary age; we have the subtler vengeance of voice and pen, which can give a more exquisite finish to the devastation of human lives. But I would remind you that Quixtus, through the neglect of his legal studies and practice, was ignorant of the ordinary laws of chicane, and of the elementary principles of financial dishonesty that guided the nefariousness of folk like “Gehenna, Unlimited.”

It must be admitted, therefore, that Quixtus entered on his career of depravity greatly handicapped.

The grey light of a hopeless May dawn was just beginning to outline the towers and spires of Westminster against the sky when Quixtus found himself by the Westminster Hospital. He was damp and chill, somewhat depressed. The thrill of adventure had passed away, leaving disappointment and a little disillusion in its place. He was also physically fatigued, and his shoulders and feet ached. One ghostly hansom-cab stood on the rank, the horse drooping its dejected head into a lean nosebag, the driver asleep inside. Quixtus resolved to arouse the man from his slumbers, and, abandoning the pursuit of evil for the night, drive home to Russell Square. But as he was crossing the road towards the vehicle, a miserable object, starting up from the earth, ran by his side and addressed him in a voice so hoarse that it scarcely rose above a whisper.

“For Gord’s sake, guv’nor, spare a poor man a copper or two. I’ve not tasted food for twenty-four hours.”

Quixtus stopped, his instinctive fingers diving into his pence-pocket. Suddenly an idea struck him.

“You must have led a very evil life,” said he, “to have come to this stage of destitution.”

“Whatcher gettin’ at?” growled the applicant, one eye fixed suspiciously on Quixtus’s face, the other on the fumbling hand.

“I’m not going to preach to you—far from it,” said Quixtus; “but I should like to know. You must have seen a great deal of wickedness in your time.”

“If you arsk me,” opined the man, “there’s nothing but wickedness in this blankety blank world.”

He did not say “blankety blank,” but used other and more lurid epithets which, though they were not exactly the ones that Quixtus himself would have chosen, at least showed him that his companion and himself were agreed on their fundamental conception of the universe.

“If you will tell me where I can find some,” he said, “I will give you half a crown.”

A glimmer of astonished interest lit up the man’s dull eyes. “Whatcher want to know for?”

“That’s my business,” said Quixtus.

The cabman, suddenly awakened, saw the possibility of a fare. He clambered out of the vehicle.

“Cab, sir?” he called across the road.

“Yes,” said Quixtus.

“ ‘Arf a crown?” said the battered man.

“Certainly,” said Quixtus.

“Then I’ll tell yer, guv’nor. I’ve been a bookie’s tout, see? Not a slap-up bookie in the ring—but an outside one—one what did a bit of welshing when he could, see?—and what I say is, that I seed more wickedness there than anywhere else. If you want to see blankety blank wickedness you go on the turf.” He cleared his throat, but his whisper had grown almost inaudible. “I’ve gone and lost my voice,” he said.

Quixtus looked at the drenched, starved, voiceless, unshorn horror of a man standing outcast and dying of want and wickedness in the grey dawn, under the shadow of the central symbols of the pomp and majesty of England.

“You look very ill,” said he.

“Consumpshon,” breathed the man.

Quixtus shivered. The cabman, who had hastily dispossessed the dejected horse of the nosebag, had climbed into his dicky and was swinging the cab round.

“I thank you very much for your information,” said Quixtus. “Here’s half a sovereign.”

Voicelessness and wonder provoked an inarticulate wheeze like the spitting of a cat. The man was still gaping at the unaccustomed coin in his hand when the cab drove off. But Quixtus had not been many minutes on his way when a thought smote him like a sledge-hammer. He brought his fist down furiously on the leathern seat.

“What a fool! What a monumental fool I’ve been!” he cried.

He had just realised that the devil had offered him as pretty a little chance of sheer wickedness as could be met with on a May morning, which he had not taken. Instead of giving the man ten shillings, he ought to have laughed in his face, taunted him with his emaciation and driven off without paying the half-crown he had promised. To have let the very first opportunity slip through his fingers! He would have to wear a badge like that of the gentle Duke Guarnieri to keep his wits from wandering.

When he reached home he looked for a moment into the little room at the head of the kitchen stairs. The Blissful One still slept, a happy smile on her face, and the paper pinned to her apron.

There was surely some chance of wickedness here. Quixtus furens scratched an inventive head. Suppose he carried her outside and set her on the doorstep. He regarded her critically. She was buxom—about twelve stone. He was a spare and unathletic man. A great yawn interrupted his speculations, and turning off the light he stumbled off sleepily and wearily to bed.

CHAPTER VI

The Blissful One carried out her master’s written injunction. He did not see her face again. She packed up her trunks the next morning and silently stole away with a racking headache and a set of gold teaspoons which she took in lieu of a month’s wages. The vague female awakened Quixtus and prepared his breakfast. When he asked her whether she could cook lunch, she grew pale but said that she would try. She went to the nearest butcher, bought a fibrous organic substance which he asserted to be prime rump-steak, and coming back did something desperate with it in a frying pan. After the first disastrous mouthful, Quixtus rose from the table.

“I give it to you for yourself, my good woman,” said he, priding himself on his murderous intent. “I’ll get lunch elsewhere.”

He back to his club, for the first time for many days. And this marked his reappearance in the great world.

He was halfway through his meal when a man, passing down the room from pay-desk to door, caught sight of him and approached with extended hand.

“My dear Quixtus. How good it is to see you again.”

He was a bald, pink-faced little man, wearing great round gold spectacles that seemed to be fitted on to his smiles. Kindliness and the gladness of life emanated from him, as perfume does from a jar of attar of roses. His name was Wonnacott, and he was a member of the council of the Anthropological Society. Quixtus, who had known him for years, scanned his glad cherubic face, and set him down as a false-hearted scoundrel. With this mental reservation he greeted him cordially enough.

“We want you badly,” said Wonnacott. “Things aren’t all they should be at the Society.”

“The monkey’s tail peeping out between their coat tails?” Quixtus asked eagerly.

“No. No. It’s only Griffiths.” Griffiths was the Vice-President. “He knows his subject as well as anybody, but he’s a perfect fool in the chair. We want you back.”

“Very good of you to say so,” replied Quixtus, “but I’m thinking of resigning from the Society altogether, giving up the study of anthropology and presenting my collection to a criminal lunatic asylum.”

Wonnacott, laughing, drew a chair from the vacant table next to Quixtus’s and sat down.

“Why—— What?”

“We know how Primitive Man in most of the epochs slew his enemies, cooked his food, and adorned or disfigured his person; but of the subtle workings of his malignant mind we are hopelessly ignorant.”

“I don’t suppose his mind was more essentially malignant than yours or mine,” said Wonnacott.

“Quite so,” Quixtus agreed. “But we can study the malignancy, the brutality and bestiality of the minds of us living people. We are books open for each other to read. Historic man too we can study—from documents—Nero, Alexander the Sixth, Titus, Oates, Sweeny Tod the Barber——”

“But, my dear man,” smiled Wonnacott, “you are getting into the province of criminology.”

“It’s the only science worth studying,” said Quixtus. Then, after a pause, during which the waiter put the Stilton in front of him and handed him the basket of biscuits, “Do you ever go to race meetings?”

“Sometimes—yes,” laughed the other, startled at the unexpectedness of the question. “I have my little weaknesses like other people.”

“There must be a great deal of wickedness to be found on race-courses.”

“Possibly,” replied Wonnacott, apologetically, “but I’ve never seen any myself.”

Quixtus musingly buttered a piece of biscuit. “That’s a pity. A great pity. I was thinking of going on the turf. I was told that nowhere else could such depravity be found.”

One or two of Wonnacott’s smiles dropped, as it were, from his face and he looked keenly at Quixtus. He saw a hard glitter in the once mild, china-blue eyes, and an unnatural hardness in the setting of the once kindly lips. There was a curious new eagerness on a face that had always been distinguished by a gentle repose. The hands, too, that manipulated the knife and biscuits, shook feverishly.

“I’m afraid you’re not very well, my dear fellow,” said he.

“Not well?” Quixtus laughed, somewhat harshly. “Why I feel ten times younger than I did this time yesterday. I’ve never been so well in my life. Why, I could——” he stopped short and regarded Wonnacott suspiciously—“No. I won’t tell you what I could do.”

He drank the remainder of his glass of white wine, and threw his napkin on the table.

“Let us go and smoke,” said he.

In the smoking-room, Wonnacott, still observing him narrowly, asked him why he was so interested in the depravity of the turf. Quixtus met his eyes with the same suspicious glance.

“I told you I was going to take up the study of criminology. It’s a useful and fascinating science. But as the subject does not seem to interest you,” he added with a quick return to his courteous manner, “let us drop it. You mustn’t suppose I’ve lost all interest in the Society. What especially have you to complain of about Griffiths?”

Wonnacott explained, and for the comfortable half-hour of coffee and cigarettes after lunch they discussed the ineffectuality of Griffiths and, as all good men will, exchanged views on the little foibles of their colleagues on the Council of the Anthropological Society. Quixtus discoursed so humanly, that Wonnacott, on his way office-wards, having lit a cigar at the spirit-lamp in the club-vestibule, looked at the burning end meditatively and said to himself:

“I must have been mistaken after all.”

But Quixtus remained for some time in the club deep in thought, scanning a newspaper with unseeing eyes. He had been injudicious in his conversation with Wonnacott. He had almost betrayed his secret. It behoved him to walk warily. In these days the successful serpent has to assume not only the voice, but the outer semblance and innocent manners of the dove. If he went crawling and hissing about the world, proclaiming his venomousness aloud like a rattle-snake, humanity would either avoid him altogether, or hit him over the head out of self-protection. He must ingratiate himself once more with mankind, and only strike when opportunity offered. For that reason he would simulate a continued interest in Prehistoric Man.

On the other hand, the newly born idea of the study of criminology hovered agreeably and comfortingly over his mind. So much so, that he presently left the club, and, walking to a foreign library, ordered the works of Cesare Lombroso, Ottolenghi, Ferri, Topinard, Corre and as many other authorities on criminology as he could think of, and then, having ransacked the second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road, drove home exultant with an excellent set of “The Newgate Calendar.”

Thus he entered upon a new phase of life. He began to mingle again with his fellows, hateful and treacherous dogs though they were. He was no longer morose and solitary. At the next meeting of the Anthropological Society he occupied the Presidential Chair, amid a chorus of (hypocritical) welcome. He accepted invitations to dinner. Also, finding intense discomfort in the ministrations of the vague female, and realising that after making good all Marrable’s defalcations, he was still the possessor of a large fortune, he procured the services of a cook and reinstated his former manservant—luckily disengaged—in office, and again inhabited the commodious apartments which he had abandoned. In fact, he not only resumed his former mode of life, but exceeded it on the social side, walking more abroad into the busy ways of men. In all of which he showed wisdom. For it is manifestly impossible for a man to pursue a successful career of villainy if he locks himself up in the impregnable recesses of a gloomy house and meets no mortal on whom to practise.

One afternoon, after deep and dark excogitation, he proceeded to Romney Place and called upon Tommy Burgrave whom he had not seen since the day of the trial. Tommy, just recovering from the attack of congestion of the lungs, which had prevented him from attending his great uncle’s funeral, was sitting in his dressing-gown before the bedroom fire, while Clementina, unkempt as usual, was superintending his consumption of a fried sole.

Tommy greeted him boyishly. He couldn’t rise, as his lap was full of trays and fat things. His uncle would find a chair somewhere in the corner. It was jolly of him to come.

“You might have come sooner,” snapped Clementina. “The boy has been half dead. If it hadn’t been for me, he would have been quite dead.”

“You nursed him through his illness?”

“What else do you suppose I meant?”

“He could have had a trained nurse,” said Quixtus. “There are such things.”

“Trained nurses!” cried Clementina, in disdain. “I’ve no patience with them. If they’re ugly, they’re brutes—because they know that a good-looking boy like Tommy won’t look at them. If they’re pretty, they’re fools, because they’re always hoping that he will.”

“I say, Clementina,” Tommy protested. “Nurses are the dearest people in the world. A fellow crocked up is just a ‘case’ for them, and they never think of anything but pulling him through. ‘Tisn’t fair of you to talk like that.”

“Isn’t it?” said Clementina, conscious of a greater gap than usual in the back of her blouse, and struggling with one hand to reconcile button and hole. “What on earth do you know about it? Just tell me, are you a woman or am I?”

Tommy laid down his fork with a sigh. “You’re an angel, Clementina, and this sole was delicious; and I wish there were more of it.”

She took the tray from his knees and put it on a side table. Tommy turned to Quixtus, who sat Sphinx-like on a straight-backed chair, and expressed his regret at not having been able to attend his great-uncle’s funeral.

“You missed an interesting ceremony,” said Quixtus.

Tommy laughed. “I suppose the old man didn’t leave me anything?”

He had heard nothing privately about the will, and, as probate had not yet been taken out, the usual summary had not been published in the newspapers.

“I’m afraid not,” said Quixtus. “Did you expect anything?”

