CHAPTER XVI

“If Winter come, can Spring be far behind!”

IT was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England longs for the south of France, and every one who has been out of England compares it unfavorably with other climates.

Cynthia had left Muriel with a frightful cold and the club accounts, and had gone out to buy her some violets. They had heard that morning from Mary Huntly that Jack was recovering, though the fever resulting from the accident had necessitated sick leave. He would probably have got Muriel’s letter by now. Cynthia looked longingly at some impossibly expensive roses, when she heard a man’s voice behind her.

“By Jove! Cynthia!” Her heart leaped from January to June. She turned her head slightly to face the obtruder—a delicate, fine-looking man with the eyes of a poet, and a chin which it would do some poets good to have. It took a moment for them to get over the memory of the last time they had met. It had begun to rain a little, and people had put up their umbrellas and pushed on more rapidly than ever.

“What do you want?” he asked, looking from the girl to the window.

“What can you afford?” said Cynthia, laughing. She was wondering what people wanted to hurry for on such a lovely day.

“I am very rich,” he responded. “Honor bright! I could buy over the business. I sold my last picture for—I can’t tell you how much, it might stir up your demon of independence. I’m going to get you the roses.” In two minutes he came back with them in his hand. “By the way, you might as well put up your umbrella, mightn’t you, it seems to be raining?” he said.

“Oh, so it is,” said Cynthia absently. They stood together uncomfortably, knowing that if no good excuse arose they would have to part.

“Don’t you think a cup of tea would be nice?” he suggested. Cynthia nodded her head decisively.

“Yes,” she said, “and muffins.”

“Do you remember,” said her companion, as they turned towards a possible restaurant “those dear little French cakes and——”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Cynthia sternly, “and I’m not going to.” Leslie Damores laughed.

“You even forgot,” he said teasingly, “just now that it was raining!”

“I thought you were in France. I didn’t know you were ever coming back to England again,” said Cynthia a little doubtfully. She noticed that he had not asked her what she was doing, and it hurt her. She would volunteer no information. They sat down by a clean table in a warm inner room; neat-capped maids fluttered here and there; it was very restful and very English. To the artist who had not been in England for eight years it was home, and the girl who held the roses in her lap filled in the picture. He studied her face carefully.

“You’re awfully changed,” he said at last. Cynthia laughed.

“I was twenty-two when I saw you last, and now I am thirty. I was never one of the dimpling kind that stay young either; as for you—you’re a man, so it’s different. But”—her voice grew strangely gentle—“you’re not quite the same, you know, Leslie; fame has come to you, and you look more of a fighter, and yet not quite so hard.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that youth should be so exacting—with its impossible whites and blacks—and that the more one roughs it, and the harder knocks one gets, the more generously shaded it all becomes,” he said, watching her with keen, eager eyes. She turned her head away and played restlessly with the flowers in her lap. “It could never change as much as that,” she thought.

The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American. The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the hour.

“I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips. “He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow, and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare the time—good-bye.”

He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets, wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in London.

Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind, and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange, lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise. This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened, glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child. The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall, slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of thirty, pushed her way to the front.

“Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?” Cynthia nodded shortly.

“Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she said.

The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door. It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women, each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect, commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary, purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There, under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help. Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it all.

After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table.

“’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her. The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “’E’s all I ’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?”

Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for all who love the little ones.

“Does he suffer much?” she asked.

“’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink, miss?”

“Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very bad case.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?”

“I’m afraid not, Carrie.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the question.

“He may live some time yet.” The girl wrapped the child up in the blanket; the fierceness in her eyes did not prevent the gentle touches of her hands.

“I ’ate God, so there! an’ I ’ate the club! an’ I ’ate you and the other lidy! I ’ate you all!” she cried hoarsely. Then suddenly the anger died out of her face; she turned hopelessly to the door, pausing irresolutely she asked again in dull despair, “Then there isn’t hanythink as you can do?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.” She drew the blanket closer round the child and passed out into the night.

It was late and Muriel had gone to bed. Cynthia came in and sat down by her.

“Do you think a man would ever trust a girl a second time?” she asked.

“That would depend, wouldn’t it,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “upon the girl’s character, and the attitude towards the broken trust, and how long ago it had happened, and what she had done in the meantime?”

“Do you think it possible if she was different that he would love her again?” Muriel sighed.

“I would have married Jack,” she said, “if he had been different, but he was the same. I suppose it all depends on whether one’s power of detachment is strong enough.”

“You’re very tired, dearest,” said Cynthia, “and I shouldn’t bother you; but—but I suppose you pray, don’t you?” Muriel smiled; she did not say she had done nothing else since she had forfeited her life’s happiness.

“Yes, I try to,” she said.

“Then,” said Cynthia, “perhaps you might as well pray for me. Good-night!”