summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/28345.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to '28345.txt')
-rw-r--r--28345.txt23984
1 files changed, 23984 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/28345.txt b/28345.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fac0835
--- /dev/null
+++ b/28345.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,23984 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Somehow Good, by William de Morgan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Somehow Good
+
+Author: William de Morgan
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2009 [EBook #28345]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOMEHOW GOOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, C. St. Charleskindt and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SOMEHOW GOOD
+
+
+
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM DE MORGAN
+
+AUTHOR OF "JOSEPH VANCE"
+AND "ALICE-FOR-SHORT"
+
+
+
+
+[Publisher's Device: Ou polla, alla polu]
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+1908
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1908,
+
+BY
+
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+_Published February, 1908_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+ PAGE
+ A RETURNED TRAVELLER. NEMESIS IN LIVERMORE'S RENTS, 1808.
+ EXTRAVAGANCE, AND NO CASH. A PAWNED WATCH, AND A RESIDUUM
+ OF FOURPENCE 1
+
+
+ CHAPTER II.
+
+ A JOURNEY IN THE TWOPENNY TUBE. A VERY NICE GIRL, AND A
+ NEGOTIATION. AN EXPOSED WIRE, AND AN ELECTROCUTION 10
+
+
+ CHAPTER III.
+
+ KRAKATOA VILLA, AND HOW THE ELECTROCUTED TRAVELLER WENT
+ THERE IN A CAB. A CURIOUS WELCOME TO A PERFECT STRANGER.
+ THE STRANGER'S LABEL. A CANCELLED MEMORY. BACK LIKE A BAD
+ SHILLING 16
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV.
+
+ HOW THE STRANGER STOPPED ON AT KRAKATOA VILLA. OF THE FREAKS
+ OF AN EXTINGUISHED MEMORY. OF HOW THE STRANGER GOT A GOOD
+ APPOINTMENT, BUT NONE COULD SAY WHO HE WAS, NOR WHENCE 35
+
+
+ CHAPTER V.
+
+ THE CHRISTMAS AFTER. OF THE CHURCH OF ST. SATISFAX, AND A
+ YOUNG IDIOT WHO CAME THERE 44
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI.
+
+ OF BOXING DAY MORNING AT KRAKATOA VILLA, AND WHAT OBSERVANT
+ CREATURES FOSSILS ARE 53
+
+
+ CHAPTER VII.
+
+ CONCERNING PEOPLE'S PASTS, AND THE SEPARATION OF THE SHEEP
+ FROM THE GOATS. OF YET ANOTHER MAJOR, AND HOW HE GOSSIPPED
+ AT HURKARU CLUB. SOME TRUSTWORTHY INFORMATION ABOUT AN
+ ALLEGED DIVORCE 60
+
+
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ THE ANTECEDENTS OF ROSALIND NIGHTINGALE, SALLY'S MOTHER. HOW
+ BOTH CAME FROM INDIA TO ENGLAND, AND TOOK A VILLA ON A
+ REPAIRING LEASE. SOMEWHAT OF SALLY'S UPBRINGING. SOME MORE
+ ROPER GOSSIP, AND A CAT LET OUT OF A BAG. A PIECE OF
+ PRESENCE OF MIND 68
+
+
+ CHAPTER IX.
+
+ HOW THOSE GIRLS DO CHATTER OVER THEIR MUSIC! MRS.
+ NIGHTINGALE'S RESOLUTION. BUT, THE RISK! A HARD PART TO
+ PLAY. THERE WAS ONLY MAMMA FOR THE GIRL! THE GARDEN OF
+ LONG AGO 82
+
+
+ CHAPTER X.
+
+ THE DANGERS OF AN UNKNOWN PAST. NETTLE-GRASPING, AND A
+ RECURRENCE. WHO AMONG US COURTS CATECHISM ABOUT HIMSELF?
+ A UNIVERSALLY PROVIDED YOUNG MAN. HOW ABOUT THE POOR OLD
+ FURNITURE? 95
+
+
+ CHAPTER XI.
+
+ MORE GIRLS' CHATTER. SWEEPS AND DUSTMEN. HOW SALLY
+ DISILLUSIONED MR. BRADSHAW. OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN 105
+
+
+ CHAPTER XII.
+
+ WHAT FENWICK AND SALLY'S MOTHER HAD BEEN SAYING IN THE BACK
+ DRAWING-ROOM. OP. 999. BACK IN THAT OLD GARDEN AGAIN, AND
+ HOW GERRY COULD NOT SWIM. THE OLD TARTINI SONATA 113
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIII.
+
+ OF A SLEEPLESS NIGHT MRS. NIGHTINGALE HAD, AND HOW SALLY
+ WOKE UP AND TALKED 131
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIV.
+
+ HOW MILLAIS' "HUGUENOT" CAME OF A WALK IN THE BACK GARDEN.
+ AND HOW FENWICK VERY NEARLY KISSED SALLY 139
+
+
+ CHAPTER XV.
+
+ CONCERNING DR. VEREKER AND HIS MAMMA, WHO HAD KNOWN IT ALL
+ ALONG. HOW SALLY LUNCHED WITH THE SALES WILSONS, AND GOT
+ SPECULATING ABOUT HER FATHER. HOW TISHY LET OUT ABOUT
+ MAJOR ROPER. HOW THERE WAS A WEDDING 150
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVI.
+
+ OF A WEDDING-PARTY AND AN OLD MAN'S RETROSPECT. A HOPE OF
+ RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE HEREAFTER. CHARLEY'S AUNT, AND PYRAMUS
+ AND THISBE. HOW SALLY TRIED TO PUMP THE COLONEL AND GOT
+ HALF A BUCKETFUL 166
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVII.
+
+ SALLY'S LARK, AND HOW SHE TOOK HER MEDICAL ADVISER INTO HER
+ CONFIDENCE AFTER DIVINE SERVICE 178
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+ OF A SWIMMING-BATH, "ET PRAETEREA EXIGUUM" 186
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIX.
+
+ HOW FENWICK KNEW ALL ABOUT THE MASS. AND HOW BARON
+ KREUTZKAMMER RECOGNISED MR. HARRISSON. LONDON AGAIN! 191
+
+
+ CHAPTER XX.
+
+ MERE DAILY LIFE AT KRAKATOA. BUT SALLY IS QUITE FENWICK'S
+ DAUGHTER BY NOW. OF HER VIEWS ABOUT DR. VEREKER, AND OF
+ TISHY'S AUNT FRANCES 203
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXI.
+
+ OF JULIUS BRADSHAW'S INNER SOUL. AND OF THE HABERDASHER
+ BATTLE AT LADBROKE GROVE ROAD. ON CARPET-STRETCHING, AND
+ VACCINATION FROM THE CALF. AN AFTER-DINNER INTERVIEW, AND
+ GOOD RESOLUTIONS. EVASIVE TRAPPISTS 217
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXII.
+
+ IT WAS THAT MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S FAULT. A SATISFACTORY CHAP, GERRY!
+ A TELEGRAM AND A CLOUD. BRONCHITIS AND ASTHMA AND FOG.
+ SALLY GOES TO MAYFAIR. THE OLD SOLDIER HAS NOTICE TO QUIT 236
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ OF A FOG THAT WAS UP-TO-DATE, AND HOW A FIRE-ENGINE RELIEVED
+ SALLY FROM A BOY. HOW SALLY GOT IN AT A GENTLEMEN'S CLUB,
+ AND HOW VETERANS COULD RECOLLECT HER FATHER. BUT THEY KNOW
+ WHAT SHE CAN BE TOLD, AND WHAT SHE CAN'T. HOW MAJOR ROPER
+ WOULD GO OUT IN THE FOG 245
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+ HOW MAJOR ROPER MET THAT BOY, AND GOT UPSTAIRS AT BALL
+ STREET. AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN ASTHMA AND BRONCHITIS. HOW
+ SALLY PINIONED THE PURPLE VETERAN, AND THERE WAS NO BOY.
+ HOW THE GOVERNOR DONE HOARCKIN', AND GOT QUALIFIED FOR A
+ SUBJECT OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 260
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXV.
+
+ ABOUT SIX MONTHS, AND HOW A CABMAN SAW A GHOST. OF SALLY'S
+ AND THE DOCTOR'S "MODUS VIVENDI," AND THE SHOOSMITH
+ FAMILY. HOW SALLY MADE TEA FOR BUDDHA, AND HOW BUDDHA
+ FORESAW A STEPDAUGHTER. DELIRIUM TREMENS 283
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+ MORNING AT LADBROKE GROVE ROAD, AND FAMILY DISSENSION.
+ FACCIOLATI, AND A LEGACY. THE LAST CONCERT THIS SEASON.
+ THE GOODY WILL COME TO IGGULDEN'S. BUT FANCY PROSY IN LOVE! 300
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+ ST. SENNANS-ON-SEA. MISS GWENDOLEN ARKWRIGHT. WOULD ANY
+ OTHER CHILD HAVE BEEN SALLY? HOW MRS. IGGULDEN'S COUSIN
+ SOLOMON SURRENDERED HIS COUCH 310
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+ HOW SALLY PUT THE FINISHING TOUCH ON THE DOCTOR, WHO
+ COULDN'T SLEEP. OF THE GRAND DUKE OF HESSE-JUNKERSTADT.
+ AND OF AN INTERVIEW OVERHEARD 323
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+ OF A MARRIAGE BY SPECIAL LICENCE. ROSALIND'S COMPARISONS.
+ OF THE THREE BRIDESMAIDS, AND HOW THE BRIDE WAS A GOOD
+ SAILOR 331
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXX.
+
+ HOW A FORTNIGHT PASSED, AND THE HONEYMOONERS RETURNED.
+ OF A CHAT ON THE BEACH, AND MISS ARKWRIGHT'S SCIENTIFIC
+ EXPERIENCE. ALMOST THE LAST, LAST, LAST--MAN'S HEAD! 337
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+ HOW SALLY DIDN'T CONFESS ABOUT THE DOCTOR, AND JEREMIAH CAME
+ TO ST. SENNANS ONCE MORE 349
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+ HOW SALLY DIVED OFF THE BOAT, AND SHOCKED THE BEACH. OF THE
+ SENSITIVE DELICACY OF THE OCTOPUS. AND OF DR. EVERETT
+ GAYLER'S OPINIONS 357
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+ OF AN INTERMITTENT CURRENT AT THE PIER-END, AND OF DOLLY'S
+ FORTITUDE. HOW FENWICK PUT HIS HEAD IN THE JAWS OF THE
+ FUTURE UNAWARES, AND PROSY DIDN'T COME. HOW SALLY AND
+ HER STEP SAW PUNCH, AND OF A THIN END OF A FATAL WEDGE.
+ BUT ROSALIND SAW NO COMING CLOUD 366
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+ OF THE REV. SAMUEL HERRICK AND A SUNSET. THE WEDGE'S
+ PROGRESS. THE BARON AGAIN, AND THE FLY-WHEEL. HOW FENWICK
+ KNEW HIS NAME RIGHT, AND ROSALIND DIDN'T. HOW SALLY AND
+ HER MEDICAL ADVISER WERE NOT QUITE WET THROUGH. HOW HE
+ HAD MADE HER THE CONFIDANTE OF A LOVE-AFFAIR. OF A GOOD
+ OPENING IN SPECIALISM. MORE PROGRESS OF THE WEDGE. HOW
+ GERRY NEARLY MADE DINNER LATE 377
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+ HOW A STONE THROWN DROVE THE WEDGE FURTHER YET. OF A
+ TERRIBLE NIGHT IN A BIG GALE, AND A DOOR THAT SLAMMED.
+ THE WEDGE WELL IN 392
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXVI.
+
+ HOW FENWICK AND VEREKER WENT FOR A WALK, AND MORE MEMORIES
+ CAME BACK. HOW FENWICK WAS A MILLIONAIRE, OR THEREABOUTS.
+ OF A CLUE THAT KILLED ITSELF. HARRISSON'S AFFAIR NOW!
+ BOTHER THE MILLIONS! IS NOT LOVE BETTER THAN MONEY? ONLY
+ FENWICK'S NAME WASN'T HARRISSON NEITHER 399
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXVII.
+
+ OF THE DOCTOR'S CAUTIOUS RESERVE, AND MRS. FENWICK'S STRONG
+ COMMON-SENSE. AND OF A LADY AT BUDA-PESTH. HOW HARRISSON
+ WAS ONLY PAST FORGOTTEN NEWSPAPERS TO DR. VEREKER. OF THE
+ OCTOPUS'S PULSE. HOW THE HABERDASHER'S BRIDE WOULD TRY ON
+ AT TWO GUAS. A WEEK, AND OF A PLEASANT WALK BACK FROM THE
+ RAILWAY STATION 416
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+
+ OF AN EXPEDITION AGAINST A GOODY, AND THE WALK BACK TO
+ LOBJOIT'S. AND THE WALK BACK AGAIN TO IGGULDEN'S. HOW
+ FENWICK TOOK VEREKER'S CONFIDENCE BY STORM. OF A COLLIER
+ THAT PUT TO SEA. SUCCESSFUL AMBUSCADE OF THE OCTOPUS.
+ PROVISIONAL EQUILIBRIUM OF FENWICK'S MIND. WHY BOTHER
+ ABOUT HORACE? WHY NOT ABOUT PICKWICK JUST AS MUCH? THE
+ KITTEN WASN'T THERE--CERTAINLY NOT! 431
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+ HOW MEMORY CREPT BACK AND BACK, AND FENWICK KEPT HIS OWN
+ COUNSEL. ROSALIND NEED NEVER KNOW IT. OF A JOLLY BIG BLOB
+ OF MELTED CANDLE, AND SALLY'S HALF-BROTHER. OF FENWICK'S
+ IMPROVED GOOD SPIRITS 448
+
+
+ CHAPTER XL.
+
+ BATHING WEATHER AGAIN, AND A LETTER FROM TISHY BRADSHAW. THE
+ TRIUMPH OF ORPHEUS. BUT WAS IT EURYDICE OR THE LITTLE
+ BATTERY? THE REV. MR. HERRICK. OF A REVERIE UNDER A
+ BATHING-MACHINE, AND OF GWENDOLEN'S MAMMA'S CONNECTING-LINK.
+ OF DR. CONRAD'S MAMMA'S DONKEY-CHAIR, AND HIS GREAT-AUNT
+ ELIZA. HOW SALLY AND HE STARTED FOR THEIR LAST WALK AT
+ ST. SENNANS 457
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLI.
+
+ OF LOVE, CONSIDERED AS A THUNDERSTORM, AND OF AGUR, THE SON
+ OF JAKEH (PROV. XXX.). OF A COUNTRY WALK AND A JUDICIOUSLY
+ RESTORED CHURCH. OF TWO CLASPED HANDS, AND THEIR
+ CONSEQUENCES. NOTHING SO VERY REMARKABLE AFTER ALL! 471
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLII.
+
+ OF A RECURRENCE FROM "AS YOU LIKE IT," AND HOW FENWICK
+ DIDN'T. WHY A SAILOR WOULD NOT LEARN TO SWIM. THE BARON
+ AGAIN. OF A CUTTLE-FISH AND HIS SQUIRT. OF THE POWER OF
+ _A PRIORI_ REASONING. OF SALLY'S CONFESSION, AND HOW
+ FENWICK WENT TO A FIRST-CLASS HOTEL 489
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+ OF AN OBSERVANT AND THOUGHTFUL, BUT SNIFFY, WAITER; AND HOW
+ HE OPENED A NEW BOTTLE OF COGNAC. HOW THE BARON SAW
+ FENWICK HOME, WITHOUT HIS HAT. AN OLD MEMORY FROM
+ ROSALIND'S PAST AND HIS. AND THEN FACE TO FACE WITH THE
+ WHOLE. SLEEP UPON IT! BUT WHAT BECAME OF HIS HORRIBLE BABY? 498
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+ OF A CONTRACT JOB FOR REPAIRS. HOW FENWICK HAD ANOTHER
+ SLEEPLESS NIGHT AFTER ALL. WHICH IS WHICH, NOW OR TWENTY
+ ODD YEARS AGO? HOW SALLY FOLLOWED JEREMIAH OUT. WHAT A LOT
+ OF TALK ABOUT A LIFE-BELT! 513
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLV.
+
+ OF CONRAD VEREKER'S REVISION OF PARADISE, AND OF FENWICK'S
+ HIGH FEVER. OF AN ENGLISH OFFICER WHO WAVERED AT BOMBAY,
+ AND OF FENWICK'S SURPRISE-BATH IN THE BRITISH CHANNEL. WHY
+ HE DID NOT SINK. THE "ELLEN JANE" OF ST. SENNANS. ONLY
+ SALLY IS IN THE WATER STILL. MORE BOATS. FOUND! 524
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+ AN ERRAND IN VAIN, AND HOW DR. CONRAD CAME TO KNOW.
+ CONCERNING LLOYD'S COFFEE-HOUSE, AND THE BATTLE OF
+ CAMPERDOWN. MARSHALL HALL'S SYSTEM AND SILVESTER'S. SOCIAL
+ DISADVANTAGES. A CHAT WITH A CENTENARIAN, AND HOW ROSALIND
+ CAME TO KNOW. THOMAS LOCOCK OF ROCHESTER. ONE O'CLOCK! 531
+
+
+ CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+ WAS IT THE LITTLE GALVANIC BATTERY? THE LAST CHAPTER RETOLD
+ BY THE PRESS. A PROPER RAILING. BUT THEY _WEREN'T_ DROWNED.
+ WHAT'S THE FUSS? MASTER CHANCELLORSHIP APPEARS AND VANISHES.
+ ELECTUARY OF ST. SENNA. AT GEORGIANA TERRACE. A LETTER FROM
+ SALLY. ANOTHER FROM CONRAD. EVERYTHING VANISHES! 554
+
+
+
+
+SOMEHOW GOOD
+
+
+
+
+SOMEHOW GOOD
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A RETURNED TRAVELLER. NEMESIS IN LIVERMORE'S RENTS, 1808. EXTRAVAGANCE,
+ AND NO CASH. A PAWNED WATCH, AND A RESIDUUM OF FOURPENCE
+
+
+An exceptionally well-built man in a blue serge suit walked into a
+bank in the City, and, handing his card across the counter, asked if
+credit had been wired for him from New York. The clerk to whom he
+spoke would inquire.
+
+As he leaned on the counter, waiting for the reply, his appearance was
+that of a man just off a sea voyage, wearing a suit of clothes well
+knocked about in a short time, but quite untainted by London dirt. His
+get-up conveyed no information about his social position or means. His
+garments had been made for him; that was all that could be said. That
+is something to know. But it leaves the question open whether their
+wearer is really only a person in decent circumstances--_one_ decent
+circumstance, at any rate--or a Duke.
+
+The trustworthy young gentleman in spectacles who came back from an
+authority in the bush to tell him that no credit had been wired so
+far, did not seem to find any difficulty in affecting confidence that
+the ultimate advent of this wire was an intrinsic certainty, like
+the post. Scarcely, perhaps, the respectable confidence he would have
+shown to a real silk hat--for the applicant's was mere soft felt,
+though it looked new, for that matter--and a real clean shirt, one
+inclusive of its own collar and cuffs. Our friend's answered this
+description; but then, it was blue. However, the confidence would
+have wavered under an independent collar and wristbands. Cohesiveness
+in such a garment means that its wearer may be an original genius:
+compositeness may mean that he has to economize, like us.
+
+"Did you expect it so early as this?" says the trustworthy young
+gentleman, smiling sweetly through his spectacles. "It isn't ten
+o'clock yet." But he only says this to show his confidence, don't you
+see? Because his remark is in its nature meaningless, as there is
+no time of day telegrams have a penchant for. No doubt there is a
+time--perhaps even times and half-a-time--when you cannot send them.
+But there is no time when they may not arrive. Except the smallest
+hours of the morning, which are too small to count.
+
+"I don't think I did," replies the applicant. "I don't think I thought
+about it. I wired them yesterday from Liverpool, when I left the boat,
+say four o'clock."
+
+"Ah, then of course it's a little too early. It may not come till late
+in the afternoon. It depends on the load on the wires. Could you call
+in again--well, a little before our closing time?"
+
+"All right." The speaker took out a little purse or pocket-book, and
+looked in it. "I thought so," said he; "that was my last card." But
+the clerk had left it in the inner sanctum. He would get it, and
+disappeared to do so. When he came back with it, however, he found its
+owner had gone, saying never mind, it didn't matter.
+
+"Chap seems in a great hurry!" said he to his neighbour clerk. "What's
+he got that great big ring on his thumb for?" And the other replying:
+"Don't you know 'em--rheumatic rings?" he added: "Doesn't look a
+rheumatic customer, anyhow!" And then both of them pinned up cheques,
+and made double entries.
+
+The chap didn't seem in a great hurry as he sauntered away along
+Cornhill, looking in at the shop-windows. He gave the idea of a chap
+with a fine June day before him in London, with a plethora of choices
+of what to do and where to go. Also of being keenly interested in
+everything, like a chap that had not been in London for a long time.
+After watching the action of a noiseless new petroleum engine longer
+than its monotonous idea of life seemed to warrant, he told a hansom
+to take him to the Tower, for which service he paid a careless two
+shillings. The driver showed discipline, and concealed his emotions.
+_He_ wasn't going to let out that it was a double fare, and impair
+a fountain of wealth for other charioteers to come. Not he!
+
+The fare enjoyed himself evidently at the Tower. He saw everything
+he could be admitted to--the Beauchamp Tower for sixpence, and the
+Jewel-house for sixpence. And he gave uncalled-for gratuities. When
+he had thoroughly enjoyed all the dungeons and all the torture-relics,
+and all the memories of Harrison Ainsworth's romance, read in youth
+and never forgotten, he told another hansom to drive him across the
+Tower Bridge, and not go too fast.
+
+As he crossed the Bridge he looked at his watch. It was half-past
+twelve. He would have time to get back before half-past one to a
+restaurant he had made a mental note of near the Bank, and still to
+allow the cabby to drive on a bit through the transpontine and
+interesting regions of Rotherhithe and Cherry Garden Pier. It was so
+unlike anything he had been seeing lately. None the worse for the
+latter, in some respects. So, at least, thought the fare.
+
+For he had the good, or ill, fortune to strike on a rich vein of
+so-called life in a London slum. Shrieks of fury, terror, pain
+were coming out of an archway that led, said an inscription, into
+Livermore's Rents, 1808. Public opinion, outside those Rents, ascribed
+them to the fact that Salter had been drinking. He was on to that pore
+wife of his again, like last week. Half killed her, he did, then! But
+he was a bad man to deal with, and public opinion wouldn't go down
+that court if I was you.
+
+"But you're not, you see!" said the fare, who had sought this
+information. "You stop here, my lad, till I come back." This to the
+cabman, who sees him, not without misgivings about a source of income,
+plunge into the filthy and degraded throng that is filling the court,
+and elbow his way to the scene of excitement.
+
+"_He's_ all right!" said that cabby. "I'll put a tenner on him, any
+Sunday morning"--a figure of speech we cannot explain.
+
+From his elevation above the crowd he can see a good deal of what goes
+on, and guess the rest. Of what he hears, no phrase could be written
+without blanks few readers could fill in, and for the meaning of which
+no equivalent can even be hinted. The actual substance of the
+occurrence, that filters through the cries of panic and of some woman
+or child, or both, in agony, the brutal bellowings and threats of a
+predominant drunken lout, presumably Mr. Salter, the incessant appeals
+to God and Christ by terrified women, and the rhetorical use of the
+names of both by the men, with the frequent suggestion that some one
+else should go for the police--this actual substance may be drily
+stated thus: Mr. Salter, a plumber by trade, but at present out of
+work, had given way to ennui, and to relieve it had for two days past
+been beating and otherwise maltreating his daughter, aged fourteen,
+and had threatened the life of her mother for endeavouring to protect
+her. At the moment when he comes into this story (as a mere passing
+event we shall soon forget without regret) he is engaged in the
+fulfilment of a previous promise to his unhappy wife--a promise we
+cannot transcribe literally, because of the free employment of a
+popular adjective (supposed to be a corruption of "by Our Lady")
+before or after any part of speech whatever, as an expletive to drive
+home meaning to reluctant minds. It is an expression unwelcome on the
+drawing-room table. But, briefly, what Mr. Salter had so sworn to do
+was to twist his wife's nose off with his finger and thumb. And he
+did not seem unlikely to carry out his threat, as Livermore's tenantry
+lacked spirit or will to interpose, and did nothing but shriek in
+panic when feminine, and show discretion when masculine; mostly
+affecting indifference, and saying they warn't any good, them Salters.
+The result seemed likely to turn on whether the victim's back hair
+would endure the tension as a fulcrum, or would come rippin' out like
+so much grarse.
+
+"Let go of her!" half bellows, half shrieks her legal possessor, in
+answer to a peremptory summons. "Not for a swiney, soap-eatin'
+Apoarstle--not for a rotten parson's egg, like you. Not for a...."
+
+But the defiance is cut short by a blow like the kick of a horse, that
+lands fairly on the eye-socket with a cracking concussion that can be
+heard above the tumult, and is followed by a roar of delight from the
+male vermin, who see all the joys before them of battle unshared and
+dangerless--the joys bystanders feel in foemen worthy of each other's
+steel, and open to be made the subject of wagers.
+
+The fare rejects all offers to hold his coat, but throws his felt hat
+to a boy to hold. Self-elected seconds make a kind of show of getting
+a clear space. No idea of assisting in the suppression of a dangerous
+drunken savage seems to suggest itself--nothing but what is called
+"seeing fair." This is, to wit, letting him loose on even terms on the
+only man who has had the courage to intervene between him and his
+victim. Let us charitably suppose that this is done in the hope that
+it means prompt and tremendous punishment before the arrival of the
+police. The cabman sees enough from his raised perch to justify his
+anticipating this with confidence. He can just distinguish in the
+crowd Mr. Salter's first rush for revenge and its consequences. "He's
+got it!" is his comment.
+
+Then he hears the voice of his fare ring out clear in a lull--such
+a one as often comes in the tense excitement of a fight. "Give him a
+minute.... Now stick him up again!" and then is aware that Mr. Salter
+has been replaced on his legs, and is trying to get at his antagonist,
+and cannot. "He's playin' with him!" is his comment this time. But
+he does not play with him long, for a swift _finale_ comes to the
+performance, perhaps consequent on a cry that heralds a policeman.
+It causes a splendid excitement in that cabman, who gets as high as
+he can, to miss none of it. "That's your sort!" he shouts, quite wild
+with delight. "That's the style! Foller on! Foller on!" And then,
+subsiding into his seat with intense satisfaction, "Done his job,
+anyhow! Hope he'll be out of bed in a week!"--the last with an
+insincere affectation of sympathy for the defeated combatant.
+
+The fare comes quickly along the court and out at the entry, whose
+occupants the cabman flicks aside with his whip suggestively. "Let
+the gentleman come, can't you!" he shouts at them. They let him come.
+"Be off sharp!" he says to the cabby, who replies, "Right you are,
+governor!" and is off, sharp. Only just in time to avoid three
+policemen, who dive into Livermore's Rents, and possibly convey Mr.
+Salter to the nearest hospital. Of all that this story knows no more;
+Mr. Salter goes out of it.
+
+The fare, who seems very little discomposed, speaks through the little
+trap to his Jehu. "I never got my new hat again," he says. "You must
+drive back; there won't be any decent hatter here."
+
+"Ask your pardon, sir--the Bridge is histed. Vessel coming
+through--string of vessels with a tug-boat."
+
+"Oh, well, get back to the Bank--anywhere--the nearest way you can."
+And after a mysterious short cut through narrow ways that recall old
+London, some still paved with cobbles, past lofty wharves or
+warehouses daring men lean from the floors of at dizzy heights, and
+capture bales for, that seem afloat in the atmosphere till one detects
+the thread that holds them to their crane above--under unexplained
+rialtos and over inexplicable iron incidents in paving that ring
+suddenly and waggle underfoot--the cab finds its way across London
+Bridge, and back to a region where you can buy anything, from penny
+puzzles to shares in the power of Niagara, if you can pay for them.
+
+Our cab-fare, when he called out, "Hold hard here!" opposite to a
+promising hat-shop, seemed to be in doubt of being able to pay for
+something very much cheaper than Niagara. He took out his purse, still
+sitting in the cab, and found in it only a sovereign, apparently. He
+felt in his pockets. Nothing there beyond five shillings and some
+coppers. He could manage well enough--so his face and a slight nod
+seemed to say--till he went back to the Bank after lunch. And so, no
+doubt, he would have done had he been content with a common human
+billycock or bowler, like the former one, at four-and-six. But man is
+born to give way to temptation in shops. No doubt you have noticed the
+curious fact that when you go into a shop you always spend more--more
+than you mean to, more than you want to, more than you've got--one or
+other of them--but always _more_.
+
+Inside the shop, billycocks in tissue-paper came out of band-boxes,
+and then out of tissue-paper. But, short of eight shillings, they
+betrayed a plebeian nature, and lacked charm. Now, those beautiful
+white real panamas, at twenty-two shillings, were exactly the thing
+for this hot weather, especially the one the fare tried on. His rich
+brown hair, that wanted cutting, told well against the warm
+straw-white. He looked handsome in it, with those strong cheek-bones
+and bronzed throat Mr. Salter would have been so glad to get at. He
+paid for it, saying never mind the receipt, and then went out to pay
+the cabby, who respectfully hoped he didn't see him any the worse for
+that little affair over the water.
+
+"None the worse, thank you! Shan't be sorry for lunch, though." Then,
+as he stands with three shillings in his hand, waiting for a recipient
+hand to come down from above, he adds: "A very one-sided affair! Did
+you hear what he said about his daughter? That was why I finished him
+so thoroughly."
+
+"No, sir, I did _not_ hear it. But he was good for the gruel he's got,
+Lord bless you! without that ... I ask your pardon, sir--no! _Not_
+from a gentleman like you! Couldn't think of it! Couldn't _think_ of
+it!" And with a sudden whip-lash, and a curt hint to his horse, that
+cabman drove off unpaid. The other took out a pencil, and wrote the
+number of the cab on his blue wristband, close to a little red
+spot--Mr. Salter's blood probably. When he had done this he turned
+towards the restaurant he had taken note of. But he seemed embarrassed
+about finances--at least, about the three shillings the cabby had
+refused; for he kept them in his hand as if he didn't know what to do
+with them. He walked on until he came to a hidden haven of silence
+some plane-trees and a Church were enjoying unmolested, and noticing
+there a box with a slot, and the word "Contributions" on it, dropped
+the three shillings in without more ado, and passed on. But he had no
+intention of lunching on the small sum he had left.
+
+An inquiry of a City policeman guided him to a pawnbroker's shop. What
+would the pawnbroker lend him on that--his watch? Fifteen shillings
+would do quite well. That was his reply to an offer to advance that
+sum, if he was going to leave the chain as well. It was worth more,
+but it would be all safe till he came for it, at any rate. "You'll
+find it here, any time up to twelve months," said the pawnbroker, who
+also nodded after him knowingly as he left the shop. "Coming back for
+it in a week, of course! All of 'em are. Name of Smith, _as_ usual!
+Most of 'em are." Yet this man's honouring Mr. Smith with a comment
+looked as if he thought him unlike "most of 'em." _He_ never indulged
+in reflections on the ruck--be sure of that!
+
+Mr. Smith, if that was his name, didn't seem uneasy. He found his
+way to his restaurant and ordered a very good lunch and a bottle of
+Perrier-Jouet--not a half-bottle; he certainly was extravagant. He
+took his time over both, also a nap; then, waking, felt for his watch
+and remembered he had pawned it; looked at the clock and stretched
+himself, and called for his bill and paid it. Most likely the wire had
+come to the Bank by now; anyhow, there was no harm in walking round to
+see. If it wasn't there he would go back to the hotel at Kensington
+where he had left his luggage, and come back to-morrow. It was a
+bore. Perhaps they would let him have a cheque-book, and save his
+having to come again. Much of this is surmise, but a good deal was the
+substance of remarks made in fragments of soliloquy. Their maker gave
+the waiter sixpence and left the restaurant with three shillings in
+his pocket, lighting a cigar as he walked out into the street.
+
+He kept to the narrow ways and little courts, wondering at the odd
+corners Time seems to have forgotten about, and Change to have
+deserted as unworthy of her notice; every door of every house an
+extract from a commercial directory, mixed and made unalphabetical by
+the extractor; every square foot of flooring wanted for Negotiation to
+stand upon, and Transactions to be carried out over. No room here for
+anything else, thought the smoker, as, after a quarter of an hour's
+saunter, he threw away the end of his cigar. But his conclusion was
+premature. For lo and behold!--there, in a strange little wedge-shaped
+corner, of all things in the world, _a barber's shop_; maybe a relic
+of the days of Ben Jonson or earlier--how could a mere loafer tell?
+Anyhow, his hair wanted cutting sufficiently to give him an excuse to
+see the old place inside. He went in and had his hair cut--but under
+special reservation; not too much! The hairdresser was compliant; but,
+said he, regretfully: "You do your 'ed, sir, less than justice." Its
+owner took his residuum of change from his pocket, and carelessly
+spent all but a few coppers on professional remuneration and a large
+bottle of eau-de-Cologne. Perhaps the reflection that he could cab all
+the way back to the hotel had something to do with this easy-going way
+of courting an empty pocket.
+
+When he got to the Bank another young gentleman, with no spectacles
+this time, said _he_ didn't know if any credit was wired. He was very
+preoccupied, pinning up cheques and initialling some important
+customer's paying-in book. But _he_ would inquire in a moment, if you
+would wait. And did so, with no result; merely expression of abstract
+certainty that it was sure to come. There was still an hour--over an
+hour--before closing time, said he to a bag with five pounds of silver
+in it, unsympathetically. If you could make it convenient to look in
+in an hour, probably we should have received it. The person addressed
+but not looked at might do so--wouldn't commit himself--and went away.
+
+The question seemed to be how to while away that hour. Well!--there
+was the Twopenny Tube. At that time it was new, and an excitement. Our
+friend had exactly fourpence in his pocket. That would take him to
+anywhere and back before the Bank closed. And also he could put some
+of that eau-de-Cologne on his face and hands. He had on him still a
+sense of the foulness of Livermore's Rents and wanted something to
+counteract it. Eau-de-Cologne is a great sweetener.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A JOURNEY IN THE TWOPENNY TUBE. A VERY NICE GIRL, AND A NEGOTIATION.
+ AN EXPOSED WIRE, AND AN ELECTROCUTION
+
+
+He took his fare in the Twopenny Tube. It was the last twopence but
+one that he had in his pocket. Something fascinated him in the idea of
+commanding, in exchange for that twopence, the power of alighting at
+any point between Cheapside and Shepherd's Bush. Which should it be?
+
+If he could only make up his mind to _not_ alighting at Chancery Lane,
+he would have two whole minutes for consideration. If British Museum
+he would have four. If Tottenham Court Road, six--and so on. For the
+time being he was a sort of monarch, in a small way, over Time and
+Space. He would go on to the Museum, at any rate.
+
+What little things life hangs on, sometimes! If he had foolishly got
+out at either Chancery Lane or British Museum, there either would have
+been no reason for writing this story; or, if written, it would have
+been quite different. For at the Museum Station a girl got into the
+carriage; and, passing him on her way to a central haven of rest, trod
+on his foot, with severity. It hurt, so palpably, that the girl begged
+his pardon. She was a nice girl, and sorry.
+
+He forgave her because she was a nice girl, with beautiful rows of
+teeth and merry eyebrows. He might have forgiven her if she had been
+a dowdy. But he liked forgiving those teeth, and those eyebrows.
+
+So when she sat down in the haven, close to his left shoulder, he
+wasn't sorry that his remark that _he_ ought to beg _her_ pardon,
+because it was all his fault for sticking out, overlapped her coming
+to an anchor. If it had been got through quicker, the incident would
+have been regarded as closed. As it was, the fag-end of it was
+unexhausted, and she didn't quite catch the whole. It was in no way
+unnatural that she should turn her head slightly, and say: "I beg
+your pardon." Absolute silence would have been almost discourteous,
+after plunging on to what might have been a bad corn.
+
+"I only meant it was my fault for jamming up the whole gangway."
+
+"Oh yes--but it was my fault all the same--for--for----"
+
+"Yes--I beg your pardon? You were going to say--for----?"
+
+"Well--I mean--for standing on it so long, then! If you had called
+out--but indeed I didn't think it was a foot. I thought it was
+something in the electricity."
+
+Two things were evident. One was that it was perfectly impossible to
+be stiff and stodgy over it, and not laugh out. The other, the obvious
+absurdity of imputing any sort of motive to the serene frankness and
+absolute candour of the speaker. Any sort of motive--"of _that_
+sort"--said he to himself, without further analysis. He threw himself
+into the laugh, without attempting any. It disposed of the discussion
+of the subject, but left matters so that stolid silence would have
+been priggish. It seemed to him that not to say another word would
+almost have amounted to an insinuation against the eyebrows and the
+teeth. He would say one--a most impersonal one.
+
+"Do they stop at Bond Street?"
+
+"Do you want to stop at Bond Street?"
+
+"Not at all. I don't care where I stop. I think I meant--is there
+a station at Bond Street?"
+
+"The station wasn't opened at first. But it's open now."
+
+What an irritating thing a conversation can be! Here was this one,
+just as one of its constituents was beginning to wish it to go on,
+must needs exhaust its subject and confess that artificial nourishment
+was needed to sustain it. And she--(for it was she, not he:--did you
+guess wrong?)--had begun to want to know, don't you see, why the man
+with the hair on the back of his browned hand and the big plain gold
+ring on his thumb did not care where he stopped. If he had had a
+holiday look about him she might have concluded that he was seeing
+London, and then what could be more natural than to break loose, as it
+were, in the Twopenny Tube? But in spite of his leisurely look, he had
+not in the least the seeming of a holiday-maker. His clothes were not
+right for the part. What he was could not be guessed without a clue,
+and the conversation had collapsed, clearly! It was irritating to be
+gravelled for lack of matter--and he was such a perfect stranger! The
+girl was a reader of Shakespeare, but she certainly didn't see her
+way to Rosalind's little expedient. "Even though my own name _is_
+Rosalind," said she to herself.
+
+It was the readiness and completeness with which the man dropped the
+subject, and recoiled into himself, that gave the girl courage to make
+an attempt to satisfy her curiosity. When a man harks back, palpably,
+on some preoccupation, after exchanging a laugh and an impersonal word
+or two with a girl who does not know him, it is the best confirmation
+possible of his previous good faith in seeming more fatherlike than
+manlike. Rosalind could risk it, surely. "Very likely he has a
+daughter my age," said she to herself. Then she saw an opening--the
+thumb-ring.
+
+"Do pray excuse me for asking, but do you find it does good? My
+mother was recommended to try one."
+
+"This ring? It hasn't done _me_ any good. But then, I have hardly
+anything the matter. I don't know about other people. I'm sorry I
+bought it, now. It cost four-and-sixpence, I think. I would sooner
+have the four-and-sixpence.... Yes, decidedly! I would sooner have
+the four-and-sixpence."
+
+"Can't you sell it?"
+
+"I don't believe I could get sixpence for it."
+
+"Do please excuse me--I mean, excuse the liberty I take--but I should
+so much like to--to...."
+
+"To buy it for sixpence? Certainly. Why not? Much better than paying
+four-and-six for a new one. Your mother _may_ find it do her good. I
+don't care about it, and I really have nothing the matter."
+
+He drew the ring off his thumb, and Rosalind took it from him. She
+slipped it on her finger, over her glove. Naturally it slipped off--a
+man's thumb-ring! She passed it up inside the glove-palm, through the
+little slot above the buttons. Then she got out her purse, and looked
+in to see what its resources were.
+
+"I have only got half-a-crown," said she. The man flushed slightly.
+Rosalind fancied he was angry, and had supposed she was offering
+beyond her bargain, which might have implied liberality, or
+benevolence, or something equally offensive. But it wasn't that at
+all.
+
+"I have no change," said he. "Never mind about the sixpence. Send me
+stamps. I'll give you my card." And then he recollected he had no
+card, and said so.
+
+"It doesn't matter being very exact," said she.
+
+"I have no money at all. Except twopence."
+
+Rosalind hesitated. This man must be very hard up, only he certainly
+did not give that impression. Still, "no money at all, except
+twopence!" Would it be safe to try to get the half-crown into his
+pocket? That was what she wanted to do, but felt she might easily
+blunder over it. If she was to achieve it, she must be quick, for the
+public within hearing was already feeling in its pocket, in order to
+oblige with change for half-a-crown. She _was_ quick.
+
+"_You_ send it _me_ in stamps," she said, pressing the coin on him.
+"Take it, and I'll get my card for the address. It will be
+one-and-eleven exactly, because of the postage. It ought to be a
+penny for stationery, too.... Oh, well! never mind, then...."
+
+She had got the card, and the man, demurring to the stationery
+suggestion, and, indeed, hesitating whether to take the coin at all,
+looked at the card with a little surprise on his face. He read it:
+
+ +------------------------------------+
+ | |
+ | MRS. NIGHTINGALE. |
+ | |
+ | MISS ROSALIND NIGHTINGALE. |
+ | |
+ | |
+ | KRAKATOA, GLENMOIRA ROAD, |
+ | |
+ | SHEPHERD'S BUSH, W. |
+ | |
+ +------------------------------------+
+
+"I'm not Mrs. Nightingale," said the girl. "That's my mother."
+
+"Oh no!" said he. "It wasn't that. It was only that I knew the name
+once--years ago."
+
+The link in the dialogue here was that she had thought the surprise
+was due to his crediting her with matrimony and a visiting-card
+daughter. She was just thinking could she legitimately inquire into
+the previous Nightingale, when he said some more of his own accord,
+and saved her the trouble.
+
+"Rosalind Nightingale was the name," said he. "Do you know any
+relation----"
+
+"Only my mother," answered the girl, surprised. "She's Rosalind, too,
+like me. I mean, _I'm_ Rosalind. I am always called Sally, though."
+
+The man was going to answer when, as luck would have it, the card
+slipped from his fingers and fluttered down. In pursuing it he missed
+the half-crown, which the young lady released, fancying he was about
+to take hold of it, and stooped to search for it where it had rolled
+under the seat.
+
+"How idiotic of me!" said he.
+
+"Next station Uxbridge Road," thus the guard proclaimed; and then,
+seeing the exploration that was going on after the half-crown, he
+added: "I should let it go at that, mister, if I was you."
+
+The man asked why?
+
+"There was a party tried that game last week. He's in the horspital
+now." This was portentous and enigmatical. The guard continued: "If a
+party gets electrocuted, it's no concern of the employees on the line.
+It lies between such parties and the Company. I shouldn't myself, if
+I was you! But it's between you and the Company. I wash _my_ hands."
+
+"If the wires are properly insulated"--this was from an important
+elderly gentleman, of a species invariable under the circumstances--"_if_
+the wires are properly insulated, there is not the slightest cause for
+apprehension of any sort or kind."
+
+"Very good!" said the guard gloomily. "Then all I say is, insoolate
+'em yourselves. Don't try to put it on me! Or else keep your hands
+well outside of the circuit." But the elderly gentleman was not ready
+to acquiesce in the conditions pointed at.
+
+"I repeat," said he, "that the protection of the public is, or ought
+to be, amply secured by the terms of the Company's charter. If any
+loophole exists for the escape of the electric current, all I can say
+is, the circumstances call for public inquiry. The safety of the
+public is the concern of the authorities."
+
+"Then," said the guard pointedly, "if I was the public, I should put
+my hands in my pocket, and not go fishing about for ambiguous property
+in corners. There!--what did I tell you? Now you'll say that was me,
+I suppose?"
+
+The thing that hadn't been the guard was a sudden crackle that leaped
+out in a blue flame under the seat where the man's hand was exploring
+for the half-crown. It was either that, or another like it, at the
+man's heel. Or both together. A little boy was intensely delighted,
+and wanted more of the same sort. The elderly gentleman turned purple
+with indignation, and would at once complain to the authorities. They
+would take the matter up, he doubted not. It was a disgrace, etc.,
+etc., etc.
+
+Rosalind, or Sally, Nightingale showed no alarm. Her merry eyebrows
+were as merry as ever, and her smile was as unconscious a frame to her
+pearly teeth as ever, when she turned to the mother of the delighted
+little boy and spoke.
+
+"There now! It's exactly like that when I comb my hair in very dry
+weather." And the good woman was able to confirm this from her own
+experience, narrating (with needless details) the strange phenomena
+attendant on the head of a young person in quite a good situation at
+Woollamses, and really almost a lady, stating several times what she
+had said to the young person, Miss Ada Taylor, and what answer she
+had received. She treated the matter entirely with reference to the
+bearings of the electric current on questions of social status.
+
+But the man did not move, remaining always with his arm under the
+seat. Rosalind, or Sally, thought he had run the half-crown home, but
+in some fixed corner from which detachment was for a moment difficult.
+Wondering why the moment should last so long, she spoke.
+
+"Have you got it?" said she.
+
+But the man spoke never a word, and remained quite still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+KRAKATOA VILLA, AND HOW THE ELECTROCUTED TRAVELLER WENT THERE IN A
+ CAB. A CURIOUS WELCOME TO A PERFECT STRANGER. THE STRANGER'S LABEL.
+ A CANCELLED MEMORY. BACK LIKE A BAD SHILLING
+
+
+Krakatoa was a semi-detached villa, a few minutes' walk from
+Shepherd's Bush Station. It looked like a showily dressed wife of a
+shabby husband; for the semi-detached other villa next door had been
+standing to let for years, and its compo front was in a state of
+decomposition from past frosts, and its paint was parched and thin
+in the glare of the present June sun, and peeling and dripping
+spiritlessly from the closed shutters among the dead flies behind
+the cracked panes of glass that had quite forgotten the meaning of
+whitening and water, and that wouldn't hack out easy by reason of
+the putty having gone 'ard. One knew at a glance that if the turncock
+was to come, see, and overcome the reluctance of the allotted
+cock-to-be-turned, the water would burst out at every pore of the
+service-pipes in that house, except the taps; and would know also
+that the adept who came to soften their hearts and handles would have
+to go back for his tools, and would be a very long time away.
+
+Krakatoa, on the other hand, was resplendent with stone-colour, and
+smelt strongly of it. And its door you could see through the glass of
+into the hall, when its shutters were not thumb-screwed up over the
+panes, was painted a green that staggered the reason, and smelt even
+more strongly than the stone-colour. And all the paint was so thick
+that the beadings on the door were dim memories, and all the execution
+on the sculptured goblets on pedestals flanking the steps in the front
+garden was as good as spoiled. And the paint simmered in the sun, and
+here and there it blistered and altogether suggested that Krakatoa,
+like St. Nicholas, might have halved its coats with the beggar next
+door--given him, suppose, one flat and one round coat. Also, that
+either the job had been 'urried, and not giv' proper time to dry, or
+that the summer had come too soon, and we should pay for it later on,
+you see if we didn't!
+
+The coatless and woe-begone villa next door had almost lost its name,
+so faded was the lettering on the gate-post that was putting out its
+bell-handle to the passer-by, even as the patient puts out his tongue
+to the doctor. But experts in palimpsests, if they had penetrated the
+superscriptions in chalk and pencil of idle authorship, would have
+found that it was The Retreat. Probably this would have been revealed
+even if the texts had been merely Bowdlerised with Indian-rubber or
+a sponge, because there were a good many objectionable passages.
+
+But The Retreat _was_ a retreat, and smelt strong of the Hermits, who
+were cats. Krakatoa was not a volcano, except so far as eruptions on
+the paint went. But then it had become Krakatoa through a mistake; for
+the four coats of paint at the end of the first seven years, as per
+agreement, having completely hidden the first name, Saratoga, and the
+builders' retention of it having been feeble--possibly even affected
+by newspaper posters, for it was not long after the date of the great
+eruption--the new name had crept in in the absence of those who could
+have corrected it, but had gone to Brighton to get out of the smell of
+the paint.
+
+When they returned, Mr. Prichard, the builder, though shocked and
+hurt at the discovery that the wrong name had been put up, was
+strongly opposed to any correction or alteration, especially as it
+would always show if altered back. You couldn't make a job of it; not
+to say a proper job. Besides, the names were morally the same, and
+it was absurd to allow a variation in the letters to impose on our
+imagination. The two names had been applied to very different
+turns-out abroad, certainly; but then they did all sorts of things
+abroad. If Saratoga, why not Krakatoa? Mr. Prichard was entrenched in
+a stronghold of total ignorance of literary matters, and his position,
+that mere differences of words ought not to tell upon a healthy mind,
+was difficult to shake, especially as he had the coign of vantage. He
+had only to remain inanimate, and what could a (presumably) widow lady
+with one small daughter do against him? So at the end of the first
+seven years, what had been Saratoga became Krakatoa, and remained so.
+
+And it was in the back garden of the again newly painted villa, seven
+years later, that the lady of the house, who was watering the garden
+in the cool of the afternoon, asked her excited daughter, who had just
+come home in a cab, what on earth could have prompted her to do such
+a mad thing, such a perfectly _insane_ thing! We shall see what it was
+immediately.
+
+"Oh, Sally, Sally!" exclaimed that young person's still young and very
+handsome mother. "What _will_ the child do next?"
+
+"Oh, mamma, mamma!" answers Sally, just on the edge of a burst of tears;
+"what _was_ I to do? What _could_ I do? It was all my fault from the
+beginning. You _know_ I couldn't leave him to be taken to the
+police-station, or the hospital, or----"
+
+"Yes, of course you could! Why not?"
+
+"And not know what became of him, or anything? Oh, mother!"
+
+"You silly child! Why on earth couldn't you leave him to the railway
+people?"
+
+"And run away and leave him alone? Oh, _mother_!"
+
+"But you don't even know his name."
+
+"Mamma, dear, how _should_ I know his name? Don't you see, it was just
+like this." And then Miss Sally Nightingale repeats, briefly and
+rapidly, for the second time, the circumstances of her interview in
+the railway-carriage and its tragic ending. Also their sequel on the
+railway platform, with the partial recovery of the stunned or
+stupefied man, his inability to speak plainly, the unsuccessful search
+in his pockets for something to identify him, and the final decision
+to put him in a cab and take him to the workhouse infirmary, pending
+discovery of his identity. The end of her story has a note of relief
+in it:
+
+"And it was then I saw Dr. Vereker on the platform."
+
+"Oh, you saw Dr. Vereker?"
+
+"Of course I did, and he came with me. He's always so kind, you know,
+and he knew the station people, so...."
+
+"Where is he now?"
+
+"Outside in the cab. He stopped to see after the man. We couldn't both
+come away, so I came to tell you."
+
+"You stupid chit! why couldn't you tell me at first? There, don't cry
+and be a goose!"
+
+But Sally disclaims all intention of crying. Her mother discards the
+watering-pot and an apron, and suppresses appearances of gardening;
+then goes quickly through the house, passes down the steps between
+the scarlet geraniums in the over-painted goblets, through the gate
+on which Saratoga ought to be, and Krakatoa is, written, and finds
+a four-wheeled cab awaiting developments. One of its occupants alights
+and meets her on the pavement. A rapid colloquy ensues in undertones,
+ending in the slightly raised voice of the young man, who is clearly
+Dr. Vereker.
+
+"Of course, you're perfectly right--perfectly right. But you'll have
+to make my peace with Miss Sally for me."
+
+"A chit of a girl like that! Fancy a responsible man like you letting
+himself be twisted round the finger of a young monkey. But you men are
+all alike."
+
+"Well, you know, really, what Miss Sally said was quite true--that it
+was only a step out of the way to call here. And she had got this idea
+that it was all her fault."
+
+"Was it?"
+
+"I can only go by what she says." The girl comes into the conversation
+through the gate. She may perhaps have stopped for a word or two with
+cook and a house-and-parlourmaid, who are deeply interested, in the
+rear.
+
+"It _was_ my fault," she said. "If it hadn't been for me, it would
+never have happened. Do see how he is now, Dr. Vereker."
+
+It is open to surmise that the first strong impulse of generosity
+having died down under the corrective of a mother, our young lady is
+gradually seeing her way to interposing Dr. Vereker as a buffer
+between herself and the subject of the conversation, for she does not
+go to the cab-door to look in at him. The doctor does. The mother
+holds as aloof as possible, not to get entangled into any obligations.
+
+"Get him away to the infirmary, or the station at once," she says.
+"That's the best thing to be done. They'll take care of him till his
+friends come to claim him. Of course, they'll come. They always do."
+The doctor seems to share this confidence, or affects to do so.
+
+"Sure to. His friends or his servants," says he. "But he can't give
+any account of himself yet. Of course, I don't know what he'll be able
+to do to-morrow morning."
+
+He resumes his place in the cab beside its occupant, who, except
+for an entire want of animation, looks much like what he did in the
+railway-carriage--the same strong-looking man with well-marked
+cheek-bones, very thick brown hair and bushy brows, a skin rather
+tanned, and a scar on the bridge of the nose; very strong hands with
+a tattoo-mark showing on the wrist and an abnormal crop of hair on the
+back, running on to the fingers, but flawed by a scar or two. Add to
+this the chief thing you would recollect him by, an Elizabethan beard,
+and you will have all the particulars about him that a navy-blue serge
+suit, with shirt to match, allows to be seen of him. But you will have
+an impression that could you see his skin beyond the sun-mark limit on
+his hands and neck, you would find it also tattooed. Yet you would not
+at once conclude he was a sailor; rather, your conclusion might go on
+other lines, but always assigning to him a rough adventurous outdoor
+life.
+
+When the doctor got into the cab and shut the door himself, he took
+too much for granted. He assumed the driver, without whom, if your
+horse has no ambition at all beyond tranquillity and an empty nosebag,
+your condition is that of one camping out; or as one in a ship moored
+alongside in dock, the kerbstone playing the part of the quay. Boys
+will then accumulate, and undervalue your appearance and belongings.
+And impossible persons, with no previous or subsequent existence, will
+endeavour to see their way to the establishment of a claim on you. And
+you will be rather grateful than otherwise that a policeman without
+active interests should accrue, and communicate to them the virus of
+dispersal, however long its incubation may be. You will then probably
+do as Dr. Vereker did, and resent the driver's disappearance. The
+boys, mysteriously in his, each other's, and the policeman's
+confidence (all to your exclusion), will be able to quicken his
+movements, and he will come trooping from the horizon, on or beyond
+which is Somebody's Entire.
+
+All this came to pass in due course, and the horse, deprived of his
+nosebag, returned to his professional obligations. But it was a shabby
+horse in a shabby cab, to which he imparted movement by falling
+forwards and saving himself just before he reached the ground. His
+reins were visibly made good with stout pack-thread, and he had a
+well-founded contempt for his whip, which seemed to come to an end
+too soon, and always to hit something wooden before it reached any
+sensitive part of his person. But he did get off at last, and showed
+that, as Force is a mode of motion, so Weakness is a mode of slowness,
+and one he took every advantage of.
+
+The mother and daughter stood looking after the vanishing label, that
+stated that the complication of inefficiencies in front of it was one
+of twelve thousand and odd--pray Heaven, more competent ones!--in the
+Metropolis, and had nearly turned to go into the house, when the very
+much younger sister (that might have been) addressed the very much,
+but not impossibly, older one thus:
+
+"Mamma, he said he knew somebody of our name!"
+
+"Well, Miss Fiddlestick!"--with an implication of what of that? Were
+there not plenty of Nightingales in the world? Miss Sally is perceptive
+about this.
+
+"Yes, but he said Rosalind."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"He didn't say where. That's all he said--Rosalind."
+
+As the two stand together watching the retreating cab we are able to
+see that our first impression of them, derived perhaps from their
+relative ages only, was an entirely false one as far as size went. The
+daughter is nearly as tall as her mother, and may end by being as big
+a woman when she has completely graduated, taken her degree, in
+womanhood. But for all that we, who have looked at both faces, know
+that when they turn round we shall see on the shoulders of the one
+youth, inexperience, frankness, and expectation of things to come; on
+those of the other a head that keeps all the mere physical freshness
+of the twenties, if not quite the bloom of the teens, but--expressed
+Heaven knows how!--experience, reserve, and retrospect on things that
+have been once and are not, and that we have no right to assume to be
+any concern of ours. Equally true of all faces of forty, do we
+understand you to say? Well, we don't know about that. It was all very
+strong in this face.
+
+We can look again, when they turn round. But they don't; for number
+twelve thousand and odd has come to a standstill, and its energumenon
+has come down off its box, and is "fiddlin' at something on the
+'orse's 'ed." So cook says, evidently not impressed with that cab. The
+doctor looks out and confers; then gets out and comes back towards the
+house. The girl and her mother walk to meet him.
+
+"Never saw such a four-wheeler in my life! The harness is tied up with
+string, and the rein's broken. The idiot says if he had a stout bit of
+whipcord, he could make it square." No sooner have the words passed
+the doctor's lips than Miss Sally is off on a whipcord quest.
+
+"I wish the child wouldn't always be in such a hurry," says her
+mother. "Now she won't know where to get it."
+
+She calls after her ineffectually. The doctor suggests that he shall
+follow with instructions. Yes, suppose he does? There is precisely the
+thing wanted in the left-hand drawer of the table in the hall--the
+drawer the handle comes off. This seems unpromising, but the doctor
+goes, and transmission of messages ensues, heard within the house.
+
+Left alone, Mrs. Nightingale, the elder Rosalind, seems reflective.
+"A funny thing, too!" she says aloud to herself. She is thinking,
+clearly, of how this man in the cab, who can't give any account of
+himself, once knew a Rosalind Nightingale.
+
+Probably the handle has come off the drawer, for they are a long time
+over that string. Curiosity has time to work, and has so much effect
+that the lady seems to determine that, after all, she would like to
+see the man. Now that the cab is so far from the door, even if she
+spoke to him, she would not stand committed to anything. It is all
+settled, arranged, ratified, that he shall go to the police-station,
+or the infirmary, "or somewhere."
+
+When the string, and Dr. Vereker, and Sally the daughter come out of
+the house, both exclaim. And the surprise they express is that the
+mother of the latter should have walked all the way after the cab,
+and should be talking to the man in it! It is not consistent with her
+previous attitude.
+
+"Now, isn't that like mamma?" says Sally. If so, why be so astonished
+at it?--is a question that suggests itself to her hearer. But
+self-confutation is not a disorder for his treatment. Besides, the
+doctor likes it, in this case. His own surprise at mamma's conduct is
+unqualified by any intimate acquaintance with her character. She may
+be inconsistency itself, for anything he knows.
+
+"Is she going to turn the cab round and bring him to the house, after
+all?" It looks like it.
+
+"I'm so glad," Sally replies to the doctor.
+
+"I hope you won't repent it in sackcloth and ashes."
+
+"I shan't. Why do you think I shall?"
+
+"How do you know you won't?"
+
+"You'll see!" Sally pinches her red lips tight over her two rows of
+pearls, and nods confirmation. Her dark eyes look merry under the
+merry eyebrows, and the lip-pinch makes a dimple on her chin--a dimple
+to remember her by. She is a taking young lady, there is no doubt of
+it. At least, the doctor has none.
+
+"Yes, Sally, it's all quite right." Thus her mother, arriving a little
+ahead of the returning cab. "Now, don't dispute with me, child, but do
+just as I tell you. We'll have him in the breakfast-room; there's
+fewer steps." She seems to have made up her mind so completely that
+neither of the others interposes a word. But she replies, moved by a
+brain-wave, to a question that stirred in the doctor's mind.
+
+"Oh yes; he has spoken. He spoke to me just now. I'll tell you presently.
+Now let's get him out. No, never mind calling cook. You take him on that
+side, doctor.... That's right!"
+
+And then the man, whose name we still do not know, found himself half
+supported, half standing alone, on the pavement in front of a little
+white eligible residence smelling of new paint. He did not the least
+know what had happened. He had only a vague impression that if some
+one or something, he couldn't say what, would only give up hindering
+him, he would find something he was looking for. But how could he
+find it if he didn't know what it was? And that he was quite in the
+dark about. The half-crown and the pretty girl who had given it to
+him, the train-guard and his cowardice about responsibility, the
+public-spirited gentleman, the railway-carriage itself, to say nothing
+of all the exciting experiences of the morning--all, all had vanished,
+leaving behind only the trace of the impulse to search. Nothing else!
+He stood looking bewildered, then spoke thickly.
+
+"I am giving trouble," said he. Then the two ladies and the gentleman,
+whom he saw dimly and did not know, looked at one another, each
+perhaps to see if one of the others would speak first. In the end the
+lady who was a woman nodded to the gentleman to speak, and then the
+lady who was a girl confirmed her by what was little more than an
+intention to nod, not quite unmixed with a mischievous enjoyment at
+the devolution of the duty of speech on the gentleman. It twinkled in
+her closed lips. But the gentleman didn't seem overwhelmed with
+embarrassment. He spoke as if he was used to things.
+
+"You have had an accident, sir.... On the railway.... In the Twopenny
+Tube.... Yes, you'll remember all about it presently.... Yes, I'm a
+doctor.... Yes, we want you to come in and sit down and rest till
+you're better.... No, it won't be a long job. _You'll_ soon come
+round.... What?... Oh no, no trouble at all! It's this lady's house,
+and she wants you to come in." The speaker seems to guess at the right
+meanings, as one guesses in the jaws of the telephone, perhaps with
+more confidence. But there was but little audible articulation on the
+other's part.
+
+He seemed not to want much support--chiefly guidance. He was taken
+down the half-dozen steps that flanked a grass slope down to a stone
+paving, and through a door under the more numerous steps he had
+escaped climbing, and into a breakfast-room flush with the kitchen,
+opening on a small garden at the back. There was the marriage of Queen
+Victoria and Prince Albert over the chimney-piece, and a tortoiseshell
+cat with a collar on the oilskin cover of a square table, who rose as
+though half resenting strange visitors; then, after stretching,
+decided on some haven less liable to disturbance, and went through the
+window to it without effort, emotion, or sound. There was a clock
+under a glass cover on the chimney-piece whose works you could see
+through, with a fascinating ratchet movement of perfect grace and
+punctuality. Also a vertical orange-yellow glass vase, twisted to a
+spiral, and full of spills. Also the leaning tower of Pisa, done small
+in alabaster. He could see all these things quite plainly, and but
+that his tongue seemed to have struck work, could have described them.
+But he could not make himself out, nor how and why he came to be there
+at all. Where ought he to have been, he asked himself? And, to his
+horror, he could not make that out either. Never mind. Patience was
+the word, clearly. Let him shut his eyes as he sat there, in the
+little breakfast-room, with the flies continually droning in the
+ceiling, and an especially large bluebottle busy in the window, who
+might just as easily have gone out and enjoyed the last hour of a long
+evening in a glorious sunshine, but who mysteriously preferred to beat
+himself for ever against a closed pane of glass, a self-constituted
+prisoner between it and a gauze blind--let him shut his eyes, and try
+to think out what it all meant, what it was all about.
+
+All that he was perfectly certain of, at that moment, was that he was
+awake, with a contused pain all over, and a very stiff left hand and
+foot. And that, knowing he had been insensible, he was striving hard
+to remember what something was that had happened just before he became
+insensible. He had nearly got it, once or twice. Yes, now he _had_ got
+it, surely! No, he hadn't. It was gone again.
+
+A mind that is struggling to remember some particular thing does not
+deal with other possibilities of oblivion. We all know the painful
+phenomenon of being perfectly aware what it is we are trying to
+remember, feeling constantly close to it, but always failing to grasp
+it. We know what it will sound like when we say it, what it will mean,
+where it was on the page we read it on. Oh dear yes!--quite plainly.
