CHAPTER III.

ALICE RETURNS.

In her pleasant room on the second-floor of Suffolk Mansions, Mrs. Wylie awaited the arrival of the two sisters.

From without there came a suggestion of bustling life in the continuous hum of wheel-traffic and an occasional cry, not unmelodious, from enterprising news-vendors. Within, everything spoke of peaceful, pleasant comfort. There was a large table in the centre of the room literally covered with periodical and permanent literature--a pleasant table to sit by, for there was invariably something of interest lying upon it, a safe stimulant to conversation. The dullest and shyest man could always find something to say to the ready listener who sat in a low cane-chair just beyond the table, near the fire, with her back to the window. There were many strange ornaments about, and a number of curiosities such as women rarely purchase in foreign lands; also sundry small impedimenta suggestive of things nautical.

Withal there was in the very atmosphere a sense of womanliness. The subtle odours emanating from wooden constructions, conceived and executed by dusky strangers, were overpowered by the healthier and livelier smell of flowers. Heliotrope nestled modestly in low vases from Venice. There was also mignonette, and on the mantelpiece a great snowy bunch of Japanese anemones thrust into a bronze vase from that same distant land, all looking, as it were, in different directions, each carrying its graceful head in a different way, no two alike, and yet all lovely, as only God can make things.

I cannot explain in what lay the charm of Mrs. Wylie's drawing-room, though it must have emanated from the lady herself. There is no room like it that I know of, where both men and women experience a sudden feeling of homeliness, an entire sense of refined ease. The surroundings were not too fragile for the touch of a man, and yet there was in them that subtle influence of grace and daintiness which appeals to the more delicate fibres of a woman's soul, and makes her recognise her own element.

The widowed lady herself was little changed since we last met her in the Far North. But those who knew her well were cognizant of the fact that the outward signs of late bereavement so gracefully worn were no cynical demonstration of a conventional grief. The white-haired old man sleeping among the nameless sons of an Arctic land was as truly mourned by this cheerful Englishwoman as ever husband could desire. There was perhaps a smaller show of cultivated grief, such as the world loves to contemplate, than was strictly in keeping with her widow's cap. No lowered tones pulled up a harmless burst of hilarity. No smothered sighs were emitted at inappropriate times in order to impress upon a world, already full enough of sorrow, the presence of an abiding woe.

But Brenda Gilholme knew that the cure was incomplete. She had carried through, to the end, the task left her by Theo Trist. The _Hermione_ lay snugly anchored by the oozy banks of a Suffolk river, and Mrs. Wylie was, so to speak, herself again--that is to say, she was once more a woman full of ready sympathy, gay with the gay, sorrowing with the afflicted. If Brenda in her analytical way saw and acknowledged the presence of a difference, it was perhaps nothing more than an overstrained feminine susceptibility. At all events, the general world opined that Mrs. Wylie was as jolly as ever. Moreover, they insinuated in a good-natured manner that the Admiral was, after all, many years her senior, and that she in all human probability had some considerable span of existence to get through yet, which he could not have shared owing to advance of infirmity.

One admirable characteristic had survived, however, this change in her life. The cheery independence of this lady was untouched by the hand of sorrow. It was her creed that at all costs a smile should be ready for the world. Regardless of criticism, she trod her own path through a hypercritical generation; and by seeking to cast the light of a brave hopefulness upon it, she illuminated the road on which her near contemporaries held their way. One great secret of her method was industry. In her gentle womanliness she sought work, not afar, but in her own field, and found it as all women can find work if they seek truly.

Even while she was awaiting the arrival of the sisters, she was not idle. On her lap there lay a huge scrap-book, and with scissors and paste she was busy collecting and arranging in due order sundry newspaper cuttings. That scrap-book will in after-years be historical, for it contained every word ever printed from the handwriting of Theodore Trist up to the date of the day when Mrs. Wylie sat alone in her drawing-room. From its pages more than one book on the art of making war has since been compiled, and from those printed words more than one general of many nationalities would confess to having learnt something.

The lady's quick ear detected the sound of a cab suddenly stopping, and when a bell rang a few moments later she laid aside her scissors and rose from her seat with no sign of surprise.

'I wonder,' she said, 'of what tragedy or comedy this may be the beginning.'

There was a certain matronly grace in her movements as she opened the door and drew Brenda Gilholme to her arms.

'Alice has come with me!' said the girl.