“Oh Lord, no!” laughed Tommy, honestly.

“Then more fool you, and more horrid old man he,” said Clementina.

There was a pause. Quixtus, not feeling called upon to defend his defunct and mocking kinsman, said nothing. Clementina drew the crumpled yellow packet of Maryland tobacco and papers from a pocket in her skirt (she insisted on having pockets in her skirts) and rolled a cigarette. When she had licked it, she turned to Quixtus.

“I suppose you know that I came like a fool to your house and was refused admittance.”

“Well trained servants,” said Quixtus, “have a knack of indiscriminate obedience.”

“You might have said something more civil,” she said, taken aback.

“If you will dictate to me a formula of politeness I will repeat it with very great pleasure,” he retorted. “Put a little honey on my tongue and it will wag as mellifluously as that of any hypocrite who wins for himself the adulation of mankind.”

“Mercy’s sake man!” exclaimed Clementina, in her astonishment allowing the smoke to mingle with her words. “Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?”

Their eyes met, and Clementina suddenly screwed up her face and looked at him. She saw in those pale blue eyes something, she could not tell what, but something which had not been in the eyes of the gentle, sweet-souled man she had painted. Her grimace, although familiar through the sittings, somewhat disconcerted him. She made the grim sound that with her represented laughter.

“I was only wondering whether I had got you right after all.”

“Of course, you got him right,” cried Tommy the ingenuous. “It’s one of the rippingest pieces of work you’ve ever done.”

“The Anthropological Society find it quite satisfactory,” said Quixtus stiffly.

“Flattered, I’m sure,” said Clementina.

Tommy, dimly aware now of antagonism, diplomatically introduced a fresh topic of conversation.

“You haven’t told him, Clementina,” said he, “of the letter you got the other day from Shanghai.”

“Shanghai?” echoed Quixtus.

“Yes, from Will Hammersley,” said Clementina, her voice softening. “He’s in very bad health, and hopes to come home within a year. I thought you, too, might have heard from him.”

Quixtus shook his head. For a moment he could not trust himself to speak. The sudden mention of that detested name stunned him like a blow. At last he said; “I never realised you were such friends.”

“He used to come to me in my troubles.”

Quixtus passed his hand between neck and collar, as if to free his throat from clutching fingers. His voice, when he spoke, sounded hoarse and far away in his ears.

“You were in his confidence, I suppose.”

“I think so,” said Clementina, simply.

To the sorely afflicted man’s unbalanced and suspicious mind this was a confession of complicity in the wrong he had suffered. He controlled himself with a great effort, and turned his face away so that she should not see the hate and anger in his eyes. She, too, had worked against him. She, too, had mocked him as the poor blind fool. She, too, he swore within himself, should suffer in the general devastation he would work upon mankind. As in a dream he heard her summarise the letter which she had received. Hammersley had of late been a victim to the low Eastern fever. Once he had nearly died, but had recovered. It had taken hold, however, of his system and nothing but home would cure him. In Shanghai he had made fortune enough to retire. Once in England again he would never leave it as long as he lived.

“He writes one or two pages of description of what May must be in England—the fresh sweet green of the country lanes, the cool lawns, the old grey churches peeping through the trees, the restful, undulating country, the smell of the hawthorn and blackthorn at dawn and eve—those are his words—the poor man’s so sick for home that he has turned into a twopenny ha’penny poet——”

“I think it’s damned pathetic,” said Tommy. “Don’t you, Uncle Ephraim?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Quixtus with a start.

“Don’t you think it’s pathetic for a chap stranded sick in a God-forsaken place in China, to write that high falutin’ stuff about England? Clementina read it to me. It’s the sort of thing a girl of fifteen might have written as a school essay—all the obvious things you know—and it meant such a devil of a lot to him—everything on earth. It fairly made me choke. I call it damned pathetic.”

Quixtus said in a dry voice, “Yes, it’s pathetic—it’s comic—it’s tragic—it’s melodramatic—it’s nostalgic—it’s climatic—— Yes,” he added, absently, “it’s climatic.”

“I wonder you don’t say it’s dyspeptic and psychic and fantastic,” said Clementina, snatching an old hat from the bed. “Do you know you’ve talked nothing but rubbish ever since you entered this room?”

“Language, my dear Clementina,” he quoted; “was given to us to conceal our thoughts.”

“Bah!” said Clementina. She held out her hand abruptly. “Good-bye. I’ll run in later, Tommy; and see how you’re getting on.”

Quixtus opened the door for her to pass out and returned to his straight-backed chair. Tommy handed him a box of cigarettes.

“Won’t you smoke? I tried one cigarette to-day for the first time, but the beastly thing tasted horrid—just as if I were smoking oatmeal.”

Quixtus declined the cigarette. He remained silent; looking gloomily at the young, eager face which masked heaven knows what faithlessness and guile. Being in league with Clementina, whom he knew now was his enemy, Tommy was his enemy too. And yet, for the life of him, he could not carry out the malignant object of his visit. For some time Tommy directed the conversation. He upbraided the treacherous English climate which had enticed him out of doors, and then stretched him on a bed of sickness. It was rough luck. Just as he was beginning to find himself as a landscape painter. It was a beautiful little bit of river—all pale golden lights and silver greys—now that May was beginning and all the trees in early leaf he could not get that spring effect again—could not, in fact, finish the picture. By the way, his uncle had not heard the news. The little picture that had got (by a mistake, according to Clementina) into a corner of the New Gallery, had just been sold. Twenty-five guineas. Wasn’t it ripping? A man called Smythe, whom he had never heard of, had bought it.

“You see, it wasn’t as if some one I knew had bought it, so as to give a chap some encouragement,” he remarked naïvely. “It was a stranger who had the whole show to pick from, and just jumped at my landscape.”

Quixtus, who had filled up by monosyllables the various pauses in Tommy’s discourse, at last rose to take his leave. He had tried now and then to say what he had come to say; but his tongue had grown thick and the roof of his mouth dry, and his words literally stuck in his throat.

“It’s awfully good of you, Uncle Ephraim,” said Tommy, “to have come to see me. As soon as I get about again, I’ll try to do something jolly for you. There’s a bit of wall in your drawing-room that’s just dying for a picture. And I say”—he twisted his boyish face whimsically and looked at him with a twinkle in his dark blue eyes—“I don’t know how in the world it has happened—but if you could let me draw my allowance now instead of the first of the month——”

This was the monthly euphemism. Against his will Quixtus made the customary reply.

“I’ll send you a cheque as usual.”

“You are a good sort,” said Tommy. “And one of these days I’ll get there and you won’t be ashamed of me.”

But Quixtus went away deeply ashamed of himself, disgusted with his weakness. He had started out with the fixed and diabolical intention of telling the lad that he was about to disinherit him.

He had schemed this exquisite cruelty in the coolness of solitude. In its craft and subtlety it appeared peculiarly perfect. He had come fully prepared to perform the deed of wickedness. Not only had Clementina’s gentle presence not caused him to waver in his design, but his discovery of her complicity in his great betrayal had inflamed his desire for vengeance. Yet, when the time came for the wreaking thereof, his valour was of the oozing nature lamented by Bob Acres. He was shocked at his pusillanimity. In the middle of Sloane Square he stopped and cursed himself, and was nearly run over by a taxi-cab. As it was empty he hailed it, and continued his maledictions in the security of its interior.

Manifestly there was something wrong in his psychological economy which no reading of Lombroso or “The Newgate Calendar” could remedy. Or was he merely suffering from a lack of experience in evil doing? Did he not need a guide in the Whole Art and Practice of Wickedness?

He walked up and down his museum in anxious thought. At last a smile lit up his gaunt features. He sat down and wrote notes of invitation to Huckaby, Vandermeer, and Billiter to dinner on the following Tuesday.

CHAPTER VII

Quixtus received them in the museum, a long room mainly furnished with specimen cases whose glass tops formed a double inclined plane, diagrams of geological formations, and bookcases full of palæontological literature—a cold, inhuman, inhospitable place. The three looked more dilapidated than ever. Huckaby’s straggling whiskers had grown deeper into his cheek; Vandermeer’s face had become foxier, Billiter’s more pallid and puffy. No overcoats hung on the accustomed pegs, for the cessation of the eleemosynary deposits had led, among other misfortunes, to the pawning of these once indispensable articles of attire. The three wore, therefore, the dismally apologetic appearance of the man who had no wedding garment. The only one of them who put on a simulated heartiness of address was Billiter. He thrust out a shaky hand—

“My dear Quixtus, how delightful——”

But the sight of his host’s unwelcoming face chilled his enthusiasm. Quixtus bowed slightly and motioned them, with his grave courtesy, to comfortless seats. He commanded the situation. So might a scholar prince of the school of Machiavelli have received his chief poisoner, strangler, and confidential abductor. They went down to dinner. It was not an hilarious meal. The conversation which used to flow now fell in spattering drops amid a dead silence.

“It’s a fine day,” said Quixtus.

“Very,” said Huckaby.

“Finer than yesterday,” said Vandermeer.

“It promises well for to-morrow,” said Billiter.

“It always breaks its promise,” said Quixtus.

“H’m,” said Huckaby.

They made up for the lacking feast of reason by material voracity. A microscopic uplifting of Spriggs the butler’s eyebrows betokened wonder at their Gargantuan helpings. Vandermeer, sitting at the foot of the table opposite to Quixtus, bent his foxy face downwards till the circumference of the plate became the horizon of his universe. Billiter ate with stolid cynicism; Huckaby, with a faint air of bravado. Once he said:

“I’m afraid Quixtus we got a bit merry the last time.”

“It’s to the memory of that,” replied Quixtus; “that I owe the pleasure of your company to-night.”

“I’m beastly sorry—” began Billiter.

“Pray don’t mention it,” Quixtus interrupted blandly. “I hope the quails are to your liking.”

“Fine,” said Vandermeer, without raising his eyes from his plate.

Once more reigned the spell of silence which oppressed even the three outcast men; but Quixtus, hardened by his fixed idea, felt curiously at his ease. He sat in his chair with the same sense of security and confidence as he had done before delivering his Presidential Address at the meeting of the Anthropological Society, while the secretary went through the preliminary formal business. The preliminary business here was the meal. As soon, however, as the port had been sent round and Spriggs had retired, Quixtus addressed his guests.

“Gentlemen,” said he, and met in turns the three pairs of questioning eyes. “You may wonder perhaps why I have invited you to dinner to-night, and why, you being thus invited, the meal has not been warmed by its accustomed glow of geniality. It is my duty and my pleasure now to tell you. Hitherto at these dinners we have—let us say—worn the comic mask. Beneath its rosy and smiling exterior we have dissimulated our own individual sentiments. We have been actors, without realising it, in an oft-repeated comedy. Only on the occasion of our last meeting did we put aside the mask and show to each other what we were.”

“I’ve already apologised,” murmured Billiter.

“My dear fellow,” said Quixtus, raising his long thin hand, “that’s the last thing I want you to do. In this world of fraud and deceit no man ought to regret having bared his soul honestly to the world. Now, gentlemen, I have not asked you here to insult you at my own table. I have gathered you around me because I need your counsel and your services for which I hope adequately to remunerate you.”

A quiver of animation passed over the three faces. “Remunerate” was a magic word; the master-word of an incantation. It meant money, and money meant food and drink—especially alcoholic drink.

“I know I am speaking for my two friends,” said Huckaby, “when I say that our hearts are always at your service.”

“The heart,” replied Quixtus, “is a physiological organ and a sentimental delusion. There are no hearts in that sense. You know as well as I do, my dear fellow, that there are no such things as love, affection, honour, loyalty in the world. Self-interest and self-indulgence are the guiding principles of conduct. Governed by a morbid and futile tradition, we refuse to regard the world in the malevolent light of day, but see it artificially through the hypocritical coloured glasses of benevolence.”

Huckaby and Vandermeer, who retained the rudiments of an intellect, looked at their once simple-minded and tender-hearted host in blank bewilderment. They hardly knew whether to wince under a highly educated gentleman’s cutting irony, or to accept these remarkable propositions as honest statements of opinion. But the ironical note was not perceptible. Quixtus spoke in the same gentle tone of assurance as he would have used when entering on a dissertation upon the dolichocephalic skulls in his collection which had been found in a long barrow in Yorkshire. He was the master of a subject laying down incontrovertible facts. So Huckaby and Vandermeer, marvelling greatly, stared at him out of speculative eyes. Billiter, before whom the incautious decanter of port had halted, lost the drift of his host’s philosophic utterances.

“The time has now come,” continued Quixtus, relighting (unsophisticated soul!) the cigar which he had allowed to go out—“the time has now come for us four to be honest with one another. Up to a recent date I was a slave to this optical delusion of tradition. But things have happened to clear my eyes, and to make me frankly confess myself no better than yourselves—an entirely unscrupulous man.”

“Pray remember that I’m a sometime Fellow—” began Huckaby.

“I’m a gentleman of good family—” began Billiter, who had understood the last sentence.

