XIV.

Thereafter men were a constant horror to her--adding a new and most savage beast to the wolves of noise, of desolation and of despair that bayed about her in this grinding city. Unable longer to face them, she went again to Miss Ram at the Agency--almost upon her knees, crying, trembling, pitching her tale from the man with the dent in his hat to the man in Wilton Road.

Miss Ram was moved to the original depths that lay beneath her grim exterior; had never realised the actual circumstances; would do what she could; no need to be frightened.

Two days later Mary was unpacking her box at 14 Palace Gardens. No sharpness, no slight now could prick her spirit; she had learned too well; she would not face those streets again.

That was eighteen months, close upon two years ago. Wounds were healing now; old-time brightness was coming back to laugh at present discomforts. It was only now and again--as now--that she, driven by some sudden stress, allowed her mind backwards to wander--bruising itself in those dark passages.

The cab stopped. She with a start came to the present; gulped a sob; was herself.

Mrs. Chater said: “Run in quickly and mix me a brandy-and-soda.”

## CHAPTER II.

Excursions In Vulgarity.

A violent dispute with the cabman set that disturbed heart yet more wildly thumping in Mrs. Chater's bosom; the sight of her husband uneasily mooning in the dining-room heated her wrath to wilder bubblings.

Mr. Chater--a 'oly dam' terror in Mincing Lane, if his office-boy may be quoted--was an astonishingly mild man in his own house.

He said brightly, noting with a shiver the gusty stress of his wife's deportment: “You _drove_ up, my dear?--And quite right, too,” he hastily added, upon a sudden fear that his remark might be interpreted as reproach.

“How do you know?” Mrs. Chater's nose went into the brandy-and-soda.

“I saw you from the window,” her husband beamed. He repeated, “The window,” and nervously pointed at it. There was a strained atmosphere in the room, and he was a little frightened.

“_Oh!_” Out from the brandy-and-soda came the nose; down went the glass with an emphasising bang: “_Oh!_”

Mr. Chater gave a startled little jump. He saw, immediately he had spoken, the misfortune into which his admission had plunged him; the bang of the glass twanged his already apprehensive nerves, and he jerked out, “Certainly, my dear,” without any clear grasp as to what he was affirming.

“If you had been a _man_,” said Mrs. Chater, speaking with a slow and extraordinary bitterness--“if you had been a _man_, you would have come out and helped me.”

“But you had got out when I came to the window, my dear.”

“With the _cabman_, I mean.” Mrs. Chater fired the word with alarming ferocity. “With the _cabman_. Did you not see that violent brute insulting me?”

It was precisely because he had observed the episode that Mr. Chater had kept well behind the curtain; but he did not adduce the fact.

“I certainly did not,” he affirmed.

“Ah! I expect you took precious good care not to. You've done the same thing before. Never to my dying day shall I forget the figure you cut outside Swan and Edgar's last Christmas. Making me--”

Mr. Chater implored: “Oh, my dear, don't drag that up again!”

“But I _do_ drag it up!” Mrs. Chater a little unnecessarily cried. “I _do_ drag it up, and I shall always drag it up--making me a fool as you did! I was ashamed of you. I was--”

Mr. Chater nervously wiped his moist palms with his pocket handkerchief: “I've told you over and over again, my dear, that I never understood the circumstances. There was a great crowd, and I was very much pushed about. If I had known the circumstances--”

Mrs. Chater hurled back the word at him: “Circumstances!”

“My dear,” the agitated man replied, ticking off the points on soft fingers, “my dear, I had gone to the window of Swan and Edgar's, leaving you, as you expressly desired, to pay the man _yourself_. When I came _back_ to you, what I gathered was that the man was entitled to a further _sixpence_ and that you had no _change_.”

Mrs. Chater lashed herself with the recollection: “Nothing of the kind!” she burst. “Nothing of the kind! What did the man say to you when you asked what was the matter?”

“I quite forget.”

“You do not forget.”

“My dear, I really and truly do forget.”

“For the hundredth time, then, let me tell you. He said that if you pushed your ugly mug into it he would knock off your blooming head.”

“Did he say _mug?_” asked Mr. Chater, assuming the air of one who, knowing this at the time, would have committed a singularly ferocious murder.

