PART III

I

THE BATHS OF APOLLO

On a foggy November morning of the year whose events have been chronicled a man came out of a house in Westminster and stood for a moment on the worn steps, supporting himself against one of the pillars of the porch, to blink sorely at the raw day. The house he was leaving was one of a few old buildings that still exist on the long, crooked street whose northern frontage follows the ancient precincts of royal abbey and palace. From its size, the graceful detail of its doorway, the white and black squares unevenly paving its hall and the depth of brickwork which the long recessed windows revealed, one judged at once that this had been, in days gone by, the town mansion of a great legal or political family, forced by its very functions to dwell at the gates of the legislature. But whatever it had been in olden times, to-day the great house was inexpressibly sordid and degraded. The cupids and garlands of its doorway, blunted by two centuries of whistling house-painters, had well-nigh disappeared once for all beneath a last coat of coarse red-brown paint. With the same dismal tint--the old penitential hue of the galleys--were daubed window-sashes and sills, the panelling of the wide hall, the carved brackets that supported the crumbling edges of its tiled roof. Within, one conjectured rightly bare lime-washed walls--disinfection, not decoration--sodden boards worn away round the knots. Even in the foggy half-light, so merciful to all that has beauty of outline still to show, its crude defacement did not escape. One felt that the pickaxe and sledge-hammer of the house-breaker, busy in a neighboring hoarded space, spared it too long.

A thick, dun mist had been creeping up-river since dawn from the Kent and Essex levels, gathering up on its way the filthy smoke of glue factories and chemical works, and holding it suspended over the spires and domes of the Imperial city. The close alleys and wynds that, like a fungus growth upon polluted soil, cover the area once sacred to the brothels and dog-kennels of the Plantagenet Court, seemed not so much to be endued with smoke and grime as actually to be built up out of compacted slabs of the sooty atmosphere. The sun was still in the east--a red wafer stuck on a sealed sky.

For a few minutes the man stood still, as if either too tired to make up his mind which way he should take, or as if, really paralyzed for the moment by the equilibrium of the forces that acted on his will, he was at the point where, vertigo having seized upon the mind and, as it were, disorientated it, direction loses its meaning. It is almost certain that had any passer-by--a policeman, a man bearing a burden, even a child--jostled the man, he would have gone on in the direction to which the collision turned him.

He wore a jacket and trousers of what had once been blue serge, faded by exposure, by dust, by rain that soaked in the dust, and sun that dried the rain in turn, to that color which is obtained by mixing all the primaries upon a palette. A streak of the coat's original color showed still under the upturned collar, and had the effect of a facing upon a soldier's tunic. Coat and trousers were miserably frayed at the edges, but neatly mended in more than one place. Probably from being worn night and day upon an almost naked body, the stiff straight lines natural to modern clothing had disappeared, and they had acquired, in their place, an actual mould of the limbs. His shoes, spattered with mud and grease, seemed once to have been brown. They were broken, and the heels had been trodden down so far that the soles curled up in front like an eastern slipper. The man was quite clean, his hair and beard even trimly kept. His face was refined. Whatever physical suffering he was undergoing or had undergone, it was evident he had not yet reached the depth at which the soul contracts and shrivels once for all, and, dropping into some inmost recess where only death shall find it again, leaves the animal epidermis to bear the outrage of life. Under one eye the discoloration of an old bruise showed faintly.

As he looked about him--first above his head, then mechanically to left and right--what was almost a look of relief and peace came over the tortured face. In this narrow drab margin twixt night and night--a day only by the calendar and by the duties it imposed--it is possible he felt something akin. Something of the mechanical precision of life that was such a reproach to his own confusion would have to be relaxed. It would be a day of late trains, of crawling, interlocked traffic, of sudden warnings from the darkness, with the ever-present possibility of some levelling disaster to lend a zest to the empty hours. Excluded from human communion on the side of its pleasures, the outcast yearns toward it all the more upon the side of its pain and mischance. What is the savagery of revolution but a very exaltation of perverted sympathy? "Weep with me, my brother," says the red of hand, "weep with me at least, since I might not rejoice with you."

He had been the last to leave the common lodging-house which had given him a night's shelter, and, as he lingered, the deputy, a big, fleshy man in shirt-sleeves, came down the passage behind him, whistling and sweeping before him the caked mud which forty pairs of broken shoes had brought in during the night. At the sound of his broom against the wainscot, the man turned sharply, with a sudden energy that was like the release of a coiled spring, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, strode off to the left quickly and aimlessly as a caged wolf. Where Great Smith Street runs into Victoria Street he turned to his left again, and followed the main thoroughfare southward. Through the happy accident of its deflection midway, at the point where the colossal doorway of the Windsor Hotel confronts the Army and Navy Stores, Victoria Street possesses, as all visitors to London with the architectural sense must have noticed, a dignity and effectiveness unique in the city of costly ineptitude. Approached from the river at sunset or sunrise, or in any light low enough and dim enough to hide the sorry detail of its lofty houses, the effect approaches the monumental. The wanderer's eyes had been fixed on the ground; but, possibly arriving at some spot where in former days he had been used to watch for it, he raised his head and stood, unsteadily, for a few seconds, intent upon the beauty with which the world is as prodigal as it is niggardly of its substance. The sky was an orange dun, deepening and lightening almost momentarily, as though some pigment with which the day was to be dyed later were being prepared overhead. The long Italianesque façade of the stores was all one blue shadow, but over its roof, through some atmospheric freak, the campanile of the new cathedral emerged, pale pink and cream, and in the upper windows of the great hotel, whose pillars and helmed mask closed the prospect on the right, a few wavering squares as of strawberry tinsel foil reflected the foggy sun. As he watched, leaning against the railing, one might have noticed his lips move. He took his clenched fists from his pockets, and opened them slowly with a strange gesture of surrender. It was as though some inward resolution, evidenced by the hasty walk, the lowered eye, the clenched hands, yielded at its first contact with the influence he was attempting to forswear.

A man who had been walking hastily from the opposite direction, with a long roll of blue prints under his arm, stopped short, pulled off his glove, and, diving into his trouser pocket, pulled out a copper and pressed it against one of the open palms. The dreamer started, closed his hand upon the penny convulsively, and, without a word of thanks, gazed after the bustling figure. He opened his fingers slowly and looked at the coin, with the same fear and repugnance that a sick man might show who, having put his hand to his mouth, finds blood upon it. Then, still holding it in his hand, he quickened his walk, until it was almost a run.

In a baker's shop near the terminus he spent half the money on a stale roll, and ate it, standing in the doorway of the Underground Station, and using his free hand to cover his mouth, as though he felt his voracity was indecent. A wretched little waif--a girl child, bareheaded, in a long dress like a woman's, and with her hair done up in a wisp--seeing him eating, approached, held out a hand scaled with dirt like a fish's skin, and begged of those rags with the same blind confidence with which the child in heart asks relief of a beggared providence. He gave her the halfpenny, and as much of the bread as he had not eaten; then, crossing the road, he shouldered his way into the station yard.

The Continental Night Mail, more than half an hour late on account of the fog, was just in. A long line of motor-cabs, with an occasional four-wheeler, stood along the curb. Porters in charge of portmanteaux and trunks were shouting and gesticulating; the air was full of grunts, whistles, and the sudden clatter of horses' feet catching hold on the pavement. The man paid no attention to the motor-cabs, but, slipping behind a four-wheeler loaded with luggage and a bicycle, followed it from the yard and into the street.

The cab rolled along through Pimlico and in the direction of the river. Almost immediately the station was left the fog shut down and hid the houses on either side. The driver, an old street pilot of thirty years, kept on at a steady amble; the man behind, quite ignorant of his destination, settled down to a steady loping run, which apparently he was prepared to keep to between the wheels as long as the horse kept to it between the shafts.

At a cross-traffic break he looked up, and saw he was not alone. A short, thick-set stranger, with a bullet head and strangling, wheezy breath, had joined him _en route_. That competition which is said to be the soul of trade was not to be lacking.

"Ullo!" said the stertorous one, as soon as he felt himself observed. "W'ere did _you_ come from?"

Finding he was not rebuked, he thought it safe to essay a little further.

"You be awf and find a ---- keb for yourself. D'jeer? Follered this from the stishun, I did."

His bearded brother in misfortune gave him such a look that he judged it wise to defer settling the difference. The cab started again, turned, and twisted in the maze of stucco streets, always followed by the two men; stopped finally in a crescent that even in daylight was secluded, but in a fog might be said to be mislaid. Bullet head, being outside the wheel, used his tactical advantage to lay one authoritative hand on the leather trunk and the other on the bicycle.

"It's aw ri', guv'nor," he called, reassuringly through the window to their proprietor. Even as he spoke, he was himself deposited upon the pavement in an efficient manner of which the tall comrade's face had given no hint. Followed, not so much a volley of oaths, as a kind of set-piece, a transparency of language, which hung suspended in the shocked air of Pimlico long enough for a window or two to open, presumably in protest. Appealed to by his fare, a literary gentleman of peaceful habit, upon the score of age and experience, the driver refused to be drawn into the conflict.

"Settle it between yerselves," he said complacently, sucking on a voice lozenge and pocketing his legal fare. "Door to door, my trade is, and don't ferget it." A woman meantime had opened the hall door, and was scolding every one, impartially, in the dialect of Fifeshire.

Nothing goads to madness like foiled knavery. The tall man, having already shouldered the trunk, the short one laid a violent and ill-advised hand upon it from behind. Next moment it was set upon the ground and with a vigorous movement of the shoulders that gave his words authority, the dreamer spoke for the first time, in a voice whose accent and whose idiom alike were familiar.

"See here, now! You have one minute to hit the grit. If you're not gone then, I'll lay that mouth of yours against the sidewalk and give it the dry cleaning it needs. Now that goes--all the way!"

"My God!" I cried, "it's Ingram!"

* * * * *

He turned to run, but I clung to him. He was a powerful man, much stronger, even exhausted as he was, than I have been at any time, but I am proud to think my grip upon him never once gave way. At last he desisted, perhaps because he heard tears in my voice, and disengaged my fingers gently.

"Ingram! Oh! in God's name what does it mean? I thought you'd gone back--thought you were thousands of miles away."

He laughed. "Can't you see what it is, Prentice? It's the last note in journalism. A delegate to the depths. Talks with the underworld. I'm doing it pretty thoroughly, don't you think?"

Well, I stood there and pleaded with him. His competitor carried in the baggage meekly, under Mrs. Mac's petrifying eye, was paid, and went his way--the mystified Jehu cracked his whip and rumbled off into the fog before I had exhausted half the arguments and expedients with which my brain swarmed. I wanted him to take money, to come in and be fed and clothed, to go back to America (assisted passage). He shook his head at everything, and at the last suggestion set his bearded jaw hard. I thought his objection very fanciful.

"I won't go back," he said, "to see a democracy that has had its chance and missed it, done to death with a golden bandage over its eyes. It's less hard to stop here among the poor devils that have never known what economic independence meant."

He found reasons equally good or equally bad for resisting my offers toward rehabilitation in England.

"It's no use, Prentice," he said, again and again. "Believe me, between the very last rung of the social ladder and the depths in which I'm swimming round and round, and waiting for the final suffocation, there's a sheer fall that no power on earth can ever bridge again. From where I am I can speak still, hear still, even feel. I look up and see living men on the slope above me. Some are slipping down, some, who have stood once on the verge and looked over, are crawling up again, weak and half dead from terror. But I and those with me are past help. You don't know the gulf that separates having a little money, even your last pound, from having none at all. That's an experience as final and irremediable as death. None can imagine it unless they have known it, and none that have known it ever come back to tell."

Before such remorseless logic I weakened, little by little. I told him he was ungenerous--that friendship involved debts of honor he had never been willing to pay; finally I went into the house to make him up a parcel of warm underclothing. I remember blubbering like a whipped lower-form urchin as I ransacked drawers and trunks, and how the string kept snapping as I tried to tie up the great untidy brown-paper parcel. When I came downstairs the street was empty.

II

LIGHTNING IN THE FOG

He ran, he has told me since, like a man with a hue-and-cry in his ears, turning left or right at random. At last his breath failed; he remembered his rags, and noticed people looking suspiciously after him. He came out onto the river somewhere near the Tate Gallery, by a yard full of spray-battered old ship figureheads, and crossed the big new bridge to the Albert Embankment. At a river sluice below an iron yard men were unloading bundles of Belgian tees and angles from a barge. The river was falling fast, and he got an hour's job helping them to unload the cargo. It was on such casual labor, I suppose, that for months he had supported life. He was paid sixpence for his hour's work, and, seeing his strength and famished willingness, the lighter-men overloaded him and raised a weal on his shoulder. He was still nearly starving, but did not dare spend the money till later. By two o'clock in the afternoon the fog was general and very thick. He was standing in the centre of the little foot-bridge that runs under the viaduct from Charing Cross Station. Above his head trains rumbled softly and circumspectly. There were Pullman cars filled with sun-worshippers on their way from the winter-smitten city to France and Italy--to ivory villa and amethyst bay, maybe to the white sun-steeped cities upon whose ramparts he had once stood sentry. The fog-signals went off in his ears like cannon. On the Middlesex shore of the river was a dim bustle, muffled tang of gongs, constant flitting of blurred lights; but under the Surrey shore, lonely as a quicksand on the Breton coast, a strip of mud left by the falling tide shone, a coppery red, beneath the bulk of the big Lambeth brewery. Below his feet a squadron of empty lorries lay moored together, four--four--and three, like a hand of cards dealt face downward by a fortune-teller. All around him was mewing, as from a dozen litters of kittens; the fog became thick with the fluttering winged forms of sea birds. No one had passed him for a long time. He stretched out his arms and spoke aloud--

"Soul! what things are these that hem us in--that compass us about this November noontide, as we roam, stifled and uncertain, through Babylon's foggy streets? These towers, soaring into the infinite; these palaces, whose limits we conjecture from the dimmed overflow of light within; these chariots, rolling one instant soundless from obscurity, next instant engulfed by it? What things are they? Even such as to-day thou beholdest them: shadows, phantoms, vapor, and cloud. To-morrow the wind shall smite them, and their places know them no more; daylight seek them, and find them gone. Oh! paradox immeasurable, that where the sun had lied to thy senses fog should truly bespeak them!"

Solitary as he seemed, he had been observed for some time. A bulky figure, in heavy overcoat and helmet, stepped from behind a girder and touched him on the shoulder.