“Yes. Yes,” replied Quixtus, interrupting them. “I know. That’s why your assistance will be valuable. I need the counsels of men of breeding and education. I find from my reading that the vulgar criminal would be useless for my purpose. Now, you all have trusted men who have failed you. So have I. You have felt the cowardly blows of Fortune. So have I. You have no vestige of faith in your fellow man—you even believed me to be a party to my late partner’s frauds—you can have, I say, no faith left in humanity. Neither have I. You are Ishmaels, your hand against every man. So am I. You would like to be revenged upon your fellow creatures. So would I. You have passed your lives in pursuing evil rather than good. You, in a word, are entirely unscrupulous. If you will acknowledge this we can proceed to business. If not; we will part finally as soon as this agreeable evening is at an end. Gentlemen what do you say?”

Billiter, looking upon the wine while it was red—there was not much left to show the colour—laughed wheezily and shortly.

“I suppose we’re wrong ‘uns,” said he. “At least I am. I own up.”

Vandermeer said bitterly: “When a man is hunted by poverty he can’t run straight, for at the end of the straight path is death.”

“And you, Huckaby?”

“I also have bolted into a drain or two in my time.”

“Good,” said Quixtus. “Now we understand one another.”

“You may understand us,” said Huckaby, tugging at his untidy beard, “but I’m hanged, drawn, and quartered if we understand you.”

“I thought I had made myself particularly clear,” said Quixtus.

“For my part,” said Billiter, “I can’t make out what you’re getting at except to make us confess that we’re wrong ‘uns.”

“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus.

“I can’t understand it,” said Vandermeer, looking intently at him across the table out of his little sharp eyes. “I can’t understand it, unless it is that you have some big scoop on and want us to come into it, so as to do the dirty work. If that’s so I’m on, so long as it’s safe. But I’ve steered clear of the law up to now and have no desire to run the risk of penal servitude.”

“Oh Lord no!” cried Billiter with a shiver.

Quixtus pressed the burning stump of his cigar against his plate and looked up with a smile.

“Please make your minds easy on that score. I have been reading criminology lately with considerable interest, and I have gone through a volume or two of ‘The Newgate Calendar,’ and the result of my reading is the conviction that crime is folly. It is a disease. It is also vulgar. No, I have no desire to increase my personal possessions in any way; neither do I contemplate the commission of acts of violence against the person or the destruction of property. Anything therefore that comes within the category of crime may be dismissed from our consideration.”

“Then in the name of Gehenna,” exclaimed Huckaby, “what is it that you want us to do?”

“It is very simple,” said Quixtus. “I may plot out an attractive scheme of wickedness, but the circumstances of my early training have left me without the power to execute it. I should like to call on any one of you for guidance, perhaps practical assistance. I may want to see and hear of wickedness going on around me. I would count on you to gratify my curiosity. Lastly, not having an inventive mind, it being rather analytic than synthetic, I should welcome any suggestions that you might bring me.”

“It’s a rum go,” said Billiter, “but I’m on, so long as there’s money in it.”

“There will be money in it,” said Quixtus.

“Then I’m on too,” said Vandermeer.

“You will find us, my dear Quixtus,” said Huckaby, “your very devoted Familiars—your Oliviers le Daim, your Eminences Grises, your âmes damnées. We’ll be your ministering evil spirits, your genii from Eblis. It’s a new occupation for a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but it’s not unalluring. And now, as Billiter has finished the decanter, may I take the liberty of asking for another bottle, so that Vandermeer and I can drink to the health of our chief.”

“With all the pleasure in life,” said Quixtus.

As soon as the three newly constituted Evil Genii were out of earshot of the house, they stopped on the pavement with one accord and burst into unseemly laughter.

“Did you ever hear anything like it?” cried Billiter.

“He’s as mad as Bedlam,” said Vandermeer.

“A sort of inverted Knight of the Round Table,” said Huckaby. “He yearns to ride abroad committing human wrongs.”

“Are we to call for orders every day like the butcher, the baker, and the greengrocer?” said Vandermeer.

“He was so sane at first,” said Vandermeer, “that I really thought he had some definite scoop in view. But it all turns out to be utter moonshine.”

“If he doesn’t want to thieve or murder or paint the town red,” said Billiter, “what the blazes in the way of wickedness is left for him to do?”

“It’s moonshine,” repeated Vandermeer.

“If it wasn’t,” said Huckaby, “none of us would touch it. We can’t take the matter seriously. We’re just lending ourselves to a farce, that’s all.”

“Naturally,” Billiter agreed. “We must humour him.”

They walked on slowly, discussing the unprecedented situation. They were unanimous in the opinion that the poor gentleman had gone distraught. They had all noticed signs of his affliction on the last occasion of their dining at his table. If he had been in his right senses then, he would surely not have behaved with such discourtesy. They agreed to forgive him for turning them out of doors.

“It’s lucky for him,” said Huckaby, “that he has three old friends like ourselves. He might have got into other hands, and then—God help him. My only reason for falling in with his mood was in order to protect him from himself—and from sharks and blood-suckers.”

Billiter and Vandermeer declared that they, too, had acted only out of a sense of loyalty to their old and distracted friend. They protested so hard that their tongues clave to the roofs of their mouths, and each acknowledged his thirst. They turned into the bar-parlour of the first public-house, where they called for whisky, and, each man having found a hat as good a substitute for the sacks of Joseph’s brethren as an overcoat, they continued to call for whisky, and to drink it until the tavern closed for the night. By that time they glowed with conscious virtue. Huckaby swore that he would permit no ruddy lobsters to dig their claws into Quixtus’s sacred person.

“Here’s poor dear old chap’s health, drunk in very last drop,” cried Billiter, enthusiastically draining his last glass.

The tragedy of Quixtus’s loss of reason reduced Vandermeer to tears. He was sorrowful in his cups. He, Vandermeer, had no one to love him; but Quixtus should never find himself in that desolate predicament, as he, Vandermeer, would love him like a friend, a brother, like a silver-haired maiden aunt.

“I’ve had a silver-haired maiden aunt myself,” he wailed.

While Billiter comforted him, Huckaby again warned them against ruddy lobsters. If they would swear to join him in a league to defend their patron and benefactor, he would accept their comradeship. If they preferred to be ruddy lobsters, he would wash his hands of them. They repudiated the crustacean suggestion. They were more Quixtus’s friends than he. A quarrel nearly broke out, each claiming to be the most loyal and disinterested friend Quixtus ever had in his life. Finally they were reconciled and wrung each other warmly by the hand. The barman called closing time and pushed them gently into the street. They staggered deviously to their several garrets and went to bed, each certain that he had convinced the two others of his beauty and nobility of soul.

Vandermeer was the first of the Evil Genii to be summoned. Quixtus laid before him the case of Tommy and the failure of his diabolical project. Vandermeer listened attentively. There was method after all in his patron’s madness. He wished to do some hurt to his nephew for the sheer sake of evil-doing. As far as the intention went he was seriously trying to carry out his malevolent principles. It was not all moonshine. Vandermeer thought quickly. He was the craftiest of the three, and that perhaps was why Quixtus had instinctively chosen him for the first adventure. He saw profit in humouring the misanthrope, though he smiled inwardly at the simplicity of his idea.

“There’s nothing particularly diabolical in telling a young fellow with a brilliant career before him that you’re going to cut him out of your will.”

“Isn’t there?” said Quixtus, with an air of disappointment. “What then would you suggest?”

“First,” answered Vandermeer, “what do you think would be a fair price for a suggestion?” He regarded him with greedy eyes. “Would twenty pounds be out of the way?”

“I’ll give you twenty pounds,” said Quixtus.

Vandermeer drew in his breath quickly, as a man does who wins a bet at long odds.

“There are all sorts of things you can do. The obvious one would be to stop his allowance. But I take it you want something more artistic and subtle. Wait—let me think—” He covered his eyes with his hand for a moment. “Look. How will this do? It strikes me as infernally wicked. You say he is devoted to his art. Well, make him give it up——”

“Excellent! Excellent!” cried Quixtus. “But how?”

“Can you get him into any business office in the City?”

“Yes. My friend Griffiths of the Anthropological Society is secretary of the Star Assurance Coy. A word from me would get the boy into the office.”

“Good. Then tell him that unless he accepts this position within a month and promises never to touch a paint-brush again, he will not receive a penny from you either during your lifetime or after your death. In this way you will bring him up against an infernal temptation, and whichever way he decides he’ll be wretched. I call that a pretty scheme.”

“It’s an inspiration of genius,” exclaimed Quixtus excitedly. “I’ll write the cheque now.” He sat down to his desk and pulled out his cheque-book. “And you will go at once to my nephew—I’ll give you a card of introduction—and acquaint him with my decision.”

“What?” cried Vandermeer.

Quixtus calmly repeated the last sentence. Vandermeer’s face went a shade paler. He wrung his hands, which were naturally damp, until they grew as bloodless as putty. He had never done any wanton harm in his life. All the meanness and sharp-dealing he had practised were but a poor devil’s shifts to fill an empty belly. Quixtus’s behest covered him with dismay. It was unexpected. It is one thing to suggest to a crazy and unpractical patron a theoretical fantasia of wickedness, and another to be commanded to put it oneself into execution. It was less moonshine than ever.

“Don’t you want to do it?” asked Quixtus, unwittingly balancing temptation, in the form of a fat cheque-book, in his hand.

Vandermeer fell. What wolf-eyed son of Hagar would have resisted?

“I think,” said he, with a catch in his throat, “that if the suggestion alone is worth twenty pounds, the carrying out of it is worth—say—ten more?”

“Very well,” said Quixtus; “but,” he added drily, “the next time I hope you’ll give an estimate to cover the whole operation.”

The second of the three to receive a summons from the Master was Billiter.

“You know something about horse-racing,” remarked Quixtus.

“What I don’t isn’t worth knowing. I’ve chucked away a fortune in acquiring the knowledge.”

“I want you to accompany me to race-meetings and show me the wickedness of the turf,” said Quixtus.

“So that’s my little job is it?”

“That’s your little job.”

“I think I can give you a run for your money,” remarked Billiter, a pale sunshine of intelligence overspreading his puffy features. “But—” he paused.

“But what?”

“I can’t go racing with you in this kit.”

“I will provide you,” said Quixtus, “with whatever costume you think necessary for the purpose.”

Billiter went his way exulting and spent the remainder of the afternoon in tracking a man down from his office in Soho, his house in Peckham, several taverns on the Surrey side of the river, to a quiet café in Regent Street. The man was a red-faced, thick-necked, hard, fishy-eyed villain with a mouth like the slit of a letter-box, and went by the name (which he wore inscribed on his hat at race-meetings) of Old Joe Jenks. Billiter drew him into a corner and whispered gleeful tidings into his ear. After which Old Joe Jenks drew Billiter to a table and filled him up with the most seductive drinks the café could provide.

Before the lessons in horse-racing under Billiter’s auspices began—for gorgeous raiment, appropriate to Sandown and Kempton, like Rome, is not built in a day—Quixtus sent for the remaining Evil Genius.

“What have you to suggest?” he asked after some preliminary and explanatory conversation.

A humorous twinkle came into Huckaby’s eye, and a smile played round his lips beneath the straggling brushwood of hair.

“I have a great idea,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Break a woman’s heart,” said Huckaby.

Quixtus reflected gravely. It would indeed be a charming, enticing piece of wickedness.

“I shouldn’t have to marry her?” he asked in some concern.

“Heaven forbid.”

“I like it,” said Quixtus, leaning back in his chair and smoothing his scrappy moustache with his lean fingers. “I like it very much. The only difficulty is: where can I find the woman whose heart I can break?”

“Take a tour abroad,” said Huckaby. “On the Continent of Europe there are thousands of English women only waiting to have their hearts broken.”

“That may be true,” said Quixtus; “but how shall I obtain the necessary introductions?”

“I,” cried Huckaby raising a bony hand that protruded through a very frayed and dirty shirt-cuff. “I, Eustace Huckaby, will reassume my air of academical distinction and will accompany you into the pays du tendre and introduce you to any woman you like. In other words, my dear Quixtus, although I may not look like a Lothario at the present moment, I have had considerable experience in amatory adventures—and I’m sure you would find my assistance valuable.”

Quixtus reflected again. Aware of his limitations he recognised the futility of going alone on a heart-breaking expedition among strange even though expectant females. But would Huckaby be an ideal companion? Huckaby was self-assertive, not to say impudent, in manner; and Huckaby had certain shocking habits. On the other hand, perhaps the impudence was the very quality needed in the quest; and as for the habits—He decided.

“Very well. I accept your proposal—on one condition. What that is you doubtless can guess.”

“I can,” said Huckaby. “I give you my word of honour that you will never see me otherwise than sober.”

An undertaking which would not preclude him from taking a bottle of whisky to bed whenever he felt so inclined.

“We had better start at once,” said Huckaby, after some necessary discussion of the question of wardrobe.

“I must wait,” replied Quixtus, “until I’ve attended some race-meetings with Billiter.”

Huckaby frowned. He was not aware that to Billiter had already been assigned a sphere of action.