+The only thing we can't remember for the life of us is--what it _was_!
+
+And while we are making stupendous efforts to recapture some such
+thing, does it ever occur to any of us to ask if we may not be
+mistaken in our tacit assumption that we are quite certain to remember
+everything else as soon as we try? That, in fact, it may be our
+memory-faculty itself that is in fault and that we are only failing to
+recall one thing because at the moment it is that one sole thing, and
+no other, that we are trying our brains against.
+
+It was so in the pause of a few minutes in which this man we write of,
+left to himself and the ticking of the clock, and hearing, through the
+activity of the bluebottle and the monotony of the ceiling flies, the
+murmur of a distant conversation between his late companions, who for
+the moment had left him alone, tried in vain to recover his particular
+thread of memory, without any uneasiness about the innumerable skeins
+that made up the tissue of his record of a lifetime.
+
+When the young doctor returned, he found him still seated where he had
+left him, one hand over his eyes, the other on his knee. As he
+sat--for the doctor watched him from the door for a moment--he moved
+and replaced either hand at intervals, with implied distress in the
+movements. They gave the impression of constant attempt constantly
+baffled. The doctor, a shrewd-seeming young man with an attentive pale
+eye, and very fair hair, seemed to understand.
+
+"Let me recommend you to be quiet and rest. Be quite quiet. You will
+be all right when you have slept on it. Mrs. Nightingale--that's the
+lady you saw just now; this is her house--will see that you are
+properly taken care of."
+
+Then the man tried to speak; it was with an effort.
+
+"I wish to thank--I must thank----"
+
+"Never mind thanks yet. All in good time. Now, what do you think you
+can take--to eat or drink?"
+
+"Nothing--nothing to eat or drink."
+
+"Well, you know best. However, there's tea coming; perhaps you'll go
+so far as a cup of tea? You would be the better for it."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Rosalind junior, or Sally, slept in the back bedroom on the
+first-floor--that is to say, if we ignore the basement floor and call
+the one flush with the street-door step the ground-floor. We believe
+we are right in doing so. Rosalind senior, the mother, slept in the
+front one. It wasn't too late for tea, they had decided, and thereupon
+they had gone upstairs to revise and correct.
+
+After a certain amount of slopping and splashing in the back room,
+uncorroborated by any in the front, Sally called out to her mother, on
+the disjointed lines of talk in real life:
+
+"I like this soap! Have you a safety-pin?" Whereto her mother replied,
+speaking rather drowsily and perfunctorily:
+
+"Yes, but you must come and get it."
+
+"It's so nice and oily. It's not from Cattley's?"
+
+"Yes, it is."
+
+"I thought it was. Where's the pin?" At this point she came into her
+mother's room, covering her slightly _retrousse_ nose with her
+fresh-washed hands, to enjoy the aroma of Cattley's soap.
+
+"In the little pink saucer. Only don't mess my things about."
+
+"Headache, mammy dear?" For her mother was lying back on the bed, with
+her eyes closed. The speaker left her hands over her nostrils as she
+spoke, to do full justice to the soap, pausing an instant in her
+safety-pin raid for the answer:
+
+"I've been feeling the heat. It's nothing. You go down, and I'll
+come."
+
+"Have some eau-de-Cologne?" But, alas! there was no eau-de-Cologne.
+
+"Never mind. You go down, and I'll follow. I shall be all right
+after a cup of tea." And Sally, after an intricate movement with a
+safety-pin, an openwork lace cuff that has lost a button, and a white
+wrist, goes down three accelerandos of stair-lengths, with landing
+pauses, and ends with a dining-room door staccato. But she isn't long
+gone, for in two minutes the door reopens, and she comes upstairs as
+fast, nearly, as she went down. In her hand she carries, visibly,
+Johann Maria Farina.
+
+"Where on earth did you find that?" says her mother.
+
+"The man had it. Wasn't it funny? He heard me say to Dr. Vereker that
+I was so sorry I'd not been able to eau-de-Cologne your forehead, and
+he began speaking and couldn't get his words. Then he got this out of
+his pocket. I remember one of the men at the station said something
+about his having a bottle, but I thought he meant a pocket-flask. He
+looks the sort of man that would have a pocket-flask and earrings."
+
+Her mother doesn't seem to find this inexplicable, nor to need
+comment. Rather the contrary. Sally dabs her brow with eau-de-Cologne,
+beneficially, for she seems better, and says now go; she won't be
+above a couple of minutes. Nor is she, in the sense in which her
+statement has been accepted, for she comes downstairs within seven by
+the clock with the dutiful ratchet movement.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When she came within hearing of those in the room below, she heard
+a male voice that was not Dr. Vereker's. Yes, the man (whom we still
+cannot speak of by a name) was saying something--slowly, perhaps--but
+fairly articulately and intelligibly. She went very deliberately, and
+listened in the doorway. She looked very pale, and very interested--a
+face of fixed attention, of absorption in something she was irresolute
+about, rather than of doubt about what she heard; an expression rather
+out of proportion to the concurrent facts, as we know them.
+
+"What is so strange"--this is what the man was saying, in his slow
+way--"is that I could find words to tell you, if I could remember what
+it is I have to tell. But when I try to bring it back, my head fails.
+Tell me again, mademoiselle, about the railway-carriage." Sally
+wondered why she was mademoiselle, but recognised a tone of deference
+in his use of the word. She did as he asked her, slightly interrupting
+her narrative to make sure of getting the tea made right as she did
+so.
+
+"I trod on your foot, you know. (One, two, three spoonfuls.) Surely
+you must remember that? (Four, and a little one for the pot.)"
+
+"I have completely forgotten it."
+
+"Then I was sorry, and said I would have come off sooner if I had
+known it was a foot. You _must_ remember that?" The man half smiled as
+he shook a slow-disclaiming head--one that would have remembered so
+gladly, if it could. "Then," continues Sally, "I saw your thumb-ring
+for rheumatism."
+
+"My thumb-ring!" He presses his fingers over his closed eyes, as
+though to give Memory a better chance by shutting off the visible
+present, then withdraws them. "No, I remember no ring at all."
+
+"How extraordinary!"
+
+"I remember a violent concussion _somewhere_--I can't say where--and
+then finding myself in a cab, trying to speak to a lady whose face
+seemed familiar to me, but who she could be I had not the slightest
+idea. Then I tried to get out of the cab, and found I could not
+move--or hardly."
+
+"Look at mamma again! Here she is, come." For Mrs. Nightingale has
+come into the room, looking white. "Yes, mother dear, I have. Quite
+full up to the brim. Only it isn't ready to pour yet." This last
+concerns the tea.
+
+Mrs. Nightingale moves round behind the tea-maker, and comes full-face
+in front of her guest. One might have fancied that the hand that held
+the pocket-handkerchief that caused the smell of eau-de-Cologne that
+came in with her was tremulous. But then that very eau-de-Cologne was
+eloquent about the recent effect of the heat. Of course, she was a
+little upset. Nothing strikes either the doctor or Mademoiselle Sally
+as abnormal or extraordinary. The latter resumes:
+
+"Surely, sir! Oh, you must, you _must_ remember about the name
+Nightingale?"
+
+"This young gentleman said it just now. _Your_ name, madame?"
+
+"Certainly, my name," says the lady addressed. But Sally
+distinguishes:
+
+"Yes, but I didn't mean that. I meant when I took the ring from you,
+and was to pay for it. Sixpence. And you had no change for
+half-a-crown. And then I gave you my mother's card to send it to us
+here. One-and-elevenpence, because of the postage. Why, surely you can
+remember that!" She cannot bring herself to believe him. Dr. Vereker
+does, though, and tells him not to try recollecting; he will only put
+himself back. "Take the tea and wait a bit," is the doctor's advice.
+For Miss Sally is transmitting a cup of tea with studied equilibrium.
+He receives it absently, leaving it on the table.
+
+"I do not know if you will know what I mean," he says, "but I have
+a sort of feeling of--of being frightened; for I have been trying to
+remember things, and I find I can remember almost nothing. Perhaps
+I should say I cannot remember _at all_--can't do any recollecting,
+if you understand." Every one can understand--at least, each says so.
+Sally goes on, half _sotto voce_: "You can recollect your own name,
+I suppose?" She speaks half-way between soliloquy and dialogue. The
+doctor throws in counsel, aside, for precaution.
+
+"You'll only make matters worse, like that. Better leave him quite
+alone."
+
+But the man's hearing doesn't seem to have suffered, for he catches
+the remark about his name.
+
+"I can't tell," he says. "I am not so sure. Of course, I can't have
+forgotten my own name, because that's impossible. I will tell it you
+in a minute.... Oh dear!..."
+
+The young doctor seemed to disapprove highly of these efforts, and to
+wish to change the conversation. "Let it alone now," said he. "Only
+for a little. Would you kindly allow me to see your arm again?"
+
+"Let him drink his tea first." This is from Miss Sally, the
+tea-priestess. "Another cup?" But no; he won't take another cup,
+thanks.
+
+"Now let's have the coat off, and get another look at the arm; never
+mind apologizing." But the patient had not contemplated apology. It
+was the stiffness made him slow. However, he got his coat off, and
+drew the blue shirt off his left arm. He had a fine hand and arm, but
+the hand hung inanimate, and the fingers looked scorched. Dr. Vereker
+began feeling the arm at intervals all the way up, and asking each
+time questions about the degree of sensibility.
+
+"I couldn't say whether it's normal or not up there." So the patient
+testified. And Mrs. Nightingale, who was watching the examination
+intently, suggested trying the other arm in the same place for
+comparison.
+
+"You didn't see the other arm at the station, doctor?" she said.
+
+"Didn't I?"
+
+"I was asking."
+
+"Well, no. Now I come to think of it, I don't think I did. We'll have
+a look now, anyhow."
+
+"_You're_ a nice doctor!" This is from Miss Sally; a little
+confidential fling at the profession. She is no respecter of persons.
+Her mother would, no doubt, check her--a pert little monkey!--only she
+is absorbed in the examination.
+
+The doctor, as he ran back the right-arm sleeve, uttered an
+exclamation. "Why, my dear sir," cried he, "here we have it! What more
+can we want?"--and pointed at the arm. And Sally said, as though
+relieved: "He's got his name written on him plain enough, anyhow!" Her
+mother gave a sigh of relief, or something like it, and said, "Yes."
+The patient himself seemed quite as much perplexed as pleased at the
+discovery, saying only, in a subdued way: "It _must_ be my name." But
+he did not seem to accept at all readily the name tattooed on his arm:
+"A. Fenwick, 1878."
+
+"Whose name can it be if it is not yours?" said Mrs. Nightingale. She
+fixed her eyes on his face, as though to watch his effort of memory.
+"Try and think." But the doctor protested.
+
+"Don't do anything of the sort," said he. "It's very bad for him, Mrs.
+Nightingale. He _mustn't_ think. Just let him rest."
+
+The patient, however, could not resign himself without a struggle to
+this state of anonymous ambiguity. His bewilderment was painful to
+witness. "If it were my name," he said, speaking slowly and not very
+clearly, "surely it would bring back the first name. I try to recall
+the word, and the effort is painful, and doesn't succeed." His hostess
+seemed much interested, even to the extent of ignoring the doctor's
+injunctions.
+
+"Very curious! If you heard the name now, would you recollect it?"
+
+"I _wish_ you wouldn't try these experiments," says the doctor. "They
+won't do him _any_ good. _Rest's_ the thing."
+
+"I think I would rather try," says Fenwick, as we may now call him.
+"I will be quiet if I can get this right."
+
+Mrs. Nightingale begins repeating names that begin with A. "Alfred,
+Augustus, Arthur, Andrew, Algernon----"
+
+Fenwick's face brightens. "That's it!" says he. "Algernon. I knew it
+quite well all the time, of course. But I couldn't--couldn't....
+However, I don't feel that I shall make myself understood."
+
+"I can't make out," said Sally, "how you came to remember the bottle
+of eau-de-Cologne."
+
+"I did not remember it. I do not now. I mean, how it came to be in the
+pocket. I can remember nothing else that was there--would have been,
+that is. There is nothing else there now, except my cigar-case and
+a pocket-book with nothing much in it. I can tell nothing about my
+watch. A watch ought to be there."
+
+"There, there!" says the doctor; "you will remember it all presently.
+Do take my advice and be quiet, and sit still and don't talk."
+
+But half an hour or more after, although he had taken this advice,
+Fenwick remembered nothing, or professed to have remembered nothing.
+He seemed, however, much more collected, and except on the
+memory-point nearly normal.
+
+When the doctor, looking at his watch, referred to his obligation to
+keep another engagement, Fenwick rose, saying that he was now
+perfectly well able to walk, and he would intrude no longer on his
+hostesses' hospitality. This would have been perfectly reasonable, but
+for one thing. It had come out that his pockets were empty, and he was
+evidently quite without any definite plan as to what he should do
+next, or where he should go. He was only anxious to relieve his new
+friends of an encumbrance. He was evidently the sort of person on
+whom the character sat ill; one who would always be most at ease when
+shifting for himself; such a one as would reply to any doubt thrown on
+his power of doing so, that he had been in many a worse plight than
+this before. Yet you would hardly have classed him on that account as
+an adventurer, because that term implies unscrupulousness in the way
+one shifts for oneself. His face was a perfectly honourable one. It
+was a face whose strength did not interfere with its refinement, and
+there was a pleasant candour in the smile that covered it as he
+finally made ready to depart with the doctor. He should never, he
+said, know how to be grateful enough to madame and her daughter for
+their kindness to him. But when pressed on the point of where he
+intended to go, and how they should hear what had become of him, he
+answered vaguely. He was undecided, but, of course, he would write and
+tell them as they so kindly wished to hear of him. Would mademoiselle
+give him the address written down?
+
+They found themselves--at least, the doctor and Sally did--inferring,
+from his refreshed manner and his confidence about departing, that his
+memory was coming back, or would come back. It might have seemed
+needless inquisitiveness to press him with further questions. They
+left the point alone. After all, they had no more right to catechize
+him about himself than if he had been knocked down by a cart outside
+the door, and brought into the house unconscious--a thing which might
+quite well have happened.
+
+Mrs. Nightingale seemed very anxious he should not go away quite
+unprovided with money. She asked Dr. Vereker to pass him on a loan
+from her before he parted with him. He could post it back when it was
+quite convenient, so the doctor was to tell him. The doctor asked,
+Wasn't a sovereign a large order? But she seemed to think not.
+"Besides," said she, "it makes it certain we shall not lose sight of
+him. I'm not sure we ought to let him go at all," added she. She
+seemed very uneasy about it--almost exaggeratedly so, the doctor
+thought. But he was reassuring and confident, and she allowed his
+judgment to overrule hers. But he must bring him back without scruple
+if he saw reason to do so. He promised, and the two departed together,
+the gait and manner of Fenwick giving rise to no immediate
+apprehension.
+
+"How rum!" said Sally, when they had gone. "I never thought I should
+live to see a man electrocuted."
+
+"A man what?"
+
+"Well, half-electrocuted, then. I say, mother----"
+
+"What, dear?" She is looking very tired, and speaks absently. Sally
+makes the heat responsible again in her mind, and continues:
+
+"I don't believe his name's Algernon at all! It's Arthur, or Andrew,
+or something of that sort."
+
+"You're very wise, poppet. Why?"
+
+"Because you stopped such a long time after Algernon. It was like
+cheating at Spiritualism. You _must_ say the alphabet quite
+steady--A--B--C--D----" Sally sketches out the proper attitude for
+the impartial inquirer. "Or else you're an accomplice."
+
+"You're a puss! No, _his_ name's Algernon, right enough.... I mean,
+I've no doubt it's Algernon. Why shouldn't it be?"
+
+"No reason at all. Dr. Vereker's is Conrad, so, of course, there's no
+reason why his shouldn't be Algernon." Satisfactory and convincing! At
+least, the speaker thinks so, and is perfectly satisfied. Her mother
+doesn't quarrel with the decision.
+
+"Kitten!" she says suddenly. And then in reply to her daughter's,
+"What's up, mammy dear?" she suggests that they shall walk out in
+front--it is a quiet, retired sort of cul-de-sac road, ending in a
+fence done over with tar, with nails along the top like the letter
+_L_ upside down--in the cool. "It's quite delicious now the sun's
+gone down, and Martha can make supper another half-hour late." Agreed.
+
+The mother pauses as they reach the gate. "Who's that talking?" she
+asks, and listens.
+
+"Nobody. It's only the sparrows going to bed."
+
+"No, no; not that! Shish! be quiet! I'm sure I heard Dr. Vereker's
+voice----"
+
+"How could you? He's home by now."
+
+"Do be quiet, child!" She continues listening.
+
+"Why not look round the corner and see if it isn't him?"
+
+"Well, I was going to; only you and the sparrows make such a
+chattering.... There, I knew it would be that! Why doesn't he bring
+him back here, at once?" For at the end of the short road are Dr.
+Vereker and Fenwick, the latter with his hand on the top of a post,
+as though resting. They must have been there some minutes.
+
+"Fancy their having got no further than the fire-alarm!" says Sally,
+who takes account of her surroundings.
+
+"Of course, I ought never to have let him go." Thus her mother, with
+decision in her voice. "Come on, child!"
+
+She seems greatly relieved at the matter having settled itself--so
+Sally thinks, at least.
+
+"We got as far as this," Dr. Vereker says--rather meaninglessly, if
+you come to think of it. It is so very obvious.
+
+"And now," says Mrs. Nightingale, "how is he to be got back again?
+That's the question!" She seems not to have the smallest doubt about
+the question, but much about the answer. It is answered, however, with
+the assistance of the previous police-constable, who reappears like
+a ghost. And Mr. Fenwick is back again within the little white villa,
+much embarrassed at the trouble he is giving, but unable to indicate
+any other course. Clearly, it would never do to accept the only one
+he can suggest--that he should be left to himself, leaning on the
+fire-alarm, till the full use of his limbs should come back to him.
+
+Mrs. Nightingale, who is the person principally involved, seems quite
+content with the arrangement. The doctor, in his own mind, is rather
+puzzled at her ready acquiescence; but, then, the only suggestion he
+could make would be that he should do precisely the same good office
+himself to this victim of an electric current of a good deal too
+many volts--too many for private consumption--or cab him off to the
+police-station or the workhouse. For Mr. Fenwick continues quite
+unable to give any account of his past or his belongings, and can only
+look forward to recollecting himself, as it were, to-morrow morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HOW THE STRANGER STOPPED ON AT KRAKATOA VILLA. OF THE FREAKS OF AN
+ EXTINGUISHED MEMORY. OF HOW THE STRANGER GOT A GOOD APPOINTMENT,
+ BUT NONE COULD SAY WHO HE WAS, NOR WHENCE
+
+
+We must suppose that the personal impression produced by the man so
+strangely thrown on the hands of Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter was
+a pleasant one. For had the reverse been the case, the resources of
+civilisation for disposing of him elsewhere had not been exhausted
+when the decision was come to that he should remain where he was;
+till next morning, at any rate. The lady of the house--of course the
+principal factor in the solution of the problem--appeared, as we have
+seen, to have made up her mind on the subject. And probably her
+daughter had been enough influenced by the stranger's manner and
+appearance, even in the short period of the interview we have just
+described, to get rid of a feeling she had of self-reproach for her
+own rashness. We don't understand girls, but we ask this question of
+those who do: Is it possible that Miss Sally was impressed by the
+splendid arm with the name tattooed on it--an arm in which every
+muscle told as in a Greek statue, without infringing on its
+roundness--the arm of Theseus or Ilissus? Or was it the tone of his
+voice--a musical one enough? Or merely his generally handsome face
+and courteous manner?
+
+He remained that night at the house, but next day still remembered
+nothing. He wished to go on his way--destination not known; but
+_somewhere_--and would have done so had it not been for Mrs.
+Nightingale, whose opposition to his going was, thought Dr. Vereker,
+almost more decisive than the case called for. So he remained on, that
+day and the next, slowly regaining the use of his right hand. But his
+memory continued a blank; and though he was not unable to converse
+about passing events, he could not fix his attention, or only with
+a great effort. What was very annoying to Sally was that he was
+absolutely unable to account for his remark about her name and her
+mother's in the railway-carriage. He could not even remember making
+this. He could recall no reason why he should have made it, from any
+of the few things that came back to his mind now--hazily, like ghosts.
+Was he speaking the truth? Why not? Mrs. Nightingale asked. Why not
+forget that as readily as anything else?
+
+His distress at this inability to remember, to account for himself,
+to himself or any one else, was almost painful to witness. The only
+consolatory circumstance was that his use and knowledge of words
+remained intact; it was his memory of actual incidents and people
+in the past that was in fault. Definite effort to follow slight
+clues remaining in his mind ended in failure, or only served to
+show that their origin was traceable to literary fiction. But his
+language-faculty seemed perfectly in order. It came out that he spoke
+French fluently, and a little Spanish, but he was just as ready with
+German. It seemed as if he had been recently among French people, if
+one could judge from such things as his calling his hostess "Madame"
+when he recovered. These facts came to light in the course of next
+day, the second of his stay in the house. The favourable impression he
+had produced on Miss Sally did not diminish, and it seemed much easier
+and more natural to acquiesce in his remaining than to cast about for
+a new whereabouts to transfer him to. So his departure was
+deferred--for a day, at least, or perhaps until the room he occupied
+should be wanted for other purposes. The postponements on the days
+that followed were a natural sequence so long as there remained any
+doubt of his ability to shift for himself.
+
+But in about a month's time the effects of the nervous shock had
+nearly disappeared, and he had almost recovered the use of his
+hand--could, in fact, write easily. Besides, as long as he remained,
+it would be impossible for an old friend of Mrs. Nightingale's, who
+frequently stayed the night, when he came on an evening visit, to
+follow a custom which was in the winter almost invariable. In the
+summer it was less important; and as soon as this friend, an old
+military gentleman spoken of as "the Major," could be got to
+understand exactly what had taken place, he readily gave up his
+quarters at Krakatoa Villa, and returned to his own, at the top of
+a house in Ball Street, Mayfair.
+
+Nevertheless, the inevitable time came for looking Fenwick's future in
+the face. It was difficult, as he was unable to contribute a solution
+of the question, except by his readiness to go out and find work for
+himself, promising not to come back till he found it.
+
+"You'll see I shall come back to dinner," said he. "I shan't make you
+late."
+
+Sally asked him what sort of work he should look for.
+
+"I have a sort of inner conviction," he replied, "that I could do
+almost anything I turned my hand to. Probably it is only a diseased
+confidence bred of what you might call my artificial inexperience.
+Every sharp young man's _bona fide_ inexperience lands him in that
+delusion."
+
+"But you must have _some_ kind of preference for _something_, however
+much you forget."
+
+"If I were to choose, I think I should like horse-training.... Oh no,
+of course I can't recall the training of any specific horse. But I
+know I know all about it, for all that. I can feel the knowledge of it
+itching in my finger-ends. Yes--I could train horses. Fruit-farming
+would require capital."
+
+"Who said anything about fruit-farming?"
+
+Fenwick laughed aloud. It was a great big laugh, that made Rosalind,
+who was giving directions in the kitchen, just across the passage,
+call out to know what they were laughing at.
+
+"I'll be hanged if I know," said he, "_why_ I said fruit-farming--I
+must have had something to do with it. It's all very odd."
+
+"But the horses--the horses," said Sally, who did not want him to
+wander from the point. "How should you go about it? Should you walk
+into Tattersall's without a character, and ask for a place?"
+
+"Not a bit of it! I should saunter into Tat's' like a swell, and ask
+them if they couldn't find me a raw colt to try my hand on for a
+wager. Say I had laid a hundred I would quiet down the most vicious
+quadruped they could find in an hour."
+
+"But that would be fibs."
+
+"Oh no! I could do it. But I don't know why I know...."
+
+"I didn't mean that. I meant you wouldn't have laid the wager."
+
+"Yes, I should. I lay it you now! Come, Miss Sally!--a hundred pounds
+to a brass farthing I knock all the vice out of the worst beast they
+can find in an hour. I shouldn't say the wager had been accepted, you
+know."
+
+"Well, anyhow, I shan't accept it. You haven't got a hundred pounds
+to pay with. To be sure, I haven't got a brass farthing that I know
+of. It's as broad as it is long."
+
+"Yes, it's that," he replied musingly--"as broad as it is long. I
+_haven't_ got a hundred pounds, that I know of." He repeated this
+twice, becoming very absent and thoughtful.
+
+Sally felt apologetic for reminding him of his position, and
+immediately said so. She was evidently a girl quite incapable of any
+reserves or concealments. But she had mistaken his meaning.
+
+"No, no, dear Miss Sally," said he. "Not that--not that at all!
+I spoke like that because it all seemed so strange to me. Do you
+know?--of all the things I can't recollect, the one I can't recollect
+_most_--can you understand?--is ever being in want of money. I _must_
+have had plenty. I am sure of it."
+
+"I dare say you had. You'll recollect it all presently, and what
+a lark that will be!" Sally's ingenious optimism made matters very
+pleasant. She did not like to press the conversation on these lines,
+lest Mr. Fenwick should refer to a loan she knew her mother had made
+him; indeed, had it not been for this the poor man would have been
+hard put to it for clothes and other necessaries. All such little
+matters, which hardly concern the story, had been landed on a
+comfortable footing at the date of this conversation.
+
+But Mr. Fenwick did not lend himself to the agreeable anticipation of
+Sally's "lark." There was a pained distraction on his handsome face as
+he gave his head a great shake, tossing about the mass of brown hair,
+which was still something of a lion's mane, in spite of the recent
+ministrations of a hairdresser. He walked to the window-bay that
+looked out on the little garden, shaking and rubbing his head, and
+then came back to where he had been sitting--always as one wrestling
+with some painful half-memory he could not trace. Then he spoke again.
+
+"Whether the sort of flash that comes in my mind of writing my name
+in a cheque-book is really a recollection of doing so, or merely
+the knowledge that I _must_ have done so, I cannot tell. But it is
+disagreeable--thoroughly disagreeable--and _strange_ to the last
+degree. I cannot tell you how--how torturing it is, always to be
+compelled to stop on the threshold of an uncompleted recollection."
+
+"I have the idea, though, quite!" said Sally. "But of course one never
+remembers signing one's name, any particular time. One does it
+mechanically. So I don't wonder."
+
+"Yes! But the nasty part of the flash is that I always know that it is
+not _my_ name. Last time it came--just now this minute--it was a name
+like Harrington or Carrington. Oh dear!" He shook and rubbed his head
+again, with the old action.
+
+"Perhaps your name isn't Fenwick, but Harrington or Carrington?"
+
+"No! That cock won't fight. In a flash, I know it's not my _own_ name
+as I write it."
+
+"Oh, but I see!" Sally is triumphant. "You signed for a firm you
+belonged to, of course. People _do_ sign for firms, don't they?" added
+she, with misgivings about her own business capacity. But Mr. Fenwick
+did not accept this solution, and continued silent and depressed.
+
+The foregoing is one of many similar conversations between Fenwick
+and Sally, or her mother, or all three, during the term of his stay
+at Krakatoa Villa. They were less encouraged by the older lady, who
+counselled Fenwick to accept his oblivion passively, and await the
+natural return of his mental powers. They would all come in time, she
+said; and young Dr. Vereker, though his studious and responsible face
+grew still more studious and responsible as time went on, and the mind
+of this case continued a blank, still encouraged passivity, and spoke
+confidently--whatever he thought--of an early and complete recovery.
+
+When, in Fenwick's absence, Sally reported to Dr. Vereker and her
+mother the scheme for applying to "Tat's" for a wild horse to break
+in, the latter opposed and denounced it so strongly, on the ground of
+the danger of the experiment, that both Sally and the doctor promised
+to support her if Fenwick should broach the idea again. But when he
+did so, it was so clear that the disfavour Mrs. Nightingale showed for
+such a risky business would be sufficient to deter him from trying it
+that neither thought it necessary to say a word in her support; and
+the conversation went off into a discussion of how it came about that
+Fenwick should remember Tattersall's. But, said he, he did not
+remember Tattersall's even now. And yet hearing the name, he had
+automatically called it "Tat's." Many other instances showed that his
+power of imagery, in relation to the past, was paralysed, while his
+language-faculty remained intact, just as many fluent speakers and
+writers spell badly. Only it was an extreme case.
+
+A fortunate occurrence that happened at this time gave its quietus to
+the unpopular horse-breaking speculation. It happened that, as Mrs.
+Nightingale was shopping at a big "universal providing" stores not far
+away, one of the clerks had some difficulty in interpreting a French
+phrase in a letter just received from abroad. No one near him looked
+more likely to help than Mrs. Nightingale, but she could do nothing
+when applied to; although, she said, she had been taught French in her
+youth. But she felt certain Mr. Fenwick could be of use--at her house.
+French idiom was evidently unfamiliar in the neighbourhood, for the
+young gentleman from the office jumped at the opportunity. He went
+away with Mrs. Nightingale's card, inscribed with a message, and came
+back before she had done shopping (not that that means such a very
+short time), not only with an interpretation, but with an exhaustive
+draft of an answer in French, which she saw to be both skilful and
+scholarly. It was so much so that a fortnight later an inquiry came to
+know if Mr. Fenwick's services would be available for a firm in the
+City, which had applied to be universally provided with a man having
+exactly his attainments and no others. In less than a month he was
+installed in a responsible position as their foreign correspondent and
+in receipt of a very respectable salary. The rapidity of phrasing in
+this movement was abnormal--_prestissimo_, in fact, if we indulge our
+musical vocabulary. But the instrumentation would have seemed less
+surprising to Sally had she known the lengths her mother had gone in
+the proffer of a substantial guarantee for Fenwick's personal honesty.
+This seeming rashness did not transpire at the time; had it done so,
+it might have appeared unintelligible--to Sally, at any rate. She
+would not have been surprised at herself for backing the interests of
+a man nearly electrocuted over her half-crown, but why should her
+mother endorse her _protege_ so enthusiastically?
+
+It is perhaps hardly necessary for us to dwell on the unsuccessful
+attempts that were made to recover touch with other actors on the
+stage of Fenwick's vanished past. Advertisement--variously worded--in
+the second column of the "Times," three times a week for a month,
+produced no effect. Miss Sally frequently referred with satisfaction
+to the case of John Williams, reported among the Psychical Researches
+of the past years, in which a man who vanished in England was found
+years after carrying on a goods-store in Chicago under another name,
+with a new wife and family, having utterly forgotten the first half of
+his life and all his belongings. Her mother seemed only languidly
+interested in this illustration, and left the active discussion of the
+subject chiefly to Sally, who speculated endlessly on the whole of the
+story; without, however, throwing any fresh light on it--unless
+indeed, the Chicago man could be considered one. And the question
+naturally arose, as long as his case continued to hold out hopes of
+a sudden return of memory, and until we were certain his condition was
+chronic, why go to expense and court publicity? By the time he was
+safely installed in his situation at the wine-merchant's, the idea of
+a police-inquiry, application to the magistrates, and so forth, had
+become distasteful to all concerned, and to none more so than Fenwick
+himself.
+
+When Dr. Vereker, acting on his own account, and unknown to Mrs.
+Nightingale and Fenwick, made confidential reference to Scotland Yard,
+that Yard smiled cynically over the Chicago storekeeper, and expressed
+the opinion that probably Fenwick's game was a similar game, and that
+things of this sort were usually some game. The doctor observed that
+he knew without being told that nine such cases out of ten had human
+rascality at the bottom of them, but that he had consulted that Yard
+in the belief that this might be a tenth case. The Yard said very
+proper, and it would do its best, and no doubt did, but nothing was
+elucidated.
+
+It is just possible that had Mr. Fenwick communicated _every_ clue he
+found, down to the smallest trifle, Dr. Vereker might have been able
+to get at something through the Criminal Investigation Department.
+But it wasn't fair to Sherlock Holmes to keep anything back. Fenwick,
+knowing nothing of Vereker's inquiry, did so; for he had decided to
+say nothing about a certain pawn-ticket that was in the pocket of an
+otherwise empty purse or pocket-book, evidently just bought. He would,
+however, investigate it himself, and did so.
+
+It was quite three weeks, though, before he felt safe to go about
+alone to any place distant from the house, more especially when he
+did not know what the expedition would lead to. When at last he got
+to the pawnbroker's, he found that that gentleman at the counter did
+not recognise him, or said he did not. Fenwick, of course, could not
+ask the question: "Did I pawn this watch?" It would have seemed
+lunacy. But he framed a question that answered as well, to his
+thinking.
+
+"Would you very kindly tell me," he asked, dropping his voice,
+"whether the person that pawned this watch was at all like me--like
+a brother of mine, for instance?" Perhaps he was not a good hand at
+pretences, and the pawnbroker outclassed him easily.
+
+"No, sir," replied he, without looking to see; "that I most certainly
+can _not_ tell you." Fenwick was not convinced that this was true, but
+had to admit to himself that it might be. This man's life was one long
+record of an infinity of short loans, and its problem was the
+advancing of the smallest conceivable sums on the largest obtainable
+security. Why _should_ he recollect one drop in the ocean of needy
+applicants? The only answer Fenwick could give to this was based on
+his belief that he looked quite unlike the other customers. More
+knowledge would have shown him that there was not one of those
+customers, scarcely, but had a like belief. It is the common form of
+human thought among those who seek to have pawns broked. They are a
+class made up entirely of exceptions.
+
+Fenwick came away from the shop with the watch that _must have been_
+his. That was how he thought of it. As soon as he wore it again, it
+became _his_ watch, naturally. But he could remember nothing about it.
+And its recovery from the pawnbroker's he could not remember leaving
+it at became an absurd dream. Perhaps in Sherlock Holmes's hands it
+would have provided a valuable clue. Fenwick said nothing further
+about it; put it in a drawer until all inquiries about him had died
+into the past.
+
+Another little thing that might have helped was the cabman's number
+written on his wristband. But here Fate threw investigation off her
+guard. The ciphers were, as it chanced, 3,600; and an unfortunate
+shrewdness of Scotland Yard, when Dr. Vereker communicated this clue,
+spotted the date in it--the third day of the sixth month of 1900. So
+no one dreamed of the cabby, who could at least have shown where the
+hat was lost that might have had a name or address inside it, and
+where he left its owner in the end. And there was absolutely no clue
+to anything elsewhere among his clothes. The Panama hat might have
+been bought anywhere; the suit of blue serge was ticketless inside the
+collar, and the shirt unmarked--probably bought for the voyage only.
+Fenwick had succeeded in forgetting himself just at a moment when he
+was absolutely without a reminder. And it seemed there was nothing
+for it but to wait for the revival of memory.
+
+This, then, is how it came about that, within three months of his
+extraordinary accident, Mr. Fenwick was comfortably settled in an
+apartment within a few minutes' walk of Krakatoa Villa; and all the
+incidents of his original appearance were getting merged in the
+insoluble, and would soon, no doubt, under the influence of a steady
+ever-present new routine of life, be completely absorbed in the actual
+past.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CHRISTMAS AFTER. OF THE CHURCH OF ST. SATISFAX, AND A YOUNG IDIOT
+ WHO CAME THERE
+
+
+When one is called away in the middle of a street-fight, and misses
+seeing the end of it, how embittered one's existence is, and continues
+for some time after! Think what our friend the cabman would have felt
+had he missed the _denouement_! And when one finds oneself again
+on its site--if that is the correct expression--how one wishes one
+was not ashamed to inquire about its result from the permanent
+officials on the spot--the waterman attached to the cab-rank, the
+crossing-sweeper at the corner, the neolithographic artist who didn't
+really draw that half-mackerel himself, but is there all day long, for
+all that; or even the apothecary's shop over the way, on the chance
+that the casualties went or were taken there for treatment after the
+battle. One never does ask, because one is so proud; but if one did
+ask, one would probably find that oblivion had drawn a veil over the
+event, and that none of one's catechumens had heard speak of any such
+an occurrence, and that it must have been another street. Because, if
+it had 'a been there, they would have seen to a certainty. And the
+monotonous traffic rolls on, on, on; and the two counter-streams of
+creatures, each with a story, divide and subdivide over the spot where
+the underneath man's head sounded on the kerbstone, which took no
+notice at the time, and now seems to know less than ever about it.
+
+Are we, in thus moralising, merely taking the mean advantage the
+author is apt to imagine he has established over his reader when he
+ends off a chapter with a snap, and hopes the said reader will not
+dare to skip? No, we are not. We really mean something, and shall get
+to it in time. Let us only be clear what it is ourselves.
+
+It refers, at any rate, to the way in which the contents of Chapters
+I. and II. had become records of the past six months later, when the
+snow was on the ground four inches thick on Christmas morning--two
+inches, at least, having been last night's contribution--and made it
+all sweet and smooth all over so that there need be no unpleasantness.
+As Sally looked out of her mother's bedroom window towards the front
+through the Venetian blind, she saw the footprints of cats alone on
+the snow in the road, and of the milk alone along the pavement. For
+the milk had preferred to come by hand, rather than plough its
+tricycle through the unknown depths and drifts of Glenmoira Road, W.,
+to which it had found its way over tracks already palliated by the
+courage of the early 'bus--not plying for hire at that hour, but only
+seeking its equivalent of the _carceres_ of the Roman Coliseum, to
+inaugurate the carriage of twelve inside and fourteen out to many
+kinds of Divine Service early in the day, and one kind only of
+dinner-service late--the one folk eat too much pudding and mince-pie
+at, and have to take a dose after. During this early introductory
+movement of the 'bus its conductor sits inside like a lord, and
+classifies documents. But he has nothing to do with our story. Let us
+thank him for facilitating the milk, and dismiss him.
+
+"My gracious goodness me!" said Sally, when she saw the snow. She did
+not say it quite from the bottom of her heart, and as her own form of
+expression; but in inverted commas, as it were, the primary
+responsibility being cook's or Jane's. "You mustn't think of getting
+up, mother."
+
+"Oh, nonsense! I shall get up the minute the hot water comes."
+
+"You won't do any good by getting up. You had much better lie in bed.
+_I_ shouldn't get up, if I was you," etc., etc.
+
+"Oh, stuff! My rheumatism's better. Do you know, I really think the
+ring _has_ done it good. Dr. Vereker may laugh as much as he
+likes----"
+
+"Well, the proof of the pudding's in the eating. But wait till you
+see how thick the snow is. _Come--in!_" This is very staccato. Jane
+was knocking at the door with cans of really hot water this time.
+"I said come in before. Merry Christmas and happy New Year, Jane!...
+Oh, I say! What a dear little robin! He's such a little duck, I hope
+that cat won't get him!" And Sally, who is huddled up in a thick
+dressing-gown and is shivering, is so excited that she goes on
+looking through the blind, and the peep-hole she has had to make to
+see clear through the frosted pane, in spite of the deadly cold on the
+finger-tip she rubbed it with. Her mother felt interested, too, in the
+fate of the robin, but not to the extent of impairing her last two
+minutes in bed by admitting the slightest breath of cold air inside a
+well-considered fortress. She was really going to get up, though, that
+was flat! The fire would blaze directly, although at this moment it
+was blowing wood-smoke down Jane's throat, and making her choke.
+
+Directly was five or six minutes, but the fire did blaze up royally in
+the end. You see, it wasn't a slow-combustion-grate, and it burned too
+much fuel, and flared away the coal, and did all sorts of comfortable,
+uneconomical things. So did Jane, who had put in a whole bundle of
+wood.
+
+But now that the wood was past praying for, and Jane had departed,
+after thawing the hearts of two sponges, it was just as well to take
+advantage of the blaze while it lasted. And Mrs. Nightingale and her
+daughter, in the thickest available dressing-gowns, and pretending
+they were not taking baths only because the bath-room was thrown out
+of gear by the frost, took advantage of the said blaze to their
+heart's content and harked back--a good way back--on the conversation.
+
+"You never said 'Come in,' chick."
+
+"I _did_, mother! Well, if I didn't, at any rate, I always tell her
+not to knock. She is the stupidest girl. She _will_ knock!" Her mother
+doesn't press the point. There is no bad blood anywhere. Did not Sally
+wish the handmaiden a merry Christmas?
+
+"The cat didn't get the robin, Sally?"
+
+"Not he! The robin was too sharp by half. Such a little darling! But
+I was sorry for the cat."
+
+"Poor pussy! Not our pussy, was it?"
+
+"Oh no; it was that piebald Tom that lives in at the empty house next
+door."
+
+"I know. Horrible beast!"
+
+"Well, but just think of being out in the cold in this weather, with
+nothing to eat! Oo--oo--oogh!" Sally illustrates, with an intentional
+shudder. "I wonder who that is!"
+
+"I didn't hear any one."
+
+"You'll see, he'll ring directly. I know who it is; it's Mr. Fenwick
+come to say he can't come to-night. I heard the click of his skates.
+They've a sort of twinkly click, skates have, when they're swung by
+a strap. He'll go out and skate all day. He'll go to Wimbledon."
+
+The girl's hearing was quite correct. A ring came at the
+bell--Krakatoa had no knocker--and a short colloquy followed between
+Jane and the ringer. Then he departed, with his twinkly click and
+noiseless footstep on the snow, slamming the front gate. Jane was able
+to include a card he had left in a recrudescence or reinforcement of
+hot water. Sally takes the card and looks at it, and her mother says,
+"Well, Sally?" with a slight remonstrance against the unfairness of
+keeping back information after you have satisfied your own
+curiosity--a thing people are odious about, as we all know.
+
+"_He's_ coming all right," says Sally, looking at both sides of the
+card, and passing it on when she has quite done with it. Sally, we may
+mention, as it occurs to us at this moment,--though _why_ we have no
+idea,--means to have a double chin when she is five years older than
+her mother is now. At present it--the chin--is merely so much youthful
+roundness and softness, very white underneath. Her mother is quite of
+a different type. Her daughter's father must have had black hair, for
+Sally can make huge shining coils, or close plaits, very wide, out of
+her inheritance. Or it will assume the form of a bush, if indulged,
+till Sally is almost hidden under it, as the Bosjesman under his
+version of Birnam Wood, that he shoots his assegai from. But the
+mother's is brown, with a tinge of chestnut; going well with her eyes,
+which have a claret tone, or what is so called; but we believe people
+really mean pale old port when they say so. She has had--still has, we
+might say--a remarkably fine figure, and we don't feel the same faith
+in Miss Sally's. That young lassie will get described as plump some
+day, if she doesn't take care.
+
+But really it is a breach of confidence to get behind the scenes and
+describe two ladies in this way, when they are so very much in
+_deshabille_--have not even washed! We will look at them again when
+they have got their things on. However, they may go on talking now.
+The blaze has lost its splendour, and dressing cannot be indefinitely
+delayed. But they can and do talk from room to room, confident that
+cook and Jane are in the basement out of hearing.
+
+"We shall do nicely, kitten! Six at table. I'm glad Mr. Fenwick can
+come. Aren't you?"
+
+"Rather! Fancy having Dr. and Mrs. Vereker and the dear old fossil
+and nobody to help out!"
+
+"My dear! You say 'Dr. and Mrs. Vereker' as if he was a married man!"
+
+"Well--him and his mammy, then! He's good--but he's professional.
+Oh dear--his professional manner! You have to be forming square to
+receive cavalry every five minutes to prevent his writing you a
+prescription."
+
+"Ungrateful little monkey! You know the last he wrote you did you no
+end of good."
+
+"Yes, but I didn't ask him for it. He wrote it by force. I hate being
+hectored over and bullied. I say, mother!"
+
+"What, kitten?"
+
+"I hope, as Mr. Fenwick's coming, you'll wear your wedding-ring."
+
+"Wear _what_?"
+
+"Wear your wedding-ring. _His_ ring, you know! You know what I
+mean--the rheumatic one."
+
+"Of course I know perfectly well what you mean," says her mother,
+with a shade of impatience in her voice. "But why?"
+
+"Why? Because it gives him pleasure always to see it on your
+finger--he fancies it's doing good to the neuritis."
+
+"Perhaps it is."
+
+"Very well, then; why not wear it?"
+
+"Because it's so big, and comes off in the soup, and is a nuisance.
+And, then, he didn't give it to me, either. He was to have had a
+shilling for it."
+
+"But he never _did_ have it. And it wasn't a shilling. It was sixpence.
+And he says it's the only little return he's ever been able to make
+for what he calls our kindness."
+
+"I couldn't shovel him out into the street."
+
+"Put his wedding-ring on, mammy, to oblige me!"
+
+"Very well, chick--I don't mind." And so that point is settled. But
+something makes the daughter repeat, as she comes into her mother's
+room dry-towelling herself, "You're sure you don't mind, mammy?" to
+which the reply is, "No, no! _Why_ should I mind? It's all quite
+right," with a forced decision, equivalent to wavering, about it.
+Sally looks at her a moment in a pause of dry-towelling, and goes
+back to her room not quite convinced. Persons of the same blood,
+living constantly together, are sometimes quite embarrassed by their
+own brain-waves, and very often misled.
+
+Exigencies of teeth and hair cut the talk short about Mr. Fenwick. But
+he gets renewed at breakfast, and, in fact, goes on more or less until
+brought up short by the early service at St. Satisfax, when he is
+extinguished by a preliminary hymn. But not before his whole story,
+so far as is known, has been passed in review. So that an attentive
+listener might have gathered from their disjointed chat most of the
+particulars of his strange appearance on the scene, and of the
+incidents of the next few weeks, and their result in the foundation
+of what seemed likely to be a permanent friendship between himself and
+Krakatoa Villa, and what certainly was (all things considered) that most
+lucrative and lucky post in a good wine-merchant's house in the City.
+For Mr. Fenwick had nothing to recommend him but his address and
+capacity, brought into notice by an accidental concurrence of
+circumstances.
+
+It had been difficult to talk much about him to himself without
+seeming to wish to probe into his past life; and as Mrs. Nightingale
+impressed on Sally for the twentieth time, just as they arrived at
+St. Satisfax, they really knew nothing of it. How could they even know
+that this oblivion was altogether genuine? It might easily have been
+so at first, but who could say how much of his past had come back to
+him during the last six months? An unwelcome past, perhaps, and one
+he was glad to help Oblivion in extinguishing.
+
+As this was on the semi-circular path in front of the Saint's shrine,
+between two ramparts of swept-up snow, and on a corrective of
+cinder-grit, Sally ascribed this speculation to a disposition on her
+mother's part to preach, she having come, as it were, within the scope
+and atmosphere of a pending decalogue. Also, she thought the
+ostentatious way in which Mr. Fenwick had gone away to skate had
+something to do with it.
+
+But she was at all times conscious of a certain access of severity in
+her mother as she approached altars--rather beyond the common attitude
+of mind one ascribes to the bearer of a prayer-book when one doesn't
+mean to go to church oneself. (We are indebted for this piece of
+information to an intermittent church-goer; it is on a subject on
+which our own impressions have little value.) In the present case
+Sally _was_ going to church, so she had to account to herself for a
+_nuance_ in her mother's manner--after dwelling on the needlessness
+and inadvisability of pressing Mr. Fenwick as to his recollections--by
+ascribing it to the consciousness of some secularism elsewhere; and he
+was the nearest case of ungodliness to hand.
+
+"I wonder whether he believes anything at all!" said Sally, assuming
+the consecutiveness of her remark.
+
+"I don't see why he shouldn't.... Why should he disbelieve more
+than...? All I mean is, I don't know." The speaker ended abruptly; but
+then that may have been because they were at the church door. Possibly
+as a protest against having carried chat almost into the precinct,
+Mrs. Nightingale's preliminary burial of her face in her hands lasted
+a long time--in fact, Sally almost thought she had gone to sleep, and
+told her so afterwards. "Perhaps, though," she added, "it was me came
+up from under the bedclothes too soon." Then she thought her levity
+displeased her mother, and kissed her. But it wasn't that. She was
+thoughtful over something else.
+
+This time, in the church, it may be Sally noticed her mother's
+abstraction (or was it, perhaps, devotional tension?) less than she
+had done when her attention had been caught once or twice lately by
+a similar strained look. For Miss Sally had her eyes on a little
+gratifying incident of her own--a trifle that would already have
+appeared as an incident in her diary, had she kept one, somewhat
+thus:--"Saw that young idiot from Cattley's Stores again in church
+to-day, in a new scarlet necktie. I wonder whether it's me, or Miss
+Peplow that gollops, or the large Miss Baker." Which would have shown
+that she was not always a nun breathless with adoration during
+religious exercises. The fact is, Sally would have made a very poor
+St. Teresa indeed.
+
+The young idiot was the same young man who had brought the difficult
+French idiom to Krakatoa, while Mr. Fenwick was still without an
+anchorage of his own. Martha the cook, who admitted him, not feeling
+equal to the negotiation, had merely said--would he mind steppin' in
+the parlour, and she would send Miss Sally up? and had departed
+bearing Mrs. Nightingale's credential-card in a hand as free from
+grease as an apron so deeply committed could make it, and brought Miss
+Nightingale in from the garden, where she was gardening--possibly
+effectually, but what do we know? When you are gardening on a summer
+afternoon, you may look very fetching, if you are nineteen, and the
+right sex for the adjective. Miss Sally did, being both, and for our
+own part we think it was inconsiderate and thoughtless of cook. Sally
+was sprung upon that young man like a torpedo on a ship with no guards
+out, saying with fascinating geniality through a smile (as one
+interests oneself in a civility that means nothing) that Mr. Fenwick
+had just gone out, and she didn't know when he would be back. But why
+not ask Mrs. Prince at the school, opposite St. Satisfax, where we
+went to church; she was French, and would be sure to know what it
+meant. _She_ wouldn't mind! "Say I sent you." And the youth, whom the
+torpedo had struck amidships, was just departing, conscious of
+reluctance, when Mr. Fenwick appeared, having come back for his
+umbrella.
+
+Sally played quite fair. She didn't hang about as she might have done,
+to rub her pearly teeth and merry eyebrows into her victim. She went
+back and gardened honourably, while Mr. Fenwick solved the riddle and
+supplied the letter. But for all that, the young man appeared next
+Sunday at St. Satisfax's, with an extremely new prayer-book that
+looked as if his religious convictions were recent, and never took
+his eyes off Sally all through the service--that is, if he did as she
+supposed, and peeped all the while that his head ought to have been,
+as she metaphorically expressed it, "under the clothes."
+
+Now, this was naturally a little unaccountable to Sally, after such
+a very short interview; and on the part, too, of a young gentleman who
+passed all the working hours of the day among working houris, as it
+were soaked and saturated in their fascinations, and not at liberty
+to squeeze their hands or ask them for one little lock of hair all
+through shop-time. Sally did not realise the force of sameness, nor
+the amount of contempt familiarity will breed. Perhaps the houris got
+tired and snappish, poor things! and used up their artificial smiles
+on the customers. Perhaps it had leaked out that the trying-on hands
+contributed only length, personally, to the loveliness of the
+trying-on figures. All sorts of things might have happened to
+influence this young man towards St. Satisfax; and how did Sally know
+how often he had seen the other young lady communicants she had
+speculated about? Her mind had certainly thrown in the large Miss
+Baker with something of derision. But that Sylvia Peplow was just the
+sort of girl men run after, like a big pale gloire-de-Dijon rose all
+on one side, with pale golden wavy hair, and great big goggly blue
+eyes, looking as if she couldn't help it! Now that we have given you
+details, from Sally's inner consciousness, of Miss Peplow's
+appearance, we hope you will perceive why she said she "golloped." We
+don't, exactly.
+
+However, on this Christmas morning it was made clear whom this young
+donkey was hankering after--this is Sally's way of putting it--as Miss
+Peplow failed to get her usual place through being late, and had to
+sit in a side-aisle, instead of the opposite of her to the idiot--we
+are again borrowing from Sally--and now the Idiot would have to glare
+round over his shoulder at her or go without! It was soon evident that
+he was quite content to go without, and that Sally herself had been
+his lode-star. The certainty of this was what prevented her taking so
+much notice of her mother as she might otherwise have done.
+
+Had she done so closely, she would hardly have put down her
+preoccupation, or tension, or whatever it was, to displeasure at Mr.
+Fenwick's going to skate on Christmas morning instead of going to
+church. What concern was it of theirs what Mr. Fenwick did?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+OF BOXING DAY MORNING AT KRAKATOA VILLA, AND WHAT OBSERVANT CREATURES
+ FOSSILS ARE
+
+
+The "dear old fossil" referred to by Miss Sally was one of those
+occurrences--auxiliaries or encumbrances, as may be--whom one is
+liable to meet with in almost any family, who are so forcibly taken
+for granted by all its members that the infection of their acceptance
+catches on, and no new-comer ever asks that they should be explained.
+If they were relatives, they would be easy of explanation; but the
+only direct information you ever get about them is that they are not.
+This seems to block all avenues of investigation, and presently you
+find yourself taking them as a matter of course, like the Lion and
+Unicorn, or the image on a stamp.
+
+Fenwick accepted "the Major," as the old fossil was called, so frankly
+and completely under that name that he was still uncertain about his
+real designation at the current moment of the story. Nobody ever
+called him anything but "the Major," and he would as soon have asked
+"Major what?" as called in question the title of the King of Hearts
+instead of playing him on the Queen, and taking the trick. So far as
+he could conjecture, the Major had accepted him in the same way. When
+the railway adventure was detailed to him, the fossil said many times,
+"How _per_fectly extraordinary!" "God bless my soul!" "You don't mean
+_that_!" and so on; but his astonishment always knocked his double
+eyeglass off, and, when he couldn't find it, it had to be recovered
+before he could say, "Eh--eh--what was that?" and get in line again;
+so he made a disjointed listener.
+
+But these fossils see more than they hear sometimes; and this old
+Major, for all he was so silent, must have noticed many little things
+that Christmas evening to cause him to say what he did next day to
+Sally. For, of course, the Major couldn't go back to his lodgings in
+Ball Street in weather like this; so he stayed the night in the spare
+room, where Mr. Fenwick had been put up tempory, cook said--a room
+which was, in fact, usually spoken of as "the Major's room."
+
+Of course, Sally was the sort of girl who would never see anything of
+that sort--you'll see what sort directly--though she was as sharp as
+a razor in a general way. What made her blind in this case was that,
+in certain things, aspects, relations of life, she had ruled mother
+out of court as an intrinsically grown-up person--one to whom some
+speculations would not apply. So she saw nothing in the fact that when
+Mr. Fenwick's knock came at the door, her mother said, "There he is,"
+and went out to meet him; nor even in her stopping with him outside on
+the landing, chatting confidentially and laughing. Why shouldn't she?
+
+She saw nothing--nothing whatever--in Mr. Fenwick's bringing her
+mother a beautiful sealskin jacket as a Christmas present. Why
+shouldn't he? The only thing that puzzled Sally was, where on earth
+did he get the money to buy it? But then, of course, he was "in the
+City," and the City is a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground. Sally found
+that enough, on reflection.
+
+She saw nothing, either, in her mother's carrying her present away
+upstairs, and saying nothing about it till afterwards. Nor did she
+notice any abnormal satisfaction on Mr. Fenwick's countenance as he
+came into the drawing-room by himself, such as one might discern in a
+hen--if hens had countenances--after a special egg. Nor did she attach
+any particular meaning to an expression on the elderly face of the
+doctor's mother that any student of Lavater would at once have seen to
+mean that _we_ saw what was going on, but were going to be maternally
+discreet about it, and only mention it to every one we met in the very
+strictest confidence. This lady, who had rather reluctantly joined the
+party--for she was a martyr to ailments--was somewhat grudgingly
+admitted by Sally to be a comfortable sort of old thing enough, if
+only she didn't "goozle" over you so. She had no _locus standi_ for
+goozling, whatever it was; for had not Sally as good as told her son
+that she didn't want to marry him or anybody else? If you ask us what
+would be the connecting link between Sally's attitude towards the
+doctor and the goozlings of a third party, we have no answer ready.
+
+No; Sally went to bed as wise as ever--so she afterwards told the
+fossil Major--at the end of the evening. She had enjoyed herself
+immensely, though the simple material for rapture was only foursquare
+Halma played by the four acuter intelligences of the six, and draughts
+for the goozler and the fossil. But then Sally had a rare faculty for
+enjoying herself, and she was perfectly contented with only one
+admirer to torment, though he was only old Prosy, as she called him,
+but not to his face. She was jolly glad mother had put on her
+maroon-coloured watered silk with velvet facings, because you couldn't
+deny that she looked lovely in it. And as for Mr. Fenwick, he looked
+just like Hercules and Sir Walter Raleigh, after being out skating all
+day long in the cold. And Sally's wisdom had not been in the least
+increased by what was, after all, only a scientific experiment on poor
+Mr. Fenwick's mental torpor when her mother, the goozler and old Prosy
+having departed, got out her music to sing that very old song of hers
+to him that he had thought the other day seemed to bring back a sort
+of memory of something. Was it not possible that if he heard it often
+enough his past might revive slowly? You never could tell!
+
+So when, on Boxing Day morning, Sally's mother, who had got down early
+and hurried her breakfast to make a dash for early prayer at St.
+Satisfax, looked in at her backward daughter and reproached her, and
+said there was the Major coming down, and no one to get him his
+chocolate, she spoke to a young lady who was serenely unprepared for
+any revelations of a startling nature, or, indeed, any revelations at
+all. Nor did getting the Major his chocolate excite any suspicions.
+
+So Sally was truly taken aback when the old gentleman, having drunk
+his chocolate, broke a silence which had lasted since a brief and
+fossil-like good-morning, with, "Well, missy, and what do _you_ say
+to the idea of a stepfather?" But not immediately, for at first she
+didn't understand him, and answered placidly: "It depends on who."
+
+"Mr. Fenwick, for instance!"
+
+"Yes, but who for? And stepfather to step-what? Stepdaughter or
+stepson?"
+
+"Yourself, little goose! _You_ would be the stepdaughter."
+
+Sally was then so taken aback that she could make nothing of it, but
+stood in a cloud of mystification. The major had to help her. "How
+would you like your mother to marry Mr. Fenwick?" He was one of those
+useful people who never _finesse_, who let you know point-blank where
+you are, and to whom you feel so grateful for being unfeeling. While
+others there be who keep you dancing about in suspense, while they
+break things gently, and all the while are scoring up a little account
+against you for considerateness.
+
+Sally's bewilderment, however, recognised one thing distinctly--that
+the Major's inquiry was not to get, but to give, information. He
+didn't the least want to know what _she_ thought; he was only working
+to give her a useful tip. So she would take her time about answering.
+She took it, looking as grave as a little downy owl-tot. Meanwhile,
+to show there was no bad feeling, she went and sat candidly on the
+fossil's knee, and attended to his old whiskers and moustache.
+
+"Major dear!" said she presently.
+
+"What, my child?"
+
+"Wouldn't they make an awfully handsome couple?" The Major replied,
+"Handsome is as handsome does," and seemed to suggest that questions
+of this sort belonged to a pre-fossilised condition of existence.
+
+"Now, Major dear, why not admit it when you know it's true? You know
+quite well they would make a lovely couple. Just fancy them going up
+the aisle at St. Satisfax! It would be like mediaeval Kings and
+Queens." For Sally was still in that happy phase of girlhood in which
+a marriage is a wedding, _et praeterea aliquid_, but not much. "But,"
+she continued, "I couldn't give up any of mamma--no, not so much as
+_that_--if she was to marry twenty Mr. Fenwicks." As the quantity
+indicated was the smallest little finger-end that could be checked off
+with a thumb-nail, the twenty husbands would have come in for a very
+poor allowance of matrimony. The Major didn't seem to think the method
+of estimation supplied a safe ground for discussion, and allowed it to
+lapse.
+
+"I may be quite wrong, you know, my dear," said he. "I dare say I'm
+only an old fool. So we won't say anything to mamma, will us, little
+woman?"
+
+"I don't know, Major dear. I'll promise not to say anything to her
+_because_ of what you've said to me. But if I suspect it myself on my
+account later on, of course I shall."
+
+"What shall you say to her?"
+
+"Ask her if it's true! Why not? But what was it made _you_ think so?"
+Whereon the Major gave in detail his impressions of the little
+incidents recorded above, which Sally had seen nothing in. He laid
+a good deal of stress on the fact that her mother had suppressed the
+Christmas present until after Dr. Vereker and his mother had departed.
+She wouldn't have minded the doctor, he said, but she would naturally
+want to keep the old bird out of the swim. Besides, there was Fenwick
+himself--one could see what _he_ thought of it! She could perfectly
+well stop him if she chose, and she didn't choose.
+
+"Stop his whatting?" asked Sally perplexingly. But she admitted the
+possibility of an answer by not pressing the question home. Then she
+went on to say that all these things had happened exactly under her
+nose, and she had never seen anything in them. The only concession she
+was inclined to make was in respect of the impression her mother
+evidently made on Mr. Fenwick. But that was nothing wonderful.
+Anything else would have been very surprising. Only it didn't follow
+from that that mother wanted to marry Mr. Fenwick, or Mr. Anybody. As
+far as he himself went, she liked him awfully--but then he couldn't
+recollect who he was, poor fellow! It was most pathetic sometimes to
+see him trying. If only he could have remembered that he hadn't been
+a pirate, or a forger, or a wicked Marquis! But to know absolutely
+nothing at all about himself! Why, the only thing that was known now
+about his past life was that he once knew a Rosalind Nightingale--what
+he said to her in the railway-carriage. And now he had forgotten that,
+too, like everything else.
+
+"I say, Major dear"--Sally has an influx of a new idea--"it ought to
+be possible to find out something about that Rosalind Nightingale he
+knew. Mamma says it's nonsense her being any relation, because she'd
+know."
+
+"And suppose we did find out who she was?"
+
+"Well, then, if we could get at her, we might get her to tell us who
+he was. And then we could tell him."
+
+Perhaps it is only his fossil-like way of treating the subject, but
+certainly the Major shows a very slack interest, Sally thinks, in the
+identity of this namesake of hers. He does, however, ask absently,
+what sort of way did he speak of her in the train?
+
+"Why--he said so little----"
+
+"But he gave you some impression?"
+
+"Oh, of course. He spoke as if she was a person--not a female you
+know--a person!"
+
+"A person isn't a female--when? Eh, missy?" This requires a little
+consideration, and gets it. The result, when it comes, seems good in
+its author's eyes.
+
+"When they sit down. When you ask them to, you know. In the parlour,
+I mean--not the hall. They might be a female then."
+
+"Did he mean a lady?"
+
+"And take milk and no sugar? And pull her gloves on to go? And leave
+cards turned up at the corner? Oh no--not a lady, certainly!"
+
+As she makes these instructive distinctions, Miss Sally is kneeling
+on a hassock before a mature fire, which will tumble down and spoil
+presently. When it does it will be time to resort to that hearth-broom,
+and restrict combustion with collected caput-mortuum of Derby-Brights,
+selected, twenty-seven shillings. Till then, Sally, who deserted the
+Major's knee just as she asked what Mr. Fenwick was to stop in, is
+at liberty to roast, and does so with undisturbed gravity. The Major
+is becoming conscious of a smell like Joan of Arc at the beginning
+of the entertainment, when her mother comes in on a high moral platform,
+and taxes her with singeing, and dissolves the parliament, and rings
+to take away breakfast, and forecasts an open window the minute the
+Major has gone.
+
+Sally doesn't wait for the open window, but as one recalled to the
+active duties of life from liquefaction in a Turkish bath, takes a
+cold plunge as far as the front gate without so much as a hat on--to
+see if the post is coming, which is absurd--and comes back braced. But
+though she only wonders what can have put such an idea as her mother
+marrying Mr. Fenwick in the Major's dear silly old head, she keeps on
+a steady current of speculation about who that Rosalind Nightingale he
+knew could possibly have been; and whether she couldn't be got at even
+now. It was such a pity he couldn't have a tip given about him who he
+was. If he were once started, he would soon run; she was sure of that.