“Well you know that he _did_ say mug--_ugly_ mug. Was _that_ a thing for a man of spirit to take quietly? Was _that_ a thing for a wife to hear bawled at her husband in the open street with the commissionaire grinning behind his hand? To my dying day I shall never forget my humiliation when you handed him sixpence.”

The unhappy husband murmured: “I do so wish you could, my dear.”

Mrs. Chater shook, handled her troops with the skill of a perfect tactician, and hurled in the attack upon another quarter.

She said: “Ah, now insult me! Insult me before Miss Humfray! That's right! _That's_ right! That's what I'm accustomed to. We all have our cross to bear, as the vicar said last Sunday, and open insult from my husband is mine. I can't complain; I married you with my eyes open.”

Mrs. Chater revealed this secret of her girlhood in a voice which implied that most young women go through the ceremony with their eyes tightly closed, mixed a second brandy-and-soda for her shattered nerves, swallowed it with the air of one draining a poison flask by way of happy release from martyrdom, banged down the glass, and, before her amazed husband could open his lips, hammered in the attack from a third quarter.

“Little you would have cared,” cried she, “if a miracle had not saved my life this afternoon!”

Mr. Chater stood aghast. “My dearest! Saved you! From what?”

His dearest bitterly inquired: “What does it matter to you? You take no interest. If my battered corpse--” Swept to tremendous heights by the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. “If my battered corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this very afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?”

Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair, affirmed that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which he happened to be standing at the moment.

Mrs. Chater trumpeted “Never!”--dropped to her chair, and continued. “You would have been glad.” Her voice shook. “Glad--and in all this wide world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have wept o'er my body.”

Of so melancholy a character was the picture thus presented to her mind, augmenting her previous agitation, that the tumult within her welled damply through her eyes, with noisy distress through her lips.

Patting her distressed back, imploring her to calm, Mr. Chater begged some account of the catastrophe from which she had escaped.

Between convulsive sobs she told him, he bridging the hiatuses of emotion with “Oh-dear-oh-dears,” in which alarm and sympathy were nicely mingled.

Painting details with a masterly hand, “And there was I alone,” she concluded--“alone, at the mercy of a wild horse and a drunken cabman.”

“But Miss Humfray was with you?”

“Miss Humfray managed to jump out and leave me.”

Through all this scene--in one form or another a matter of daily occurrence, and therefore not to arouse interest--Mary had stood waiting its cessation and her orders. Mr. Chater turned upon her. Naturally disposed to be kind to the girl, he yet readily saw in his wife's statement a way of escape from the castigation he had been enduring. As the small boy who has been kicked by the bully will with delighted relief rush to the bully's aid when the kicks are at length turned to another, urging him on so that he may forget his first prey, so Mr. Chater, delighted at his fortune, eagerly joined in turning his wife's wrath to Mary's head. For self-preservation, at whatever cost to another, is the most compelling of instincts: its power great in proportion as we have allowed our fleshly impulses to master us. If, when they prompt, we coldly and impersonally regard them, find them unworthy and crush them back humiliated, they become in time disciplined--wither and die. In proportion as we permit them, upon the other hand, they come in time to drive us with a fierceness that cannot be checked.

Mr. Chater had disciplined no single impulse that came to him with his flesh.

In pious horror he turned upon the girl.

“Managed to jump out!” he exclaimed, speaking as one re-echoing a horror hardly to be believed.

“Managed to jump out! Miss Humfray, I would not have thought it of you!”

She cried: “Mr. Chater, I fell!”

Disregarding, and with a deeper note of pained reproach, he continued: “So many ties, I should have thought, would have bound you to my wife in such an emergency--the length of time you have been with us; the unremitting kindness she has shown you, treating you as one of ourselves, in sickness tending you, bountifully feeding and clothing you, going out of her way to make you happy. Oh, Miss Humfray!”

The strain on his invention paused him. Mrs. Chater, moved by this astonishing revelation of her love, assumed an air in keeping--an air of some pain but no surprise at such ingratitude. She warmed to this husband who, if no hero in the matter of ferocious cabmen, could at least champion her upon occasion.

Mary cried: “But I did not jump out! Indeed I did not, Mr. Chater; I fell.”