“I don’t want to say anything unfriendly. But if I were you I shouldn’t trust Billiter too implicitly. He’s a—” he paused—being sober and serious he rejected the scarlet epithet which, when used in allusion to his friends, had given colour to his gayer speech—“He’s a man who knows too much of the game.”

“My dear Huckaby,” said Quixtus. “I shall never trust another human being as long as I live.”

That evening, somewhat wondering that he had heard no news of Tommy or of Vandermeer, he unlocked the iron safe in his museum and took out his will. He lit a candle and set it by the hearth. Now was the time to destroy the benevolent document. He put it near the flame; then drew it back. A new thought occurred to him. To practise on his nephew the same trick as his uncle had played upon him was mere unintelligent plagiarism. He felt a sudden disdain for the merely mimetic in wickedness.

“I will be original,” said he. “Yes, original.” He repeated the word as a formula both of consolation and incentive, and blowing out the candle, put the will back into the safe.

CHAPTER VIII

Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.

The pious ejaculation was in the nature of a reply to Miss Etta Concannon, the fragile slip of a girl whose portrait she had painted and in whose cornflower-blue eyes she had caught the haunting fear. There was no fear, however, in the eyes to-day. They were bright, direct, and abnormally serious. She had just announced her intention of becoming a hospital nurse. Whereupon Clementina had cried: “Lord have mercy upon us!”

Now it must be stated that Etta Concannon had bestowed on an embarrassed Clementina her young and ardent affection; secretly, during the sittings for the portrait which her father had commissioned Clementina to paint as a wedding present, and openly; when the sittings were ended and she called upon Clementina as a friend. In the first flush of this avowed adoration she would send shy little notes, asking whether she might come to the studio to tea. As she lived quite close by, the missives were despatched by hand. Clementina, disturbed in the midst of her painting, would tear a ragged corner from the first bit of paper her eyes fell upon—note-paper, brown-paper, cartridge-paper—once it was sand-paper—scribble “Yes” on it with a bit of charcoal and send it out to the waiting messenger. At last she was driven to desperation.

“My good child,” she said, “can’t you drop in to tea without putting me to this elaborate correspondence?”

Etta Concannon thought she could, and thence-forward came to tea unheralded, and, eventually such were her powers of seduction that she enticed Clementina to her own little den in her father’s house in Cheyne Walk—a fairy den all water-colour and gossamer very much like herself, in which Clementina gave the impression of an ogress who had blundered in by mistake. It was on the first visit that Clementina repudiated the name of Miss Wing. She hated and loathed it. On Etta’s lips it suggested a prim, starched governess—the conventional French caricature of the English Old Maid with long teeth and sharp elbows. She might be an old maid, but she wasn’t a prim governess. Everybody called her Clementina. Upon which, to her professed discomfort, Etta threw her arms round her neck and kissed her and called her a darling. Why Clementina wasted her time over this chit of a girl she was at a loss to conjecture. She was about as much use in the world as a rainbow. Yet for some fool reason (her own expression) Clementina encouraged her, and felt less grim in her company. The odd part of their intercourse was that the one thing under heaven they did not talk about was the bullet-headed, bull-necked young man to whom Etta was engaged—not until one day when, in response to the following epistle, Clementina brusquely dismissed her sitter, skewered on a battered hat, and rushed round to Cheyne Walk.

“My dearest, dearest Clementina,—Do come to me. I am in abject misery. The very worst has happened. I would come to you, but I’m not fit to be seen.

Your own unhappy

“Etta.”

“My poor child,” cried Clementina, as she entered the bower and beheld a very dim and watery fairy sobbing on a couch. “Who has been doing this to you?”

“It’s R-Raymond,” said Etta, chokingly.

To her astonishment Clementina found herself sitting on the couch with her arms round the girl. Now and then she did the most idiotic things without knowing in the least why she did them. In this position she listened to Etta’s heartrending story. It was much involved, here and there incoherent, told with singular disregard of chronological sequence. When properly pieced together and shorn of irrelevance, this is what it amounted to:

Certain doings of the bullet-headed young man, doings not at all creditable—mean and brutal doings indeed—had reached the ears of Etta’s father. Now Etta’s father was a retired admiral, and Etta the beloved child of his old age. The report of Captain Hilyard’s doings had wounded him in his weakest spot. In a fine fury he telephonically commanded the alleged wrongdoer to wait upon him without delay. Captain Hilyard obeyed. The scene of the interview was a private room in the service club to which Admiral Concannon belonged. Admiral Concannon went straight to the point—it is an uncomfortable characteristic of British admirals. The bullet-headed young man not being able to deny the charges brought against him, Admiral Concannon expressed himself in such terms as are only polished to their brightest perfection on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. The young man showed resentment—amazing impudence, according to the Admiral—whereupon the Admiral consigned him to the devil and charged him never to let him (the Admiral) catch him (the bullet-headed young man) lifting his scoundrelly eyes again to an innocent young girl. Admiral Concannon came home and told his daughter as much of the tale of turpitude as was meet for her ears. Captain Hilyard repaired forthwith in unrighteous wrath to his quarters and packed off Etta’s letters, with a covering note in which he insinuated that he was not sorry to have seen the last of her amiable family. It had all happened that day.

Hence the tears.

“I thought you wrote me that the worst had happened,” said Clementina.

“Well, hasn’t it?”

“Good Lord!” cried Clementina. “It’s the very best thing that ever happened to you in all your born days.”

In the course of a week Clementina brought the sorrowing damsel round to her own way of thinking.

“Do you know,” said Etta, “I used to be rather afraid of him.”

“Any fool could see that,” said Clementina.

“Did you guess?” This with wide-open cornflower eyes.

“Look at your portrait and you’ll see,” said Clementina, mindful of the avalanche of memories which the portrait of Tommy Burgrave’s rough-and-ready criticism of the bullet-headed young man had started on its overwhelming career. “Have you ever looked at it?”

“Of course I have.”

“To look at a thing and to see it,” remarked Clementina, “are two entirely different propositions. For instance, you looked at that young man, but you didn’t see him. Yet your soul saw him and was afraid. Your father too—I can’t understand what he was about when he consented to the engagement.”

“Captain Hilyard’s father and he were old mess-mates,” said Etta.

“Old messmakers!” snapped Clementina. “And what made you accept him?”

Etta looked mournful. “I don’t know.”

“The next time you engage yourself to a young man, just be sure that you do know. I suppose this one said, ‘Dilly, dilly, come and be killed,’ and you went like the foolish little geese in the nursery rhyme.”

“They were ducks, dear,” laughed Etta, taking Clementina’s grim face between her dainty hands. “Ducks like you.”

Clementina suffered the caress with a wry mouth.

“I think you’re getting better,” she said. “And I’m jolly glad of it. To have one young idiot on my hands ill with congestion of the lungs and another ill with congestion of the heart—both at the same time—is more than I bargained for. I suppose you think I’m a sort of Sister of Charity. Why don’t you do as your father tells you and go down to your Aunt What’s-her-name in Somersetshire?”

Etta made a grimace. “Aunt Elmira would drive me crazy. You’re much more wholesome for me. And as for father”—she tossed her pretty head—“he has to do what he’s told.”

So Etta remained in town, her convalescence synchronising with that of Tommy Burgrave. Clementina began to find time to breathe and to make up arrears of work. As soon as Tommy was able to take his walks abroad, and Etta to seek distraction in the society of her acquaintance, Clementina shut herself up in her studio, forbidding the young people to come near her, and for a week painted the livelong day. At last, one morning two piteous letters were smuggled almost simultaneously into the studio.

“. . . I haven’t seen you for months and months. Do let me come to dinner to-night. . . . Tommy.”

“. . . Oh darling, DO come to tea this afternoon. . . . Etta.”

“I shall go and paint in the Sahara,” cried Clementina. But she seized two dirty scraps of paper and scrawled on them:

“Lord, yes, child, come to dinner.”

“Lord, yes, child, I’ll come to tea.” and having folded them crookedly despatched them to her young friends.

It was during this visit of Clementina to the fairy bower in Cheyne Walk that Etta informed her of her intention of becoming a hospital nurse.

“Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said Etta.

“The idea is preposterous,” replied Clementina. “What need have you to work for your living?”

“I want to do something useful in the world.”

“You’ll do much better by remaining ornamental,” said Clementina. “It’s only when a woman is as ugly as sin and as poor as charity that she need be useful; that’s to say while she’s unmarried. When she’s married she has got as much as she can do to keep her husband and children in order. A girl like you with plenty of money and the devil’s own prettiness has got to stay at home and fulfil her destiny.”

Etta, sitting on the window seat, looked at the Thames, seen in patches of silver through the fresh greenery of the Embankment trees.

“I know what you’re thinking of, dear,” she said, with the indulgent solemnity of the Reverend Mother of a Convent, “but I shall never marry.”

“Rubbish,” said Clementina.

“I’ve made up my mind, quite made up my mind.”

Clementina sighed. Youth is so solemn, so futile, so like the youth of all the generations that have passed away. The child was suffering from one of the natural sequelæ of a ruptured engagement. Once maidens in her predicament gat them into nunneries and became nuns and that was the end of them. Whether they regretted their rash act or not, who can say? Nowadays they rush into philanthropic or political activity, contriving happy evenings for costermongers or unhappy afternoons for Cabinet Ministers. The impulse driving them to nunnery, Whitechapel, or Caxton Hall has always been merely a reaction of sex; and the duration of the period of reaction is proportionate to the degree of brokenness of the heart. As soon as the heart is mended, sex has her triumphant way again and leaps in response to the eternal foolishness that the maiden blushes to read in the eyes of a comely creature in trousers. This Clementina knew, as all those—and only those—whose youth is behind them know it; and so, when Etta with an air of cold finality said that she had made up her mind, Clementina sighed. It was so ludicrously pathetic. Etta’s heart had not even been broken; it had not sustained the wee-est, tiniest fracture; it had been roughly handled; that was all. In a month’s time she would no more yearn to become a hospital nurse than to follow the profession of a chimney-sweep. In a month’s time she would be flirting with merry, whole-hearted outrageousness. In a month’s time, if the True Prince came along, she might be in love. Really in love. What a wonderful gift to a man would be the love of this fragrant wisp of womanhood!

“I’ve quite made up my mind, dear,” she repeated.

“Then there’s nothing more to be said,” replied Clementina.

A shade of disappointment spread over the girl’s face, like a little cloud over a May morning. She jumped from the window-seat and slid to a stool by Clementina’s chair.

“But there’s lots to be said. Lots. It’s a tremendously important decision in life.”

“Tremendous,” said Clementina.

“It means that I’ll die an old maid.”

“Like me,” said Clementina.

“If I’m like you I won’t care a bit!”

“Lord save us,” said Clementina.

The girl actually took it for granted that she enjoyed being an old maid.

“I’ll have a little house in the country all covered with honeysuckle, and a pony-trap and a dog and a cat and you’ll come and stay with me.”

“I thought you were going to be a hospital nurse,” said Clementina.

“So I am; but I’ll live in the house when I’m off duty.”

Clementina rolled a cigarette. Etta knelt bolt upright and offered a lighted match. Now when a lissom-figured girl kneels bolt upright, with a shapely head thrown ever so little back, and stretches out her arm, there are few things more adorable in this world of beauty. Clementina looked at her for full ten seconds with the eyes of a Moses on Mount Nebo—supposing (a bewildering hypothesis) that Moses had been an artist and a woman—and then, disregarding cigarette and lighted match, she laid her hands on the girl’s shoulders and shook her gently so that she sank back on her heels, and the match went out.

“Oh, you dear, delightful, silly, silly child.”

She rose abruptly and went to the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette for herself. Etta laughed in blushing confusion.

“But darling, nurses do have times off now and then.”

“I wasn’t thinking about nurses at all,” said Clementina.

“Then what were you thinking of?” asked Etta; still sitting on her heels and craning her head round.

“Never mind,” said Clementina. “But what will you want an old frump like me in your house for?”

“To listen to my troubles,” said the girl.

Clementina walked home through the soft May sunshine, a smile twinkling in her little beady eyes and the corners of her lips twisted into an expression of deep melancholy. If she had been ten years younger there would have been no smile in her eyes. If she had been ten years older a corroborative smile would have played about her lips. But at thirty-five a woman in Clementina’s plight often does not know whether to laugh or to cry, and if she is a woman with a sense of humour she does both at once. The eternal promise, the eternal message vibrated through the air. The woman of five-and-thirty heard it instinctively and rejected it intellectually. She hurried her pace and gripped her umbrella—Clementina always carried a great, untidy, bulging umbrella—as if to assure herself that it would rain to-morrow from leaden skies. But the day laughed at her, and the gardens which she passed flaunted lilac and laburnum and pink may and springtide and youth before her, and buttercups looked at her with a mocking air of innocence. Forget-me-nots in window-boxes leaned forward and whispered, “See how fresh and young we are.” A very young plane tree looked impudently green; in its dainty fragility it suggested Etta.