+But did he want to run?--that was a point to consider. Did he really
+forget as much as he said he did? How came he not to have forgotten
+his languages he was so fluent with? And how about his book-keeping?
+And that curious way he had of knowing about places, and then looking
+puzzled when asked when he had been there. When they talked about
+Klondyke the other day, for instance, and he seemed to know so much
+about it.... But, then, see how he grasped his head, and ruffled his
+hair, and shut his eyes, and clenched his teeth over his efforts to
+recollect whether he had really been there himself, or only read it
+all in the "Century" or "Atlantic Monthly"! Surely he was in earnest
+then.
+
+Sally's speculations lasted her all the way to No. 260, Ladbroke Grove
+Road, where she was going to a music-lesson, or rather music-practice,
+with a friend who played the violin; for Sally was learning the
+viola--to be useful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONCERNING PEOPLE'S PASTS, AND THE SEPARATION OF THE SHEEP FROM THE
+ GOATS. OF YET ANOTHER MAJOR, AND HOW HE GOSSIPPED AT THE HURKARU
+ CLUB. SOME TRUSTWORTHY INFORMATION ABOUT AN ALLEGED DIVORCE
+
+
+You who read this may have met with some cross-chance such as we are
+going to try to describe to you; possibly with the same effect upon
+yourself as the one we have to confess to in our own case--namely,
+that you have been left face to face with a problem to which you have
+never been able to supply a solution. You have given up a conundrum
+in despair, and no one has told you the answer.
+
+Here are the particulars of an imaginary case of the sort. You have
+made acquaintance--made friends--years ago with some man or woman
+without any special introduction, and without feeling any particular
+curiosity about his or her antecedents. No inquiry seemed to be
+called for; all concomitants were so very usual. You may have felt a
+misgiving as to whether the easy-going ways of your old papa, or the
+innocent Bohemianisms of his sons and daughters will be welcome to
+your new friend, whom you credit with being a little old-fashioned
+and strait-laced, if anything. But it never occurs to you to doubt or
+investigate; why should you, when no question is raised of any great
+intimacy between you and the So-and-sos, which may stand for the name
+of his or her family. They ask no certificate from you, of whom they
+know just as little. Why should you demand credentials of a passer-by
+because he is so obliging as to offer to lend you a Chinese vocabulary
+or Whitaker? Why should your wife try to go behind the cheque-book and
+the prayer-book of a married couple when all she has had to do with
+the lady was, suppose, to borrow a square bottle of her, marked off
+in half-inch lengths, to be shaken before taken? Why not accept her
+unimpeachable Sunday morning as sufficient warranty for talking to
+her on the beach next day, and finding what a very nice person she is?
+Because it would very likely be at the seaside. But suppose any sort
+of introduction of this sort--you know what we mean!
+
+Well, the So-and-sos have slipped gradually into your life; let this
+be granted. We need not imagine, for our purpose, any extreme
+approaches of family intimacy, any love affairs or deadly quarrels.
+A tranquil intercourse of some twenty years is all we need, every year
+of which has added to your conviction of the thorough trustworthiness
+and respectability of the So-and-sos, of their readiness to help you
+in any little difficulty, and of the high opinion which the rest of
+the world has of Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so--the world which knew them
+when it was a boy, and all their connexions and antecedents, which,
+you admit, you didn't....
+
+And then, after all these years, it is suddenly burst upon you that
+there was a shady story about So-and-so that never was cleared
+up--something about money, perhaps; or, worse still, one of those
+stories your informant really doesn't like to be responsible for the
+particulars of; you must ask Smith yourself. Or your wife comes to you
+in fury and indignation that such a scandalous falsehood should have
+got about as that Clara So-and-so was never married to So-and-so at
+all till ever so long after Fluffy or Toppy or Croppy or Poppy was
+born! We take any names at random of this sort, merely to dwell on
+your good lady's familiarity with the So-and-so family.
+
+Well, then--there you are! And what can you make of it? There you are
+face to face with the fact that a man who was a black sheep twenty or
+thirty years ago has been all this time making believe to be a white
+sheep so successfully as never was. Or, stranger still, that a woman
+who has brought up a family of model daughters--daughters whom it
+would be no exaggeration to speak of as on all fours with your own,
+and who is quite one of the nicest and most sympathetic people your
+wife has to go to in trouble--this woman actually--_actually_--if this
+tale is true, was guilty in her youth ... there--that will do! Suppose
+we say she was no better than she should be. She hadn't even the
+decency to be a married woman before she did it, which always makes it
+so much easier to talk to strange ladies and girls about it. You can
+say all the way down a full dinner-table that Lady Polly Andrews got
+into the Divorce Court without doing violence to any propriety at all.
+But the story of Mrs. So-and-so's indiscretion while still Miss
+Such-and-such must be talked of more guardedly.
+
+And all the while behold the subjects of these stories, in whom, but
+for this sudden revelation of a shady past, you can detect no moral
+difference from your amiable and respectable self! They puzzle you, as
+they puzzle us, with a doubt whether they really are the same people;
+whether they have not changed their identity since the days of their
+delinquency. If they really are the same, it almost throws a doubt on
+how far the permanent unforgiveness of sins is expedient. We of
+course refer to Human Expediency only--the construction of a working
+hypothesis of Life, that would favour peace on earth and good-will
+towards men; that would establish a _modus vivendi_, and enable us to
+be jolly with these reprobates--at any rate, as soon as they had
+served their time and picked their oakum. We are not intruding on the
+province of the Theologian--merely discussing the problem of how we
+can make ourselves pleasant to one another all round, until that final
+separation of the sheep from the goats, when, however carefully they
+may have patched up their own little quarrels, they will have to bid
+each other farewell reluctantly, and make up their minds to the
+permanent endurance of Heaven and Hell respectively.
+
+We confess that we ourselves think there ought to be a Statute of
+Limitations, and that after a certain lapse of time any offence,
+however bad, against morality might be held not to have been
+committed. If we feel this about culprits who tempted us, at the time
+of their enormity, to put in every honest hand a whip to lash the
+rascal naked the length of a couple of lamp-posts, how much more when
+the offence has been one which our own sense of moral law (a perverted
+one, we admit) scarcely recognises as any offence at all. And how much
+more yet, when we find it hard to believe that they--actually _they
+themselves_, that we know now--can have done the things imputed to
+them. If the stories are really true, were they not possessed by evil
+spirits? Or have they since come to be possessed by better ones than
+their normal stock-in-trade?
+
+What is all this prosy speculation about? Well, it's about our friend
+in the last chapter, Sally's mother. At least, it is suggested by her.
+She is one of those perplexing cases we have hinted at, and we
+acknowledge ourselves unable to account for her at the date of the
+story, knowing what we do of her twenty years previously. It's little
+enough, mind, and much of it inferential. Suppose, instead of giving
+you our inferences, we content ourselves with passing on to you the
+data on which we found them. Maybe you will see your way to some
+different life-history for Sally's mother.
+
+The first insight we had into her past was supplied by a friend of
+Sally's "old fossil," who was himself a Major, but with a difference.
+For he was really a Major, whereas the fossil was only called so by
+Krakatoa Villa, being in truth a Colonel. This one was Major Roper, of
+the Hurkaru Club, an old schoolfellow of ours, who was giving us a cup
+of coffee and a cigar at the said Club, and talking himself hoarse
+about Society. When the Major gets hoarse his voice rises to a squeak,
+and his eyes start out of his head, and he appears to swell. I forget
+how Mrs. Nightingale came into the conversation, but she did, somehow.
+
+"She's a very charming woman, that," squeaked the Major--"a _very_
+charming woman! I don't mind tellin' _you_, you know, that I knew her
+at Madras--ah! before the divorce. I wouldn't tell Horrocks, nor that
+dam young fool Silcox, but I don't mind tellin' _you_! Only, look
+here, my dear boy, don't you go puttin' it about that _I_ told you
+anythin'. You know I make it a rule--a guidin' rule--_never to say
+anythin'_. You follow that rule through life, my boy! Take the word
+of an old chap that's seen a deal of service, and just you _hold your
+tongue_! You make a point--you'll find it pay----" An asthmatic cough
+came in here.
+
+"There was a divorce, then?" we said. Terms had to be made with the
+cough, but speech came in the end.
+
+"Oh yes, of course--of course! Don't mind repeatin' that--thing was
+in the papers at the time. What I was suggestin' holdin' your tongue
+about was that story about Penderfield and her.... Well, as I said
+just now, I don't mind repeatin' it to you; you ain't Horrocks nor
+little Silcox--you can keep your tongue in your head. Remember, _I_
+know nothing; I'm only tellin' what was said at the time.... Now,
+whatever was her name? Was it Rayner, or was it Verschoyle? Pelloo!...
+Pelloo!..." The Major tried to call the attention of a man who was deep
+in an Oriental newspaper at the far end of the next room. But when the
+Major overstrains his voice, it misses fire like a costermonger's,
+and only a falsetto note comes on a high register. When this happens
+he is wroth.
+
+"It's that dam noise they're all makin'," he says, as soon as he has
+become articulate. "That's the man I want, behind the 'Daily
+Sunderbund.' If it wasn't for this dam toe, I'd go across and ask him.
+No, don't you go. Send one of these dam jumpin' frogs--idlin' about!"
+He requisitions a passing waiter, gripping him by the arm to give
+him instructions. "Just--you--touch the General's arm, and ketch his
+attention. Say Major Roper." And he liquidates his obligations to
+a great deal of asthmatic cough, while the jumping frog does his
+bidding.
+
+The General (who is now Lord Pellew of Cutch, by-the-bye) came with
+an amiable smile from behind the journal, and ended a succession
+of good-evening nods to newcomers by casting an anchor opposite
+the Major. The latter, having by now taken the surest steps towards
+bringing the whole room into his confidence, stated the case he sought
+confirmation for.
+
+Oh yes, certainly; the General was in Umballa in '80; remembered the
+young lady quite well, and the row between Penderfield and his wife
+about her. As for Penderfield, everybody remembered _him_! _De mortuis
+nil_, etc.--of course, of course. For all that, he was one of the
+damnedest scoundrels that ever deserved to be turned out of the
+service. Ought to have been cashiered long ago. Good job he's gone to
+the devil! Yes, he was quite sure he was remembering the right girl.
+No, no, he wasn't thinking of Daisy Neversedge--no, nor of little Miss
+Wrennick: same sort of story, but he wasn't thinking of them at all.
+Only the name wasn't either Rayner or Verschoyle. General Pellew stood
+thoughtfully feeling about in a memory at fault, and looking at an
+unlighted cigar he rolled in his fingers, as though it might help if
+caressed. Then he had a flash of illumination. "Rosalind Graythorpe,"
+he said.
+
+There we had it, sure enough! The Major see-sawed in the air with
+a finger of sudden corroboration. "Rosalind Graythorpe," he repeated
+triumphantly, and then again, "Ros-a-lind Graythorpe," dwelling on the
+syllables, and driving the name home, as it were, to the apprehension
+of all within hearing. It was so necessary to a complete confidence
+that every one should know whom he was holding his tongue about. Where
+would be the merit of discretion else? But the enjoyment of details
+should be _sotto voce_. The General dropped his voice to a good
+sample, suggesting a like course to the more demonstrative secrecy
+of the Major.
+
+"I remember the whole story quite well," said he. "The girl was
+going out by herself to marry a young fellow up the country at
+Umballa, I think. They were _fiances_, and on the way the news
+came of the outbreak of cholera. So she got hung up for a while at
+Penderfield's--sort of cousin, I believe, him or his wife--till the
+district was sanitary again. Bad job for her, as it turned out! Nobody
+there to warn her what sort of fellow Penderfield was--and if there
+had been she wouldn't have believed 'em. She was a madcap sort of
+a girl, and regularly in the hands of about as bad a couple as you'll
+meet with in a long spell--India or anywhere! They used to say out
+there that the she Penderfield winked at all her husband's affairs as
+long as he didn't cut across _her_ little arrangements--did more than
+wink, in fact--lent a helping hand; but only as long as she could rely
+on his remaining detached, as you might say. The moment she suspected
+an _entichement_ on her husband's part she was up in arms. And he
+was just the same about her. I remember Lady Sharp saying that
+if Penderfield had suspected his wife of caring about any of her
+co-respondents he would have divorced her at once. They were a rum
+couple, but their attitude to one another was the only good thing
+about them." The General lighted his cigar, and seemed to consider
+this was chapter one. The Major appended a foot-note, for our benefit.
+
+"_Leave be_ was the word--the word for Penderfield. _You'll_
+understand that, sir. No _meddlin'_! A good-lookin' Colonel's wife in
+garrison has her choice, good Lard! Why, she's only got to hold her
+finger up!" We entirely appreciated the position, and that a siren has
+a much easier task in the entanglement of a confiding dragoon than
+falls to the lot of Don Giovanni in the reverse case. But we were more
+interested in the particular story of Mrs. Nightingale than in the
+general ethics of profligacy.
+
+"I suppose," we suggested, "that the young woman threatened to be a
+formidable rival, as there was a row?" Each of the officers nodded at
+the other, and said that was about it. The Major then started on
+a little private curriculum of nods on his own account, backed by a
+half-closed eye of superhuman subtlety, and added once or twice that
+that _was_ about it. We inferred from this that the row had been
+volcanic in character. The Major then added, repeating the air-sawing
+action of his forefinger admonitorily, "But mind you, _I_ say nothin'.
+And my recommendation to you is to say nothin' neither."
+
+"The rest of the story's soon told," said the General, answering our
+look of inquiry. "Miss Graythorpe went away to Umballa to be married.
+It was all gossip, mind you, about herself and Penderfield. But gossip
+always went one way about any girl he was seen with. I have my own
+belief; so has Jack Roper." The Major underwent a perfect convulsion
+of nods, winks, and acquiescence. "Well, she went away, and was
+married to this young shaver, who was very little over twenty. He
+wasn't in the service--civil appointment, I think. How long was it,
+Major, before they parted? Do you recollect?"
+
+"Week--ten days--month--six weeks! Couldn't say. They didn't part at
+the church door; that's all I could say for certain. Tell him the
+rest."
+
+"They certainly parted very soon, and people told all sorts of
+stories. The stories got fewer and clearer when it came out that the
+young woman was in the family way. No one had any right _then_ to
+ascribe the child that was on its road to any father except the young
+man she had fallen out with. But they did--it was laid at Colonel
+Penderfield's door, before there was any sufficient warrant. However,
+it was all clear enough when the child was born."
+
+"When was the divorce?"
+
+"He applied for a divorce a twelvemonth after the marriage. The child
+was then spoken of as being four months old. My impression is he did
+not succeed in getting a divorce."
+
+"Not he," said the Major, overtopping the General's quiet, restrained
+voice with his falsetto. "I recollect _that_, bless you! The Court
+commiserated him, but couldn't give him any relief. So he made a bolt
+of it. And he's never been heard of since, as far as I know."
+
+"What did the mother do? Where did she go?" we asked.
+
+"Well, she might have been hard put to it to know what to do. But she
+met with old Lund--Carrington Lund, you know, not Beauchamp; he'd
+a civil appointment at Umritsur--comes here sometimes. You know him?
+She's his Rosey he talks about. He was an old friend of her father,
+and took her in and protected her--saw her through it. She came with
+him to England. I was with them on the boat, part of the way. Then
+she took the name of Macnaghten, I believe. The young husband's name
+I can't remember the least. But it wasn't Macnaghten."
+
+The Major squeaked in again:
+
+"No--nor hers neither! Nightingale, General--that's the name she goes
+by. Friend of this gentleman. Very charmin' person indeed! Introdooce
+you? And a very charmin' little daughter, goin' nineteen." The two
+officers interchanged glances over our young friend Sally. "She was
+a nice baby on the boat," said the General; and the Major chuckled
+wheezily, and hoped she didn't take after her father.
+
+We left him to the tender mercies of gout and asthma, and the
+enjoyment of a sherry-cobbler through a straw, looking rather too fat
+for his snuff-coloured trousers with a cord outside, and his flowered
+silk waistcoat; but very much too fat for the straw, the slenderness
+of which was almost painful by contrast.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Perhaps you will see from this why we hinted at the outset of this
+chapter why Mrs. Nightingale was a conundrum we had given up in
+despair, of which no one had told us the answer. We wanted your
+sympathy, you see, and to get it have given you an insight into the
+way our information was gleaned. Having given you this sample, we will
+now return to simple narrative of what we know of the true story, and
+trouble you with no further details of how we came by it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE ANTECEDENTS OF ROSALIND NIGHTINGALE, SALLY'S MOTHER. HOW BOTH CAME
+ FROM INDIA TO ENGLAND, AND TOOK A VILLA ON A REPAIRING LEASE. SOMEWHAT
+ OF SALLY'S UPBRINGING. SOME MORE ROPER GOSSIP, AND A CAT LET OUT OF A
+ BAG. A PIECE OF PRESENCE OF MIND
+
+
+Sally Graythorpe (our Mrs. Nightingale) was the daughter of a widowed
+mother, also called Sally, the name in both cases being (as in that of
+her daughter whom we know) Rosalind, not Sarah. This mother married
+_en secondes noces_ a former sweetheart; it had been a case of a match
+opposed by parents on the ground of the apparent hopelessness of the
+young man's prospects. Mr. Paul Nightingale, however, falsified the
+doleful predictions about his future by becoming a successful
+leader-writer and war correspondent. It was after the close of the
+American Civil War, in which he had gained a good deal of distinction,
+that he met at Saratoga his old flame, Mrs. Graythorpe, then a widow
+with a little daughter five or six years old. Having then no wishes to
+consult but their own, and no reason to the contrary appearing, they
+were married.
+
+They did not find the States a pleasant domicile in the early days
+following the great war, and came to England. The little daughter soon
+became like his own child to Mr. Paul Nightingale, and had his wish
+been complied with she would have taken his name during his life. But
+her mother saw no reason, apparently, for extinguishing Mr. Graythorpe
+_in toto_, and she remained Sally Graythorpe.
+
+Miss Graythorpe was, at a guess, about fifteen when her stepfather
+died. Her mother, now for the second time a widow, must have been
+very comfortably off, as she had an income of her own as well as a
+life-interest in her late husband's invested savings, which was
+unfettered by any conditions as to her marrying again, or otherwise.
+She was not long in availing herself of this liberty; for about the
+time when her daughter was of an age to be engaged on her own account,
+she accepted a third offer of marriage--this time from a clergyman,
+who, like herself, had already stood by the death-beds of two former
+mates, and was qualified to sympathize with her in every way,
+including comfortable inheritances.
+
+But the young Sally Graythorpe kicked furiously against this new
+arrangement. It was an insult to papa (she referred to Mr.
+Nightingale; her real papa was a negligible factor), and she wouldn't
+live in the same house with that canting old hypocrite. She would go
+away straight to India, and marry Gerry--_he_ would be glad enough to
+have her--see how constant the dear good boy had been! Not a week
+passed but she got a letter. She asked her mother flatly what could
+she want to marry again for at her time of life? And such a withered
+old sow-thistle as that! Sub-dean, indeed! She would _sub-dean_ him!
+In fact, there were words, and the words almost went the length of
+taking the form known as "language" _par excellence_. The fact is,
+this Sally and her mother never _did_ get on together well; it wasn't
+the least like her subsequent relation with our special Sally--Sally
+number three--who trod on Mr. Fenwick in the Twopenny Tube.
+
+The end of the "words" was a letter to Gerry, a liberal trousseau,
+and a first-class passage out by P. and O. The young lady's luggage
+for the baggage-room was beautifully stencilled "Care of Sir Oughtred
+Penderfield, The Residency, Khopal." Perfectly safe in his keeping no
+doubt it would have been. But, then, that might have been true also of
+luggage if consigned to the Devil. If the tale hinted at in our last
+chapter _was_ true, its poor little headstrong, inexperienced heroine
+would have been about as safe with the latter.
+
+Anyhow, this club gossip supplies all the broad outline of the story;
+and it is a story we need not dwell on. It gives us no means of
+reconciling the like of the Mrs. Nightingale we know now with the
+amount of dissimulation, if not treachery, she must have practised on
+an unsuspicious boy, assuming that she did, as a matter of course,
+conceal her relation with Penderfield. One timid conjecture we have
+is, that the girl, having to deal with a subject every accepted phrase
+relating to which is an equivocation or an hypocrisy, really found it
+impossible to make her position understood by a lover who simply
+idolized the ground she trod on. Under such circumstances, she may
+either have given up the attempt in despair, or jumped too quickly to
+the conclusion that she had succeeded in communicating the facts, and
+had been met half-way by forgiveness. Put yourself in her position,
+and resolve in your mind exactly how you would have gone about it--how
+you would have got a story of that sort forced into the mind of a
+welcoming lover; wedged into the heart of his unsuspicious rapture.
+Or, if you fancied he understood you, and no storm of despairing
+indignation came, think how easy it would be to persuade yourself you
+had done your duty by the facts, and might let the matter lapse! Why
+should not one woman once take advantage of the obscurities of decorum
+so many a man has found comforting to his soul during confession of
+sin, when pouring his revelations into an ear whose owner's experience
+of life has not qualified her to understand them. Think of the
+difficulty you yourself have encountered in getting at the absolute
+facts in some delicate concurrence of circumstances in this connexion,
+because of the fundamental impossibility of getting any one, man or
+woman, to speak direct truth!
+
+Let us find out, or construct, all the excuses we can for poor Miss
+Graythorpe. Let us imagine the last counsel she had from the only one
+of her own sex who would be likely to know anything of the matter--the
+nefarious partner (if the Major's surmise was true) in the crime of
+her betrayer. "You are making a fuss about nothing. Men are not so
+immaculate themselves; your Gerry is no Joseph! If he rides the high
+horse with you, just you ask him what _he_ had to say to Potiphar's
+wife! Oh, we're not so strait-laced out here--bless us alive!--as we
+are in England, or pretend to be." We can fancy the elegant brute
+saying it.
+
+All our surmises bring us very little light, though. It is not that
+we are at such a loss to forgive poor Sally Graythorpe as a mere human
+creature we know nothing about. The difficulty is to reconcile what
+she seems to have been then with what she is now. We give it up.
+
+Only, we wish to remark that it is her offence against her _fiance_
+alone that we find it hard to stomach. As to her relations with
+Colonel Penderfield, we can say nothing without full particulars. And
+even if we had them, and they bore hard upon Miss Graythorpe, our mind
+would go back to the Temple in Jerusalem, and a morning nearly two
+thousand years ago. The voice that said who was to cast the first
+stone is heard no more, or has merged in ritual. But the Scribes and
+Pharisees are with us still, and quite ready to do the pelting. We
+should be harder on the Colonel, no doubt, with our prejudices; only,
+observe! he isn't brought up for judgment. He never is, any more
+than the other party was that day in Jerusalem. But, then, the
+Scribes and Pharisees were male! And they had the courage of their
+convictions--their previous convictions!--and acted on them in their
+selection of the culprit.
+
+Without further apology for retailing conjecture as certainty, the
+following may be taken as substantially the story of this lady--we do
+not know whether to call her a divorced or a deserted wife--and her
+little encumbrance.
+
+She found a resource in her trouble in the person of this old friend
+of her stepfather Paul Nightingale, Colonel (at that time Major) Lund.
+This officer had remained on in harness to the unusual age of
+fifty-eight, but it was a civil appointment he held; he had retired
+from active service in the ordinary course of things. It was probably
+not only because of his old friendship for her stepfather, but because
+the poor girl told him her unvarnished tale in full and he believed
+it, that he helped and protected her through the critical period
+that followed her parting from her husband; found her a domicile and
+seclusion, and enlisted on her behalf the sympathies of more than one
+officer's wife at our Sally's birth-place--Umritsur, if Major Roper
+was right. He corresponded with her mother as intercessor and
+mediator, but that good lady was in no mood for mercy: had her
+daughter not told her that she was too old to think of marriage? Too
+old! And had she not called her venerable sub-dean a withered old
+sow-thistle? She could forgive, under guarantees of the sinner's
+repentance; for had not her Lord enjoined forgiveness where the bail
+tendered was sufficient? Only, so many reservations and qualifications
+occurred in her interpretations of the Gospel narrative that
+forgiveness, diluted out of all knowledge, left its perpetrator free
+to refuse ever to see its victim again. But she would pray for her.
+A subdiaconal application would receive attention; that was the
+suggestion between the lines.
+
+The kind-hearted old soldier pooh-poohed her first letters. She would
+come round in time. Her natural good-feeling would get the better of
+her when she had had her religious fling. He didn't put it so--a
+strict old Puritan of the old school--but that was Miss Graythorpe's
+gloss in her own mind on what he did say. However, her mother never
+did come round. She cherished her condemnation of her daughter to the
+end, forgiving her again _more suo_, if anything with increased
+asperity, on her death-bed.
+
+This Colonel Lund is (have we mentioned this before?) the "old fossil"
+whom we have seen at Krakatoa Villa. He was usually called "the Major"
+there, from early association. He continued to foster and shelter his
+_protegee_ during the year following the arrival of our own particular
+young Sally on the scene, saw her safely through her divorce
+proceedings, and then, when he finally retired from his post as deputy
+commissioner for the Umritsur district, arranged that she herself,
+with her encumbrance and an ayah, should accompany him to England. His
+companion travelled as Mrs. Graythorpe, and Sally junior as Mrs.
+Graythorpe's baby. She was excessively popular on the voyage; Sally
+was not suffering from sea-sickness, or feeling apparently the least
+embarrassed by the recent bar-sinister in her family. She courted
+Society, seizing it by its whiskers or its curls, and holding on like
+grim death. She endeavoured successively to get into the Indian Ocean,
+the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic,
+but failed in every attempt, and was finally landed at Southampton in
+safety, after a resolute effort to drag the captain, who was six feet
+three high and weighed twenty stone, ashore by his beard. She was
+greatly missed on the remainder of the voyage (to Bremen--the boat was
+a German boat) by a family of Vons, who fortunately never guessed at
+the flaw in Sally's extraction, or there's no knowing what might not
+have happened.
+
+But the arrival was too late for her poor mother to utilise her
+services towards a reconciliation with her own offended parent. A
+sudden attack of influenza, followed by low diet on high principles,
+and uncombated by timely port wine and tonics, had been followed by
+heart-failure, and the sub-dean was left free to marry again, again.
+Whether he did so or not doesn't matter to us. The scheme Mrs.
+Graythorpe had been dwelling on with pleasure through the voyage of
+simply dropping her offspring on its grandmother, and leaving it to
+drive a coach and six through the latter's Christian forgiveness, was
+not to come to pass. She found herself after a year and a half of
+Oriental life back in her native land, an orphan with a small--but
+it must be admitted a very charming--illegitimate family. It was
+hard upon her, for she had been building on the success of this
+manoeuvre, in which she had, perhaps, an unreasonable confidence. If
+she could only rely on Sally not being inopportunely sick over mamma
+just at the critical moment--that was the only misgiving that crossed
+her mind. Otherwise, such creases and such a hilarious laugh would be
+too much for starch itself. Poor lady! she had thought to herself more
+than once, since Sally had begun to mature and consolidate, that if
+Gerry had only waited a little--just long enough to see what a little
+duck was going to come of it all--and not lost his temper, all
+might have been made comfortable, and Sally might have had a little
+legitimate half-brother by now. What _had_ become--what would become
+of Gerry? That she did not know, might never know.
+
+One little pleasant surprise awaited her. It came to her knowledge
+for the first time that she was sole heir to the estate of her late
+stepfather, Paul Nightingale. The singular practice that we believe
+to exist in many families of keeping back all information about
+testamentary dispositions as long as possible from the persons they
+concern, especially minors, had been observed in her case; and her
+mother, perhaps resenting the idea that her daughter--a young
+chit!--should presume to outlive her, had kept her in ignorance of the
+contents of her stepfather's will. It did not really matter much. Had
+the sum been large, and a certainty, it might have procured for her a
+safer position when a temporary guest at the Residency at Khopal, or
+even caused her indignant young bridegroom to think twice before he
+took steps to rid himself of her. But, after all, it was only some
+three hundred and fifty pounds a year, and depended on the life of a
+lady of forty-odd, who might live to be a hundred. A girl with no more
+than that is nearly as defenceless as she is without it.
+
+A condition was attached to the bequest--not an unwelcome one. She was
+to take her stepfather's name, Nightingale. She was really very glad
+to do this. There was a _faux air_ of a real married name about Mrs.
+Nightingale that was lacking in Mrs. Graythorpe. Besides, all
+troublesome questions about who Sally's father was would get lost
+sight of in the fact that her mother had changed her name in connexion
+with that sacred and glorious thing, an inheritance. A trust-fund
+would always be a splendid red-herring to draw across the path of Mrs.
+Grundy's sleuth-hounds--a quarry more savoury to their nostrils even
+than a reputation. And nothing soothes the sceptical more than being
+asked now and again to witness a transfer of stock, especially if it
+is money held in trust. It has all the force of a pleasant alterative
+pill on the circulation of Respectability--removes obstructions
+and promotes appetite--is a certain remedy for sleeplessness, and
+so forth. So though there wasn't a particle of reason why Mrs.
+Nightingale's money should be held by any one but herself, as she had
+no intention whatever of marrying, Colonel Lund consented to become
+her trustee; and both felt that something truly respectable had been
+done--something that if it didn't establish a birthright and a correct
+extraction for Miss Sally, at any rate went a long way towards it.
+
+By the time Mrs. Nightingale had got settled in the little house at
+Shepherd's Bush, that she took on a twenty-one years' lease five or
+six years after her return to England, and had christened it
+Saratoga, after her early recollection of the place where she first
+saw her stepfather, whose name she took when she came into the money
+he left her--by this time she, with the assistance of Colonel Lund,
+had quite assumed the appearance of a rather comfortably off young
+widow-lady, who did not make a great parade of her widowhood, but
+whose circumstances seemed reasonable enough, and challenged no
+inquiry. Inquisitiveness would have seemed needless impertinence--just
+as much so as yours would have been in the case of the hypothetical
+So-and-sos at the beginning of our last chapter. A vague impression
+got in the air that Sally's father had not been altogether
+satisfactory--well, wasn't it true? It may have leaked out from
+something in "the Major's" manner. But it never produced any effect
+on friends, except that they saw in it a reason why Mrs. Nightingale
+never mentioned her husband. He had been a black sheep. Silence about
+him showed good feeling on her part. _De mortuis_, etc....
+
+Of one thing we feel quite certain--that if, at the time we made this
+lady's acquaintance, any chance friend of hers or her daughter's--say,
+for instance, Laetitia Wilson, Sally's old school-friend and present
+music-colleague--had been told that Mrs. Nightingale, of Krakatoa
+Villa, No. 7, Glenmoira Road, Shepherd's Bush, W., had been the
+heroine of divorce proceedings under queer circumstances, that her
+husband wasn't dead at all, and that that dear little puss Sally was
+Goodness-knows-who's child, we feel certain that the information would
+have been cross-countered with a blank stare of incredulity. Why, the
+mere fact that Mrs. Nightingale had refused so many offers of marriage
+was surely sufficient to refute such a nonsensical idea! Who ever
+heard of a lady with a soiled record refusing a good offer of marriage?
+
+But while we are showing our respect for what the man in the street
+says or thinks, and the woman in the street thinks and says, are we
+not losing sight of a leading phrase of the symphony, sonata,
+cantata--whatever you like to call it--of Mrs. Nightingale's life? A
+phrase that steals in, just audibly--no more, in the most _strepitoso_
+passage of the stormy second movement--a movement, however, in which
+the proceedings of the Divorce Court are scarcely more audible,
+_pianissimo legato_, a chorus with closed lips, all the stringed
+instruments _sordini_. But it grows and grows, and in _allegro con
+fuoco_ on the voyage home, and only leaves a bar or two blank, when
+the thing it metaphorically represents is asleep and isn't suffering
+from the wind. It breaks out again _vivacissimo accelerando_ when Miss
+Sally (whom we allude to) wakes up, and doesn't appreciate Nestle's
+milk. But it always grows, and in due course may be said to become
+the music itself.
+
+More intelligibly, Mrs. Nightingale became so wrapped up in her baby,
+that had seemed to her at first a cruel embarrassment--a thing to be
+concealed and ignored--that very soon she really had no time to think
+about where she broke her molasses-jug, as Uncle Remus says. The new
+life that it had become hers to guard took her out of herself, made
+her quite another being from the reckless and thoughtless girl of two
+years ago.
+
+As time went on she felt more and more the value of the newcomer's
+indifference to her extraction and the tragedy that had attended it.
+A living creature, with a stupendous capacity for ignoring the past,
+and, indeed, everything except a monotonous diet, naturally gave
+her mind a bias towards the future, and hope grew in her heart
+unconsciously, without reminding her that it might have been despair.
+A bad alarm, when the creature was six months old, that an enteric
+attack might end fatally, had revealed to its mother how completely
+it had taken possession of her own life, and what a power for
+compensation there was even in its most imperious and tyrannical
+habits. As it gradually became articulate--however unreasonable it
+continued--her interest in its future extinguished her memories of her
+own past, and she found herself devising games for baby before the
+little character was old enough to play them, and costumes before she
+was big enough to wear them. By the time Saratoga Villa had become
+Krakatoa, Miss Sally had had time to benefit by a reasonable
+allowance of the many schemes her mother had developed for her
+during her infancy. Had all the projects which were mooted for her
+further education at this date been successfully carried out, she
+would have been an admirable female Crichton, if her reason had
+survived the curriculum. Luckily for her, she had a happy faculty
+for being plucked at examinations, and her education was consequently
+kept within reasonable bounds.
+
+There was, however, one department of culture in which Sally outshot
+all competitors. This was swimming. She would give a bath's length at
+the Paddington Baths to the next strongest swimmer in the Ladies'
+Club, and come in triumphant in a race of ten lengths. It was a grand
+sight to see Sally rushing stem on, cleaving the water with her head
+almost as if breath were an affectation, and doubling back at the end
+while the other starters were scarcely half-way. Or shooting through
+the air in her little blue costume straight for the deepest water, and
+then making believe to be a fish on the shiny tiles at the bottom.
+
+Her mother always said she was certain that if that little monkey
+had managed to wriggle through some hole into the sea, on her voyage
+home, she would have swum after the ship and climbed up the rudder
+chains. Possibly, but she was only twelve months old! If, however, she
+had met with an early death, her mother's lot would have lacked its
+redemption. The joint life of the two supplies a possible answer
+to the conundrum that has puzzled us. For in a certain sense the
+absorption of her own existence in that of another than herself had
+made of Rosalind the woman, at the date of our introduction to her,
+quite another person from Rosalind the hot-headed and thoughtless girl
+that had quarrelled with her natural guardian for doing what she had
+a perfect right to do, and had steered alone into unknown seas, a ship
+without a rudder or a compass, and very little knowledge of the stars
+of heaven for her guide. We can see what she is now much better than
+we can judge what she was then.
+
+It need not be supposed that this poor lady never felt any interest,
+never made any inquiry, about the sequel of the life she had so
+completely _bouleverse_; for, whatever blame we feel bound to express,
+or whatever exculpation we contrive to concoct for her, there can be
+no doubt what the result was to the young man who has come into the
+story, so far, only under the name of Gerry. We simply record his
+designation as it has reached us in the data we are now making use of.
+It is all hearsay about a past. We add what we have been able to
+gather, merely noting that what it seems to point to recommends itself
+to us as probable.
+
+"Nobody knoo, nobody cared," was our friend Major Roper's brief reply
+to an inquiry what became of this young man. "Why, good Lard, sir!" he
+went on, "if one was to begin fussin' about all the Johnnies that shy
+off when there's a row of that sort, one would never get a dam night's
+rest! Not but what if I could recollect his name. Now, what _was_ his
+confounded name? Thought I'd got it--but no--it wasn't Messiter. Fancy
+his Christian name was Jeremiah.... I recollect Messiter I'm thinkin'
+of--character that looked as if he had a pain in his stomach--came
+into forty thousand pounds. Stop a bit--was it Indermaur? No, it
+wasn't Indermaur. No use guessin'--give it up."
+
+Besides, the Major was getting purple with suppressed coughing. When
+he had given it up, he surrendered unconditionally to the cough, but
+was presently anxious to transmit, through its subsidence, an idea
+that he found it impossible to shake across the table between us out
+of an inarticulate forefinger end. It assumed form in time. Why not
+ask the lady herself? We demurred, and the old soldier explained.
+
+"Not rushin' at her, you know, and sayin', 'Who the dooce was
+it married you, ma'am?' I'm not a dam fool. Showin' tact, you
+know--puttin' it easy and accidental. 'Who was that young beggar
+now?--inspector--surveyor--something of the sort--up at Umballa in
+seventy-nine? Burrumpooter Irrigation--that's what _he_ was on.' And,
+Lard bless you, my dear sir, you don't suppose she'll up and say, 'I
+suppose you mean that dam husband of mine.' Not she! Sensible woman
+that, sir--seen the world--knows a thing or two. You'll see she'll
+only say, 'That was Foodle or Parker or Stebbins or Jephson,' as may
+be, accordin' to the name."
+
+We did not see our way to this enterprise, and said so. We drew a
+line; said there were things you could do, and things you couldn't do.
+The Major chuckled, and admitted this might be so; his old governor
+used to say, "Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines." The last
+two words remained behind in the cough, unless, indeed, they were
+shaken out off the Major's forefinger into a squeezed lemon that was
+awaiting its Seltzer.
+
+"But I can tell you thing, Mr.," said he, forgetting our name, as
+soon as he felt soothed by the lemon-squash. "He didn't keep his name,
+that young man didn't. You may bet he didn't safely! Only, it's no use
+askin' me why, nor what he changed it to. If it _was_ him that was
+lost in the Bush in New South Wales, when I was at Sydney, why, of
+course that chap's _name_ was the same. I remember that much. Can't
+get hold of the name, though." He appeared to consult the pattern on
+his silk pocket-handkerchief as an oracle, and to await its answer
+with a thoughtful eye. Presently he blew his nose on the oracle, and
+returned it to his pocket, adding: "But it's a speculation--little
+speculation of my own. Don't _ask me_!" We saw, however, that more
+would come, without asking. And it came.
+
+"It made a talk out there at the time. But _that_ didn't bring him to
+life. You may talk till you're hoarse, but you won't bring a dead man
+to--not when he's twenty miles off in a forest of gum-trees, as like
+as tallow-candles.... Oh yes, they had the natives put on the
+scent--black trackers, they call 'em--but, Lard! it was all no use.
+They only followed the scent of his horse, and the horse came back a
+fortnight after with them on his heels, an hour or so behind.... He'd
+only just left his party a moment, and meant to come back into the
+open. I suppose he thought he was sure to cross a cutting, and got
+trapped in the solid woodland."
+
+"But what was the speculation? You said just now...."
+
+"Not much to go by," said the Major, shaking a discouraging head.
+"Another joker with another name, who turned up a hundred miles off!
+Harrisson, I fancy--yes, Harrisson. It was only my idea they were the
+same. I came away, and don't know how they settled it."
+
+"But something, Major Roper, must have made you think this man the
+same--the same as Jeremiah Indermaur, or whatever his name was--Mrs.
+Nightingale's man?"
+
+"Somethin' must! What it was is another pair of shoes." He cogitated
+and reflected, but seemed to get no nearer. "You ask Pelloo," he said.
+"He might give you a tip." Then he called for a small glass of cognac,
+because the Seltzer was such dam chilly stuff, and the dry sherry was
+no use at all. We left him arranging the oracle over his face, with
+a view to a serious nap.
+
+We got a few words shortly after with General Pellew, who seemed a
+little surprised at the Major's having referred to him for
+information.
+
+"I don't know," said he, "why our friend Roper shouldn't recollect as
+much about it as I do. However, I do certainly remember that when this
+young gentleman, whatever his name was, left the station, he did go to
+Sydney or Melbourne, and I have some hazy recollection of some one
+saying that he was lost in the Bush. But why old Jack fancies he was
+found again or changed his name to Harrisson I haven't the slightest
+idea."
+
+So that all we ourselves succeeded in getting at about Gerry may be
+said to have been the trap-door he vanished through. Whether Mrs.
+Nightingale got at other sources of information we cannot say.
+Whatever she learned she would be sure to keep her own counsel about.
+She may have concluded that the bones of the husband who had in a fit
+of anger deserted her had been picked by white ants, twenty years ago,
+in an Australian forest; or she may have come to know, by some means,
+of his resuscitation from the Bush, and his successes or failures in
+a later life elsewhere. We have had our own reasons for doubting that
+she ever knew that he took the name of Harrisson--if he really did--a
+point which seemed to us very uncertain, so far as the Major's
+narrative went. If she did get a scrap of tidings, a flying word,
+about him now and again, it was most likely all she got. And when she
+got it she would feel the danger of further inquiry--the difficulty of
+laying the reasons for her curiosity before her informant. You can't
+easily say to a stranger: "Oh, do tell us about Mrs. Jones or Mr.
+Smith. She or he is our divorced or separated wife or husband." A
+German might, but Mrs. Nightingale was not a German.
+
+However, she _may_ have heard something about that Gerry, we
+grant you, in all those twenty long years. But if you ask us our
+opinion--our private opinion--it is that she scarcely heard of him,
+if she heard at all, and certainly never set eyes on him, until one
+day her madcap little daughter brought him home, half-killed by
+an electric shock, in a cab we were at some pains to describe
+accurately a few pages ago. And even then, had it not been for the
+individualities of that cab, she might have missed seeing him, and let
+him go away to the infirmary or the police-station, and probably never
+been near him again.
+
+As it was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following
+that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the
+face of her old lover--of her husband. Eighteen--twenty--years had
+made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the
+world he had lived in was on him; and it was the mark of a rough,
+strong world where one fights, and, if one is a man of this sort, maybe
+wins. But she never doubted his identity for a moment. And the way in
+which she grasped the situation--above all, the fact that he had not
+recognised her and would not recognise her--quite justified, to our
+thinking, Major Roper's opinion of her powers of self-command.
+
+Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped
+comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the
+"electrocuted" man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party
+down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took
+that sanguinary galvanic shock to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOW THOSE GIRLS DO CHATTER OVER THEIR MUSIC! MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S
+ RESOLUTION. BUT, THE RISK! A HARD PART TO PLAY. THERE WAS ONLY MAMMA
+ FOR THE GIRL! THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO
+
+
+Two parts in a sestet, played alone, may be a maddening torture to
+a person whose musical imagination is not equal to supplying the other
+four. Perhaps you have heard Haydn, Op. 1704, and rejoiced in the
+logical consecutiveness of its fugues, the indisputableness of its
+well-classified statements, the swift pertinence of the repartees of
+the first violin to the second, the apt _resume_ and orderly
+reorganization of their epigrammatic interchanges by the 'cello and
+the double-bass, the steady typewritten report and summary of the
+whole by the pianoforte, and the regretful exception to so many points
+taken by the clarionet. If so, you have no doubt felt, as we have, a
+sense of perfect satisfaction at faultless musical structure, without
+having to surrender your soul unconditionally to the passionate appeal
+of a Beethoven, or to split your musical brains in conjectures about
+what Volkanikoffsky is driving at. You will find at the end that you
+have passed an hour or so of tranquil enjoyment, and are mighty
+content with yourself, the performers, and every one else.
+
+But if you only hear the two parts, played alone, and your mental
+image of all the other parts is not strong enough to prevent your
+hearing the two performers count the bars while the non-performers
+don't do anything at all, you will probably go away and come back
+presently, or go mad.
+
+Nobody else was there when Sally and Laetitia Wilson were counting
+four, and beginning too soon, and having to go back and begin all over
+again, and missing a bar, and knocking down their music-stands when
+they had to turn over quick. So nobody went mad. Mamma had gone to an
+anti-vaccination meeting, and Athene had gone to stay over Bank
+Holiday at Leighton Buzzard, and the boys had gone to skate, and papa
+was in his study and didn't matter, and they had the drawing-room to
+themselves. Oh dear, how very often they did count four, to be sure!
+
+Sally was _distraite_, and wasn't paying proper attention to the music.
+Whenever a string had to be tightened by either, Sally introduced
+foreign matter. Laetitia was firm and stern (she was twenty-four, if
+you please!), and wouldn't respond. As thus, in a tightening-up pause:
+
+"I like him awfully, you know, Tishy. In fact, I love him. It's a
+pleasure to hear him come into the house. Only--one's _mother_, you
+know! It's the _oddity_ of it!"
+
+"Yes, dear. _Now_, are you ready?... It only clickets down because you
+will _not_ screw in; it's no use turning and leaving the key
+sloppy...."
+
+"I know, Tishy dear--teach your granny! There, I think that's right
+now. But it _is_ funny when it's one's mother, isn't it?"
+
+"One--two--three--four! There--you didn't begin! Remember, you've got
+to begin on the demisemiquaver at the end of the bar--only not too
+staccato, remember--and allow for the pause. Now--one, two, three,
+four, and you begin--in the _middle_ of four--_not_ the end. Oh dear!
+Now once more...." etc.
+
+You will at once see from this that Sally had lost no time in finding
+a confidante for the fossil's communication.
+
+An hour and a half of resolute practising makes you not at all sorry
+for an oasis in the counting, which you inaugurate (or whatever you do
+when it's an oasis) by smashing the top coal and making a great blaze.
+And then you go ever so close, and can talk.
+
+"Are you sure it isn't Colonel Lund's mistake? Old gentlemen get very
+fanciful." Thus Miss Wilson. But it seems Sally hasn't much doubt.
+Rather the other way round, if anything!
+
+"I thought it might be, all the way to Norland Square. Then I changed
+my mind coming up the hill. Of course, I don't know about mamma till
+I ask her. But I expect the Major's right about Mr. Fenwick."
+
+"But how does _he_ know? How do you know?"
+
+"I don't know." Sally tastes the points of a holly-leaf with her
+tongue-tip, discreetly, to see how sharp they are, and cogitates. "At
+least," she continues, "I _do_ know. He never takes his eyes off mamma
+from the minute he comes into the house."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Besides--lots of things! Oh no; as far as that goes, I should say
+_he_ was spooney."
+
+"I see. You're a vulgar child, all the same! But about your
+mother--that's the point."
+
+The vulgar child cogitates still more gravely.
+
+"I should say _now_," she says, after thinking it over, "that--only
+I never noticed it at the time, you know----"
+
+"That what?"
+
+"That mamma knows Mr. Fenwick is spooney, and looks up at times to see
+that he's going on."
+
+Laetitia seems to receive this idea with some hesitation or reserve.
+"Looks up at times to see if he's going on?" she repeats inquiringly.
+
+"Yes, of course--like we should. Only I didn't say 'see if.' I said
+'see that.' It makes all the difference."
+
+Miss Wilson breaks into a laugh. "And there you are all the time
+looking as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, and as grave as
+a judge."
+
+Sally has to acquiesce in being kissed by her friend at this point;
+but she curls up a little as one who protests against being
+patronised. "We-e-e-ell!" she says, lengthening out the word, "why
+not? I don't see anything in _that_!"
+
+"Oh no, dear--_that's_ all right! Why shouldn't it be?"
+
+But this isn't candid of Laetitia, whose speech and kiss had certainly
+appeared to impute suppressed insight, or penetration, or sly-pussness,
+or something of that sort to her young friend. But with an implied
+claim to rights of insight, on her own account, from seniority. Sally
+is _froissee_ at this, but not beyond jerking the topic into a new
+light.
+
+"Of course, it's their being grown up that makes one stare so. If it
+wasn't for that...." But this gives away her case, surrenders all
+claim to her equality with Laetitia's twenty-four years. The advantage
+is caught at meanly.
+
+"That's only because you're a baby, dear. Wait till you're ten years
+older, and thirty-eight won't seem so old. I suppose your mother's
+about that?"
+
+"Mother? Why, she's nearly thirty-nine!"
+
+"And Mr. Fenwick?"
+
+"Oh, _he's_ forty-one. _Quite!_ Because we talked it all over, and made
+out they were over eighty between them."
+
+"Who talked it over?"
+
+"Why, him and her and me, of course. Last night."
+
+"Who did you have, Sally dear?"
+
+"Only ourselves, and Dr. Prosy and his Goody mother."
+
+"I thought Mr. Fenwick----"
+
+"I counted him in with us--mother and me and the Major."
+
+"Oh, you counted him in?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I count him in, if I like?"
+
+"Why not? And you do like?" There is an appearance of irritating
+sagacity about Sally's friend. "What did Dr. Vereker say, Sally dear?"
+
+"Doc-tor Vereker! Dr. Prosy. Prosy's not a referee--it was no concern
+of his! Besides--they'd gone."
+
+"Who'd gone?"
+
+"Dr. Prosy and his old hen of a mother. Well, Tishy dear, she _is_
+like that. Comes wobbling down on you as if you were a chicken! I hope
+you don't think mother and I and Mr. Fenwick would talk about how old
+we were added together, with old Goody Prosy in it!"
+
+"Of course not, dear!"
+
+"Oh, Tishy dear, how aggravating you are! Now do please don't be
+penetrating. You know you're trying to get at something; and there's
+nothing to get at. It was perfectly natural. Only, of course, we
+should never dream of talking about how old before people and their
+gossipy old mothers."
+
+"Of course not, dear!"
+
+"There, now! You're being imperturbable! I knew you would. But you may
+say what you like--there really was nothing in it. Nothing whatever
+that time! However, of course mother does like Mr. Fenwick very
+much--everybody knows that."
+
+Laetitia says time will show, and Sally says, "Show what?" For the
+remark connects with nothing in the conversation. Its maker does not
+reply, but retires into the fastnesses of a higher philosophy, unknown
+to the teens, but somehow attainable in the early twenties. She comes
+down, however, to ask after Dr. Vereker. Sally has as good as held her
+tongue about him. Have they quarrelled?
+
+"My dear Tishy! The idea! A _perfect stranger_!"
+
+"I thought you were such good friends."
+
+"I've nothing against Dr. Vereker. But fancy quarrelling with him!
+Like bosom friends. Kissing and making it up. What next!" Laetitia
+seems to have discovered that Sally, subjected to a fixed amused look,
+is sure to develop, and maintains one; and Sally follows on:
+
+"One has to be on an intimate footing to fall out. Besides, people
+shouldn't be hen's sons. Not if they expect that sort of thing!"
+
+"Which sort?"
+
+"You know perfectly well, Tishy dear! And they shouldn't be worthy,
+either, people shouldn't. I'm not at all sure it isn't his worthiness,
+just as much as his mother. I _could_ swallow his mother, if it came
+to that!"
+
+Laetitia, without relaxing the magnetism of her look, is replacing
+a defective string. But a stimulating word will keep Sally up to the
+mark. It would be a pity she should die down, having got so far.
+
+"Not at all sure _what_ isn't his worthiness!"
+
+"Now, Tishy dear, what nonsense! As if you didn't understand! You may
+just as well be penetrating outright, if you're going to go on like
+that. All I know is that, worthiness or no, if Dr. Vereker expects
+I'm going to put him on a quarrelling footing, he's mistaken, and the
+sooner he gives up the idea the better. I suppose he'll be wanting me
+to cherish him next."
+
+And then what does that irritating Laetitia Wilson do but say suddenly,
+"I'm quite ready for the scherzo, dear, if you are." Just as if Sally
+had been talking all this for her own private satisfaction and
+amusement! And she knew perfectly well, Laetitia did, that she had been
+eliciting, and that she meant to wait a day or two, and begin again
+ever so far on, and make believe Sally had said heaps of things. And
+Sally had really said nothing--_nothing_!
+
+However, Miss Wilson was certainly a very fine violin figure, and
+really striking in long sostenuto notes, with a fine throat and
+handsome fingers on her left hand with broad bones, and a handsome
+wrist on her bowing-arm where it was wanted. Only now, of course, she
+hadn't got her Egyptian bracelet that looked so well, and her hair
+wasn't done in a coronet, but only just twisted up anyhow. Besides,
+when it's a difficult scherzo and you take it quick, your appearance
+of having the concentration of Bonaparte and Julius Caesar, and the
+alacrity of a wild cat, doesn't bring out your good points. Give us
+an _andante maestoso_ movement, or a _diminuendo rallentando_ that
+reaches the very climax and acme of slowness itself just before the
+applause comes! It was rather as a meditation in contrasts, though,
+that Sally thought thus to herself; for detached musical jerks of
+diabolical rapidity, that have to be snapped at with the punctuality
+of the mosquito slayer, don't show your rounded lines to advantage,
+and make you clench your teeth and glare horribly.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Our story is like the scherzo in one respect: it has to be given in
+detached jerks--literary, not musical--and these jerks don't come at
+any stated intervals at all. The music was bad enough--so Sally and
+Laetitia thought--but the chronicle is more spasmodic still. However,
+if you want to know its remaining particulars, you will have to brace
+yourself up to tolerating an intermittent style. It is the only one
+our means of collecting information admits of.
+
+This little musical interlude, and the accidental chat of our two
+young performers, gives us a kind of idea of what was the position
+of things at Krakatoa Villa six months after Fenwick made his singular
+reappearance in the life of Mrs. Nightingale. We shall rely on your
+drawing all our inferences. There is only one belief of ours we need
+to lay stress upon; it is that the lady's scheme to do all she could
+to recapture and hold this man who had been her husband was no mere
+slow suggestion of the course of events in that six months, but a
+swift and decisive resolution--one that, if not absolutely made at
+once, paused only in the making until she was quite satisfied that
+the disappearance of Fenwick's past was an accomplished fact. Once
+satisfied of that, he became to her simply the man she had loved
+twenty years ago--the man who did not, could not, forgive her
+what seemed so atrocious a wrong, but whom she could forgive the
+unforgiveness of; and this all the more if she had come to know of the
+ruinous effect her betrayal of him had had--must have had--upon his
+after-life. He was this man--this very man--to all appearance with
+a mysterious veil drawn, perhaps for ever, over the terrible close of
+their brief linked life and its hideous cause--over all that she would
+have asked and prayed should be forgotten. If only this oblivion could
+be maintained!--that was her fear. If it could, what task could be
+sweeter to her than to make him such amends as lay in her power for
+the wrong she had done him--how faultfully, who shall say? And if, in
+late old age, no dawn of memory having gleamed in his ruined mind, she
+came to be able to speak to him and tell him his own story--the tale
+of the wreck of his early years--would not that almost, _almost_,
+carry with it a kind of compensation for what she had undergone?
+
+But her terror of seeing a return of memory now was a haunting
+nightmare to her. She could only soothe and alleviate her anxiety
+by suggesting efforts at recollection to Fenwick, and observing with
+concealed satisfaction how utterly useless they all were. She felt
+guilty at heart in being so happy at his ill-success, and had to
+practise an excusable hypocrisy, an affectation of disappointment at
+his repeated failures. On one particular occasion a shudder of
+apprehension passed through her; she thought he had got a clue. If he
+did, what was to prevent his following it up? She found it hard to say
+to him how sorry she was this clue led to nothing, and to forecast
+from it encouragement for the future. But she said to herself after
+that, that she was a good actress, and had played her part well. The
+part was a hard one.
+
+For what came about was this. It chanced one evening, some three
+months after the railway adventure, when Fenwick had become an
+accepted and constant visitor at Krakatoa Villa, that as he took a
+very late leave of Sally and her mother, the latter came out with him
+into the always quiet road, while Sally ran back into the house to
+direct a letter he was to post, but which had been forgotten for the
+moment, just as he was departing.
+
+They had talked a great deal, and with a closer familiarity than ever
+before, of the problem of Fenwick's oblivion. Both ladies had gone on
+the lines of suggesting clues, trying to recall to him the things that
+_must_ have been in his life as in others. How about his parents?
+Well, he remembered that, as a fact, he had a father and mother. It
+was _themselves_ he could not recollect. How about his schooldays? No,
+that was a blank. He could not even remember having been flogged. Yet
+the idea of school was not unfamiliar; how, otherwise, could he laugh
+as he did at the absurdity of forgetting all about it, especially
+being flogged? But his brothers, his sisters, how _could_ he forget
+_them_? He _did_, although in their case, as in that of his parents,
+he somehow knew that some definite identities had existed that he had
+forgotten. But any effort to recall any specific person came to
+nothing, or else he only succeeded in reviving images manifestly
+confused with characters in fiction or history. Then Sally, who was
+rather incredulous about this complete vacuity of mind, had said to
+him: "But come now, Mr. Fenwick, you don't mean to say you don't know
+if you ever had a sweetheart?" And he had replied with a laugh: "My
+dear Miss Sally, I'm sure I must have had plenty of sweethearts.
+Perhaps it's because I had so many that I have forgotten them
+all--all--all! They are all gone with the rest. I can do sums, and can
+speak French, but what school I learned to keep accounts at I can't
+tell you; and as to where I lived (as I must have done) among French
+people to speak French, I can tell no more than Adam." And then he had
+become rather reserved and silent till he got up to go, and they had
+not liked to press him for more. The pained look they had often been
+distressed to see came on his face, and he pressed his fingers on his
+eyelids as though shutting out the present world might help him to
+recall the past; then with a rough head-shake of his thick hair, like
+a big dog, and a brushing of it about with both hands, as though he
+would rouse this useless head of his to some sort of action, he put
+the whole thing aside, and talked of other matters till he left the
+house.
+
+But when he and Mrs. Nightingale found themselves alone in the road,
+enjoying the delicious west wind that meant before the morning to
+become an equinoctial gale, and blow down chimney-pots and sink ships,
+he turned to her and went back to what they had been talking of. She
+could see the fine strong markings of his face in the moonlight, the
+great jaw and firm lips, the handsome nose damaged by a scar that lay
+true across the bridge of it, and looked white in the gleam of the
+moon, the sad large eyelids and the grave eyes that had retaken the
+look he had shaken off. She could note and measure every change
+maturity had stamped upon him, and could see behind it the boy
+that had come to meet her at the station at Umballa twenty years
+before--had met her full of hope, met her to claim his reward after
+the long delay through the hideous days of the pestilence, to
+inaugurate the anticipated hours of happiness he had trembled to dream
+of. And the worst of the cholera wards that had filled the last months
+of his life with horror had held nothing for him so bad as the tale
+she had to tell or conceal. She could see back upon it as they stood
+there in the moonlight. Do not say she was not a strong woman.
+
+"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale," Fenwick said, "it's always a night
+of this sort that brings back one's youth? You know what I mean?"
+
+"I think I understand what you mean, Mr. Fenwick. You mean if"--she
+hesitated a moment--"if you _could_ recollect."
+
+He nodded a complete yes.
+
+"Just that," said he. "I don't know if it's the millions of dry leaves
+sweeping about, or the moon scudding so quick through the clouds, or
+the smell of the Atlantic, or the bark coming off the plane-trees, or
+the wind blowing the roads into smooth dust-drifts and hard clear-ups
+you could eat your dinner off--I don't know what it is, but something
+or another on a night of this sort does always seem to bring old times
+back, when, as you say, they can be got back on any terms." He
+half-laughed, not in earnest. She found something to say, also not
+very much in earnest.
+
+"Because we remember nights of the sort when we were small, and that
+brings them back."
+
+"Come, I say now, Mrs. Nightingale! As if we couldn't remember all
+sorts of nights, and nothing comes back about them. It's this
+particular sort of night does the job."
+
+"Did you think you remembered something, Mr. Fenwick?" There was
+anxiety in her voice, but no need to conceal it. It would as readily
+pass muster for anxiety that he _should_ have remembered something as
+that he shouldn't.
+
+"I can hardly go so far as that. But that joke of your little pussycat
+about the sweethearts got mixed with the smell of the wind and the
+chrysanthemums and dahlias and sunflowers." He pressed his fingers
+hard on his eyes again. "Do you know, there's pain in it--worse than
+you'd think! The half-idea that comes is not painful in itself--rather
+the contrary--but it gives my brain a twist at the point at which I
+can recall no more. Yes, it's painful!"
+
+"But there _was_ a half-idea? Forgive me if it gives you pain, and
+don't try. Only I'm not sure you ought not to try when the chance
+comes, for your own sake."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind trying. This time it was something about a front
+garden and a girl and a dog-cart." He had not taken his hands from his
+eyes. Now he did so, brushing them on his hair and forehead as before.
+"I get no nearer," said he.
+
+"A front garden and a girl and a dog-cart," thus Miss Sally saucily,
+coming out with the letter. "Did you have a very touching parting, Mr.
+Fenwick? Now, mind you don't forget to post it. I wouldn't trust you!"
+He took the letter from her, but seemed too _distrait_ to notice her
+little piece of levity; then, still speaking as if in distress or
+pain, he said:
+
+"It must have been some front garden, long ago. This one brought it
+back--this and the leaves. Only there was nothing for the dog-cart."
+
+"And only mamma for the girl"--thus Sally the irrepressible. And then
+mamma laughed, but not Mr. Fenwick at all. Only Sally thought her
+mother's laugh came hard, and said to herself, now she should catch
+it for chaffing! However, she didn't catch it, although the abruptness
+with which her mother said good-night and went back into the house
+half confirmed her impression that she should.
+
+On the contrary, when she followed her a few minutes later, having
+accompanied Fenwick to near the road end, and scampered back to the
+house, turning to throw Parthian good-nights after him, she found her
+mother pale and thoughtful, and surely the lips and hands she used to
+kiss her with were cold. She wasn't even sure that wasn't a tear.
+Perhaps it was.
+
+For mamma had had a bad ten minutes--scarcely a _mauvais quart
+d'heure_--and even that short interim had given her time to see that
+this kind of thing would be incessant with her recovered husband,
+granting that she could recover him. Only of that she felt nearly
+secure--unaccountably, perhaps; certainly not warrantably. But how to
+bear this kind of thing through a life?--that was the question.
+
+What was this kind of thing, this bad ten minutes, that had made her
+tremble, and turn white, and glad to get away, and be alone a minute
+before Sally came up jubilant? But oh, how glad, for all that, to get
+at her daughter's lips to kiss!--only not too hard, so as to suggest
+reflection and analysis.
+
+What had upset Mrs. Nightingale was a counter-memory of twenty years
+ago, a clear and full and vivid recollection of the garden and the
+girl and the dog-cart. And then also there "had only been mamma for
+the girl." But oh, the relation the lassie who said those words bore
+to those past days, her place in the drama that filled them out!
+Little wonder her mother's brain reeled.
+
+She could see it all vividly now, all over again. A glorious night
+like this; a dazzling full moon sailing in the blue beyond the tumbled
+chaos of loose cloud so near the earth; the riot of the wind-swept
+trees fighting to keep a shred of their old green on their bareness,
+making new concessions to the blast, and beating their stripped limbs
+together in their despair; the endless swirl of leaves at liberty,
+free now at last to enjoy a short and merry life before becoming food
+for worms. She could see the face she had just parted from, but twenty
+years younger--the same bone-structure with its unscarred youth upon
+it, only a lesser beard with a sunnier tinge, but all the thickness of
+the hair. She could remember the voices in the house, the farewells to
+the young man who was just starting for India, and how she slipped
+down to say a last good-bye on her own account, and felt grateful to
+that old Dean Ireson (the only time in her life) for begging her
+mother (who, of course, was the Rosalind Nightingale Fenwick spoke of
+in the train) on no account to expose herself to the night-air. Why,
+she might have come down, too, into the garden, and spoiled it all!
+And then she could remember--oh, how well!--their last words in the
+windy garden, and the horse in the dog-cart, fresh from his stall,
+and officiously anxious to catch the train--as good as saying so, with
+flings and stamps. And how little she cared if the groom _did_ hear
+him call her Rosey, for that was his name for her.
