CHAPTER VI

“The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”

“YOU have not come to see me for some time, Jack, yet we used to be good friends once, didn’t we? One seems to have one’s seasons for those kind of things, then they drop out. With sleeves, you know, one mustn’t keep the fashion on a bit too long. I have known dressmakers—but I won’t trouble you with my philosophy. I am going to have dear Mrs. Huntly and a charming cousin of hers to dinner, and so thought you might, perhaps, care to join us, though I’m candid enough to admit I hope it will not be merely for the charming cousin’s sake.

“EDITH LE MENTIER.”

Jack Hurstly read the note, written on rich, heavy cream, a tiny, definite hand between large margins. It all seemed very familiar to him. Three years ago there used to be a drawer full of them, though he had burned them of course, he remembered, after the scene in the garden. It had all been very graceful and harmless, and he had immensely admired and pitied her with her dense husband, who shattered her dainty little subtleties with a heavy word or two, and “called things,” as she plaintively remarked to Jack, “by their proper names, as if things,” she had added, “should ever be called by names at all, and least of all by their right ones.”

Then he had met Muriel. He thought of that first evening, and of her frank, disarming look, and of how she not only did not say things she did not mean, but actually went so far as to say the things she did.

It was a change from a little winding stream now here, now there, to a free, open lake with its clear reflection from the sky.

It was natural that after this should come the scene in the garden; what he could not understand was this little dinner three years afterwards.

Curiosity and Muriel’s wilful remoteness prompted him to accept the invitation; but he did so formally.

Edith, when she read his letter, broke into a little laugh.

“A joke, my dear?” her husband asked, looking over his newspaper across the breakfast table.

“Certainly not, Ted,” said Edith; “I should never dream of laughing at a joke at breakfast time!” Her husband returned to his sporting notes—they seemed to him so much easier to understand.

Mrs. le Mentier prepared to meet her guests by dressing in Jack Hurstly’s favorite color. It happened to be the one which suited her; but it is possible she would have worn it if it had not. It takes a woman longer than three years to forget a man’s favorite colors, and longer still not to wear them when she remembers.

Gladys Travers was the first to arrive, with Mary Huntly’s brother, a deeply earnest young clergyman with thoughtful eyes. “Cyril had to bring me,” she said, smiling, “because Mary had a headache, one of those horrid dark-room ones, you know, with tea and toast. I don’t believe he quite approves though of dinner parties, do you, Cyril?” Mrs. le Mentier shook hands with him sympathetically.

“I know quite well what you feel,” she said in her slow, gentle voice. “It’s the herding together of rich people to eat brilliantly, while all the great half of the world have no brilliance and no dinner, and I think it is so good of you to come. I’ve only just _really_ one or two to-night, so I hope you won’t find us very worldly.”

Cyril Johnstone had blushed at his cousin’s speech, but now that his hostess paused he said gently, “Mary was so very sorry she could not come.”

“Dear Mary,” Edith murmured as she glided across the room to welcome two men who had entered at the same time—Jack Hurstly and a young doctor, a man of good family and even better brains. “How good of you to come, doctor!” said she, her eyes sparkling their most vivid welcome. “One feels,” she said, turning to the young clergyman, “with busy men like you what a debt of gratitude one owes. Now you, Captain Hurstly,” she added (for the first time addressing Jack), “had, I am sure, nothing to give up?”

“Everything to attract, certainly,” said Jack with a smile at Gladys, who was glancing with laughing, observant eyes from one to the other.

Dinner was announced, and Edith, taking the young priest’s arm, followed the rest of the party. She was thinking it extremely stupid of dear Mary to have a dark-room headache, and she was talking to Mr. Johnstone on the marvellous utility of Bands of Hope.

“Yes,” she said, glancing over the flower-decked table, “it’s the name itself. Hope! What a lot it calls up, doesn’t it? Spring mornings, one imagines, and skies too blue to deny one anything. There’s something in the word which makes one think of waves.”

“Because they break themselves on the rocks?” suggested Gladys, “or cover quicksands?”

“It’s a word,” said the doctor, smiling, “with a very expansive meaning, and a use even more expanded than its meaning.”

Mr. Johnstone looked across to Mrs. le Mentier. “It’s one of the cardinal virtues,” he said gently.

“And they,” said his cousin, looking at Jack, “always close a conversation, because you see it’s so inconvenient to have to take off one’s shoes.”

Mr. Johnstone looked shocked, and Edith started another subject.

“My husband,” she said, “is away—fishing, I think it is. He has, poor man, a deadly feud against all animal nature, and he spends his time trying to exterminate it. I must confess it seems to me rather a hopeless quest.”

“Don’t you English say,” asked Gladys of the doctor, “that it’s strengthening to the character?”

The doctor smiled. “More to the muscles than to the character, I should fancy,” he said.

“But isn’t it one of your tests of a character,” she persisted, “in England that it should _have_ fine muscles?” The conversation became international. Edith watched, but took no part; she was listening to Jack, who was not talking to her.

He was instead appealing to Cyril Johnstone. “Are you at all interested,” he asked, “in those slum clubs?” The priest’s face brightened.

“Immensely,” he said. “My work is there, you know, and so I have seen a good deal of them. But of course you refer to those under parochial guidance?”