“Drat the child,” said Clementina, and she walked along, shutting her eyes to the immature impertinences of the spring. But outside the window of a fruiterer’s in the Royal Hospital Road she stopped short, with a little inward gasp. A bunch of parrot-tulips—great riotous gold things splashed all over with their crimson hearts’ blood, flared like the sunset flames of a tropical summer. As a hungry tomtit flies straight to a shred of meat, she went in and bought them.

When she reached her house in Romney Place she peeped for the last (and the hundredth) time into the open mouth of the twisted white paper cornet.

“They’ll make a nice bit of colour on the dinner-table for Tommy,” she said to herself.

O Clementina! O Woman! What in the name of Astarte had the gold and crimson reprobates to do with Tommy?

She let herself in with her key, traversed her Sheraton drawing-room, and opened the door leading on to the studio gallery. Tommy was below, walking up and down like a young wild beast in a cage. His usually tidy hair was ruffled, as though frenzied fingers had disturbed its calm. Clementina called out:

“You asked if you could come to dinner. Six o’clock isn’t dinner-time.”

“I know,” he cried up at her. “I’ve been here for an hour.”

She went down the spiral staircase and confronted him.

“What have you been doing to your hair? It’s like Ferdinand’s in The Tempest. And;” noticing a new note of violence in the customary peaceful chaos of the studio, “why have you been kicking my cushions about?”

“My uncle has gone stick, stark, staring, raving, lunatic mad,” said Tommy.

He turned on his heel and strode to the other end of the studio. Clementina threw the parrot-tulips on a chair and drew off her left-hand old cotton glove, which she cast on the tulips. Then for a while, during Tommy’s retreat and approach, she gazed thoughtfully at the thumb-tip which protruded from the right-hand glove.

“I’m not at all surprised,” she said, when Tommy joined her.

“How else can you account for it?” cried Tommy, flinging his arms wide.

“Account for what?”

“What he has done. Listen. A week ago he came to see me, as jolly as could be. You were there——”

“About as jolly as a slug,” said Clementina.

“Anyway he was all right. I told the dear old chap I had unaccountably exceeded my allowance—and he sent me a cheque next day, just as he always does. This afternoon a card is brought up to me—my uncle’s card. Written on it in his handwriting: ‘To introduce Mr. Theodore Vandermeer.’ ”

“What name?” asked Clementina, pricking her ears.

“Vandermeer.”

“Go on.”

“I tell the servant to show him in—and in comes a dilapidated devil looking like a mangy fox——”

“That’s the man.”

“Do you know him?”

“All right. Go on.”

“—— who squirms and wriggles and beats about the bush, and at last tells me that he is commissioned by my uncle to inform me that unless I give up painting and go into some infernal City office within a month he’ll stop my allowance and cut me out of his will.”

Clementina worked the thumb-tip through the hole in the right hand glove until the entire thumb was visible.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

Tommy waved his arms. “I must try to see my uncle and ask him what’s the meaning of it. Of course I’ve no claim on him—but he’s a rich man and fond of me and all that—and, when my poor mother died, he sort of adopted me and gave me to understand that I needn’t worry. So I haven’t worried. And when I took up with painting he encouraged me all he knew. It’s damnable!” He paused, and strode three or four paces up the studio and three or four back, as though to work off the dangerous excess of damnability in the situation. “It isn’t as if I were an idle waster going to the devil. I’ve worked jolly hard, haven’t I? I’ve put my back into it, and I’m beginning to do something. Only last week I was telling him about the New Gallery picture—he seemed quite pleased—and now, without a minute’s warning, he sends this foxy-faced jackal to tell me to go into an office. It’s—it’s—God knows what it isn’t!”

“I believe,” said Clementina, looking at her thumb, “that there are quite worthy young men in City offices.”

“I would sooner go into a stoke-hole,” cried Tommy. “Oh, it’s phantasmagorical!”

He sat down on the platform of the throne and buried his head in his hands.

“Cheer up,” said Clementina. “The world hasn’t come to an end yet and we haven’t had dinner.”

She opened a door at the back of the studio that communicated with the kitchen regions and, calling out for Eliza, was answered by a distant voice.

“Go to the grocer’s and fetch a bottle of champagne for dinner.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the voice, coming nearer. “What kind of champagne?”

“I don’t know,” said Clementina. “But tell him to send the best bottle he has got.”

“What a good sort you are,” said Tommy.

Neither were alarmed by the prospective quality of this vaguely selected vintage. How holy is simplicity! It enables men and women to face and pass through terrors without recognising them.

Clementina took off her hat and right-hand glove, and rolled a cigarette. Tommy burst out again:

“Why didn’t he send for me and tell me so himself? Why didn’t he write? Why did he charter this seedy, ugly scoundrel? I asked the wretch. He said my uncle thought that such a delicate communication had better be made through a third party. But what’s my uncle doing—associating with such riff-raff? Why didn’t he choose a gentleman? This chap looks as if he’d murder you for tuppence.”

The young are apt to exaggerate the defects of those who have not gained their esteem. As a matter of fact, acknowledged afterwards by Tommy, Vandermeer had accomplished his unpleasant mission with considerable tact and delicacy. Tommy was an upstanding, squarely built young Saxon, with a bright blue eye, and there was a steep flight of stairs leading down from his studio.

“Once I fed him on ham and beef round the corner,” said Clementina.

“The devil you did,” said Tommy.

Clementina related the episode and her subsequent conversation with Quixtus.

“I give it up,” said Tommy. “I knew that my uncle was greatly upset by the trial—and I have been thinking that perhaps it has rather unhinged his mind—and that was why he took up with such a scarecrow. But he has apparently been a friend of his for years. It shows you how little we know of our fellow creatures,” he moralised. “If there ever was a chap I thought I knew inside out it was my Uncle Ephraim.” Then pity smote him. “If he’s really off his head, it’s tragic. He was the best and dearest and kindest-hearted fellow in the world.”

“Did you ask the man whether your uncle had gone mad?”

“Of course I did—in so many words. Man seemed to look on it as an astonishing suggestion. He said my uncle had long disapproved of my taking up painting as a profession, and now had arrived at the conviction that the best thing for me was a commercial career—a commercial career!”

So do Thrones and Dominations, I imagine, speak of the mundane avocations of a mere Angel.

“If you refuse, you’ll be giving up three hundred a year now and heaven knows how much afterwards,” said Clementina.

“And if I accepted I would be giving up my self-respect, my art, my dreams, every thing that makes for Life—Life with the biggest of capital L’s. By George, no! If my uncle won’t listen to reason I’ll not listen to unreason, and there’s an end of it. I’ll pull through somehow.”

“Good,” said Clementina, who had remained remarkably silent. “I was waiting to hear you say that. If you had hesitated I should have told you to go home and dine by yourself. A little starvation and struggle and fringe to your trousers will be the making of you. As for your uncle, if he’s crazy he’s crazy, and there’s an end of it, as you say. Let’s talk no more about it. What made you beg to come to dinner this evening?” she asked, with a resumption of her aggressive manner.

“The desire of the moth for the star,” he laughed.

She responded in her grim way, and bade him amuse himself while she went upstairs to wash her face and hands. Clementina did wash her face, literally, scrubbing it with Old Brown Windsor soap and towelling it vigorously afterwards, thereby accomplishing, as her feminine acquaintances asserted, the ruin of her skin. She rose and went to the foot of the stairs. Tommy’s eye fell on the parrot-tulips in their white comet.

“What are you going to do with those gaudy things?”

Clementina had forgotten them. The curious impulse of the blood that had led to their purchase had been spent. Tommy’s news had puzzled her and had taken her mind off foolishness. She glanced at them somewhat ashamedly.

“Stick them in water, of course,” she replied. “You don’t suppose I’m going to wear them?”

“Why not?” cried Tommy, and, snatching out a great gold and crimson bloom, he held it against her black hair and swarthy brow. “By Jove. You look stunning!”

Clementina, in a tone of some asperity, told him not to be a fool, and mounted the stairs with unaccountably burning cheeks.

At dinner, Tommy, inspired by more than three-fourths of the grocer’s best bottle of champagne talked glowingly of his prospects in the event of his uncle’s craziness not being a transitory disorder. After all, the world was his oyster, and he knew the trick of opening it. Most people bungled, and jabbed their fingers through trying to prize it open at the wrong end. The wise man, said he, in the tone of an infant Solon, was he who not only made a mock of misfortune, but bent it to his own use as an instrument for the attainment of happiness. When challenged, he confessed that he got this gem of sapience out of a book. But it was jolly true, wasn’t it? Really, he was looking forward to poverty. He was sick of silk hats and patent leather boots and the young women he met at tea-parties. Nature beat the lot. Nature for him. Thoreau—“The boy’s going as cracked as his uncle!” cried Clementina—Thoreau, he insisted, had found out the truth. He would give up his studio, take a labourer’s cottage in the country at two shillings a week, live on lentils, paint immortal though perhaps not instantaneously remunerative landscapes by day and do all sorts of things with his pencil for the sake of a livelihood by night. He knew of a beautiful cottage, two rooms and a kitchen, near Hagbourne, in Berkshire. The place was a forest of cherry-trees. Nothing more breathlessly beautiful on the earth than the whole of a countryside quivering with cherry-blossom—except the same countryside when it was a purple mist of cherries. Geoffrey King had the cottage last summer. There was a bit of a garden which he could cultivate—cherry-trees in it, of course; also flowers and vegetables. He would supply Clementina with pansies and potatoes all the year round. There was a pig-sty, too—useful in case he wanted to run a pig. When Clementina was tired of London, she could come to the cottage and he would sleep in the pig-sty.

For the second time that day she asked:

“What will you want an old frump like me in the house for?”

“To look at my pictures,” said Tommy.

Clementina sniffed. “I thought as much,” she said. “Really, the callous selfishness of old age is saint-like altruism compared with the fresh, spontaneous egotism of youth.”

Tommy, accustomed to her sharp sayings, only laughed boyishly. How was he to guess the history of the parrot-tulips? He was mildly surprised, however, when she decided to spend the evening, not in the studio, but in the stiff, Sheraton drawing-room. He protested. It was so much jollier in the studio. She asked why.

“This place has no character, no personality. It looks like a show drawing-room in a furniture dealer’s window. It has nothing to do with you. It means nothing.”

“That’s just why I want to sit in it,” said Clementina. “You can go to the studio, if you like.”

“That wouldn’t be polite,” said Tommy.

She shrugged her shoulders and sat down at the piano and played scraps of Mozart, Beethoven, and Grieg—memories of girlhood—with the inexpert musician’s uncertainty of touch. Tommy wandered restlessly about the room examining the Bartolozzis and the backs of the books in the glass-protected cases. At last he became conscious of strain. He leant over the piano, and waited until she had broken down hopelessly in a fragment of Peer Gynt.

“Have I said or done anything wrong, Clementina? If so, I’m dreadfully sorry.”

She shut the piano with a bang.

“You poor, motherless babe,” she cried. “Whom would you go to with your troubles, if you hadn’t got me?”

Tommy smiled vaguely.

“Deuce knows,” said he.

“Then let us go down to the studio and talk about them,” said Clementina.

CHAPTER IX

After leaving Clementina, Tommy went for a long brisk walk in order to clear his mind, and on his homeward way along the Embankment, branched off to the middle of old Chelsea Bridge in order to admire the moonlight view; he also took off his hat in order to get cool. The treacherous May wind cooled him effectually and sent him to bed for three days with a chill.

Clementina sat by his rueful bedside and rated him soundly. The idea of one just recovering from pneumonia setting his blood boiling hot and then cooling himself on a bridge at midnight in the bitter north-east wind! He was about as sane as his uncle. They were a pretty and well-matched pair. Both ought to be placed under restraint. A dark house and a whip would have been their portion in the good old times.

“I’ve got ’em both now,” said Tommy, grinning. “This confounded bedroom is my dark house and your tongue is the whip.”

“I hope it hurts like the devil,” said Clementina.

Tommy wrote from his sick bed a dignified and manly letter to his uncle, and, like Brutus, paused for a reply. None came. Quixtus read it, and his warped vision saw ingratitude and hypocrisy in every line. He had already spoken to Griffiths about the office-stool in the Star Insurance Company. Tommy’s emphatic refusal to sit on it placed him in an awkward position with regard to Griffiths. Openings in a large insurance office are not as common as those for hop-pickers in August. Griffiths, a sour-tempered man at times, would be annoyed. Quixtus, encouraged by Vandermeer, regarded himself as an ill-used uncle, and not only missed all the thrill of his deed of wickedness, but accepted Tommy’s decision as a rebuff to his purely benevolent intentions. He therefore added the unfortunate Tommy to the list of those whom he had tried and found wanting. He had a grievance against Tommy. Such is the topsyturvydom of man after a little thread has snapped in his brain.