+
+"Now, Gerry, remember, I've made you _no_ promises; but I'll play
+fair. If I change my mind, I'll write and tell you. And you may write
+to me."
+
+"Every day?"
+
+"Silly boy, be reasonable! Once a month! You'll see, you'll get tired
+of it."
+
+"Come, Rosey, I say! The idea!"
+
+"Yes, you will! Now go! You'll lose the train."
+
+"Oh, Rosey dearest!"
+
+"Yes, what?--you'll lose the train."
+
+"Oh, my dearest, I _can't_! Just think--I may never see you again!"
+
+"You _must_ go, Gerry dear! And there's that blockhead of a boy
+outside there."
+
+"Never mind him; he's nobody! Only one more.... Yes, _dearest love_,
+I'm really going.... Good-bye! good-bye! God bless you!"
+
+And then how she stood there with the memory of his lips dying on
+hers, alone by the gate, in the wild wind, and heard the sharp regular
+trot of the horse lessen on the hard road and die away, and then the
+running of a train she thought was his, and how he would surely miss
+it, and have to come back. And it _would_ be nice just to see him
+again! But he was gone, for all that, and he was a dear good boy. And
+she recollected going to her bedroom to do up her hair, which had all
+come down, and hiding her face on her pillow in a big burst of tears.
+
+Her mind harked back on all this as he himself, the same but changed,
+stood there in the moonlight striving to recollect it all, and
+mysteriously failing. But at least, he _did_ fail, and that was
+something. But oh, what a wrench it gave to life, thought, reason,
+to all her heart and being, to have that unconscious chit cut in
+with "only mamma for the girl!" What and whence was this little
+malaprop? Her overwrought mind shut away this question--almost in
+the asking it--with "Dearer to me, at least, than anything else in
+this world, unless----" and then shut away the rest of the answer.
+
+But she was glad to get at Sally, and feel her there, though she
+could not speak freely to her--nor, indeed, speak at all. And as soon
+as the tension died down, she went back as to a source of peace to the
+failure of his powers of memory, obvious, complete. All her hopes lay
+in that. Where would they be if the whole past were suddenly sprung on
+him? He _might_ be ready to bury bygones, but----
+
+She woke next day fairly at ease in her mind, but feeling as one does
+after any near-run escape. And then it was she said to herself that
+she was a good actress. But the part _was_ hard to act.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The relations between Fenwick and the Nightingales, mother and
+daughter, seem to us to have been acquiring cohesion at the time of
+the foregoing interview. It is rather difficult to say why. But it
+serves to pave the way to the state of things that Sally accepted as
+the "spooneyness" of Fenwick, and her mother's observation of his
+"going on," without the dimmest idea of the underlying motives of the
+drama. Another three months, bringing us on to these discriminations
+of Sally's, may also have brought about appearances that justified
+them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE DANGERS OF AN UNKNOWN PAST. NETTLE-GRASPING, AND A RECURRENCE. WHO
+ AMONG US COURTS CATECHISM ABOUT HIMSELF? A UNIVERSALLY PROVIDED YOUNG
+ MAN. HOW ABOUT THE POOR OLD FURNITURE?
+
+
+We defy the acutest of psychologists to estimate precisely the hold
+love has on a man who is diagnosed, in the language of the vulgar
+child Sally, as "spooney." Probably no patient has ever succeeded in
+doing this himself. It is quite another matter when the eruption has
+broken out, when the crater is vomiting flames and the lava is pouring
+down on the little homesteads at the mountain's base, that may stand
+in the metaphor for all that man's duties and obligations. By that
+time he _knows_. But, while still within the "spooney" zone he knows
+no more than you or I (or that most important _she_) what the morrow
+means to bring. Will it be a step on or a step back? An altogether
+new _she_, or the fires of the volcano, let loose beyond recall?
+
+Fenwick was certainly not in a position to gauge his own feelings
+towards Mrs. Nightingale. All previous experience was cut away from
+him, or seemed so. He might have been, for anything he knew, a married
+man with a family, a devoted husband. He might have been recently
+wedded to an adoring bride, and she might now be heart-broken in her
+loneliness. How could he tell? The only thing that gave him courage
+about this was that he _could_ remember the fact that he had had
+parents, brothers, sisters. He could not recollect _anything whatever_
+about sweetheart, wife, or child. Unearthly gusts of half-ideas came
+to him at times, like that of the girl and the dog-cart. But they only
+gave him pain, and went away unsolved, leaving him sick and dizzy.
+
+His situation was an acutely distressing one. He was shackled and
+embarrassed, so to speak, by what he knew of his relations to
+existence. At any moment a past might be sprung on him, bringing him
+suddenly face to face with God knows what. So strongly did he feel
+this that he often said to himself that the greatest boon that could
+be granted to him would be an assurance of continued oblivion. He was
+especially afflicted by memories of an atrocious clearness that would
+come to him in dreams, the horror of which would remain on into his
+waking time. They were not necessarily horrible things at all, but
+their clearness in the dream, and their total, if slow, disappearance
+as the actual world came back, became sometimes an excruciating
+torment. Who could say that they, or some equivalents, might not reach
+him out of the past to-day or to-morrow--any time?
+
+For instance, he had one morning waked up in a perfect agony--a cold
+perspiration as of the worst nightmares--because of a dream harmless
+enough in itself. He had suddenly remembered, in the dream-street he
+could identify the houses of so plainly, a first-floor he had occupied
+where he had left all his furniture locked up years ago. And he had
+found the house and the first-floor quite easily, and had not seen
+anything strange in the landlord saying that he and his old woman
+often wondered when Mr. Fenwick would come for his things. It was not
+the accumulation of rent unpaid, nor that of the dirt he knew he
+should find on the furniture (all of which he could recollect in the
+dream perfectly well), but the fact that he had forgotten it all, and
+left it unclaimed all those years, that excruciated him. Even his
+having to negotiate for its removal in his shirt did not afflict him
+so much as his forgetfulness for so long of the actual furniture; his
+conviction of the reality of which lasted on after his discovery about
+his costume had made him suspect, in his dream, that he was dreaming.
+
+To a man whose memory is sound, who feels sure he looks back on an
+actual past in security, such a dream is only a curiosity of sleep. To
+Fenwick it was, like many others of the same sort, a possible herald
+of an analogous revelation in waking hours, with a sequel of dreadful
+verification from some abysm of an utterly forgotten past.
+
+His worst terror, far and away, was the fear that he was married and a
+father. It might have been supposed that this arose from a provisional
+sense of pity for the wife and children he must have left; that his
+mind would conceive hypothetical poverty for them, or sorrow,
+disease, or death, the result direct or indirect of his disappearance.
+But this was scarcely the case. They themselves were too intensely
+hypothetical. In this respect the blank in his intellect was so
+unqualified that it might never have occurred to him to ask himself
+the question if they existed had it not been suggested to him by Mrs.
+Nightingale herself. It was, in fact, a question she almost always
+recurred to when Miss Sally was out of the way. It was no use trying
+to talk seriously when that little monkey was there. She turned
+everything to a joke. But the Major was quite another thing. He would
+back her up in anything reasonable.
+
+"I wish more could be done to find out," said she for the twentieth
+time to Fenwick one evening, shortly after the musical recital of last
+chapter. "I don't feel as if it was right to give up advertising.
+Suppose the poor thing is in Australia or America."
+
+"The poor thing is my hypothetical wife?"
+
+"Exactly so. Well, suppose she is. Some people never see any newspapers
+at all. And all the while she may have been advertising for _you_."
+
+"Oh no; we should have been sure to see or hear."
+
+"But why? Now I ask you, Mr. Fenwick, suppose she advertised half a
+dozen times in the 'Melbourne Argus' or the 'New York Sun,' _would_
+you have seen it, necessarily?"
+
+"_I_ should not, because I never see the 'Melbourne Argus' or the 'New
+York Sun.' But those agents we paid to look out go steadily through
+the agony columns--the personal advertisements--of the whole world's
+press; they would have found it if it had ever been published."
+
+"I dare say they only pocketed the money."
+
+"That they did, no doubt. But they gave me something for it. A hundred
+and twenty-three advertisements addressed to Fenwicks--none of them
+to me!"
+
+"But have we advertised enough?"
+
+"Oh, heavens, yes. Think of the answers we've had! I've just received
+the hundred and forty-second. From a lady in distressed circumstances
+who bought a piano ten years ago from a party of my name and
+initials--thought I might be inclined to buy it back at half-price.
+She proposes to call on me early next week."
+
+"Poor Mr. Fenwick! It _is_ discouraging, I admit. But, oh dear! fancy
+if there's some poor thing breaking her heart somewhere! It's easy
+enough for you--_you_ don't believe in her."
+
+"That's it; I don't!" He dropped a tone of pleasantry, and spoke more
+seriously. "Dear Mrs. Nightingale, if my absence of conviction of
+the existence of this lady did not rise to the height of a definite
+disbelief in her altogether--well, I should be wretched. But I feel
+very strongly that I need not make myself a poor miserable about her.
+I _don't_ believe in her, that's the truth!"
+
+"You don't believe a man could forget his wife?"
+
+"I _can't_ believe it, try how I may! Anything--anybody else--but his
+wife, no!"
+
+Fenwick had come in late in the evening, as he was in the habit of
+doing, often three or four times in the week. He looked across from
+his side of the hearthrug, where he had been standing watching the
+fire, but could not see the face opposite to him. Mrs. Nightingale was
+sitting with her back to the light sheltering her eyes from the blaze
+with a fire-screen. So Fenwick saw only the aureole the lamp made in
+her hair--it was a fine halo with a golden tinge. Sally was very proud
+of mamma's hair; it was much better fun to do than her own, said the
+vulgar child. But even had she not been hidden by the screen, the
+expression on her face might have meant nothing to him--that is,
+nothing more than the ready sympathy he was so well accustomed to.
+A little anxiety of eye, a tremor in the lip, the birth of a frown
+without a sequel--these might have meant anything or nothing. She
+might even have turned whiter than she did, and yet not be said to
+show the cross-fire of torments in her heart. She was, as we told you,
+a strong woman, either by nature, or else her life had made her one.
+
+For, think of what the recesses of her memory held; think of the past
+she looked back on, and knew to be nothing but a blank to him. Think
+of what _she_ was, and _he_ was, as he stood there and said, "Anybody
+else, but his wife;" and then rather shaped the "No" that followed
+with his lips than said it; but shook an emphasis into the word with
+his head.
+
+"When are you going to get your hair cut, Mr. Fenwick?" said she;
+and he did think she changed the subject abruptly, without apparent
+cause. "It's just like a lion's mane when you shake it like that."
+
+"To-morrow, if you think it too disreputable."
+
+"I like it. Sally wants to cut it...."
+
+The last few words showed the completeness of Fenwick's _tame
+cattitude_ in the family. It had developed in an amazingly short time.
+Was it due to the old attachment of this man and woman--an attachment,
+mind you, that was sound and strong till it died a violent death? We
+do not find this so very incredible; perhaps, because that memory of
+their old parting in the garden went nearer to an actual revival than
+any other stirring in his mind. But, of course, there may have been
+others equally strong, only we chance to hear of this one.
+
+That was not our purpose, however, in recording such seeming trivial
+chat. It was not trivial on Mrs. Nightingale's part. She had made up
+her mind to flinch from nothing, always to grasp her nettle. Here was
+a nettle, and she seized it firmly. If she identified as clearly as
+she did that shaken lion-mane of Fenwick's with that of Gerry, the
+young man of twenty years ago, and seeing its identity was silent,
+that would be flinching. She would and did say the self-same thing she
+could recall saying to Gerry. And she asked Fenwick when he was going
+to get his hair cut with a smile, that was like that of the Indian
+brave under torture. A knife was through her heart. But it was well
+done, so she thought to herself. If she could be as intrepid as that,
+she could go on and live. She tried experiments of this sort when the
+watchful merry eyes of her daughter were not upon her, and even felt
+glad, this time, that the Major was having a doze underneath a "Daily
+Telegraph." Fenwick took it all as a matter of course, mere chaff....
+
+Did he? If so, why, after a few words more of chat, did he press his
+hands on his eyes and shake a puzzled head; then, after an abrupt turn
+up and down the room, come back to where he stood at first and draw a
+long breath?
+
+"Was that a recurrence, Mr. Fenwick?" she asked. They had come to
+speak of these mental discomforts as _recurrences_. They would afflict
+him, not seldom, without bringing to his mind any definite image. And
+this was the worst sort. When an image came, his mind felt eased.
+
+"A sort of one."
+
+"Can you tell when it came on?" All this was nettle-grasping. She was
+getting used to it. "Was it before or after I said that about your
+hair?"
+
+"After. No, before. Perhaps just about then." Mrs. Nightingale decided
+that she would not tempt Providence any further. Self-discipline was
+good, but not carried to danger-point.
+
+"Now sit down and be quiet," she said. "We won't talk any more about
+unpleasant things. Only the worst of it is," she added, smiling,
+"that one's topics--yours and mine, I mean--are so limited by the
+conditions. I should ask any other man who had been about the world,
+as you _must_ have done, all sorts of questions about all sorts of
+places--where he had been, whom he had seen. You can't answer
+questions, though I hope you will some day...."
+
+She paused, and he saw the reason. "You see," said he, with a
+good-humoured laugh, "one gets back directly to the unpleasant
+subject, whether one will or no. But if I could remember all about
+my precious self, I might not court catechism about it...."
+
+"_I_ should not about mine." This was said in a low tone, with a
+silent look on the unraised eyes that was almost an invitation not to
+hear, and her lips hardly moved to say it, either. He missed it for
+the moment, but finished his speech with the thought in his mind.
+
+"Still, it's an ill-wind that blows nobody good. See what a clear
+conscience I have! But what was that _you_ said?"
+
+She dropped the fire-screen and raised her eyes--fine eyes they were,
+which we might have likened to those of Juno had the eyes of oxen been
+blue--turning them full on him. "When?" said she.
+
+"Just this minute. I ought to have apologized for interrupting you."
+
+"I said I should not court catechism about myself. I should not."
+Fenwick felt he could not assign this speech its proper place in the
+dialogue without thinking. He thought gravely, looking to all seeming
+into the fire for enlightenment; then turned round and spoke.
+
+"Surely that is true, in a sense, of all mankind--mankind and
+womankind. Nobody wants to be seen through. But one's past would need
+to be a very shaky one to make one wish for an oblivion like mine to
+extinguish it."
+
+"I should not dislike it. I have now all that I wish to keep out of
+the past. I have Sally. There is nothing I could not afford to forget
+in the past, no one thing the loss of which could alter her in the
+least, that little monkey of a daughter of mine! And there are many,
+many things I should like to see the last of." From which speech
+Fenwick derived an impression that the little monkey, the vulgar
+child, had come back warm and living and welcome to the speaker's
+mind, and had driven away some mists of night, some uglinesses that
+hung about it. How he wished he could ask: "Was one of them her
+father?" That was not practicable. But it was something of that sort,
+clearly. His mind could not admit the idea of a haunting remorse, a
+guilty conscience of an action of her own, in the memory of the woman
+who spoke to him. He was too loyal to her for that. Besides, the
+wording of her speech made no such supposition necessary. Fenwick's
+answer to it fell back on abstractions--the consolation a daughter
+must be, and so forth.
+
+"There she is!" said her mother; and then added, as perturbation
+without heralded Miss Sally's approach: "I will tell you what I meant
+some other time." For there she was, no doubt of it, wild with
+excitement to report the splendid success of the great sestet, the
+production of which had been the event of the musical gathering she
+had come from. And you know as well as we do how it is when youth and
+high spirits burst in upon the sober stay-at-homes, intoxicated with
+music and lights and supper and too many people talking at once.
+Sally's eyebrows and teeth alone would have been enough to set all the
+birds singing in the dullest coppices decorum ever planted, let alone
+the tales she had to tell of all the strange and wonderful things that
+had come to pass at the Erskine Peels', who were the givers of the
+party, and always did things on such a scale.
+
+"And where do you think, mother, Mrs. Erskine Peel gets all those
+good-looking young men from that come to her parties? Why, from the
+Stores, of course. Just fancy!... How do I know? Why, because I talked
+to one of them for ever so long, and made him tell me all about it. I
+detected him, and told him so straight off. How did I recognise him?
+Why, of course, because he's that young man that came here about the
+letter. Oh, _you_ know, Mr. Fenwick! Gracious me, how slow you are!
+The young man that brought you the letter to translate. Rather tall,
+dark eyes."
+
+"Oh yes, certainly. I remember him quite well. Well, I expect he made
+a very good young man for a small tea-party."
+
+"Of course he did, and it's quite ridiculous." By which the vulgar
+child meant that class distinctions were ridiculous. She had this way
+of rushing subjects, eliding the obvious, and relying on her hearers.
+"He told me all about it. He'd been universally provided, he said; and
+I promised not to tell. Miss Erskine Peel--that's Orange, you know,
+the soprano--went to the manager and said her mother said they _must_
+get more men, though it wasn't dancing, or the rooms looked so bad;
+only they mustn't be fools, and must be able to say Wagner and Liszt
+and things. And he hoped I didn't think he was a fool."
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+"Said I couldn't say--didn't know him well enough. He might be, to
+look at. Or not, accordingly. I didn't say _that_, you know, mamma."
+
+"I didn't know, darling. You're very rude sometimes."
+
+"Well, he said he could certainly say Wagner and Liszt, and even more,
+because--it was rather sad, you know, mamma dear----"
+
+"Sally, you've told that young man he may call; you know you have!"
+
+"Well, mamma dear, and if I have, I don't see that anybody's mare's
+dead. Because, do listen!" Fenwick interposed a parenthesis.
+
+"I don't think you need to be apprehensive, Mrs. Nightingale. He was
+an educated young man enough. His not knowing a French phrase like
+that implies nothing. Not one in a hundred would." The way in which
+the Major, who, of course, had come out of his doze on the inrush of
+Miss Sally, looked across at Fenwick as he said this, implied an
+acquired faith in the judgment of the latter. Sally resumed.
+
+"Just let me tell you. His name's Bradshaw. Only he's no relation to
+_the_ Bradshaw--in a yellow cover, you know. We-e-ell, I don't see
+anything in that!" Sally is defending her position against a smile her
+mother and Fenwick have exchanged. They concede that there is nothing
+in it, and Sally continues. "Where was I? Oh, Bradshaw; yes. He was an
+awfully promising violinist--awfully promising! And what do you think
+happened? Why, the nerves of his head gave way, and he couldn't stand
+the vibration! So it came to being Cattley's or nothing." Sally
+certainly had the faculty of cutting a long story short.
+
+She thought the story, so cut, one that her mother and Mr. Fenwick
+might have shown a more active interest in, instead of saying it was
+time for all of us to be in bed. She did not, however, ascribe to them
+any external preoccupation--merely an abstract love of Truth; for was
+it not nearly one o'clock in the morning?
+
+Nevertheless, a little incident of Mr. Fenwick's departure, not
+noticed at the moment, suddenly assumed vitality just as Sally was
+"going off," and woke her up. What was it she overheard her mother
+say to him, just as he was leaving the house, about something she had
+promised to tell him some time? However, reflection on it with waking
+faculties dissipated the importance it seemed to have half-way to
+dreamland, and Sally went contentedly to sleep again.
+
+Fenwick, as he walked to his lodgings through the dull February night,
+did not regard this something, whatever it was, as a thing of slight
+importance at all. He may have been only "spooney," but it was in a
+sense that left him no pretence for thinking that anything connected
+with this beautiful young widow-lady could be unimportant to him. On
+the contrary, she was more and more filling all his waking thoughts,
+and becoming the pivot on which all things turned. It is true, he
+"dismissed from his mind"--whatever that means--every presumptuous
+suggestion that in some precious time to come she might be willing to
+throw in her lot with his own, and asked himself what sort of thing
+was he that he should allow such an idea to come even as far as
+contradiction-point? He, a poor inexplicable wreck! What was the Self
+he had to offer, and what else had he? But, indeed, the speculation
+rarely got even to this maturity, so promptly was it nipped in the
+bud. Only, there were so many buds to nip. He became aware that he
+was giving a good deal of attention to this sort of gardening.
+
+Also, he had a consciousness that he was growing morbidly anxious for
+the maintenance of his own oblivion. That which was at first only
+a misgiving about what a return of memory might bring to light, was
+rapidly becoming a definite desire that nothing should come to light
+at all. How _could_ he look forward to that "hypothetical" wife whom
+he did not in the least believe in, but who might be somewhere, for
+all that! He knew perfectly well that his relations with Krakatoa
+Villa would _not_ remain the same, say what you might! Of course, he
+also knew that he had no relations there that _need_ change--most
+certainly not! At this point an effort would be made against the
+outcrop of his thoughts. Those confounded buds were always bursting.
+It was impossible to be even with them.
+
+Perhaps it was on this evening, or rather early morning, as he walked
+home to his lodgings, that Fenwick began to recognise more fully than
+he had done before Mrs. Nightingale's share in what was, if not an
+absolute repugnance to a revival of the unknown past, at least a very
+ready acquiescence in his ignorance of it. But surely, he reasoned
+with himself, if this cause is making me contented with my darkness,
+it is the more reason that it should be penetrated.
+
+An uncomfortable variation of his dream of the resurrected first-floor
+crossed his mind. Suppose he had forgotten the furniture, but
+remembered the place, and gone back to tenant it with a van-load of
+new chairs and tables. What would he have done with the poor old
+furniture?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MORE GIRLS' CHATTER. SWEEPS AND DUSTMEN. HOW SALLY DISILLUSIONED MR.
+ BRADSHAW. OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN
+
+
+It is impossible to make Gluck's music anything but a foretaste of
+heaven, as long as there is any show of accuracy in the way it is
+rendered. But, then, you must go straight on, and not go over a
+difficult phrase until you know it. You must play fair. Orpheus would
+probably only have provoked Cerberus--certainly wouldn't have put him
+to sleep--if he had practised, and counted, and gone back six bars
+and done it again.
+
+But Cerberus wasn't at 260, Ladbroke Grove Road, on the Tuesday
+following Mrs. Erskine Peel's musical party, which was the next time
+Sally went to Laetitia Wilson. And it was as well that he wasn't, for
+Sally stuck in a passage at the end of one page and the beginning of
+the next, so that you had to turn over in the middle; and it was bad
+enough, goodness knew, without that! It might really have been the
+north-west passage, so insuperable did it seem.
+
+"I shall never get it right, I know, Tishy," said the viola.
+
+And the violin replied: "Because you never pay any attention to the
+arpeggio, dear. It doesn't begin on the chord. It begins on the G
+flat. Look here, now. One--two--three. One--two--three."
+
+"Yes, that's all very well. Who's going to turn over the leaf, I
+should like to know? I know I shall never do it. Not because the
+nerves of my head are giving way, but because I'm a duffer."
+
+"I suppose you know what that young man is, dear?" Sally accepts this
+quite contentedly, and immediately skips a great deal of unnecessary
+conversation.
+
+"I'm not in love with him, Tishy dear."
+
+"Didn't say you were, dear. But I suppose you don't know what he is,
+all the same." Which certainly seems inconsecutive, but we really
+cannot be responsible for the way girls talk.
+
+"Don't know, and don't want to know. What is he?"
+
+"He's from Cattley's." This throws a light on the conversation. It
+shows that Sally had told Laetitia who she was going to meet at her
+mother's next evening. Sally is not surprised.
+
+"As if I didn't know all about this! As if he didn't tell me his
+story!"
+
+"Like the mock-turtle in Alice?"
+
+"Now, Tishy dear, is that an insinuation, or isn't it? Do be candid!"
+
+"The mock-turtle told his story. Once, he was a real turtle."
+
+"Very well, Tishy dear. That's as much as to say Julius Bradshaw is
+mock. I can't see where the mockness comes in myself. He told _me_
+all about it, plain enough."
+
+"Yes--and you know what a rage Mrs. Erskine Peel is in, and says it
+was an _eclaircissement_."
+
+"Why can't she be satisfied with English?... What! Of course, there
+are _hundreds_ of English equivalents for _eclaircissement_. There's
+bust-up."
+
+"That's only one."
+
+"Tishy dear, don't be aggravating! Keep to the point. Why mustn't
+I have Julius Bradshaw to play with if I like because he's at
+Cattley's?"
+
+"You may, if you _like_, dear! As long as you're satisfied, it's
+all right."
+
+"What fault have you to find with him?"
+
+"I! None at all. It's all perfectly right."
+
+"You are _the_ most irritating girl."
+
+"Suppose we take the _adagio_ now--if you're rested."
+
+But Sally's back was up. "Not until you tell me what you really mean
+about Julius Bradshaw."
+
+So Laetitia had her choice between an explicit statement of her
+meaning, and an unsupported incursion into the _adagio_.
+
+"I suppose you'll admit there _are_ such things as social
+distinctions?"
+
+Sally wouldn't admit anything whatever. If sociometry was to be a
+science, it must be worked out without axioms or postulates. Laetitia
+immediately pointed out that if there were no such things as social
+distinctions of course there was no reason why Mr. Julius Bradshaw
+shouldn't take his violin to Krakatoa Villa. "Or here, or anywhere,"
+concluded Laetitia, with a touch of pride in the status of Ladbroke
+Grove Road. Whereupon Sally surrendered as much of her case as she
+had left.
+
+"You talk as if he was a sweep or a dustman," said she.
+
+"I don't see why you should mind if I do, dear. Because, if there are
+to be no social distinctions, there's no reason why all the sweeps and
+dustmen in Christendom shouldn't come and play the violin at Krakatoa
+Villa.... Now, not _too_ slow, you know. One--two--three--four--that'll
+do." Perhaps Sally felt it would be a feeble line of defence to dwell
+on the scarcity of good violinists among sweeps and dustmen, and that
+was why she fell into rank without comment.
+
+This short conversation, some weeks on in the story, lets in one or
+two gleams of side-light. It shows that Sally's permission to the
+young man Bradshaw to call at her mother's had been promptly taken
+advantage of--jumped at is the right expression. Also that Miss Wilson
+had stuck-up ideas. Also that Sally was a disciple of what used to be
+called Socialism; only really nowadays such a lot of things get called
+Socialism that the word has lost all the discriminative force one
+values so much in nouns substantive. Also (only we knew it already)
+that Sally was no lawyer. We do not love her the less, for our part.
+
+But nothing in this interchange of shots between Sally and her friend,
+nor in anything she said to her mother about Mr. Bradshaw, gives its
+due prominence to the fact that, though that young gentleman was a
+devout worshipper at the shrine of St. Satisfax, he had only become so
+on the Sunday after Miss Sally had casually mentioned the latter as a
+saint she frequented. Perhaps she "dismissed it from her mind," and it
+was obliging enough to go. Perhaps she considered she had done her
+duty by it when she put on record, in soliloquy, her opinion that if
+people chose to be gaping idiots they might, and she couldn't help
+it. She had a happy faculty for doing what she called putting young
+whippersnappers in their proper places. This only meant that
+she managed to convey to them that the lines they might elect to
+whippersnap on were not to be those of sentimental nonsense. And
+perhaps she really dealt in the wisest way with Mr. Bradshaw's
+romantic adoration of her at a distance when he fished for leave to
+call upon her. The line he made his application on was that he should
+so like to play her a rapid movement by an unpronounceable Slav. She
+said directly, why not come and bring his violin on Wednesday evening
+at nine? That was her mother's address on the card on the fiddle-case.
+He must recollect it--which he did unequivocally.
+
+Now, if this young lady had had a fan, she might have tittered with
+it, or blushed slightly, and said, "Oh, Mr. Bradshaw!" or, "Oh, sir!"
+like in an old novel--one by Fanny Burney, or the like. But she did
+nothing of the sort, and the consequence was that he had, as it were,
+to change the _venue_ of his adoration--to make it a little less
+romantic, in fact. Her frank and breezy treatment of the subject had
+let in a gust of fresh air, and blown away all imagination. For there
+naturally was a good deal of that in a passion based on a single
+interview and nourished by weekly stimulants at morning services.
+In fact, when he presented himself at Krakatoa Villa on Wednesday
+evening as invited--the day after Laetitia's remarks about his social
+position--he was quite prepared to be introduced to the young woman's
+_fiance_, if.... Only, when he got as far as the _if_, he dropped the
+subject. As soon as he found there was no such person he came to
+believe he would not have been much disconcerted if there had been.
+How far this was true, who can say?
+
+He was personally one of those young men about whom you may easily
+produce a false impression if you describe them at all. This is
+because your reader will take the bit in his teeth, and run away with
+an idea. If you say a nose has a bridge to it, this directly produces
+in some minds an image like Blackfriars Bridge; that it is straight,
+the AEginetan marbles; that it is _retrousse_, the dog in that Hogarth
+portrait. Suggest a cheerful countenance, and you stamp your subject
+for ever as a Shakespearian clown. So you must be content to know that
+Mr. Bradshaw was a good-looking young man, of dark complexion, and of
+rather over medium height and good manners. If he had not been, he
+would never, as an article of universal provision for parties, have
+passed muster at Cattley's. He was like many other young men such as
+one sees in shops; but then, what very nice-looking young men one
+sometimes sees there! Sally had classed him as a young whippersnapper,
+but this was unjust, if it impugned his stature. She repeated the
+disparaging epithet when, in further justification to Miss Wilson of
+her asking him to her mother's house, she sketched a policy of conduct
+to guide inexperienced girls in their demeanour towards new male
+friends. "You let 'em come close to, and have a good look," said the
+vulgar child. "Half of 'em will be disgusted, and go away in a huff."
+
+Mrs. Nightingale had known Mr. Bradshaw for a long time as a customer
+at a shop knows the staff in the background, mere office secretions,
+who only ooze out at intervals. For Bradshaw was not strictly a
+counter-jumper, although Miss Wilson more than once spoke of him so,
+adding, when it was pointed out to her that theoretically he never
+went behind counters, by jumping or otherwise, that that didn't make
+the slightest difference: the principle was the same.
+
+Sally's mother did not share her friend's fancies. But she had not
+confidence enough in the stability of the earth's crust to give way
+freely to her liberalism, drive a coach-and-six through the Classes,
+and talk to him freely about the shop. She did not know what a Social
+Seismologist would say on the point. So she contented herself with
+treating him as a matter of course, as a slight acquaintance whom she
+saw often, merely asking him if that was he. To which the reply was
+in the affirmative, like question-time in the Commons.
+
+"Is this the Strad? Let's have it out," says Sally. For Mr. Bradshaw
+possessed a Strad. He brought it out of its coffin with something of
+the solicitude Petrarch might have shown to the remains of Laura, and
+when he had rough-sketched its condition of discord and corrected
+the drawing, danced a Hungarian dance on it, and apologized for his
+presumption in doing so. He played so very well that it certainly did
+seem rather a cruel trick of fate that gave him nerves in his head.
+Sally then said, might she look at it? and played chords and runs,
+just to feel what it was like. Her comment was that she wished her
+viola was a Strad.
+
+We record all this to show what, perhaps, is hardly worth the
+showing--a wavering in a man's mind, and that man a young one. Are
+they not at it all day long, all of them? Do they do anything but
+waver?
+
+When Sally said she wished her viola was a Strad, Mr. Bradshaw's mind
+shortly became conscious that some passing spook, of a low nature, had
+murmured almost inaudibly that it was a good job _his_ Strad wasn't
+a viola. "Because, you see," added the spook, "that quashes all
+speculation whether you, Mr. Bradshaw, are glad or sorry you needn't
+lay your instrument at this young lady's feet. Now, if immediately
+after you first had that overwhelming impression of her--got
+metaphorically torpedoed, don't you know?--such a wish as hers had
+been expressed, you probably would have laid both your Strad and your
+heart at her feet, and said take my all!" But now that he had been so
+far disillusioned by Sally's robust and breezy treatment of the
+position, he was not quite sure the spook had not something to say for
+himself. Mr. Bradshaw was content to come down off his high horse, and
+to plod along the dull path of a mere musical evening visitor at
+a very nice house. Pleasant, certainly, but not the aim of his
+aspirations from afar at St. Satisfax's. His _amour propre_ was a
+little wounded by that spook, too. Nothing keeps it up to the mark
+better than a belief in one's stability--in love-matters, especially.
+
+He was not quite sure of the exact moment the spook intruded his
+opinion, so _we_ can't be expected to know. Perhaps about the time
+Miss Wilson came in (just as he was showing how carefully he had
+listened to Joachim) and said could _he_ play those? She wished _she_
+could. She was thrown off her guard by the finished execution, and for
+the moment quite forgot Cattley's and the classitudes. Sally instantly
+perceived her opening. She would enjoy catching Tishy out in any sort
+of way. So she said: "Mr. Bradshaw will show you how, Tishy dear; of
+course he will. Only, not now, because if we don't begin, we shan't
+have time for the long quartet." If you say this sort of thing about
+strangers in Society, you really ought to give them a chance. So
+thought Laetitia to herself, and resolved to blow Sally up at the first
+opportunity.
+
+As for that culprit, she completed her work, from her own position of
+perfect security, with complacency at least. And she felt at the end
+of her evening (which we needn't dwell on, as it was all crotchets,
+minims, and F sharps and G flats) that her entrenchments had become
+spontaneously stronger without exertion on her part. For there were
+Tishy and Mr. Bradshaw, between whom Sally had certainly understood
+there was a great gulf fixed, sitting on the very same sofa and talking
+about a Stradivarius. She concluded that, broadly speaking, Debrett's
+bark is worse than his bite, and that he is, at heart, a very
+accommodating character.
+
+"I hope you saw Tishy, mamma dear." So spoke Sally to her mother,
+after the musicians first, and then Fenwick, had dispersed their
+several ways. Mrs. Nightingale seemed very _distraite_ and
+preoccupied.
+
+"Saw Tishy what, kitten?"
+
+"Tishy and Mr. Bradshaw on that sofa."
+
+"No, darling. Oh yes, I did. What about them?"
+
+"After all that rumpus about shop-boys!" But her mother's attention
+is not easy to engage this evening, somehow. Her mind seems somewhere
+else altogether. But from where it is, it sees the vulgar child very
+plainly indeed, as she puts up her face to be kissed with all its
+animation on it. She kisses it, animation and all, caressing the rich
+black hair with a hand that seems thoughtful. A hand can. Then she
+makes a little effort to shake off something that draws her away, and
+comes back rather perfunctorily to her daughter's sphere of interest
+and the life of town.
+
+"Did Laetitia call Mr. Bradshaw a shop-boy, chick?"
+
+"Very nearly--at least, I don't know what you call not calling anybody
+shop-boy if she didn't." Her mother makes a further effort--comes back
+a little more.
+
+"What did she say, child?"
+
+"Said you could always tell, and it was no use my talking, and the
+negro couldn't change his spots."
+
+"She has some old-fashioned ideas. But how about calling him a
+shop-boy?"
+
+"Not in words, but worse. Tishy always goes round and round. I wish
+she'd _say_! However, Dr. Vereker quite agrees with me. _We_ think it
+_dishonest_!"
+
+"What did Dr. Vereker think of Mr. Bradshaw?" We have failed to note
+that the doctor was the 'cello in the quartet.
+
+"Now, mamma darling, fancy asking Dr. Prosy what he thinks! I wasn't
+going to. Besides, as if it mattered what they think of each other!...
+Who? Why, men, of course!"
+
+"Mr. Fenwick's a man, and you asked him."
+
+"Mr. Fenwick's a man on other lines--absolutely other. He doesn't come
+in really." Her mother repeats the last four words, not exactly
+derisively--rather, if anything, her accent and her smile may be said
+to caress her daughter's words as she says them. She is such a silly,
+but such a dear little goose--that seems the implication.
+
+"We-e-ll," says Sally, as she has said before, and we have tried to
+spell her. "I don't see anything in that, because, look how reasonable!
+Mr. Fenwick's ... Mr. Fenwick's ... why, of course, entirely different.
+I say, mother dearest...."
+
+"What, kitten?"
+
+"What were you and Mr. Fenwick talking about so seriously in the back
+drawing-room?" The two are upstairs in the front bedroom at this
+minute, by-the-bye.
+
+"Did you hear us, darling?"
+
+"No, because of the row. But one could tell, for all that." Then Sally
+sees in an instant that it is something her mother is not going to
+tell her about, and makes immediate concession. "Where was the Major
+going that he couldn't come?" she asks. "He generally makes a point
+of coming when it's music."
+
+"I fancy he's dining at the Hurkaru," says her mother. But she has
+gone back into her preoccupation, and from within it externalises an
+opinion that we should be better in bed, or we shall never be up in
+the morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+WHAT FENWICK AND SALLY'S MOTHER HAD BEEN SAYING IN THE BACK DRAWING-ROOM.
+ OP. 999. BACK IN THAT OLD GARDEN AGAIN, AND HOW GERRY COULD NOT SWIM.
+ THE OLD TARTINI SONATA
+
+
+As soon as ever Mr. Bradshaw touched his violin, and before ever he
+began to play his Hungarian Dance on all four strings at once, Mrs.
+Nightingale and Mr. Fenwick went away into the back drawing-room, not
+to be too near the music. Because there was a fire in both rooms.
+
+In the interval of time that had passed since Christmas Sally had
+contrived to "dismiss from her mind" Colonel Lund's previsions about
+her mother and Mr. Fenwick. Or they had given warning, and gone of
+their own accord. For by now she had again fallen into the frame of
+mind which classified her mother and Fenwick as semi-elderly people,
+and, so to speak, out of it all. So her mind assented readily to
+distance from the music as a sufficient reason for a secession to the
+back room. Non-combatants are just as well off the field of battle.
+
+But a closer observer than Sally at this moment would have noticed
+that chat in an undertone had already set in in the back drawing-room
+even before the Hungarians had stopped dancing. Also that the applause
+that came therefrom, when they did stop, had a certain perfunctory
+air, as of plaudits something else makes room for, and comes back
+again after. Not that she would have "seen anything in it" if she had,
+because, whatever her mother said or did was, in Sally's eyes, right
+and normal. Abnormal and bad things were conceived and executed
+outside the family. Nor, in spite of the _sotto voce_, was there
+anything Sally could not have participated in, whatever exception she
+might have taken to something of a patronising tone, inexcusable
+towards our own generation even in the most semi-elderly people on
+record.
+
+Her mother, at Sally's latest observation point, had taken the large
+armchair quite on the other side of the rug, to be as far off the
+music as possible. Mr. Fenwick, in reply to a flying remark of her
+own, she being at the moment a music-book seeker, wouldn't bring the
+other large armchair in front of the fire and be comfortable, thank
+you. He liked this just as well. Sally had then commented on Mr.
+Fenwick's unnatural love of uncomfortable chairs "when he wasn't
+walking about the room." She fancied, as she passed on, that she heard
+her mother address him as "Fenwick," without the "Mr." So she did.
+
+"You are a restless man, Fenwick! I wonder were you so before the
+accident? Oh dear! there I am on that topic again!" But he only
+laughed.
+
+"It doesn't hurt _me_," he said. "That reminds me that I wanted to
+remind _you_ of something you said you would tell me. You know--that
+evening the kitten went to the music-party--something you would tell
+me some time."
+
+"I know; I'll tell you when they've got to their music, if there isn't
+too much row. Don't let's talk while this new young man's playing; it
+seems unkind. It won't matter when they're all at it together." But in
+spite of good resolutions silence was not properly observed, and the
+perfunctory pause came awkwardly on the top of a lapse. Fenwick then
+said, as one who avails himself of an opportunity:
+
+"No need to wait for the music; they can't hear a word we say in there.
+We can't hear a word _they_ say."
+
+"Because they're making such a racket." Mrs. Nightingale paused with
+a listening eye, trying to disprove their inaudibility. The examination
+confirmed Fenwick. "I like it," she continued--"a lot of young voices.
+It's much better when you don't make out what they say. When you can't
+hear a word, you fancy some sense in it." And then went on listening,
+and Fenwick waited, too. He couldn't well fidget her to keep her
+promise; she would do it of herself in time. It might be she preferred
+talking under cover of the music. She certainly remained silent till
+it came; then she spoke.
+
+"What was it made me say that to you about something I would tell you?
+Oh, I know. You said, perhaps if you knew your past, you would not
+court catechism about it. And I said that, knowing mine, _I_ should
+not either. Wasn't that it?" She fixed her eyes on him as though to
+hold him to the truth. Perhaps she wanted his verbal recognition of
+the possibility that she, too, like others, might have left things in
+the past she would like to forget on their merits--cast-off garments
+on the road of life. It may have been painful to her to feel his faith
+in herself an obstacle to what she wished at least to hint to him,
+even if she could not tell him outright. She did not want too much
+divine worship at her shrine--a ready recognition of her position of
+mortal frailty would be so much more sympathetic, really. A feeling
+perhaps traceably akin to what many of us have felt, that if our
+father the devil--"auld Nickie Ben"--would only tak' a thought and
+mend, as he aiblins might, he would be the very king of father
+confessors. If details had to be gone into, we should be sure of _his_
+sympathy.
+
+"Yes, that was it. And I suppose I looked incredulous." Thus Fenwick.
+
+"You looked incredulous. I would sooner you should believe me. Would
+you hand me down that fire-screen off the chimney-piece? Thank you."
+She was hardening herself to the task she had before her. He gave her
+the screen, and as he resumed his seat drew it nearer to her. Mozart's
+Op. 999 had just started, and it was a little doubtful if voices could
+be heard unless, in Sally's phrase, they were close to.
+
+"I shall believe you. Does what you were going to tell me relate
+to----"
+
+"Go on."
+
+"To your husband?"
+
+"Yes." The task had become easier suddenly. She breathed more freely
+about what was to come. "I wish you to know that he may be still
+living. I have heard nothing to the contrary. But I ought to speak
+of him as the man who was my husband. He is no longer that." Fenwick
+interposed on her hesitation.
+
+"You have divorced him?" But she shook her head--shook a long
+negative. And Fenwick looked up quickly, and uttered a little sharp
+"Ah!" as though something had struck him. The slow head-shake said as
+plain as words could have said it, "I wish I could say yes." So
+expressive was it that Fenwick did not even speculate on the third
+alternative--a separation without a divorce. He saw at once he could
+make it easier for her if he spoke out plain, treating the bygone as
+a thing that _could_ be spoken of plainly.
+
+"He divorced you?" She was very white, but kept her eyes steadily
+fixed on him over the fire-screen, and her voice remained perfectly
+firm and collected. The music went on intricately all the while. She
+spoke next.
+
+"To all intents and purposes. There was a technical obstacle to a
+legal divorce, but he tried for one. We parted sorely against my will,
+for I loved him, and now it is over nineteen years since I saw him
+last, or heard of him or from him. But he was absolutely blameless.
+Unless, indeed, it is to be counted blame to him that he could not
+bear what no other man could have borne. I cannot possibly give you
+all details. But I wish you to hear this that I have to tell you from
+myself. It is painful to me to tell, but it would be far worse that
+you should hear it from any one else. I feel sure it is safe to tell
+you; that you will not talk of it to others--least of all to that
+little chick of mine."
+
+"You may trust me--indeed, you may--without reserve. I see you wish
+to tell me no more, so I will not ask it."
+
+"And blame me as little as possible?"
+
+"I cannot blame you."
+
+"Before you say that, listen to as much as I can tell you of the
+story. I was a young girl when I went out alone to be married to him
+in India. We had parted in England eight months before, and he had
+remained unchanged--his letters all told the same tale. I quarrelled
+with my mother--as I now see most unreasonably--merely because she
+wished to marry again. Perhaps she was a little to blame not to be
+more patient with a headstrong, ill-regulated girl. I was both. It
+ended in my writing out to him in India that I should come out and
+marry him at once. My mother made no opposition." She remained silent
+for a little, and her eyes fell. Then she spoke with more effort,
+rather as one who answers her own thoughts. "No, I need say nothing of
+the time between. It was no excuse for the wrong I did _him_. I can
+tell you what that was...." It did not seem easy, though, when it came
+to actual words. Fenwick spoke into the pause.
+
+"Why tell me now? Tell me another time."
+
+"I prefer now. It was this way: I kept something back from him till
+after we were married--something I should have told him before. Had I
+done so, I believe to this moment we should never have parted. But my
+concealment threw doubt on all else I said.... I am telling more than
+I meant to tell." She hesitated again, and then went on. "That was my
+wrong to him--the concealment. But, of course, it was not the ground
+of the divorce proceedings." Fenwick stopped her again.
+
+"Why tell me any more? You are being led on--are leading yourself
+on--to say more than you wish."
+
+"Well, I will leave it there. Only, Fenwick, understand this: my
+husband was young and generous and noble-hearted. Had I trusted him,
+I believe all might have gone well, even though he...." She hesitated
+again, and then cancelled something unsaid. "The concealment was my
+fault--the mistrust. That was all. Nothing else was my _fault_." As
+she says the words in praise of her husband she finds it a pleasure
+to let her eyes rest on the grave, handsome, puzzled face that, after
+all, really is _his_. She catches herself wondering--so oddly do the
+undercurrents of mind course about--where he got that sharp white scar
+across his nose. It was not there in the old days.
+
+She looks at him until he, too, looks up, and their eyes meet. "Well,
+then," she says, "I will tell you no more. Blame me as little as
+possible." And to this repetition of her previous words he says again,
+"I cannot blame you," very emphatically.
+
+But Mrs. Nightingale felt perplexed at his evident sincerity; would
+rather he should have indulged in truisms, we were not all of us
+perfect, and so forth. When she spoke again, some bars of the music
+later, she took for granted that his mind, like hers, was still
+dwelling on his last words. She felt half sorry she had, so to speak,
+switched off the current of the conversation.
+
+"If you will think over what I have told you, Fenwick, you will see
+that you cannot help doing so."
+
+"How can that be?"
+
+"Surely! My husband sought to divorce me, and was himself absolutely
+blameless. How can you do otherwise than blame me?"
+
+"Partly--only partly--because I see you are keeping back
+something--something that would exonerate you. I cannot believe you
+were to blame."
+
+"Listen, Fenwick! As I said, I cannot tell you the whole; and the
+Major, who is the only man alive who knows all the story, will, I
+know, refuse to tell you anything, even if you ask him, and that I
+wish you not to do."
+
+"I should not dream of asking him."
+
+"Well, he would refuse. I know it. But I want you to know all I can
+tell you. I do not want any groundless excuses made for me. I will not
+accept any absolution from any one on a false pretence. You see what
+I mean."
+
+"I see perfectly. I am not sure, though, that you see my meaning. But
+never mind that. Is there anything further you would really like me
+to know?"
+
+She waited a little, and then answered, keeping her eyes always fixed
+on Fenwick: "Yes, there is."
+
+But at this moment the first movement of Op. 999 came to a perfect
+and well thought out conclusion, bearing in mind everything that had
+been said on six pages of ideas faultlessly interchanged by four
+instruments, and making due allowance for all exceptions each had
+courteously taken to the other. But Op. 999 was going on to the
+second movement directly, and only tolerated a pause for a few
+string-tightenings and trial-squeaks, to get in tune, and the removal
+of a deceased fly from a piano-candle. The remark from the back-room
+that we could hear beautifully in here seemed to fall flat, the
+second violin merely replying "All right!" passionlessly. The
+instruments then asked each other if they were ready, and answered
+yes. Then some one counted four suggestively, for a start, and life
+went on again.
+
+Mrs. Nightingale and Fenwick sat well on into the music before either
+spoke. He, resolved not to seem to seek or urge any information at
+all; all was to come spontaneously from her. She, feeling the
+difficulty of telling what she had to tell, and always oppressed with
+the recollection of what it had cost her to make her revelation to
+this selfsame man nineteen years ago. She wished he would give the
+conversation some lift, as he had done before, when he asked if what
+she had to tell referred to her husband. But, although he would gladly
+have repeated his assistance, he could see his way to nothing, this
+time, that seemed altogether free from risk. How if he were to
+blunder into ascribing to her something more culpable than her actual
+share in the past? She half guessed this; then, seeing that speech
+must come from herself in the end, took heart and faced the position
+resolutely. She always did.
+
+"You know this, Fenwick, do you not, that when there is a divorce, the
+husband takes the children from their mother--always, when she is in
+the wrong; too often, when she is blameless. I have told you I was the
+one to blame, and I tell you now that though my husband's application
+for a divorce failed, from a technical point of law, all things came
+about just as though he had succeeded. Don't analyse it now; take it
+all for granted--you understand?"
+
+"I understand. Suppose it so! And then?"
+
+"And then this. That little monkey of mine--that little unconscious
+fiddling thing in there"--and as Mrs. Nightingale speaks, the sound of
+a caress mixes with the laugh in her voice; but the pain comes back as
+she goes on--"My Sallykin has been mine, all her life! My poor husband
+never saw her in her childhood." As she says the word _husband_
+she has again a vivid _eclat_ of the consciousness that it is
+he--himself--sitting there beside her. And the odd thought that mixes
+itself into this, strange to say, is--"The pity of it! To think how
+little he has had of Sally in all these years!"
+
+He, for his part, can for the moment make nothing of this part of
+the story. He can give his head the lion-mane shake she knows him by
+so well, but it brings him no light. He is reduced to mere slow
+repetition of her data; his hand before his eyes to keep his brain,
+that has to think, clear of distractions from without.
+
+"Your husband never saw her. She has been yours all her life. Had she
+been your husband's child, he would have exercised his so-called
+rights--his _legal_ rights--and taken her away. Are those the
+facts--so far?"
+
+"Yes--go on. No--stop; I will tell you. At the beginning of this year
+I should have been married exactly twenty years. Sally is
+nineteen--you remember her birthday?"
+
+"Nineteen in August. Now, let me think!" Just at this moment the second
+movement of Op. 999 came to an end, and gave an added plausibility to
+the blank he needed to ponder in. The viola in the next room looked
+round across her chair-back, and said, "I say, mother"--to a repetition
+of which Mrs. Nightingale replied what did her daughter say? What
+she said was that her mother and Mr. Fenwick were exactly like the
+canaries. They talked as hard as they could all through the music, and
+when it stopped they shut up. Wasn't that true? To which her mother
+answered affirmatively, adding, "You'll have to put a cloth over us,
+chick, and squash us out."
+
+Fenwick was absorbed in thought, and did not notice this interlude. He
+did not speak until the music began again. Then he said abruptly:
+
+"I see the story now. Sally's father was not...."
+
+"Was not my husband." There is not a trace of cowardice or hesitation
+in her filling out the sentence. There is pain, but that again dies
+away in her voice as she goes on to speak of her daughter. "I do not
+connect him with her now. She is--a thing of itself--a thing of herself!
+She is--she is Sally. Well, you see what she is."
+
+"I see she is a very dear little person." Then he seems to want to say
+something and to pause on the edge of it; then, in answer to a "yes"
+of encouragement from her, continues, "I was going to say that she
+must be very like him--like her father."
+
+"Very like?" she asks--"or very unlike? Which did you mean?"
+
+"I mean very like as to looks. Because she is so unlike you."
+
+"She is like enough to him, as far as looks go. It's her only fault,
+poor chick, and _she_ can't help it. Besides, I mind it less now that
+I have more than half forgiven him, for her sake." The tone of her
+voice mixes a sob and a laugh, although she utters neither, and is
+quite collected. "But she is quite unlike him in character. Sally is
+not an angel--oh dear, no!" The laugh predominates. "But----"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"She is not a devil." And as she said this the pain was all back again
+in the dropped half-whisper in which she said it. And in that moment
+Fenwick made his guess of the whole story, which maybe went nearer
+than we shall do with the information we have to go upon. In this
+narrative, as we tell it now, that story is _known_ only to its chief
+actor, and to her old friend who is now dining at the Hurkaru Club.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The third movement of Op. 999 was not a very long one, and, coming
+to an end at this point, seemed to supply a reason for silence that
+was not unwelcome in the back drawing-room. The end of a trying
+conversation had been attained. Both speakers could now affect
+attention to what was going on in the front. This had taken the form
+of a discussion between Mr. Julius Bradshaw and Miss Laetitia Wilson,
+who was anxious to transfer her position of first violin to that young
+gentleman. We regret to have to report that Miss Sally's agreement
+with her friend about the desirability had been _sotto voce_'d in
+these terms: "Yes, Tishy dear! Do make the shop-boy play the last
+movement." And Miss Wilson had then suggested it, saying there was
+a bit she knew she couldn't play. "And you expect _me_ to!" said the
+owner of the Strad, "when I haven't so much as looked at it for three
+years past." To which Miss Sally appended a marginal note, "Stuff
+and nonsense! Don't be affected, Mr. Bradshaw." However, after
+compliments, and more protestations from its owner, the Strad was
+brought into hotchpot, and Laetitia abdicated.
+
+"Won't you come and sit in here, to be away from the music?" said the
+back-drawing-room. But Laetitia wanted to see Mr. Bradshaw's fingering
+of that passage. We are more interested in the back drawing-room.
+
+Like many other athletic men--and we have seen how strongly this
+character was maintained in Fenwick--he hated armchairs. Even in the
+uncomfortable ones--by which we mean the ones _we_ dislike--his
+restless strength would not remain quiet for any length of time. At
+intervals he would get up and walk about the room, exasperating the
+sedate, and then making good-humoured concession to their weakness.
+Mrs. Nightingale could remember all this in Gerry the boy, twenty
+years ago.
+
+If it had not been for that music, probably he would have walked about
+the room over that stiff problem in dates he had just grappled with.
+As it was, he remained in his chair to solve it--that is, if he did
+solve it. Possibly, the moment he saw something important turned on
+the date of Sally's birth, he jumped across the solution to the
+conclusion it was to lead to. Given the conclusion, the calculation
+had no interest for him.
+
+But the story his mind constructed to fit that conclusion stunned him.
+It knitted his brows and clenched his teeth for him. It made the hand
+that had been hanging loose over the uncomfortable chair-back close
+savagely on something--a throat, perhaps, that his imagination
+supplied? How like he looked, thought his companion, to himself on one
+occasion twenty years ago! But his anger now was on her behalf alone;
+it was not so in that dreadful time she hoped he might never recollect.
+If only his memory of all the past might remain as now, a book with
+a locked clasp and a lost key!
+
+She watched him as he sat there, and saw a calmer mood come back upon
+him. Each wanted a _raison d'etre_ for a silent pause, and neither was
+sorry for the desire each might ascribe to the other of hearing the
+last movement of the music undisturbed. Op. 999 was prospering,
+there was no doubt of it! Laetitia Wilson was a very fair example of
+a creditable career at the R.A.M. But she was not quite equal to this
+unfortunate victim of a too nervous system, who could play like an
+angel for half an hour, mind you--not more. This was his half-hour;
+and it was quite reasonable for Fenwick to take for granted that his
+hostess would like to pay attention to it, or _vice-versa_. So both
+sat silent.
+
+But as she sat listening to Op. 999, and watching wonderingly the
+strange victim of oblivion, of whom she knew--scarcely acknowledging
+it always, though--that she had once for a short time called him
+husband, her mind went back to an old time when he and she were young:
+before the tragic memory that she sometimes thought might have been
+lived down had come into her life and his. And a scene rose up before
+her out of that old time--a scene of young men, almost boys, and girls
+who but the other day were in the nursery, playing lawn-tennis in a
+happy garden, with never a thought for anything in this wide world but
+themselves, and each other, and the scoring, and how jolly it would be
+in the house-boat at Henley to-morrow. And then this garden-scene
+a little later in the moonrise, and herself and one of the players,
+who was Gerry--this very man--left by the other two to themselves,
+on a garden-seat his arm hung over, just as it did now over that
+chair-back. How exactly he sat then as he sat now, his other hand in
+charge of the foot he had crossed on his knee, just as now, to keep
+it from a slip along his lawn-tennis flannels! How well she could
+remember the tennis-shoe, with its ribbed rubber sole, in place of
+that highly-polished calf thing! And she could remember every word
+they said, there in the warm moonlight.
+
+"What a silly boy you are!"
+
+"I don't care. I shall always say exactly the same. I can't help it."
+
+"All silly boys say that sort of thing. Then they change their minds."
+
+"I never said it to any girl in my life but you, Rosey. I never thought
+it. I shall never say it again to any one but you."
+
+"Don't be nonsensical!"
+
+"I'm _not_! It's _true_."
+
+"Wait till you've been six months in India, Gerry."
+
+And then the recollection of what followed made it seem infinitely
+strange to her that Fenwick should remain, as he had remained,
+immovable. If the hand she could remember so well, for all it had
+grown so scarred and service-worn and hairy, were to take hers as it
+did then, as they sat together on the garden-seat, would it shake now
+as formerly? If his great strong arm her memory still felt round her
+were to come again now, would she feel in it the tremor of the passion
+he was shaken by then; and in caresses such as she half reproved him
+for, but had no heart to resist, the reality of a love then young and
+strong and full of promise for the days to come? And now--what? The
+perished trunk of an uprooted tree: the shadow of a half-forgotten
+dream.
+
+As he sat silent, only now and then by some slight sign, some new
+knitting of the brow or closing of the hand, showing the tension of the
+feeling produced by the version his mind had made of the story half
+told to him--as he sat thus, under a kind of feint of listening to
+the music, the world grew stranger and stranger to his companion. She
+had fancied herself strong enough to tell the story, but had hardly
+reckoned with his possible likeness to himself. She had thought that
+she could keep the twenty years that had passed clearly in her mind;
+could deal with the position from a good, sensible, matter-of-fact
+standpoint.
+
+The past was past, and happily forgotten by him. The present had still
+its possibilities, if only the past might remain forgotten. Surely she
+could rely on herself to find the nerve to go through what was, after
+all, a mere act of duty. Knowing, or rather feeling, that Fenwick would
+ask her to marry him as soon as he dared--it was merely a question of
+time--her duty was plainly to forewarn him--to make sure that he was
+alive to the antecedents of the woman he was offering himself to. She
+knew _his_ antecedents; as many as she wished to know. If the twenty
+years of oblivion concealed irregularity, immorality--well, was she not
+to blame for it? Was ever a better boy than Gerry, as she knew him, to
+the day they parted? It was her fault or misfortune that had cast
+him all adrift. As to that troublesome question of a possible wife
+elsewhere, in the land of his oblivion, she had quite made up her mind
+about that. Every effort had been made to find such a one, and failed.
+If she reappeared, it would be her own duty to surrender Fenwick--if he
+wished to go back. If he did not, and his other wife wished to be free,
+surely in the _chicane_ of the law-courts there must be some shuffle
+that could be for once made useful to a good end.
+
+Mrs. Nightingale had reasoned it all out in cold blood, and she was,
+as we have told you, a strong woman. But had she really taken her own
+measure? Could she sit there much longer; with him beside her, and his
+words of twenty years ago sounding in her ears; almost the feeling of
+the kisses she had so dutifully pointed out the lawlessness, and
+allowed the repetition of, in that old forgotten time--forgotten by
+him, never by her! Was it possible to bear, without crying out, the
+bewilderment of a mixed existence such as that his presence and
+identity forced upon her, wrenching her this way and that, interweaving
+the woof of _then_ with the weft of _now_, even as in that labyrinth of
+musical themes and phrases in the other room they crossed and recrossed
+one another at the bidding of each instrument as its turn came to tell
+its tale? Her brain reeled and her heart ached under the intolerable
+stress. Could she still hold on, or would she be, after all, driven
+to make some excuse, and run for the solitude of her own room to live
+down the tension as best she might alone?
+
+The music itself came to her assistance. Its triumphant strength, in
+an indescribable outburst of hope or joy or mastery of Fate, as it drew
+near to its final close, spoke to her of the great ocean that lies
+beyond the crabbed limits of our stinted lives, the boundless sea our
+rivulets of life steal down to, to be lost in; and while it lasted made
+it possible for her to be still. She took her eyes from Fenwick, and
+waited. When she raised them again, in the silence Op. 999 came to an
+end in, she saw that he had moved. His face had gone into his hands;
+and as she looked up, his old action of rubbing them into his loose
+hair, and shaking it, had come back, and his strong identity with his
+boyhood, dependent on the chance of a moment, had disappeared. He got
+up suddenly, and after a turn across the room he was in, walked into
+the other one, and contributed his share to the babble of felicitation
+or comment that followed what was clearly thought an achievement in
+musical rendering.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear!" said Laetitia Wilson. "Was ever a poor girl so sat
+upon? I feel quite flat!" This was not meant to be taken too much _au
+pied de la lettre_. It was merely a method of praise of Mr. Bradshaw.
+
+"But what a jolly shame you had to give it up!" This was Sally in
+undisguised admiration. But in Mr. Julius Bradshaw's eyes, Sally's
+identity had undergone a change. Her breezy frankness had made hay of
+a _grande passion_, and was blowing the hay all over the field. He had
+come close to, and had a good look; but he will hardly go away in a
+huff, although he feels a little silly over his public worship of these
+past weeks. Just at this moment of the story, however, he is very
+apologetic towards Miss Wilson; on whom, if she reports correctly, he
+has sat. He tries no pretences with a view to her reinstatement, even
+on a par with himself. He knows, and every one knows, they would be
+seen through immediately. It is no use assuring her she is a capital
+player, of her years. Much better let it alone!
+
+"Are you any the worse, Mr. Bradshaw?" says Dr. Vereker. Obviously, as
+a medical authority, it is his duty to "voice" this inquiry. So he
+voices it.
+
+"N--no; but that's about as much as I can do, with safety. It won't do
+to spoil my night's rest, and be late at the shop." It was easy to talk
+about the shop with perfect unreserve after such a performance as that.
+
+"Oh dear! we are so sorry for you!" Thus the two girls. And concurrence
+comes in various forms from Vereker, Fenwick, and the pianist, whom we
+haven't mentioned before. He was a cousin of Miss Wilson's, and was one
+of those unfortunate young men who have no individuality whatever. But
+pianists have to be human unless you can afford a pianola. You may
+speak of them as Mr. What's-his-name, or Miss Thingummy, but you must
+give them tea or coffee or cake or sandwiches, or whatever is brought
+in on a tray. This young man's name, we believe, was Elsley--Nobody
+Elsley, Miss Sally in her frivolity had thought fit to christen him.
+You know how in your own life people come in and go out, and you never
+know anything about them. Even so this young man in this story.
+
+"I was very sorry for myself, I assure you"--it is Bradshaw who
+speaks--"when I had to make up my mind to give it up. But it couldn't
+be helped!" He speaks without reserve, but as of an unbearable subject;
+in fact, Sally said afterwards to Tishy, "it seemed as if he was going
+to cry." He doesn't cry, though, but goes on: "At one time I really
+thought I should have gone and jumped into the river."
+
+"Why didn't you?" asks Sally. "I should have."
+
+"Yes, silly Sally!" says Laetitia; "and then you would have swum like
+a fish. And the police would have pulled you out. And you would have
+looked ridiculous!"
+
+But Sally is off on a visit to her mother in the next room.
+
+"Tired, mammy darling?"
+
+She kisses her, and her mother answers: "Yes, love, a little," and
+kisses her back.
+
+"Doesn't he play _beautifully_, mother?" says Sally.
+
+But her mother says "Yes" absently. Her attention is taken off by
+something else. What is wrong with Mr. Fenwick? Sally doesn't think
+anything is. It's only his way.
+
+"I'm sure there's something wrong," says Mrs. Nightingale, and gets
+up to go into the front-room rather wearily. "I shall go to bed soon,
+poppet," she says, "and leave you to do the honours. Is anything wrong,
+doctor?" She speaks under her voice to Vereker, looking very slightly
+round at Fenwick, who, after the movement that alarmed her--a rather
+unusually marked head-shake and pressure of his hands on his eyes--is
+standing looking down at the fire, on the rug with his back to her, as
+she speaks to Vereker.