Mrs. Chater said _“Fell!”_ With sublime forbearance she added, “Never mind; the incident is past.”

“Mrs. Chater, you must know that I fell out. I was leaning out--you had asked me to see the name of the street--when the horse stumbled.”

“It is curious,” said Mrs. Chater, with a pained little smile, “that you managed to 'fall out' before the horse could recover and bolt.”

“Very, very curious,” Mr. Chater echoed.

How hateful they were, the girl felt. She broke out: “I--”

“Miss Humfray, that is enough. Help me upstairs. I will lie down.”

Mr. Chater jumped brightly to the bell. “My dear, do; I will send you a hot-water bottle.”

His wife recalled the shortcomings for which she had been taking him to task. “Send a fiddlestick,” she rapped; “on a boiling day like this!”

She took Mary's arm; leaning heavily, passed from the room.

## CHAPTER III.

Excursions In The Mind Of A Heroine.

Her mistress disrobed, head among pillows, slippered, coverleted, eau-de-Cologne on temples, with closed eyes inviting sleep to lull the tumults of the day. Mary climbed to her room.

About her mouth there was a ridiculous twitching; and as she watched it in the mirror she strove to wrap herself in the armour in which she had learned to take buffetings.

To be dispassionate was the salve she had schooled herself to use upon a wounded spirit--to regard this Mary with the comically twitching face whom now she saw in the glass as a second person whose sufferings might be coldly regarded and dissected.

It is a most admirable accomplishment. Nothing is so easy as to be philosophic upon the cares of another--nothing so easy as to wax impatient with an acquaintance who allows himself to be overridden by troubles and pains which appear to us of trifling moment. If, then, we can school ourselves to regard the figure that bears our name as one person, and our ego as another, we have at least a chance of chiding that figure out of all the fancied sufferings it may undergo.

With some success Mary had studied the art; now gave that Mary-in-the-glass who stood before her a healthy reproof.

“The ridiculous thing you did,” Mary-in-the-glass was told--“the ridiculous thing you did to make yourself miserable was to go thinking about--about Ireland.”

The mouth of Mary-in-the-glass ominously twitched.

“There you go again. And it is so absolutely forbidden to think about that. Whatever's the use of it?”

Mary-in-the-glass could adduce no reason, and must be prodded.

“Does it do you any good? Does it do _them_ any good, do you suppose, to know that you can never think of them without making yourself unhappy?”

Mary-in-the-glass attempted a weak quibble; was instantly snapped.

“I'm not saying you are _never_ to think of them. Goodness knows what I should do if I did not. It's all right to think of them when you are happy and they can share the happiness with you; but, when you choose to be idiotically miserable, that's the time you are not to go whining anywhere near them--understand? You only make them unhappy and make your troubles worse. Troubles! if you can't see the fun of Mrs. Chater, you must be a wretched sort of person. Her face when the cab brought her back! And trying to feel her heart! And her rage with that little worm of a Mr. Chater! Can't you see the fun of it instead of crying over it?”

Mary-in-the-glass could. The successive recollections induced the prettiest dimples on her face. She was at once forgiven.

Indeed, to snuggle back into her and to merge into her again was just now very desirable to the censorious Mary-outside-the-glass. For, merged in her sentimental and romantic personality, a most delectable line of thought could be pursued--a delectable line, since along this trail was to be encountered that stranger who had caught her in her wild ejection from the cab.

Sinking in a chair, Mary adventured upon it; she was instantly met.

Mary-outside-the-glass essayed her best to prevent the interview. “Poof!” Mary-outside-the-glass, that cold young person, sneered. “Poof! You little idiot! A stranger with whom you spoke for five minutes, whom you will never again see, and from whose recollections you have most certainly passed unless to be recalled as a joke--perhaps to some other girl!” (A nasty dig that, but they are monsters these Marys-outside-the-glass.) “Why, you must be a donkey to think about him! For goodness' sake come away before you make yourself too utterly ridiculous! You won't. Well, perhaps you will try to recall the figure you must have cut in his eyes? Do you remember what you must have looked like as you shot out of the cab like a sack of straw? Pretty sight, eh? And can you imagine the expression on your face as you banged into his arms? Charming you must have looked, mustn't you? And can you by any means realise the idiot you must have looked when Mrs. Chater came up and swept you off like an escaped puppy, recaptured and in for a whipping? Striking figure you cut, didn't you? You didn't happen to peep back through the little window at the back of the cab and see him laughing, I suppose? Ah, you should have looked....”