Now, it so happened that, on the selfsame day that Tommy crawled again into the open air, Clementina, standing before her easel and painfully painting drapery from the lay figure, suddenly felt the whole studio gyrate in a whirling maelstrom into whose vortex of unconsciousness she was swiftly sucked. She fell in a heap on the floor, and remained there until she came to with a splitting headache and a sensation of carrying masses of bruised pulp at various corners of her body instead of limbs. Her maid, Eliza, finding her lying white and ill on the couch to which she had dragged herself, administered water—there was no such thing as smelling-salts in Clementina’s house—and, on her own responsibility, summoned the nearest doctor. The result of his examination was a diagnosis of overwork. Clementina jeered. Only idlers suffered from overwork. Besides, she was as strong as a horse. The doctor reminded her that she was a woman, with a woman’s delicately adjusted nervous system. She also had her sex’s lack of restraint. A man, finding that he was losing sleep, appetite, control of temper and artistic grip, would abandon work and plunge utterly unashamed into hoggish idleness. A woman always feels that by fighting against weakness she is upholding the honour of her sex, and struggles on insanely till she drops.

“I’m glad you realise I’m a woman,” said Clementina.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the first man who has done so for many years.”

The doctor, a youngish man, very earnest, of the modern neuropathic school, missed the note of irony. This was the first time he had seen Clementina.

“You’re one of the most highly strung women I’ve ever come across,” said he, gravely. “I want you to appreciate the fact and not to strain the tension to breaking-point.”

“You wrap it up very nicely,” said Clementina, “but, to put it brutally, your honest opinion is that I’m just a silly, unreasonable, excitable, sex-ridden fool of a female like a million others. Isn’t that so?”

The young doctor bore the scrutiny of those glittering, ironical points of eyes with commendable professional stolidity.

“It is,” said he, and in saying it he had the young practitioner’s horrible conviction that he had lost an influential new patient. But Clementina stretched out her hand. He took it very gladly.

“I like you,” she said, “because you’re not afraid to talk sense. Now I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

“Go away for a complete change—anywhere will do—and don’t think of work for a month at the very least.”

“All right,” said Clementina.

When Tommy, looking very much the worse for his relapse, came in the next day to report himself in robust health once more, Clementina acquainted him with her own bodily infirmities. It was absurd, she declared, that she should break down, but absurdity was the guiding principle of this comic planet. Holiday was ordained. She had spent a sleepless night thinking how she should make it. Dawn had brought solution of the problem. Why not make it in fantastic fashion, harmonising with the absurd scheme of things?

“What are you going to do?” asked Tommy. “Spend a frolicsome month in Whitechapel, or put on male attire and go for a soldier?”

“I shall hire an automobile and motor about France.”

“It’s sporting enough,” said Tommy, judicially, “but I should hardly call it fantastic.”

“Wait till you’ve heard the rest,” said Clementina. “I had originally intended to take Etta Concannon with me; but since you’ve come here looking like three-ha’porth of misery, I’ve decided to take you.”

“Me?” cried Tommy. “My dear Clementina, that’s absurd.”

“I thought you would agree with me,” said Clementina, “but I’m going to do it. Wouldn’t you like to come?”

“I should think so!” he exclaimed, boyishly. “It would be gorgeous. But——”

“But what?”

“How can I afford to go motoring abroad?”

“You wouldn’t have to afford it. You would be my guest.”

“It’s delightful of you, Clementina, to think of it—but it’s impossible.”

Whereupon an argument arose such as has often arisen between man and woman.

“I’m old enough to be your grandmother, or at least you think so, which comes to the same thing,” said Clementina.

Tommy’s young pride would not allow him to accept largesse from feminine hands, however elderly and unromantic.

“If I had a country house and hosts of servants and several motor-cars and asked you to stay, you’d come without hesitation.”

“That would be different. Don’t you see for yourself?”

Clementina chose not to see for herself. Here was a dolorous baby of a boy disinherited by a lunatic uncle, emaciated by illness and unable to work, refusing a helping hand just because it was a woman’s. It was preposterous. Clementina grew angry. Tommy held firm.

“It’s merely selfish of you. Don’t you see I want a companion?”

Tommy pointed out the companionable qualities of Etta Concannon. But she would not hear of Etta. The sight of Tommy’s wan face had decided her, and she was a woman who was accustomed to carry out her decisions. She was somewhat dictatorial, somewhat hectoring. She had taken it into her head to play fairy godmother to Tommy Burgrave, and she resented his repudiation of her godmotherdom. Besides, there were purely selfish reasons for choosing Tommy rather than Etta, which she acknowledged with inward candour. Tommy was a man who would fetch and carry and keep the chauffeur up to the mark, and inspire gendarmes and custom-house officials and maitres-d’hotel with respect, and, although Clementina feared neither man nor devil, she was aware of the value of a suit of clothes filled with a male entity as a travelling adjunct to a lone woman. With Etta the case would be different. Etta would fetch her motor-veil and carry her gloves with the most adoringly submissive grace in the world; but all the real fetching and carrying for the two of them would have to be done by Clementina herself. Therein lay the difference between Clementina and the type generally known as the emancipated woman. She had no exaggerated notions of the equality of the sexes, which in feminine logic generally means the high superiority of women. Circumstance had emancipated her from dependence upon the other sex, but on the circumstance and the emancipation she cast not too favourable an eye. She had a crystal clear idea of the substantial usefulness of men in this rough and not always ready cosmic scheme. Therefore, for purposes of utility, she wanted Tommy. In her usual blunt manner she told him so.

“You run in here at all hours of the day and night, and it’s Clementina this and Clementina that until I can’t call my soul my own—and now, the first time I ask you to do me a service you fall back on your silly little prejudices and vanity and pride, and say you can’t do it.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Tommy, humbly.

“I tell you what it is,” said Clementina, with a curiously vicious feminine stroke, “you’d come if I was a smart-looking woman with fine clothes who could be a credit to you—but you won’t face going about with an animated rag-and-bone shop like me.”

Tommy flushed as pink as only a fair youth can flush; he sprang forward and seized her wrists and, unwittingly, hurt her in his strong and indignant grip.

“What you’re saying is abominable and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. If I thought anything like that I’d be the most infernal cur that ever trod the earth. I’d like to shake you for daring to say such things about me.”

He flung away her hands and stalked off to the other end of the studio, leaving her with tingling wrists and unfindable retort.

“If you really think I can be of service to you,” he said, in a dignified way, having completed the return journey, “I shall be most happy to come.”

“I don’t want you to make a martyr of yourself,” she snapped.

Tommy considered within himself for a moment or two, then broke into his boyish laugh.

“I’m an ungrateful pig, and I’ll follow you all over the world. Dear old Clementina,” he added, more seriously, putting his hand on her shoulder, “forgive me.”

Clementina gently removed his hand. She preferred the grip on the wrists that hurt. But, mollified, she forgave him.

So in a few days they started on their travels.

The thirty-five horse-power car whirled them, a happy pair, through the heart of summer. Above the blue sky blazed, and beneath the white road gleamed a shivering streak. The exhilarating wind of their motion filled their lungs and set their tired pulses throbbing. Now and then, for miles, the great plane trees on each side of the way formed the never-ending nave of an infinite cathedral, the roof a miracle of green tracery. Through quiet, sun-baked villages they passed, at a snail’s pace, hooting children and dogs from before their path—and because they proceeded slowly and Tommy was goodly to look upon, the women smiled from their doorways, or from the running laundry stream where they knelt and beat the wet clothes, or from the fountain in the cool, flagged little square jutting out like a tiny transept from the aisle of the street. Babies stared stolidly. Here and there a bunch of little girls, their hair tied in demure pigtails, the blue sarrau over their loud check frocks; would laugh and whisper, and one more daring than the rest would wave an audacious hand, and when Tommy blew her a kiss from his fingers there came the little slut’s gracious response, amid mirth and delight unspeakable. Men would look up from their dusty, bare, uneven bowling-alley beneath the trees and watch them as they went by. An automobile, in spite of its frequency, is always an event in a French village. If it races mercilessly through; there is reasonable opportunity to curse which always gladdens the heart of man. If it proceeds slowly and shows deference to the inhabitants, it is an event rare enough to command their admiration. Instead of shutting their eyes against a sort of hell-chariot in a whirlwind; they can observe the gracefully built car and its stranger though human occupants, which is something deserving a note in the record of an eventless day. If they stopped and quitted the car so as to glance at leisure at old church or quaint fountain—and in many an out-of-the-way village in France the water of the community gushes forth from a beautiful work of art—all the idlers of the sunny place clustered round the car, while the British chauffeur stood by the radiator, impeccably vestured and unembarrassed as a Fate. At noon came the break for déjeuner; preferably in some little world-forgotten townlet, where, after the hors-d’œuvre, omelette, cutlet, chicken, and fruit—and where is the sad, plague-stricken hamlet of France that cannot, in the twinkling of an eye, provide such a meal for the hungry wayfarer?—they loved to take their coffee beneath the awning of a café on the shady side of the great, sleepy square, and absorb the sleepy, sunny, prosperous spirit of the place; the unpainted bandstand in the centre, the low-lying houses with sleepy little shops and cafés—Heavens! how many cafés!—around it, the modern, model-built Hôtel de Ville, the fine avenue of plane trees without which no Grande Place in France could exist, and, above the roofs of the houses, the weather-beaten, crumbling Gothic tower of the church surmounted by its extinguisher-shaped leaden belfry alive with vivid yellows and olives. And then the road again past the rapidly becoming familiar objects; the slow ox-carts; the herd of wayside goats in charge of a dirty, tow-headed child; the squad of canvas-suited soldiers; the great lumbering waggons drawn by a string of three gaudily and elaborately yoked horses, the driver fast asleep on the top of his mountainous load; the mongrel dogs that sought, and happily found not, euthanasia beneath the wheels of the modern car of Juggernaut; the sober-vested peasant women bending beneath their burdens with the calm unexpressive faces of caryatides grown old and withered. Towards the late afternoon was reached the larger town where they would halt for the night: first came the eternal, but grateful, outer boulevard cool with foliage, running between newly built, perky houses and shops and then leading into the heart of the older city, grey, narrow-streeted, picturesque. As the automobile clattered through the great gateway of the hotel into the paved courtyard, out came the decent landlord and smiling landlady, welcomed their guests, summoned unshaven men in green-baize aprons—who, at dinner, were to appear in the decorous garb of waiters, and in the morning, by a subtle modification of costume (dingy white aprons instead of green-baize) were to do uncomplaining work as housemaids—to take down the luggage, and showed the travellers to their clean, bare rooms. After the summary removal of the journey’s dust came the delicious saunter through the strange old town; the stimulus of the sudden burst into view of the west front of a cathedral, with its deeply recessed and sculptured doorways, and its great, flamboyant window struck by the westering sun; the quick, indrawn breath of delight when, in a narrow, evil-smelling, cobble-paved street, they came unexpectedly upon some marvel of an early Renaissance façade, with its refined riot of ornament, its unerring proportions, its laughing dignity—laughing all the more and with all the more dignity, as became its mocking, aristocratic soul, because the ground floor was given up to a dingy tinsmith and its upper storeys to the same class of easy-going, slatternly folk who sat at the windows of the other unconsidered houses in the sallow and homely street; the gay relief of emerging from such unsavoury and foot-massacring by-ways into the quarter of the town on which the Syndicat d’Initiative prides itself—the wide, well-kept thoroughfare or place with its inevitable greenery, its flourishing cafés thick with decorous folk beneath the awnings, its proud and prosperous shops, its Municipal Theatre, Bourse, Hôtel de Ville, its generously spouting fountain, its statue of the great son—poet, artist, soldier—of the locality; its crowd of well-fed saunterers—fat and greasy citizens, the supercilious aristocrat and the wolf-eyed anarchist might perhaps join together in calling them—but still God’s very worthy creatures; its general expression, not of the joy of life, for a provincial town is, as a whole, governed by conditions which affect only a part of a great capital, but of the undeniable usefulness and pleasurableness of human existence. Then, after dinner, out again to the cool terrace of a café—in provincial France no one lounges over coffee and tobacco in an hotel—and lastly to bed, with wind and sun in their eyes and in their hearts the peace of a beautiful land.

They had planned the first part of their route—Boulogne, Abbeville, Beauvais, Sens, Tonnerre, Dijon, through the Côté d’Or and down the valley of the Rhone to Avignon. After that the roads of France were open to them to go whithersoever they willed. The ground, the experience, the freedom, all were new to them. To Clementina France had practically been synonymous with Paris—not Paris of the Grands Boulevards, Montmartre, and expensive restaurants, but Paris of the Left Bank, of the studios, of struggle and toil—a place not of gaiety but grimness. To Tommy it meant Paris, too—Paris of the young artist-tourist, a museum of great pictures—the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Pantheon immortalised by Puvis de Chavannes; also Dieppe, Dinard, and such-like dependencies of Britain. But of the true France such as they beheld it now they knew nothing, and they beheld it with the wide-open eyes of children.

After a few days the weariness fell from Clementina’s shoulders; new life sped through her veins. Her hard lips caught the long-forgotten trick of a smile. She almost lost the art of acid speech. She grew young again.

Tommy held the money-bag.

“I’m not going to look like a maiden aunt treating a small boy to buns at a confectioner’s,” she had declared. “I’m going to be a real lady for once and see what it’s like.”