"Don't you think you'd best get to one side or the other? It's bad loitering weather."

Ingram started at the touch, then looked over his shoulder and laughed.

"I see," he said. "But there's no fear of that," and he looked at the river again. "You'd have come in after me, I suppose--boots, overcoat, and all."

"I'm not saying what I'd have done," the constable answered stolidly. "My dooty, I hope. But it's not the day I should choose to win the Albert Medal on."

He looked at the suspect closer, and seeing a man probably as strong as himself, his voice and manner changed. There was a new freemasonry in it when he spoke again, and a strange curiosity, shame-faced but eager.

"Man to man, mate; is it very bad?"

Ingram turned on his heels like the soldier he had been.

"Man to man--no. I've earned sixpence this morning; that's supper and bed. My nakedness is only an offence to the providence I've ceased to believe in, and I've the æsthetic sense which makes a thing like that," and he pointed to the patch of rosy mud, "a living joy. What man who works for bread will have more to say in two hundred years? Do you know there are great artists who'd go a day without food to paint truly what we've got under our feet. Not many English ones, though. I'll do them that justice."

"I think I know wot you mean," said S. 11. "I'm fond of pitchers myself. I suppose you know there's one of our force gets 'is pitcher into the 'cademy reg'lar every year. But hunger's one thing and starvation's another."

"It's not starvation, man; it's the fear of it that's putting out the sun and stars for three quarters of the world. 'Do _my_ work or starve! do _my_ work or starve!' that's what every factory hooter and works bell and alarm clock is ding-donging from morning till night. We're all too frightened to do ourselves justice. We sit down to our desk, or stand to our bench or easel with a full belly and an icy cold heart. So the great book never gets written, and the great picture never gets painted, and the great wrong never gets righted, and the soul we have no use for is passing into piston-rods and flywheels that eat up human flesh and blood as the beasts of the field chew grass. No thank you, constable. Didn't I tell you I'd got sixpence. Keep it for the next woman you have to move on. _That's_ the shame--_that's_ the unpardonable sin."

There had been no present thought of self-destruction in his mind, but, in spite of himself, the policeman's suspicion stirred a dormant idea that was now a comfort to him, now a terror, just so far as it lay vague or assumed definite shape. He climbed the ascent into the Strand, glad to be in the crowd again, and to feel himself jostled and elbowed by its hurrying life. Amid all the human tide that, after having turned the wheels of commerce all day, was now setting homeward, there was probably no one who walked straighter or brisker than he.

His long steps soon carried him into a distant quarter of the city; but as night fell he turned them toward Westminster again--back to the house where he had slept last night and perhaps many a night before. It was no better than others that lay to his hand, but at least its horrors were familiar. He shrank from new initiations. Besides, it was not seven o'clock, and eight was the earliest hour at which such places opened. How to kill an hour?--absorbing occupation for a mind like this.

He decided to follow the Embankment again. There, if his feverish walk outpaced the clock, he might loiter--lean upon the parapet, sit down upon one of the seats. He would buy some liver in Lambeth and cook it before the lodging-house fire. He was faint when he reached Blackfriars, and not from hunger alone. Dimly he divined a crisis. The last of a little store of illusions with which he concealed from himself how personal and irremediable was his misery had been expended during that wild talk with the man in blue upon the bridge. Something, if life was to continue, must supply its place.

The work upon the widening of the bridge was still in progress. Opposite De Keyser's Hotel a big wooden hoarding covered the pavement, making a little niche with the low granite wall of the Embankment. It was too early in the evening for the recess to be occupied or to be explored by the bull's-eye lantern of law and order. He crept within it under cover of the fog, and, resting his arms upon the wet granite wall, relit a half-smoked cigarette. All day long, throughout his defiant speech, his indignant bearing, his wretched assumption of energy, he had felt himself under an observation as unfriendly as it was thorough. Some other self, cold, critical, sneering, was watching his struggles with amused contempt. He had felt its presence before, but never so utterly detached, so hostile or so impatient. That _alter se_ which education creates and easy living nourishes, and which, deplore him as we may, is a personality to be reckoned with at every crisis and in every action of our lives, is never long content to outlive such an experience as his. It is only a question of time before the rational in man wearies of prison and poor entertainment.

"_Let us go hence!_"

Ingram smoked his cigarette until it burnt his lips, leaned over the parapet, and, as he dropped the glowing end into the river, measured the distance to the water that was "_clop-clopping_" soupily against the foot of the Embankment. His isolation in the heart of London was strangely complete, for such foot-passengers as passed, passed wide of him by a railed plank walk built outside of the great wooden hoarding that concealed him from view. The wide roadway, moreover, full of vague sound and motion--blast of motor-horns, rumble of trams, quick come and go of blurred lamps, accentuated his solitude. He waited until a heavy tread that was going westward had died away into the fog. Then he drew up his legs, first one, then the other, upon the parapet beside his hands.

"_Oh Gawd! oh Gawd!_" a voice groaned behind him. He checked his sinister movement and listened intently. Some one--some fellow-creature in torment--was cursing and sobbing on the pavement he had just left. He got down and groped for it. A man, huddled together, and with one leg jerking convulsively, was lying with his head against the boards.

Ingram put his arms round him and lifted him gently.

III

VALEDICTORY

Mrs. McNaughten has assured me that I stood for nearly five minutes, the brown paper parcel under my arm, staring blankly, first in one direction, then in another, and licking my lips. I am glad of her evidence that a mood so abject and personal lasted no longer. Because--alas!--what held me in a trance that temporarily lost count of time was not that this intolerable thing had befallen Paul Ingram, dear Paul, with whom I had sat, so many a night and on into the small hours, holding converse, high and austere, on man's destiny through life and beyond--no, it was that, having befallen him, it might befall any one, and, befalling any one--let me give the full measure of my craven heart--it might befall me. For one paralyzing instant that veil which mercifully cloaks the extreme chances of fate had been plucked aside. I had looked full into its malignant eyes, and, like the man in the Greek fable, what I had seen had been enough to turn flesh to stone. In that moment the shadowy safeguards which men erect between themselves and the grim possibilities of destiny--knowledge of the world, self-consciousness, confidence in untested friendships--stood revealed, the shams they are. The security born of years--anxious, toilsome years it is true, but during none of which, for a single day or night, bread, clothing, or sheltered sleep had failed me--shook and fluttered darkly like the eternal hills in an earthquake. I literally lost hold on life.

Thank God, the mood was over soon. I had time to be pitiful, to be even angry, with an illogical but humanizing wrath that fate, taking hourly toll of the world, had not spared one dear to me. I blamed myself bitterly for leaving him alone those few minutes. I had wearied of well-doing too soon. He must have yielded at last. Seated by the familiar fireside, fed and comforted, with the pipe in his mouth that still bore the scar of his long wolfish teeth upon its stem, a better mood must have awakened. I say a better mood, because, at certain depths, misfortune calls almost for the same treatment as crime, and the kindness that seeks to save must be disciplining as well as compassionate.

I dined at the _À-peu-près_ after my work was done, hoping against hope there would be news of him there--some indication that might put me on his track again. Smeaton was in the chair to-night--old Smeaton, best and bravest knight that ever set quill in rest--with his little restless pink face, snapping black eyes, tumbled white hair, and bulging and disordered waistcoat. I was greeted uproariously. For nearly a month I had been away in the south of France, press correspondent at a murder trial which had stirred all thinking Europe by the depths it revealed of cynical depravity on the one side, and of morbid, reiterated condonation on the other. It was by far the biggest thing I had been given to do yet, and I hoped I had done it well; but it was too much to hope that, in a subject coming home so nearly to the average sensual male, the psychological conclusions I had drawn should pass unchallenged. I sat for over an hour, besieged by questions, pelted with authorities, shouted down, derided unexpectedly and as unexpectedly championed. Even madame's indulgence was not proof against such pandemonium. She pushed open the lace-curtained door, put her hands to her pretty brown ears, and shook a reproving finger at her unruly family.

"_Quel tapage! Mon Dieu, quel br-r-ruit!_"

"_Oui!_" cries Smeaton, pointing at her excitedly with the nut-crackers. "_Et vous en êtes la cause!_"

"Do you remember your Yankee friend's dictum on the little point of manners we've been discussing?" Mackworth asked me when order was restored. He was a dark, depressed man, perhaps the richest who dined at the _À-peu-près_ regularly, and had written the most talked-about novel of the year before last.

"By the way," interrupted Smeaton, whose manners are bad, "who's seen Ingram lately?"

"I saw him--to-day," I answered, balancing the spoon on my coffee-cup.

"What's he doing? I thought he'd gone back to the States."

"He followed a growler I took from Victoria and wanted to carry in my trunk. Would have had to fight another man, too, for the sixpence."

Madame could not have desired a more complete cessation of turmoil than followed these words of mine. In more than one pair of eyes I saw the panic that would be my own lasting shame rise suddenly, and as suddenly be checked. I wonder how they got it under.

"Was he very bad?" asks Smeaton, in a low voice. "Down--right down?"

I nodded.

"_Poor--devil!_ Did he know you, Prentice?"

"Not at first. It was too foggy to recognize the house."

"What did you do?"

"Grabbed him as he turned to run, and held him. He wouldn't come in, but let me go to fetch him some clothes. When I came out, he'd bolted."

"Bravo!" said Smeaton, and clapped his pudgy little hands.

"Why do you say that?" I asked, voicing a surprise I think we all shared.

"Because it confirms a judgment of my own upon Ingram. He was the logical animal _par excellence_, and to take money or substance one hasn't been allowed to earn, if it's only a penny to buy a loaf or a rag to cover nakedness, is to sell logic as Esau sold his birthright. If there were more like Ingram, the tangle of this filthy old kaleidoscope we call life might straighten out. He'll die, of course, but at least he'll die with a man's soul in him."

"Listen to Satan rebuking sin!" said Waldron of the _Hemisphere_.

Smeaton brought his fist down on the table. "Yes," he thundered. "I know what you mean. Yes, I've given charity. I've cast bread on the waters--to drowning men that were begging for a rope. I've helped lame dogs--over stiles that led to nowhere. And every time I've done it, Waldron, I've been ashamed of myself. For I know I'm helping to protract an agony and perpetuating a state of things that ought to have been done with twenty years ago. Literature isn't paying its way to-day: that's the cold fact we must face. And a thing that isn't paying its way is a sham, no matter if it's as brilliant as the last ten years of the old French monarchy. It's falling more and more into the hands of men and women who either eke out a little private means by scribbling, or else eke out their hire by borrowing. Journalism's not so rotten; but, by the Lord Harry, after a morning in Fleet Street I sometimes think half of us are living by taking in one another's washing."

"You're taking rather a black view," said Waldron.

"Am I? Well, compare the present day with long ago--with Grub Street--with what Macaulay calls the darkest period of English letters. Read Johnson's early life--Savage--all the historical instances. Look at the sums those beggars got! Twenty-five pounds benefit from a play that ran fourteen nights: fifty pounds for an ode to Royalty once a year: ten pounds for translating a volume of Portuguese travels. Why, to many a man whose name is a household word to-day these things read like a fairy tale. They used to call on publishers with 'projects' and have luncheon served them while he read 'em over."

"What about the novel?" says Waldron, with a half-look at Mackworth.

"In its death throes. Fifty years hence the English novel--considered as literature, mind you--will be as dead as the epic poem. I stick to what I've said. When a thing ceases to pay its way, it's a sign the stage of national development that called for it is over."

"What's going to take its place?"

"Look around you. Something's begun to take its place already: articles, books--by people who've _done_ things, not dreamed them--written in the English any one can write who tries. 'Three months' lion slaughter in Central Africa'; 'One degree nearer that pole'; 'How I made my millions.' Especially the last. People never weary of that. They don't see that the game must be up, or the secrets wouldn't be being given away."

"Come!"--noticing a silence of dissent round the table. "Take a concrete instance. Mackworth, there's only one opinion about 'When the Sky Fell.'"

"You're very good."

"Simple justice, my boy. Now, take us behind the scenes a little. How long did it take you to write it?"

"Nine or ten months."

"Say nine. Working hard?"

"All day and every day."

"How long before you found a publisher?"

"Finished in June, and it came out in the autumn season."

"That's a year. Were you paid on publication?"

"No: six months afterward."

"Eighteen months. I don't like to ask you any more."

"Oh, I don't mind telling. I've cleared a hundred and twenty pounds."

"For eighteen months' work and worry."

"It's great fun. I've nearly done another."

"Yes, but assuming, for the sake of argument----"

"----that I had to live on it, eh? Well, I'm afraid there'd have been a third after Prentice's cab this morning."

"I think that settles it," said Smeaton, looking round. "No. The novel's had its day. And what a day it's been! Let us think of that. Fielding to Henry James! It's like the creation of another world. Come! I'll give you a toast we can all drink in silence--'Speedy deliverance to Paul Ingram!' And now let's talk of something more cheerful. Who's been to see Fenella Barbour's Cuckoo dance at the Stadium?"

"I suppose that's really the stage of national development we've reached," hazarded Mackworth.

"If it is, there's something to be said for it," said Smeaton, stoutly.

"She's paying _her_ way, anyhow," said some one. "Two hundred and fifty a week ought to keep the wolf from the door."

"Oh, the wolf at the stage door is a domesticated animal. No one wants to frighten him away."

I wasn't interested in what followed, and dropped out. Now and then a word or two struck me: "A clog-dancer with sophistications." "Anyway, you'll see a jolly pretty girl!" "No, not Jewish, Mackworth--Phœnician. Mother was Cornish, and she's a throw-back more than two thousand years straight to Carthage." "As much again for the posters. Briggses paid her four hundred for the 'Crême de Pêche.'"

And I smoked on, thinking of Ingram's rags. As our party broke up, I thought Smeaton made me a sign to stop on. When we were alone, he smoked silently for a while, and then--

"This is a more than usually filthy tragedy, Prentice."

"About Ingram? Yes, it's pretty bad."

"Wasn't there some book he was going to set the Thames alight with? Has it been published?"

"No. It had some funny adventures; but not that one."

"You read it. Was it really good? Between ourselves, you know."

"Oh, I answer for it."

"Don't be in a hurry. It's not late. You knew Ingram better than most of us. Now, wasn't there something between him and the little girl we've been talking of? Perhaps you guessed I didn't mention her by accident. Didn't they come here together more than a year ago?"