'Yes, dear,' replied Mrs. Wylie, and she proceeded to greet the taller sister with a kiss also, but of somewhat less warmth.

Then the three ladies passed into the drawing-room together. There was a momentary pause, during which Mrs. Huston mechanically loosened the strings of her smart little bonnet and looked round the room appreciatively.

'How perfectly delicious,' she exclaimed, 'it is to see a comfortable English drawing-room again! I almost kissed the maid who opened the door; she was such a pleasant contrast to sneaking Cingalese servants.'

Mrs. Wylie smiled sympathetically, but became grave again instantaneously. Her eyes rested for a second on Brenda's face.

'Alice,' explained Brenda, coming forward to the fireplace and raising one neatly shod foot to the fender, 'does not give a very glowing account of Ceylon.'

'Nor,' added Mrs. Huston with light pathos, 'of the blessed state of matrimony.'

Mrs. Wylie drew forward a chair.

'Sit down,' she said hospitably, 'and warm yourselves. We will have some tea before you take your things off.'

'And now Alice,' she resumed, after seating herself in the softly lined cane chair near the literary table, 'tell me all ... you wish to tell me.'

'Oh,' replied the beautiful woman, removing her gloves daintily, 'there is not much to tell. Moreover, the story has not the merit even of novelty. The raw material is lamentably commonplace, and I am afraid I cannot make a very interesting thing of it. Wretched climate, horribly dull station, thirsty husband. _Voilà tout!_'

'To which, however,' suggested Mrs. Wylie with a peculiar intonation, 'might perhaps be added military society and Indian habits.'

The younger woman shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

'Oh no!' she exclaimed irresponsibly. 'But all that is a question of the past, and the present is important enough to require some attention.'

She extended her feet to the warmth of the fire, and contemplated her small boots with some satisfaction.

'Yes...?'

'I have bolted,' she said, replying to the inferred query, 'and he is in all probability after me.'

Mrs. Wylie turned aside the screen which she was holding between her face and the fire. Her intelligent eyes rested for a moment on the speaker's face, then she transferred her attention to Brenda, who stood near the mantelpiece with her two gloved hands resting on the marble. The girl was gazing down between her extended arms into the fire, and a warm glow nestled rosily round her face. The eyes were too sad for their years.

'I am very sorry to hear it,' said the widow with conviction.

'There was no alternative. I could not stand it any longer.'

'How did you manage it?' asked Mrs. Wylie quietly, almost too quietly.

'Oh, I got rid of some jewellery, and there was a Captain Markynter who was kind enough to get my ticket and see me off!'

A peculiar silence followed this cool remark. Mrs. Wylie sat quite still, holding the palm screen before her face. Brenda stood motionless as a statue. Mrs. Huston curved her white wrist, and looked compassionately at a small red mark made by the button of her glove. At length the uneasy pause was broken. Without moving, Brenda spoke in a cool, clear voice, almost monotonous.

'Alice,' she explained, 'is a great advocate for masculine assistance. She considers us totally incapable of managing our own affairs, and powerless to act for ourselves. She has been regretting all day that Theo should be away, and consequently beyond our call.'

Mrs. Huston laughed somewhat forcedly, and drew in her feet.

'It is like this,' she explained. 'If my husband catches me I think I shall probably kill myself! Theo is so strong and reliable, and somehow ... so _capable_, that I naturally thought of him in my emergency.'

'Naturally,' echoed Mrs. Wylie mechanically.

At that moment she was not thinking whether her monosyllabic remark was cruelly sarcastic or simply silly. Her whole mind was devoted to the study of Brenda's face, upon which the firelight glowed; but in the proud young features there was nothing legible--nothing beyond a somewhat anxious thoughtfulness.

'I think,' continued Mrs. Huston, 'that we may count on a week's start. My affectionate husband cannot be here before then.'

To this neither lady made reply. The servant came in, and in a few moments tea was served. Brenda presided over the little basket table, and prepared each cup with a foreknowledge of the several tastes. During this there was no word spoken. From the nonchalance of the ladies' manner one might easily have imagined that the younger couple had just come in from a long day's shopping.

'Have you,' asked the widow at length, as she stirred her tea placidly, 'thought of what you are doing?'

'Oh yes!' was the laughing rejoinder, in which, however, there was no mirth. 'Oh yes! I have thought, and thought, and thought, until the subject was thrashed out dry. There was nothing else to do but think, and read yellow-backed novels, all the voyage home.'