+
+"I fancy he's had what he calls a recurrence," says the doctor. "Nothing
+to hurt. These half-recollections will go on until the memory comes
+back in earnest. It may some time."
+
+"Are you talking about me, doctor?" His attention may have been caught
+by a reflection in a glass before him. "Yes, it was a very queer
+recurrence. Something about lawn-tennis. Only it had to do with what
+Miss Wilson said about the police fishing Sally out of the water." He
+looks round for Miss Wilson, but she is at the other end of the room
+on a sofa talking to Bradshaw about the Strad, as recorded once before.
+Sally testifies:
+
+"Tishy said it wouldn't work--trying to drown yourself if you could
+swim. No more it would."
+
+"But why should that make me think of lawn-tennis? It did." He looks
+seriously distressed by it--can make nothing out.
+
+"Kitten," says Sally's mother to her suddenly, "I think I shall go away
+to bed. I'm feeling very tired."
+
+She says good-night comprehensively, and departs. But she is so clearly
+the worse for something that her daughter follows her to see that the
+something is not serious. Outside she reassures Sally, who returns. Oh
+no, she is only tired; really nothing else.
+
+But what drove her out of the room was a feeling that she must be alone
+and silent. Could her position be borne at all? Yes, with patience and
+self-control. But that "why should it make me think of lawn-tennis?"
+was trying. Not only the pain of still more revived association, but
+the fear that his memory might travel still further into the past. It
+was living on the edge of the volcano.
+
+Her own memory had followed on, too, taking up the thread of that old
+interview in the garden of twenty years ago. She had felt again the
+clasp of his arm, the touch of his hand; had heard his voice of
+passionate protest--protest against the idea that he could ever forget.
+And she had then pretended to make a half-joke of his earnestness. What
+would he do now, really, if she were to tell him she preferred his
+great friend Arthur Fenwick to him? That was nonsense, he said. She
+knew she didn't. Besides, Arthur wanted Jessie Nairn. Why, didn't they
+waltz all the waltzes at the party last week?... Well, so did we, for
+that matter, all-but.... And just look how they had run away together!
+Wasn't that them coming back? Yes, it was; and artificial calm ensued,
+and more self-contained manners. But then, before the other two young
+lovers could rejoin them, she had time for a word more.
+
+"No, dear Gerry, seriously. If I were to write out _no_ to you in
+India--a great big final NO--then what do you think you would do?"
+
+"I know what I _think_ I should do. I should throw myself into the
+Hooghly or the Ganges."
+
+"You silly boy! You would swim about, whether you liked or no. And then
+Jemadars, or Shastras, or Sudras, or something would come and pull you
+out. And then how ridiculous you would look!"
+
+"No, Rosey, because I can't swim. Isn't it funny?"
+
+Then she recollected _his_ friend's voice striking in with: "What's
+that? Gerry Palliser swim! Of course he can't. He can wrestle, or run,
+or ride, or jump; and he's the best man I know with the gloves on. But
+swim he _can't_! That's flat!" Also how Gerry had then told eagerly how
+he was nearly drowned once, and Arthur fished him up from the bottom of
+Abingdon Lock. The latter went on:
+
+"It was after that we tattooed each other, his name on my arm, my
+name on his, so as not to quarrel. You know, I suppose, that men who
+tattoo each other's arms can't quarrel if they try?" Arthur showed
+"A. Palliser," tattooed blue on his arm. Both young men were very grave
+and earnest about the safeguard. And then she remembered a question she
+asked, and how both replied with perfect gravity: "Of course, sure to!"
+The question had been:--Was it invariable that all men quarrelled if
+one saved the other from drowning?
+
+She sits upstairs alone by the fire in her bedroom, and dreams again
+through all the past, except the nightmare of her life--_that_ she
+always shudders away from. Sally will come up presently, and then she
+will feel ease again. Now, it is a struggle against fever.
+
+She can hear plainly enough--for the house is but a London suburban
+villa--the strains from the drawing-room of what is possibly the most
+hackneyed violin music in the world--the Tartini (so-called) Devil
+Sonata--every phrase, every run, every chord an enthralling mystery
+still, an utterance none can explain, an inexhaustible thing no age can
+wither, and no custom stale. It is so soothing to her that it matters
+little if it makes them late. But that young man will destroy his
+nerves to a certainty outright.
+
+Then comes the chaos of dispersal--the broken fragments of the
+intelligible a watchful ear may pick out. Dr. Vereker won't have a cab;
+he will leave the 'cello till next time, and walk. Mr. Bradshaw wants
+to get to Bayswater. Of course, that's all in our way--we being Miss
+Wilson and the cousin, the nonentity. We can give Mr. Bradshaw a lift
+as far as he goes, and then he can take the growler on. Then more
+good-nights are wished than the nature of things will admit of before
+to-morrow, Fenwick and Vereker light something to smoke, with a
+preposterous solicitude to use only one tandsticker between them, and
+walk away umbrella-less. From which we see that "it" is holding up.
+Then comes silence, and a consciousness of a policeman musing, and
+suspecting doors have been left stood open.
+
+And it was then Sally went upstairs and indited her friend for sitting
+on that sofa after calling him a shop-boy. And she didn't forget it,
+either, for after she and her mother were in bed, and presumably
+better, she called out to her.
+
+"I say, mammy!"
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"Isn't that St. John's Church?"
+
+"Isn't which St. John's Church?"
+
+"Where Tishy goes?"
+
+"Yes, Ladbroke Grove Road. Why?"
+
+"Because now Mr. Bradshaw will go there--public worship!"
+
+"Will he, dear? Suppose we go to sleep." But she really meant "you,"
+not "we"; for it was a long time before she went to sleep herself. She
+had plenty to think of, and wanted to be quiet, conscious of Sally in
+the neighbourhood.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We hope our reader was not misled, as we ourselves were, when Mrs.
+Nightingale first saw the name on Fenwick's arm, into supposing that
+she accepted it as his real name. She knew better. But then, how was
+she to tell him his name was Palliser? Think it over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+OF A SLEEPLESS NIGHT MRS. NIGHTINGALE HAD, AND HOW SALLY WOKE UP
+ AND TALKED
+
+
+Was it possible, thought Rosalind in the sleepless night that followed,
+that the recurrence of the tennis-garden in Fenwick's mind might
+grow and grow, and be a nucleus round which the whole memory of his
+life might re-form? Even so she had seen, at a chemical lecture, a
+supersaturated solution, translucent and spotless, suddenly fill with
+innumerable ramifications from one tiny crystal dropped into it. Might
+not this shred of memory chance to be a crystal of the right salt
+in the solvent of his mind, and set going a swift arborescence to
+penetrate the whole? Might not one branch of that tree be a terrible
+branch--one whose leaves and fruit were poisoned and whose stem was
+clothed with thorns? A hideous metaphor of the moment--call it the
+worst in her life--when her young husband, driven mad with the
+knowledge that had just forced its way into his reluctant mind, had
+almost struck her away from him, and with angry words, of which the
+least was traitress, had broken through the effort of her hands to
+hold him, and left her speechless in her despair.
+
+It was such a nightmare idea, this anticipation that next time she met
+Gerry's eyes she might see again the anger that was in them on that
+blackest of her few married days, might see him again vanish from
+her, this time never to return. And it spread an ever growing horror,
+greater and greater in the silence and the darkness of the night, till
+it filled all space and became a power that thrilled through every
+nerve, and denied the right of any other thing in the infinite void
+to be known or thought of. Which of us has not been left, with no
+protection but our own weak resolutions, to the mercy of a dominant
+idea in the still hours when others were near us sleeping whom we
+might not wake to say one word to save us?
+
+What would his face be like--how would his voice sound--when she saw
+him next? Or would some short and cruel letter come to say he had
+remembered all, and now--for all the gratitude he owed her--he could
+not bear to look upon her face again, hers who had done him such a
+wrong! If so, what should she--what could she do?
+
+There was only one counter-thought to this that brought with it a
+momentary balm. She would send Sally to him to beg, beseech, implore
+him not to repeat his headstrong error of the old years, to swear to
+him that if only he could know all he would forgive--nay, more, that
+if he could know quite all--the very whole of the sad story--not only
+would he forgive, but rather seek forgiveness for himself for the too
+harsh judgment he so rashly formed.
+
+What should she say to Sally? how should she instruct her to plead
+for her? Never mind that now. All she wanted in her lonely, nervous
+delirium was the ease the thought gave her, the mere thought of the
+force of Sally's fixed, immovable belief--_that_ she was certain
+of--that whatsoever her mother had done was right. Never mind the exact
+amount of revelation she would have to make to Sally. She might surely
+indulge the idea, just to get at peace somehow, till--as pray Heaven it
+might turn out--she should know that Gerry's mind was still unconscious
+of its past. The chances were, so she thought mechanically to herself,
+that all her alarms were groundless.
+
+And at the first--strange as it is to tell--Sally's identity was only
+that of the daughter she had now, that filled her life, and gave her
+the heart to live. She was the Sally space was full of for her. _What_
+she was, and _why_ she was, merged, as it usually did, in the broad
+fact of her existence. But there was always the chance that this _what_
+and _why_--two bewildering imps--should flaunt their unsolved conundrum
+through her mother's baffled mind. There they were, sure enough in the
+end, enjoying her inability to answer, dragging all she prayed daily
+to be better able to forget out into the light of the memory they had
+kindled. There they were, chuckling over her misery, and hiding--so
+Rosalind feared--a worse question than any, keeping it back for a
+final stroke to bring her mental fever to its height--how could Sally
+be the daughter of a devil and her soul be free from the taint of his
+damnation?
+
+If Rosalind had only been well read in the mediaeval classics, and had
+known that story of Merlin's birth--the Nativity that was to rewrite
+the Galilean story in letters of Hell, and give mankind for ever
+to be the thrall of the fallen angel his father! And now the babe
+at its birth was snatched away to the waters of baptism, and poor
+Satan--alas!--obliged to cast about for some new plan of campaign;
+which, to say truth, he must have found, and practised with some
+success. But Rosalind had never read this story. Had she done so she
+might have felt, as we do, that the tears of an absolutely blameless
+mother might serve to cleanse the inherited sin from a babe unborn as
+surely as the sacramental fount itself.
+
+And it may be that some such thought had woven itself into the story
+Fenwick's imagination framed for Rosalind the evening before--that time
+that she said of Sally, "She is not a devil!" The exact truth, the
+ever-present record that was in her mind as she said this, must remain
+unknown to us.
+
+But to return to her as she is now, racked by a twofold mental fever,
+an apprehension of a return of Fenwick's memory, and a stimulated
+recrudescence of her own; with the pain of all the scars burnt in
+twenty years ago revived now by her talk with him of a few hours since.
+She could bear it no longer, there alone in the darkness of the night.
+She _must_ get at Sally, if only to look at her. Why, that child never
+could be got to wake unless shaken when she was wanted. Ten to one she
+wouldn't this time. And it would make all the difference just to see
+her there, alive and leagues away in dreamland. If her sleep lasted
+through the crackle of a match to light her candle, heard through the
+open door between their rooms, the light of the candle itself wouldn't
+wake her. Rosalind remembered as she lit the candle and found her
+dressing-gown--for the night air struck cold--how once, when a
+ten-year-old, Sally had locked herself in, and no noise or knocking
+would rouse her; how she herself, alarmed for the child, had thereon
+summoned help, and the door was broken open, but only to be greeted
+by the sleeper, after explanation, with, "Why didn't you knock?"
+
+She was right in her forecast, and perhaps it was as well the girl did
+not wake. She would only have had a needless fright, to see her mother,
+haggard with self-torment, by her bedside at that hour. So Rosalind
+got her full look at the rich coils of black hair that framed up the
+unconscious face, that for all its unconsciousness had on it the
+contentment of an amused dreamer, at the white ivory skin it set off
+so well, at the one visible ear that heard nothing, or if it did,
+translated it into dream, and the faint rhythmic movement that vouched
+for soundless breath. She looked as long as she dared, then moved away.
+But she had barely got her head back on her pillow when "Was that you,
+mother?" came from the next room. Her mother always said of Sally that
+nothing was certain but the _imprevu_, and ascribed to her a monstrous
+perversity. It was this that caused her to sleep profoundly through
+that most awakening of incidents, a person determined not to disturb
+you, and then to wake up short into that person's self-congratulations
+on success.
+
+"Of course it was, darling. Who else could it have been?"
+
+Sally's reply, "I thought it was," seems less reasonable--mere
+conversation making--and a sequel as of one reviewing new and more
+comfortable positions in bed follows naturally. A decision on the point
+does not prohibit conversation, rather facilitates it.
+
+"What did you come for, mammy?"
+
+"Eau-de-Cologne." The voice has a fell intention of instant sleep in it
+which Sally takes no notice of.
+
+"Have you got it?"
+
+"Got it? Yes. Go to sleep, chatterbox."
+
+It was true about the eau-de-Cologne, for Rosalind, with a self-acting
+instinct that explanation might be called for, had picked up the
+bottle on her return journey. You see, she was always practising
+wicked deceits and falsehoods, all to save that little chit being made
+miserable on her account. But the chit wasn't going to sleep again. She
+was going to enjoy her new attitude awake. Who woke her up? Answer that.
+
+"I say, mother!"
+
+"What, kitten? Go to sleep."
+
+"All right--in a minute. Do you remember Mr. Fenwick's bottle of
+eau-de-Cologne?"
+
+"Of course I do. Go to sleep."
+
+"Just going. But wasn't it funny?"
+
+"What funny?--Oh, the eau-de-Cologne!"
+
+Rosalind isn't really sleepy, and may as well talk. "Yes, that was very
+funny. I wonder where he got it." She seems roused, and her daughter is
+repentant.
+
+"Oh dear! What a shame! I've just spoiled your go-off. Poor mother!"
+
+"Never mind, chick! I like to talk a little. It _was_ funny that he
+should have a big bottle of eau-de-Cologne, of all things, in his
+pocket."
+
+"Yes, but it was rummer still about Rosalind Nightingale--_his_
+Rosalind Nightingale, the one he knew." This is dangerous ground, and
+Rosalind knows it. But a plea of half-sleep will cover mistakes, and
+conversation about the pre-electrocution period is the nearest approach
+to taking Sally into her confidence that she can hope for. She is so
+weary with her hours of wakefulness that she becomes a little reckless,
+foreseeing a resource in such uncertainty of speech as may easily be
+ascribed to a premature dream.
+
+"It's not _impossible_ that it should have been your grandmother,
+kitten. But we can't find out now. And it wouldn't do us any good that
+I can see."
+
+"It would be nice to know for curiosity. Couldn't anything be fished
+out in the granny connexion? No documents?"
+
+"Nothing will ever be fished out by me in that connexion, Sally
+darling." Sally knows from her mother's tone of voice that they are
+approaching an _impasse_. She means to give up the point the moment it
+comes fully in view. But she will go on until that happens. She has to
+think out what was the name of the Sub-Dean before she speaks again.
+
+"Didn't the Reverend Decimus Ireson grab all the belongings?"
+
+"They were left to him, child. It was all fair, as far as that goes.
+I didn't grudge him the things--indeed, I felt rather grateful to him
+for taking them. It would only have been painful, going over them.
+Different people feel differently about these things. I didn't want
+old recollections."
+
+"Hadn't the Reverend Decimus a swarm of brats?"
+
+"Sal--ly _dar_ling!... Well, yes, he had. There were two families. One
+of six daughters, I forget which."
+
+"Couldn't they be got at, to see if they wouldn't recollect something?"
+
+"Of course they could. They've married a lawyer--at least, one of them
+has. And all the rest, I believe, live with them." At another time Sally
+would have examined this case in relation to the Deceased Wife's Sister
+Bill. She was too interested now to stop her mother continuing: "But
+what a silly chick you are! Why should _they_ know anything about it?"
+
+"Why shouldn't they?"
+
+Her mother's reply is emphasized. "My dear, do consider! I was with
+your grandmother till within a month of her marriage with the Reverend,
+as you call him, and I should have been ten times more likely to hear
+about Mr. Fenwick than ever they would afterwards. Your grandmother had
+never even seen them when I went away to India to be married."
+
+"What's the lawyer's name?"
+
+"Bearman, I think, or Dearman. But why?--Oh, no, by-the-bye, I think
+it's Beazley."
+
+"Because I could write and ask, or call. Sure to hear something."
+
+"My dear, you'll hear nothing, and they'll only think you mad."
+Rosalind was beginning to feel that she had made a mistake. She did not
+feel so sure Sally would hear nothing. A recollection crossed her mind
+of how one of the few incidents there was time for in her short married
+life had been the writing of a letter by her husband to his friend, the
+real Fenwick, and of much chaff therein about the eldest of these very
+daughters, and her powerful rivalry to Jessie Nairn. It came back to
+her now. Sally alarmed her still further.
+
+"Yes, mother. I shall just get Mr. Fenwick to hunt up the address, and
+go and call on the Beazleys." This sudden assumption of a concrete form
+by the family was due to a vivid image that filled Sally's active brain
+immediately of a household of parched women presided over by a dried
+man who owned a wig on a stand and knew what chaff-wax meant, which
+she didn't. A shop window near Lincoln's Inn was responsible. But to
+Rosalind it really seemed that Sally must have had other means of
+studying this family, and she was frightened.
+
+"You don't know them, kitten?"
+
+"Not the least. Don't want to." This reflection suggests caution.
+"Perhaps I'd better write...."
+
+"Better do nothing of the sort, child. Better go to sleep...."
+
+"All right." But Sally does not like quitting the subject so abruptly,
+and enlarges on it a little more. She sketches out a letter to be
+written to the lady who is at present a buffer-state between the dried
+man and the parched women. "Dear madam," she recites, "you may perhaps
+recall--or will perhaps recall--which is right, mother?"
+
+"Either, dear. Go to sleep." But just at this moment Rosalind
+recollects with satisfaction that the name was neither Beazley nor
+Dearman, but Tressilian Tredgold. She has been thinking of falling
+back on affectation of sleep to avoid more alarms, but this makes it
+needless.
+
+"I'm sure I've got the name wrong," she says, with revived wakefulness
+in her voice.
+
+But Sally is murmuring to herself--"Perhaps recall my mother, Mrs.
+Rosalind Nightingale--Rosalind in brackets--by her maiden name of--by
+the same name--who married the late Mr. Graythorpe in India--I say,
+mother...."
+
+"Yes, little goose."
+
+"How am I to put all that?"
+
+"Go to sleep! I don't think you'll find that family very--coming. My
+impression is you had much better leave it alone. What good would it
+do you to find out who Mr. Fenwick was? And perhaps have him go away
+to Australia!"
+
+"Why Australia?"
+
+Oh dear, what mistakes Rosalind did make! Why on earth need she
+name the place she knew Gerry did go to? America would have done just
+as well.
+
+"Australia--New Zealand--America--anywhere!" But Sally doesn't
+mind--has fallen back on her letter-sketch.
+
+"Apologizing for troubling you, believe me, dear madam, yours
+faithfully--or very faithfully, or truly--Rosalind Nightingale.... No;
+I should not like Mr. Fenwick to go away anywhere. No more would you.
+I want him here, for us. So do you!"
+
+"I should be very sorry indeed for Mr. Fenwick to go away. We should
+miss him badly. But fancy what his wife must be feeling, if he has one.
+I can sympathize with her." It really was a relief to say anything so
+intensely true.
+
+Did the reality with which she spoke impress Sally more than the mere
+words, which were no more than "common form" of conversation? Probably,
+for something in them brought back her conference with the Major on
+Boxing Day morning when her mother was at church. What was that
+she had said to him when she was sitting on his knee improving his
+whiskers?--that if she, later on, saw reason to suppose his suspicions
+true, she would ask her mother point-blank. Why not? And here she was
+with the same suspicions, quite, quite independent of the Major. And
+see how dark it was in both rooms! One could say anything. Besides, if
+her mother didn't want to answer, she could pretend to be asleep. She
+wouldn't ask too loud, to give her a chance.
+
+"Mother darling, if Mr. Fenwick was to make you an offer, how should
+you like it?"
+
+"Oh dear! _What's_ the child saying? What is it, Sallykin? I was just
+going off."
+
+Now, obviously, you can ask a lady Sally's question in the easy course
+of flowing chat, but you can't drag her from the golden gates of sleep
+to ask it. It gets too official. So Sally backed out, and said she had
+said nothing, which wasn't the case. The excessive readiness with which
+her mother accepted the statement looks, to us, as if she had really
+been awake and heard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+HOW MILLAIS' "HUGUENOT" CAME OF A WALK IN THE BACK GARDEN. AND HOW
+ FENWICK VERY NEARLY KISSED SALLY
+
+
+In spite of Colonel Lund's having been so betimes in his forecastings
+about Mrs. Nightingale and Fenwick (as we must go on calling him for
+the present), still, when one day that lady came, about six weeks
+after the nocturne in our last chapter, and told him she must have his
+consent to a step she was contemplating before she took it, he felt a
+little shock in his heart--one of those shocks one so often feels when
+one hears that a thing he has anticipated without pain, even with
+pleasure, is to become actual.
+
+But he replied at once, "My dear! Of course!" without hearing any
+particulars; and added: "You will be happier, I am sure. Why should
+I refuse my consent to your marrying Fenwick? Because that's it, I
+suppose?" That was it. The Major had guessed right.
+
+"He asked me to marry him, last night," she said, with simple
+equanimity and directness. "I told him yes, as far as my own wishes
+went. But I said I wouldn't, if either you or the kitten forbade the
+banns."
+
+"I don't think we shall, either of us." It was a daughter's
+marriage-warrant he was being asked to sign; a document seldom signed
+without a heartache, more or less, for him who holds the pen. But his
+_coeur navre_ had to be concealed, for the sake of the applicant;
+no wet blanket should be cast on her new happiness. He kissed her
+affectionately. To him, for all her thirty-nine or forty birthdays,
+she was still the young girl he had helped and shielded in her despair,
+twenty years ago, he himself being then a widower, near forty years her
+senior. "No, Rosa dear," continued the Major. "As far as I can see,
+there can be no objection but one--_you_ know!"
+
+"_The_ one?"
+
+"Yes. It is all a _terra incognita_. He _may_ have a wife elsewhere,
+seeking for him. Who can tell?"
+
+"It is a risk to be run. But I am prepared to run it"--she was going
+to add "for his sake," but remembered that her real meaning for these
+words would be, "for the sake of the man I wronged," and that the Major
+knew nothing of Fenwick's identity. She had not been able to persuade
+herself to make even her old friend her confidant. Danger lay that way.
+She _knew_ silence would be safe against anything but Fenwick's own
+memory.
+
+"Yes, it is a risk, no doubt," the Major said. "But I am like him. I
+cannot conceive a man forgetting that he had a wife. It seems an
+impossibility. He has talked about you to me, you know."
+
+"In connexion with his intention about me?"
+
+"Almost. Not quite definitely, but almost. He knew I understood what he
+meant. It seemed to me he was fidgeting more about his having so little
+to offer in the way of worldly goods than about any possible wife in
+the clouds."
+
+"Dear fellow! Just fancy! Why, those people in the City would take him
+into partnership to-morrow if he had a little capital to bring in. They
+told him so themselves."
+
+"And you would finance him? Is that the idea? Well, I suppose as I'm
+your trustee, if the money was all lost, I should have to make it up,
+so it wouldn't matter."
+
+"Oh, Major dear! is _that_ what being a trustee means?"
+
+"Of course, my dear Rosa! What did you think it meant?"
+
+"Do you know, I don't know what I _did_ think; at least, I thought it
+would be very nice if you were my trustee."
+
+The conversation has gone off on a siding, but the Major shunts the
+train back. "That was what you and little fiddle-stick's-end were
+talking about till three in the morning, then?"
+
+"Oh, Major dear, did you hear us? And we kept you awake? What a _shame_!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+For on the previous evening, Sally being out musicking and expected
+home late, Fenwick and Mrs. Nightingale had gone out in the back-garden
+to enjoy the sweet air of that rare phenomenon--a really fine spring
+night in England--leaving the Major indoors because of his bronchial
+tubes. The late seventies shrink from night air, even when one means to
+be a healthy octogenarian. Also, they go away to bed, secretively, when
+no one is looking--at least, the Major did in this case. Of course, he
+was staying the night, as usual.
+
+So, in the interim between the Major's good-night and Sally's
+cab-wheels, this elderly couple of lovers (as they would have worded
+their own description) had the summer night to themselves. As the Major
+closed his bedroom window, he saw, before drawing down the blind, that
+the two were walking slowly up and down the gravel path, talking
+earnestly. No impression of mature years came to the Major from that
+gravel path. A well-made, handsome man, with a bush of brown hair and
+a Raleigh beard, and a graceful woman suggesting her beauty through the
+clear moonlight--that was the implication of as much as he could see,
+as he drew the inference a word of soliloquy hinted at, "Not Millais'
+Huguenot, so far!" But he evidently expected that grouping very soon.
+Only he was too sleepy to watch for it, and went to bed. Besides, would
+it have been honourable?
+
+"It's no use, Fenwick," she said to him in the garden, "trying to keep
+off the forbidden subject, so I won't try."
+
+"It's not forbidden by me. Nothing could be, that _you_ would like
+to say."
+
+Was that, she thought, only what so many men say every day to so many
+women, and mean so little by? Or was it more? She could not be sure
+yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her
+misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face
+in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that
+you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the
+peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely
+nothing.
+
+For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is
+briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her
+husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had
+never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her
+relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was,
+longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but
+stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk
+the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole.
+_She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.
+
+"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you,
+I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"
+
+"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."
+
+"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further,
+or die out completely?"
+
+He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar;
+then, after a moment's thought, replied:
+
+"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I
+think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His
+companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and
+resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all,
+or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.
+
+"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"
+
+"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an 'A' that felt right.
+Unless it was Arthur, but I'm sure my name never was Arthur!"
+
+"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair
+stress upon it. I easily might have."
+
+"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"
+
+"My husband's name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice
+that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could
+keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her
+self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she
+would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would
+betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She
+_was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself
+of her own self-command: "I knew him very little by that name, though.
+I always called him Gerry."
+
+He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen
+apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of
+a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that
+it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.
+
+"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion
+theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew
+it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever
+made Gerry out of Algernon. It's always Algy."
+
+"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."
+
+"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence,
+"that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may
+not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it,
+and so on."
+
+"What do you understand?"
+
+"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress,
+naturally, on your husband's name, and also on its abbreviation. It
+affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."
+
+"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry
+too? It might be----"
+
+"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental
+adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each
+other by chance, as yours and mine have done."
+
+"What is 'almost knowing'? But tell me this. When I call you
+Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the association or impression repeat
+itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good
+deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to
+drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the
+state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his
+memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by
+his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not
+help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her
+doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show,
+if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased
+from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after
+speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again
+freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than
+his reply, after another moment of reflection:
+
+"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name
+Algernon _was_ produced by your way of saying it. It _was_ hypnotic
+suggestion! I assure you that, however strange you may think it, every
+time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you
+said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the
+diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am
+quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_'s
+has driven it home." He didn't seem quite in earnest over his
+conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.
+
+But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his
+companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not
+call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he
+went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.
+
+"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel
+it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any
+illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on
+records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my
+crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the
+dark--unless, indeed----"
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten
+world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be
+shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so
+convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid
+change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had
+them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason
+only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"
+
+"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."
+
+"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a
+forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its
+details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day
+is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I
+could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be
+sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to
+the unknown."
+
+"You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see
+before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There
+was nettle-grasping in this.
+
+"It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image
+of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact
+that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a
+large _if_. I am content to go on without an hypothesis--that is really
+all she is now. And my belief that, if she had ever existed, I should
+not be _able_ to disbelieve in her, underlies my acceptance of her in
+that character."
+
+Mrs. Nightingale laughed. "We are mighty metaphysical," said she.
+"Wouldn't it depend entirely on what she was like, when all's said
+and done? I believe I'm right. We women are more practical than men,
+after all."
+
+"You make game of my metaphysics, as you call them. Well, I'll drop the
+metaphysics and speak the honest truth." He stopped and faced round
+towards her, standing on the garden path. "Only, you must make me one
+promise."
+
+She stopped also, and stood looking full at him.
+
+"What promise?"
+
+"If I tell you all I think in my heart, you will not allow it to come
+between me and you, to undermine the only strong friendship I have in
+the world, the only one I know of."
+
+"It shall make no difference between us. You may trust me."
+
+They turned and walked again slowly, once up and down. Then Fenwick's
+voice, when he next spoke, had an added earnestness, a growing tension,
+with an echo in it, for her, of the years gone by--a ring of his young
+enthusiasm, of his passionate outburst in the lawn-tennis garden twenty
+years ago. He made no more ado of what he had to say.
+
+"I can form no image in my mind, try how I may, of any woman for whose
+sake I would give up one hour of the precious privilege I now enjoy.
+I have no right to--to assess it, to make a definition of it. But
+I _have_ it now. I could not resume my place as the husband of a now
+unknown wife--you know what I mean--and not lose the privilege of
+being near _you_. It may be--it is conceivable, I mean; no more--that
+a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring
+me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It _may_
+be so--it _may_ be! All I know is--all I can say is--that I can now
+_imagine_ nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would
+be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He
+paused a moment, as though he thought he was going beyond his rights of
+speech, then added more quietly: "No; I can imagine _no_ hypothetical
+wife. And as for my hypothetical daughter, I find I am always utilising
+Sally for her."
+
+Mrs. Nightingale murmured in an undertone the word "Sallykin," as she
+so often did when her daughter was mentioned, with that sort of caress
+in her voice. This time it was caught by a sort of gasp, and she
+remained silent. What Sally _was_ had crossed her mind--the strange
+relation in which she stood to Fenwick, born in _his_ wedlock, but no
+daughter of his. And there he was, as fond of the child as he could be.
+
+Fenwick may have half misunderstood something in her manner, for when
+he spoke again his words had a certain aspect of recoil from what he
+had said, at least of consideration of it in some new light.
+
+"When I speak to you as freely as this, remember the nature of the
+claim I have to do so--the only apology I can make for taking an
+exceptional licence."
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"I mean I do not count myself as a man--only a sort of inexplicable
+waif, a kind of cancelled man. A man without a past is like a child,
+or an idiot from birth, suddenly endowed with faculties."
+
+"What nonsense, Fenwick! You have brooded and speculated over your
+condition until you have become morbid. Do now, as Sally would say,
+chuck the metaphysics."
+
+"Perhaps I was getting too sententious over it. I'm sorry, and please
+I won't do so any more."
+
+"Don't then. And now you'll see what will happen. You will remember
+everything quite suddenly. It will all come back in a flash, and oh,
+how glad you will be! And think of the joy of your wife and children!"
+
+"Yes, and suppose all the while I am hating them for dragging me away
+from you----"
+
+"From me and Sally?"
+
+"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You
+and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to
+bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine--because I cannot imagine
+_them_--it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would
+drive me _mad_. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself--as I say
+now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am--that to be here with
+you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable."
+
+"All that would change if you recovered them."
+
+"Yes--yes--maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from _them_! They are
+strangers--nonentities. You are--you are--oh, it's no use----" He
+stopped suddenly.
+
+"What am I?"
+
+"It's no use beating about the bush. You are the centre of my life as
+it is, you are what I--all that is left of me--love best in the world!
+I cannot _now_ conceive the possibility of anything but hatred for what
+might come between us, for what might sever the existing link, whatever
+it may be--I care little what it is called, so long as I may keep it
+unbroken...."
+
+"And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He
+could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken.
+Then he replied in a voice less firm than before:
+
+"Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour
+of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in
+Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the
+consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It
+was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of
+her feelings toward himself.
+
+"What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite
+calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure
+and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance,
+no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not
+waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe,
+or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her
+husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what
+there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in
+her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be
+said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul
+is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not
+overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the
+cup to his lips.
+
+The Huguenot arrangement might have gone on in the undisturbed
+moonlight till the chill of the morning came to break it up if a
+cab-wheel _crescendo_ and a _strepitoso_ peal at the bell had not
+announced Sally, who burst into the house and rushed into the
+drawing-room tumultuously, to be corrected back by a serious word from
+Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in
+the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was _en regle_,
+when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree.
+Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more
+self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally
+saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove
+Road--the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What
+_do_ you think, N or M? And then develop the engagement of O to P, or
+the jilting of Q by R.
+
+There was just time for a dozen words between the components of the
+Millais group in the moonlight.
+
+"Shall we tell Sally?" It was the Huguenot that asked the question.
+
+"Not just this minute. Wait till I can think. Perhaps I'll tell her
+upstairs. Now say good-bye before the chick comes, and go." And the
+chick came on the scene just too late to criticise the _pose_.
+
+"I say, mother!" this with the greatest _empressement_ of which
+humanity and youth are capable. "I've got something I _must_ tell you!"
+
+"What is it, kitten?"
+
+"Tishy's head-over-ears in love with the shop-boy!"
+
+"Sh-sh-sh-shish! You noisy little monkey, do consider! The neighbours
+will hear every word you say." So they will, probably, as Miss Sally's
+voice is very penetrating, and rings musically clear in the summer
+night. Her attitude is that she doesn't care if they do.
+
+"Besides they're only cats! And _nobody_ knows who Tishy is, or the
+shop-boy. I'll come down and tell you all about it."
+
+"We're coming up, darling!" You see, Sally had manifestoed down into
+the garden from the landing of the stair, which was made of iron
+openwork you knocked flower-pots down and broke, and you have had to
+have a new one--that, at least, is how Ann put it. On the stair-top
+Mrs. Nightingale stems the torrent of her daughter's revelation
+because it's so late and Mr. Fenwick must get away.
+
+"You must tell him all about it another time."
+
+"I don't know whether it's any concern of his."
+
+"Taken scrupulous, are we, all of a sudden?" says Fenwick, laughing.
+"That cock won't fight, Miss Pussy! You'll have to tell me all about
+it when I come to-morrow. Good-night, Mrs. Nightingale." A sort of
+humorous formality in his voice makes Sally look from one to the
+other, but it leads to nothing. Sally goes to see Fenwick depart,
+and her mother goes upstairs with a candle. In a minute or so
+Sally pelts up the stairs, leaving Ann and the cook to thumbscrew
+on the shutter-panels of the street door, and make sure that
+housebreaker-baffling bells are susceptible.
+
+"Do you know, mamma, I really _did_ think--what do you think I thought?"
+
+"What, darling?"
+
+"I thought Mr. Fenwick was going to kiss me!" In fact, Fenwick had only
+just remembered in time that family privileges must stand over till
+after the revelation.
+
+"Should you have minded if he had?"
+
+"_Not a bit!_ Why should _anybody_ mind Mr. Fenwick kissing them? You
+wouldn't yourself--you know you wouldn't! Come now, mother!"
+
+"I shouldn't distress myself, poppet!" But words are mere wind; the
+manner of them is everything, and the foreground of her mother's manner
+suggests a background to Sally. She has smelt a rat, and suddenly fixes
+her eyes on a tell-tale countenance fraught with mysterious reserves.
+
+"Mother, you _are_ going to marry Mr. Fenwick!" No change of type could
+do justice to the emphasis with which Sally goes straight to the point.
+Italics throughout would be weak. Her mother smiles as she fondles her
+daughter's excited face.
+
+"I am, darling. So you may kiss him yourself when he comes to-morrow
+evening."
+
+And Tishy's passion for the shop-boy had to stand over. But, as the
+Major had said, the mother and daughter talked till three in the
+morning--well, past two, anyhow!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+CONCERNING DR. VEREKER AND HIS MAMMA, WHO HAD KNOWN IT ALL ALONG. HOW
+ SALLY LUNCHED WITH THE SALES WILSONS, AND GOT SPECULATING ABOUT HER
+ FATHER. HOW TISHY LET OUT ABOUT MAJOR ROPER. HOW THERE WAS A WEDDING
+
+
+The segment of a circle of Society that did duty for a sphere, in the
+case of Mrs. Nightingale and Sally, was collectively surprised when it
+heard of the intended marriage of the former, having settled in its own
+mind that the latter was the magnet to Mr. Fenwick's lodestone. But
+each several individual that composed it had, it seemed, foreseen
+exactly what was going to happen, and had predicted it in language that
+could only have been wilfully mistaken by persons interested in proving
+that the speaker was not a prophet. Exceptional insight had been
+epidemic. The only wonder was (to the individual speaker) that Mrs.
+Nightingale had remained single so long, and the only other wonder was
+that none of the other cases had seen it. They had evidently only taken
+seership mildly.
+
+Dr. Vereker had a good opportunity of studying omniscience of a
+malignant type in the very well marked case of his own mother. You may
+remember Sally's denunciation of her as an old hen that came wobbling
+down on you. When her son (in the simplicity of his heart) announced
+to her as a great and curious piece of news that Mr. Fenwick was
+going to marry Mrs. Nightingale, she did not even look up from her
+knitting to reply: "What did I say to you, Conny?" For his name was
+Conrad, as Sally had reported. His discretion was not on the alert on
+this occasion, for he incautiously asked, "When?"
+
+The good lady laid down her knitting on her knees, and folded her
+hands, interlacing her fingers, which were fat, as far as they would
+go, and leaning back with closed eyes--eyes intended to remain closed
+during anticipated patience.
+
+"Fancy asking me that!" said she.
+
+"Well, but--hang it!--_when?_"
+
+"Do not use profane language, Conrad, in your mother's presence. Can
+you really ask me, 'When?' Try and recollect!"
+
+Conrad appeared to consider; but as he had to contend with the problem
+of finding out when a thing had been said, the only clue to the nature
+of which was the date of its utterance, it was no great wonder that his
+cogitations ended in a shake of the head subdivided into its
+elements--shakes taken a brace at a time--and an expression of face as
+of one who whistles _sotto voce_. His questioner must have been looking
+between her eyelids, which wasn't playing fair; for she indicted him on
+the spot, and pushed him, as it were, into the dock.
+
+"_That_, I suppose, means that I speak untruth. Very well, my dear!"
+Resignation set in.
+
+"Come, mother, I say, now! Be a reasonable maternal parent. When did
+I say anybody spoke untruth?"
+
+"My dear, you _said_ nothing. But if your father could have heard what
+you did _not_ say, you know perfectly well, my dear Conrad, what he
+would have _thought_. Was he likely to sit by and hear me insulted?
+Did he ever do so?"
+
+The doctor was writing letters at a desk-table that he used for
+miscellaneous correspondence as much as possible, in order that this
+very same mother of his should be left alone as little as possible. He
+ended a responsible letter, and directed it, and made it a thing of the
+past with a stamp on it in a little basket on the hall-table outside.
+Then he came back to his mother, and bestowed on her the kiss, or peck,
+of peace. It always made him uncomfortable when he had to go away to
+the hospital under the shadow of dissension at home.
+
+"Well, mother dear, what was it you really did say about the Fenwick
+engagement?"
+
+"It would be more proper, my dear, to speak of it as the Nightingale
+engagement. You will say it is a matter of form, but...."
+
+"All right. The Nightingale engagement...."
+
+"My dear! So abrupt! To your mother!"
+
+"Well, dear mammy, what was it, really now?" This cajolery took effect,
+and the Widow Vereker's soul softened. She resumed her knitting.
+
+"If you don't remember what it was, dear, it doesn't matter." The
+doctor saw that nothing short of complete concession would procure
+a tranquil sea.
+
+"Of course, I remember perfectly well," he said mendaciously. He knew
+that, left alone, his mother would supply a summary of what he
+remembered. She did so, with a bound.
+
+"I said, my dear (and I am glad you recollect it, Conrad)--I said from
+the very first, when Mr. Fenwick was living at Krakatoa--(it was all
+_quite_ right, my dear. Do you think I don't know? A grown-up daughter
+and two servants!)--I said that any one with eyes in their head could
+see. And has it turned out exactly as I expected, or has it not?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Very well, dear. I'm glad you say so. Now, don't contradict me
+another time."
+
+The close observer of the actual (whom we lay claim to be) has
+occasionally to report the apparently impossible. We do not suppose
+we shall be believed when we say that Mrs. Vereker added: "Besides,
+there was the Major."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Professor Sales Wilson, Laetitia's father, was _the_ Professor Sales
+Wilson. Only, if you had seen that eminent scholar when he got outside
+his library by accident and wanted to get back, you wouldn't have
+thought he was _the_ anybody, and would probably have likened him to
+a disestablished hermit-crab--in respect, that is, of such a one's desire
+to disappear into his shell, and that respect only. For no hermit-crab
+would ever cause an acquaintance to wonder why he should shave at all
+if he could do it no better than that; nor what he was talking to
+himself about so frequently; nor whether he polished his spectacles so
+long at a time to give the deep groove they were making across his nose
+a chance of filling up; nor whether he would be less bald if he rubbed
+his head less; nor what he had really got inside that overpowering
+phrenology of brow, and behind that aspect of chronic concentration.
+But about the retiring habits of both there could be no doubt.
+
+He lived in his library, attired by nature in a dressing-gown and
+skull-cap. But from its secret recesses he issued manifestoes which
+shook classical Europe. He corrected versions, excerpted passages,
+disallowed authenticities, ascribed works to their true authors, and
+exposed the pretensions of sciolists with a vigour which ought to have
+finally dispersed that unhallowed class. Only it didn't, because they
+are a class incapable of shame, and will go on madly, even when they
+have been proved to be _mere_, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Perhaps
+they had secret information about the domestic circumstances of their
+destroyer, and didn't care. If Yamen had had private means of knowing
+that Vishnu was on uncomfortable terms with his wife, a corrected
+version of the whole Hindu mythology might have been necessary.
+
+However, so far as can be conjectured, the image the world formed of
+the Professor was a sort of aggregate of Dr. Johnson, Bentley, Grotius,
+Mezzofanti, and a slight touch of, say Conington, to bring him well
+up to date. But so much of the first that whenever the _raconteur_
+repeated one of the Professor's moderately bon-mots, he always put
+"sir" in--as, for instance, "A punster, sir, is a man who demoralises
+two meanings in one word;" or, "Should you call that fast life, sir?
+_I_ should call it slow death." The _raconteur_ was rather given to
+making use of him, and assigning to him _mots_ which were not at all
+_bons_, because they only had the "sir" in them, and were otherwise
+meaningless. He was distressed, not without reason, when he heard that
+he had said to Max Mueller, or some one of that calibre, "There is no
+such thing, sir, as the English language!" But he very seldom heard
+anything about himself, or any one else; as he passed his life, as
+aforesaid, in his library, buried in the Phoenician Dictionary he
+hoped he might live to bring out. He had begun the fourth letter;
+but _we_ don't know the Phoenician alphabet. Perhaps it has only four
+letters in it.
+
+He came out of the library for meals, of course. But he took very
+little notice of anything that passed at the family board, and read
+nearly the whole time, occasionally saying something forcible to
+himself. Indeed, he never conversed with his family unless deprived
+of his book. This occurred on the occasion when Sally carried the
+momentous news of her mother's intended marriage to Ladbroke Grove
+Road, the second day after they had talked till two in the morning.
+Matrimony was canvassed and discussed in all its aspects, and the
+particular case riddled and sifted, and elucidated from every point of
+the compass, without the Professor being the least aware that anything
+unusual was afoot, until Grotefend got in the mayonnaise sauce.
+
+"Take your master's book away, Jenkins," said the lady of the house.
+And Jenkins, the tender-hearted parlourmaid, allowed master to keep
+hold just to the end of the sentence. "Take it away, as I told you,
+and wipe that sauce off!"
+
+Sally did so want to box that woman's ears--at least, she said so
+after. She was a great horny, overbearing woman, was Mrs. Sales Wilson,
+and Sally was frightened lest Laetitia should grow like her. Only,
+Tishy's teeth never _could_ get as big as that! Nor wiggle.
+
+The Professor, being deprived of his volume, seemed to awake
+compulsorily, and come out into a cold, unlearned world. But he
+smiled amiably, and rubbed his hands round themselves rhythmically.
+
+"Well, then!" said he. "Say it all again."
+
+"Say what, papa?"
+
+"All the chatter, of course."
+
+"What for, papa?"
+
+"For me to hear. Off we go! _Who's_ going to be married?"
+
+"You see, he was listening all the time. _I_ shouldn't tell him, if
+I were you. Your father is really unendurable. And he gets worse."
+Thus the lady of the house.
+
+"What does your mother say?" There is a shade of asperity in the
+Professor's voice.
+
+"Says you were listening all the time, papa. So you were!" This is
+from Laetitia's younger sister, Theeny. Her name was Athene. Her brother
+Egerton called her "Gallows Athene"--an offensive perversion of the
+name of the lady she was called after. Her mother had carefully taught
+all her children contempt for their father from earliest childhood. But
+toleration of his weaknesses--etymology, and so on--had taken root in
+spite of her motherly care, and the Professor was on very good terms
+with his offspring. He negatived Theeny amiably.
+
+"No, my dear, I was like Mrs. Cluppins. The voices were loud, and
+forced themselves upon my ear. But as you all spoke at once, I have
+no idea what anybody said. My question was conjectural--purely
+conjectural. _Is_ anybody going to marry anybody? _I_ don't know."
+
+"What is your father talking about over there? _Is_ he going to help
+that tongue or not? Ask him." For a peculiarity in this family was that
+the two heads of it always spoke to one another through an agent. So
+clearly was this understood that direct speech between them, on its
+rare occasions, was always ascribed by distant hearers to an outbreak
+of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the
+advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked
+for. On this occasion Laetitia's literal transmission of "_Are_ you
+going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind
+to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing--she was the visitor--was
+pleading at his elbow for its complement of tongue.
+
+But soon a four-inch space intervened between the lonely tongue-tip
+on the dish and what had once been, in military language, its base
+of operations. Everybody that took tongue had got tongue.
+
+"Well, then, how about who's married whom?" Thus the Professor,
+resuming his hand-rubbing, and neglecting the leg of a fowl.
+
+"Make your father eat his lunch, Laetitia. We _cannot_ be late again
+this afternoon." Whereon every one ate too fast; and Sally felt very
+glad the Professor had given her such a big slice of tongue, as she
+knew she wouldn't have the courage to have a second supply, if offered,
+much less ask for it.
+
+"Do you hear, papa? I'm to make you eat your lunch," says Laetitia;
+and her mother murmurs "That's right; make him," as though he were an
+anaconda in the snake-house, and her daughter a keeper who could go
+inside the cage. Laetitia then adds briefly that Mrs. Nightingale is
+going to marry Fenwick.
+
+"Ha! Mercy on us!" says the Professor quite vaguely, and, even more so,
+adds: "Chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken!" Though what he
+says next is more intelligible, it is unfortunate and ill-chosen: "And
+who _is_ Mrs. Nightingale?"
+
+The sphinx is mobility itself compared with Mrs. Wilson's intense
+preservation of her _status quo_. The import of which is that the
+Professor's blunders are things of everyday occurrence--every minute,
+rather. She merely says to Europe, "You see," and leaves that continent
+to deal with the position. Sally, who always gets impatient with the
+Wilson family, except the Professor himself and Laetitia--though _she_
+is trying sometimes--now ignores Europe, and gets the offender into
+order on her own account.
+
+"Why, Professor dear, don't you know Mrs. Nightingale's my mother?
+I'm Sally Nightingale, you know!"
+
+"I'm not at all sure that I did, my dear. I think I thought you were
+Sally Something-else. My mind is very absent sometimes. You must
+forgive me. Sally Nightingale! To be sure!"
+
+"Never mind, Professor dear!" But the Professor still looks vexed at
+his blunder. So Sally says in confirmation, "I've forgiven you. Shake
+hands!" And doesn't make matters much better, for her action seems
+unaccountable to the absent-minded one, who says, "Why?" first, and
+then, "Oh, ah, yes--I see. Shake hands, certainly!" On which the
+Sphinx, at the far end of the table, wondered whether the ancient
+Phoenicians were rude, under her breath.
+
+"I'm so absent, Sally Nightingale, that I didn't even know your father
+wasn't living." Laetitia looks uncomfortable, and when Sally merely
+says, "I never saw my father," thinks to herself what a very discreet
+girl Sally is. Naturally she supposes Sally to be a wise enough child
+to know something about her own father. But the Wilson family were not
+completely in the dark about an unsatisfactory "something queer" in
+Sally's extraction; so that she credits that unconscious young person
+with having steered herself skilfully out of shoal-waters; but she
+is not sure whether to class her achievement as intrepidity or cheek.
+She is wanted in the intelligence department before she can decide
+this point.
+
+"Perhaps, if you try, Laetitia, you'll be able to make out whether your
+father is or is not going to eat his lunch."
+
+But as this appeal of necessity causes the Professor to run the risk
+of choking himself before Laetitia has time to formulate an inquiry, she
+can fairly allow the matter to lapse, as far as she is concerned. The
+dragon, her mother--for that was how Sally spoke of the horny one--kept
+an eye firmly fixed on the unhappy honorary member of most learned
+societies, and gave the word of command, "Take away!" with such
+promptitude that Jenkins nearly carried off the plate from under his
+knife and fork as he placed them on it.
+
+A citation from the Odyssey was received in stony silence by the
+Dragon, who, however, remarked to her younger daughter that it was no
+use talking about Phineus and the Harpies, because they had to be at
+St. Pancras at 3.10, or lose the train. And perhaps, if the servants
+were to be called Harpies, your father would engage the next one
+himself. They were trouble enough now, without that.
+
+Owing to all which, the reference to Sally's father got lost sight of;
+and she wasn't sorry, because Theeny, at any rate, wasn't wanted to
+know anything about him, whatever Laetitia and her mother knew or
+suspected.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, Sally's declaration that she "never saw" him
+was neither discretion, nor intrepidity, nor cheek. It was simple
+Nature. She had always regarded her father as having been accessory
+to herself before the fact; also as having been, for some mysterious
+reason, unpopular--perhaps a _mauvais sujet_. But he was Ancient
+History now--had joined the Phoenicians. Why should _she_ want to know?
+Her attitude of uninquiring acquiescence had been cultivated by her
+mother, and it is wonderful what a dominant influence from early
+babyhood can do. Sally seldom spoke of this mysterious father of hers
+in any other terms than those she had just used. She had never had an
+opportunity of making his acquaintance--that was all. In some way,
+undefined, he had not behaved well to her mother; and naturally she
+sided with the latter. Once, and once only, her mother had said to her,
+"Sally darling, I don't wish to talk about your father, but to forget
+him. I have forgiven him, because of you. Because--how could I have
+done without you, kitten?" And thereafter, as Sally's curiosity was
+a feeble force when set against the possibility that its gratification
+might cause pain to her mother, she suppressed it easily.
+
+But now and again little things would be said in her presence that
+would set her a-thinking--little things such as what the Professor
+has just said. She may easily have been abnormally sensitive on the
+point--made more prone to reflection than usual--by last night's
+momentous announcement. Anyhow, she resolved to talk to Tishy about
+her parentage as soon as they should get back to the drawing-room,
+where they were practising. All the two hours they ought to have played
+in the morning Tishy would talk about nothing but Julius Bradshaw.
+And look how ridiculous it all was! Because she _did_ call him
+"shop-boy"--you know she did--only six weeks ago. Sally didn't see why
+_her_ affairs shouldn't have a turn now; and although she was quite
+aware that her friend wanted her to begin again where they had left off
+before lunch, she held out no helping hand, but gave the preference to
+her own thoughts.
+
+"I suppose my father drank," said Sally to Tishy.
+
+"If you don't know, dear, how should I?" said Tishy to Sally. And that
+did seem plausible, and made Sally the more reflective.
+
+The holly-leaves were gone now that had been conducive to thought at
+Christmas in this same room when we heard the two girls count four
+so often, but Sally could pull an azalea flower to pieces over her
+cogitations, and did so, instead of tuning up forthwith. Laetitia was
+preoccupied--couldn't take an interest in other people's fathers, nor
+her own for that matter. She tuned up, though, and told Sally to look
+alive. But while Sally looks alive she backs into a conversation of
+the forenoon, and out of the pending discussion of Sally's paternity.
+Their two preoccupations pull in opposite directions.
+
+"You _will_ remember not to say anything, won't you, Sally dear? Do
+promise."
+
+"Say anything? Oh no; _I_ shan't say anything. I never do say things.
+What about?"
+
+"You know as well as I do, dear--about Julius Bradshaw."
+
+"Of course I shan't, Tishy. Except mother; she doesn't count. I say,
+Tishy!"
+
+"Well, dear. Do look alive. I'm all ready."
+
+"All right. Don't be in a hurry. I want to know whether you really
+think my father drank."
+
+"Why should I, dear? I never heard anything about him--at least, I
+never heard anything myself. Mamma heard something. Only I wasn't to
+repeat it. Besides, it was nothing whatever to do with drink." The
+moment Laetitia said this, she knew that she had lost her hold on
+her only resource against cross-examination. When the difficulty of
+concealing anything is thrown into the same scale with the pleasure of
+telling it, the featherweights of duty and previous resolutions kick
+the beam. Then you are sorry when it's too late. Laetitia was, and
+could see her way to nothing but obeying the direction on her music,
+which was _attacca_. To her satisfaction, Sally came in promptly in
+the right place, and a first movement in B sharp went steadily through
+without a back-lash. There seemed a chance that Sally hadn't caught
+the last remark, but, alas! it vanished.
+
+"What was it, then, if it wasn't drink?" said she, exactly as if there
+had been no music at all. Laetitia once said of Sally that she was
+a horribly direct little Turk. She was very often--in this instance
+certainly.
+
+"I suppose it was the usual thing." Twenty-four, of course, knew more
+than nineteen, and could speak to the point of what was and wasn't
+usual in matters of this kind. But if Laetitia hoped that vagueness
+would shake hands with delicacy and that details could be lubricated
+away, she was reckoning without her Turk.
+
+"What _is_ the usual thing?"
+
+"Hadn't we better go on to the fugue? I don't care for the next
+movement, and it's easy----"
+
+"Not till you say what you mean by 'the usual thing.'"
+
+"Well, dear, I suppose you know what half the divorce-cases are about?"
+
+"_Tishy!_"
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"There was _no_ divorce!"
+
+"How do you know, dear?"
+
+"I _should_ have known of it."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"You might go on for ever that way. Now, Tishy dear, do be kind and
+tell me what you heard and who said it. _I_ should tell _you_. You
+_know_ I should." This appeal produces concession.
+
+"It was old Major Roper told mamma--with blue pockets under his eyes
+and red all over, creeks and wheezes when he speaks--do you know him?"
+
+"No, I don't, and I don't want to. At least, I've just seen him at
+a distance. I could see he was purple. _Our_ Major--Colonel Lund, you
+know--says he's a horrible old gossip, and you can't rely on a word he
+says. But what _did_ he say?"
+
+"Well, of course, I oughtn't to tell you this, because I promised not.
+What he _said_ was that your mother went out to be married to your
+father in India, and the year after he got a divorce because he was
+jealous of some man your mother had met on the way out."
+
+"How old was I?"
+
+"Gracious me, child! how should _I_ know. He only said you were a baby
+in arms. Of course, you must have been, if you think of it." Laetitia
+here feels that possible calculations may be embarrassing, and tries to
+avert them. "Do let's get on to the third movement. We shall spend all
+the afternoon talking."
+
+"Very well, Tishy, fire away! Oh, no; it's me." And the third movement
+is got under way, till we reach a _pizzicato_ passage which Sally
+begins playing with the bow by mistake.
+
+"That's _pits_!" says the first violin, and we have to begin again at
+the top of the page, and the Professor in his library wonders why on
+earth those girls can't play straight on. The Ancient Phoenicians are
+fidgeted by the jerks in the music.
+
+But it comes to an end in time, and then Sally begins again:
+
+"I _know_ that story's all nonsense now, Tishy."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because mother told me once that my father never saw me, so come now!
+Because the new-bornest baby that ever was couldn't be too small for
+its father to see." Sally pauses reflectively, then adds: "Unless he
+was blind. And mother would have said if he'd been blind."
+
+"He couldn't have been blind, because----"
+
+"Now, Tishy, you see! You're keeping back lots of things that old
+wheezy squeaker said. And you _ought_ to tell me--you know you ought.
+Why couldn't he?"
+
+"You're in such a hurry, dear. I was going to tell you. Major Roper
+said he never saw him but once, and it was out shooting tigers, and he
+was the best shot for a civilian he'd ever seen. There was a tiger was
+just going to lay hold of a man and carry him off when your father
+shot him from two hundred yards off----"
+
+"The man or the tiger? I'm on the tiger's side. I always am."
+
+"The tiger, stupid! You wouldn't want your own father to aim at a tiger
+and hit a man?"
+
+Sally reflects. "I don't think I should. But, I say, Tishy, do you mean
+to say that Major Roper meant to say that he was out shooting with my
+father and didn't know what his name was?"
+
+"Oh, no. He said his name, of course. It was Palliser ... that was
+right, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh dear, no; it was Graythorpe. Palliser indeed!"
+
+"It was true about the tiger though, because Major Roper says he's got
+the skin himself now."
+
+"Only it wasn't my father that shot it. That's quite clear." Sally was
+feeling greatly relieved, and showed it in the way she added: "Now,
+doesn't that just show what a parcel of nonsense the whole story is?"
+
+Sally had never told her friend about her mother's name before she
+took that of Nightingale. Very slight hints had sufficed to make her
+reticent about Graythorpe. Colonel Lund had once said to her: "Of
+course, your mother was Mrs. Graythorpe when she came to England; that
+was before she changed her name to Nightingale, you know?" She
+knew that her mother's money had come to her from a "grandfather
+Nightingale," whose name had somehow accompanied it, and had been (very
+properly, as it seemed to her) bestowed on herself as well as her
+mother. They were part and parcel of each other obviously. In fact, she
+had never more than just known of the existence of the name Graythorpe
+in her family at all, and it had been imputed by her to this unpopular
+father of hers, and put aside, as it were, on a shelf with him. Even if
+her mother had not suggested a desire that the name should lapse, she
+herself would have accepted its extinction on her own account.
+
+But now this name came out of the past as a consolation. Palliser
+indeed! How could mamma have been Mrs. Graythorpe if her husband's name
+had been Palliser? Sally was not wise enough in worldly matters to know
+that divorced ladies commonly fall back on their maiden names. And she
+had been kept, or left, so much in the dark that she had taken for
+granted that her mother's had been Nightingale--that, in fact, she had
+retaken her maiden name at her father's wish, possibly as a censure
+on the misbehaviour of a husband who drank or gambled or was otherwise
+reprobate. Her young mind had been manipulated all one way--had been
+in contact only with its manipulators. Had she had a sister or brother,
+they would have canvassed the subject, speculated, run conclusions to
+earth, and demanded enlightenment. She had none but her mother to go
+to, unless it were Colonel Lund; and the painful but inevitable task of
+both was to keep her in the dark about her parentage at all hazards.
+"If ever," said the former to the latter, "my darling girl has a child
+of her own, I may be able to tell her her mother's story." Till then,
+it would be impossible.
+
+Sally had had a narrow escape of knowing more about this story when
+the veteran Sub-Dean qualified himself for an obituary in the "Times,"
+which she chanced upon and read before her mother had time to detect
+and suppress it. Luckily, a reasonable economy of type had restricted
+the names and designations of all the wives he had driven tandem, and
+no more was said of his third than that she was Rosalind, the widow
+of Paul Nightingale. So, as soon as Sally's mother had read the text
+herself, she was able to say to the Major, quite undisturbedly, that
+the old Sub-Dean had gone at last, leaving thirteen children. The name
+Graythorpe had not crept in.
+
+But we left Sally with a question unanswered. Didn't that show what
+nonsense old Major Roper's story was? Laetitia was rather glad to
+assent, and get the story quashed, or at least prorogued _sine die_.
+
+"It did seem rather nonsense, Sally dear. Major Roper was a stupid old
+man, and evidently took more than was good for him." Intoxicants are
+often of great service in conversation.
+
+In this case they contributed to the reinstatement of Mr. Bradshaw.
+Dear me, it did seem so funny to Sally! Only the other day this young
+man had been known to her on no other lines than as an established
+fool, who came to stare at _her_ out of the corners of his dark eyes
+all through the morning service at St. Satisfax. And now it was St.
+John's, Ladbroke Grove Road, and, what was more, he was being tolerated
+as a semi-visitor at the Wilsons'--a visitor with explanations in an
+undertone. This was the burden of Laetitia, as soon as she had contrived
+to get Sally's troublesome parent shelved.
+
+"Why mamma needs always to be in such a furious fuss to drag in his
+violin, I do _not_ know. As if he needed to be accounted for! Of
+course, if you ask a Hottentot to evenings, you have to explain him.
+But the office-staff at Cattley's (which is really one of the largest
+firms in the country) are none of them Hottentots, but the contrary....
+Now I know, dear, you're going to say what's the contrary of a
+Hottentot, and all the while you know perfectly well what I mean."
+
+"Cut away, Tishy! What next?"
+
+"Well--next, don't you think it very dignified of Mr. Bradshaw to be
+_able_ to be condescended to and explained in corners under people's
+breaths and not to show it?"
+
+"He's got to lump it, if he doesn't like it." Sally, you see, has
+given up her admirer readily enough, but, as she herself afterwards
+said, it's quite another pair of shoes when you're called on to give
+three cheers for what's really no merit at all! What does the young
+man expect?
+
+"Now, that's unkind, Sally dear. You wouldn't like _me_ to. Anyhow,
+that's what mamma _does_. Takes ladies of a certain position or with
+expectations into corners, and says she hates the expression gentleman
+and lady, but _they_ know what she means...."
+
+"_I_ know. And they goozle comfortably at her, like Goody Vereker."
+
+"Doesn't it make one's flesh creep to have a mother like that? I do get
+to hate the very sight of shot silk and binoculars on a leg when she
+goes on so. But I suppose we never shall get on together--mamma and I."
+
+"What does the Professor think about him?"
+
+"Oh--papa? Of course, papa's _perfectly hopeless_! It's the only true
+thing mamma ever says--that he's _perfectly hopeless_. What do you
+suppose he did that Sunday afternoon when Julius Bradshaw came and had
+tea and brought the Strad--the first time, I mean?... Why, he actually
+fancied he had come from the shop with a parcel, and never found out he
+couldn't have when he had tea in the drawing-room, and only suspected
+something when he played Rode's 'Air with Variations for Violin and
+Piano.' Just fancy! He wanted to know why he shouldn't have tea when
+every one else did, and offered him cake! And Sunday afternoon and
+a Stradivarius! _Do_ say you think my parents trying, Sally dear!"
+
+Sally assented to everything in an absent way; but that didn't matter
+as long as she did it. Laetitia only wanted to talk. She seemed, thought
+Sally, improved by the existing combination of events. She had had to
+climb down off the high stilts about Bradshaw, and had only worked in
+one or two slight _Grundulations_ (a word of Dr. Vereker's) into her
+talk this morning. Tishy wasn't a bad fellow at all (Sally's
+expression), only, if she hadn't been taught to strut, she wouldn't
+have been any the worse. It was all that overpowering mother of hers!
+
+Before she parted with her friend that afternoon Sally had a sudden
+access of Turkish directness:
+
+"Tishy dear, _are_ you going to accept Julius Bradshaw if he asks you,
+or _not_?"
+
+"Well, dear, you know we must look at it from the point of view of what
+he would have been if it hadn't been for that unfortunate nervous
+system of his. The poor fellow couldn't help it."
+
+"But are you, or not? That's what _I_ want an answer to."
+
+"Sally dear! Really--you're just like so much dynamite. What would you
+do yourself if you were me? I ask you."
+
+"I should do exactly whatever you settle to do if I were you. It stands
+to reason. But what's it going to be? That's the point."