I told him what I knew, including the boat-train incident.

"Isn't that Ingram all over?" he exclaimed. "If his eye or his friend or his ladylove offended him, one felt the axe would be out in a minute. You know what they're saying about her now?"

"About dancing the night her mother died? Why shouldn't she? If she'd been a shop-girl or a typist, no one would have thrown stones at her for going on with her work. They'd have thought the more of her for it."

"No, no, my dear boy. I mean the Darcher case--woman at Hampstead who poisoned herself and the little boy, you know. There was a mysterious lady came down in the car with Lumsden. Her name was kept out, but they say----"

"That it was she. Oh! impossible, Smeaton! How could it be?"

"Because she left the theatre with him, and happened to be in his house when the message came through. Two o'clock in the morning! I had it from a quarter that isn't usually wrong."

"And you believe it?"

Smeaton shrugged his shoulders. "My dear boy, I've given up guessing. Anybody that wants it can have the benefit of the doubt, now." _Puff! puff!_ "I often think of poor Newstead, last time I saw him, at Guy's. They thought he was going to get well, and he was sitting up on the pillows reading one of those blasted Sunday papers that you write for. 'Well Newstead,' said I, as I was going, 'what am I to tell the boys?' 'Tell them,' he says, laying his poor claw of a hand on the paper, 'tell them I'm driven to my grave at last by the beauty and the horror of life!'" _Puff! puff!_ "Why don't you go and see her? You can get there easy enough. She's interviewed once a week on an average."

"What good would it do?"

Smeaton rapped for his _addition_. "I dunno. I think if I were a friend of Ingram's I'd take a certain amount of malicious pleasure in letting her know what you saw to-day."

IV

SOMETHING LIKE CLOVES

As a matter of fact, I found no difficulty at all. Little Winstanley was pleased with my murder specials, and fixed up an interview over the 'phone in no time.

"You're getting rather heavy metal for this, Prentice," he said, puffing out his cheeks and regarding me with the benevolence a man keeps for the work of his own hands; "but toddle along and see what you make of her." One of Winstanley's illusions is that he has "formed" me.

Fenella had a very pretty little doll's house in the tiny square that is tucked away near Knightsbridge Barracks, whose gardens back upon the Park. The brickwork was very neatly pointed, and the window boxes were full of chrysanthemums, and a red door with brass appointments flew open to my rather timid ring with a disconcerting suddenness. But I was not prepossessed with the stunted little maid who opened it. Neither in manner nor appearance was she "up to" the house. There was a latent hostility, too, in the way she scanned me.

"Noospapers?" she queried over her shoulder, as she closed the door.

I admitted it.

"Come in 'ere and wait."

I was precipitated rather than ushered into a fireless dining-room, a little cold and uncheery for all its graceful furnishings of dark scrolled wood and striped mulberry velvet cushions. There was a hanging lamp over the oval table, of liver-colored bronze; mistletoe leaves stuck over with little electric berries, which budded into light as the girl left the room. The sideboard was covered with silver toys. I remember a jointed crab and lobster, and a ship on wheels with all its sails set, and a coach and six, whose driver, his calves in the air, waved a long whiplash over six curled, trampling stallions. I know there are more striking contrasts in the world if one goes seeking them, but for me the injustice of life always stands pictured now by a shelf full of useless beaten silver toys on the one hand, and on the other by a coat buttoned across a naked throat.

I wonder would I have known my pale little girl with the frightened eyes, whose heart I had been so strangely commissioned to break, eighteen months ago? Then I had only been able to guess at the probable grace of the body which a rough travelling coat so thoroughly covered, and though, even in the strained, anxious face and disordered hair, beauty had been apparent, it had been beauty seen through a mist of tears, its harmonies disordered by the tortured questioning soul.

Since that time I suppose her figure had attained its full graciousness of line and had reached the limit of development which modern standards of bodily beauty, forced to take a fashion into consideration, would consider compatible with elegance for a woman of her height. She was still in half-mourning, and wore a trained dress of some soft gray material embroidered in black on the breast and sleeves. I am a child in such matters, but imagine her dressmaker, or the builder of garments more intimate still, must have been something of an artist, for, seen thus, there was absolutely nothing to recall the boyish _sans gêne_ of figure and manner which was her great asset--her trump card upon the stage, and which, from the moment she kissed her hands across the footlights, never failed to bring rapturous applause about her ears. Her dark hair, "fine as the finest silk" (after all, there is no bettering the robust descriptiveness of fairy-tale), was dressed rather fashionably than prettily--wide across her forehead in front, and rather far beyond her head at the back. I thought she wore too many rings, and diamonds glittered in the soft shadow of her throat.

She did not recognize me, but gave me her hand to shake without condescension, which was all in her favor. I will make a further confession: At the first frank, interested glance of her eyes I consigned old Smeaton and his hateful friend who didn't often make mistakes to the eternal fellowship of Ananias. The impossibility simply began and ended with those eyes. It was not the glamour of a lovely face and a gracious welcome, for, as I took her hand, I remember feeling indignant that so little shadow of the wrong my friend had done her crossed the bright well-being of her life. It was too evident that she forgave and forgot with equal completeness. Poor, logical-minded Paul, carrying about with him night and day the image of this lost mistress. Did I blame him that food and raiment were hateful to him?

"Why," she said, "poor man! you're shivering. This room is a bit cold, isn't it? I'm afraid Frances doesn't like the press. I've noticed she always shows them into whichever room hasn't a fire in it. She's rather a tyrant, Frances is. But it's nice isn't it, to have some one left who cares enough for you to bully you. Druce, the housekeeper, was my nurse once. Come across to the drawing-room. It's much prettier, and there's a fire in it. Twenty minutes now"--lifting a warning finger--"not an instant longer."

I followed her across the ridiculous little hall into a drawing-room whose size surprised me. It was low but very long, and the bottom was filled in by a curved window of leaded glass looking out over the sodden Park, where a belated rider or two still walked a steaming horse and probably dreamed of a hot bath and dinner. The room, with its lacquered "dancing dado," and walls hung with Chinese silk, has been often paragraphed. It smelt of sandalwood and roses, and had a fire of old whale-ship logs burning in a steel casket upon the hearth, with little spurts of flame, all manner of unexpected tints--violet and bottle-green and strawberry red. How fond she was of color and glitter! A frightful old bull-terrier--reared, I should say, from his appearance, in the bosom of some knacker's family, and whose head something, prosperity perhaps, had turned violently on one side--got up from the hearth-rug and came limping and sniffing across the room. Fenella got down on her knees and put her soft cheek to the repulsive pink nose.

"Did _he_ want to be interviewed then? And so he shall. Do you know"--looking up at me--"you're the first one that's seen _him_? I generally show two small ones like pen-wipers; but they're away at a show." She turned to the dog again. "Is he vezzy old then, and vezzy blind, and vezzy much chewed and bitten, poor old man! and is the world just one big, dark smell to him? Well if 'oo _will_ chew my whiskers, dear, of _tourse_ 'oo'll sneeze!" She jumped up as though some thought suddenly checked her playful mood. "Put _him_ down, please!" she said, pointing in a business-like manner to my open note-book. "Name? Roquelaure--Rock for short. Eighteen years old--two years less than me. Fancy _that_--younger than me! No tricks--only habits. We were puppies together--at least, I mean--Yes, yes. Put it down that way. It sounds rather _dear_, I think. Sit down, please. Now, what else do you want to hear about? My dancing? Oh! I've always danced. Used to do it instead of flying into a rage."

"Wait one minute, please," I said. "'The usefulness of dancing as an outlet for the emotion is probably a discovery as old as the world itself.' Um--um----When did you begin to take regular lessons, and how far----?"

I looked up. She had recognized me. Forgetfulness? Oh! I was as bad as the others.

"Wait a moment!" She rose, and left the room as quickly as her tight silk underskirt would let her. She was back again in a minute, holding my card in her hand.

"Are you _his_ Mr. Prentice?"

I bowed my head, and laid note-book and pencil aside. What a fool I had been to come!

"Where is he? Do you see him? Oh, _how_ I've tried and tried to remember your name!"

"I don't know where he is."

"But you've seen him? I know you have. Answer, please. Why do you look so queer?"

"I saw him last week."

"Was he well? Was he happy?"

"He was--starving, I think."

"_O-oh!_" I had seen tragedy in the girl's face, now I saw it in the woman's. I told her as much as I dared. I hope I was merciful.

"Why didn't you hold him?" she cried, at one point of the story. "Oh, my God! Why did you let him go? Don't you know the sort of man he is?"

"I thought I was doing my best. I had only gone to get him some warm clothes. It was such a raw, foggy morning. That seemed the first thing."

"Some warm clothes!" she repeated, under her breath, looking round at the silk and silver and roses. Then she broke down, and cried and cried. Poor soul! I had to stop her at last. I was afraid she'd be ill.

She was very docile, dried her eyes, and begged my pardon for what she'd just said.

"You're his friend, aren't you?" she pleaded, "his real, true friend? You won't give him up?"

"What can I do? I'd even bear it for him if I could."

"No you couldn't," she said, tightening her lips and shaking her head decisively. "Nobody can bear anything for him. Do you think I didn't try?"

She rolled her handkerchief up into a ball, and tucked it away, with a resolute little gesture.

"I'm not going to despair," she said bravely, with a kind of gulp and a tremor of her throat that set the diamonds streaming blue fire. "I think things will come all right. I've had a kind of a--kind of sign. Shall I tell you?"--timidly.

I'm foolishly impulsive, and I kissed her hand. After all, the dog does it.

"Listen, then! Thursday week"--I started, but she didn't notice it--"Thursday week I was feeling simply _awful_ all day. I can't explain it. Imagine some one you love is being tried for something that means death--or more awful still, if it goes against him. It got worse and worse. I've never missed a night I was billed for, but I shouldn't have been able to go on as I was. Still, I went down to the theatre--just on chance, you know. It was half-past seven or quarter to eight. I had an hour, but I dressed early to be safe. Suddenly something seemed to say inside of me, 'Now! now! down on your knees, quick. This is the dangerous time.' My dresser had gone out. I locked the door, and fell on my knees in a kind of faint. I prayed, and prayed as well as I could. I don't remember much what. I think I asked God, if Paul was never, never to be happy again, to take him the best way to some place where nothing could hurt him any more, and where he would see me and know what I was feeling for him. And then, Mr. Prentice--and then----Oh! it was wonderful. Something all warm and comfortable, like--oh! like _cloves_--why do you laugh? I'm trying to tell you the best way I can--seemed to come round my heart. I got up from my knees. It was eight-fifteen, and my dresser was banging on the door and asking if I was ill. I opened it and hugged her. She must have thought me crazy. All the sadness was gone--every bit. I knew they'd done trying him, and he--and he----" She struggled with her emotion, and, then, covering her face with her hands, rocked backward and forward, moaning and sobbing--"he's Not Guilty. No! my love's Not Guilty."

There was a knock at the door. She turned her head quickly into the shadow.

"Come in!"

"It's Sir Bryan, madam."

"Tell him to wait in the dining-room.... Now, Mr. Prentice, we must try again. What are the best papers to advertise in? Papers that--that quite poor people read most?"

I gave two or three an unsolicited testimonial.

"Write your address--your private address--on this card. I'll put an advert."--she said it this way--"in three for a year. Just your initial. The moment you hear, telegraph--no, telephone me! I'll say you're to be always given my address. I don't go to New York for nearly a year. Good-bye. I'll send you something for your paper to-night."

I did not see the sporting baronet, but I smelt his cigar in the hall, and I saw his damned motor-car outside the door. And as I walked out of the little square, I wondered whether perhaps it wouldn't be to every one's advantage, and his own, if Paul Ingram should never be heard of on this earth again.

V

A VERY VULGAR CHAPTER

"Ingram, Paul. Will Paul Ingram communicate at once with 'P.,' 15, Darlaston Crescent? The matter is urgent, and concerns the future happiness of another."

Some day, when Paul Ingram is already a legend, the dipper into musty records who stumbles upon this heartrending appeal in issue after issue will imagine he has made a rare find. Always supposing another eventuality, which I sometimes seem to foresee, has not supervened, and that a reformed society, for security's sake, and as an earnest of its reformation, does not make a bonfire once for all of the records of its past depravity and madness.

Nothing, to me, affords fruit for such sad thought as to see unworldly folk taking advantage of the machinery of a world that is organized to crush them and their like out of existence. That Oxford graduate who seeks "congenial employment as amanuensis or secretary," the gentlewoman "thrown suddenly upon her own resources through financial loss" who is anxious for a post as nursery governess, as companion, as anything that will allay the fright and loneliness at her heart--("fond of children," she adds. Poor soul, one sees her casting a wistful glance into passing perambulators.) Do not the very compositors, I wonder, laugh as they set up such type? I was sorry indeed for that "other" whose happiness depended upon Ingram's resurrection.

Meantime I had given my word, and I was not idle. Every good journalist is a bit of a detective at heart, and I discovered a mournful zest in following Paul's calvary, step by step, from one lodging to another. Everywhere I found help and sympathy, and conceived a new regard for the maligned race of landladies. (Mrs. McNaughten, of course, is _hors concours_.)

"Ah! poor gentleman," said one grimy soul. "Well I remember the night he come. I knocked at the door to arst 'im if 'e wouldn't take somethin' 'eartenin' with 'is tea--a bloater, or a rasher--and there 'e wos, settin' with 'is 'ead down on the table. Money? Oh, a trifle of rent, sir. Wanted to leave 'is trunk be'ind; but there, live and let live's my motter. It went to my 'eart to 'ave 'im go--wanted care, 'e did--but you see, sir, me bein' only a workin' woman, and 'avin' a 'usband at 'ome with bronickal trouble----Thank you kindly, sir, sence you orfer it. You won't think no worst of me for takin' it, will you?"

At the very next stopping place--I had almost said stumbling place--the trunk came to hand. Strangely enough, he owed nothing here. I suppose at a certain point in misfortune a man flings his possessions from him as a swimmer flings his clothes.

"Took 'is things away in a bundle, wot there wos," said the mistress of this house, who was nursing and rocking a child as she spoke. "I ain't techt nothink," with a slight shiver. "If so be you're a friend of the party, you'd prabst better open it. The keys is upstairs. No: nothin' owin,' but I wasn't sorry w'en 'e went. Too strange in 'is manner. It goes agenst a 'ouse w'en things--you know wot I mean--'appens in it."