So Clementina did nothing in the most ladylike manner, while Tommy played courier and carried through all arrangements with the impressive air of importance that only a young Briton in somebody else’s motor-car can assume. He had forgotten the little sacrifice of his pride, he had forgotten, or at least he disregarded, with the precious irresponsibility of three-and-twenty, the fact that his income was reduced to the negligible quantity of a pound a week; he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the passing hour, and if ever he did cast a forward glance at the clouded future, behold! the clouds were rosy with the reflections of the present sunshine.

He was proud of his newly discovered talent as a courier, and boasted in his boyish way.

“Aren’t you glad you’ve got me to take care of you?”

“It’s a new sensation for me to be taken care of.”

“But you don’t dislike it?”

He was arranging at the bottom of the car a pile of rugs and wraps as a footstool for Clementina, at the exact height and angle for her luxurious comfort.

Clementina sighed. She was beginning to like it very much indeed.

CHAPTER X

When they swung round the great bend of the Rhone, and Vienne came in sight, Tommy uttered a cry of exultation.

“Oh Clementina, let us stay here for a week!”

When they stood an hour afterwards on the great suspension bridge that connects Vienne with the little town of Sainte-Colombe, and drank in the afternoon beauty of the place, Tommy amended his proposition.

“Oh Clementina,” said he, “let us stay here for ever!”

Clementina sighed, and watched the broad blue river sweeping in its majestic curve between the wooded mountains from whose foliage peeped a myriad human habitations, the ancient Château-Fort de la Bâtie standing a brave and mutilated sentinel on its dominating hill, the nestling town with its Byzantine towers and tiled roofs, the Gothic west front of the Cathedral framed by the pylons of the bridge, the green boulevarded embankment and the fort of Sainte-Colombe in its broader and more smiling valley guarded, it too, by its grim square tower, the laughing peace of the infinite web of afternoon shadow and afternoon sunlight. Away up the stream a barge moved slowly down under a sail of burnished gold. A few moments afterwards coming under the lee of the mountains, the sail turned into what Tommy, who had pointed it out, called a dream-coloured brown. From which it may be deduced that Tommy was growing poetical.

In former times Clementina would have rebuked so nonsensical a fancy. But now, with a nod, she acquiesced. Nay more, she openly agreed.

“We who live in a sunless room in the midst of paint-pots, know nothing of the beauty of the world.”

“That’s true,” said Tommy.

“We hope, when we’re tired, that there is such a place as the Land of Dreams, but we imagine it’s somewhere east of the sun, and west of the moon. We don’t realise that all we’ve got to do to get there is to walk out of our front door.”

“It all depends upon the inward eye, doesn’t it?” said the boy. “Or, perhaps, indeed, it needs a double inward eye—two personalities, you know, harmonised in a subtle sort of way, so as to bring it into focus. You see what I mean? I don’t think I could get the whole dreamy adorableness of this if I hadn’t you beside me.”

“Do you mean that, Tommy?” she asked, with eyes fixed on the Rhone.

“Of course I do,” he replied, earnestly.

Her lips worked themselves into a smile.

“I never thought my personality could harmonise with any other on God’s earth.”

“You’ve lived a life of horrible, rank injustice.”

She started, as if hurt. “Ah! don’t say that.”

“To yourself, I mean, dearest Clementina. You’ve never allowed yourself a good quality. Now you’re beginning to find out your mistake.”

“When it’s pointed out that I can harmonise with your beautiful nature!”

At the flash of the old Clementina, Tommy laughed.

“I’m not going to deny that there’s good in me. Why should I? If there wasn’t, I shouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have asked me to be your companion,” he added quickly, fearing lest she might put a wrong construction on his words. “When a good woman does a man the honour of admitting him to her intimate companionship, he knows he’s good—and it makes him feel better.”

Her left elbow rested on the parapet of the bridge, and her chin rested on the palm of her hand. Without looking at him she stretched out the other hand and touched him.

“Thank you for saying that, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.

Their mutual relations had modified considerably during the journey. The change, in the first place, had come instinctively from Tommy. Hitherto, Clementina had represented little to his ingenuous mind but the rough-and-ready comrade, the good sort, the stunning portrait-painter. With many of his men friends he was on practically the same terms. Quite unconsciously he patronised her ever so little, as the Prince Charmings of life’s fairy-tale are apt to patronise those who are not quite so charming or quite so princely as themselves. When he had dined with the proud and gorgeous he loved to strut before her aureoled in his reflected splendour; not for a moment remembering that had Clementina chosen to throw off her social nonconformity she could have sat in high places at the houses of such a proud and gorgeous hierarchy as he, Tommy Burgrave, could not hope, for many years, to consort with. Sometimes he treated her as an old family nurse, who spoiled him, sometimes as a bearded master; he teased her; chaffed her, laid traps to catch her sharp sayings; greeted her with “Hullo,” and parted from her with an airy wave of the hand. But as soon as they set off on their travels the subtle change took place, for which the fact of his being her guest could only, in small degree, account. Being in charge of all arrangements, and thus asserting his masculinity, he saw Clementina in a new light. For all her unloveliness she was a woman; for all her lack of convention she was a lady born and bred. She was as much under his protection as any dame or damsel of the proud and gorgeous to whom he might have had the honour to act as escort; and without a moment’s self-consciousness he began to treat Clementina with the same courteous solicitude as he would have treated such dame or damsel, or, for the matter of that, any other woman of his acquaintance. Whereas, a month or two before he would have tramped by her side for miles without the thought of her possible fatigue entering his honest head, now her inability to stroll about the streets of these little provincial towns, without physical exhaustion, caused him grave anxiety. He administered to her comfort in a thousand ways. He saw to the proper working of the shutters in her room, to the smooth opening of the drawers and presses; put the fear of God into the hearts of chamber-maids and valets through the medium of a terrific lingua franca of his own invention; supplied her with flowers; rose early every morning to scour the town for a New York Herald so that it could be taken up to Clementina’s room with her coffee, and petit croissant. His habit of speech, too, became more deferential, and his discourse gained in depth and sincerity what it lost in picturesque vernacular. To sum up the whole of the foregoing in a phrase, Tommy’s attitude towards Clementina grew to be that of an extremely nice boy towards an extremely nice maiden aunt.

This change of attitude acted very powerfully on Clementina. As she had remarked, it was a new sensation to be taken care of: one which she liked very much indeed. All the sternly repressed feminine in her—all that she called the silly fool woman—responded to the masculine strength and delicacy of touch. She, on her side, saw Tommy in a new light. He had developed from the boy into the man. He was responsible, practical, imperious in his frank, kindly, Anglo-Saxon way. It was a new joy for the woman, who, since girlhood, had fought single-handed for her place in the world, to sit still and do nothing while difficulties vanished before his bright presence just as the crests of alarming steeps vanished before the irresistible rush of the car.

Once when a loud report and the grinding of the wheels announced a puncture, she cried involuntarily.

“I’m so glad!”

Tommy laughed. “Well, of all the feminine reasons for gladness!”—Clementina basked in her femininity like a lizard in the sun. “I suppose it’s because you can sit in the shade and watch Johnson and me toiling and broiling like niggers on the road.”

She blushed beneath her swarthy skin. That was just it. She loved to see him throw off his coat and grapple like a young Hercules with the tyre. For Johnson’s much more efficient exertions she cared not a scrap.

Her heart was full of new delights. It was a new delight to feel essentially what she in her irony used to term a lady; to be addressed with deference and tenderness, to have her desires executed just that instant before specific formulation which gives charm and surprise. Every day she discovered a new and unsuspected quality in Tommy, and every evening she dwelt upon the sweetness, freshness, and strength of his nature. The lavender fragrance, the nice maiden-aunt-ity of her relations with Tommy, I am afraid she missed.

It gave her an odd little thrill of pleasure when Tommy propounded his theory of the perfect focal adjustment of the good in their natures. When he implicitly gave her rank as angel she was deeply moved. So she stretched out her hand and touched him and said “Thank you.”

“You said nothing about my proposal to stay here for ever,” he remarked, after a while.

“I’m quite ready,” she replied absently. “Why shouldn’t we?”

Tommy pointed out a white château that flashed through the greenery of the hill behind the cathedral.

“That’s the place we’ll take. We’ll fill it with books—chiefly sermons, and flowers—chiefly poppies, and we’ll smoke hashish instead of tobacco, and we’ll sleep and paint dream-pictures all the rest of our lives.”

“I suppose you can’t conceive life—even a dream-life—without pictures to paint in it?”

“Not exactly,” said he. “Can you?”

“I shouldn’t be painting pictures in my dream-life.”

“What would you be doing?”

But Clementina did not reply. She looked at the brave old sentinel fort glowing red in the splendour of the westering sun. Tommy continued—“I’m sure you would be painting. How do you think a musician could face an existence without music? or a golfer without golf?” and he broke into his fresh laugh. “I wonder what dream-golf would be like? It would be a sort of mixed arrangement, I guess, with stars for balls and clouds for bunkers and meads of asphodels for putting greens.” He suddenly lifted his hands, palm facing palm, and looked through them at the framed picture. “Clementina dear, if I don’t get that old Tour de la Bâtie with the sunset on it, I’ll die. It will take eternity to get it right, and that’s why we must stay here for ever.”

“We’ll stay as long as you like,” said Clementina, “and you can paint to your heart’s content.”

“You’re the dearest thing in the world,” said Tommy.

Dinner time drew near. They left the bridge reluctantly, and mounted the great broad flight of forty steps that led to the west door of the Cathedral. A few of the narrow side streets brought them into the Place Miremont, where their hotel was situated. In the lazy late afternoon warmth it looked the laziest and most peaceful spot inhabited by man. The square, classic Town Library, hermetically closed, its inner mysteries hidden behind drawn blinds, stood in its midst like a mausoleum of dead and peaceful thoughts. Nothing living troubled it save a mongrel dog asleep on the steps. No customer ruffled the tranquillity of the shops around the Place. A red-trousered, blue-coated little soldier—so little that he looked like a toy soldier—and an old man in a blouse, who walked very slowly in the direction of the café, were the only humans on foot. Even the hotel omnibus, rattling suddenly into the square, failed to break the spell of quietude. For it was empty, and its emptiness gave a pleasurable sense of distance from the fever and the fret of life.

It is even said that Pontius Pilate found peace in Vienne, lying, according to popular tradition, under a comparatively modern monolith termed the Aiguille.

“Are you quite sure this place isn’t too dead-and-alive for you?” Clementina asked, as they approached the hotel.

He slid his hand under her arm.

“Oh no!” he cried, with a little reassuring squeeze. “It’s heavenly.”

While she was cleansing herself for dinner, Clementina looked in the glass. Her hair, as usual, straggled untidily over her temples. She wore it bunched up anyhow in a knot behind, and the resentful hair-pins invariably failed in their office. This evening she removed the faithful few, the saving remnant that for the world’s good remains in all communities, even of hair-pins, and her hair thick and black fell about her shoulders. She combed it, brushed it, brought it up to the top of her head and twisting it into a neat coil held it there with her hand, and for a moment or two studied the effect somewhat dreamily. Then, all of a sudden, a change of mood swept over her. She let the hair down again, almost savagely wound it into its accustomed clump into which she thrust hair-pins at random, and turned away from the mirror, her mouth drawn into its old grim lines.

Tommy found her rather uncommunicative at dinner which was served to them at a separate side table. At the table d’hôte in the middle of the room, eight or nine men, habitués and commercial travellers fed in stolid silence. She ate little. Tommy; noticing it, openly reproached himself for having caused her fatigue. The day in the open air—and open air pumped into the lungs at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour—was of itself tiring. He ought not to have dragged her about the town. Besides, he added with an appearance of great wisdom, a surfeit of beauty gave one a soul-ache. They had feasted on nothing but beauty since they had left Chalon-sur-Saône that morning. He, too, had a touch of soul-ache; but luckily it did not interfere with his carnal appetite. It ought not to interfere with Clementina’s. Here was the whitest and tenderest morsel of chicken that ever was and the crispest bit of delectable salad. He helped her from the dish which she had refused at the hands of the waiter, and she ate meekly. But after dinner, she sent him off to the café by himself, saying that she would read a novel in the salon and go to bed early.

The loneliness of the salon, instead of resting her, got on her nerves; which angered her. What business had she, Clementina Wing, with nerves? Or was Tommy right? Perhaps it was soul-ache from which she was suffering. Certainly, one strove to pack away into oneself anything of beauty, making it a part of one’s spiritual being. One could be a glutton and suffer from the consequences. The soul-ache, if such it were, had nothing of origin in the emotions that had prompted her touch on Tommy’s arm, or the coiling of her hair on the top of her head. Nothing at all. Besides, it was a very silly novel, a modern French version of Daphnis and Chloe, in which Daphnis figured as a despicable young neuropath whom Tommy would have kicked on sight, and Chloe, a sly hussy whom a sensible mother would have spanked. She threw it into a corner and went to her room to brace her mind with Tristram Shandy.