+
+"He hasn't proposed yet."
+
+"That has nothing whatever to do with it. What you've got to do is
+to make--up--your--mind." These last four words are very _staccato_
+indeed. Tishy recovers a dignity she has rather been allowing to lapse.
+
+"By the time you're my age, Sally dear, you'll see there are ways
+and ways of looking at things. Everything can't be wrapped up in a
+nutshell. We're not Ancient Phoenicians nowadays, whatever papa may
+say. But you're a dear, impulsive little puss."
+
+The protest was feeble in form and substance, and quite unworthy of
+Miss Sales Wilson, the daughter of _the_ Professor Sales Wilson. No
+wonder Sally briefly responded, "Stuff and nonsense!" and presently
+went home.
+
+Of course, the outer circle of Mrs. Nightingale's society (for in this
+matter we are all like Regents Park) had their say about her proposed
+marriage. But they don't come into our story; and besides, they had too
+few data for their opinions to be of any value. What a difference it
+would have made if old Major Roper had met Fenwick and recalled the
+face of the dead shot who, it seemed, had somehow ceded his tiger-skin
+to him. But no such thing happened, nor did anything else come about
+either to revive the story of the divorce or to throw a light on the
+identity of Palliser and Fenwick. Eight weeks after the latter (or the
+former?) had for the second time disclosed his passion to the same
+woman, the couple were married at the church of St. Satisfax, and,
+having started for the Continent the same afternoon, found themselves,
+quite unreasonably happy, wandering about in France with hardly a
+thought beyond the day at most, so long as a letter came from Sally at
+the _postes-restantes_ when expected. And he had remembered nothing!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+OF A WEDDING PARTY AND AN OLD MAN'S RETROSPECT. A HOPE OF RETRIBUTIVE
+ JUSTICE HEREAFTER. CHARLEY'S AUNT, AND PYRAMUS AND THISBE. HOW SALLY
+ TRIED TO PUMP THE COLONEL AND GOT HALF A BUCKETFUL
+
+
+And thus it came about that Rosalind Palliser (_nee_ Graythorpe) stood
+for the second time at the altar of matrimony with the same bridegroom
+under another name. The absence of bridesmaids pronounced and accented
+the fact that the bride was a widow, though, as there were very few of
+the congregation of St. Satisfax who did not know her as such, the
+announcement was hardly necessary. Discussion of who her late husband
+was, or was not, had long since given way to a belief that he was a bad
+lot, and that the less that was said about him the better. If any one
+who was present at the wedding was still constructing theories about
+his identity--whether he had divorced his wife, was divorced himself,
+or was dead--certainly none of those theories connected themselves with
+the present bridegroom. As for Sally, her only feeling, over and above
+her ordinary curiosity about her father, was a sort of paradoxical
+indignation that his intrusion into her mother's life should have
+prevented her daughter figuring as a bridesmaid. It would have been so
+jolly! But Sally was perfectly well aware that widows, strong-nerved
+from experience, stand in no need of official help in getting their
+"things" on, and acquiesced perforce in her position of a mere
+unqualified daughter.
+
+The Major--that is to say, Colonel Lund--stayed on after the wedding,
+under a sort of imputation of guardianship necessary for Sally--an
+imputation accepted by her in order that the old boy should not feel
+lonesome, far more than for any advantage to herself. She wasn't sure
+it did him any good though, after all, for the wedding-party (if it
+could be called one, it was so small), having decided that its
+afternoon had been completely broken into, gave itself up to
+dissipation, and went to see "Charley's Aunt." The old gentleman did
+not feel equal to this, but said if Sally told him all about it
+afterwards it would be just as good, and insisted on her going. He said
+he would be all right, and she kissed him and left him reading "Harry
+Lorrequer," or pretending to.
+
+The wedding-party seemed to have grown, thought the Major, in contact
+with the theatrical world when, on its return, it filled the summer
+night with sound, and made the one-eyed piebald cat who lived at The
+Retreat foreclose an interview with a peevish friend acrimoniously.
+Perhaps it was only because the laughter and the jests, the good-nights
+mixed with echoes of "Charley's Aunt," and reminders of appointments
+for the morrow, broke in so suddenly on a long seclusion that the Major
+seemed to hear so many voices beyond his expectation.
+
+The time had not hung heavy on his hands though--at least, no heavier
+than time always hangs on hands that wore gloves with no fingers near
+upon eighty years ago. The specific gravity of the hours varies less
+and less with loneliness and companionship as we draw nearer to the
+last one of all--the heaviest or lightest, which will it be? The old
+boy had been canvassing this point with another old boy, a real Major,
+our friend Roper, at the Hurkaru Club not long before, and, after he
+had read a few pages of "Harry Lorrequer" he put his spectacles in to
+keep the place, and fell back into a maze of recurrence and reflection.
+
+Was he honest, or was it affectation, when he said to that pursy and
+purple old warrior that if the doctor were to tell him he had but an
+hour to live he should feel greatly relieved and happy? Was his heart
+only pretending to laugh at the panic his old friend was stricken with
+at the mere mention of the word "death"--he who had in his time faced
+death a hundred times without a qualm? But then that was military
+death, and was his _business_. Death the civilian, with paragraphs in
+the newspapers to say "the worst" was feared, and the fever being kept
+down, and the system being kept up, and smells of carbolic acid and
+hourly bulletins--that was the thing he shrank from. Why, the Major
+could remember old Jack Roper at Delhi, in the Mutiny, going out in
+the darkness to capture those Sepoy guns--what was that place
+called--Ludlow Castle?--and now!...
+
+"Oh dammy, Colonel! Why, good Lard! who's dyin' or goin' to die? Time
+enough to talk about dyin' when the cap fits. You take my advice, and
+try a couple of Cockle's anti-bilious. My word for it, it's liver!..."
+And then old Jack followed this with an earthquake-attack of coughing
+that looked very much as if the cap was going to fit. But came out of
+it incorrigible, and as soon as he could speak endorsed his advice
+with an admonitory forefinger: "You do as I tell you, and try 'em."
+
+But the fossil, who was ten years his senior, answered his own question
+to himself in the affirmative as he sat there listening to the distant
+murmur of wheels on the Uxbridge Road and the music of the cats
+without. Yes, he was quite honest about it. He had no complaint to
+make of life, for the last twenty years at any rate. His dear little
+_protegee_--that was how he thought of Sally's mother--had taken
+good care of that. But he had some harsh indictments against earlier
+years--or rather _had_ had. For he had dismissed the culprits with
+a caution, and put the records on a back-shelf.
+
+He could take them down now and look at them without flinching. After
+all, he was so near the end! What did it matter?
+
+There they all were, the neglected chronicles, each in its corner of
+his mind. Of his school-days, a record with all the blots and errors
+worked into the text and made to do duty for ornaments. Not a blemish
+unforgiven. It is even so with us, with you; we all forgive our
+schools. Of his first uniform and his first love, two records with
+a soil on each. For a chemical brother spilt sulphuric acid over the
+first, and the second married a custom-house officer. Of his first
+great cloud--for, if he did not quite forget his first love, he soon
+got a second and even a third--a cloud that came out of a letter that
+reached him in camp at Rawal Pindi, and told him that his father,
+a solicitor of unblemished character till then, had been indicted for
+fraudulent practices, and would have to stand his trial for
+misdemeanour. Of a later letter, even worse, that told of his acquittal
+on the score of insanity, and of how, when he went back two years
+after on his first leave, he went to see his father in an asylum; who
+did not know him and called him "my lord," and asked him to "bring his
+case before the house." Then of a marriage, like a dream now, with
+a wife who left him and a child that died; and then of many colourless
+years of mere official routine, which might have gone on till he fell
+down in harness, but for the chance that threw in his way the daughter
+of an old friend in sore trouble and alone. Not until her loneliness
+and want of a protector on her voyage home suggested it did the harness
+come off the old horse. And then, as we have seen, followed the
+happiest fourth part of his life, as he accounted it, throughout which
+he had never felt so willing to die as he had done before. Rosalind
+Graythorpe grew into it as a kind of adopted daughter, and brought with
+her the morsel of new humanity that had become Sally--that would be
+back in an hour from "Charley's Aunt."
+
+And now Rosey had found a guardian, and was provided for. It would be
+no way amiss now for the Major to take advantage of death. There is
+so much to be said for it when the world has left one aching!
+
+His confidence that his _protegee_ had really found a haven was no
+small compliment to Fenwick. For the latter, with his strange unknown
+past, had nothing but his personality to rely on; and the verdict of
+the Major, after knowing him twelve months, was as decisive on this
+point as if he had known him twelve years. "He may be a bit
+hot-tempered and impulsive," said he to Sally. "But I really couldn't
+say, if I were asked, _why_ I think so. It's a mere idea. Otherwise,
+it's simply impossible to help liking him." To which Sally replied,
+borrowing an expression from Ann the housemaid, that Fenwick was a cup
+of tea. It was metaphorical and descriptive of invigoration.
+
+But the Major's feeling that he was now at liberty to try Death after
+Life, to make for port after stormy seas, had scarcely a trace in it
+of dethronement or exclusion from privileges once possessed. It was not
+his smallest tribute to Fenwick that he should admit the idea to his
+mind at all--that he might have gained a son rather than lost a
+daughter. At least, he need not reject that view of the case, but it
+would not do to build on it. _Unberufen!_ The Major tapped three times
+on the little table where the lamp stood and "Harry Lorrequer" lay
+neglected. He pulled out his watch, and decided that they would not be
+very long now. He would not go to bed till he had seen the kitten--he
+usually spoke of her so to her mother. He had to disturb the kitten's
+cat, who was asleep on him, to get at the watch; who, being selfish,
+made a grievance of it, and went away piqued after stretching. Well,
+he was sorry of course, but it would have had to come, some time. And
+he hadn't moved for ever so long!
+
+"I wonder," half said, half thought he to himself, "I wonder who or
+what he really is?... If only we could have known!... Was I right not
+to urge delay?... Only Rosey was so confident.... _Could_ a woman of
+her age feel so sure and be misled?"
+
+It was _her_ certainty that had dragged his judgment along a path it
+might otherwise have shrunk from. He could not know her reasons, but
+he felt their force in her presence. Now she was gone, he doubted. Had
+he been a fool after all?
+
+"Well--well; it can't be altered now. And she would have done it just
+the same whatever I said.... I suppose she was like that when she was
+a girl.... I wish I had even seen that husband of hers.... So odd they
+should both be Algernon! Does he know, I wonder, that the other was
+Algernon?" For the Major had religiously adhered to his promise not to
+say anything to Fenwick about the old story. He knew she had told it,
+or would tell it in her own time.
+
+Then his thoughts turned to revival of how and where he found her
+first, and, as it all came back to him, you could have guessed, had you
+seen his face, that they had lighted on the man who was the evil cause
+of all, and the woman who had abetted him. The old hand on the table
+that had little more strength in it than when it wore a hedger's glove
+near eighty years ago, closed with the grip of all the force it had,
+and the lamp-globe rang as the tremor of his arm shook the table.
+
+"Oh, I pray God there is a hell," came audibly from as kind a heart as
+ever beat. "_How_ I pray God there is a hell!" Then the stress of his
+anger seemed to have exhausted him, for he lay back in his armchair
+with his eyes closed. In a few moments he drew a long breath, and as
+he wiped the drops from his brow, said aloud to himself: "I wish the
+kitten would come." He seemed happier only from speaking of her. And
+then sat on and waited--waited as for a rescue--for Sally to come and
+fill up the house with her voice and her indispensable self.
+
+Something of an inconsistency in the attitude of his mind may have
+struck across the current of his reflections--something connected with
+what this indispensable thing actually was and whence--for his thoughts
+relented as the image of her came back to him. Where would those eyes
+be, conspirators with the lids above them and the merry fluctuations of
+the brows; where would those lips be, from which the laughter never
+quite vanished, even as the ripple of the ocean's edge tries how small
+it can get but never dies outright; where the great coils of black hair
+that would not go inside any ordinary oilskin swimming-cap; where the
+incorrigible impertinence and flippancy be we never liked to miss a
+word of; where, in short, would Sally be if she had never emerged from
+that black shadow in the past?
+
+Easy enough to say that, had she not done so, something else quite as
+good might have been. Very likely. How can we limit the possible to the
+conditional-praeter-pluperfect tense? But then, you see, it wouldn't
+have been Sally! That's the point.
+
+Sally's mother had followed such thoughts to the length of almost
+forgiving the author of her troubles. But she could not forgive him
+considered also as the author of her husband's. The Major could not
+find any forgiveness at all, though the thought of Sally just sufficed
+to modify the severity of his condemnation. Leniency dawned.
+
+"Yes--yes; I was wrong to say that. But I couldn't help it." So said
+the old man to himself, but quite as though he spoke to some one else.
+He paused a little, then said again: "Yes; I was wrong. But oh, what
+a damned scoundrel! And _what_ a woman!" Then, as though he feared a
+return of his old line of thought, "I wish Sally would come." And
+a dreadful half-thought came to him, "Suppose there were a fire at
+the theatre, and I had to wire ... why--that would be worst of all!"
+
+So, almost without a pause between, he had prayed for a hell to punish
+a crime, and for the safety of the treasured thing that was its
+surviving record--a creature that but for that crime would never have
+drawn breath.
+
+His reading-lamp had burned out its young enthusiasm, and was making up
+its mind to go out, only not in any hurry. It would expire with dignity
+and leave a rich inheritance of stench. Meanwhile, its decadence was
+marked enough to frank the Major in neglecting "Harry Lorrequer" for
+the rest of the time, and also served to persuade him that he had
+really been reading. Abstention from a book under compulsion has
+something of the character of perusal. Gibbon could not have collected
+his materials on those lines, certainly. But the Major felt his
+conscience clearer from believing that he meant to go on where he had
+been obliged to stop. He cancelled "Harry Lorrequer," put him back in
+the bookcase to make an incident, then began actively waiting for the
+return of the playgoers. Reference to his watch at short intervals
+intensified their duration, added gall to their tediousness. But so
+convinced was he that they "would be here directly" that it was at
+least half-an-hour before he reconsidered this insane policy and
+resumed his chair with a view to keeping awake in it. He was convinced
+he was succeeding, had not noticed he was dozing, when he was suddenly
+wrenched out of the jaws of sleep by the merry voices of the
+home-comers and the loss of the piebald cat's temper as aforesaid.
+
+"Oh, Major dear, you haven't gone to bed! You will be so tired! Why
+didn't you go?"
+
+"I've been very happy, chick. I've been reading 'Harry Lorrequer.'
+I like Charles Lever, because I read him when I was a boy. What's
+o'clock?" He pulled out his watch with a pretence, easy of detection,
+that he had not just done so ten minutes before. It was a lie about
+"Harry Lorrequer," you see, so a little extra didn't matter.
+
+"It's awfully late!" Sally testified. "Very nearly as late as it's
+possible to be. But now we're in for it, we may as well make it
+a nocturnal dissipation. Ann!--don't go to bed; at least, not before
+you've brought some more fresh water. This will take years to hot up.
+Oh, Major, Major, why _didn't_ you make yourself some toddy? I never
+go out for five minutes but you don't make yourself any toddy!"
+
+"I don't want it, dear child. I've been drinking all day--however, of
+course, it was a wedding...."
+
+"But you must have some now, anyhow. Stop a minute, there's some one
+coming up the doorsteps and Ann's fastened up.... No, it's not the
+policeman. _I_ know who it is. Stop a minute." And then presently the
+Major hears Sally's half of an interview, apparently through a keyhole.
+"I shan't open the door ... two bolts and a key and a chain--the idea!
+What is it?... My pocky-anky?... Keep it, it won't bite you ... send it
+to the wash!... No, really, do keep it if you don't mind--keep it till
+Brahms on Thursday. Remember! Good-night." But it isn't quite
+good-night, for Sally arrests departure. "Stop! What a couple of idiots
+we are!... What for?--why--because you might have stuffed it in the
+letter-box all along." And the incident closes on the line indicated.
+
+"It was only my medical adviser," Sally says, returning with
+explanations. "Found my wipe in the cab."
+
+"Dr. Vereker?"
+
+"Yes. Dr. Him. Exactly! We bawled at each other through the keyhole like
+Pyramus and Trilby----" She becomes so absorbed in the details of the
+toddy that she has to stand a mere emendation over until it is ready.
+Then she completes: "I mean Thisbe. I wonder where they've got to?"
+
+"Pyramus and Thisbe?"
+
+"No, mother and her young man.... No, I won't sit on you. I'll sit
+here; down alongside--so! Then I shan't shake the toddy overboard."
+
+Her white soft hand is so comforting as it lies on the Major's on the
+chair-arm that he is fain to enjoy it a little, however reproachful
+the clock-face may be looking. You can pretend your toddy is too hot,
+almost any length of time, as long as no one else touches the tumbler;
+also you can drink as slow as you like. No need to hurry. Weddings
+don't come every day.
+
+"Was it very funny, chick?"
+
+"Oh, wasn't it! But didn't mamma look _lovely_?... I've seen it twice
+before, you know." This last is by way of apology for giving the
+conversation a wrench. But the Major didn't want to talk over the
+wedding--seemed to prefer "Charley's Aunt."
+
+"He dresses up like his aunt, doesn't he?"
+
+"Oh yes--it's glorious fun! But _do_ say you thought mamma looked
+lovely."
+
+"Of course she did. She always does. But had the others seen 'Charley's
+Aunt' before?"
+
+"Tishy and her Bradshaw? Oh yes--at least, I suppose so."
+
+"And Dr. Vereker?"
+
+"Oh, of course _he_ had--twice at least. The times we saw it, mother
+and I. He went too.... We-e-e-ell, there's nothing in that!" (We can
+only hope again our spelling conveys the way the word _well_ was
+prolonged.)
+
+"Nothing at all. Why should there be? What a nice fellow Vereker is!"
+
+"My medical adviser? Oh, _he's_ all right. Never mind him; talk about
+mother."
+
+"They must be very nearly at Rheims by now." This is mere obedience
+to orders on the Major's part. He feels no real interest in what he
+is saying.
+
+"How rum it must be!" says Sally, with grave consideration. And the
+Major's "What?" evolves that "it" means marrying a second husband.
+
+"Going through it all over again when you've done it once before,"
+continues this young philosopher. The Major thinks of asking why it
+should be rummer the second time than the first, but decides not to,
+and sips his toddy, and pats the hand that is under his. In a hazy,
+fossil-like way he perceives that to a young girl's mind the "rumness"
+of a second husband is exactly proportionate to the readiness of its
+acceptance of the first. Unity is just as intrinsic a quality of
+a first husband as the colour of his eyes or hair. Moreover, he is
+expected to outlive you. Above all, he is perfectly natural and a
+matter of course. We discern in all this a sneaking tribute to an
+idea of a hereafter; but the Major didn't go so far as that.
+
+"She looked very jolly over it," said he, retreating on generalities.
+"So did he."
+
+"Gaffer Fenwick? I should think so indeed! Well he might!" Then, after
+a moment's consideration: "He looked like my idea of Sir Richard
+Grenville. It's only an idea. I forget what he did. Elizabethan
+johnny."
+
+"What do you call him? Gaffer Fenwick? You're a nice, respectable young
+monkey! Well, he's not half a bad-looking fellow; well set up." But
+none of this, though good in itself, is what Sally sat down to talk
+about. A sudden change in her manner, a new earnestness, makes the
+Major stop an incipient yawn he is utilising as an exordium to a hint
+that we ought to go to bed, and become quite wakeful to say: "I will
+tell you all I can, my child." For Sally has thrust aside talk of the
+day's events, making no more of the wedding ceremony than of "Charley's
+Aunt," with: "_Why_ did my father and mother part? You _will_ tell me
+now, won't you, Major dear?"
+
+Lying was necessary--inevitable. But he would minimise it. There was
+always the resource of the legal fiction; all babes born in matrimony
+are legally the children of their mother's husband, _quand-meme_. He
+must make that his sheet-anchor.
+
+"You know, Sallykin, your father and mother fell out before you were
+born. And the first time I saw your mother--why, bless my soul, my
+dear! you were quite a growing girl--yes, able to get a staff-officer's
+thumb in your mouth, and bite it. Indeed, you did! It was General
+Pellew; they say he's going to be made a peer." The Major thinks he
+sees his way out of the fire by sinking catechism in reminiscences. "I
+can recollect it all as if it were yesterday. I said to him, 'Who's the
+poor pretty little mother, General?' Because he knew your mother, and
+I didn't. 'Don't you know?' said he. 'She's Mrs. Graythorpe.' I asked
+about her husband, but Pellew had known nothing except that there was
+a row, and they had parted." The Major's only fiction here was that he
+substituted the name Graythorpe for Palliser. "Next time I saw her we
+picked up some acquaintance, and she asked if I was a Lincolnshire
+Lund, because her father always used to talk of how he went to Lund's
+father's, near Crowland, when he was a boy. 'Stop a bit,' said I; 'what
+was your father's name?' 'Paul Nightingale,' says she." Observe that
+nothing was untrue in this, because Rosey always spoke and thought of
+Paul Nightingale as her father.
+
+"That was my grandfather?" Sally was intent on accumulating
+facts--would save up analysis till after. The Major took advantage of
+a slight choke over his whiskey to mix a brief nod into it; it was a
+lie--but, then, he himself couldn't have said which was nod and which
+was choke; so it hardly counted. He continued, availing himself at
+times of the remains of the choke to help him to slur over difficult
+passages.
+
+"He was the young brother of a sort of sweetheart of mine--a silly
+boyish business--a sort of calf-love. She married and died. But he was
+her great pet, a favourite younger brother. One keeps a recollection
+of this sort of thing."--The Major makes a parade of his powers of
+oblivion, and his failure to carry it out sits well upon him.--"Of
+course, my romantic memories"--the Major smiles derision of Love's
+young dream--"had something to do with my interest in your mother, but
+I hope I should have done the same if there had been no such thing.
+Well, the mere fact of your father's behaviour to your mother...." He
+stopped short, with misgivings that his policy of talking himself out
+of his difficulties was not such a very safe one, after all. Here he
+was, getting into a fresh mess, gratuitously!
+
+"Mamma won't talk about that," says Sally, "so I suppose I'm not to ask
+_you_." The Major must make a stand upon this, or the enemy will swarm
+over his entrenchments. Merely looking at his watch and saying it's
+time for us to be in bed will only bring a moment's respite. There is
+nothing for it but decision.
+
+"Sally dear, your mother does not tell you because she wishes the whole
+thing buried and forgotten. Her wishes must be my wishes...."
+
+He would like to stop here--to cut it short at that, at once and for
+good. But the pathetic anxiety of the face from which all memories of
+"Charley's Aunt" have utterly vanished is too much for his fortitude;
+and, at the risk of more semi-fibs, he extenuates the sentence.
+
+"One day your mother may tell you all about it. She is the proper
+person to tell it--not me. Neither do I think I know it all to tell."
+
+"You know if there was or wasn't a divorce?" The Major feels very sorry
+he didn't let it alone.
+
+"I'll tell you that, you inquisitive chick, if you'll promise on honour
+not to ask any more questions."
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Honour bright?"
+
+"Honest Injun!"
+
+"That's right. Now I'll tell you. There was no divorce, but there was
+a suit for a divorce, instituted by him. He failed to make out a case."
+Note that the expression "your father" was carefully excluded. "She was
+absolutely blameless--to my thinking, at least. Now that's plenty for
+a little girl to know. And it's high time we were both in bed and
+asleep."
+
+He kisses the grave, sad young face that is yearning to hear more, but
+is too honourable to break its compact. "They'll be at Rheims by now,"
+says he, to lighten off the conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SALLY'S LARK. AND HOW SHE TOOK HER MEDICAL ADVISER INTO HER CONFIDENCE
+ AFTER DIVINE SERVICE
+
+
+Though Sally cried herself to sleep after her interview with her
+beloved but reticent old fossil, nevertheless, when she awoke next
+morning and found herself mistress of the house and the situation, she
+became suddenly alive to the advantages of complete independence. She
+was an optimist constitutionally; for it _is_ optimism to decide that
+it is "rather a lark" to breakfast by yourself when you have just
+dried the tears you have been shedding over the loss of your morning
+companion. Sally came to this conclusion as she poured out her tea,
+after despatching his toast and coffee to the Major in his own room.
+He sometimes came down to breakfast, but such a dissipation as yesterday
+put it out of the question on this particular morning.
+
+The lark continued an unalloyed, unqualified lark quite to the end of
+the second cup of tea, when it seemed to undergo a slight clouding
+over--a something we should rather indicate by saying that it slowed
+down passing through a station, than that it was modulated into a minor
+key. Of course, we are handicapped in our metaphors by an imperfect
+understanding of the exact force of the word "lark" used in this
+connexion.
+
+The day before does not come back to us during our first cup at
+breakfast, whether it be tea or coffee. A happy disposition lets what
+we have slept on sleep, till at least it has glanced at the weather,
+and knows that it is going to be cooler, some rain. Then memory
+revives, and all the chill inheritance of overnight. We pick up the
+thread of our existence, and draw our finger over the last knots, and
+then go on where we left off. We remember that we have to see about
+this, and we mustn't be late at that, and that there's an order got
+to be made out for the stores. There wasn't in Sally's case, certainly,
+because it was Sunday; but there was tribulation awaiting her as soon
+as she could recollect her overdue analysis of the Major's concealed
+facts. She had put it off till leisure should come; and now that she
+was only looking at a microcosm of the garden seen through the window,
+and reflected upside down in the tea-urn, she had surely met with
+leisure. Her mind went back tentatively on the points of the old man's
+reminiscences, as she looked at her own thoughtful face in the convex
+of the urn opposite, nursed in two miniature hands whose elbows were
+already becoming unreasonably magnified, though really they were next
+to nothing nearer.
+
+Just to think! The Major had actually been in love when he was young.
+More than once he must have been, because Sally knew he was a widower.
+She touched the shiny urn with her finger, to see how hideously it
+swelled in the mirror. You know what fun that is! But she took her
+finger back, because it was too hot, though off the boil.
+
+There was a bluebottle between the blind and the window-pane, as usual;
+if he was the same bluebottle that was there when Fenwick was first
+brought into this room, he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,
+like the old _regime_ in France. He only knew how to butt and blunder
+resonantly at the glass; but he could do it as well as ever, and he
+seemed to have made up his mind to persevere. Sally listened to his
+monotone, and watched her image in the urn.
+
+"I wish I hadn't promised not to ask more," she thought to herself.
+"Anyhow, Tishy's wrong. Nobody ever was named Palliser--that's flat!
+And if there was a divorce-suit ever so, _I_ don't care!..." She had to
+stop thinking for a moment, to make terms with the cat, who otherwise
+would have got her claws in the beautiful white damask, and ripped.
+
+"Besides, if my precious father behaved so badly to mamma, how could it
+be _her_ fault? I don't _believe_ in mother being the _least_ wrong in
+anything, so it's no use!" This last filled out a response to an
+imaginary indictment of an officious Crown-Prosecutor. "I know what I
+should like! I should like to get at that old Scroope, or whatever his
+name is, and get it all out of him. I'd give him a piece of my mind,
+gossipy old humbug!" It then occurred to Sally that she was being
+unfair. No, she wouldn't castigate old Major Roper for tattling, and at
+the same time cross-examine him for her own purposes. It would be
+underhand. But it would be very easy, if she could get at him, to make
+him talk about it. She rehearsed ways and means that might be employed
+to that end. For instance, nothing more natural than to recur to the
+legend of how she bit General Pellew's finger; that would set him off!
+She recited the form of speech to be employed. "Do you know, Major
+Roper, I'm told I once bit a staff-officer's finger off," etc. Or would
+it be better not to approach the matter with circumspection, but go
+straight to the point--"You must have met my father, Major Roper,
+etc.," and then follow on with explanations? Oh dear, how difficult it
+was to settle! If only there were any one she could trust to talk to
+about it! Really, Tishy was quite out of the question, even if she
+could take her mind off her Bradshaw for five minutes, which she
+couldn't.
+
+"Of course, there's Prosy, if you come to that," was the conclusion
+reached at the end of a long avenue of consideration, on each side of
+which referees who might have been accepted, but had been rejected,
+were supposed to be left to their disappointment. "Only, fancy making
+a confidant of old Prosy! Why, he'd feel your pulse and look at your
+tongue, just as likely as not."
+
+But Dr. Vereker, thus dismissed to the rejected referees, seemed not to
+care for their companionship, and to be able to come back. At any rate,
+Miss Sally ended up a long cogitation with, "I've a great mind to go
+and talk to Prosy about it, after all! Perhaps he would be at church."
+
+Now, if this had been conversation instead of soliloquy, Sally's
+constitutional frankness would have entered some protest against the
+assumption that she intended to go to church as a matter of course. As
+she was her only audience, and one that knew all about the speaker
+already, she slurred a little over the fact that her decision to attend
+church was influenced by a belief that probably Dr. Vereker would be
+there. If she chose, she should deceive herself, and consult nobody
+else. She looked at her watch, as the open-work clock with the punctual
+ratchet-movement had stopped, and was surprised to find how late she
+was. "Comes of weddings!" was her comment. However, she had time to
+wind the clock up and set it going when she came downstairs again ready
+for church.
+
+St. Satisfax's Revd. Vicar prided himself on the appropriateness of his
+sermons; so, this time, as he had yesterday united a distinguished and
+beautiful widow to her second husband, he selected for his text the
+parable of the widow's son. True, Mrs. Nightingale had no son, and
+her daughter wasn't dead, and there is not a hint in the text that
+the widow of Nain married again, or had any intention of doing so. On
+the other hand, the latter had no daughter, presumably, and her son
+was alive. And as to marrying again, why, there was the very gist
+and essence of the comparison, if you chose to accept the cryptic
+suggestions of the Revd. Vicar, and make it for yourself. The lesson
+we had to learn from this parable was obviously that nowadays widows,
+however good and solvent, were mundane, and married again; while in the
+City of Nain, nineteen hundred years ago, they (being in Holy Writ)
+were, as it were, Sundane, and didn't. The delicacy of the reverend
+suggestion to this effect, without formal indictment of any offender,
+passes our powers of description. So subtle was it that Sally felt she
+had nothing to lay hold of.
+
+Nevertheless, when the last of the group that included herself and the
+doctor, and walked from St. Satisfax towards its atomic elements'
+respective homes, had vanished down her turning--it was the large Miss
+Baker, as a matter of fact--then Sally referred to the sermon and its
+text, jumping straight to her own indictment of the preacher.
+
+"Why shouldn't my mother marry again if she likes, Dr.
+Vereker--especially Mr. Fenwick?"
+
+"Don't you think it possible, Miss Sally, that the parson didn't mean
+anything about your mother--didn't connect her in his mind with----"
+
+"With the real widow in the parable? Oh yes, he did, though! As if
+mother was a real widow!"
+
+Now, the doctor had heard from his own widowed mother the heads of
+the gossip about the supposed divorce. He had pooh-poohed this as mere
+tattle--asked for evidence, and so on. But, having heard it, it was
+not to be wondered at that he put a false interpretation on Sally's
+last words. They seemed to acknowledge the divorce story. He felt
+very unsafe, and could only repeat them half interrogatively, "As
+if Mrs. Nightingale was a real widow?" But with the effect that
+Sally immediately saw clean through him, and knew what was passing
+in his mind.
+
+"Oh no, Dr. Vereker! I wasn't thinking of _that_." She faced round to
+disclaim it, turning her eyes full on the embarrassed doctor. Then she
+suddenly remembered it was the very thing she had come out to talk
+about, and felt ashamed. The slightest possible flush, that framed up
+her smile and her eyes, made her at this moment a bad companion for
+a man who was under an obligation not to fall in love with her--for
+that was how the doctor thought of himself. Sally continued: "But I
+wish I had been, because it would have done instead."
+
+The young man was really, at the moment, conscious of very little
+beyond the girl's fascination, and his reply, "Instead of what?" was
+a little mechanical.
+
+"I mean instead of explaining what I wanted you to talk about special.
+But when I spoke, you know, just now about a real widow, I meant a real
+widow that--that _wids_--you know what I mean. Don't laugh!"
+
+"All right, Miss Sally. I'm serious." The doctor composes a
+professional face. "I know perfectly what you mean." He waits for the
+next symptom.
+
+"Now, mother never did wid, and never will wid, I hope. She hasn't got
+it in her bones." And then Miss Sally stopped short, and a little extra
+flush got time to assert itself. But a moment after she rushed the
+position without a single casualty. "I want to know what people say,
+when I'm not there, about who my father was, and why he and mother
+parted. And I'm sure you can tell me, and will. It's no use asking
+Tishy Wilson any more about it." Observe the transparency of this young
+lady. She wasn't going to conceal that she had talked of it to Tishy
+Wilson--not she!
+
+Dr. Vereker, usually reserved, but candid withal, becomes, under the
+infection of Sally's frankness, candid and unreserved.
+
+"People haven't talked any nonsense to _me_; I never let them. But my
+mother has repeated to me things that have been said to her.... She
+doesn't like gossip, you know!" And the young man really believes what
+he says. Because his mother has been his religion--just consider!
+
+"I know she doesn't." Sally analyses the position, and decides on the
+fib in the twinkling of an eye. She is going to make a son break a
+promise to his mother, and she knows it. So she gives him this as
+a set-off. "But people _will_ talk to her, of course! Shall I get _her_
+to tell _me_?"
+
+The doctor considers, then answers:
+
+"I think, Miss Sally--unless you particularly wish the contrary--I
+would almost rather not. Mother believed the story all nonsense, and
+was very much concerned that people should repeat such silly tattle.
+She would be very unhappy if she thought it had come to your ears
+through her repeating it in confidence to me."
+
+"Perhaps you would really rather not tell it, doctor." Disappointment
+is on Sally's face.
+
+"No. As you have asked me, I prefer to tell it. Only you won't speak
+to her at all, will you?"
+
+"I really won't. You may trust me."
+
+"Well, then, it's really very little when all's said and done. Somebody
+told her--I won't say who it was--you don't mind?" Sally didn't--"told
+her that your father behaved very badly to your mother, and that he
+tried to get a divorce from her and failed, and that after that they
+parted by mutual consent, and he went away to New Zealand when you were
+quite a small baby."
+
+"Was that quite all?"
+
+"That was all mother told me. I'm afraid I rather cut her short by
+saying I thought it was most likely all unfounded gossip. Was any of
+it true? But I've no right to ask questions...."
+
+"Oh, Dr. Vereker--no! That wouldn't be fair. Of course, when you are
+asked to tell, you are allowed to ask. Every one always is. Besides,
+I don't mind a bit telling you all I know. Only you'll be surprised at
+my knowing so very little."
+
+And then Sally, with a clearness that did her credit, repeated all the
+information she had had--all that her mother had told her--what she had
+extracted from Colonel Lund with difficulty--and lastly, but as the
+merest untrustworthy hearsay, the story that had reached her through
+her friend Laetitia. In fact, she went the length of discrediting it
+altogether, as "Only Goody Wilson, when all was said and done." The
+fact that her mother had told her so little never seemed to strike her
+as strange or to call for comment. It was right that it should be so,
+because it was in her mother's jurisdiction, and what she did or said
+was right. Cannot most of us recall things unquestioned in our youth
+that we have marvelled at our passive acceptance of since? Sally's
+mother's silence about her father was ingrained in the nature of
+things, and she had never speculated about him so much as she had done
+since Professor Wilson's remark across the table had led to Laetitia's
+tale about Major Roper and the tiger-shooting.
+
+Sally's version of her mother's history was comforting to her hearer on
+one point: it contained no hint that the fugitive to Australia was not
+her father. Now, the fact is that the doctor, in repeating what his
+mother had said to him, had passed over some speculations of hers about
+Sally's paternity. No wonder the two records confirmed each other,
+seeing that the point suppressed by the doctor had been studiously
+kept from Sally by all her informants. He, for his part, felt that the
+bargain did not include speculations of his mother's.
+
+"Well, doctor?" Thus Sally, at the end of a very short pause for
+consideration. Vereker does not seem to need a longer one. "You mean,
+Miss Sally, do I think people talk spitefully of Mrs. Nightingale--I
+suppose I must say Mrs. Fenwick now--behind her back? Isn't that the
+sort of question?" Sally, for response, looks a little short nod at the
+doctor, instead of words. He goes on: "Well, then, I don't think they
+do. And I don't think you need fret about it. People will talk about
+the story of the quarrel and separation, of course, but it doesn't
+follow that anything will be said against either your father or mother.
+Things of this sort happen every day, with fault on neither side."
+
+"You think it was just a row?"
+
+"Most likely. The only thing that seems to me to tell against your
+father is what you said your mother said just now--something about
+having forgiven him for your sake." Sally repeats her nod. "Well,
+even that might be accounted for by supposing that he had been very
+hot-tempered and unjust and violent. He was quite a young chap, you
+see...."
+
+"You mean like--like supposing Jeremiah were to go into a tantrum now
+and flare up--he does sometimes--and then they were both to miff off?"
+
+"Something of that sort. Very likely they would have understood each
+other better if they had been a little older and wiser...."
+
+"Like us?" says Sally, with perfect unconsciousness of one aspect of
+the remark. "And then they might have gone on till now." Regret that
+they did not do so is on her face, till she suddenly sees a new
+contingency. "But then we shouldn't have had Jeremiah. I shouldn't have
+fancied that at all." She doesn't really see why the doctor smiled at
+this, but adds a grave explanation: "I mean, if I'd tried both, I might
+have preferred my step." But there they were at Glenmoira Road, and
+must say good-bye till Brahms on Thursday.
+
+Only, the doctor did (as a matter of history) walk down that road with
+Sally as far as the gate with Krakatoa Villa on it, and got home late
+for his mid-day Sunday dinner, and was told by his mother that he might
+have considered the servants. She herself was, meekly, out of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+ OF A SWIMMING-BATH, "ET PRAETEREA EXIGUUM"
+
+
+This was the best of the swimming-bath season, and Sally rarely passed
+a day without a turn at her favourite exercise. If her swimming-bath
+had been open on Sunday, she wouldn't have gone to church yesterday,
+not even to meet Dr. Vereker and talk about her father to him. As it
+was, she very nearly came away from Krakatoa Villa next morning without
+waiting to see the letter from Rheims, the post being late. Why _is_
+everything late on Monday?
+
+However, she was intercepted by the postman and the foreign postmark--a
+dozen words on a card, but she read them several times, and put the
+card in her pocket to show to Laetitia Wilson. She was pretty sure to be
+there. And so she was, and by ten o'clock had seen the card and
+exhausted its contents. And by five-minutes-past Sally was impending
+over the sparkling water of Paddington swimming-bath. She was dry so
+far, and her blue bathing-dress could stick out. But it was not to be
+for long, for her two hands went together after a preliminary stretch
+to make a cutwater, and down went Sally with a mighty splash into the
+deep--into the moderately deep, suppose we say--at any rate into ten
+thousand gallons of properly filtered Thames water, which had been
+(no doubt) sterilised and disinfected and examined under powerful
+microscopes until it hadn't got a microbe to bless itself with. When
+she came up at the other end, to taunt Laetitia Wilson with her
+cowardice for not doing likewise, she was a smooth and shiny Sally,
+like a deep blue seal above water, but with modifications towards
+floating fins below.
+
+"Now tell me about the row last night," said she, after reproaches met
+by Laetitia with, "It's no use, dear. I wasn't born a herring like you."
+
+Sally must have heard there had been some family dissension at Ladbroke
+Grove Road as she came into the bath with Laetitia, whom she met at the
+towel-yielding _guichet_. However, the latter wasn't disposed to
+discuss family matters in an open swimming-bath in the hearing of the
+custodian, to say nothing of possible concealed dressers in horse-boxes
+alongside.
+
+"My dear child, _is_ this the place to talk about things in? _Do_ be
+a little discreet sometimes," is her reply to Sally's request.
+
+"There's nobody here but us. Cut away, Tishy!" But Miss Wilson will
+_not_ talk about the row, whatever it was, with the chance of
+goodness-knows-who coming in any minute. For one thing, she wants to
+enjoy the telling, and not to be interrupted. So it is deferred to
+a more fitting season and place.
+
+Goodness-knows-who (presumably) came in in the shape of Henriette
+Prince, who was, after Sally, the next best swimmer in the Ladies'
+Club. After a short race or two, won by Sally in spite of heavy odds
+against her, the two girls turned their attention to the art of
+rescuing drowning persons. A very amusing game was played, each
+alternately committing suicide off the edge of the bath while the other
+took a header to her rescue from the elevation which we just now saw
+Sally on ready to plunge. The rules were clear. The suicide was to do
+her best to drag the rescuer under water and to avoid being dragged
+into the shallow end of the bath.
+
+"I know you'll both get drowned if you play those tricks," says Laetitia
+nervously.
+
+"No--we _shan't_," vociferates Sally from the brink. "Now, are you
+ready, Miss Prince? Very well. Tishy, count ten!"
+
+"Oh, I wish you wouldn't! One--two--three...." And Laetitia, all whose
+dignity and force of character go when she is bathing, does as she is
+bidden, and, at the "ten," the suicide, with a cry of despair, hurls
+herself madly into the water, and the rescuer flies to her succour.
+What she has to do is to grasp the struggling quarry by the elbows
+from behind and keep out of the reach of her hands. But the tussle that
+ensues in the water is a short one, for the rescuer is no match for the
+supposed involuntary resistance of the convulsed suicide, who eludes
+the coming grasp of her hand with eel-like dexterity, and has her round
+the waist and drags her under water in a couple of seconds.
+
+"There now!" says Sally triumphantly, as they stand spluttering and
+choking in the shallow water to recover breath. "Didn't I do that
+beautifully?"
+
+"Well, but _anybody_ could like that. When real people are drowning
+they don't do it like that." Miss Prince is rather rueful about it.
+But Sally is exultant.
+
+"Oh, don't they!" she says. "They're worse when it's real
+drowning--heaps worse!" Whereon both the other girls affirm in chorus
+that then nobody can be saved without the Humane Society's
+drags--unless, indeed, you wait till they are insensible.
+
+"Can't they?" says Sally, with supreme contempt. "We were both of us
+drowned that time fair. But now you go and drown yourself, and see if
+I don't fish you out. Fire away!"
+
+They fire away, and the determined suicide plays her part with spirit.
+But she is no match for the submarine tactics of her rescuer, who seems
+just as happy under water as on land, and rising under her at the end
+of a resolute deep plunge, makes a successful grasp at the head of her
+prey, who is ignominiously towed into safety, doing her best to drown
+herself to the last.
+
+This little incident is so amusing and exciting that the three young
+ladies, who walk home together westward, can talk of nothing but
+rescues all the way to Notting Hill. Then Miss Henriette Prince goes on
+alone, and as Laetitia and Sally turn off the main road towards the home
+of the former, the latter says: "Now tell me about the row."
+
+It wasn't exactly a row, it seemed; but it came to the same thing.
+Mamma had made up her mind to be detestable about Julius Bradshaw--that
+was the long and short of it. And Sally knew, said Laetitia, how
+detestable mamma could be when she tried. If it wasn't for papa, Julius
+Bradshaw would simply be said not-at-home to, and have to leave a card
+and go. But she was going to go her own way and not be dictated to,
+maternal authority or no. Perhaps the speaker felt that Sally was
+mentally taking exception to universal revolt, for a flavour of excuse
+or justification crept in.
+
+"Well!--I can't help it. I _am_ twenty-four, after all. I shouldn't
+say so if there was anything against him. But no man can be blamed for
+a cruel conjunction of circumstances, and mamma may say what she likes,
+but being in the office really makes all the difference. And look how
+he's supporting his mother and sister, who were left badly off. _I_
+call it noble."
+
+"But you know, Tishy, you did say the negro couldn't change his
+spots, and that I must admit there were such things as social
+distinctions--and you talked about sweeps and dustmen, you know you
+did. Come, Tishy, did you, or didn't you?"
+
+"If I said anything it was leopard, not negro. And as for sweeps and
+dustmen, they were merely parallel cases used as illustrations; and I
+don't think I deserve to have them raked up...." Miss Wilson is rather
+injured over this grievance, and Sally appeases her. "She shan't have
+them raked up, she shan't! But what was this row really about, that's
+the point? It was yesterday morning, wasn't it?"
+
+"How often am I to tell you, Sally dear, that there was really no
+_row_, property speaking. If you were to say there had been comments
+at breakfast yesterday, then recrimination overnight, and a stiffness
+at breakfast again this morning, you would be doing more than justice
+to it. You'll see now if mamma isn't cold and firm and disinherity and
+generally detestable about it."
+
+"But what _was_ it? That's what _I_ want to know."
+
+"My dear--it was--absolutely nothing! Why should it be stranger for
+Mr. Bradshaw to drive me home to save two hansoms than for you and
+Dr. Vereker and the Voyseys to go all in one growler?"
+
+"Because the Voyseys live just round the corner, quite close. It came
+to three shillings because it's outside the radius." The irrelevancy of
+this detail gives Laetitia an excuse for waiving the cab-question, on
+which her position is untenable. She dilutes it with extraneous matter,
+and it is lost sight of.
+
+"It doesn't matter whether it's cabs or what it is. Mamma's just the
+same about everything. Even walking up Holland Park Lane after the
+concert at Kensington Town Hall. I am sure if ever anything was
+reasonable, that was." She pauses for confirmation--is, in fact,
+wavering about the correctness of her own position, and weakly seeking
+reassurance. She is made happier by a nod of assent from Miss Sally.
+"Awfully reasonable!" is the verdict of the latter. Whatever there is
+lacking seriousness in the judge's face is too slight to call for
+notice--a mere twinkle to be ignored. Very little self-deception is
+necessary, and in this department success is invariable.
+
+"I knew you would say so, dear," Tishy continues. "And I'm sure you
+would about the other things too ... well, I was thinking about tea in
+Kensington Gardens on Sunday. We have both of us a perfect right to
+have tea independently, and the only question is about separate tables."
+
+"Suppose I come--to make it square."
+
+"Suppose you do, dear." And the proposal is a relief evidently.
+
+A very slight insight into the little drama that is going on at
+Ladbroke Grove Road is all that is wanted for the purposes of this
+story. The foregoing dialogue, ending at the point at which the two
+young women disappear into the door of No. 287, will be sufficient to
+give a fairly clear idea of the plot of the performance, and to point
+to its _denouement_. The exact details may unfold themselves as
+the story proceeds. The usual thing is a stand-up fight over the
+love-affair, both parties to which have made up their minds--becoming
+more and more obdurate as they encounter opposition from without--followed
+by reconciliations more or less real. Let us hope for the former in the
+present case, and that Miss Wilson and Mr. Bradshaw's lot may not be
+crossed by one of those developments of strange inexplicable fury which
+so often break out in families over the schemes of two young people to
+do precisely what their parents did before them; and most ungovernably,
+sometimes, on the part of members who have absolutely no suggestion
+to make of any alternative scheme for the happiness of either.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+HOW FENWICK KNEW ALL ABOUT THE MASS. AND HOW BARON KREUTZKAMMER
+ RECOGNISED MR. HARRISSON. LONDON AGAIN!
+
+
+"Why do they call it the _messe des paresseux_?" The question must have
+been asked just as Sally looked at her watch because she saw the clock
+had stopped. But the nave of the Cathedral of Rheims was very unlike
+that of St. Satisfax as the bride and bridegroom lingered in out of the
+sunshine, and the former took the unwarrantable liberty, for a heretic,
+of crossing herself from the Holy Water at the foot of the column near
+the door. But she made up for it by the amount of _sous_ she gave to
+the old blind woman, who must have been knitting there since the days
+of Napoleon at least, if she began in her teens.
+
+"You haven't done it right, dearest. I knew you wouldn't. Look here."
+And Fenwick crosses himself _secundum artem_, dipping his finger first
+to make it valid.
+
+"But how came you to know?" His wife does not say this; she only thinks
+it. And how came he to know about the _messe des paresseux_? She
+repeats her question aloud.
+
+"Because the lazy people don't come to Mass till ten," he replies. They
+are talking under their breath, as English folk do in foreign churches,
+heedless of the loud gabble and resonant results of too much snuff
+on the part of ecclesiastics off duty. Their own salvation has
+been cultivated under a list slipper, cocoanut matting, secretive
+pew-opener policy; and if they are new to it all, they are shocked to
+see the snuff taken over the heads and wooden _sabots_ of the devout
+country-folk, whose ancestors knelt on the same hard stone centuries
+ago, and prayed for great harvests that never came, and to avert lean
+years that very often did. The Anglican cannot understand the real
+aboriginal Papist. Sally's mother was puzzled when she saw an old,
+old kneeling figure, toothless and parchment-skinned, on whose rosary
+a pinch of snuff _ut supra_ descended, shake it off the bead in
+evidence, and get on to the next _Ave_, even as one who has business
+before her--so many pounds of oakum to pick, so many bushels of peas
+to shell. It was a reality to her; and there was the Blessed Virgin
+herself, a visible certainty, who would see to the recognition of it
+at headquarters.
+
+Fenwick passed up the aisle, dreamily happy in the smell of the
+incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making--she intensely happy
+too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her
+husband of twenty years ago--cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for
+all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that
+made the music--pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!--that he
+might recollect. How could he remember the _messe des paresseux_, and
+keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first
+discomfort that had crossed her married mind--put it away!
+
+It was easy to put it all away and forget it in the hush and gloom
+of the great church, filled with the strange intonation from
+Heaven-knows-where--some side-chapel unseen--of a Psalm it would have
+puzzled David to be told was his, and a scented vapour Solomon would
+have known at once; for neither myrrh nor frankincense have changed one
+whit since his day. It was easy enough so long as both sat listening to
+_Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax_. Carried _nem. con._ by all
+sorts and conditions of Creeds. But when the little bobs and tokens and
+skirt-adjustments of the fat priest and his handsome abettor (a young
+fellow some girl might have been the wife of, with advantage to both)
+came to a pause, and the congregation were to be taken into confidence,
+how came Gerry to know beforehand what the fat one was going to say,
+with that stupendous voice of his?
+
+"_Hoc est corpus meum, et hic est calix sanguinis mei._ We all kneel,
+I think." Thus the bridegroom under his breath. And his companion heard,
+almost with a shudder, the selfsame words from the priest, as the
+kneeling of the congregation subsided.
+
+"Oh, Gerry--darling fellow! How _can_ you know that, and not know...."
+
+"How I came by it? It's very funny, but I _can't_, and that's the
+truth. I don't feel as if I ever _could_ know, what's more. But it all
+seems a matter of course."
+
+"Perhaps you're a Catholic all the while, without knowing it?"
+
+"Perhaps I am. But I should like to know, because of going to the other
+place with you. I shouldn't care about purgatory without you, Rosey
+dearest. No--not even with a reversionary interest in heaven."
+
+And then the plot thickened at the altar, and the odour of myrrh and
+frankincense, and little bells rang to a climax, and the handsome young
+priest, let us hope, felt he had got value for the loss of that
+hypothetical girl.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+That little incident in the great church at Rheims was the first
+anxiety of Rosalind Fenwick's married life--the first resumption of the
+conditions she had been so often unnerved by during the period of their
+betrothal. She was destined to be crossed by many such. But she was, as
+we have said, a strong woman, and had made up her mind to take these
+anxieties as part of the day's work--a charge upon her happiness that
+had to be paid. It was a great consolation to her that she could speak
+to her husband about the tension caused by her misgivings without
+assigning any special reasons for anxiety that would not be his as much
+as hers. She had to show uneasiness in order to get the relief his
+sympathy gave her; but there were unknown possibilities in the Bush
+enough to warrant it without going outside what was known to both. No
+need at all that he should know of her separate unseen burden, for that!
+
+But some of the jolts on the road, as we might call them, were to be
+sore trials to Rosalind. One came in the fourth week of their honeymoon,
+and quite spoiled for her the last three days of her holiday. However,
+Fenwick himself laughed about it--that was one comfort.
+
+It was at Sonnenberg. You know the Great Hotel, or Pension, near the
+Seelisberg, that looks down on Lucerne Lake, straight over to where
+Tell shot the arrow? If you do not, it does not matter. Mr. and Mrs.
+Fenwick had never been there before, and have never been there since.
+And what happened might just as easily have happened anywhere else.
+But it was there, as a matter of fact; and if you know the place, you
+will be able to imagine the two of them leaning on the parapet of the
+terrace that overlooks the lake, watching the steamer from Lucerne
+creeping slowly to the landing-place at the head of a white comet it
+has churned the indescribable blue of the lake to, and discussing
+whether it is nearest to Oriental sapphire or to green jasper at its
+bluest.
+
+Rosalind had got used to continual wonderment as to when and where
+Fenwick had come to know so well this thing and that thing he spoke of
+so familiarly; so she passed by the strange positiveness of his speech
+about the shades of jasper, the scarcity of really blue examples, and
+his verdict that the bluest possible one would be just the colour of
+that water below them. She was not going to ask him how he came to be
+so mighty wise about chalcedony and chrysoprase and sardonyx, about
+which she herself either never knew or had forgotten. She took it all
+as a matter of course, and asked if the Baron's cigar was a good one.
+
+"Magnificent!" Fenwick replied, puffing at it. "How shall we return
+his civility?"
+
+"Give _him_ a cigar next time you get a chance."
+
+Fenwick laughs, in derision of his own cigars.
+
+"God bless me, my dearest love! Why, one of the Baron's is worth my
+whole box. We must discover something better than that." Both ponder
+over possible reciprocities in silence, but discover nothing, and seem
+to give up the quest by mutual consent. Then he says: "I wonder why
+he cosseted up to us last night in the garden so!" And she repeats:
+"I wonder why!"
+
+"I don't believe he even knows our name," she continues; and then he
+repeats: "_I_ don't believe he knows our name. I'm sure he doesn't."
+
+"And it was so dark, he couldn't have seen much of us. But his cigar's
+quite beautiful. Blow the smoke in my face, Gerry!" She shuts her eyes
+to receive it. How handsome Sally would think mamma was looking if she
+could see her now in the light of the sunset! Her husband thinks much
+to that effect, as he turns to blow the smoke on order into the face
+that is so close to his, as they lean arm-in-arm on the parapet the sun
+has left his warmth on, and means to take his eyes off in half an
+hour. They really look quite a young couple, and the frivolity of their
+conduct adds to the effect. Nobody would believe in her grown-up
+daughter, to see that young Mrs. Algernon Fenwick.
+
+"I am ferry root, Mrs. Harrisson. If I introot, you shall say I
+introot." It is the Baron, manifestly. His form--or rather his bulk,
+for he cannot be said to have a form; he is amorphous--is baronial in
+the highest degree. His stupendous chest seems to be a huge cavern for
+the secretion of gutturals, which are discharged as heavy artillery
+at a hint from some unseen percussion-cap within.
+
+Mrs. Fenwick starts, a little taken aback at the Baron's thunderclap;
+for he had approached unawares, and her closed eyes helped on the
+effect. When they opened, they looked round, as for a third person. But
+the Baron was alone.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Harrisson?" She asks the question with the most absolute
+unconsciousness that she was herself the person addressed. The Baron,
+still believing, presumably, that Fenwick is _Mr._ Harrisson, is not
+a person to be trusted with the position created. He develops an
+offensive waggery, shakes the forefinger that has detected an escapade,
+and makes of his lips the round _O_ of shocked propriety, at heart in
+sympathy with the transgressor. His little grey eyes glare through his
+gold-rimmed spectacles, and his huge chest shakes with a substratum of
+laughter, only just loud enough to put in the text.
+
+"O-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! No, do not be afraight. She is not here. We
+unterzdant. It is all unterzdoot. We shall be ferry tizgreet...." And
+then the Baron pats space with his fingers only, not moving his hand,
+as a general indication of secrecy to the universe.
+
+Probably the slight flush that mantles the face he speaks to is less
+due to any offence at his fat, good-humoured German raillery than to
+some vague apprehension of the real nature of the position about to
+develop. But Fenwick imputes it to the former. If Rosey was inclined to
+treat the thing as a harmless joke, he would follow suit; but she looks
+hurt, and her husband, sensitive about every word that is said to her,
+blazes out:
+
+"What on earth do you mean? What the devil do you mean? How dare you
+speak to my wife like that?" He makes a half-step towards the burly
+mass of flesh, still shaking with laughter. But his wife stops him.
+
+"Do be patient, Gerry darling! Don't flare up like that. I'll have a
+divorce. I'll tell Sally...." a threat which seems to have a softening
+effect. "Can't you see, dear, that there is some misunderstanding?"
+Fenwick looks from her to the Baron, puzzled. The latter drops his
+jocular rallying.
+
+"I saw last night you did not know me, Mr. Harrisson. That is
+straintch! Have you forgotten Diedrich Kreutzkammer?" He says his name
+with a sort of quiet confidence of immediate recognition. But Fenwick
+only looks blankly at him.
+
+"He does not know me!" cries the German, with an astonished voice.
+"'Frisco--the Klondyke--Chicago--the bridge at Brooklyn--why, it is not
+two years ago...." He pauses between the names of the places, enforcing
+each as a reminder with an active forefinger.
+
+Fenwick seems suddenly to breathe the fresh air of a solution of the
+problem. He breaks into a sunny smile, to his wife's great relief.
+
+"Indeed, Baron Kreutzkammer, _my_ name is not Harrisson. _My_ name is
+Fenwick, and this lady is my wife--Mrs. Fenwick. I have never been in
+any of the places you mention." For the moment he forgot his own state
+of oblivion: a thing he was getting more and more in the habit of
+doing. The Baron looked intently at him, and looked again. He slapped
+his forehead, not lightly at all, but as if good hard slaps would
+really correct his misapprehensions and put him right with the world.
+
+"I am all _wronck_" he said, borrowing extra force from an indurated
+_g_. "But it is ferry bustling--I am bustled!" By this he meant
+puzzled. Fenwick felt apologetic.
+
+"I don't know how to thank you for the cigar Mr. Harrisson ought to
+have had," said he. He felt really ashamed of having smoked it under
+false pretences.
+
+"You shall throw it away, and I giff you one for yourself. That is
+eacey! But I am bustled."
+
+He continued puzzled. Mrs. Fenwick felt that he was only keeping
+further comment and inquiry in check because it would have been
+a doubt thrown on her husband's word to make any. Her uneasiness
+would have been visible if her power of concealing it had not been
+fortified by her belief that his happiness as well as hers depended
+(for the present, at any rate) on his ignorance of his own past.
+Perhaps she was wrong; with that we have nothing to do; we are telling
+of things as they happened. Only we wish to record our conviction that
+Rosalind Fenwick was acting for her husband's sake as well as her
+own--not from a vulgar instinct of self-preservation.
+
+The Baron made conversation, and polished his little powerful
+spectacle-lenses. He blew his nose like a salute of one gun in the
+course of his polishing. When _we_ blow _our_ nose, we hush our
+pocket-handkerchief back into its home, and ignore it a little. The
+Baron didn't. He continued polishing on an unalloyed corner through
+the whole of a very perceptible amount of chat about the tricks memory
+plays us, and the probable depth of the blue water below. Rosalind's
+uneasiness continued. It grew worse, when the Baron, suddenly
+replacing his spectacles and fixing his eyes firmly on her husband,
+said sternly, "Yes, it is a bustle!" but was relieved when equally
+suddenly, he shouted in a stentorian voice, "We shall meed lader,"
+and took his leave.
+
+"He's a jolly fellow, the Baron, anyhow!" said Fenwick. "I wonder
+whether they heard him at Altdorf?"
+
+"Every word, I should think. But how I should like to see the Mr.
+Harrisson he took you for!"
+
+This was really part of a policy of nettle-grasping, which continued.
+She always felt happier after defying a difficulty than after
+flinching. After all, if Gerry's happiness and her own were not motive
+enough, consider Sally's. If she should really come to know her
+mother's story, Sally might die of it.
+
+Fenwick went on to the ending of the cigar, dreamily wondering,
+evidently "bustled" like the Baron. As he blew the last smoke away,
+and threw the smoking end down the slope, he repeated her words spoken
+a minute before, "_I_ should like to see the Mr. Harrisson he took
+me for."
+
+"It would be funny to see oneself as ithers see one. Some power might
+gie you the giftie, Gerry. If only we could meet that Mr. Harrisson!"
+
+"Do you remember how we saw our profiles in a glass, and you said,
+'I'm sure those are somebody else'? Illogical female!"
+
+"Why was I illogical? I knew they were going to turn out us in the
+end. But I was sure I shouldn't be convinced at once." And the talk
+wandered away into a sort of paradoxical metaphysics.
+
+But when, later in the evening, this lady was described by confidential
+chat at the far end of the salon as that handsome young Mrs. Algernon
+Fenwick who was only just married, and whose husband was playing chess
+in the smoking-room, and what a pity it was they were not going to
+stop over Monday, she thus described, accurately enough, was rather
+rejoicing that that handsome Mr. Fenwick, who looked like a Holbein
+portrait, was being kept quiet for half an hour, because she wanted to
+get a chance for a little chat with that dreadful noisy Prussian Von,
+who made all the glasses ring at table when he shouted so. Rosalind had
+her own share of feminine curiosity, don't you see? and she was not by
+any means satisfied about Mr. Harrisson. She did not acknowledge the
+nature of her suspicions to herself, but she would very much like to
+know, for all that! She got her opportunity.
+
+"I shouldn't the least mind myself if smoking _were_ allowed in the
+salon, Baron. You saw to-day that I really liked the smoke?"
+
+"Ja! when I make that chogue. It was a root chogue. But I am
+forgiffen?"
+
+"It was Gerry who had to be forgiven, breaking out like that. I hope
+he has promised not to do so any more?"
+
+"He has bromiss to be goot. I have bromiss to be goot. We shall be
+_sages enfants_, as the French say. But I will tell you, Madame
+Fenwick, about my vrent Harrisson your Cherry is so ligue...."
+
+"Let's go out on the terrace, then you can light a cigar and be
+comfortable.... Yes, I'll have my wrap ... no, that's wrong-side-out
+... that's right now.... Well, perhaps it will be a little cool for
+sitting down. We can walk about."
+
+"Now I can tell you about my vrent in America that your hussband is so
+ligue. He could speague French--ferry well indeed." Rosalind looked up.
+"It was when I heard your hussband speaguing French to that grosse
+Grafin Pobzodonoff that I think to myself that was Alchernon Harrisson
+that I knew in California."
+
+"Suppose we sit down. I don't think it's too cold.... Yes, this place
+will do nicely. It's sheltered from the wind." If she does look a
+little pale--and she feels she does--it will be quite invisible in this
+dark corner, for the night is dark under a canopy of blazing stars.
+"What were you saying about French?"
+
+"Alchernon Harrisson--that was his name--he could speague it well. He
+spogue id ligue a nadiff. Better than I speague English. I speague
+English so well because I have a knees at Ganderbury." This meant a
+niece at Canterbury. Baron Kreutzkammer speaks English so well that it
+is almost a shame to lay stress on his pronunciation of consonants.
+The spelling is difficult too, so we will give the substance of what
+he told Rosalind without his articulation. By this time she, for her
+part, was feeling thoroughly uneasy. It seemed to her--but it may
+be she exaggerated--that nothing stood between her husband and
+the establishment of his identity with this Harrisson except the
+difference of name. And how could she know that he had not changed his
+name? Had she not changed hers?
+
+The Baron's account of Harrisson was that he made his acquaintance
+about three years since at San Francisco, where he had come to choose
+gold-mining plant to work a property he had purchased at Klondyke.