To Mrs. Purvis's secret disappointment, I believe, there was nothing in the trunk but a mass of torn paper and a queer brown-paper parcel that I seemed to recognize. It was addressed to the house near Golden Square, and the label was headed with the name of some legal firm in the West End. It was the manuscript of "Sad Company."

For a long while after Mrs. Purvis had left me to attend to the shrill wants of some of her elder children, I sat with it in my lap, looking out of the rain-spotted window upon the mouldering back gardens beneath, where string after string of intimate household linen dried or stiffened in the sooty air. I thought of the tender, mournful wisdom, the sad insight into life which that despised bundle contained, bought with the blood and sweat, and tears maybe, of thirty years: jotted down--for I knew its history--in cattle camps, by Algerian bivouac fires, in hotel lobbies of roaring Western cities. And I thought of the little luxurious house beside the Park, filled with all that ministers to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. A pretty face and figure, an aptitude for bodily movement, a few shallow tricks of manner, had earned that in a year for a woman whom I had already occasion to know couldn't spell. Well, the world knows what it wants. The world had chosen. Was there to be no appeal? Is failure here failure forever? Or is there, beyond this world, with its stark denials of justice, another where such things count still, and where the reward so insolently and capriciously withheld shall be bestowed, the hungerer after justice, even artistic justice, have his fill? Sad questions that no religion cares to answer.

And here my search ended. He had left no address: no letters had followed him. I took the manuscript away with me and locked it into a drawer. I was not sure yet what I would do with it. Show the world what manner of man it had despised, perhaps. Or perhaps tie a stone around it and sink it in mid-channel. I must think which Paul would have chosen.

Nearly six months afterward in late summer, I was sitting at my desk and beginning to think of turning in, when Mrs. McNaughten rapped at the door. A "vairy rough body" was asking for me. Should she show him up or bid him state the natur-re of his business?

"Doesn't he say what he wants?"

"He'll say nothing but that he wants Mister-r-r P. He says ye'll understand fine. _Mister 'P.'_ I think the body's daft."

The advertisement. My heart jumped. "Show him up, please. At once!"

A short thick-set man in soiled working clothes and with a colored handkerchief round his neck came in, tossed a cap on the table with a gesture full of natural grace, stretched his neck two or three times, as if to intimate that he was ready for any manner of reception, and began to beat a limy dust with the back of his hand out of as much of his corduroys as was within easy reach.

"Nime of Palamount," he said, oracularly and rather hoarsely. "Builder's mite, my tride is."

I indicated a chair. "And what can I do for you, Mr. Palamount? I am not contemplating any repairs or additions to my quarters at present."

All this time the man had kept one hand in his pocket. He drew it out, holding a newspaper, folded very small and very tight.

"In conneckshun wiv two advertysements," said he. "Fifteen Darlaston Crescent is the address wot's on one. 'Ere y'are. Marked in blue it is. Initial of 'P.'"

He unfolded the journal and handed it to me. It was the paragraph which heads this chapter, and which, having been paid for a year in advance, would reiterate its useless appeal for another six months to come unless----Somehow Mr. Palamount did not impress me as a bearer of glad tidings.

"Well," I asked, without much hope. "What news can you give?"

"'Old 'ard," said my visitor, who was feeling through various pockets, as if in search of fresh documents.

"You needn't bother," I said, irritably. "I know it's in more than one."

The horny-handed one smiled, a powdery and superior smile, as of foresight justified.

"Ah!" said he. "That's wot I thought you'd be in the dark abaht. Two parties there is. Complickitions--that's wot I calls it. 'Ere y'are. Sund'y _'Erald_. Twenty-first July. 'Work'ahse Marster, depitties _and_ uvvers.'"

I snatched the paper from his hand and devoured the salient paragraph. It was a very superior article; far more calculated to strike a reader's imagination than the feeble little effort we had concocted between us. I read it aloud.

"£200 Reward. To workhouse masters, lodging-house deputies and others....

"The above reward will be paid for information that shall lead to the discovery or certify the death of PAUL INGRAM, native of Lilburn, Massachusetts, U. S. A. He was discharged from the French Foreign Legion in March 19--. Was subsequently correspondent in Morocco for the Federated Press, and is known to have been living in London in very reduced circumstances as recently as last September.

"Communications are to be made to the American Consulate, St. Helens Place, Bishopsgate, or to Messrs. Pollexfen, Allport and Pollexfen, Solicitors, 52a, Bedford Row, W. C."

A description of my hapless friend followed, remarkable, or perhaps not remarkable, for conveying the very haziest notion of his appearance.

Mr. Palamount was regarding my amazed face meanwhile with excited relish, somewhat tempered by his surroundings which were ill adapted to its natural relief by expectoration.

"Wotcher mike of it?"

I stared helplessly. "It's--money, I suppose."

The builder of houses was now approaching his supreme effect. He half rose from his chair, made an ineffectual attempt to rid his voice of cobwebs, and pointed an accusing finger, about the shape and size of a banana, at the two papers in my lap. At last he spoke.

"'Ue and cry: that's wot that is."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"Wot I ses. 'Ue and cry. There's lot of blokes, mind you as won't tike blood-money as'll give evidence of w'ereabahts if they thinks it's all stright. Money? yus--I _don't_ fink. Certify 'is deaf? It'll be certified all right if 'e puts 'is nose inter that loryer's orfice or if any bloomin' copper's nark as knows 'im gets 'is eyes on that parrygraft. Tike it aht, guv'nor. Git 'im aw'y somew're w'ere there ain't no extry-edition treaties. Shive 'is beard, too, 'e'd better, less 'e growed it since."

To say that I was dazed by Mr. Palamount's mental processes is to state bare truth.

"You think he's done something, then, and is in hiding?"

"Yus. Cut a bloke in hot blood, I fink."

"And that my advertisement will help put the police on his track?"

"Yus," said Mr. Palamount succinctly and without any implied respect for my superior lucidity. "Watch the 'ahse, they will, and pinch 'im w'en 'e calls."

"But--my dear obfuscated friend----"

"'Ere, guv'nor; no langwidge please."

"Well, my dear friend, Paul Ingram's an old friend of mine. He's a highly respectable citizen. It's true he's got no money, but you and I know that isn't a crime. One advertisement is put in by his friends who want to help him, and as for the other--it's too late to-night, but I shall find out all about it first thing to-morrow."

My new friend made a repressive gesture. "'Ere guv'nor--none o' that. I seen it fust. If it's all right, them two 'undred quids is prop'ly mine."

"Well, do you know where he is?"

"I know w'ere 'e wos a week ago. To fink," catching up his cap and dashing it to the ground, "to fink as I showed 'im that one o' yours four munfs ago."

"You'd better tell me all you know," I said, losing patience. "Will you have some beer first?" The cobwebs were getting on my nerves.

"Beer!" echoed my visitor. He had, indeed, a generally unslaked appearance that rendered the question an impertinence. "Beer!" he said again, giving the word this time its full diapason or organ sound. The rest was vigorous action.

Unfortunately he had not an equal talent for connected narrative, and I was too anxious about Paul to welcome the light upon dark places which his discursiveness incidentally threw. One day, late in the previous autumn, I made out, his own trade being slack, he was working on the tramway extension to one of the northern suburbs. About midday the fog came on so thickly that the road-making gang were laid off for the day, and wended their way home after the riotously sociable manner of their class, with frequent calls at favored houses of refreshment. When evening fell, he was drinking in a bar the other side of Blackfriars with a neighbor and fellow-workman, whose patronymic of Barker had been long abandoned in familiar discourse for the more recondite one of "Flying Fox." ("Put two tanners on the 'orse 'e did, at odds on, an' won fruppence.") The backer of certainties had only been taken on that morning by the foreman after a week's waiting, and was probably in ill-humor at his enforced leisure. Either for this reason or some other a dispute arose in the bar of the George and Cushion, which was ended by Mr. Barker's shouldering his way out, with the expressed intention of pursuing his homeward way unaccompanied by any "bleedin' skrim-shanker." Mr. Palamount was eager to detail the misunderstanding that had led to this cruel charge, but I checked him, and from this point the story took quite a leap forward.

"Parsin' Thomases 'Orsepittel, I see'd a crahd rahnd the cas'alty door, an' arst 'oo was 'urt. 'Bloke on the Embankmint,' they ses, 'knocked over by a motor-keb near Blackfriars: come aht of the fog like a cannon-ball,' they ses. I arst the nime, 'cos I was feelin' anxious 'baht Foxie; not drunk 'e wasn't, but I give you my word 'e'd 'ad some, and 'e wasn't a man as could 'old the booze. 'That's 'im, they ses--'that's the party. Ginger-'aired wiv freckles; arnswers to nime of Barker.' 'I'm a pal,' I ses, ''oo's in wiv 'im?' 'Man that fahnd 'im,' they ses--'eddigicated bloke: give 'im fust ide, and 'eld 'is 'ead in 'is lap in the tramcar.'

"They let me in w'en they 'eard I was a friend of the party wot was 'urt. Big room wiv benches: young tawfs in long w'ite coats--sawboneses I calls 'em--nurses too (my word, not 'alf givin' 'em the tale): blue jars, an' a smell wot mikes yer fice crack. 'Wotcher want?' the mitron ses to me. 'I fink I can identify the party, sister,' I ses, 'I'm a nighbor.' 'Wite 'ere,' she ses. 'They'll be bringin' 'im through in a minute.' So I sets dahn. A tall furrin' lookin' bloke was a settin' on a bench nigh me, wiv a beard. Werry thin an' fierce 'e wos and eyes a blazin' like coals. 'Crool business over there,' I ses, pointin' to the screen. 'Wife near 'er time, four nippers, an' only took on yesterday. Fust job since the spring.' 'I know abaht it,' 'e ses. I was a-goin' to arst 'im ow 'e knew, w'en the row begins from be'ind the screen. Just told 'im they 'ad as 'e was a free munfs' kise. 'I carn't do wiv it. I carn't do wiv it,' 'e was 'ollerin' over and over ag'in as they carries 'im through. 'My wife's near 'er time, and there ain't five shillin's in the 'ouse.' Tryin' to git up 'e was, and arstin' Gawd to strike 'im dead. ''Oo knows this man?' ses one of the doctors as was 'olding 'is arms. I was a-goin' to speak w'en the tall bloke jumps up and goin' over to the stretcher, bends dahn and w'ispers somethin' quick. Foxie stops strugglin' an' looks rahnd at 'im. ''Ow will yer?' 'e ses, and looks rahnd at 'im. 'Never you mind' ses the man. 'I didn't promust without knowin' 'ow. You wite,' 'e ses, 'and there'll be good news termorrer.' I fink Foxie was stunned like and let 'em carry 'im aw'y quiet. I was a wonderin' too w'ile they filled up 'is card for 'is missus, 'cos I never see destitootion so pline as on 'im.

"W'en we was ahtside: 'Nah then,' he ses, and 'e couldn't 'ave spoke brisker not if 'ed bin one of the doctors. 'Somethin's got to be done.' 'Yus,' I ses, lookin' at 'im 'ard. '_Done_' I ses, like that. 'Tike me to 'is 'ome fust of all,' 'e ses. 'You know the w'y.' I'd mide up me mind be now as 'e was balmy, and I was a bit ashimed of 'im on the tram. But 'e pide 'is own fare and 'eld 'is jor. On'y w'en we wos gittin' near Camberwell: 'Wot sort of woman is this Mrs. Barker?' 'e arst me. 'I don't know much of 'er,' I told 'im. 'Keeps 'erself to 'erself she does. But sence she's bin doin' laundery work, my missus looks in and gives the kids their meals and a bit of a wash. Gimekeeper's daughter, she wos, in the country.' 'E looks dahn on to the Walworth Road w'ere some gels was a-dancin' to a organ. 'Gimekeeper's daughter!' 'e ses. 'In the country! My Gawd! 'Ow many kids?' 'Four,' I ses. 'Eldest is a van-boy earnin' five bob a week. T'other three's little gels. Don't see 'em in the street much. Mother keeps 'em indoors. Un'ealthy, I calls it.'

"Mrs. Barker must 'ave been listenin' for 'er man, 'cos she comes aht 'fore we'd got to the landin'. Tall, dark, 'an'some woman, wiv a diffrunt voice to most of the wimmin' dahn our w'y. Not so 'igh. 'Oh, Jim,' she ses. 'Wot mikes you so lite. 'Ave you forgot--?' and then stops short, seein' us two. 'You tell 'er,' I ses, keeping aht o' sight and nudgin' 'im. 'That's wot I come for,' 'e ses, and goes in and shets the door in me fice. I listened, expectin' to 'ear screaming, but there wos only talkin'--fust 'im very low, then 'er, and then more talkin', like prayin'. 'You can come in now,' 'e ses, throwin' open the door. She was settin' by the fire, cryin' to 'erself and young Ern, in 'is blue coat and brass buttons, blubbering into 'is coker, and two plites under the 'arth, one on top of the other, and grivy bubbling between the edges. The little gels wos in bed. On'y one room they 'ad.

"'Wot was Barker's job,' 'e asks. 'Road-making gang.' 'My old job,' 'e ses wiv a larf. 'Yus, I don't fink,' I ses, with a sidewise look at 'im. 'That'd be a better tale, matey, if there was a little more meat on your ribs.' 'I've mide roads,' 'e ses, 'under a sun as'd melt you like a taller candle.' 'Wot kinder roads?' 'Millitery roads.' 'Oh,' I ses. 'You bin a soljer?' 'Yus,' 'e ses, 'the only real sort as is left. I never enlisted at eighteen to 'ave my 'ealth built up wiv 'ealthy food an' Swedish gymnastics, so be the time I was twenty I c'd go to Injer and sit in a verander durin' the 'eat of the d'y, flappin' the flies awf me fice w'ile a brown bag o 'bones shined me buttons and kep' me rifle clean. I never bin a luxury seven years and a problem all the rest of me life. Gimme that poker!'

"Young Ern giv it 'im, staring like 'is eyes would drop aht. 'E took it up be the two ends and bent it double, then 'anded it to me. 'Staighten it out,' 'e ses, wipin' 'is forehead. 'It's a knack,' I ses. 'E took it agen' and laid it out true, wiv a kind of a 'eave of 'is chest an' a groan. Next thing 'e did wos to put 'is 'ands over 'is fice and tumble in a 'eap on the floor.