'Then,' murmured the widow, with gentle interrogation, 'this Captain Parminter did not come home with you?'

Mrs. Huston changed colour, and her lips moved slightly. She glanced towards Mrs. Wylie beneath her dark lashes, and answered with infinite self-possession:

'No! And his name is Markynter.'

The palm-leaf did not move. Presently, however, Mrs. Wylie laid it aside, and asked for some more tea.

'Well,' she said cheerily, 'I suppose we must make the best of a very bad bargain. What do you propose to do next?'

In the most natural and confiding way imaginable, Mrs. Huston looked up towards her sister, who was still standing. There was an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders.

'Brenda,' she answered, 'says that I must run away and hide in some small village, which is not exactly a cheerful prospect.'

'It would hardly do,' said Brenda, as if in defence of her own theory, 'to go down to Brighton and stay at the Bedford Hotel, for instance.'

'If,' added Mrs. Wylie in the same tone, 'you really want to avoid your husband, you must certainly hide; but I do not see what you can gain by such a proceeding. It can never be permanent, and you will soon get tired of chasing each other round England.'

'Perhaps he will get tired of it first.'

'If he does, what will your position be? Somewhat ambiguous, I imagine.'

'It cannot be worse than it is at present.'

'Oh yes,' replied the widow calmly. 'It can!'

She set her empty cup on the tray, and sat with her two hands clasped together on her lap. She had not come through fifty years of life, this placid lady, without learning something of the world's ways, and she recognised instantly what Alice Huston's position was. It was the old story which is told every day in all parts of the world, more especially, perhaps, in India--the wearisome tale of a mistaken marriage between a man of small intellect and a woman of less. If both husband and wife be busy, the one with his bread-winning, the other with her babies, such unions may be a near approach to animal happiness--no more can be hoped for. The very instincts of it are animal, and as such it is safe. But if one or both be idle, the result is simply 'hell.' No other expression can come near it.

Captain Huston's military duties were not such as occupied more than a few hours of the week, and during the rest of his existence he was actively idle. His mind was fallow; he was totally without resource, without occupation, without interest. There is no man on earth to beat the ordinary British military officer in downright futile idleness. The Spanish Custom-house official runs a close race with the Italian inn-keeper in this matter, but both enjoy their laziness, and are never bored. When our commissioned defender is naturally of an idle turn of mind, he is intensely bored; his existence is one long yawn, and the faculty of enjoyment dies a natural death within his soul. I can think of no more despicable sample of humanity than a man who cannot find himself something to do under all circumstances, and in all places; and surely no one can blame his Satanic majesty for a proverbial readiness to supply the deficiency from his own store of easy tasks.

If Alice Gilholme had searched through the entire army-list, she could scarcely have found a man less suitable to be her husband than Captain Huston. Petty, short-sighted jealousy on his part, vapid coquetry on hers, soon led to the inevitable end, and the result was thrown upon the hands of Brenda and Mrs. Wylie with easy nonchalance by the spoilt child of society.

It was no sudden disillusionment for Brenda, but merely one more wretched curtain torn aside to display the hideous reality of human existence and human selfishness. No thought of complaint entered the girl's head. With a pathetic silence she simply applied herself to the task set before her, with no great hope of reaching a satisfactory solution.

Before the three ladies had spoken further upon the subject chiefly occupying their thoughts, the drawing-room door was thrown open, and with studied grace William Hicks crossed the threshold.

The hat that he carried daintily in his left hand was not quite the same in contour as those worn by his contemporaries. To ensure this peculiarity, the artist was forced to send to Paris for his head-gear, where he paid a higher price and received an inferior article. But the distinction conferred by a unique hat is practically immeasurable and without price. Mr. Hicks' gloves were also out of the common; likewise his strangely-cut coat and misshapen continuations.

The _tout ensemble_ was undoubtedly pleasing. It must have been so, because he was obviously satisfied, and the artistic eye is the acknowledged arbitrator in matters of outward adornment, whether it be of mantelshelves or human forms divine.

The three ladies turned to greet him with that ready feminine smile which is ever there to lubricate matters when the social wheel may squeak or grate.

'Oh, bother!' whispered Brenda to herself, as she held out her hand.

'What?' exclaimed Hicks, with languid surprise and visibly deep pleasure. 'Mrs. Huston! I am delighted. When I left my studio and plunged into all this mist and gloom this afternoon, I never thought that both would be dispelled so suddenly.'