And so on. This was the attitude of that cold, calculating, dispassionate Mary-outside-the-glass. But Mary smothered the voice--would not hear a word of it. Completely she became Mary-in-the-glass, that sentimental young woman, and in that personality tripped along the path of thought where stood her stranger.

Delectably she relived the encounter. Paced down the street, took again his arm; without a fault recalled his words, without a check gave her replies; recalled the pitch of his voice to the nicest note, struck again the light in his eyes.

Now why? She had met other men; in Ireland had thrice wounded her tender heart by negations that had caused three suitors most desperate anguish. None had awakened in her a deeper interest; and yet here was a stranger--suddenly encountered, as suddenly left--who in her mind had appropriated a track which she was eager to make a well-beaten path. Why?

But Mary-in-the-glass, that sentimental young woman, was no prober of emotions. They veiled the hard business of commonplace life; and amid them mistily she now floated afar into dim features where her stranger, stranger no more, walked with her hand in hand.

There was attempt at first to construct an actual re-encounter. Mary-in-the-glass, that romantic young woman, very speciously pointed out that in London when once you see a man you may reasonably suppose that you will again meet him. For in London one does not aimlessly wander; one has some set purpose and traverses a thousand times the same streets, crossing daily at the same points as though upon the pursuit of a chalked line. Mary-in-the-glass, therefore, constructing a re-encounter, happened to be strolling along the scene of the accident, and lo! there was he!

Unhappily this vision was transient. Mary-outside-the-glass, that cold young woman, got in a word here that erased the picture. The square where the cab crashed was too far afield to take the children for their walk; holiday was a boon rarely granted and never granted at the particular hour of the catastrophe--the only time of day at which, according to the chalked-line theory, she might reasonably expect to find the stranger in the same spot.

But Mary did not brood long upon this melancholy obstacle; drove away Mary-outside-the-glass; became again Mary-in-the-glass. And they are impossible creatures these Marys-in-the-glass. They will approach an unbridged chasm across which no Mary-out-side could by any means adventure, and, floating the gulf, will deliriously roam in the fields beyond.

So now. And in that dream-world of the musing brain Mary with her stranger sublimely wandered. With her form and his she peopled all the favourite spots she knew; contrived others and strolled in them; introduced other persons, and marked their comment on her dear companion.

It was he whom she made to do mighty deeds in those misty fields; of herself hers were merely a girl's gentle fancies, held modest by her sex's natural desire to be loved for itself alone--not for big behaviour.

## CHAPTER IV.

Excursions In A Nursery.

The loud bang of a door was the gong that called Mary back from those pleasant fields. They whirled from her, leaving her in sudden realisation of the material.

She glanced at the clock.

“Goodness!” cried she, and fell to scattering her outdoor finery at a speed dangerous under any but the deftest fingers. Into a skirt of black and a simple blouse she slipped, and down, skimming the stairs, to where her charges bided their bedtime.

Opening the nursery door she paused upon the threshold with a little “Oh!” of surprise. There was a reek of cigar smoke; its origin between the lips of a burly young man who stood drumming a tune upon the window-pane.

Mr. Bob Chater turned at her entry. “I've been waiting for you a long time,” he said.

She asked, “Whatever for?” and in her tone there was a chill.

“Didn't I tell you yesterday that I was coming to see the kids tubbed?”

“I didn't think you meant it.”

Mr. Bob Chater laughed. “Well, now you see that I did. I've been looking forward to this all day.”

Plainly she was perturbed. She said: “Mr. Chater, I really would rather you did not, if you don't mind.”

“Well, but I do mind, d'you see? I mind very much indeed. It would be the bitterest disappointment.”

His playfulness sat ill upon him. This was a stout young man, black-eyed, dark-moustached, with a thick and heavy look about him.

She would not catch his mood. “I am sure when I ask you--”

“Well, you're jolly well wrong, you know,” he laughed; “'cause I ain't going.”