"Wot a ter-do there was! Missis Barker bithing 'is 'ead wiv cold water, old Mrs. Conder from the nex' room tryin' to pour gin down 'is teef--'See wot it is,' she ses, 'to never be wivout a bottle'--young Ern 'ollering out to loosen 'is neck w'en there wasn't nothin' to loosen. 'Oh! is 'e dying?' ses Mrs. Barker to me. 'Dyin'!' I ses; 'not 'im. Acceleration is wot's the matter with 'im and nothing else.' "

Here my curiosity got the better of my anxiety. "What do you mean by acceleration?"

He shifted uneasily in his chair. "Well, guv'nor, it's a word us people has got. 'Aven't you read in the pipers w'ere it ses, 'Vital Statistics. In London ten persons was found dead of starvition during the past year?' That's ten w'ere the coroner couldn't think o' nothin' else. All the others is only 'acceleration.' Pneumonia accelerated be insufficient nourishment, brownchitis accelerated, 'ousemaid's knee, tennis elber--wotcher like, so long as it's on'y accelerated. Looks better and keeps the charitable people comfortabler in their minds. 'Acceleration,' I ses to 'er; 'and that's the meddicine 'e wants,' pointing to the plites under the fire. 'And, 'e wants it sharp.'

"'E come to 'isself presently, and seemed quite ashimed. Sed it wos 'is own fault, and that that poker trick didn't oughter be done on less than a 'ole roll once a d'y. We give 'im the tommy, and at first 'e tried to eat slow. But it wasn't no use. 'E just seemed to in'ale them beef and taters an' a 'ousehold loaf and four cups o' coker. Mrs. Barker ackcherally larfed as she cut the slices. Women is funny, guv'nor. She seemed to fergit 'er own trouble. Wouldn't 'ear of 'im goin' away that night, but mide 'im up a bed in the passidge.

"Before I come aw'y it was arranged wot we was to do. I was to call for 'im in the morning and bring a suit of corduroys. We wos to go dahn togevver and apply for Foxie's job fer 'im.

"There wasn't no trouble over that. I got dahn early and give my mites the tile, and though the foreman wagged 'is mahth a bit, 'e saw there was trouble comin' unless 'e give in. 'E went a bit slow the fust d'y or so; but arter that there wasn't a better 'and, and in three weeks' time the foreman give 'im charge of a gang on a job up Finchley w'y."

"And you became great friends, I suppose."

"Well, guv'nor, I won't s'y that. 'E wasn't a bloke you could tike lib'ties wiv. Not enough wot I calls give an' tike abaht 'im. One 'er two tried calling 'im 'the lodger' and was sorry. But we went 'ome togevver and dahn to 'orsepittle of a Sund'y, and after Mrs. Barker gone to Queen Charlotte my missus useter look in reglar. But I give you my word there wasn't much as she could do. 'Owever early she come round, there was the floor swep' an' the kids dressed and barfed--great on barfs, 'e was: fussy I calls it--and 'avin' their breakfast and 'im sluicin' 'isself in the passidge. Wonderful 'ow 'e could cook too. Useter mike soup outer milk and vegitables. Never seed sich a thing, nor my missus neither."

"When did he tell you his name?"

"I'm a-comin' to that. Fust night I arst 'im and 'e said 's nime was 'Bruvverhood.' Well, it might be; 'cos I worked for a firm 'o that nime at Deptford--engineers they was. But one night soon after Barker's missus gone aw'y, I got a letter from 'im askin' me to call. Funny, I thought it, 'cos we'd come home togevver that evening. 'Owever, I cleaned up and went rahnd. There 'e was in what 'e called the buzzum of 'is fam'ly. Pretty sight it was. Young Ern was gone to the cawfy concert at Syviour's Schools. There was 'im smokin' 'is pipe an' little Effel wiv 'er curls brushed out recitin' a pome 'baht the night afore Christmas, and anuvver little gel on 'is knee, and Gertie on the floor pl'yin' wiv piper chickens wot 'e'd cut out. Schools was shut on accahnt o' scarlet fever, and 'e'd bin teachin' them their lessons.

"'E jumped up and called in Mrs. Conder to put the kids to bed. ''Ammertoe,' 'e ses, w'en we was in the street--that's my nime with my mites--''Ammertoe, I got to trust some one, and it's goin' ter be you.' 'E pulls a bit o' piper out of 'is wescutt pocket. 'This 'ere's a cheque,' 'e ses, 'an' I want you to go down termorrer and cash it at the bank.' Well, remembering 'ow I'd met 'im, you c'ud a knocked me over wiv a canary's wing fevver. 'You ain't done bad, matey,' I ses, 'out of two munfs' navvyin',' 'No, I 'aven't bin long putting a nest-egg by,' 'e ses, quietly. 'That's a fact,' I ses, very serious. 'What's your gime?' 'E 'anded me the bit o' piper and I read the nime at the bottom. 'Ullo,' I ses, 'you're the bloke they're advertisn' for--spoilin' some one's 'appiness--in the _Sund'y 'Erald_.' 'Yus,' 'e ses.' 'And that's wot I'm trustin' you with. Not the money--that's nothin'.' 'But wot abaht it?' I ses. 'Will they give it me?' 'They may arst questions,' 'e ses. 'But you ain't to know too much. Say you've give consideration, and a workin' man ain't to be kep' out of 'is due. There's no one can give that talk better'n you, 'Ammertoe', 'e ses, smilin'. 'And besides, I'll p'y you for your trouble.' ''Ere, guv'nor,' I ses, 'old lard! You're a eddigicated bloke, but don't think a artesian ain't got feelin's. You 'ave pide me,' I ses. 'I'm pide by wot I jest see up in Barker's 'ome.'

"There wasn't no real trouble at the bank. 'E'd give me annuvver letter to put into the envelope 'e'd sent me, signed wiv the same name as was on the cheque. The cashier looked pretty 'ard at me, and two or three clurks puts their 'eads togevver. 'Don't 'urry,' I ses. 'I'm pide be the year, and it don't matter w'ere I spend me time.' Cahnted the five quids free times, they did, to be sure two wasn't stuck togevver. Non-prejoocers, that's wot I calls them.

"This 'appened so often that the clurks got to know me. One night, jest before Foxie comes 'ome, I couldn't 'elp openin' my mahth a bit, jest to 'im. 'Wotcher goin' to do wiv all the money I drawed to-d'y? Give Barker a surprise be gettin' their stuff out o' pawn? Rare lot's bin up the spaht,' I ses. 'No,' 'e ses. 'It ain't wuth while now.' 'W'y not?' 'Cos they ain't 'ere for long. I'm a goin' to emmygrite them, 'Ammertoe.' I was 'avin a drink at the time, an' I nearly choked. 'Yus,' 'e goes on, afore I could speak, lookin' at the ceilin', 'they're a goin' to God's promust land. Them kids is a goin' to grow up somew'eres they don't 'ave to be shut in a room for fear of wot they may see and 'ear. It's full of tigers and wolves, that street is,' 'e ses, pointin' aht the winder, w'ere Bill Shannon was a tryin' to git 'is missus 'ome wiv all her clothes on. 'They're a goin' to be woke up on the trine some mornin' to see the blessed sun come up under the prairie as big and red as the dome of Paul's. It ain't spoiled sence I seed it fust, nigh on to twenty-five years ago. I've fallen from there to 'ell,' 'e ses, 'and there ain't no return ticket the w'y I come. But if I can't go back meself, I can show uvvers the w'y to escape.'

"'And ain't you a-goin' now'eres?' I ses, noticin' for the fust time 'ow w'ite and ill 'e was lookin'. 'Oh, yus,' 'e ses. 'I got my journey to go too.' 'Crost the sea?' I arst 'im. 'Just a short w'y,' 'e ses. 'Crost the sea to a big white furrin town I knows of, w'ere there's a tramcar w'itin', as'll tike me 'alf-w'y. Full of women in wi'te caps it'll be, goin' 'ome from marketin' wiv baskets in their laps, and maybe there'll be some like meself as found there wasn't no sale for the wares wot they carried in. And w'ere it stops there's a road up a 'ill that turns through a field w'ere they're stackin' 'ay this minnit, wiv steep clay banks on bofe sides, and a old farm w'ere ducks is a swimmin' in a pond and pigeons a slippin' and slidin' dahn the roof. And w'en I've reached that,' 'e ses, 'I'll rest a bit and look down on a gray village and miles and miles of sand, wiv the sea a-crawlin' and a-crinklin' beyond; 'cos I'll know,' 'e ses, 'as I've reached my journey's end at last. Think of it,' 'e ses, grippin' my shoulder 'ard. 'Think of it,' 'e ses, 'man! Clean, soft, dry sand, warm from a 'ole day's sun, and the grass a-wavin' and the sea w'isperin' and the gulls mewin'. There's worse ends to a journey than that, and you and me's seen 'em.' I looks at 'im very 'ard indeed. 'If you tike my advice,' I ses, 'before you goes on any of them journeys you'll 'ave a rest and some one to look arter you.' 'I shall 'ave some one,' 'e ses. 'She'll be a w'itin' for me in that town I telled you of. She'll tike my 'and and won't never let go until----Tell me, 'Ammertoe,' 'e ses, breakin' off sudden, 'wotcher think of me? Man to man. Think I'm a good man, dontcher?' 'Yus,' I ses. 'Bit balmy all the sime.' 'I ain't balmy,' 'e ses, 'and I ain't good. I'm a very crooil man, 'Ammertoe, and the reason is I'm too sine; too clear in me ed. W'en a man's too clear in 'is mind, it's death and ruin for 'em as 'as to do wiv 'im.... And nah, drink yer beer up. We're talkin' nonsense, and I must git back to my bybies."

"Did you never talk to him again about this plan of his?" It was curious how our voices had dropped. We had both risen, and were standing opposite one another with a curious effect of being on different sides of an open grave.

"Never, guv'nor. Flyin' Fox come 'ome nex' day, and wot with explainin' everything to 'im, and wot with n'ighbors droppin' in, some s'yin', 'It's the best thing could 'a 'appened,' and uvvers, 'mark my words, you'll rue the d'y.' There wasn't no chanst again not for private talk. Foxie was dized in 'is manner. Mrs. Barker and the kids they 'ad it all cut an' dried. It was too lite for 'im like to 'ave any s'y in the matter. 'Let 'im alone,' Mr. Bruvver'ood says--still called 'im that afore stringers, I did--'let 'im alone. 'E'll come to 'isself on the steamer. With wot you got and wot a woman can earn cookin' and cleanin' w'ere you're goin', 'e can 'ave the fust year to git well and strong. It'll be a convalescent 'ome to 'm, Canada will.'

"I took a mornin' off to see 'em start. Wonderful sight it was! Near four 'undred on the one trine, singin' 'Old Lang Syne' and 'Gawd Sive the King,' and shykin' 'ands all rahnd, and the people left be'ind s'yin': 'Leave us in your will.' The nippers was very smart, all in new warm togs, and little Gladys wiv a Teddy bear wot my missus giv' 'er. Thought 'e was coming with 'em up to the end they did. Didn't dare to tell'm no different. And at the end, as the guard was a-wavin' 'is flag, Mrs. Barker broke dahn and frows 'er arms round 'is neck and kisses 'im like 'e was another woman or praps more, cryin' like 'er 'eart would break. 'Good job for you, Foxie,' my missus ses,'as you're leavin' the lodger behind.' We all larft at that, and then the w'istle blew and the trine went awf wiv 'ankerchiffs at all the winders. 'E stood a long time lookin' after it. W'en it was gone,' e turns to me. 'Let's 'ave one more drink,' 'e ses. 'Wot ho,' I ses. 'But ain't you comin' to work? 'Cos we was on a job togevver. 'Not to-d'y,' 'e ses. 'Tell the foreman I ain't up to the mark.' So we 'ad one drink and I goes off, ignorant as a blessed byby wot was in 'is 'ead. And w'en I got home in the evenin'----"

"Well----?"

"Gawn, guv'nor. Took all 'is fings--not as there was much--and left no address. And I ain't set eyes on 'im from that day to this."

"Can you suggest anything?"

"Yus, I can. That's w'y I come here. I fink 'e's done something 'fore you knowed 'im or I knowed 'im, and is a-goin' to give 'isself up. You don't? Well, no matter. Wotever it is, I don't fink 'e'll likely tike any steps before 'e 'ears a word from the parties as is in Canada to know 'ow they gets on at fust. They 'ave 'is address, I'm sure o' that. Wotcher think? Don't that 'elp us a bit?"

"Can you give me theirs?"

Mr. Palamount had come well provided with documentary evidence. He drew a soiled and crumpled piece of print from another waistcoat pocket. It was only the name of the Canadian Pacific agent in Alberta. The straw was a very slender one.

"I'll cable them to-morrow, prepaid. And I'll see the lawyers first thing in the morning. Don't be afraid," for I thought I detected a slight look of anxiety on Mr. Palamount's battered face. "I'm after something better even than two hundred pounds."

VI

GENEALOGICAL

The first thing I did the next morning, after a sleepless night besieged by possibilities, was to send a prepaid cable to Alberta; rather for the relief of my own feelings than because my promptitude could effect any possible good. Indeed, as the telegraph clerk was at pains to inform me, eight o'clock in England is three o'clock in western Canada, and the very earliest of alarm clocks had not yet delivered its nerve-racking message there. Also I was pacing up and down the passage outside Pollexfen and Allport's offices fully three quarters of an hour before their managing clerk ascended the linoleum-covered stairs, rattling his keys and warbling a morning carol, to open them for the day.

Mr. Pollexfen, the senior partner, was a spruce, well-preserved man, with white hair and moustache, but as little of parchment in his manner as in his florid, supple skin. He swung round in his chair and listened to my story attentively, with the tips of his fingers joined, and clicking his well-groomed nails as I talked.

"Well! well! well!" said he, with a commentary sigh, when I had ended. "It's a strange case: the strangest, I verily believe, that I've had to deal with in the whole course of my practice."

He pulled a drawer open and tossed something to me across the table.

"Do you know anything of this?"

"This" was a little book sumptuously bound in blue roan, and bearing upon its cover, embossed and gilt, a coat-of-arms, and the following legend in old English lettering.

"Pedigree of the Ingram or Ingraham family of Lilburn, Mass."

It was the very pamphlet over which, more than two years ago now, Paul had joined me in rather shamefaced laughter.

"Oh, yes," I replied. "I saw it at his rooms. Look! there's his name at the bottom."