“Captain Hurstly,” Mrs. le Mentier broke in, “is referring, I feel sure, to the sweetest free-lance in the world, a dear friend of ours who has thought it her duty to disassociate herself from her home, and even to a certain extent from the Church, because she thinks she can, as the phrase goes, ‘reach nearer to the people’s hearts’ that way. You’ll admit it’s heroically brave of her. People’s hearts give one such shocks when one _does_ get near them.”

“A case of hysteria,” murmured the doctor under his breath, “in its most patent modern form.”

Gladys glanced lightly at Jack Hurstly; then she said in a sweet, penetrating voice, “There you are wrong, doctor. Muriel is the most healthy-minded girl I know.”

“Her hysteria may be confined to one form,” he ventured.

“Ah, but you should see her!” said Gladys. Here the voice of Cyril Johnstone broke in.

“It seems to me,” he exclaimed, “the saddest thing in the world and the most useless. There has been too much talk about the people’s hearts, too many missions of sentimental women. What can they give the people? Their need, their crying need, is for the cultivation of the soul, and it is we—set apart as God’s ministers—who are called upon, and to whom alone rightly belongs the unspeakable privilege and duty of serving the poor!”

Mrs. le Mentier looked gravely devotional and stifled a yawn.

Jack Hurstly looked at Gladys, who again meeting his look broke out into a defence.

“And while the Low and the High, the Broad and the Long (if there _are_ any long, or if they aren’t all long), quarrel as to who shall help the poor, and how they shall be dressed to do it, what are the poor going to do? And why shouldn’t a woman, or even a man for that matter, go down among them and teach them how to live? What kind of souls are you going to teach in wretchedly uncultivated bodies, cousin Cyril? And if you believe in clubs, why aren’t you thankful for their work, even if the clergy are not asked to take Bible classes in them? As for Muriel and her poor, she’s taught them how to smile, and I actually heard one of them say ‘Thank you’ the other day. I don’t believe an archbishop could do as much even with his robes on.”

Mr. Johnstone opened his mouth to answer her tirade; but Jack Hurstly, who had been listening delightedly, clapped his hands and laughed, and he felt that it was impossible to argue against a joke. Mrs. le Mentier rose to her feet smiling. She felt that her dinner had not helped her much; and she did not love Gladys.

“Let us leave the gentlemen alone, dear,” she said, “to discuss our short-comings and their dominion. It’s an entrancing subject, I believe—when you can have it all your own way.”

The two women floated gracefully out of the room. They were rejoined very shortly by the men, whom it is presumed found their points of view on “the entrancing subject” too different for prolonged discussion. Gladys and the doctor stood out on the balcony.

The balmy June evening filled with the noises of the streets below seemed very soothing to them, and their talk interested both immensely, so much so that they did not hear Mrs. le Mentier preparing to sing, and only ceased when her low, sweet voice rang out, “Life and the world and mine ownself are changed for a dream’s sake—for a dream’s sake.”

It was a simple song, but she sung it with a quiet passion and intensity that entirely captivated her audience. When the song was over they were not ready with their applause, and even the doctor looked as if he had met an ideal. Edith sang again, and they went home, all but Jack Hurstly. “I must speak to you a minute, Jack,” his hostess had murmured as he turned over the leaves of her music, and for the song’s sake he stayed.

She stood in the middle of the room, her hands held loosely in front of her, like a child’s. “Haven’t you punished me long enough—Jack?” she asked.

“My dear Mrs. le Mentier,” he began.

“Ah!” she murmured, “Mrs. le Mentier! Mrs.—le Mentier—Jack!”

He had before wished that he had never come; there seemed now nothing else to do but to wish it more strongly. She looked so young and piteous, and her eyes were full of a real emotion. The only ways left were to be weak or brutal. The last alternative would end the scene quicker.

“It doesn’t seem much good, does it,” he finally said, “to go over all this again?”

She smiled wistfully. “Is it all over then for you?” she asked. “Do you know, it was silly of me, wasn’t it? I somehow thought you might still be the same, and the three years’ penance enough for the past mistake?” She spoke with a kind of strained slowness very pitiful to hear.

“Things have changed so!” he muttered.

“Things?” she laughed. “How a man falls back on the inanimate! Things don’t change, my dear Jack, but women grow older and men grow wiser—that’s all. Let me congratulate you then on your increase of wisdom, and you will be a little sorry—for my increasing age?” He frowned and looked at the door; she winced as if he had struck her. “You want to go?” she said. “Well, there’s one thing, my dear Jack, for you to remember. If you should get tired of your sweet firebrand in the slums, ‘things have not changed,’ you will remember, won’t you? And women don’t—so the way is still open.”

He stepped past her to the door, but he turned back to look at her (he often turned back). She was twisting her fan in her hands and trying to smile.

“You can always come back,” she said.

“Oh! I’m not such a brute as that!” exclaimed the man at the door.

“Oh, aren’t you?” she laughed. “You have your limits, then? I’m so glad! And you had better go now, for I have mine too.”

When the door closed firmly after him limits seemed to dissolve. She put the fan down carefully on the table, and she looked at her miserable face in the glass with a vague, ulterior satisfaction, for even if one’s heart was broken it was something of a comfort that one looked distinctly pretty in tears.