Mary flushed slightly; moved to the hearthrug where sat David and Angela, her small charges, watching, from their toys, the scene.

It occurred to Mr. Bob Chater that she was annoyed.

“I say, be decent to a fellow, Miss Humfray,” he said. “Look here, I hadn't seen the kids for two years when I came back yesterday. They hardly remember their kind big brother.” He addressed the small girl whose round eyes, moving from speaker to speaker since Mary had entered, were now upon him. “Do you, Angela?” he asked.

“I--hate--you,” Angela told him, in the slow utterance of one giving completest effect to a carefully weighed sentiment.

With equal impressiveness, David, seated beside her, lent his authority to the statement. “I--hate--you--too,” he joined.

Mr. Bob Chater laughed a little stupidly.

Mary cried: “Oh, Angela! Oh, David! How can you speak like that!”

“He is perfectly abom'able,” Angela said, unmoved. “He made Davie cry. He trod on Davie's beetle.”

The cracked corpse of a mechanical beetle, joy of David's heart, was produced in evidence; its distressed owner reddening ominously at this renewed recollection of the calamity.

Mary took the sad pieces tenderly. “Silly children! He never meant to break it. Oh, such silly children!”

Angela protested, “He did! He did! He put his foot over it while it was running, and stopped it. He told David to get it away if he could, and David bit his leg, and he said 'Damn you!' and crushed it crack.”

Mary whipped a glance at the murderer. She ignored the evidence. “To-morrow!” said she. “Why, what fun! To-morrow we'll play hospital like we did when Christabel broke her arm. We'll make Mr. Beetle just as well as ever he was before!”

“I'll be doctor!” cried David, transported into delight.

“Yes, and Angela nurse. Look, we'll put poor Mr. Beetle on the mantelpiece to-night, right out of the draughts. If he got a draught into that crack in his back, goodness knows what wouldn't happen. He must eat slops like Christabel did. _What_ fun! Now, bed--_bustle!_”

Their adored Mary had restored confidence. They clung about her.

“It was a pure accident,” explained Mr. Bob Chater, gloomily watching this scene. “I'll buy you another to-morrow.”

“There!” Mary cried. “Think of that!”

David reflected upon it without emotion. He regarded his big brother sullenly; sullenly said, “I don't want another.”

Mary cried brightly: “Rubbish! Come, kiss your brother good-night, and say 'thank you!' Both of you. Quick as lightning!”

They hung back.

Mary had obtained so complete a command of their affections that her word was the wise law which, ordinarily, they had come unquestioningly to accept. In their short lives David and Angela had experienced a procession of nurses, of nursery-governesses, of lady-helps, each one of whom received or gave her month's notice within a few weeks of arrival, and against whom they had conducted a sullen or a violent war. From the first it had been different with Miss Humfray. As was their custom (for this constant change tried tempers) upon the very day of her arrival they had met her with frank hostility, had declared mutiny at her first command. But her reception of this attitude they found a new and astonishing experience. She had not been shocked, had not been angry, had ventured no threat to tell their mother. Instead, at the outbreak of defiance, she went into the gayest and most infectious laughter, kissed them--and they had capitulated before they realised the event.

A second attempt at mutiny, made upon the following day, met with a reception equally novel. Again this pretty Miss Humfray had laughed, but this time had fully sympathised with their view of the point at issue and had made of the affair a most entrancing game. She, behold, was a pirate captain; they were the rebellious crew. In five minutes they had marooned her upon the desert island represented by the hearthrug; had rowed away with faces which, under her instructions, were properly stern; and only when she waved the white flag of truce had they taken her aboard again. Meanwhile the subject of the quarrel had been forgotten.

Never a dispute arose thereafter. They idolised this pretty Miss Humfray: whatsoever she said was clearly right.

Here, however, was a dangerous conflict of opinion. They hung back.

“Quickly,” Mary repeated. “Kiss him, and say thank-you quickly, or there will be no story when you are in bed.”

It was a terrific price to pay; their troubled faces mirrored the conflict of decision.

David found solution. In his slow, solemn voice, “You kiss him first,” he said. Miss Humfray always took their medicine first, and David argued from the one evil necessity to this other.