"It seems so strange to us," the lawyer mused. "So contrary to all preconceived notions of America. Here, in peer-governed, class-beridden England, we take these things so much more as a matter of course. Myself, as an instance. I believe we are a highly respectable landed family, somewhere in the Eastern Counties, but I'd be bothered to say what my great-grandmother's maiden name was, and, I assure you, except for some tangible reason, I would regard time spent in finding out as time sadly wasted. The very crest on my spoons and carriage is a matter of tradition. It's never occurred to me to regard it with any degree of complacency. But, indeed, I must own to a rather complete ignorance of America, though we manage a good deal of business for clients over there. My ignorance extended, until lately, to the very name of the city where all this money was made. Oshkosh? You're a journalist, I see. Can you truthfully say the name stirs any latent geographical idea."

"Yes. I've heard Ingram mention it. It's a big grain-shipping place on the Lakes."

"Grain?--grain? Yes. That's how the dollars were made, I remember. Three quarters of a million of them. Over sixty thousand pounds. We had no idea of it. The plainest, driest little man. Stayed at one of those cheap Bloomsbury hotels, and lunched on an apple and a wheat biscuit."

"Do you mean to say all this money is left to my friend unconditionally?"

"Absolutely, sir. Lester Ingraham--he'd even gone back to the old spelling--seems to have spent the evening of his days in compiling the little book you hold in your hand. That's how he came to be sent to us by our New York correspondents. They are big people, and seemed to think him very small fry indeed. It had become an absolute obsession with him. Used to bore Allport to death talking of the senior and the junior branches, and sometimes it was all I could do to keep a straight face. His dream had been to buy the old homestead and die there, and he told me the discovery it had been pulled down robbed him of ten years' life. Then the idea occurred to him, since it had vanished and he had no near relatives, to leave his money to the last Ingram born within the old walls, the walls which, as he told me impressively, had had an Indian arrow-head sticking in them for two hundred and fifty years. He had seen that in the museum. Well, well--who says romance is dead?"

"Sixty thousand pounds!" All the time Mr. Pollexfen was speaking I kept writing the sum on the Ingram pedigree with my finger nail, calculating interest at, say, four per cent, and thinking of Paul as I had last seen him.

"I've told you everything, Mr. Pollexfen. What do you think of our chance of finding him again within the year that is stipulated?"

The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. "Very slight indeed, I fear, even if the advertisement reaches his eye. You say he had over two hundred pounds in a bank at his disposal, and chose to run after cabs. Now, to me, that looks very like hallucination. No. If I was the reversionary legatee, I'd feel pretty comfortable."

I said I had told him everything, but, as a matter of fact, I had not told him what I had every reason to believe I knew, and that is, the source whence the money came which Ingram had been loath to touch. I wonder, if I had, whether he would have changed his estimate of my poor quixotic friend. Codes of honor must seem shadowy things to a man who has been instructing counsel for thirty years.

VII

THE WAITING-ROOM

And, after all, it happened so simply in the end. A brief note, lying on my table, when I got back, with an address at the top that was strange to me, asking me to call "when convenient, for a chat." Imagine if I found it convenient. Is there in all the world a cleaner, purer joy than to be the bearer of such tidings as mine?

The house proved to be one of some shabby mouldering little stucco "gardens" near Chalk Farm. It suggested seediness rather than great poverty, and, with my abominable journalist's _flair_ for the dramatic, I was almost sorry the contrast was not to be a more startling one. Perhaps I hardly realized how much misery a decorous exterior can conceal in modern London, until an old woman, bent, deaf and short-sighted almost to blindness, opened the door. The hall was more than bare; it was naked. Not a picture on the walls, not a strip of oilcloth on the boards. On the bottom stair a cheap glass lamp without a shade had been set down and filled the passage with wavering, smoky shadows. The air was penetrated with the raw smell of paraffin, the "_triple bouquet_" of poverty.

If the nakedness had repelled in the hall, its persistence in the room to which I was let find my way was shocking. No curtains nor blinds at the window; a low truckle bed, rather felt than seen in the shadow at one side; upon the uncarpeted floor a great, crooked parallelogram of moonlight. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I made out further a chair by the bedside, with a flat candlestick and a paper-covered book turned face downward, and a big china wash-basin close to the bedside. I don't know what made me look more curiously at this than at anything else, and shudder when I saw how dark its contents were. Next moment I had felt for his hand and grasped it in mine, Thank God! it was not cold and heavy as I had half dreaded. Life--feverish, parched, burning life, it is true, but still life, was in its contact.

He must have been sleeping, and it is eloquent of his utter abandonment that, before I uttered a word, he guessed who had awakened him.

"Clear away that candle and sit down," he said, in a drowsy, muffled voice. "No! don't light it please."

I sat down obediently, and looked around me again. Gradually, as I gazed, the full significance of the stripped room came home to me. It was the bareness of the station waiting-room--the room in which one chafes and frets, watching the hand crawl over the clock-face, with an ear strained to catch the faint whistle of the train that is to bear us away to where we would or should be. That was it. He had come here to wait. The poor faint voice spoke again.

"I'd been lying here a long time," it said, "watching the moon, and it must have sent me to sleep. Don't ride rough, old man," feeling clumsily for the hand that was at my eyes. "It's easier for me than it would be for almost any one else. I often wonder what it was gave me such a conviction of the utter unreality of the world. I think it was the years I spent, month after month, alone on the great wastes. I used to come into the cities and see the people swarming under the arc-lights round the hotels and theatres, and think that's what they'd been doing all the while, night after night. One can't take a world seriously that can mean two such different things to different men. Hold that basin a minute, will you, Prentice? I've got to cough. I can't put it off any longer. Thanks! Yes, it was that last winter in London that broke the bowl and loosed the golden cord. I thought I'd been through a lot and knew all life could do; but, by God! I never imagined anything like that. Stop snivelling, man. I tell you there's no pain at all now. Just something like a big yawn that gets worse while I speak. And I had a lot to say. Do you know, what you said rankled a bit: I mean about my not understanding the ethics of friendship. Why, old man, I've often said to myself that there'd have to be a God if only to thank Him for a friend like you. Now I'm going to discharge the debt. Where shall I begin?"

I told him what I knew already. I forget exactly what words I used. Poor broken ones, no doubt. I told him he was a hero, a saint: that just to have lived a life like his to the end was to have won the bays and gained the victory. He stopped me halfway.

"Nonsense, you sentimental old penny-a-liner! Any one would have done the same. You'd have done it yourself, and you'd have done it far better, because you'd have loved while you worked. That's where I break down. Try to see me as I am, Prentice. I like to have you sorry for me; but don't let illusion mingle with the regret. I hated them! yes, yes, I did. Hated them as a man like me hates anything warm and human that encumbers him and tangles his feet upon his own ruinous tragic course. Even while those angels sat on my knee and ate their bread and jam and asked for more fairy stories I was straining for escape--thinking out ways by which I could rid myself of them, once and for all. You know the way I took. I had to sell my honor for it--handle money that you'd have died before you touched. For I'd given my word to them, fool that I was. I'd eaten their bread, and there's only the one law among white men. Fumble round, Prentice--there's a tumbler full of water somewhere near your feet."

He drank and went on, at first in a calmer voice:

"It began by my going to the theatre where she was dancing. I'd gone to the door again and again, taken my place in the queue and come away at the last moment. And one night I went on and sat up in the gallery, jammed tight, waiting for her. People were talking. I won't say what I heard. It may be true. They didn't know that what they were heaping up was only more damnation for the shabby, shame-faced brute that sat among them, biting his tongue, and keeping his fists deep in his pockets for fear he should curse them suddenly and strike them over their unclean mouths. And then--she came on the stage, Prentice, and kissed her hands, and the whole house got up and roared and cheered. But I hung my head. I didn't dare look at her for a long, long time. At last, when I knew the dance was over, I found the courage. She was curtseying and smiling up at us, and it happened my first glance went straight into her eyes."

He gripped my wrist.

"There's the shadow there, Prentice, what I told you of the night we walked home: the look I was afraid of when I sent you to meet her. None of you see it, because you didn't know her before. God! how it shocked me. I couldn't stand it. I jumped up and climbed out. Some of the men hit out at me. There's some sort of a chapel on the other side of the Circus. The door was open, and there were about twenty people listening to a man gabbling in a language that's like nothing in heaven or earth. I knelt down on a bench at the bottom of the church and prayed, the first time since I swore off--oh! twenty years ago. 'Don't let it touch her!' I kept on saying. 'It's up to my neck, it's over my mouth and down my loathing throat, but don't let it touch the hem of her dress! I give in, God! You have me beaten, eternal Father, all in, down and out. But oh, Jehovah, Jahveh! Shining One! don't hurt a slip of a girl.' A man touched me on the shoulder. Said I'd better go out and come back on an evidence night.

"So you see, Prentice, for all my cleverness, I've had to come to it at last. I've had to whine for mercy to the God that made the tiger and the cancer microbe. I am only an old Puritan, after all. One lifetime's too short to get two centuries and a half of Massachusetts out of your blood. The only time a real codfish Yankee's out of mischief is when he's making the dollars. A hundred years ago I should have been a great preacher of the word, Prentice. One of the sort that the sight of a man rejoicing in his strength or a woman in her beauty goads to cruel madness. And wherever I'd have gone I'd have left bowed heads and chilled hearts and minds half-crazed with the fear of judgment to come. What joy I'd have taken in it! I'd have been so busy seeing death got its due, it never would have occurred to me life had any rights. But it's a hundred years too late for that. The world's grown wiser. It never will let that sort of deviltry get the upper hand again. They saw it in my work, Prentice. That's why they've kept me bottled up and let me kill myself inch by inch with my own poison. But if a man can't do ill broadcast, there's always a quiet place where mischief can be done. You can always take your revenge for the world's common sense on some trustful soul that's laid itself bare in your hands...."

Then I think he ceased to talk coherently.

"----and so I said to myself: I'll go down to the sea, where I had my darling all my own, pure and loving, before the stain of the world reached her or evil tongues made busy with her name. She's there still, I know. She's haunting those lonely sands, crying and wringing her hands and kissing the old letters because I won't write her any new. But she must forgive me when I ask her pardon and show her my punishment, and when it's all told, we'll sit hand in hand and knee to knee and watch the sun foundering out at sea and when the last little red streak has gone----"

He broke off suddenly, and sat up in bed.

"Where are my clothes? Haven't they sent them yet? I _can't_--I can't be found like this, you know! It's a wretched little piece of vanity, but I can't. And now I'm getting so weak, I can't go into town again. Perhaps I didn't tell them where to--send--the right number."...

His voice died away in his throat, and he lay back, quite exhausted.

It was nearly two hours afterward before I left the house for the last time. A doctor had seen him, and a nurse was settling in an arm-chair to watch him for the night. We'd done what we could to that awful room. That wasn't much, but the train was nearly due now, so it didn't really matter. There was a lot of work before me on the morrow.

And it wasn't until I was halfway home that I remembered the sixty thousand pounds!

VIII

'TWIXT SHINE AND SHADE

To be young, to be beautiful, to be free; to radiate a charm which it is felt not ungracious alone but ridiculous to pretend to withstand, and to be paid for its exercise in the tangible form that renders all else possible; to wake one morning and discover that pleasure, change of scene, and gracious surroundings have become the anxious concern of good genii whose motives are too evident to make any demands upon gratitude: to find each day a fairy vista wherein, by a happy perversion of the gray old rule, fulfilment waits upon desire: in one word, to be "the vogue." Has life ever offered more than this? and is it not a mere question of time how long any memory of old defeat, any regret for a lost Eden, can resist an assault by happiness made from so many quarters?

I think, if the whole truth could be known, Fenella's state of mind during her two years of furore would be a curious psychological study. I have just been looking through a pile of _Sceptres_ and _Prattlers_, the issue of those enchanted years. It is hardly an exaggeration to say her photograph appeared in one or the other every week.--Fenella at Ascot--"The Secret of Success. One favorite whispers it to another."--"Look pleasant, please! A recent snapshot of Lord Lulford's popular niece." (I forget who invented this phrase. It was rather done to death.) Here are more: "Commons idol among the 'backwoodsmen' at the Burbery point-to-point. Names from left to right: Miss Barbour, Sir Bryan Lumsden, et cetera, et cetera." "Will 'No. 8' go up to-night? After a strenuous day with the North Herts, Miss Barbour has to hustle to catch the London train." I say, take out all the palpable poses, all the profitable winsomeness of poster or postcard--there must be one or two where she was taken off her guard--and then try to trace the shadow poor Paul fancied he saw. I can only say I have failed. Complete absorption in the business of the moment--that is all I ever found.

Of course I know that people in the world do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and that there are all sorts of dodges whereby if not happiness, at any rate the peace of mind necessary for due enjoyment of life, can be secured. The sad thought can be kept moving on a day ahead, an hour ahead; always in sight, as it were, but always out of one's mental reach. Even so, the question remains whether such a shifty process can be continued indefinitely, and if a day does not come when the harassed ghost, weary, like poor Joe, of incessant moving on, takes wing, once and for all, for the land of oblivion.

I was years making up my mind about Fenella. I sometimes fancied the dear lady knew it, and that that was the reason my brooding glances were never surprised. It would have been so easy to look up and catch them. "A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Prentice." And then--remember I'm a journalist, and used to seeing truth sold at the price--"I was wondering whether I wasn't only just in time, after all."

She did catch me at last. It was on that night, I fancy, that I passed once and for all from the sober status of "my husband's great friend" to the more vertiginous one of "my own." Paul was out at some committee meeting or another--he leaves her a good deal alone--and would not be in till late. I had been sitting silent a long while, watching the busy slender fingers and the sweet puckered brow. Knitting is rather a rite with Fenella, but I pity the naked she clothes if they had to wait on the work of her own hands. She had dropped a stitch. "One--two--three," she was counting under her breath--"_one_ and _two_ and _three_!" and then----Oh, I protest, madam! it was an unfair advantage that you took. I forget what answer I stammered out. She stuck her needles into the wool, glanced at the clock and told me everything.

* * * * *

A long electric launch, whose stern was covered by a white awning lined with green, skimmed its way through the lines of moored yachts, and across the blue Solent, its prow held high like the breast of a diving sea-bird. Over the bows, from which two sheets of water spurted away, clear and convex as blown glass, a seaman sat, dressed in ducks, and holding a long boat-hook in his hand. Round the ribbon of his glazed hat, in letters of gold, the legend ran--

S.Y. _Castadiva_, R.Y.C.