+Rosalind found it a little difficult to understand the account of how
+the acquaintance began, from want of knowledge of mining machinery. But
+the gist of it was that the Baron, at that time a partner in a firm
+that constructed stamping-mills, was explaining the mechanism of one to
+Harrisson, who was standing close to a small vertical pugmill, or mixer
+of some sort, just at the moment the driving-engine had stopped and the
+fly-wheel had nearly slowed down. He went carelessly too near the still
+revolving machinery, and his coat-flap was caught and wound into the
+helix of the pugmill. "It would have crowned me badly," said the Baron.
+But he remained unground, for Harrisson, who was standing close to the
+moribund fly-wheel, suddenly flung himself on it, and with incredible
+strength actually cut short the rotation before the Baron could
+be entangled in a remorseless residuum of crushing power, which, for
+all it looked so gentle, would have made short work of a horse's
+thigh-bone. The Baron's coat was spoiled, though he was intact. But
+Harrisson's right arm had done more than a human arm's fair share of
+work, and had to rest and be nursed. They had become intimate friends,
+and the Baron had gone constantly to inquire after the swelled arm. It
+took time to become quite strong again, he said. It was a fine strong
+arm, and burned all over with gunpowder, "what you call daddooed in
+English."
+
+"Did it get quite well?"
+
+"Ferry nearly. There was a little blaze in the choint here"--the Baron
+touched his thumb--"where the bane remained--a roomadic bane. He
+burgessed a gopper ring for it. It did him no goot." Luckily Rosalind
+had discarded the magic ring long since, or it might have come into
+court awkwardly.
+
+If she still entertained any doubts about the identity of her husband
+and Harrisson, the Baron's next words removed them. They came in answer
+to an expression of wonder of hers that he should so readily accept her
+husband's word for his identity in the face of the evidence of his own
+senses. "I really think," she had said, "that if I were in your place
+I should think he was telling fibs." This was nettle-grasping.
+
+"Ach, ach! No--no--no!" shouted the Baron, so loud that she was afraid
+it would reach the chess-players in the smoking-room, "I arrife at it
+by logic, by reasson. Giff me your attention." He held up one finger
+firmly, as an act of hypnotism, to procure it. "Either I am ride or
+I am wronck. I cannot be neither."
+
+"You might be mistaken."
+
+The Baron's finger waved this remark aside impatiently. "I will fairy
+the syllogism," he shouted. "Either your husband _is_ Mr. Harrisson,
+or he is _not_. He cannot be neither." This was granted. "Ferry well,
+then. If he is Mr. Harrisson, Mr. Harrisson has doled fips. But I know
+Mr. Harrisson would not dell fips. Imbossible!"
+
+"And if he is not?" The Baron points out that in this case his
+statement is true by hypothesis, to say nothing of the intrinsic
+probability of truthfulness on the part of any one so like Mr.
+Harrisson. He is careful to dwell on the fact that this consideration
+of the matter is purely analysis of a metaphysical crux, indulged in
+for scientific illumination. He then goes on to apologize for having
+been so very positive. But no doubt one or two minor circumstances had
+so affected his imagination that he saw a very strong likeness where
+only a very slight one existed. "I shall look again. I shall be wicer
+next time." But what were the minor circumstances, Rosalind asked.
+
+"There was the French--the lankwitch--that was one. But there was
+another--his _noce_! I will tell you. When my frent Harrisson gribe
+holt of that wheel, his head go down etchwice." The Baron tried to hint
+at this with his own head, but his neck, which was like a prize-bull's,
+would not lend itself to the illustration. "That wheel was ferry
+smooth--with a sharp gorner. _His noce touch that corner._" The Baron
+said no more in words, but pantomimic action and a whistle showed
+plainly how the wheel-rim had glided on the bridge of Mr. Harrisson's
+nose. "It took off the gewdiggle, and made a sgar. Your hussband's
+noce has that ferry sgar. That affected my imatchination. It is easy
+to unterzdant."
+
+But the subject was frightening Rosalind. She would have liked to hear
+much more about Mr. Harrisson; might ever have ended by taking the fat
+Baron, whom she thoroughly liked, into her confidence. The difficulty,
+however, was about decision in immediate action, which would be
+irrevocable. Silence was safer--or, sleep on it at least. For now, she
+must change the conversation.
+
+"How sweet the singing sounds under the starlight!" But the Baron will
+not tolerate any such loose inaccuracy.
+
+"It would sount the same in the taydime. The fibrations are the same."
+But he more than makes up for his harsh prosaism by singing, in unison
+with the singers unseen:
+
+ "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
+ Dass ich so traurig bin...."
+
+No one could ever have imagined that such heavenly sounds could come
+from anything so fat and noisy. Mrs. Fenwick shuts her eyes to listen.
+
+When she opens them again, jerked back from a temporary dream-paradise
+by the Baron remarking with the voice of Stentor or Boanerges that it
+is a "ferry broody lied," her husband is standing there. He has been
+listening to the music. The Baron adds that his friend Mr. Harrisson
+was "ferry vond of that lied."
+
+But when the two of them have said a cordial good-night to the unwieldy
+nightingale, who goes away to bed, as he has to leave early in the
+morning, Fenwick is very silent, and once and again brushes his hair
+about, and shakes his head in his old way. His wife sees what it is.
+The music has gone as near touching the torpid memory as the wild
+autumn night and the cloud-race round the moon had done in the little
+front garden at home a year ago.
+
+"A recurrence, Gerry?" she asks.
+
+"Something of the sort, Rosey love," he says. "Something quite mad this
+time. There was a steam-engine in it, of all things in the world!" But
+it has been painful, evidently--a discomfort at least--as these things
+always are.
+
+Rosalind's apprehension of untimely revelations dictated a feeling
+of satisfaction that the Baron was going away next day; her regret
+at losing the choice of further investigation admitted one of
+dissatisfaction that he had gone. The net result was unsettlement and
+discomfort, which lasted through the remainder of Sonnenberg, and did
+not lift altogether until the normallest of normal life came back in
+a typical London four-wheeler, which dutifully obeyed the injunction
+to "go slowly," not only through the arch that injunction brooded over,
+but even to the end of the furlong outside the radius which commanded
+an extra sixpence and got more. But what did that matter when Sally was
+found watching at the gate for its advent, and received her stepfather
+with an undisguised hug as soon as she found it in her heart to
+relinquish her mother?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+MERE DAILY LIFE AT KRAKATOA. BUT SALLY IS QUITE FENWICK'S DAUGHTER
+ BY NOW. OF HER VIEWS ABOUT DR. VEREKER, AND OF TISHY'S AUNT FRANCES
+
+
+When you come back from a holiday to a sodden and monstrous London,
+it is best to be welcomed by something young--by a creature that is
+convinced that it has been enjoying itself, and that convinces you as
+well, although you can't for the life of you understand the details.
+Why should anything enjoy itself or anything else in this Cimmerian
+gloom, while away over there the great Alpine peaks are white against
+the blue, and otherwhere the music of a hundred seas mixes with their
+thunder on a thousand shores? Why come home?
+
+But when we do and find that nothing particular has happened, and that
+there's a card for us on the mantelpiece, how stuffy are our welcomers,
+and how well they tone into the surrounding grey when they are elderly
+and respectable? It is different when we find that, from their point of
+view, it is we that have been the losers by our absence from all the
+great and glorious fun the days have been made of while we were away
+on a mistaken and deluded continent, far from this delectable human
+ant-hill--this centre and climax of Life with a capital letter. But
+then, when this is so, they have to be young, as Sally was.
+
+The ex-honeymooners came back to jubilant records of that young lady's
+experience during the five weeks of separation. She listened with
+impatience to counter records of adventures abroad, much preferring to
+tell of her own at home. Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick acquiesced in the _role_
+of listeners, and left the rostrum to Sally after they had been revived
+with soup, and declined cutlets, because they really had had plenty to
+eat on the way. The rostrum happened to be a hassock on the hearthrug,
+before the little bit of fire that wasn't at all unwelcome, because
+September had set in quite cold already, and there was certain to be a
+warm Christmas if it went on like this, and it would be very unhealthy.
+
+"And oh, do you know"--thus Sally, after many other matters had been
+disposed of--"there has been such an awful row between Tishy and her
+mother about Julius Bradshaw?" Sally is serious and impressed; doesn't
+see the comic side, if there is one. Her mother felt that if there was
+to be a volley of indignation discharged at Mrs. Wilson for her share
+in the row, she herself, as belonging to the class mother, might feel
+called on to support her, and was reserved accordingly.
+
+"I suppose Laetitia wants to marry Mr. Bradshaw. Is that it?"
+
+"Of course that's it! He hasn't proposed, because he's promised not
+to; but he will any time Tishy gives a hint. Meanwhile Goody Wilson has
+refused to sanction his visits at the house, and Laetitia has said she
+will go into lodgings."
+
+"Sally darling, I do wish you wouldn't call all the married ladies of
+your acquaintance _Goody_. You'll do it some day to their faces."
+
+"It's only the middle-aged bouncers."
+
+"Well, dear chick, do try and not call them Goody. What did Goo--there!
+I was going to do it myself. What did Mrs. Wilson say to that?"
+
+"Said Tishy's allowance wouldn't cover lodgings, and she had nothing
+else to fall back on. So we go into the Park instead."
+
+Even Mrs. Fenwick's habituation to her daughter's incisive method is no
+proof against this. She breaks into an affectionate laugh, and kisses
+its provoker, who protests.
+
+"We-e-ell! There's nothing in _that_. We have tea in the shilling
+places under the trees in Kensington Gardens. _That's_ all right."
+
+"Of course that's all right--with a _chaperon_ like you! Who _could_
+say anything? But do tell me, Sally darling, does Mrs. Wilson dislike
+this young man on his own account, or is it only the shop?"
+
+"Only the shop, I do believe. And Tishy's twenty-four! What _is_ my
+stepfather sitting smiling at there in that contented way? Is that
+a Mossoo cigar? It smells very nice."
+
+"I was smiling at you, Sarah. No, it's not a Mossoo that I know of. A
+German Baron gave it me.... No, dearest! It really _was_ all right....
+No--I really can't exactly say how; but it _was_ all right for all
+that...." This was in answer to a comment of his wife.
+
+"Never mind the German Baron," Sally interrupts. "What business have
+you to smile at me, Jeremiah?" They had christened each other Jeremiah
+and Sarah for working purposes.
+
+"Because I chose--because you're such a funny little article." He comes
+a little nearer to her, and putting his arm round her neck, pinches her
+off-cheek. She gives him a very short kiss--hardly a real one--just an
+acknowledgment. He remains with her little white hand in his great
+hairy one, and she leans against him and accepts the position. But that
+cigar is on her mother's mind.
+
+"How many did he give you, Gerry? Now tell the truth."
+
+"He gave me a lot. I smuggled them. I can't tell you _why_ it seemed
+all right I should accept them. But it _did_."
+
+"I suppose you know best, dear. Men are men, and I'm a female. But he
+was such a perfect stranger." She, of course, knew quite well that he
+was not, but there was nettle-grasping in it on her part.
+
+"Yes, he was. But somehow he didn't seem so. Perhaps it was because I
+flew into such a rage with him about what he called his 'crade chogue.'
+But it wasn't _only_ that. Something about the chap himself--I can't
+tell what." And Fenwick becomes _distrait_, with a sort of restless
+searching on his face. He sits on, silent, patting Sally's little white
+hand in his, and letting the prized cigar take care of itself, and
+remains silent until, after a few more interesting details about the
+"great row" at Ladbroke Grove Road, all three agree that sleep is
+overdue, and depart to receive payment.
+
+Rosalind knows the meaning of it all perfectly. Some tiny trace of
+memory of the fat Kreutzkammer lingered in her husband's crippled
+mind--something as confused as the revolving engine's connexion with
+the German volkslied. But enough to prevent his feeling the ten francs'
+worth of cigars an oppressive benevolence. It was very strange to
+her that it should so happen, but, having happened, it did not seem
+unnatural. What was stranger still was that Gerry should be there,
+loving Sally like a father--just as her own stepfather Paul Nightingale
+had come to love _her_--caressing her, and never dreaming for a moment
+how that funny little article came about. Yes, come what might, she
+would do her best to protect these two from that knowledge, however
+many lies she had to tell. She was far too good and honourable a
+woman to care a particle about truthfulness as a means to an easy
+conscience; she did not mind the least how much hers suffered if it
+was necessary to the happiness of others that it should do so. And
+in her judgment--though we admit she may have been wrong--a revelation
+of the past would have taken all the warmth and light out of the happy
+and contented little world of Krakatoa Villa. So long as she had the
+cloud to herself, and saw the others out in the sunshine, she felt
+safe, and that all was well.
+
+She would have liked companionship inside the cloud, for all that. It
+was a cruel disappointment to find, when she came to reflect on it,
+that she could not carry out a first intention of taking Colonel Lund
+into her confidence about the Baron, and the undoubted insight he had
+given into some portion of Fenwick's previous life. Obviously it would
+have involved telling her husband's whole story. Her belief that he was
+Harrisson involved her knowledge that he was not Fenwick. The Major
+would have said at once: "Why not tell him all this Baron told you, and
+see if it wouldn't bring all his life back to him?" And then she would
+have to tell the Major who he really was, to show him the need of
+keeping silence about the story. No, no! Danger lay that way. Too much
+finessing would be wanted; too many reserves.
+
+So she bore her secret knowledge alone, for their sakes feeling all
+the while like the scapegoat in the wilderness. But it was a happy
+wilderness for her, as time proved. Her husband's temper and
+disposition were well described by Sally, when she told Dr. Vereker in
+confidence one day that when he boiled he blew the lid off, but that
+he was a practical lamb, and was wax in her mother's hands. A good fizz
+did good, whatever people said. And the doctor agreed cordially. For
+he had a mother whose temper was notoriously sweetness itself, but was
+manipulated by its owner with a dexterity that secured all the effects
+of discomfort to its beneficiaries, without compromising her own claims
+to canonization.
+
+Fenwick's temper--this expression always means want of temper, or
+absence of temper--was of the opposite sort. It occasioned no
+inconvenience to any one, and every one detected and classed it after
+knowing him for twenty-four hours. The married couple had not existed
+for three months in that form before this trivial individuality was
+defined by Ann and Cook as "only master." Sally became so callous after
+a slight passing alarm at one or two explosions that she would, for
+instance, address her stepfather, after hearing his volleys at
+some offender in the distance, with, "Who did I hear you calling a
+confounded idiot, Jeremiah?" To which he would reply, softening into
+a genial smile: "Lost my temper, I did, Sarah dear. Lost my temper with
+the Wash. The Wash sticks in pins and the heads are too small to get
+hold of"; or, "People shouldn't lick their envelopes up to the hilt,
+and spoil one's ripping-corner, unless they want a fellow to swear";
+or something similar belonging to the familiar trials of daily life.
+
+But really safety-valve tempers are so common that Fenwick's would
+scarcely have called for notice if it had not been that, on one
+occasion, a remark of Sally's about a rather more vigorous _emeute_
+than usual led her mother, accidentally thrown off her guard, to reply:
+"Yes! But you have no idea how much better he is----" and then to stop
+suddenly, seeing the mistake she was making. She had no time to see
+a way out of the difficulty before Sally, puzzled, looked at her with:
+"Better than when? I've known him longer than you have, mother." For
+Sally always boasted of her earlier acquaintance.
+
+"No _when_ at all, kitten! How much better he is when we are alone!
+He never flares up then--that's what I meant." But she knew quite well
+that her sentence, if finished, would have stood, "how much better he
+is than he used to be!" She was too candid a witness in the court of
+her own conscience to make any pretence that this wasn't a lie. Of
+course it was; but if she never had to tell a worse one than that for
+Sally's sake, she would be fortunate indeed.
+
+She was much more happy in the court of her conscience than she was in
+that of St. Satisfax--if we may ascribe a judicial status to him, to
+help us through with our analysis of her frame of mind. His was a court
+which, if not identical at all points with the analogous exponents of
+things Divine in her youth, was fraught with the same jurisdiction;
+was vocal with resonances that proclaimed the same consequences to the
+unredeemed that the mumblings of a pastor of her early days, remembered
+with little gratitude, had been inarticulate with. Her babyhood had
+received the idea that liars would be sent unequivocally to hell, and
+her maturity could not get rid of it. Outside the precinct of the
+saint, the brief working morality that considers other folk first was
+enough for her; within it, the theologism of an offended deity still
+held a traditional sway. Outside, her whole soul recoiled from the idea
+of her child knowing a story that would eat into her heart like a
+cancer; within, a reserve-corner of that soul, inoculated when it was
+new and susceptible, shuddered at her unselfish adhesion to the only
+means by which that child could be kept in ignorance.
+
+However, she was clear about one thing. She would apologize in prayer;
+but she would go to hell rather than have Sally made miserable. Thus it
+came about that Mrs. Fenwick continued a very devout church-goer, and,
+as her husband never left her side when he had a choice, he, too,
+became a frequent guest of St. Satisfax, whom he seemed to regard as
+a harmless though fantastic person who lived in some century or other,
+only you always forgot which.
+
+His familiarity with the usages of the reformed St. Satisfax, and his
+power of discriminating the lapses of that saint towards the vices
+of his early unregenerate days--he being all the while perfectly
+unconscious how he came to know anything of either--continued to
+perplex his wife, and was a source of lasting bewilderment to Sally.
+A particular incident growing out of this was always associated in
+Rosalind's mind with an epithet he then applied to Sally for the first
+time, but which afterwards grew to be habitual with him.
+
+"Of course, it's the Communion-table," he said in connexion with some
+discussion of church furniture. "We have no altars in our church
+nowadays. You're a Papist, Sarah!"
+
+"I thought Communion-tables were an Evangelical start," said Sally
+irreverently. "A Low Church turn-out. Our Mr. Prince is a Tractarian,
+and a Ritualist, and a Puseyite, and an Anglican. That's his game! The
+Bishop of London won't let him perform High Mass, and _I_ think it a
+shame! Don't you?... But I say, Jeremiah!" And Jeremiah refrained from
+expressing whatever indignation he felt with the Bishop of London, to
+find what Sally said. It was to the effect that it was incredible that
+he should know absolutely nothing about the original source of his
+information.
+
+"I can only tell you, Sarah dear," he said, with the ring of sadness in
+his voice that always came on this topic, "that I _do_ remember nothing
+of the people who taught me, or the place I learned in. Yet I know
+about Tract No. 90, and Pusey and Newman, for all that. How I remember
+things that were information, and forget things that were things, is
+more than I can tell you. But can't you think of bits of history you
+know quite well, without ever recalling where you got them from?"
+
+"Of course I can. At least, I could if I knew some history. Only I
+don't. Oh yes, I do. Perkin Warbeck and Anne of Cleves. I've forgotten
+about them now, only I know I knew them both. I've answered about them
+in examinations. They're history all right enough. As to who taught me
+about them, couldn't say!"
+
+"Very well, Sarah. Now put a good deal of side into your stroke, and
+you'll arrive at me."
+
+But the revival of the old question had dug up discomfort his mind had
+done its best to inter; and he went silent and sat with a half-made
+cigarette in his fingers thinking gravely. Rosalind, at a writing-table
+behind him, moved her lips at Sally to convey an injunction. Sally,
+quickly apprehensive, understood it as "Let him alone! Don't rake up
+the electrocution!" But Sally's native directness betrayed her, and
+before she had time to think, she had said, "All right; I won't." The
+consequence of which was that Fenwick--being, as Sally afterwards
+phrased it, "too sharp by half"--looked up suddenly from his reverie,
+and said, as he finished rolling his cigarette, "What won't our
+daughter?"
+
+The pleasure that struck through his wife's heart was audible in her
+voice as she caught it up. "Our daughter won't be a silly inquisitive
+little puss-cat, darling. It only worries you, and does no good."
+And he replied to her, as she came behind him and stood with an
+appreciative side-face against his, with a semi-apology for the phrase
+"daughter," and allowed the rest of what they were speaking of to
+lapse.
+
+"I called her it for the pleasure of saying it," said he. "It sounded
+so nice!" And then he knew that her kiss was approval, but of course
+had no conception of its thoroughness. For her part, she hardly dared
+to think of the strangeness of the position; she could only rejoice
+at its outcome.
+
+After that it became so natural to him to speak of Sally as "our
+daughter" that often enough new acquaintances misconceived her relation
+to him, and had a shrewd insight that Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick must have
+been married very young. Once some visitors--a lady with one married
+daughter and two single ones--were so powerfully impressed with Sally's
+resemblance to her supposed parent that three-fourths of them went
+unconvinced away, in spite of the efforts of the whole household to
+remove the error. The odd fourth was supposed to have carried away
+corrective information. "I got the flat one, with the elbows, in
+a quiet corner," said Sally, "and told her Jeremiah was only step.
+Because they all shouted at once, so it was impossible to make them
+hear in a lump."
+
+Mistakes of this sort, occurring frequently, reacted on Mr. and Mrs.
+Fenwick, who found in them a constant support and justification for
+the theory that Sally was really the daughter of both, while admitting
+intellectual rejection of it to be plausible to commonplace minds. They
+themselves got on a higher level, where _ex-post-facto_ parentages
+were possible. Causes might have miscarried, but results having turned
+out all right, it would never do to be too critical about antecedents.
+Anyhow, Sally was _going to be_ our daughter, whether she _was_ or not.
+
+Rosalind always found a curious consolation in the reflection that,
+however bewildering the position might be, she had it all to herself.
+This was entirely apart from her desire to keep Fenwick in ignorance
+of his past; that was merely a necessity for his own sake and Sally's,
+while this related to the painfulness of standing face to face with
+an incredible conjunction of surroundings. She, if alone, could take
+refuge in wonder-struck silence. If her knowledge were shared with
+another, how could examination and analysis be avoided? And these would
+involve the resurrection of what she could keep underground as long
+as she was by herself; backed by a thought, if needed, of the merry
+eyebrows and pearly teeth, and sweet, soft youth, of its unconscious
+result. But to be obliged to review and speculate over what she desired
+to forget, and was helped to forget by gratitude for its consequences,
+would have been a needless addition to the burden she had already
+to bear.
+
+The only person she could get any consolation from talking with was
+the Major, who already knew, or nearly knew, the particulars of the
+nightmare of twenty years ago. But, then--we feel that we are repeating
+this _ad nauseam_--he was quite in the dark about Fenwick's identity,
+and was to be kept there. Rosalind had decided it so, and she may have
+been right.
+
+Would she have done better by forcing on her husband the knowledge of
+his own identity, and risking the shock to her daughter of hearing the
+story of her outsider father's sin against her mother? Her decision
+against this course was always emphasized by--may even have been
+unconsciously due to--her prevision of the difficulty of the
+communication to Sally. How should she set about it? She pictured
+various forms of the attempt to herself, and found none she did not
+shudder at.
+
+The knowledge that such things could be would spoil the whole world for
+the girl. She had to confess to herself that the customary paltering
+with the meaning of words that enables modern novels to be written
+about the damnedest things in the universe would either leave her mind
+uninformed, or call for a commentary--a rubric in the reddest of red
+letters. Even a resort to the brutal force of Oriental speech done into
+Jacobean English would be of little avail. For hypocrisy is at work all
+through juvenile reception of Holy Writ, and brings out as a result
+the idea that that writ is holy because it uses coarse language about
+things that hardly call for it. It Bowdlerises Potiphar's wife, and
+favours the impression that in Sodom and Gomorrah the inhabitants were
+dissipated and sat up late. This sort of thing wouldn't work with
+Sally. If the story were to be told at all, her thunderbolt directness
+would have it all out, down to the ground. Her mother went through the
+_pros_ and _cons_ again and again, and always came to the same
+conclusion--silence.
+
+But for all that, Rosalind had a background belief that a time would
+come when a complete revelation would be possible. Her mind stipulated
+for a wider experience for Sally before then. It would be so infinitely
+easier to tell her tale to one who had herself arrived at the goal of
+motherhood, utterly unlike as (so she took for granted) was to be the
+way of her arrival, sunlit and soft to tread, from the black precipice
+and thorny wastes that had brought her to her own.
+
+Any possible marriage of Sally's, however, was a vague abstraction of
+an indistinct future. Perhaps we should say _had been_, and admit that
+since her own marriage Mrs. Fenwick had begun to be more distinctly
+aware that her little daughter was now within a negligible period of
+the age when her own tree of happiness in life had been so curtly
+broken off short, and no new leafage suffered to sprout upon the broken
+stem. This identity of age could not but cause comparison of lots.
+"Suppose it had been Sally!" was the thought that would sometimes
+spring on her mother's mind; and then the girl would wonder what mamma
+was thinking of that she should make her arm that was round her tighten
+as though she feared to lose her, or bring her an irrelevant,
+unanticipated kiss.
+
+This landmark-period bristled with suggested questions of what was to
+follow it. Sally would marry--that seemed inevitable; and her mother,
+now that she was herself married again, did not shrink from the idea
+as she had done, in spite of her protests against her own selfishness.
+
+Miss Sally's attitude toward the tender passion did not at present
+give any grounds for supposing that she was secretly its victim, or
+ever would be. Intense amusement at the perturbation she occasioned
+to sensitive young gentlemen seemed to be the nearest approach to
+reciprocating their sentiments that she held out any hopes of. She
+admitted as a pure abstraction that it was possible to be in love,
+but regarded applicants as obstacles that stood in their own way.
+
+"I'm sure his adoration does him great credit," she said to Laetitia
+one day about a new devotee--for there was no lack of them. "But it's
+his eyes, and his nose, and his mouth, and his chin, and his ears, and
+his hair, and his hands and his feet, and his altogether that----"
+
+"That what?" asked her friend.
+
+"That you can't expect a girl to then, if you insist upon it."
+
+"Some girl will, you'll see, one of these days."
+
+"What!--even that man with teeth!" This was some chance acquaintance,
+useful for illustration, but not in the story. Laetitia knew enough of
+him to give a testimonial.
+
+"He's a very good fellow, whatever you may say!" said she.
+
+"My dear Tishy! Goodness is the distinguishing feature of the opposite
+sex. I speak as a person of my own. Men's moral qualities are always
+high. If it wasn't for their appearance, and their manners, and their
+defective intelligences, they would make the most charming husbands."
+
+"How very young you are!" Miss Wilson said, superior experience oozing
+out at every pore. Sally might have passed this by, but when it came
+to patting you on the cheek, she drew a line.
+
+"Tishy dear, do you mean to go on like that, when I'm a hundred and you
+are a hundred and five?"
+
+"Yes, dear. At least, I can't say. Anything may have happened by then."
+
+"What sort of thing? Come, Tishy, don't be enigmatical. For instance?"
+
+"You'll change your mind and be wiser--you'll see." Which might have
+been consecutive in another conversation. But it was insufferably
+patronizing in Laetitia to evade the centenarian forecast that should
+have come in naturally, and retreat into a vague abstraction, managing
+to make it appear (Sally couldn't say how or why) that her own general
+remarks about man, which meant nothing, were a formal proclamation
+of celibacy on her part. It is odd how little the mere wording of
+a conversation may convey, especially girl's conversation. What _is_
+there in the above to warrant what came next from Sally?
+
+"If you mean Dr. Vereker, that's ridiculous."
+
+"I never mentioned his name, dear."
+
+"Of course you didn't; you couldn't have, and wouldn't have. But
+anybody could tell what you meant, just the same, by leaving your mouth
+open when you'd done speaking." We confess freely that we should not
+have known, but what are we? Why _should_ Laetitia's having left her
+lips slightly ajar, instead of closing them, have "meant Dr. Vereker"?
+
+But the fact is--to quote an expression of Sally's own--brain-waves
+were the rule and not the exception with her. And hypnotic suggestion
+raged as between her and Miss Laetitia Wilson, interrupting practice,
+and involving the performers in wide-ranging, irrelevant discussion. It
+was on a musical occasion at Ladbroke Grove Road that this conversation
+took place.
+
+Laetitia wasn't going to deny Dr. Vereker, evidently, or else there
+really was something very engrossing about her G string. Sally went on,
+while she dog's-eared her music, which was new, to get good turning-over
+advantages when it came to playing.
+
+"My medical adviser's not bad, taken as an aunt. I don't quite know
+what I should do without poor Prosy. But as for anything, of course
+that's absurd. Why, half the fun is that there _isn't_ anything!"
+
+Laetitia knew as well as possible that her young friend, once started,
+would develop the subject on her own lines without further help from
+her. She furnished her face with a faint expression of amused waiting,
+not strong enough to be indictable, but operative, and said never
+a word.
+
+"Foolery would spoil it all," pursued Sally; "in fact, I put my
+foot down at the first go-off. I pointed out that I stipulated to
+be considered a chap. Prosy showed tact--I must say that for
+Prosy--distinctly tact. You see, if I had had to say a single word
+to him on the subject, it would have been all up." Then possibly,
+in response to a threat of an inflexion in her friend's waiting
+countenance, "I should say, when I make use of the expression 'pointed
+out,' perhaps I ought to say 'conveyed to him.'" Sally gets the viola
+in place for a start, and asks is her friend ready? Waiting, it seems;
+so she merely adds, "Yes, I should say conveyed it to him." And off
+they go with the new piece of music in B flat, and are soon involved in
+terrifying complications which have to be done all over again. At the
+end, they are ungrateful to B flat, and say they don't care much for
+it; it will be better when they can play it, however. Then Laetitia
+schemes to wind Sally up a little.
+
+"Doesn't the Goody goozle at you about him, though? You said she did."
+
+"The Goody--oh yes! (By-the-bye, mother says I mustn't call your ma
+Goody Wilson, or I shall do it to her face, and there'll be a pretty
+how-do-you-do.) Prosy's parent broods over one, and gloats as if one
+was crumpets; but Prosy himself is very good about her--aware of her
+shortcomings."
+
+"I don't care what you call _my_ mother. Call her any name you like.
+But what does Dr. Vereker say?"
+
+"About his'n? Says she's a dear good mother, and I mustn't mind her.
+I say, Tishy!"
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"What _is_ the present position of the row? You said your mother. You
+know you did--coming from the bath--after Henriette went away."
+
+"I did say my mother, dear. But I wish it were otherwise. I've told
+Mr. Bradshaw so."
+
+"You'd be much nicer if you said Julius. Told him what?"
+
+"Told him a girl can't run counter to the wishes of her family in
+practice. Of course, M--well, then, Julius, if you will have it--is
+ready to wait. But it's really ridiculous to talk in this way, when,
+after all, nothing's been said."
+
+"_Has_ nothing?"
+
+"Not _to_ anybody. Only him and me."
+
+"At Riverfordhook?"
+
+"Why, yes, what I told you. We needn't go over it again."
+
+"In the avenue. And moonrise and things. What o'clock was it, please,
+ma'am?"
+
+"About ten-fifteen, dear. We were in by eleven." This was a faint
+attempt to help dignity by a parade of accuracy in figures, and an
+affectation of effrontery. "But really we needn't go over it again. You
+know what a nice letter he wrote Aunt Frances?" And instead of waiting
+for an answer, Tishy, perhaps to avoid catechism about the moonrise and
+things, ploughs straight on into a recitation of her lover's letter to
+her aunt: "Dear Lady Sales--Of course it will (quite literally) give me
+the _greatest possible_ pleasure to come. I will bring the Strad"; and
+then afterwards he said: "I hope your niece will give a full account
+of me, and not draw any veils over my social position. However, this
+being written at my desk here on the shop-paper will prevent any
+misunderstanding."
+
+"Your Aunt Frances has been hatching you--you two!" says Sally,
+ignoring the letter.
+
+"She is a dear good woman, if ever there was one. I wish mamma was my
+aunt-by-marriage, and she her!" And then Laetitia went on to tell many
+things about the present position of the "row" between herself and her
+mother, concerning which it can only be said that nothing transpired
+that justified its existence. Seeing that no recognition was asked for
+of any formal engagement either by the "young haberdasher" himself--for
+that was the epithet applied to him (behind his back, of course) by
+the older lady--or by the object of his ambitious aspirations, it might
+have been more politic, as well as more graceful, on her part, to leave
+the affair to die down, as love-affairs unopposed are so very apt to
+do. Instead of which she needs must begin endeavouring to frustrate
+what at the time of her first interference was the merest flirtation
+between a Romeo who was tied to a desk all day, and a Juliet who was
+constantly coming into contact with other potential Romeos--plenty of
+them. Our own private opinion is that if the Montagus and Capulets had
+tried to bury the hatchet at a public betrothal of the two young
+people, the latter would have quarrelled on the spot. Setting their
+family circles by the ears again would almost have been as much fun as
+a secret wedding by a friar. You doubt it? Well, we may be wrong. But
+we are quite certain that the events which followed shortly after the
+chat between the two girls recorded above either would never have come
+to pass, or would have taken an entirely different form, if it had not
+been for the uncompromising character of Mrs. Sales Wilson's attitude
+towards her daughter's Romeo.
+
+We will give this collateral incident in our history a chapter to
+itself, for your convenience more than our own. You can skip it, you
+see, if you want to get back to Krakatoa Villa.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+OF JULIUS BRADSHAW'S INNER SOUL. AND OF THE HABERDASHER'S BATTLE AT
+ LADBROKE GROVE ROAD. ON CARPET STRETCHING, AND VACCINATION FROM
+ THE CALF. AN AFTER-DINNER INTERVIEW, AND GOOD RESOLUTIONS. EVASIVE
+ TRAPPISTS
+
+
+You can remember, if you are male and middle-aged, or worse, some
+little incident in your own early life more or less like that
+effervescence of unreal passion which made us first acquainted with
+Mr. Julius Bradshaw and his violin. Do you shake your head, and deny
+it? Are you prepared to look us in the face, and swear you never, when
+a young man, had a sleepless night because of some girl whom you had
+scarcely spoken to, and who would not have known who you were if you
+had been able to master your trepidation and claim acquaintance; and
+who, in the sequel, changed her identity, and became what the greatest
+word-coiner of our time called a "speech-friend" of yours, without
+a scrap of romance or tenderness in the friendship?
+
+Sally's sudden change of identity from the bewitching little gardener
+who had fascinated this susceptible youth, to a merely uncommonly nice
+girl, was no doubt assisted by his introduction just at that moment
+to the present Mrs. Julius Bradshaw. For it would be the merest
+affectation to conceal the ultimate outcome of their acquaintance.
+
+When Julius came to Krakatoa Villa, he came already half disillusioned
+about Sally. What sort of an _accolade_ he expected on arriving to
+keep his passion on its legs, Heaven only knows! He certainly had
+been chilled by her easy-going invitation to her mother's. A definite
+declaration of callous indifference would not have been half so
+effective. Sally had the most extraordinary power of pointing out that
+she stipulated to be considered as a chap; or conveying it, which came
+to the same thing. On the other hand, Laetitia, who had been freely
+spoken of by Sally as "making a great ass of herself about social
+tommy-rot and people's positions," and who was aware of the justice of
+the accusation, had been completely jerked out of the region of Grundy
+by Julius's splendid rendering of Tartini, and had felt disconcerted
+and ashamed; for Tishy was a thorough musician at heart. The
+consequence was an _amende honorable_ to the young man, on whom--he
+having no idea whatever of its provoking cause--it produced the effect
+that might have been anticipated. Any young lady who wishes to enslave
+a young man will really do better work by showing an interest in
+himself than by any amount of fascination and allurement, on the lines
+of Greuze. We are by no means sure that it is safe to reveal this
+secret, so do not let it go any farther. Young women are formidable
+enough, as it is, without getting tips from the camp of the enemy.
+
+Anyhow, Sally became a totally different identity to Mr. Julius
+Bradshaw. He, for his part, underwent a complete transformation in
+hers--so much so that the vulgar child was on one occasion quite
+taken aback at a sudden recollection of his _debut_, and said to
+her stepfather: "Only think, Jeremiah! Tishy's Julius is really that
+young idiot that came philandering after me Sundays, and I had quite
+forgotten it!"
+
+The young idiot had settled down to a reasonable personality; if not
+to a manifestation of his actual self, at any rate as near as he was
+likely to go to it for some time to come; for none of us ever succeeds
+in really showing himself to his fellow-creatures outright. That's
+impossible.
+
+Sally had never said very much to her friend of this pre-introduction
+phase of Julius--had, in fact, thought little enough about it. Perhaps
+her taking care to say nothing at all of it in his later phase was her
+most definite acknowledgment of its existence at any time. It was only
+a laughable incident. She saw at once, when she took note of that sofa
+_seance_, which way the cat was going to jump; and we are bound to say
+it was a cat that soon made up its mind, and jumped with decision.
+
+Mrs. Sales Wilson's endeavour to intercept that cat had been prompt
+and injudicious. She destroyed whatever chance there was of a sudden
+_volte-face_ on its part--and oh, the glorious uncertainty of this
+class of cat!--first by taking no notice of it aggressively, next
+by catching hold of its tail, too late. In the art of ignoring
+bystanders, she was no match for the cat. And detention seemed only
+to communicate impetus.
+
+Julius Bradshaw's first receptions at the Ladbroke Grove House had
+been based mainly on his Stradivarius. The Dragon may be said to have
+admitted the instrument, but only to have tolerated its owner, as one
+might tolerate an organman who owned a distinguished monkey. Still, the
+position was an ambiguous one. The Dragon felt she had made a mistake
+in not shutting the door against this lion at first. She had "let
+him in, to see if she could turn him out again," and the crisis of
+the campaign had come over the question whether Mr. Bradshaw
+might, or should, or could be received into the inner bosom of the
+household--that is to say, the dinner-bosom. The Dragon said no--she
+drew the line at that. Tea, yes--dinner, no!
+
+After many small engagements over the question in the abstract, the
+plot thickened with reference to the arrangements of a particular
+Thursday evening. The Dragon felt that a decisive battle must be
+fought; the more so that her son Egerton, whom she had relied on
+to back her against a haberdasher, though he might have been useless
+against a jockey or a professional cricketer, had gone over to the
+enemy, and announced (for the Professor had failed to communicate
+the virus of scholarship to this young man) that he was unanimous
+that Mr. Bradshaw should be forthwith invited to dinner.
+
+His mother resorted to the head of the household as to a Court of
+Appeal, but not, as we think, in a manner likely to be effective. Her
+natural desire to avenge herself on that magazine of learning for
+marrying her produced an unconciliatory tone, even in her preamble.
+
+"I suppose," she said, abruptly entering his library in the vital
+centre of a delectable refutation of an ignoramus--"I suppose it's no
+use looking to you for sympathy in a matter of this sort, but----"
+
+"I'm busy," said the Professor; "wouldn't some other time do as well?"
+
+"I knew what I had to expect!" said the lady, at once allowing her
+desire to embitter her relations with her husband to get the better
+of her interest in the measure she desired to pass through Parliament.
+She left the room, closing the door after her with venomous quietness.
+
+The refutation would have to stand over; it was spoiled now, and the
+delicious sarcasm that was on his pen's tip was lost irrevocably. He
+blotted a sentence in the middle, put his pen in a wet sponge, and
+opened his door. He jerked it savagely open to express his attitude
+of mind towards interruption. His "_What_ is it?" as he did so was in
+keeping with the door-jerk.
+
+"I can speak of nothing to you if you are so _tetchy_"--a word said
+spitefully, with a jerk explanatory of its meaning. "Another time will
+do better, now. I prefer to wait."
+
+When these two played at the domestic game of exasperate-my-neighbour,
+the temper lost by the one was picked up by the other, and added to
+his or her pack. It was so often her pack that there must have been an
+unfair allotment of knaves in it when dealt--you know what that means
+in beggar-my-neighbour? On this occasion Mrs. Wilson won heavily.
+It was not every day that she had a chance of showing her great
+forbearance and self-restraint, on the stairs to an audience of a man
+in leather kneecaps who was laying a new drugget in the passage, and
+a model of discretion with a dustpan, whose self-subordination was
+beyond praise; her daughter Athene in the passage below inditing her
+son Egerton for a misappropriation of three-and-fivepence; and a faint
+suspicion of Laetitia's bedroom door on the jar, for her to listen
+through, above.
+
+It wasn't fair on the Professor, though; for even before he exploded,
+his lady-wife had had ample opportunity of reconnoitring the
+battle-field, and, as it were, negotiating with auxiliaries, by a show
+of gentle sweetness which had the force of announcement that she was
+being misunderstood elsewhere. But she would bear it, conscious of
+rectitude. Now, the Professor didn't know there was any one within
+hearing; so he snapped, and she bit him _sotto voce_, but raised a meek
+voice to follow:
+
+"Another time will be better. I prefer to wait." This was all the
+public heard of her speech. But she went into the library.
+
+"What do you want to speak to me about?" Thus the Professor, remaining
+standing to enjoin the temporary character of the interview; to
+countercheck which the lady sank in an armchair with her back to the
+light. Both she and Laetitia conveyed majesty in swoops--filled up
+_fauteuils_--could motion humbler people to take a seat beside them.
+"Tishy's Goody runs into skirts--so does _she_ if you come to that!"
+was Sally's marginal note on this point. The countercheck was effectual,
+and from her position of vantage the lady fired her first shot.
+
+"You know perfectly well what I want to speak about." The awkward part
+of this was that the Professor did know.
+
+"Suppose I do; go on!" This only improved his position very slightly,
+but it compelled the bill to be read a first time.
+
+"Do you wish your daughter to marry a haberdasher?"
+
+"I do not. If I did, I should take her round to some of the shops."
+
+But his wife is in no humour to be jested with. "If you cannot be
+serious, Mr. Wilson, about a serious matter, which concerns the
+lifelong well-being of your eldest daughter, I am only wasting my time
+in talking to you." She threatens an adjournment with a slight move.
+Her husband selects another attitude, and comes to business.
+
+"You may just as well say what you have come to say, Roberta. It's
+about Laetitia and this young musician fellow, I suppose. Why can't
+you leave them alone?" Now, you see, here was a little triumph for
+Roberta--she had actually succeeded in getting the subject into the
+realm of discussion without committing herself to any definite
+statement, or, in fact, really saying what it was. She could prosecute
+it now indirectly, on the lines of congenial contradiction of her
+husband.
+
+"I fully expected to be accused of interfering with what does not
+concern me. I am not surprised. My daughter's welfare is, it appears,
+to be of as little interest to me as it is to her father. Very well."
+
+"What do you wish me to do? Will you oblige me by telling me what
+it is you understand we are talking about?" A gathering storm of
+determination must be met, the Dragon decides, by a corresponding
+access of asperity on her part. She rises to the occasion.
+
+"I will tell you about what I do _not_ understand. But I do not expect
+to be listened to. I do _not_ understand how any father can remain in
+his library, engaged in work which cannot possibly be remunerative,
+while his eldest daughter contracts a disgraceful marriage with a
+social inferior." The irrelevance about remuneration was ill-judged.
+
+"I can postpone the Dictionary--if that will satisfy you--and go on
+with some articles for the Encyclopaedia, which pay very well, until
+after the ceremony. Is the date fixed?"
+
+"It is easy for you to affect stupidity, and to answer me with would-be
+witty evasions. But if you think to deter me from my duty--a mother's
+duty--by such pitiful expedients you are making a great mistake. You
+make my task harder to me, Septimus, but you do not discourage me. You
+know as well as I do--although you choose to affect the contrary--that
+what I am saying does not relate to any existing circumstances, but
+only to what may come about if you persist in neglecting your duty
+to your family. I came into this room to ask you to exercise your
+authority with your daughter Laetitia, or if not your authority--for she
+is over twenty-one--your influence. But I see that I shall get no help.
+It is, however, what I expected--no more and no less." And the skirts
+rustle with an intention of getting up and going away injured.
+
+Mrs. Wilson had a case against her husband, if not a strong one. His
+ideas of the duties of a male parent were that he might incur paternity
+of an indefinite number of sons and daughters, and discharge all his
+obligations to them by providing their food and education. Having paid
+quittance, he was at liberty to be absorbed in his books. Had his
+payments been large enough to make his wife's administration of the
+household easy, he might have been justified, especially as she, for
+her part, was not disposed to allow him any voice in any matter.
+Nevertheless, she castigated him frightfully at intervals for not
+exercising an authority she was not prepared to permit. He was nothing
+but a ninepin, set up to be knocked down, an Aunt Sally who was never
+allowed to keep her pipe in her mouth for ten consecutive seconds. The
+natural consequence of which was that his children despised him, but
+to a certain extent loved him; while, on the other hand, they somewhat
+disliked their mother, but (to a certain extent) respected her. It is
+very hard on the historian and the dramatist that every one is not
+quite good or quite bad. It would make their work so much easier. But
+it would not be nearly so interesting, especially in the case of the
+last-named.
+
+The Professor may have had some feeling on these lines when he stopped
+the skirts from rustling out of the apartment by a change in his
+manner.
+
+"Tell me seriously what you wish me to do, Roberta."
+
+"I wish you to give attention, if not to the affairs--_that_ I cannot
+expect--of your household, at least to this--you may call it foolish
+and pooh-pooh it--business of Laetitia and this young man--I really
+cannot say young gentleman, for it is mere equivocation not to call
+him a haberdasher."
+
+The Professor resisted the temptation to criticize some points of
+literary structure, and accepted the obvious meaning of this.
+
+"Tell me what he really is."
+
+"I have told you repeatedly. He is nothing--unless we palter with the
+meaning of words--but a clerk in the office at the stores where we pay
+a deposit and order goods on a form. They were originally haberdashers,
+so I don't see how you can escape from what I have said. But I have
+no doubt you will try to do so."
+
+"How comes he to be such a magnificent violinist? Are they all...?"
+
+"I know what you are going to say, and it's foolish. No, they are not
+all magnificent violinists. But you know the story quite well."
+
+"Perhaps I do. But now listen. I want to make out one thing. This
+young man talked quite freely to me and Egerton about his place, his
+position, salary--everything. And yet you say he isn't a gentleman."
+
+"Of course he isn't a gentleman. I don't the least understand what
+you mean. It's some prevarication or paradox." Mrs. Wilson taps the
+chair-arm impatiently.
+
+"I mean this--if he isn't a gentleman, how comes it that he isn't
+ashamed of being a haberdasher? Because he _isn't_. Seemed to take
+it all as a matter of course."
+
+"I cannot follow your meaning at all. And I will not trouble you to
+explain it. The question now is--will you, or will you not, _do_
+something?"
+
+"Has the young gentleman?"--Mrs. Wilson snorted audibly--"Well, has
+this young haberdasher made any sort of definite declaration to
+Laetitia?"
+
+"I understand not. But it's impossible not to see."
+
+"Would it not be a little premature for me to say anything to him?"
+
+"Have I asked you to do so?"
+
+"I am a little uncertain what it is you have asked me to do."
+
+Mrs. Wilson contrived, by pantomime before she spoke, to express her
+perfect patience under extremest trial, inflicted on her by an impudent
+suggestion that she hadn't made her position clear. She would, however,
+state her case once more with incisive distinctness. To that end she
+separated her syllables, and accented selections from them, even as
+a resolute hammer accents the head of a nail.
+
+"Have I not told you dis_tinct_ly"--the middle syllable of this word
+was a sample nailhead--"a _thou_sand times that what I wish you to
+do--however much you may shirk doing it--is to _speak_ to Laetitia--to
+remonstrate with her about the encouragement she is giving to this
+young man, and to _point out_ to her that a girl in her position--in
+short, the duties of a girl in her position?" Mrs. Wilson's come-down
+at this point was an example of a solemn warning to the elocutionist
+who breaks out of bounds. She was obliged to fall back arbitrarily on
+her key-note in the middle of the performance. "Have I said this to
+you, Mr. Wilson, or have I not?"
+
+"Speaking from memory I should say _not_. Yes--certainly _not_. But
+I can raise no reasonable objection to speaking to Laetitia, provided
+I am at liberty to say what I like. I understand that to be part of
+the bargain."
+
+"If you mean," says the lady, whose temper had not been improved by the
+first part of the speech; "if you mean that you consider yourself at
+liberty to encourage a rebellious daughter against her mother, I know
+too well from old experience that that is the case. But I trust that
+for once your right feeling will show you that it is your _plain duty_
+to tell her that the course she is pursuing can only lead to the loss
+of her position in society, and probably to poverty and unhappiness."
+
+"I can tell her you think so, of course," says the Professor, drily.
+
+"I will say no more"--very freezingly. "You know as well as I do what
+it is your _duty_ to say to your daughter. What you will _decide_
+to say, I do _not_ know." And premonitory rustles end in a move to
+the door.
+
+"You can tell her to come in now--if you like." The Professor won't
+show too vivid an interest. It isn't as if the matter related to a
+Scythian war-chariot, or a gold ornament from a prehistoric tomb, or
+_variae lectiones_.
+
+"At least, Septimus," says the apex of the departing skirts, "you will
+remember what is due to yourself and your family--_I_ am nobody--so far
+as not to encourage the girl in resisting her mother's authority." And,
+receiving no reply, departs, and is heard on the landing rejecting
+insufficient reasons why the drugget will not lay flat. And presently
+issuing a mandate to an upper landing:
+
+"Your father wishes to speak to you in his library. _I_ wish you to
+go." The last words not to seem to abdicate as Queen Consort.
+
+Laetitia isn't a girl whom we find new charms in after making her
+mother's acquaintance. You know how some young people would be passable
+enough if it were not for a lurid light thrown upon their identity by
+other members of their family. You know the sister you thought was a
+beauty and dear, until you met her sister, who was gristly and a jade.
+But it's a great shame in Tishy's case, because we do honestly believe
+her seeming _da capo_ of her mother is more skirts than anything else.
+We credit their respective _apices_ with different dispositions,
+although (yes, it's quite true what you say) we don't see exactly from
+what corner of the Professor's his daughter got her better one. He's
+all very well, but....
+
+Anyhow, we are sorry for Tishy now, as she comes uneasily into the
+library to be "spoken to." She comes in buttoning a glove and saying,
+"Yes, papa." She was evidently just going out--probably arrested by
+the voices in the library.
+
+"Well, my dear, your mother wishes me to speak to you.... H'm! h'm!
+By-the-bye," he interrupts himself, "it really is a very extraordinary
+thing, but it's just like work-people. A man spends all his life laying
+carpets, and the minute he lays mine it's too big or too small."
+
+"The man outside? He's very tiresome. He says the passage is an unusual
+size."
+
+"I should have taken that point when I measured it. It seems to me late
+in the day now the carpet's made up. However, that's neither here nor
+there. Your mother wishes me to--a--to speak to you, my dear."
+
+"What does she want you to say, papa?"
+
+"H'm--well!--it's sometimes not easy to understand your mother. I
+cannot say that I have gathered precisely what it is she wishes me
+to say. Nor am I certain that I should be prepared to say it if I
+knew what it was."--Tishy brightened perceptibly.--"But I am this
+far in sympathy with what I suppose to be her meaning"--Tishy's face
+fell--"that I should be very sorry to hear that you had made any
+binding promises to any young gentleman without knowing more of his
+antecedents and connexions than I suppose you do at the present about
+this--a--musical friend of yours--without consulting me." The
+perfunctory tone in which he added, "and your mother," made the words
+hardly worth recording.
+
+But perhaps the way they, in a sense, put the good lady out of court,
+helped to make her daughter brighten up again. "Dear papa," she said,
+"I should never dream for one moment of doing such a thing. Nor would
+Mr. Bradshaw dream of asking me to do so."
+
+"That's quite right, my dear--quite enough. Don't say anything more.
+I am not going to catechize you." And Tishy was not sorry to hear
+this, because her disclaimer of a binding promise was only true in the
+letter. In fact, our direct Sally had only the day before pounced upon
+her friend with, "You know perfectly well he's kissed you heaps of
+times!" And Tishy had only been able to begin an apology she was not
+to be allowed to finish with, "And suppose he has...?"
+
+However, her sense of an untruthfulness that was more than merely
+technical was based not so much on the bare fact of a kissing-relation
+having come about, as upon a particular example. She knew it was the
+merest hypocrisy to make believe that the climax of that interview at
+Riverfordhook, where there were the moonrise and things, did not
+constitute a pledge on the part of both. However, Tishy is not the
+first young lady, let me tell you--if you don't know already--who has
+been guilty of equivocation on those lines. It is even possible that
+her father was conniving at it, was intentionally accepting what he
+knew to be untrue, to avoid the trouble of further investigation, and
+to be able to give his mind to the demolition of that ignoramus. A
+certain amount of fuss was his duty; but the sooner he could find an
+excuse to wash his hands of these human botherations and get back to
+his inner life the better.
+
+Perhaps it was a sense of chill at the suspicion that her father was
+not concerned enough about her welfare that made Laetitia try to arrest
+his retirement into his inner life. Or it may have been that she was
+sensitive, as young folk are, at her new and strange experience of Real
+Love, and at the same time grated on--scraped the wrong way--in her
+harsh collision with her mother, who was showing Cupid no quarter, and
+was only withheld from overt acts of hostility to Julius Bradshaw by
+the knowledge that excess on her part would precipitate what she sought
+to avert.
+
+Whatever the cause was, her momentary sense of relief that her father
+was not going to catechize her was followed by a feeling that she
+almost wished he would. It would be so nice to have a natural parent
+that was really interested in his daughter's affairs. Poor Tishy felt
+lonely, and as if she was going to cry. She must unpack her heart, even
+if it bored papa, who she knew wanted to turn her out and write. She
+broke down over it.
+
+"Oh, papa--papa! Indeed, I want to do everything you wish--whatever you
+tell me. I _will_ be good, as we used to say." A sob grew in her throat
+over this little nursery recollection. "Only--only--only--it isn't
+really quite true about no promises. We haven't made them, you know,
+but they're _there_ all the same." Tishy stops suddenly to avoid a sob
+she knows is coming. A pocket-handkerchief is called in to remove tears
+surreptitiously, under a covering pretence of a less elegant function.
+The Professor hates scenes worse than poison, and Tishy knows it.
+
+"There, there! Well, well! Nothing to cry about. _That's_ right." This
+is approval of the disappearance of the pocket-handkerchief--some
+confusion between cause and effect, perhaps. "Come, my child--come,
+Laetitia--suppose now you tell me all about it."
+
+Tishy acknowledges to herself that she desires nothing better. Yes,
+papa dear, she will, indeed she will, tell him everything. And then
+makes a very fair revelation of her love-affair--a little dry and
+stilted in the actual phrasing, perhaps, but then, what can you expect
+when one's father is inclined to be stiff and awkward in such a matter,
+to approach it formally, and consider it an interview? It was all
+mamma's fault, of course. Why should she be summoned before the bar of
+the house? Why couldn't her father find his way into her confidence in
+the natural current of events? However, this was better than nothing.
+
+Besides, we softened gradually as we developed the subject. One of
+us, who was Mr. Bradshaw at first, became Julius later, with a strong
+lubricating effect. We began with sincere attachment, but we loved
+each other dearly before we had done. We didn't know when "it" began
+exactly--which was a fib, for we were perfectly well aware that "it"
+began that evening at Krakatoa Villa, which has been chronicled
+herein--but for a long time past Julius had been asking to be allowed
+to memorialise the Professor on the subject.
+
+"But you know, papa dear, I couldn't say he was to speak to you until
+I was quite certain of myself. Besides, I did want him to be on better
+terms with mamma first."
+
+Professor Wilson flushed angrily, and began with a knitted brow, "I
+wish your mother would----" but stopped abruptly. Then, calming down:
+"But you are quite certain _now_, my dear Laetitia?" Oh dear, yes; no
+doubt of that. And how about Julius? The confident ring of the girl's
+laugh, and her "Why, you should hear him!" showed that she, at least,
+was well satisfied of her lover's earnestness.
+
+"Well, my dear child," said the Professor, who was beginning to feel
+that it was time to go back to his unfinished ignoramus, tyro, or
+sciolist; "I tell you what I shall do. When's he coming next? Thursday,
+to dinner. Very well. I shall make a little opportunity for a quiet
+talk with him, and we shall see."
+
+The young lady came out of the library on the whole comfortabler then
+she had entered it, and finished buttoning that glove in the passage.
+As she stood reflecting that papa would really be very nice if he would
+shave more carefully--for the remains of his adieu was still rasping
+her cheek--she was aware of the voice of the carpet; she heard it
+complain, through the medium of its layer, or stretcher, who seemed
+to mean to pass the remainder of his days scratching the head of
+perplexity on the scene of his recent failure to add to his
+professional achievements.
+
+"It's what I say to the guv'nor"--thus ran his Jeremiad--"in dealin'
+with these here irregular settin's out, where nothin's not to say
+parallel with anything else, nor dimensions lendin' theirselves to
+accommodation. 'Just you let me orfer it in,' I says 'afore the final
+stitchin' to, or even a paper template in extra cases is a savin' in
+the end.' Because it stands to reason there goes more expense with an
+ill-cut squint or obtoose angle, involvin' work to rectify, than cut
+ackerate in the first go-off. Not but what ruckles may disappear under
+the tread, only there's no reliance to be placed. You may depend on it,
+to make a job there's nothin' like careful plannin', and foresight in
+the manner of speakin'. And, as I say to the guv'nor, there's no need
+for a stout brown-paper template to go to waste, seein' it works in
+with the under-packin'." And much more which Tishy could still hear
+murmuring on in the distance as she closed the street door and fled
+to an overdue appointment with Sally, into whose sympathetic ear she
+could pour all her new records of the progress of the row.
+
+To tell the whole of the prolonged pitched battle that ensued would
+take too much ink and paper. The Dragon fought magnificently, so long
+as she had the powerful backing of her married daughter, Mrs. Sowerby
+Bagster, and the skirmishing help of Athene. This latter was, however,
+not to be relied on--might go over to the enemy any moment. Mrs.
+Bagster, or Clarissa, who was an elder sister of Laetitia's, became
+lukewarm, too, on a side-issue being raised. It did not appear to
+connect itself logically with the bone of contention, having reference
+entirely to vaccination from the calf. But it led to an exaggerated
+sensitiveness on her part as to the responsibility we incurred by
+interference with what might (after all) be the Will of Providence.
+If this should prove so, it would be our duty not to repine. Clarissa
+contrived to surround the subject with an unprovoked halo of religious
+meekness, and to work round to the conclusion that it would be
+presumptuous not to ask Mr. Bradshaw to dinner. Only this resulted
+absolutely and entirely from her refusing to have her three children
+all vaccinated from the calf forthwith, because their grandmother
+thought it necessary. The latter, finding herself deserted in her hour
+of need by a powerful ally--for three whole children had given Clarissa
+a deep insight into social ethics, and a weighty authority--surrendered
+grudgingly. She tried her best to make her invitation to dinner take
+the form of leave to come to dinner, and partly succeeded. Her
+suggestions that she hoped Mr. Bradshaw would understand the rules of
+the game at the table of Society caused the defection of her remaining
+confederate, Athene, who turned against her, exclaiming: "He won't eat
+with his knife, at any rate!" However, it was too late to influence
+current events. The battle was fought and over.
+
+The obnoxious young man didn't eat with his knife when he came, with
+docility, a day after he received the invitation. Remember, he appears
+originally in this story as a chosen of Cattley's, one warranted to
+defy detection by the best-informed genteelologist. He went through
+his ordeal very well, on the whole, considering that Egerton (from
+friendship) was always on the alert to give him tips about civilised
+conduct, and that Mrs. Wilson called him nearly every known dissyllabic
+name with _A_'s in it--Brathwaite, Palgrave, Bradlaugh, Playfair, and
+so on, but not Bradshaw. She did this the more as she never addressed
+him directly, treating him without disguise as the third-person
+singular in a concrete form. This was short-sighted, because it
+stimulated her husband to a tone of civility which would probably
+have risen to deference if the good lady had not just stopped short
+of insult.
+
+Egerton and the only other male guest (who was the negative young
+pianist known to Sally as Somebody Elsley) having found it convenient
+to go away at smoking-time to inspect the latter's bicycle, the
+Professor seized his opportunity for conversation with the
+third-person-singular. He approached the subject abruptly:
+
+"Well, it's Laetitia, I understand, that we're making up to, eh?"
+Perhaps it was this sudden conversion to the first person plural that
+made the young man blush up to the roots of his hair.
+
+"What can I say?" he asked hesitatingly. "You see, Professor Wilson,
+if I say yes, it will mean that I have been p-paying my addresses, as
+the phrase is...."
+
+"And taking receipts?"
+
+"Exactly--and taking receipts, without first asking her father's leave.
+And if I say no----"
+
+"If you say no, my dear young man, her father will merely ask you
+to help yourself and pass the port (decanter with the little brass
+ticket--yes, that one. Thank you!). Well, I see what you mean, and we
+needn't construct enigmas. We really get to the point. Now tell me all
+about it." We don't feel at all sure the Professor's way of getting to
+the point was not a good one. You see, he had had a good deal to do
+with young men in early academical phases of existence--tutorships and
+the like--and had no idea of humming and hawing and stuttering over
+their affairs. Besides, it was best for Bradshaw, as was shown by the
+greater ease with which he went on speaking, and began telling the
+Professor all about it.
+
+"I shouldn't be speaking truthfully, sir, if I were to pretend things
+haven't gone a little beyond--a little beyond--the exact rules. But
+you've no idea how easily one can deceive oneself."
+
+"Haven't I?" The Professor's mind went back to his own youth. He knew
+very well how easily he had done it. A swift dream of his past shot
+through his brain in the little space before Bradshaw resumed.
+
+"Well, it was only a phrase. Of course you know. I mean it has all
+crept on so imperceptibly. And I have had no real chance of talking
+about it--to _you_, sir--without asking for a formal interview. And
+until very lately nothing Laet--Miss Wilson...."
+
+"Tut-tut! Laetitia--Laetitia. What's the use of being prigs about it?"
+
+"Nothing Laetitia has said would have warranted me in doing this. I
+_could_ have introduced the subject to Mrs. Wilson once or twice,
+but...."
+
+"All right. I understand. Well, now, what's the exact state of things
+between you and Laetitia?"
+
+"You will guess what our wishes are. But we know quite well that their
+fulfilment is at present impossible. It may remain so. I have no means
+at present except a small salary. And my mother and sister----"
+
+"Have a claim on you--is that it?" The Professor's voice seems to
+forestall a forbidding sound. But he won't be in too great a hurry.
+He continues: "You must have some possibility in view, some sort of
+expectation."
+
+Bradshaw's reply hesitated a good deal.
+
+"I am afraid I have--I am afraid--allowed myself to fancy--that, in
+short, I might be able to--outgrow this unhappy nervous affection."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"I know what you mean, Professor Wilson. You mean that a violinist's
+position, however successful, would be less than you have a right to
+expect for your daughter's husband. Of course that is so, but----"
+
+"But I mean nothing of the sort." The Professor is abrupt and decisive,
+as one who repudiates. "I know nothing about positions. However, Mr.
+Bradshaw, you are quite right this far--that is what Mrs. Wilson would
+have meant. _She_ knows about positions. What _I_ meant was that you
+wouldn't have enough to live upon at the best, in any comfort, and
+that I shouldn't be able to help you. Suppose you had a large family,
+and the nervous affection came back?" His hearer quakes at this crude,
+unfeeling forecast of real matrimonial facts. He and Laetitia fully
+recognise in theory that people who marry incur families; but, like
+every other young couple, would prefer a veil drawn over their
+particular case. The young man flinches visibly at the Professor's
+needlessly savage hypothesis of disasters. Had he been a rapid and
+skilful counsel in his own behalf, he would have at once pounced on
+a weak point, and asked how many couples would ever get married at
+all, if we were to beg and borrow every trouble the proper people
+(whoever they are) are ready to give away and lend. He can only look
+crestfallen, and feel about in his mind for some way of saying, "If
+I wanted Laetitia to promise to marry me, that would apply. As matters
+stand, it is not to the purpose," without seeming to indite the
+Professor for prematureness. Of course, the position had been created
+entirely by the Dragon. Why could she not have let them alone, as her
+husband had said to her? Why not, indeed?