Mr. Bob Chater laughed delightedly. “That's a brilliant idea!” he cried; came two strides towards Mary; put a hand upon her arm.

So sudden, so unexpected was his movement, that by the narrowest chance only did she escape his purpose. A jerk of her head, and he had mouthed at the air two inches from her face.

She shook her arm free. “Oh!” she cried; and in the exclamation there was that which would have given a nicer man pause.

Mr. Bob Chater was nothing abashed. A handsome face and a bold air had made conquests easy to him. It was an axiom of his that a girl who worked for her living by that fact proclaimed flirtation to be agreeable to her--at all events with such as he. Chance had so shaped affairs that this was the first time his theory had found disproof. He saw she was offended; so much the more tickling; conquest was thereby the more enticing.

He laughed; said he was only “rotting.”

Mary did not reply. The command to kiss their brother went by default; she hurried her charges through the door to the adjoining night nursery.

When they were started upon undressing she came back.

“You're going to let me see you tub them?” Bob asked her.

Busy replacing toys in cupboards, she did not reply.

“You're not angry, are you?”

She gave him no answer.

Bob Chater discarded the laugh from his tone. “If you are angry, I'm very sorry. You must have known I was only fooling. It was only to make the kids laugh.”

So far as was possible she kept her back to him.

The continued slight pricked him. His voice hardened. “When I have the grace to apologise, I think you might have the grace to accept it.”

Mary said in low tones: “If you meant only to make them laugh, of course I believe you. It is all right.”

“Good. Well, now, may I see them tubbed?”

“I have told you I would rather not.”

“Dash it all, Miss Humfray, you're rather unkind, aren't, you? Here have I been away nearly two years--I've been travelling on the Continent for the firm-you know that, don't you?”

She said she had heard Mr. and Mrs. Chater talking of it.

“Well, and yet you won't let me come near my darling little sister and my sweet little brother to tell 'em all about it?”

“But I'm not keeping you from them, Mr. Chater. You have had plenty of time.”

“Time! Why, I only got back yesterday!”

“You have been in here this afternoon.”

“Ah, they were shy. They're better when you are here.”

She had finished her task, and she turned to him. “Mr. Chater, you know I could not keep David and Angela from you even if I dreamed of doing such a thing. Only, I say I would rather you did not come in while I bath them, that is all.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Mrs. Chater would not like it for one thing, I feel sure.”

“Oh, that's all rot. Mother wouldn't mind--anyway, I do as I like in this house.”

From all she had heard of Mrs. Chater's beloved Bob, Mary guessed this to be true. Long prior to his arrival she had been prejudiced against him; acquaintance emphasised the prophetic impression.

“Another night, then,” she said.

He felt he was winning. No girl withstood him long.

“No, to-night. Another thing--I want to know you better. This arrangement is all new to me. There was a nurse here in your place when I went. I've hardly spoken to you. Have you ever been abroad?”

“No.”

“Well, I'll tell you--and the kids--some of my adventures while you're tubbing 'em. Lead on.”

She was at the night-nursery door. Evidently this man would not see her conventional reason for not wishing him at the tubbing. Angela had grown a biggish girl since he went away.

She said, “Please not to-night.”

“I'm jolly well coming,” he chuckled.

The lesson of dependence was wilfully forgotten. Mary agreed with Angela and David: she hated this Bob.

“No,” she said sharply, “you are not.”

He had thrown his cigar into the grate; taken out another; stooped to the hearth to scratch a match. His back was to her; to him all her tone conveyed was that a “rag” was on hand.

“We'll see,” he laughed; struck the match.

She stepped swiftly within the door; closed it.

Bob Chater laughed again; ran across.

The lock clicked as she turned the key.

“Let me in!” he cried, rattling the handle. “Let me in!”

The splash of water answered him.

He thumped the panel. “Open the door!”

“Now, Angela,” he heard her say, “quick as lightning with that chimmy.”

Bob's face darkened; he damned beneath his breath. Then with a laugh he turned away. “I'm going to have some fun with that girl,” he told himself; and on the way downstairs, her pretty face and figure in his mind, pleased himself with vicious anticipation.

## CHAPTER V.

Excursions At A Dinner-Table.