Amidships a tall, broad-shouldered man in blue serge, very sunburnt, and wearing a peaked cap, sat, or rather sprawled, in conversation, probably technical, with the driver of the dynamo, whose head and shoulders only appeared above the half-deck. Under the awning a girl was sitting alone. Her furled parasol made a vivid splash of scarlet against her snowy dress.

Near the jetty of the yacht club the engine ceased to flutter, and the sailor, putting out his boat-hook, drew the launch to shore. The man in blue jumped out and, extending a long arm, helped the girl to land.

"Moor her where you can to-night, Mr. Weeks," he said to the head and shoulders. "I'll see the commodore to-morrow and find out why we're not given our usual berth."

"Ay, ay, sir."

"And, Weeks, have the launch sent back at three sharp, with the baggage on board. Becket needn't come. I'm going to Beverbrook immediately after lunch, and shall sleep there. Good-day, Weeks."

"Good day, Sir Bryan."

Meantime, the girl, unfurling her parasol and balancing it daintily on her shoulder, walked toward the land, looking about her with a bright interest at the blue bay, the white sails of the yachts, and the smartly dressed crowd loitering outside the yacht club enclosure. She wore a white linen princesse robe, its costly simplicity adorned only by a wide band of embroidery that ran from throat to hem, and a big gray straw hat trimmed with a wreath of what roses would look like if nature had had the good taste to make them the color of pansies--the roses that bloom in the Rue de la Paix.

Slowly as she walked, she had reached the hedge of the enclosure before her companion overtook her. Inside the lawn was not crowded. The big regatta had taken place the day before, and it was lunch hour. Such groups as were strolling up and down or sitting in little encampments of canopied arm-chairs stopped flirting or talking to stare and whisper. On some of the women's faces appeared the dubious admiration that is kept for social audacity in their sex. The girl seemed unconscious of the effect she was creating and looked about her indifferently. Espying some friends in a far corner, she signalled vigorously with her open parasol.

"Bryan, there's Lady Carphilly and Mrs. Rolf d'Oyley. I must go and talk to them. Will you come too, or wait?"

"I'll wait," the man answered shortly. "I've sent in for my letters and I'll open them here. We ought to have lunch soon. Don't be long, Flash."

A club waiter who had been standing in the offing with a pile of letters on a salver and an initialled leather dispatch case, approached and disposed them on a table near the chair into which the baronet had flung himself. Lumsden bestowed a casual glance upon the pile and looked toward the man's free hand.

"What have you got there?"

"A telegram for Miss Barbour, Sir Bryan."

"Give it to me."

The man handed it over without demur. Bryan ripped it open and read the message through. He looked thoughtful.

"How long has this been here?"

"Two days, Sir Bryan."

"Didn't they try to get it through by wireless?"

"I can't say, Sir Bryan. I'll ask if you wish."

"No: it doesn't matter. Bring me a 'John Henry'."

He slipped the opened telegram into his coat pocket and, lighting a cigar, proceeded to read his mail through, systematically, but with a pre-occupied brow.

The past twelve months had dealt hardly with Bryan. There is probably in the life of most of us some day, or preferably some night, when fate chooses to pay us the arrears of years, in which the hours as they pass over our heads grizzle them, and our tears, if tears we can shed, are a corrosive acid that bite their record upon our cheeks for all time. No one honestly mistook Lumsden for a young man after his little son's death.

It may have been something in one of the letters he had just read--may be, who knows, something even in the telegram, that made him, after he had swept his correspondence, with various pencil scribblings on the margins, into the dispatch case, recall that night with rather more deliberation than he usually permitted himself, and stare gloomily at the group into which, with much embracing and chatter, pitched in a key of congratulatory envy, Fenella had been drawn.

How she had changed! How she had changed since then! To-day, as for many a day past, it was in nothing more precise than this loose mental phrase that his ill-defined dissatisfaction could find vent. Beyond it he seemed unable to go, and was even forced to admit a certain flimsiness in a charge out of which no better indictment could be framed. Because, whatever strain upon his finer perceptions had made the year of probation the torture it had undoubtedly been, he could not deny that she had remained true as steel to the bargain made with him in the house of death--a bargain so vague that scarcely any pretext would have been too tawdry to discharge her from it had she wished. She had sacrificed her good repute to him forthwith; had even seemed eager for circumstances that, as far as the world was concerned, should put the sacrifice past doubt, and if, of late, it had been coming back to her, as most women's is conveyed from them, in whispers, the rehabilitation was not of her own devising, but rather part of the observed tendency of murder and other violations of established usage to "out." Strangely enough, her fame fared better at women's hands than at men's, and worse among those who were convinced of her technical integrity (the phrase was even invented for her) than with those who inclined to give the ominous face of appearances its full value. I don't know why this should have been so. Perhaps vice has its own hypocrisies and canting code of law, and her resistance to the spirit after the letter had been so admirably fulfilled was held an outrage. At least she gave him no anxiety, although he knew that temptation had reached her, once from a quarter so exalted that it is not usually taken into account--even suspected one wooing as honorable as perfunctory, and although all his money and all his good will could not make him as young as the hot blood that besieged her. Her house was always open to him, at hours which his own forbearance was trusted to keep within the limits set by decorum; she kept whisky and cigars for him in her sideboard, with even the little sprig of vanilla in the cigar cabinet that she must have seen and taken note of in his own rooms. She never denied him her company nor discovered affinities among his friends; she even seemed to have a tender conscience in this regard, and looked round anxiously for him whenever the ripple of her little triumphs carried her temporarily out of hail. Whence then his secret dissatisfaction? Oh, this termless war of attainment with desire, old in human story as the history of David's unruly sons! Was Bryan the first to set a snare and grudge the fair plumage he had coveted for the marks of his own springe upon it?

She was a great success, socially. She entered the smart world, it is true, under his auspices, and because he was sulky if she was not asked to the same houses, and because it was important to a good many people that Bryan Lumsden, to say nothing of Calvert & Co., should be kept in good humor. But, once in, her own talents were quite competent to keep her in the place he had made for her. She had even reached a point now where her successes were her own, and no longer were held to throw reflected lustre upon her sponsor. She fitted quickly and easily into what, after all, was her own class. In a year she rode hard and straight and had developed a heady but hitherto successful system of tactics at bridge. Bryan no longer got the credit of her clothes, but it was generally understood she was frightfully in debt and would marry him when her creditors delivered their ultimatum. She had an infantile wit and a faculty for what the French term _choses inouïes_. One of her riddles became proverbial.

"What did the fishes say to Noah when he asked them into the ark?" "No tanks."

I subjoin a few more specimens, not with any hope that their charm will subsist in print, but just to show with what things, on pretty lips, the weary old world is prepared to be amused.

Once she was trying to collect money for some charity and no one had change. This happens sometimes even in smart society. "Oh, dear," sighed Fenella, "everybody has the hand-to-mouth disease."

She was slightly angered at a restraining clause in one of her contracts, discovered when too late.

"You're a bad man," she told the flustered manager, "and you deserve to come to a nasty sticky end."

To Rock, of ill odor in the Park, after his senile advances had been rebuffed by a snobby little Pekinese: "Don't whine, _dee-ar_! I don't believe that kind of dog knows whether it's a dog or a poll-parrot or an insect."

"Bryan's caught cold, I think," she said one morning. "He keeps calling for 'Letitia'."

If these are fair samples of the parts she put at the disposal of her new friends, her reputation is not the surprise it might be to a man who knows that the dear lady to this day conducts her conversation upon an economical little vocabulary of about three hundred words.

Maybe the conscience we have spoken of had been pricking her, for when Lumsden raised his head from his reverie the world had gone red, and he was looking at the sun through her parasol.

"You look glum, old man," said Fenella. "What's the matter? Do you want your lunch?"

Lumsden got up and stretched. He had been pulling at his moustache, and one hair--a white one--was on the shoulder of his blue reefer. She picked it off, held it up to the light, looked unfathomably at him and blew it daintily into the air.

"Perhaps we'd best have lunch now," she said. "I want to get to Beverbrook soon and see what arrangements they've made. Do you remember Edmaston, Bryan, where they put that dreadful polish down--Takko or Stikko or something--and when my foot stuck I buzzed and every one laughed?"

"Don't you feel nervous, Flash?"

"Just a teeny. When do _They_ come?"

"Oh, to dinner; but you won't be introduced till you've danced. And remember, Flash, you must only speak when you're spoken to by Them. Just answer questions."

"I'll try not to disgrace you," she said airily, and led the way to the pavilion.

IX

BEATEN AT THE POST

She was very gay and flippant during lunch, and while crossing the bay, and in the motor on the way to the great ducal house, where she was going, if not to sing for her supper, at least to dance for her dinner. She was very serious and a little dictatorial on the stage, but immediately after tea took the owner of the Chaste Goddess and so much else by the arm, and proceeded to drag him on a prolonged tour of inspection, through the stables, round the noble Italian gardens--at whose lichened fawns and satyrs she made faces, expressive of the utmost scorn and defiance, but which only succeeded in being charming, and the English garden--where the leaden shepherdesses were pronounced "ducks"; into the aviary to drive four macaws to frenzy with a long straw, and back by orchid houses and hothouses to the terrace again. She picked a good many flowers and ate a quantity of fruit.

It was while she was picking grapes in the vine house that Lumsden took heart and disburthened himself of a little of his recent chagrin.

"Flash! I'm going to scold you!"

"Oh, Bryan! what for? For culling all these grapes? I like 'cull,' it sounds less greedy than 'pick.' I cull, thou culleth--no, _cullest_--she culls."

"Flash! out of all the world what made you pick on those two Jezebels to speak to on the lawn?"

"What's the matter with them besides 'jezziness'?"

"You know well enough. They're not nice women."

"Really nice women don't have much to say to me? Have you noticed it, skipper?"

"They would if----Oh! stop eating all those grapes. You'll make yourself sick."

"If what, please?"

"If you'd only do the straight thing?"

"What do you mean? Go into a refuge?"

"A _refuge_! What abominable twaddle you can talk when you like."

She laid a sticky finger over his mouth. "Tut-tut-tut! Come outside if you're going to scold. It's too fuzzy in here. You'll get a rush of brains to the head."

Outside, the garden was deserted. The centre of interest seemed to have shifted to the upper terrace. A large horny beetle was pursuing his homeward or outward way over the pounded shell of the walk. Fenella assisted him with the point of her parasol, and did not relax her good offices until he was in dazed safety upon the border. Then she looked up.

"Flash! why don't you marry me and have done with it?"

She punched six holes in the path before replying.

"What do you want to 'have done with?' Why can't we go on as we are a little longer?"

"Because it's--unnatural. There are other reasons, but that's enough."

"It isn't, if you don't let it worry you--Oh! what am I saying? Bryan, do you think we'd care as much for one another if--if I did as you say."

"Of course we should--more every day."

"Why didn't you keep getting fonder and fonder of those others, then?"

"I think that question most unseemly. You don't seem to realize I'm asking you to be my wife."

"M-m! It is hard to."

"Oh, don't be clever. Every one's clever. What are you waiting for?"

No answer.

"Shall I tell you?"

"If you think you know, dear."

"You're waiting until there's not one little bit left of the girl I fell in love with, the girl who tried to hide her bare arms under Perse's ruffle in the hall at Lulford, and who cried by the cot where my poor little urchin was dying. You've never forgiven me that cursed night in Mount Street."

"Dear! I've never mentioned it from that day to this."

"Well, it's behind everything you say. It's behind your eyes when they look at me. Can't you understand I wasn't myself."

"You were a little--eh? Weren't you, dear? Not much; just a gentlemanly glow."

"And it's your way of taking revenge for it. And a d----d cruel woman's way it is."

She laid her hand on his arm. "Bryan, don't worry me now. I've got a lot to go through to-night. It's harder than anybody thinks. There's some sense in what you say. But we can talk about it some other time.... Oh! look up there! What's happening?"

A big browny-red closed motor-car rolled along the upper terrace and stopped at the great doorway. In a moment servants--visitors seemed to run together, to range themselves in two lines, one on each side of the wide curved steps. Framed in the dark gothic arch, the Lord of Beverbrook appeared, noble, white of hair and moustache, with a serene and lofty humility in his bent head that was strangely impressive. The rest is Apotheosis. Before it we veil our dazzled eyes.

* * * * *

He had not gone to bed at two o'clock the next morning. He sat, completely dressed, smoking and looking out his bedroom window over the silvering terraces and park. The great gay house was abed: the night very still. Only to his left, above the low quadrangle of some stables or outhouses, could be seen a dim shaft of light. A murmur of voices, the sound of water running and splashing about a hose-pipe, seemed to come from that direction.

His thoughts were busy, but not directly with the girl whose interests and his own were by now tacitly associated. The night had been a new triumph for her--in a way the crown upon all the rest--but such triumphs by now were discounted in advance, felt almost to be in the order of nature. No. It was the telegram he was thinking of, the telegram that he had intercepted on the lawn at Cowes. He had not so much forgotten it till now as mentally pigeon-holed it for future consideration. This habit, acquired in business, he unconsciously followed in all the concerns of life.

Who was making himself this beggar's advocate in London. Who was "Prentice." Curse him! whoever he was. Few though the words had been, they contained a hint of some previous understanding or rendezvous. Who were the conspirators that wanted to drag a girl away from the light and laughter that was her due, (influences so desirable from every point of view) into the chill shadow of a hospital death-bed. He had long ceased to be jealous of Ingram, as of a man whom the world that was his friend had taken in hand and beaten handsomely, but there is no hatred so merciless and lawless as that with which contempt is mingled. The suppression of the telegram never struck him as dishonor, although he was not a cruel or a treacherous man. He counted it a fair counter-stroke to what he esteemed a blow in the dark, a stab from behind. Letter by letter and word for word the hateful thing was printed on his brain, but who does not know the instinct of return to a message in which substance and significance are so inversely proportioned? To have read nine times is no reason for not reading a tenth. The screed has not changed, but the mood may have; and, with the new mood, who knows what fresh meaning may not leap at us.

He got up, opened the wardrobe, and felt in the pockets of his blue coat. It was not in either of them. He considered awhile. Had he packed it, with the letters, into his dispatch case? If so, it had gone aboard to his secretary, which didn't matter much. But--no. He distinctly remembered feeling it in his pocket during the crossing to the mainland. Plainly gone, then. But where?