She had not been long there, however, when there came a knocking at her door. On her invitation to enter, the door opened and Tommy stood breathless on the threshold. His eyes were bright and he was quivering with excitement.

“Do come out. Do come out and see something. I hit upon it unawares, and it knocked me silly. I’ve run all the way back to fetch you.”

“What is it?”

“Something too exquisite for words.”

“What about the soul-ache?”

“Oh! Let us have an orgy while we’re about it,” he cried recklessly. “It’s worth it. Do come. I want you to feel the thing with me.”

The appeal was irresistible. It was spirit summoning spirit. Without thinking, but dimly conscious of a quick throbbing of the heart, Clementina put on her hat and went with Tommy out of the hotel. The full moon blazed from a cloudless sky, flooding the little silent square. She paused on the pavement.

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said.

“Oh—that’s only the silly old moon,” cried Tommy. “I’ve got something much better for you than that.”

“What is it?” she asked again.

“You wait,” said he.

He took her across the square, through two or three turns of narrow cobble-paved streets, whirled her swiftly round a corner and said;

“Look!”

Clementina looked, and walked straight into the living heart of the majesty that once was Rome. There, in the midst of an open space, the modern houses around it obscured, softened, de-characterised by the magic-working moon, stood in its proud and perfect beauty the Temple of Augustus and Livia. Twenty centuries, with all their meaning, vanished in a second. It was the heart of Rome. There was the great Temple, perfect, imperishable, with its fluted Corinthian columns, its entablature, its pediment, its noble cornice throwing endless mysteries of shadow. No ruin, from which imagination flogged by scholarship might dimly picture forth what once had been; but the Temple itself, untouched, haughty, defying Time, the companion for two thousand years of the moon that now bathed it lovingly, as a friend of two thousand years’ standing must do, in its softest splendour, and sharing with the moon its godlike scorn of the hectic and transitory life of man.

Clementina drew a sharp breath of wonder. Moisture clouded her eyes. She could not speak for the suddenness of the shock of beauty. Tommy gently took her arm, and they stood for a long time in silence, close together. In their artists’ sensitiveness they were very near together, too, in spirit. She glanced at his face in the moonlight, alive with the joy of the thing, and her heart gave a sudden leap. All the beauty of the day translated itself into something even more radiant that flooded her soul, causing the rows of fluted columns to swim before her eyes until she shut them with a little sigh of content.

At last they moved and walked slowly round the building.

“I just couldn’t help fetching you,” said Tommy.

“Oh, I’m glad you did. Oh so glad. Why didn’t we know of this before we came.”

“Because we are two thrice-blessedly ignorant cockneys, dear. I hate to know what I’m going to see. It’s much better to be like stout Cortez and his men in the poem and discover things, isn’t it? By Jove, I shall never forget running into this.”

“Nor I,” said Clementina.

“The moment the car turned the bend to-day I knew something was going to happen here.”

More had happened than Tommy dreamed of in his young philosophy. Nor did Clementina enlighten him. She slid his arm from under hers and took it, and leaned ever so little on it, for the first time for many, many years a happy woman.

When they left the Temple she pleaded for an extension of their walk. She was no longer tired. She could go on for ever beneath such a moon.

“A night made for lovers,” said Tommy, “and we aren’t the only ones—look!”

And indeed there were couples sauntering by, head to head, talking of the things the moon had heard so many million times before.

“I suppose they take us also for lovers,” said Clementina foolishly.

“I don’t care if they do,” said Tommy. “Let us pretend.”

“Yes,” said Clementina. “Let us pretend.”

They wandered thus lover-like through the town, and came on the quay where they sat on the coping of the parapet, and watched the moonlit Rhone and the brave old Château-Fort on the hill.

“Are you glad you came with me?” she asked.

“It has been a sort of enchanted journey,” he replied, seriously. “And to-night—well to-night is just to-night. There are no words for it. I’ve never thanked you—there are things too deep for thanks. In return I would give you everything I’ve got—in myself, you know—if you wanted it. In fact,” he added, with a boyish laugh, “I’ve given it to you already whether you want it or not.”

“I do want it, Tommy,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “You don’t know how much I want it.”

“Then you have a devoted, devoted, devoted slave for the rest of your life.”

“I do believe you are fond of me.”

“Fond of you!” he cried. “Why, of course I am. There’s not another woman like you in the world.” He took her hand and kissed it. “Bless you,” he said. Then he rose. “We’ve sat out here long enough. Your hands are quite cold and you’ve only that silly blouse on. You’ll catch a chill.”

“I’m quite warm,” said Clementina mendaciously; but she obeyed him with surprising meekness.

If any one had had a sufficiently fantastic imagination and sufficient audacity to prophesy to Clementina before she started from London the effect upon her temperament of a Roman Temple and moonshine, she would have said things in her direct way uncomplimentary to his intelligence. She would have forgotten her own epigram to the effect that woman always has her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit. But her epigram had proved its truth. She was feeling a peculiar graciousness in the focal adjustment above considered, was letting her spirit soar with its brother to planes of pure beauty, when lo! suddenly, spirit was hurled from the empyrean into the abyss by the thing clinging round its neck, which took its place on the said planes with a pretty gurgle of exultation.

That is what had happened.

And is it not all too natural? There are plants which will keep within them a pallid life in a coal-cellar—but put in the sun and the air and the rain will break magically into riotous leaf and bud and flower. Love, foolish, absurd, lunatic, reprehensible—what you will—had come into the sun and the air and the rain, and it had broken magically into blossom. Of course, she had no business to bring it into the air; she ought to have kept it in the coal-cellar; she ought not to have let the door be opened by the wheedlings of a captivating youth. In plain language, a woman of six-and-thirty ought never to have fallen in love with a boy of twenty-three. Of course not. A vehement passionate nature is the easiest thing in the world to keep under control. A respectable piece of British tape ought to be strong enough leash for any tiger of the jungle.

That Clementina, ill-favoured and dour, should have given herself up, in the solitude of her room, to her intoxication is, no doubt, a matter for censure. It was mad and bad and sad, but it was sweet. It was human. The rare ones from whom no secrets of a woman’s pure heart are hid might say that it was divine. But the many who pity let them not grudge her hour of joy to a woman of barren life.

But it was only an hour. The grey dawn crept into the sleepless room, and the glamour of the moonlight had gone. And there was a desperate struggle in the woman’s soul. The boy’s words rang in her ears. He was fond of her, devoted to her, would give up his life to her. He spoke sincerely. Why should she not take the words at a little above their face-value? No strong-natured woman of five-and-thirty, with Clementina’s fame and wealth and full great sympathy need fear rebuff from a generous lad who professes himself to be her devoted, devoted, devoted slave. All she has to do is to put up the banns. Whether ultimate bliss will be achieved is another matter. But to marry him out of hand is as easy as lying. It did not need Clementina’s acute intelligence for her to be fully aware of this. And another temptation crept over her pillow to her ear, peculiarly insidious. The boy would be free to pursue his beloved art without sordid cares. There would be no struggle and starvation and fringed hems to his trousers. A woman who really loves a man would sooner her heart were frayed than his trouser-hems.

She rose and threw wide the shutters. The little Place Miremont looked ghostly in the white light, and the classic Bibliothèque, with its round-headed windows, more than ever a calm mausoleum of human wisdom. It is strange how coldly suggestive of death is the birth of day.

Clementina crept back to bed and, tired out, fell asleep. The waiter bringing in the breakfast tray awakened her. On the New York Herald which Tommy had gone to the railway station to procure, lay a dewy cluster of red and yellow roses; on a plate a pile of letters, the top one addressed in Etta Concannon’s great girlish scrawl.

Why in the world should a bunch of parrot-tulips have flared before her eyes? They did. They had marked the beginning of it. The red and yellow roses marked the end.

“Attendez un moment,” she said to the waiter, while she tore open the envelope and glanced through Etta’s unimportant letter. “Bring me a telegraph form.”

He produced one from his pocket. If you ask a waiter in a good French provincial hotel for anything—a copy of Buckle’s History of Civilisation or a boot-jack—he will produce it from his pocket. He also handed her a pencil.

This she bit musingly for a few seconds. Then she scribbled hastily on the telegraph form:

“Join me at once. Book straight through to Lyons. Wire train. Will meet you at station. Promise you”—Her lips twisted into a wry smile as the word she sought entered her head—“heavenly time. My guest of course. Clementina. Hôtel du Nord, Vienne.”

“By the way, garçon,” she said, handing him the telegram, “why is this called the Hôtel du Nord?”

“Parceque, Madame, c’est ici, à Vienne, que commence le Midi,” replied the waiter.

He bowed himself out. A courtier of Versailles at the levée of the Pompadour could not have made his speech and exit with better grace.

Later in the day Clementina received the reply from Etta.

“You darling, starting to-morrow. Arrive Lyons seven o’clock morning Thursday.”

Tommy, fired by the picture made by the bend of the Rhone and the Château-Fort de la Bâtie, spent most of the day on the quay, with the paraphernalia of his trade, easel and canvas and box of colours and brushes, painting delightedly, while Clementina, beneath an uncompromising white umbrella with a green lining, bought on her travels, sat near by reading many tales out of one uncomprehended novel. Just before dinner she informed him of the almost immediate arrival of Etta Concannon.

“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed in an injured voice. “That spoils everything.”

“I don’t think so,” said Clementina.

CHAPTER XI

Clementina motored to Lyons by herself; dined in gaunt and lonely splendour at the Grand Hotel, and met Etta Concannon’s train very early the next morning. Etta, dewy fresh after her all night train journey, threw her arms round her neck and kissed her effusively. She was a heaven-born darling, a priceless angel, and various other hyperbolical things. Yes, she had had a comfortable journey; no trouble at all; all sorts of nice men had come to her aid at the various stages. She had been up since five standing in the corridor and looking at the country which was fascinating. She had no idea it was so full of interest.

“And did one of the nice men get up at five too, and stand in the corridor?” asked Clementina.

The girl flushed and laughed. “How did you guess? I couldn’t help it. How could I? And it was quite safe. He was ever so old.”

“I’m glad I’ve got you in charge now,” said Clementina.

“I’ll be so good, dear,” said the girl.

The luggage secured, they drove off. Etta’s eyes sparkled, as they went through the ugly, monotonous, clattering streets of Lyons.

“What an adorable town!”

As it was not even lit by the cheap glamour of the sun, for the sky was overcast and threatening, it looked peculiarly depressing to normal vision. But youth found it adorable. O thrice blessed blindness of youth!

“What has happened to Mr. Burgrave?” she asked, after a while, “I suppose his time was up and he had to go back.”

“Oh, no,” said Clementina coolly. “He’s at Vienne.”

“Oh-h!” said Etta, with a little touch of reproach. “I thought it was just going to be you and I and us two.”

“We’ll put him in front next to Johnson and have the back of the car all to ourselves. But I thought you liked Tommy Burgrave.”

“He’s quite harmless,” said Etta carelessly.

“And he thinks of nothing in the world but his painting, so he won’t bother his head much about you,” said Clementina.

Etta fell at once into the trap. “I’m not going to let him treat me as if I didn’t exist,” she cried. “I’m afraid you’ve been spoiling him, darling. Men ought to be shown their place and taught how to behave.”

His behaviour, however, on their first meeting was remarkably correct. The car, entering Vienne, drew up by the side of the quay where he had pitched his easel. He rose and ran to greet its occupants with the most welcoming of smiles, which were not all directed at Clementina. Etta had her share. It is not in the nature of three-and-twenty to look morosely on so dainty a daughter of Eve—all the daintier by contrast with the dowdy elder woman by her side. Tommy had spoken truly when he had professed his downright honest affection for Clementina; truly also when he had deprecated the summoning of the interloping damsel. But he had not counted on the effect of contrast. He had seen Etta in his mind’s eye as just an ordinary young woman who would disturb that harmonious adjustment of artistic focus on whose discovery he had prided himself so greatly. Now he realised her freshness and dewiness and goodness to look upon. She adorned the car; made quite a different vehicle of it. Standing by the door he noticed how passers-by turned round and glanced at her with the frank admiration of their race. Tommy at once felt himself to be an enviable fellow; he was going to take a great pride in her; at the lowest, as a mere travelling adjunct, she did him credit. Clementina watched him shrewdly, and the corners of her mouth curled in an ironical twist.

“It isn’t my fault, Miss Concannon, that I didn’t come to Lyons to meet you. Clementina wouldn’t let me. You know what a martinet she is. So I was here all last evening simply languishing in loneliness.”

“Why wouldn’t you let poor Mr. Burgrave come to Lyons, Clementina?” laughed Etta.

“If you begin to pester me with questions,” replied Clementina, “I’ll pack you off to England again.”

“All inquiries to be addressed to the courier,” said Tommy.

“And you’ll answer them?”

“Every one,” said Tommy.

Thus the freemasonry of youth was at once established between them. Etta smiled sweetly on him as the car drove off to the hotel, and Tommy returned to his easel with the happy impression that everything, especially the intervention of interloping damsels, was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.