'Is it dispelled?' asked Mrs. Huston, glancing playfully towards the window.

'In here it is. But then,' he added, as he shook hands with Mrs. Wylie, 'there is never any mist or gloom in this room.'

With a pleasant laugh, as if deprecating his own folly, he turned to greet Brenda, who had stood near the mantelpiece with her gloved hand extended. Then his manner changed. Moreover, it was a distinctly advantageous alteration. One would have imagined, from the expression of his handsome but thoroughly weak face, that if there was anybody on earth whom he respected and admired, almost as much as he respected and admired William Hicks, that person was Brenda.

For her he had no neatly-turned pleasantry--no easy, infectious laugh.

'I did not know you were coming home, Mrs. Huston,' he said, turning again to that lady. Then his social training enabled him to detect unerringly that he might be on a dangerous trail, and with ready skill he turned aside. 'This is not the best time of year,' he continued, 'to return to your native shores. Personally I am rather disgusted with the shore in question, but we must surely hope for some more sunshine before we finally bid farewell to the orb of day for the winter. We poor artists are the chief sufferers, I am sure.'

'At all events,' put in Mrs. Wylie easily, 'you take it upon yourselves to grumble most. There is always something to displease you--the want of daylight, the scarcity of buyers, or the hopeless stupidity of the hanging-committee.'

'I think I confine my observations to the weather,' murmured Hicks, gazing sadly into the fire, towards which bourne Brenda's glance was also apparently directed, for she presently pressed the glowing coals down with the sole of her dainty boot, and quite lost the studied poesy of the artist's expression. 'I am, I think,' he continued humbly, 'independent of buyers and hanging-committees. I do not exhibit at Burlington House, and you know I never sell.'

'Indeed,' said Mrs. Huston, with slight interest, for the elder lady had turned away and was busy with her second cup of tea, which was almost cold.

'No,' answered Hicks, with the eagerness that comes to egotistical talkers when they are sure of a new listener. 'No. I don't care to enter into competition with men who depend more upon conventional training than natural talent. The Royal Academy is only a human institution, and, perhaps, it is only natural that their own students should be favoured before all others. I am not an Academy student, you know!'

Mrs. Huston contented herself with no more compromising affirmative than a gracious inclination of the head. It is just possible that, fresh from Ceylon, and consequently deplorably ignorant of artistic affairs as she was, the knowledge that William Hicks was not an Academy student had been denied her. This most lamentable fact, however, if it existed, she concealed with all the cleverness of her sex, and Hicks came to the conclusion, later on, that she must have known. He could not conceive it possible that a woman moving in intelligent circles, although in the outer rims thereof, and far from the living centre of Kensington, could be unaware of such an important item in his own personal history; this being no mean part of the artistic history of the nineteenth century.

Enveloped as he was, however, in conceit, he had the good taste to perceive that his bewildering presence was on this particular occasion liable to be considered bliss of an alloyed description, and in a short time he took his leave.

As he was moving round and saying good-bye, Mrs. Huston returned to the artistic question, from which they had never strayed very far. Indeed, art was somewhat apt to become a nauseating subject of conversation wherever William Hicks was allowed to influence matters to any extent.

'You have never sent pictures to the Academy, then?' she asked innocently.

'Oh no!' he answered with mild horror. 'Good-bye, so glad to see you home again.'

And then he vanished.

Mrs. Wylie watched his retreating figure with a pleasant and sociable expression on her intelligent face.

'That,' she was reflecting, 'is a lie!' She happened to know that Hicks had been refused a place on the walls of Burlington House.

If I were a ghost, or if I ever come to be one, I shall not take up the old, time-worn craft of frightening people during the stilly hours. Instead of such uninteresting work, I shall make a collection in a phantom pocket-book of asides and murmured reflections. From such, an interesting study of earthly existence, and more particularly of social life, might well be made.

On those phantom pages might, for instance, be inscribed the reflections of William Hicks as he made his way down the broad staircase of Suffolk Mansions.

'Whew!' was their tenor; 'ran right into it. She's left him; I could see that. Seems to me she's on the verge of a catastrophe--divorce or separation, or something like that.'

In the drawing-room Mrs. Wylie was saying reflectively to either or both of her companions:

'This is the beginning of it. That man will tell everyone he meets before going to bed to-night that you are home. He did not ask where your husband was, which shows that he wanted to know; consequently he will wonder over it, and will take care to tell everyone what he is wondering about.'