He took the coat off the rack and looked at it as though he would read its history since dinner. His own man was not with him, but he had stopped at Beverbrook before and knew the valeting was a little overdone. R---- was so natty himself. He had flung it on the bed when he dressed. Whoever did the room had taken it to be brushed or pressed, and the telegram had fallen out of the pocket. How could he be sure? Oh! he knew. There had been a tiny smear of white paint under the left cuff. If the coat had been taken away----He took it to the light. The white smudge was gone.

He was not pleased at the accident, but decided to dismiss the matter for the night. The faculty to do so, and to fall asleep on some pleasant thought, was part of his life's sound régime. He began to think of her again. How prettily she had carried off her success. He recalled the little bob-curtsey in the Presence, so in character after the hoydenish dance--the gleam of sub-audacity that accompanied it, which every charming woman knows she can permit herself in company, however august, where her charm is likely to be felt. But who would have done it so gracefully? He had stood aloof (it seemed more decent to), but he remembered how long she had been kept in the circle, and how every one had laughed from time to time. Her competence, her amazing competence--that was what he was never done marvelling at. Nothing seemed to scare her, nothing to dazzle her. What a genius there can be in school nicknames! And then, that chin and jaw of turned ivory, and the hair, dark and fragrant as a West India night, and the diamond twinkling in the little fleshy ear.

Suddenly he stood quite still, with his hair-brushes in his hand, listening intently. Some one was scratching stealthily on the upper panel of his bedroom door. Remember the hour--the stillness--the man's old experience, and of what his imagination was full. His heart seemed to miss two or three beats, and to resume its function thickly and heavily in his throat. The last traces of anger and dissatisfaction died away. Women had called Bryan Lumsden's face beautiful before. They might have called it so now again.

He walked to the door and opened it softly. It was she; but dressed, with her hat and veil, and with the telegram in her hand.

"Bryan!--Bryan!" she said under her breath, and then stopped. Her agitation was so great that she could not go on. He drew her gently into his room and closed the door.

"You must be careful, Flash," he said gravely. "This isn't an ordinary visit like Lulford, you know. It won't do to have any scandal here."

"Bryan, can I speak to you a minute?"

"Go on."

"You know what you asked me this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"I will, I will, I _will_; any time you like."

He looked at the telegram and his face hardened.

"If----?"

"Yes. If you get me to London to-night."

"Flash! it's absurd. Think of the hour! Can't you wait till morning?"

"No. I shall go mad."

"But even if the station is open, it will take hours to get a special."

"You have your car."

"Yes; but every one's in bed, and the garage probably locked up. Be reasonable."

"Oh, no they're not," she said eagerly. "I can hear them from my window. They have lamps and they're washing the cars with a hose."

"What has happened?"

She handed him the telegram quite simply. "I found this on my table. It's been opened. I don't understand----"

He read it through again and folded it quite small and evenly.

"Where's your room? You can't wait here."

"At the other end of the corridor--Oh, Bryan! God bless you!"

"_S-sh!_ How will I know it? It won't do to make a mistake."

"Can't I hang a stocking over the knob?"

He looked at her askance a moment, then put on his jacket and walked away into the darkness. After what must have seemed more, and was probably less, than half an hour, he tapped softly at her door. He was wearing the big coat she knew so well. He had wrapped her in it more than once.

"I've arranged it," he said, in a low voice, strangely gentle. "Follow me, and walk quietly."

X

A YEAR AND A DAY

We got Paul out of that dreadful lodging and into a private ward at St. Faith's. I'll never forget the way Smeaton helped. We had the very best advice, but all the doctors shook their heads over him. Some old adhesion of the lung, they said, that, under normal conditions, he might have lived till eighty and never suspected, but which privation, or a chill, or a blow, or perhaps all three, had fretted to malignity. There'd have to be an operation. It wasn't what is called a desperate one, was well within the competence of modern surgery in an ordinary case, but everything was against poor Ingram. Webber, who was watching the general condition, took no responsibility for the operation, and Tuckey, who was to do the cutting, took no responsibility for the result. As a division of responsibility, it was the neatest piece of work, I think, I have ever seen.

"It's not really strength he lacks," said Webber, after his last visit before the critical morning. "It's the _vivida vis_, the desire of life, that isn't there. Two grains of hope would be worth all the oxygen and beef-juice and brandy we could pump into him in a month."

I didn't confide to Webber that I'd already told Paul sixty thousand pounds was waiting till he was well enough to claim it, without seeing one shade of pleasurable emotion come into the tired, drooping eyes. As for Fenella, her name was never mentioned between us. I don't think he had any idea how much he had told me in that dark room at Chalk Farm, and I did not remind him. I had reason, soon enough, to bless my forbearance, for day followed day, and no answer to my telegram reached me. At Park Row I had found a sullen reluctance to give any information at all. She was travelling--she was on the sea--had left no instructions for forwarding. But a journalist is not to be thrown off the scent by a sulky and probably venal little slavey. Two telephone calls put me into possession of Lumsden's probable movements, and I knew I had not gone very far astray in sending the telegram to his care at Cowes. I never doubted for an instant that it had reached her hands. No; she had sought advice where advice, perhaps, was already backed by natural authority, and had decided that, under the circumstances----You see what I mean? It is true she might have written or wired asking for news. But trying to repair life's errors is a thankless task. Through the breach we are patching up the whole salt, dark ocean of destiny comes pouring and thundering about our stunned ears.

I slept little on the night before Paul's operation, and was up and moving restlessly about my rooms before the sun had risen. Who is it says, "Help cometh with the morning?" The Bible, probably. Anyway, I know I was heartened by seeing the rosy glow on the curtained windows opposite. It is a strange thing that I, who was to have no share in the day's great business, was probably up the first. Paul, I hope, was asleep, and I am sure Tuckey and Webber were. How far easier is work than waiting! The one has its seasons--a life may be wasted in the other.

I was looking out my sitting-room window, thinking this and many a deep solemn thought besides, when a big car, covered so thickly with mud and dust that its color could not be distinguished, and with the unmistakable appearance of having been driven far and furiously, swung--one might almost say dropped--into the crescent. I knew it was she. Oh, how I loathed myself for my doubt! I had the door open before she could put her foot on the steps.

She flashed into my face one mute, awful question in which I could tell the anguish of hours was concentrated, and I gave her the mute reply which says, "Not yet."

"Oh, thank God! thank God!" she said, and clasped her hands across her breast. The man in the car, stooped above the steering-wheel, did not move once nor look round.

"Can I see him now? Will he know me?"

"You won't be let see him till nine. The operation is at eleven, and there's hope. He was conscious last night but very weak. I can tell you no more."

If I sound harsh or cold, lay it to the charge of the man at the wheel.

I went on. "Shall I arrange for you to see him at nine?"

"Is it far?"

"Just across the river."

"I'll call back at quarter to nine, and you must take me."

She climbed into the car without looking at me again, and next moment was gone. Across the road I counted six blinds drawn to one side.

Lumsden never asked whether the man he had brought her a hundred and thirty miles to see was dead or alive. His face was set like a stone. In the main road he turned it to her, a mere dusty mask.

"Where do you want to go now?"

"Go to my house. I'll get you a drink and some breakfast. You must be half dead."

He headed the car for Knightsbridge without a word, and while Frances, sleep struggling with surprise in her bemused brain, was fulfilling her humble rôle in the romance by poaching two eggs over the electric stove, they sat in the dining-room on opposite sides of the table. She had filled a long, thin glass with the beverage his heart loved, but he only sipped it, which was not like Bryan, and turned the tumbler thoughtfully round and round. He avoided her eyes. He had seemed to avoid them all the way up.

"Will you come with me to--to the hospital?" she asked, when the silence had begun to weigh upon her.

"No. I don't want to see him."

"Bryan, since we're to be married, I think I'd best tell you what I wouldn't tell that night at Mount Street. Do you remember?"

"Yes. Well?"

"Dear, there's no reason, when you see him, you should feel anything but just a great, deep pity for all his unhappiness. I don't know why I didn't tell you this before. I think it was your doubting him drove me mad. And you're quite right in saying I've changed myself on purpose. It was because, after I learned the world a bit, I saw what a fraud I really was. All those little girl's ways you liked so much--they're very pretty, I dare say, but they're shams for me, anywhere off the stage. I had no right to them. I'm only what the world calls a 'good girl'--I'm only a girl at all, because he was merciful and--spared me. He must have been a very good man."

"Or a very cold one? Which?"

"Well. I'm not going to try to answer that, Bryan. It's what you call yourself an 'unseemly question'."

"You're a strange creature."

"Oh no, I'm not, Bryan. Not a bit different really to heaps and heaps of other women. I used to think I was once, at Sharland, because I didn't seem to have the other girls' ways or their curiosity. But I know better now. Do you remember Lord--the old lawyer beast that we went to the White City with? He took me on the launches, and when we were alone, he leaned over and told me--oh, something I can't even tell you, Bryan--now. He said it in French first and then, in case I didn't know what it was in French, he translated it into English. Those are the things that make us _loathe_ you, Bryan--deep, deep, deep, down in the little bit of us you never reach. But I only giggled, as any other girl would have done, any other girl who felt the same as me. And now he'll always remember me as--the woman who laughed."

"You're all a mystery."

"Not half as much as is pretended, Bryan. The mystery comes about because we don't tell the truth. Married women don't tell it, even, to one another, and it's thought shocking to tell a girl things that the first man she meets will tell her if she lets him. I hear more than most, 'cos I'm not one thing nor the other, and every one thinks I'll tell them things back, and then they'll find out what's puzzling them about us two. And we never tell you. How dare we? We find a set of rules ready made for us--by you. You take the men we really want from us because you're stronger than they are, or richer, or even braver than they are, and since it's the way you settle things among yourselves, and since you're satisfied with what you get by it, we pretend we're satisfied too. But it's one thing to conquer them, Bryan, and it's another thing to conquer us. I'll tell you a little woman's secret: No nice girl ever gives herself up quite to a man unless there's a little of _her mother_ in him. There was an awful lot in Paul. I found it out."

"A bit of an old woman, in fact?"

"Oh! I see I can't teach you. It doesn't matter. So you see, dear," in a different voice and raising her head, "there's not much left for you. But what there is I'd rather you had than any one else. I _like_ you, Bryan--I like you _so_."

"And you think I ought to be satisfied with that?"

"Well, you know what you said a year ago."

"Yes--a year ago, but not now. Yesterday perhaps, but not this morning. It's the old Scots law limit--a year and a day. Often the wisdom that doesn't come in the year comes in a night. You're too deadly wise, Flash; too utterly disillusioned. I never could stand it. There'd be nothing to teach you; nothing to break down. You believe you've taken my measure, and every time I tried to lift our lives out of the mud, I'd feel you were laughing at me--down in that little bit you've just told me of. It may be as you say, all a make-believe, but, by G--d! it doesn't do to have both know it. What do you want most, really? Your liberty?"

She did not answer or raise her head.

"Well, you can have it." He got up and took his cap off the table. "Good-bye."

She didn't speak until he had his hand on the handle of the door. And then--

"Bryan, I've never let you kiss me. You can now if you like."

He spun round on his heel, as though some one had given him a blow between the shoulders. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her, or humble her pride to death. A foul name seemed to be actually forming itself on his lips. But he came across the room, and took her in his arms, and held her a long while.

"Take care, please," she said, breathlessly, "you're hurting me--a little."

Then he let her go.

"Oh, Flash!" he said hoarsely. "Doesn't that mean anything to you? Doesn't that tell you something?"

She was looking in the mirror at a little red mark where he had pressed the earring into her neck.

"Good-bye," he said again, and she heard the hall door slam. And then the throb of the motor began to rattle the windows in their frames.

She fell upon her knees and buried her face in her hands.

XI

TWO GRAINS OF HOPE

If that early morning call at half-past five had been my only meeting with Fenella, I don't think I should have known her when she came back at nine. All the weariness had gone out of her face. Under her light cloak she was freshly and beautifully dressed. Her eyes seemed to brim with a sort of wistful happiness. I hated the task; but knowing what she was about to see, I _had_ to try and prepare her. But I soon saw I was having my trouble for nothing. I think she hardly heard me. Her heart, it was plain, was full of that brave, sane hope that, even when it is brought to nothing, I think bears sorrow best. Webber had just paid his morning visit, but she did not wait for his report. I fancy from the look he gave me that he took in the situation at a glance. I smiled back at him a little nervously. He had prescribed two grains of hope, and I was conscious of bringing an overdose.

In the private ward my impulsive companion took no notice of doctors or nurses, but went straight over to the bed on whose snowy pillow the poor wasted face lay like a gray shadow. She gave a little moan at the first sight of it: that was all. His eyes were closed. She knelt down, and passing her arm ever so gently underneath his neck, threw back her cloak, and laid the shadowy face upon the warmth, and the fragrance, and the softness beneath.

"Paul," she said at his ear, low, but so distinctly that we all heard. "Don't you know me, dear? It's Nelly, come back to take care of you, and look after you and love you all the rest of your life. You're going to get well, aren't you, dear, for her sake? 'Cos you mustn't break her heart a second time, you know. And, dear, she doesn't want you to talk; but won't you just open your poor tired eyes once, a teeny second, to show you know whose arm is round you? Because she's been waiting, waiting--oh, such a weary time! just waiting, dear, till you sent for her."

There was silence for a few seconds, broken only by the unrestrained sobbing of the little day nurse at the foot of the bed.

Then Ingram opened his eyes.

* * * * *

"I don't know whether he's going to die or get well," I said, some hours later. I was trying to swallow _chateaubriand_ and champagne and unmanly emotion all at the same time, which doesn't help lucidity. But I'd been supporting an anxious day on a tin and a half of cigarettes, and the champagne was old Smeaton's fault, so perhaps I shall be forgiven. "I don't know whether he's going to get well or die. I can't feel it matters much, to-night. You'd know what I meant if you'd seen his face. Oh! it was wonderful. I think I know now how a man looks when he wakes in heaven and knows he very nearly missed it. And the Barbour woman, crooning and cooing over him, and the nurses snivelling, and all those doctors trying to pull the poor devil back to life! Yes, you can laugh if you like, Smeaton. But I say it's a damned fine old world, and I'm glad to have a place where I can sit and watch it--even if it is only a second-floor front and back in Pimlico."

* * * * *

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]