+
+But Master Julius has to see his way out into the open, and he is
+merely looking puzzled, and letting a very fair cigar out--and, you
+know, they are never the same thing relighted. Perhaps what he does
+is as good as anything else.
+
+"I see you are right, sir, and I am afraid I am to blame--I must
+be--because my selfish thoughtlessness, or whatever it ought to be
+called, has placed us in a position out of which no happiness can
+result for either?" He looks interrogatively into the Professor's gold
+spectacles, but sees no relaxation in the slightly knitted brow above
+them. Their owner merely nods.
+
+"But you needn't take all the blame to yourself," he says. "I've no
+doubt my daughter is entitled to her share of it"--to which Bradshaw
+tries to interpose a denial--"only it really doesn't matter whose fault
+it is."
+
+The disconcerted lover, who felt all raw, public, and uncomfortable,
+wondered a little what the precise "it" was that could be said to be
+any one's fault. After all, he and Laetitia were just two persons going
+on existing, and how could it be any concern of any one else's what
+each thought of or felt for the other? It is true he lacked absolution
+for the kissing transgressions; they were blots on a clean sheet of
+mere friendship. But would the Dragon be content that he and Laetitia
+should continue to see each other if they signed a solemn agreement
+that there was to be no kissing? You see, he was afraid he was going
+to be cut off from his lady-love, and he didn't like the looks of the
+Professor. But he didn't propose the drawing up of any such compact.
+Perhaps he didn't feel prepared to sign it. However, he was to be
+relieved from any immediate anxiety. The Professor had never meant
+to take any responsibility, and now that he had said his say, he only
+wanted to wash his hands of it.
+
+"Now, understand me, Bradshaw," said he--and there was leniency and
+hope in the dropped "Mr."--"I do not propose to do more than advise;
+nor do I know, as my daughter is twenty-four, what I can do except
+advise. We won't bring authority into court.... Oh yes, no doubt
+Laetitia believes she will never act against my wishes. Many girls have
+thought that sort of thing. But----" He stopped dead, with a little
+side-twist of the head, and a lip-pinch, expressing doubt, then
+resumed: "So I'll give you my advice, and you can think it over. It
+is that you young people just keep out of each other's way, and let
+the thing die out. You've no idea till you try what a magical effect
+absence has; poetry is all gammon. Take my advice, and try it. Have
+some more port? No--thank me! Then let's go upstairs."
+
+Upstairs were to be found all the materials for an uncomfortable
+evening. A sort of wireless telegraphy that passed between Bradshaw
+and Laetitia left both in low spirits. They did not rise (the spirits)
+when the Professor said, to the public generally, "Well, I must say
+good-night, but _you_ needn't go," and went away to his study; nor when
+his Dragon followed him, with a strong flavour of discipline on her.
+For thereupon it became necessary to ignore conflict in the hinterland
+of some folding-doors, accompanied by sounds of forbearance and a high
+moral attitude. There was no remedy but music, and as soon as Bradshaw
+got at his Stradivarius the mists seemed to disperse. The _adagio_ of
+Somebody's quartette No. 101 seemed to drive a coach-and-six through
+mortal bramble-labyrinths. But as soon as it ceased, the mists came
+back all the thicker for being kept waiting. And the outcome of a
+winding-up interview between the sweethearts was the conclusion that
+after what had been said by the father of one of them, it was necessary
+that all should be forgotten, and be as though it had never been.
+And the gentleman next day, when he showed himself at his desk at
+Cattley's, provoked the remark that Paganini had got the hump this
+morning--which shows that his genius as a violinist was recognised
+at Cattley's.
+
+As for the lady, we rather think she made up her mind in the course
+of the night that if her family were going to interfere with her
+love-affairs, she would let them know what it was to have people
+yearning for other people in the house. For she refused boiled eggs,
+eggs and bacon, cold salmon-trout, and potted tongue at breakfast next
+day, and left half a piece of toast and half a cup of tea as a visible
+record that she had started pining, and meant to do it in earnest.
+
+What Laetitia and Julius suffered during their self-inflicted
+separation, Heaven only knows! This saying must be interpreted as
+meaning that nobody else did. They were like evasive Trappist monks,
+who profess mortification of the flesh, but when it comes to the
+scratch, don't flog fair. Whatever they lost in the cessation of
+uncomfortable communion at the eyrie, or lair, of the Dragon was more
+than made up for by the sub-rosaceous, or semi-clandestine, character
+of the intercourse that was left. Stolen kisses are notoriously
+sweetest, but when, in addition to this, every one is actually the
+very last the shareholders intend to subscribe for, their fascination
+is increased tenfold. And every accidental or purely unintentionally
+arranged meeting of these two had always the character of an interview
+between people who never meet--which, like most truths, was only false
+in exceptional cases; and in this instance these were numerous.
+Factitious absence of this sort will often make the heart grow fonder,
+where the real thing would make it look about for another; and another
+is generally to be found.
+
+It might have been unsafe to indulge in speculation, based on the then
+_status quo_, as to when the inevitable was going to happen. We know
+all about it now, but that doesn't count. Stories, true or false,
+should be told consecutively.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+IT WAS THAT MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S FAULT. A SATISFACTORY CHAP, GERRY! A
+ TELEGRAM AND A CLOUD. BRONCHITIS AND ASTHMA AND FOG. SALLY GOES TO
+ MAYFAIR. THE OLD SOLDIER HAS NOTICE TO QUIT
+
+
+The most deeply-rooted instinct of mankind is the one that prompts
+it to lay the blame on some one else. Mankind includes womankind, and
+woman includes (for we believe she is still living) the Dragon of
+the last chapter. As it did not occur to this good lady that her own
+attitude of estrangement from Laetitia had anything to answer for in the
+rash and premature development of the latter's love-affair, she cast
+about for a scapegoat, and found one in the person of Rosalind Fenwick.
+Some one had schemed the whole business, clearly, and who else could
+it be but that woman? Of course, Laetitia herself was simply the victim
+of a plot--she was young and inexperienced; people's daughters are.
+
+But nothing in the nefarious business had escaped the watchful eye of
+the Dragon. At the time of the very first appearance of "that Mrs.
+Nightingale" on the scene she had pointed out her insidious character,
+and forewarned North and North-west Kensington of what was to be
+expected from a person of her antecedents. It was true no one knew
+anything about these latter; but, then, that was exactly the point.
+
+"It's useless attempting to find excuses for that woman. Clarissa,"
+she had said. "It's always the same story with people of that sort.
+Whenever they have no proper introduction, they always turn out
+schemers and matchmakers. I detected her, and said so at once. It is
+easy for your father to pretend he has forgotten. He always does. My
+consolation is that I did my duty. And then, of course, it all turns
+out as I said. Anybody could have known what sort of person she was
+with half an eye!"
+
+"And what sort of person is she?" asked Clarissa coldly. She had not
+forgotten the vaccination from the calf.
+
+"The sort of person you would expect. Unless, Clarissa, you are going
+to take a leaf out of your father's book, and make believe you do not
+understand what is transparently on the surface. What interest can
+Major Roper have in inventing the story, I should like to know?"
+
+"How does he come to know so much about it? Who told him?"
+
+"Who _told_ him? Why, of course that very old gentleman--what's his
+name?--_you_ know----" Mrs. Wilson tries if she can't recollect
+with a quick vibration of a couple of fingers to back up her brain.
+"Colonel Dunn!"
+
+"Major Lund?"
+
+"Lunn or Dunn. Yes, I remember now; it's Lunn, because the girl said
+when she was a child she thought Sally Lunns had something to do with
+both. You may depend on it, I'm right. Well, Major Roper's his most
+intimate friend. They belong to the same club."
+
+The ladies then lost sight of their topic, which lapsed into a rather
+heated discussion of whether the very old gentleman was a Colonel or
+a Major. As we don't want to hear them on this point, we may let them
+lapse too.
+
+It may have been because of some home anxieties--notably about the
+Major, whose bronchitis had been bad--that Rosalind Fenwick continued
+happily unconscious of having incurred any blame or taken any
+responsibility on herself in connexion with the Ladbroke Grove row,
+as Sally called it. If she _had_ known of it, very likely it would
+not have troubled her, for she was really too contented with her own
+condition and surroundings to be concerned about externals. Whatever
+troubles she had were connected with the possibility, which always
+seemed to grow fainter, of a revival of her husband's powers of memory.
+Sometimes whole weeks would pass without an alarm. Sometimes some
+little stirring of the mind would occur twice in the same day; still,
+the tendency seemed to be, on the whole, towards a more and more
+complete oblivion.
+
+But the fact is that so long as she had the Major invalided at Krakatoa
+Villa (for he was taken ill there, and remained on her hands many
+weeks before he could return to his lodgings) she had the haziest
+impressions of the outside world. Sally talked about "the row" while
+they were nursing the old boy, but really she heeded her very little.
+Then, when the invalid was so far reinstated that he was fit to be
+moved safely, Sally went away too, for a change.
+
+The respite to old Colonel Lund was not to be for long. But the rest,
+alone with her husband, was not unwelcome to Rosalind.
+
+"I can never have been one-tenth as happy, Rosey darling," said he to
+her one day, "as I have been in the last six months. I should recollect
+all about it if I had."
+
+"You're a satisfactory chap to deal with, Gerry--I must say that for
+you. You always beam, come what may. Even when you fly out--which you
+do, you know--it's more like a big dog than a wasp. You were
+always...." Now, Rosalind was going to say "always like that"; it was
+a mistake she was constantly in danger of. But she stopped in time,
+and changed her speech to "You're not without your faults, you know!
+You never can come to an anchor, and be quiet. You sit on the arms of
+chairs, and your hands are too big and strong. No; you needn't stop. Go
+on!" We like leaving the words to elucidate the concurrent action. "And
+you don't smell much of tobacco."
+
+Fenwick, however, had noticed the kink in the thread, and must needs
+wind it back to get a clear line. "I was always what?" said he. His
+wife saw a way out.
+
+"Always good when your daughter was here to manage you." It wasn't so
+satisfactory as it might have been, but answered in dealing with a mind
+so unsuspicious. Sally's having spent Christmas and stayed on a little
+at a friend's in the country lent plausibility to a past tense which
+might else have jarred.
+
+"I don't want the kitten all to myself, you know," said Fenwick. "It
+wouldn't be fair. After all, she _was_ yours before she was mine."
+
+There was not a tremor in the hand that lay in his, the one that was
+not caressing her cheek; not a sign of flinching in the eyes that
+turned round on him; not a trace of hesitation in the voice that said,
+with concession to a laugh in it: "Yes, she _was_ mine before she was
+yours." Such skill had grown in this life of nettle-grasping!--indeed,
+she hardly felt the sting now. This time she was able to go on
+placidly, in the unconnected way of talk books know not, and life
+well knows:
+
+"Do you know what the kitten will be next August?"
+
+"Yes; twenty-one."
+
+"It's rather awful, isn't it?"
+
+"Which way do you mean? It's awful because she isn't _fiancee_, or
+awful because she might be at any minute?"
+
+"You've picked up her way of going to the point, Gerry. I never said
+anything about her being _fiancee_."
+
+"No, but you meant it."
+
+"Of course I did! Well, then, because she might be any minute. I'm
+very glad she _isn't_. Why, you know I _must_ be!"
+
+"_I_ am, anyhow!"
+
+"Just think what the house would be without her!"
+
+"The best place in the world still for me." She acknowledges this by
+a kiss on his hairy hand, which he returns _via_ her forehead; then
+goes on: "All the same, I'll be hanged if I know what we should do
+without our kitten. But has anything made you afraid?"
+
+"Oh no; nothing at all! Certainly; no, nothing. Have _you_ noticed
+anything?"
+
+"Oh dear, no! For anything I can see, she may continue a--a sort of
+mer-pussy to the end of time." Both laugh in a way at the name he
+has made for her; then he adds: "Only...."
+
+"Only what?"
+
+"Nothing I could lay hold of."
+
+"I wonder whether you're thinking of the same thing as I am?" Very
+singularly, it does not seem necessary to elucidate the point. They
+merely look at each other, and continue looking as Fenwick says:
+
+"They _are_ a funny couple, if that's it!"
+
+"They certainly _are_," she replies. "But I _have_ thought so, for
+all that!" And then both look at the fire as before, this being, of
+course, in the depth of winter. Rosalind speaks next.
+
+"There's no doubt about _him_, of course! But the chick would have
+told me at once if...."
+
+"If there had been anything to tell. No doubt she would."
+
+"Of course, it's absurd to suppose he could see so much of her as he
+does, and not...."
+
+"Perfectly absurd! But then, you know, that young fiddler was very
+bad, indeed, about the chick until he made her acquaintance."
+
+"So he was." Thoughtfully, as one who weighs.
+
+"The kitten met him with a sort of stony geniality that would have
+knocked the heart out of a Romeo. If Juliet had known the method,
+she could have nipped Shakespeare in the bud."
+
+"She _didn't_ want to. Sally _did_."
+
+"But then Shakespeare might have gone on and written a dry respectable
+story--not a love-story; an esteem story--about how Juliet took an
+interest in Romeo's welfare, and Romeo posted her letters for her, and
+presented her with a photograph album, and so on. And how the families
+left cards."
+
+"But it isn't exactly stony geniality. It's another method altogether
+with the doctor--a method the child's invented for herself."
+
+Fenwick repeats, "A method she's invented for herself. Exactly. Well,
+we shall have her back to-morrow. What time does she come?" And then
+her mother says, interrupting the conversation: "What's that?"
+
+"What's what?"
+
+"I thought I heard the gate go."
+
+"Not at this time of night." But Fenwick is wrong, for in a moment
+comes an imperious peal at the bell. A pair of boots, manifestly on
+a telegraph-boy's cold feet, play a devil's tattoo on the sheltered
+doorstep. They have been inaudible till now, as the snow is on the
+ground again at Moira Villas. In three minutes the boots are released,
+and they and their wearer depart, callously uninterested in the
+contents of the telegram they have brought. If we were a telegraph-boy,
+we should always be yearning to know and share the joys and sorrows of
+our employers. This boy doesn't, to judge by the way he sings that he
+is "Only the Ghost of a Mother-in-law," showing that he goes to the
+music-halls.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Less than ten minutes after the telegraph-boy has died away in the
+distance Rosalind and her husband are telling a cab to take them to
+174, Ball Street, Mayfair.
+
+It does so grudgingly, because of the state of the roads. It wants
+three-and-sixpence, and gets it, for the same reason. But it doesn't
+appear to be drawn by a logical horse who can deal with inferences,
+because it is anxious to know when its clients are going back, that
+it may call round for them.
+
+For the telegram was that there was "no cause immediate apprehension;
+perhaps better come--Major." As might have been expected from such
+a telegram about a man of his age, just after seeming recovery from an
+attack of bronchitis, the hours on earth of its subject were numbered.
+Fever may abate, temperature may be brought down to the normal, the
+most nourishing possible nourishment may be given at the shortest
+possible intervals, but the recoil of exhaustion will have its way when
+there is little or nothing left to exhaust. Colonel Lund had possibly
+two or three years of natural life before him, disease apart, when
+a fierce return of the old enemy, backed by the severity of a London
+winter, and even more effectually by its fog, stopped the old heart a
+few thousand beats too soon, and ended a record its subject had ceased
+to take an interest in a few paragraphs short of the normal _finis_.
+
+We allow our words to overtake our story in this way because we know
+that you know--you who read--exactly what follows telegrams like the
+one that came to Mrs. Fenwick. If you are new and young, and do not
+know it yet, you will soon. However, we can now go back.
+
+When the economical landlady (a rather superior person) who had opened
+the street-door was preceding Rosalind up the narrow stairs, and
+turning up gas-jets from their reserve of darkness-point, she surprised
+her by saying she thought there was the Major coming downstairs.
+"Yes, madam; the Major--Major Roper," she continued, in reply to an
+expression of astonishment. Rosalind had forgotten that Colonel Lund
+was, outside her own family, "the Colonel."
+
+It was Major Roper whom we have seen at the Hurkaru Club, as purple as
+ever and more asthmatic--in fact, the noise that was the Major coming
+downstairs was also the noise of the Major choking in the fog. It came
+slowly down, and tried hard to stop, in order that its source might
+speak intelligibly to the visitors. What time the superior person stood
+and grudged the gas. In the end, speech of a sort was squeezed out
+slowly, as the landlady, stung to action by the needless gas-waste,
+plucked the words out of the speaker's mouth at intervals, and finished
+them up for him. The information came piecemeal; but in substance it
+was that he had the day before found his old friend coughing his liver
+up in this dam fog, and had taken on himself to fetch the medical man
+and a nurse; that these latter, though therapeutically useless, as is
+the manner of doctors and nurses, had common-sense enough to back him
+(Roper) in his view that Mrs. Fenwick ought to be sent for, although
+the patient opposed their doing so. So he took upon himself to wire.
+There wasn't any occasion whatever for alarm, ma'am! Not the slightest.
+"You hear me, and mark what I say--an old stager, ma'am! Ever such
+a little common-sense, and half the patients would recover!" A few
+details of the rapid increase of the fever, of the patient's resistance
+to the sending of his message, and an indication of a curious feeling
+on the old Colonel's part that it wouldn't be correct form to go back
+to be nursed through a second attack when he had so lately got safe
+out of the first one. All this landed the speaker in something near
+suffocation, and made his hearers protest, quite uselessly, against his
+again exposing himself to the fog. Whereon the landlady, with a finger
+on the gas-tap, nodded toward the convulsed old officer to supply her
+speech with a nominative, and spoke. What she said was merely: "Hasn't
+been to bed." And then waited for Rosalind to go upstairs with such
+aggressive patience that the latter could only say a word or two of
+thanks to Major Roper and pass up. He, for his part, went quicker
+downstairs to avoid the thanks, and the gas-tap vigil came to a sudden
+end the moment Rosalind turned the handle of the door above.... Now,
+what is the object of all this endless detail of what might have been
+easily told in three words--well, in thirty, certainly?
+
+Simply this: to show you why Fenwick, following on after some
+discussion with the cab below, was practically invisible to the
+asthmatic one, who passed him on the stairs just as the light above
+vanished. So he had no chance of recognizing the donor of his tiger's
+skin, which he might easily have done in open day, in spite of the
+twenty years between, for the old chap was as sharp as a razor about
+people. He passed Fenwick with a good-evening, and Mr. Fenwick, he
+presumed, and his good lady was on ahead, as indicated by the speaker's
+thumb across his shoulder. Fenwick made all acknowledgments, and felt
+his way upstairs in the dark till the nurse with a hand-lamp looked
+over the banisters for him.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When Sally came back to Krakatoa Villa early next day she found an
+empty house, and a note signed Jeremiah that explained its emptiness.
+We had been sent for to the Major, and Sally wasn't to be frightened.
+He had had a better night than last night, the doctor and nurse said;
+and Sally might come on as soon as she had had a good lunch. Only she
+was on no account to fidget.
+
+So she didn't fidget. She had the good lunch very early, left Ann to
+put back her things in the drawers, and found her way through the
+thickening fog to the Tube, only just anxious enough about the Major
+to feel, until the next station was Marble Arch, that London had
+changed and got cruder and more cold-hearted since she went away, and
+that the guard was chilly and callous about her, and didn't care how
+jolly a house-party she had left behind her at Riverfordhook. For it
+was that nice aunt of Tishy's that had asked her down for a few days,
+and the few days had caught on to their successors as they came, and
+become a fortnight. But he appeared to show a human heart, at least,
+by a certain cordiality with which he announced the prospect of Marble
+Arch, which might have been because it was Sally's station. Now, he
+had said Lancaster Gate snappishly, and Queen's Road with misgiving,
+as though he would have fain added D.V. if the printed regulations
+had permitted it. Also, Sally thought there was good feeling in the
+reluctance he showed to let her out, based entirely on nervousness
+lest she should slip (colloquially) between the platform.
+
+You don't save anything by taking the pink 'bus, nor any 'bus for that
+matter, down Park Lane when the traffic tumbles down every half-minute,
+in spite of cinders lavished by the authority, and can't really see its
+way to locomotion when it gets up. So you may just as well walk. Sally
+did so, and in ten minutes reached the queer little purlieu teeming
+with the well-connected, and named after the great Mysteries they are
+connected with, that lies in the angle of Park Lane and Piccadilly.
+Persons of exaggerated sense of locality or mature hereditary
+experience can make short cuts through this district, but the wayfarer
+(broadly speaking) had better not try, lest he be found dead in a mews
+by the Coroner, and made the subject of a verdict according to the
+evidence. Sally knew all about it of old, and went as straight through
+the fog as the ground-plan of the streets permitted to the house where
+her mother and a nurse were doing what might be done to prolong the
+tenancy of the top-floor. But both knew the occupant had received
+notice to quit. Only, it did seem so purposeless, this writ of
+ejectment and violent expulsion, when he was quite ready to go, and
+wanted nothing but permission.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+OF A FOG THAT WAS UP-TO-DATE, AND HOW A FIRE-ENGINE RELIEVED SALLY FROM
+ A BOY. HOW SALLY GOT IN AT A GENTLEMEN'S CLUB, AND HOW VETERANS COULD
+ RECOLLECT HER FATHER. BUT THEY KNOW WHAT SHE CAN BE TOLD, AND WHAT
+ SHE CAN'T. HOW MAJOR ROPER WOULD GO OUT IN THE FOG
+
+
+Mrs. Fenwick was not sorry to break down a little, now that her
+daughter had come to break down on. She soon pulled together, however.
+Breaking down was not a favourite relaxation of hers, as we have seen.
+Her husband had, of course, left her to go to his place of business,
+not materially the worse for a night spent without closed eyes and in
+the anxiety of a sick-chamber.
+
+"Oh, mother darling! you are quite worn out. How is he?"
+
+"He's quiet now, kitten; but we thought the cough would have killed him
+in the night. He's only so quiet now because of the opiates. Only at
+his age----" Mrs. Fenwick stopped and looked at the nurse, whose shake
+of the head was an assent to the impossibility of keeping a patient of
+eighty alive on opiates. Then, having gone thus far in indicating the
+grim probabilities of the case, Sally's mother added, as alleviation
+to a first collision with Death: "But Dr. Mildmay says the inflammation
+and fever may subside, and then, if he can take nourishment----" but
+got no further, for incredulity of this sort of thing is in the air of
+the establishment.
+
+Not, perhaps, on Sally's part. Young people who have not seen Death
+face-to-face have little real conception of his horrible unasked
+intrusion into the house of Life. That house is to them almost as
+inviolable as the home of our babyhood was to the most of us, a
+sacred fane under the protection of an omnipotent high-priest and
+priestess--papa and mamma. Almost as inviolable, that is, when those
+who live in it are our friends. Of course, the people in the newspapers
+go dying--are even killed in railway accidents. This frame of mind
+will change for Sally when she has seen this patient die. For the
+time being, she is half insensible--can think of other things.
+
+"What did the party mean that let me in, mother darling? The fusty
+party? She said she thought it was the Major. I didn't take any notice
+till now. I wanted to get up."
+
+"It was the other Major, dear--Major Roper. Don't you know? _He_ used
+to talk of him, and say he was an old gossip." In the dropped voice and
+the stress on the pronoun one can hear how the speaker's mind knows
+that the old Colonel is almost part of the past. "But they were very
+old friends. They were together through the Mutiny. _He_ was his
+commanding officer." Sally's eyes rest on the old sabre that hangs
+on its hook in the wall, where she has often seen it, ranking it
+prosaically with the other furnishings of "the Major's" apartment. Now,
+a new light is on it, and it becomes a reality in a lurid past, long,
+long before there was any Sally. A past of muzzle-loading guns and
+Minie rifles, of forced marches through a furnace-heat to distant forts
+that hardly owned the name, all too late to save the remnant of their
+defenders; a past of a hundred massacres and a thousand heroisms;
+a past that clings still, Sally dear, about the memory of us oldsters
+that had to know it, as we would fain that no things that are, or are
+to be, should ever cling about yours. But you have read the story often,
+and the tale of it grows and lives round the old sabre on the wall.
+
+Except as an explanation of the fusty party's reference to a Major, Old
+Jack--that was Sally's Major's name for him--got very little foothold
+in her mind, until a recollection of her mother's allusion to him as an
+old gossip having made her look for a suitable image to place there,
+she suddenly recalled that it was he that had actually seen her father;
+talked to him in India twenty years ago; could, and no doubt would,
+tell her all about the divorce. But there!--she couldn't speak to him
+about it here and now. It was impossible.
+
+Still, she was curious to see him, and the fusty but genteel one had
+evidently expected him. So, during the remainder of what seemed to
+Sally the darkest day, morally and atmospherically, that she had ever
+spent--all but the bright morning when she ran into the fog somewhere
+near Surbiton, full of tales to tell of the house-party that now seemed
+a happy dream--during this gloomy remainder Sally wondered what could
+have happened that the other Major should not have turned up. The fog
+would have been more than enough to account for any ordinary
+non-appearance; hardly for this one.
+
+For it turned out, as soon as it got full powers to assert itself, the
+densest fog on record. The Londoner was in his element. He told the
+dissatisfied outsider with pride of how at midday it had been
+impossible to read large pica on Ludgate Hill; he didn't say why he
+tried to do so. He retailed frightful stories--but always with a sense
+of distinction--of folk crushed under hoofs and cart-wheels. If one
+half were true, some main thoroughfares must have been paved with
+flattened pedestrians. The satisfaction he derived from the huge
+extra profits of the gas-companies made his hearer think he must be
+a shareholder, until _pari passu_ reasoning proved him to have invested
+in fog-signals. His legends of hooligans preying on the carcasses of
+strangled earls undisturbed had a set-off in others of marauders who
+had rushed into the arms of the police and thought them bosom friends;
+while that of an ex-Prime Minister who walked round and round for
+an hour, and then rang at a house to ask where he was, ended in
+consolation, as the door was opened by his own footman, who told him
+he wasn't at home. Exact estimates were current, most unreasonably, of
+the loss to commerce; so much so that the other Londoner corrected him
+positively with, "Nearer three-quarters of a million, they say," and
+felt proud of his higher knowledge. But neither felt the least ashamed,
+nor the least afraid of the hideous, inevitable future fog, when a
+suffocated population shall find, as it surely will, that it is at the
+bottom of a sea of unbreathable air, instead of one that merely makes
+it choke its stomach up and kills an old invalid or two. On the
+contrary, both regarded it as the will of a judicious Providence,
+a developer of their own high moral qualities and a destroyer of their
+germs.
+
+Bronchitis and asthma are kittle-cattle to shoe behind, even where the
+sweet Mediterranean air blows pure upon Rapallo and Nervi, but what
+manner of cattle are they in a London fog? Can they be shoed at all?
+As Mrs. Fenwick sits and waits in terror to hear the first inevitable
+cough as the old man wakes, and talks in whispers to her daughter in
+the growing darkness, she feels how her own breath drags at the tough
+air, and how her throat resents the sting of the large percentage of
+sulphur monoxide it contains. The gas-jet is on at the full--or rather
+the tap is, for the fish-tail burner doesn't realise its ideal. It
+sputters in its lurid nimbus--gets bronchitis on its own account, tries
+to cough its tubes clear and fails. Sally and her mother sit on in the
+darkness, and talk about it, shirking the coming suffocation of their
+old friend, and praying that his sleep may last till the deadly air
+lightens, be it ever so little. Sally's animated face shows that she
+is on a line of cogitation, and presently it fructifies.
+
+"Suppose every one let their fires out, wouldn't the fog go? It
+couldn't go on by itself."
+
+"I don't know, chick. I suppose it's been all thought out by committees
+and scientific people. Besides, we should all be frozen."
+
+"Not if we went to bed."
+
+"What! In the daytime?"
+
+"Better do nothing in bed than be choked up."
+
+"I dare say the fog wouldn't go away. You see, it's due to atmospheric
+conditions, so they say."
+
+"That's only because nobody's there to stop 'em talking nonsense.
+Look at all that smoke going up our chimney." So it was, and a jolly
+blaze there was going to be when the three shovelfuls Sally had
+enthusiastically heaped on had incubated, and the time was ripe for
+the poker.
+
+Had you been there you would have seen in Sally's face as it caught the
+firelight-flicker and pondered on the cause of the fog, that _she_ had
+not heard a choking fit of the poor old sleeper in the next room. And
+in her mother's that she _had_, and all the memory of the dreadful
+hours just passed. Her manner, too, was absent as she talked, and she
+listened constantly. Sally was to know what it was like soon. The opium
+sleep would end.
+
+"Isn't that him?" The mother's sharp ear of apprehension makes her say
+this; the daughter has not heard the buried efforts of the lung that
+cannot cough. It will succeed directly, if the patient is raised up,
+so. Both have gone quickly and quietly into the sick-chamber, and it
+is the nurse who speaks. Her prediction is fulfilled, and the silent
+struggle of suffocation becomes a tearing convulsion, that means to
+last some while and does it. How the old, thin tenement of life can go
+on living unkilled is a problem to solve. But it survives this time.
+Perhaps the new cough-mixture will make the job easier next time. We
+shall see.
+
+Anyhow, this attack--bad as it was--has not been so bad as the one he
+had at three this morning. Rosalind and Nurse Emilia invent a paroxysm
+of diabolical severity, partly for the establishment of a pinnacle for
+themselves to look down on Sally from, partly for her consolation. He
+wasn't able to speak for ever so long after that, and this time he is
+trying to say something.... "What is it, dear?"
+
+"Couldn't we have a window open to let a little air in?"
+
+Well!--we could have a window open. We could let a little air in--but
+only a very little. And that very little would bring with it copious
+percentages of moisture saturated with finely subdivided carbonaceous
+matter, of carbon dioxide, and sulphur dioxide, and traces of hydric
+chloride, who is an old friend of our youth, known to us then as
+muriatic acid.
+
+"It's such a thick fog, Major dear. As soon as it clears a little
+we'll open the window. Won't we, Sally?"
+
+"Is Sally there?... Come and touch my hand, kitten.... That's
+right...." What is left of the Major can still enjoy the plump little
+white hand that takes the old fingers that once could grasp the sword
+that hangs on the wall. It will not be for very long now. A newspaper
+paragraph will soon give a short record of all the battles that sword
+left its scabbard to see, and will tell of its owner's service in his
+later days as deputy Commissioner at Umritsur, and of the record of
+long residence in India it established, exceeding that of his next
+competitor by many years. Not a few old warriors that were in those
+battles, and many that knew his later time, will follow him beyond it
+very soon. But he is not gone yet, and his hand can just give back its
+pressure to Sally's, as she sits by him, keeping her heart in and her
+tears back. The actual collapse of vital forces has not come--will not
+come for a few days. He can speak a little as she stoops to hear him.
+
+"Young people like you ought to be in bed, chick, getting beauty-sleep.
+You must go home, and make your mother go.... _You_ go. _I_ shall be
+all right...."
+
+"It isn't night, Major dear"--Sally makes a paltry attempt to
+laugh--"it's three in the afternoon. It's the fog." But she cannot hear
+what he says in answer to this, go close as she may. After a pause of
+rest he tries again, with raised voice:
+
+"Roper--Roper--Old Jack ... mustn't come ... asthma in the fog ...
+somebody go to stop him." He is quite clear-headed, and when Sally says
+she will go at once, he spots the only risk she would run, being young
+and healthy:
+
+"Sure you can find your way? Over the club-house--Hurkaru Club----"
+And then is stopped by a threat of returning cough.
+
+But Sally knows all about it, and can find her way anywhere--so she
+says. She is off in a twinkling, leaving her mother and the nurse to
+wait for the terrible attack that means to come, in due course, as
+soon as the new cough-mixture gets tired.
+
+Sally is a true Londoner. _She_ won't admit, whoever else does,
+that a fog is a real evil. On the contrary, she inclines to Prussian
+tactics--flies in the face of adverse criticism with the decision that
+a fog is rather a lark when you're out in it. Actually face to face
+with a human creature choking, Sally's optimism had wavered. It
+recovers itself in the bracing atmosphere of a main-thoroughfare
+charged to bursting with lines of vehicles, any one of which would
+go slowly alone, but the collective slowness of which finds a vent
+in a deadlock a mile away--an hour before we can move, we here.
+
+By what human agency it comes about that any wheeled vehicle drawn
+of horses can thunder at a hand-gallop through the matrix of such
+a deadlock, Heaven only knows! But the glare of the lamps of the
+fire-brigade, hot upon the wild excitement of their war-cry, shows
+that this particular agglomeration of brass and copper, fraught with
+suppressed energy of steam well up, means to try for it--seems to have
+had some success already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits--the
+rapid _crescendo_ of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that
+might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her
+skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind
+and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing
+"Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound
+of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see,
+Sally believed the Major might pull through even now.
+
+Also the coming of the engine relieved her from what threatened to
+become a permanent embarrassment. A boy, who may have been a good
+boy or may not, had attached himself to her, under pretext of
+either a strong organ of locality or an extensive knowledge of town.
+
+"Take yer 'most anywhere for fourpence! Anywhere yer like to name.
+'Ammersmith, 'Ackney Wick, Noo Cross, Covent Garden Market, Regency
+Park. Come, I say, missis!"
+
+Sally shouldn't have shaken her head as she did. She ought to have
+ignored his existence. He continued:
+
+"I don't mind makin' it thruppence to the Regency Park. Come, missis,
+I say! Think what a little money for the distance. How would _you_
+like to do it yourself?" Sally rashly allowed herself to be led into
+controversy.
+
+"I tell you I don't want to go to Regents Park." But the boy passed
+this protest by--ignored it.
+
+"You won't get no better oarfer. You ask any of the boys. They'll
+tell you all alike. Regency Park for thruppence. Or, lookey here
+now, missis! You make it acrorst Westminster Bridge, and I'll say
+twopence-'a'penny. Come now! Acrorst a bridge!" This boy had quite
+lost sight of the importance of selecting a destination with reference
+to its chooser's life-purposes, in his contemplation of the advantages
+of being professionally conducted to it. Sally was not sorry when the
+coming of the fire-engine distracted his attention, and led to his
+disappearance in the fog.
+
+Pedestrians must have been stopping at home to get a breath of fresh
+air indoors, as the spectres that shot out of the fog, to become
+partly solid and vanish again in an instant, seemed to come always
+one at a time.
+
+"Can you tell me, sir"--Sally is addressing a promising spectre, an
+old gentleman of sweet aspect--"have I passed the Hurkaru Club?" The
+spectre helps an imperfect hearing with an ear-covering outspread hand,
+and Sally repeats her question.
+
+"I hope so, my dear," he says, "I hope so. Because if you haven't, I
+have. I wonder where we are. What's this?" He pats a building at its
+reachable point--a stone balustrade at a step corner. "Why, here we
+are! This is the Club. Can I do anything for you?"
+
+"I want Major Roper"--and then, thinking more explanation asked for,
+adds--"who wheezes." It is the only identification she can recall from
+Tishy's conversation and her mother's description. She herself had
+certainly seen their subject once from a distance, but she had only
+an impression of something purple. She could hardly offer that as
+identification.
+
+"Old Jack! He lives in a kennel at the top. Mulberry, tell Major Roper
+lady for him. Yes, better send your card up, my dear; that's right!"
+
+By this time they are in a lobby full of fog, in which electric light
+spots are showing their spiritless nature. Mulberry, who is like Gibbon
+the historian painted in carmine (a colour which clashes with his
+vermilion lappets), incites a youth to look sharp; also, to take that
+card up to Major Roper. As the boy goes upstairs with it two steps at
+a time Sally follows the old gentleman into a great saloon with standing
+desks to read skewered journals on and is talking to him on the
+hearthrug. She thinks she knows who he is.
+
+"I came to stop Major Roper coming round to see _our_ Major--Colonel
+Lund, I mean. It isn't fit for him to come out in the fog."
+
+"Of course, it isn't. And Lund mustn't come out at his age. Why, he's
+older than I am.... What? Very ill with bronchitis? I heard he'd been
+ailing, but they said he was all right again. Are you his Rosey?"
+
+"No, no; mamma's that! She's more the age, you know. I'm only twenty."
+
+"Ah dear! how one forgets! Of course, but he's bad, I'm afraid."
+
+"He's very bad. Oh, General Pellew--because I know it's you--his cough
+is so dreadful, and there's no air for him because of this nasty fog!
+Poor mamma's there, and the nurse. I ought to hurry back; but he wanted
+to prevent Major Roper coming round and getting worse himself; so we
+agreed for me to come. I'll just give my message and get back."
+
+"Your mamma was Mrs. Graythorpe. I remember her at Umballa years ago.
+I know; she changed her name to Nightingale. She is now Mrs...?" Sally
+supplied her mother's married name. "And you," continued Lord Pellew,
+"were Baby Graythorpe on the boat."
+
+"Of course. You came home with Colonel Lund; he's told me about that.
+Wasn't I a handful?" Sally is keenly interested.
+
+"A small handful. You see, you made an impression. I knew you before,
+though. You had bitten me at Umballa."
+
+"He's told me about that, too. Isn't that Major Roper coming now?" If
+it is not, it must be some one exactly like him, who stops to swear at
+somebody or something at every landing. He comes down by instalments.
+Till the end of the last one, conversation may continue. Sally wants
+to know more about her _trajet_ from India--to take the testimony of
+an eyewitness. "Mamma says always I was in a great rage because they
+wouldn't let me go overboard and swim."
+
+"I couldn't speak to that point. It seems likely, though. I always want
+to jump overboard now, but reason restrains me. You were not reasonable
+at that date."
+
+"It _is_ funny, though, that I have got so fond of swimming since. I'm
+quite a good swimmer."
+
+Major Roper is by this time manifest volcanically at the bottom of the
+staircase, but before he comes in Lord Pellew has time to say so is
+his nasturtium granddaughter a good swimmer. He has thirteen, and
+has christened each of them after a flower. He hopes thirteen isn't
+unlucky, and then Major Roper comes in apologetic. Sally can just
+recollect having seen him before, and thinks him as purple as ever.
+
+"Lund--er!--Lund--er!--Lund--er!--Lund," he begins; each time he says
+the name being baffled by a gasp, but holding tight to Sally's hand, as
+though to make sure of her staying till he gets a chance. He gets none,
+apparently, for he gives it up, whatever he was going to say, with the
+hand, and says instead, in a lucky scrap of intermediate breath: "I was
+comin' round--just comin'--only no gettin' those dam boots on!" And
+then becomes convulsively involved in an apology for swearing before
+a young lady. She, for her part, has no objection to his damning his
+boots if he will take them off, and not go out. This she partly
+conveys, and then, after a too favourable brief report of the patient's
+state--inevitable under the circumstances--she continues:
+
+"That's what I came on purpose to say, Major Roper. You're not to come
+out on any account in the fog. Colonel Lund wouldn't be any better for
+your coming, because he'll think of you going back through the fog,
+and he'll fret. Please do give up the idea of coming until it clears.
+Besides, he isn't my grandfather." An inconsecutive finish to correct
+a mistake of Old Jack's. She resumes the chair she had risen from when
+he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no
+breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a
+chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's
+last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains
+standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see
+both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes to the Major
+in time.
+
+"Good Lard, my dear--excuse--old chap, you know!--why, good Lard, what
+a fool I am! Why, I knoo your father in India."
+
+But he stops suddenly, to Sally inexplicably. She does not see that
+General Pellew has laid a finger of admonition on his lips.
+
+"I never saw my father," she says. It is a kind of formula of hers
+which covers all contingencies with most people. This time she does not
+want it to deadlock the conversation, which is what it usually serves
+for, so she adds: "You really knew him?"
+
+"Hardly knoo," is the reply. "Put it I met him two or three times, and
+you'll about toe the line for a start. Goin' off at that, we soon come
+up to my knowin' the Colonel's not your grandfather." Major Roper does
+not get through the whole of the last word--asthma forbids it--but his
+meaning is clear. Only, Sally is a direct Turk, as we have seen, and
+likes clearing up things.
+
+"You know my friend Laetitia Wilson's mother, Major Roper?" The Major
+expresses not only that he does, but that his respectful homage is due
+to her as a fine woman--even a queenly one--by kissing his finger-tips
+and raising his eyes to heaven. "Well, Laetitia (Tishy, I call her)
+says you told her mother you knew my father in India, and went out
+tiger-hunting with him, and he shot a tiger two hundred yards off and
+gave you the skin." Sally lays stress on the two hundred yards as
+a means of identification of the case. No doubt the Major owned many
+skins, but shot at all sorts of distances.
+
+It is embarrassing for the old boy, because he cannot ignore General
+Pellew's intimations over Sally's head, which she does not see. He is
+to hold his tongue--that is their meaning. Yes, but when you have made
+a mistake, it may be difficult to begin holding it in the middle.
+Perhaps it would have been safer to lose sight of the subject in the
+desert of asthma, instead of reviving it the moment he got to an oasis.
+
+"Some misunderstanding'," said he, when he could speak. "I've got a
+tiger-skin the man who shot it gave me out near Nagpore, but he wasn't
+your father." How true that was!
+
+"Do you remember his name?" Sally wants him to say it was Palliser
+again, to prove it all nonsense, but a warning finger of the old
+General makes him desperate, and he selects, as partially true, the
+supposed alias which--do you remember all this?--he had ascribed to
+the tiger-shooter in his subsequent life in Australia.
+
+"Perfectly well. His name was Harrisson. A fine shot. He went away
+to Australia after that."
+
+Sally laughs out. "How very absurd of Tishy!" she says. "She hadn't
+even got the name you said right. _She_ said it was Palliser. It sounds
+like Harrisson." She stopped to think a minute. "But even if she had
+said it right it wouldn't be my father, because his name, you know,
+was Graythorpe--like mine before we both changed to Nightingale--mother
+and I. We did, you know."
+
+Old Jack assents to this with an expenditure of breath not warranted
+where breath is so scarce. He cannot say "of course," and that he
+recollects, too often. Perhaps he is glad to get on a line of veracity.
+The General says "of course," also. "Your mother, my dear, was Mrs.
+Graythorpe when I knew her at Umballa and on the boat." Both these
+veterans call Sally "my dear," and she doesn't resent it.
+
+But her message is really given, and she ought to get back. She
+succeeds in finally overruling Major Roper's scheme of coming out into
+the fog, which has contrived to get blacker still during this
+conversation; but has more trouble with the other old soldier. She
+only overcomes that victor in so many battle-fields by representing
+that if he does see her safe to Ball Street _she_ will be miserable if
+she doesn't see _him_ safe back to the club. "And then," she adds, "we
+shall go on till doomsday. Besides, I _am_ young and sharp!" At which
+the old General laughs, and says isn't _he_? Ask his granddaughters!
+Sally says no, he isn't, and she can't have him run over to please
+anybody. However, he will come out to see her off, though Old Jack must
+do as he's told, and stop indoors. He watches the little figure vanish
+in the fog, with a sense of the merry eyebrows in the pretty shoulders,
+like the number of a cab fixed on behind.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When General Pellew had seen Sally out, to the great relief of Gibbon
+of the various reds in the lobby, he returned and drew a chair for
+himself beside Major Roper, who still sat, wrestling with the fog,
+where he had left him.
+
+"What a dear child!... Oh yes; she'll be all right. Take better care
+of herself than I should of her. She would only have been looking after
+me, to see that I didn't get run over." He glanced round and dropped
+his voice, leaning forward to the Major. "She must never be told."
+
+"You're right, Pelloo! Dam mistake of mine to say! I'm a dam
+mutton-headed old gobblestick! No better!" We give up trying to
+indicate the Major's painful interruptions and struggles. Of course,
+he might have saved himself a good deal by saying no more than was
+necessary. General Pellew was much more concise and to the purpose.
+
+"_Never_ be told. I see one thing. Her mother has told her little or
+nothing of the separation."
+
+"No! Dam bad business! Keep it snug's the word."
+
+"You saw she had no idea of the name. It _was_ Palliser, wasn't it?"
+
+"Unless it was Verschoyle." Major Roper only says this to convince
+himself that he might have forgotten the name--a sort of washy
+palliation of his Harrisson invention. It brings him within a
+measurable distance of a clear conscience.
+
+"No, it wasn't Verschoyle. I remember the Verschoyle case." By this
+time Old Jack is feeling quite truthful. "It _was_ Palliser, and
+it's not for me to blame him. He only did what you or I might have
+done--any man. A bit hot-headed, perhaps. But look here, Roper...."
+
+The General dropped his voice, and went on speaking almost in a
+whisper, but earnestly, for more than a minute. Then he raised it
+again.
+
+"It was that point. If you say a word to the girl, or begin giving
+her any information, and she gets the idea you can tell her more,
+she'll just go straight for you and say she must be told the whole.
+I can see it in her eyes. And _you can't tell her the whole_. You
+know you can't!"
+
+The Major fidgeted visibly. He knew he should go round to learn about
+his old friend (it was barely a quarter of a mile) as soon as the least
+diminution of the fog gave him an excuse. And he was sure to see Sally.
+He exaggerated her age. "The gyairl's twenty-two," said he weakly. The
+General continued:
+
+"I'm only speaking, mind you, on the hypothesis.... I'm supposing the
+case to have been what I told you just now. Otherwise, you could
+work the telling of it on the usual lines--unfaithfulness, estranged
+affections, desertion--all the respectable produceable phrases. But as
+for making that little Miss Nightingale _understand_--that is, without
+making her life unbearable to her--it can't be done, Major. It can't
+be done, old chap!"
+
+"I see your game. I'll tell her to ask her mother."
+
+"It can't be done that way. I hope the child's safe in the fog." The
+General embarked on a long pause. There was plenty of time--more time
+than he had (so his thought ran) when his rear-guard was cut off by the
+Afridis in the Khyber Pass. But then the problem was not so difficult
+as telling this live girl how she came to be one--telling her, that is,
+without poisoning her life and shrouding her heart in a fog as dense
+as the one that was going to make the street-lamps outside futile
+when night should come to help it--telling her without dashing the
+irresistible glee of those eyebrows and quenching the smile that
+opened the casket of pearls that all who knew her thought of her by.
+
+Both old soldiers sat on to think it out. The older one first
+recognised the insolubility of the problem. "It can't be done," said
+he. "Girls are not alike. She's too much like my nasturtium
+granddaughter now...."
+
+"I shall have to tell her dam lies."
+
+"That won't hurt you, Old Jack."
+
+"I'm not complainin'."
+
+"Besides, I shall have to tell 'em, too, as likely as not. You must
+tell me what you've told, so as to agree. I should go round to ask
+after Lund, only I promised to meet an old thirty-fifth man here at
+five. It's gone half-past. He's lost in the fog. But I can't go away
+till he comes." Old Jack is seized with an unreasoning sanguineness.
+
+"The fog's clearin'," he says. "You'll see, it'll be quite bright in
+half-an-hour. Nothin' near so bad as it was, now. Just you look at
+that window."
+
+The window in question, when looked at, was not encouraging. So far as
+could be seen at all through the turgid atmosphere of the room, it was
+a parallelogram of solid opacity crossed by a window-frame, with a
+hopeless tinge of Roman ochre. But Old Jack was working up to a fiction
+to serve a purpose. By the time he had succeeded in believing the fog
+was lifting he would be absolved from his promise not to go out in it.
+It was a trial of strength between credulity and the actual. The
+General looked at the window and asked a bystander what he thought,
+sir? Who felt bound to testify that he thought the prospect hopeless.
+
+"You're allowin' nothin' for the time of day," said Major Roper, and
+his motive was transparent. Sure enough, after the General's friend
+had come for him, an hour late, the Major took advantage of the doubt
+whether absolute darkness was caused by fog or mere night, and in spite
+of all remonstrances, began pulling on his overcoat to go out. He
+even had the effrontery to appeal to the hall-porter to confirm his
+views about the state of things out of doors. Mr. Mulberry added his
+dissuasions with all the impressiveness of his official uniform and the
+cubic area of its contents. But even his powerful influence carried no
+weight in this case. It was useless to argue with the infatuated old
+boy, who was evidently very uneasy about Major Lund, and suspected also
+that Miss Nightingale had not reported fair, in order to prevent him
+coming. He made himself into a perfect bolster with wraps, and put on
+a respirator. This damned thing, however, he took off again, as it
+impeded respiration, and then went out into the all but solid fog,
+gasping and choking frightfully, to feel his way to Hill Street and
+satisfy himself the best thing was being done to his old friend's
+bronchitis.
+
+"They'll kill him with their dam nostrums," said he to the last member
+of the Club he spoke to, a chance ex-Secretary of State for India, whom
+he took into his confidence on the doorstep. "A little common-sense,
+sir--that's what's wanted in these cases. It's all very fine, sir, when
+the patient's young and can stand it...." His cough interrupted him,
+but he was understood to express that medical attendance was fraught
+with danger to persons of advanced years, and that in such cases his
+advice should be taken in preference to that of the profession. He
+recovered enough to tell Mulberry's subordinate to stop blowin'
+that dam whistle. There were cabs enough and to spare, he said, but
+they were affecting non-existence from malicious motives, and as a
+stepping-stone to ultimate rapacity. Then he vanished in the darkness,
+and was heard coughing till he turned a corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOW MAJOR ROPER MET THAT BOY, AND GOT UPSTAIRS AT BALL STREET. AN
+ INTERVIEW BETWEEN ASTHMA AND BRONCHITIS. HOW SALLY PINIONED THE PURPLE
+ VETERAN, AND THERE WAS NO BOY. HOW THE GOVERNOR DONE HOARCKIN', AND GOT
+ QUALIFIED FOR A SUBJECT OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
+
+
+Old Jack's powers of self-delusion were great indeed if, when he
+started on his short journey, he really believed the fog had mended. At
+least, it was so dense that he might never have found his way without
+assistance. This he met with in the shape of a boy with a link, whom
+Sally at once identified from his description, given when the Major had
+succeeded in getting up the stairs and was resting in the sitting-room
+near the old sabre on the wall, wiping his eyes after his effort.
+Colonel Lund was half-unconscious after a bad attack, and it was best
+not to disturb him. Fenwick had not returned, and no one was very easy
+about him. But every one affirmed the reverse, and joined in a sort of
+Creed to the effect that the fog was clearing. It wasn't and didn't
+mean to for some time. But the unanimity of the creed fortified the
+congregation, as in other cases. No two believers doubted it at once,
+just as no two Alpine climbers, strung together on the moraine of
+a glacier, lose their foothold at the same time.
+
+"I know that boy," said Sally. "His nose twists, and gives him a
+presumptuous expression, and he has a front tooth out and puts his
+tongue through. Also his trousers are tied on with strings."
+
+"Everlastin' young beggar, if ever there was one," says the old
+soldier, in a lucid interval when speech is articulate. But he is
+allowing colloquialism to run riot over meaning. No everlasting person
+can ever have become part of the past if you think of it. He goes on to
+say that the boy has had twopence and is to come back for fourpence in
+an hour, or threepence if you can see the gas-lamps, because then
+a link will be superfluous. Sally recognises the boy more than ever.
+
+"I wonder," she says, "if he's waiting outside. Because the party of
+the house might allow him inside. Do you think I could ask, mother?"
+
+"You might _try_, kitten," is the reply, not given sanguinely. And
+Sally goes off, benevolent. "Even when your trousers are tied up with
+string, a fog's a fog," says she to herself.
+
+"I knoo our friend Lund first of all...." Thus the Major, nodding
+towards the bedroom door.... "Why, God bless my soul, ma'am, I knew
+Lund first of all, forty-six years ago in Delhi. Forty--six--years!
+And all that time, if you believe me, he's been the same obstinate
+moole. Never takin' a precaution about anythin', nor listening to
+a word of advice!" This is about as far as he can go without a choke.
+Rosalind goes into the next room to get a tumbler of water. The nurse,
+who is sitting by the fire, nods towards the bed, and Rosalind goes
+close to it to hear. "What is it, dear?" She speaks to the invalid
+as to a little child.
+
+"Isn't that Old Jack choking? I know his choke. What does he come out
+for in weather like this? What does he mean? Send him back.... No,
+send him in here." The nurse puts in a headshake as protest. But for
+all that, Sally finds, when she returns, that the two veterans are
+contending together against their two enemies, bronchitis and asthma,
+with the Intelligence Department sadly interrupted, and the enemy in
+possession of all the advantageous points.
+
+"He oughtn't to try to talk," says Rosalind. "But he will." She and
+Sally and the nurse sit on in the fog-bound front room. The gas-lights
+have no heart in them, and each wears a nimbus. Rosalind wishes Gerry
+would return, aloud. Sally is buoyant about him; _he's_ all right,
+trust _him_! What about the everlasting young beggar?
+
+"I persuaded Mrs. Kindred," says Sally. "And we looked outside for him,
+and he'd gone."
+
+"Fancy a woman being named Kindred!"
+
+"When people are so genteel one can believe anything! But what do you
+think the boy's name is?... Chancellorship! Isn't that queer? She knows
+him--says he's always about in the neighbourhood. He sleeps in the
+mews behind Great Toff House."
+
+Her mother isn't listening. She rises for a moment to hear what she may
+of how the talk in the next room goes on; and then, coming back, says
+again she wishes Gerry was safe indoors, and Sally again says, "Oh,
+_he's_ all right!" The confidence these two have in one another makes
+them a couple apart--a sort of league.
+
+What Mrs. Fenwick heard a scrap of in the next room would have been,
+but for the alarums and excursions of the two enemies aforementioned,
+a consecutive conversation as follows:
+
+"You're gettin' round, Colonel?"
+
+"A deal better, Major. I want to speak to _you_."
+
+"Fire away, old Cockywax! You remember Hopkins?--Cartwright
+Hopkins--man with a squint--at Mooltan--expression of his, 'Old
+Cockywax.'"
+
+"I remember him. Died of typhoid at Burrampore. Now you listen to me,
+old chap, and don't talk--you only make yourself cough."
+
+"It's only the dam fog. _I'm_ all right."
+
+"Well, shut up. That child in the next room--it's her I want to talk
+about. You're the only man, as far as I know, that knows the story.
+She doesn't. She's not to be told."
+
+"Mum's the word, sir. Always say nothin', that's my motto.
+Penderfield's daughter at Khopal--at least, he was her father. One dam
+father's as good as another, as long as he goes to the devil." This may
+be a kind of disclaimer of inheritance as a factor to be reckoned with,
+an obscure suggestion that human parentage is without influence on
+character. It is not well expressed.
+
+"Listen to me, Roper. You know the story. That's the only man I can't
+say God forgive him to. God forgive _me_, but I can't."
+
+"Devil take me if I can!... Yes, it's all right. They're all in the
+next room...."
+
+"But the woman was worse. She's living, you know...."
+
+"I know--shinin' light--purifying society--that's her game! I'd purify
+_her_, if I had my way."
+
+"Come a bit nearer--my voice goes. I've thought it all out. If the
+girl, who supposes herself to be the daughter of her mother's husband,
+tries to run you into a corner--you understand?"
+
+"I understand."
+
+"Well, don't you undeceive her. Her mother has never told her
+_anything_. She doesn't suppose she had any hand in the divorce. She
+thinks his name was Graythorpe, and doesn't know he wasn't her father.
+Don't you undeceive her--promise."
+
+But the speaker is so near the end of his tether that the Major has
+barely time to say, "Honour bright, Colonel," when the bronchial storm
+bursts. It may be that the last new anodyne, which is warranted to have
+all the virtues and none of the ill-effects of opium, had also come to
+the end of _its_ tether. Mrs. Fenwick came quickly in, saying he had
+talked too much; and Sally, following her, got Major Roper away,
+leaving the patient to her mother and the nurse. The latter knew what
+it would be with all this talking--now the temperature would go up,
+and he would have a bad night, and what would Dr. Mildmay say?
+
+Till the storm had subsided and a new dose of the sedative had been
+given, Sally and Old Jack stood waiting in sympathetic pain--you
+know what it is when you can do nothing. The latter derived some
+insignificant comfort from suggestions through his own choking that
+all this was due to neglect of his advice. When only moans and heavy
+breathing were left, Sally went back into the bedroom. Her mother was
+nursing the poor old racked head on her bosom, with the sword-hand of
+the days gone by in her own. She said without speaking that he would
+sleep presently, and the fewer in the room the better, and Sally left
+them so, and went back.
+
+Yes, the Major would take some toddy before he started for home. And
+it was all ready, lemons and all, in the black polished wood cellaret,
+with eagles' claws for feet. Sally got the ingredients out and began
+to make it. But first she gently closed the door between the rooms,
+to keep the sound of their voices in.
+
+"You really did see my father, though, Major?" There seemed to be
+a good deal of consideration before the answer came, not all to be
+accounted for by asthma.
+
+"Yes--certainly--oh yes. I saw Mr. Graythorpe once or twice. Another
+spoonful--that's plenty." A pause.
+
+"Now, don't spill it. Take care, it's very hot. That's right." Another
+pause. "Major Roper...."
+
+"Yes, my dear. What?"
+
+"_Do_ tell me what he was like."
+
+"Have you never seen his portrait?"
+
+"Mother burnt it while I was small. She told me. Do tell me what you
+recollect him like."
+
+"Fine handsome feller--well set up. Fine shot, too! Gad! that was a
+neat thing! A bullet through a tiger two hundred yards off just behind
+the ear."
+
+"But I thought _his_ name was Harrisson." The Major has got out of his
+depth entirely through his own rashness. Why couldn't he leave that
+tiger alone? Now he has to get into safe water again.
+
+A good long choke is almost welcome at this moment. While it goes on he
+can herald, by a chronic movement of a raised finger, his readiness to
+explain all as soon as it stops. He catches at his first articulation,
+so that not a moment may be lost. There were _two_ tigers--that's the
+explanation. Harrisson shot one, and Graythorpe the other. The
+cross-examiner is dissatisfied.
+
+"Which was the one that shot the tiger two hundred yards off, just
+behind the ear?"
+
+The old gentleman responds with a spirited decision: "Your father,
+my dear, your father. That tiger round at my rooms--show it you if
+you like--that skin was given me by a feller named Harrisson, in the
+Commissariat--quite another sort of Johnny. He was down with the
+Central Indian Horse--quite another place!" He dwells on the
+inferiority of this shot, the smallness of the skin, the close
+contiguity of its owner. A very inferior affair!
+
+But, being desperately afraid of blundering again, he makes the fact
+he admits, that he had confoozed between the two cases, a reason for
+a close analysis of the merits of each. This has no interest for
+Sally, who, indeed, had only regarded the conversation, so far, as a
+stepping-stone she now wanted to leap to the mainland from. After all,
+here she is face-to-face with a man who actually knows the story of the
+separation, and can talk of it without pain. Why should she not get
+something from him, however little? You see, the idea of a something
+that could not be told was necessarily foreign to a mind some
+somethings could not be told to. But she felt it would be difficult to
+account to Major Roper for her own position. The fact that she knew
+nothing proved that her mother and Colonel Lund had been anxious she
+should know nothing. She could not refer to an outsider over their
+heads. Still, she hoped, as Major Roper was deemed on all hands an
+arrant old gossip, that he might accidentally say something to enlighten
+her. She prolonged the conversation in this hope.
+
+"Was that before I was born?"
+
+"The tiger-shootin'? Well, reely, my dear, I shouldn't like to say.
+It's twenty years ago, you see. No, I couldn't say--couldn't say when
+it was." He is beginning to pack himself in a long woollen scarf an
+overcoat with fur facings will shortly cover in, and is, in fact,
+preparing to evacuate a position he finds untenable. "I must be
+thinkin' of gettin' home," he says. Sally tries for a word more.
+
+"Was it before he and mother fell out?" It is on the Major's lips to
+say, "Before the proceedings?" but he changes the expression.
+
+"Before the split? Well, no; I should say after the split.
+Yes--probably after the split." But an unfortunate garrulity prompts
+him to say more. "After the split, I should say, and before
+the----"--and then he feels he is in a quagmire, and flounders to the
+nearest land--"before your father went away to Australia." Then he
+discerns his own feebleness, recognising the platitude of this last
+remark. For nobody could shoot tigers in an Indian jungle after he had
+gone off to Australia. Clearly the sooner he gets away the better.
+
+A timely choking-fit interposes to preserve its victim from further
+questioning. The patient in the next room is asleep or torpid, so he
+omits farewells. Sally's mother comes out to say good-night, and Sally
+goes down the staircase with him and his asthma, feeling that it is
+horrible and barbarous to turn him out alone in the dense blackness.
+Perhaps, however, the peculiar boy with the strange name will be there.
+That would be better than nothing. Sally feels there is something
+indomitable about that boy, and that fog nourishes and stimulates it.
+
+But, alas!--there is no boy. And yet it certainly would be fourpence
+if he came back. For, though it may be possible to see the street
+gas-lamps without getting inside the glass, you can't see them from
+the pavement. Nevertheless, the faith that "it" is clearing having been
+once founded, lives on itself in the face of evidence, even as other
+faiths have done before now. So the creed is briefly recited, and the
+Major disappears with the word good-night still on his lips, and his
+cough, gasp, or choke dies away in the fog as he vanishes.
+
+Somebody is whistling "Arr-hyd-y-nos" as he comes from the other side
+in the darkness--somebody who walks with a swinging step and a resonant
+foot-beat, some one who cares nothing for fogs. Fenwick's voice is
+defiant of it, exhilarated and exhilarating, as he ceases to be a cloud
+and assumes an outline. Sally gives a kiss to frozen hair that crackles.
+
+"What's the kitten after, out in the cold? How's the Major?"
+
+"Which? _Our_ Major? He's a bit better, and the temperature's lower."
+Sally believed this; a little thermometer thing was being wielded as
+an implement of optimism, and had lent itself to delusions.
+
+"Oh, how scrunchy you are, your hands are all ice! Mamma's been getting
+in a stew about _you_, squire." On which Fenwick, with the slightest of
+whistles, passes Sally quickly and goes four steps at a time up the
+stairs, still illuminated by Sally's gas-waste. For she had left the
+lights at full cock all the way up.
+
+"My dearest, you never got my telegram?" This is to Rosalind, who
+has come out on the landing to meet him. But the failure of the
+telegram--lost in the fog, no doubt--is a small matter. What shelves
+it is the patient grief on the tired, handsome face Fenwick finds
+tears on as he kisses it. Sally has the optimism all to herself now.
+Her mother knows that her old friend and protector will not be here
+long--that, of course, has been true some time. But there's the
+suffering, present and to come.
+
+"We needn't stop the chick hoping a little still if she likes." She
+says it in a whisper. Sally is on the landing below; she hears the
+whispering, and half guesses its meaning. Then she suppresses the
+last gas-tap, and follows on into the front room, where the three sit
+talking in undertones for perhaps an hour.
+
+Yes, that monotonous sound is the breathing of the patient in the next
+room, under the new narcotic which has none of the bad effects of
+opium. The nurse is there watching him, and wondering whether it will
+be a week, or twenty-four hours. She derives an impression from
+something that the fog really is clearing at last, and goes to the
+window to see. She is right, for at a window opposite are dimly
+visible, from the candles on either side of the mirror, two white arms
+that are "doing" the hair of a girl whose stays are much too tight.
+She is dressing for late dinner or an early party. Then the nurse,
+listening, understands that the traffic has been roused from its long
+lethargy. "I thought I heard the wheels," she says to herself. Then
+Sally also becomes aware of the sound in the traffic, and goes to _her_
+window in the front room.
+
+"You see I'm right," she says. "The people are letting their fires out,
+and the fog's giving. Now I'm going to take you home, Jeremiah." For
+the understanding is that these two shall return to Krakatoa Villa,
+leaving Rosalind to watch with the nurse. She will get a chop in half
+an hour's time. She can sleep on the sofa in the front room if she
+feels inclined. All which is duty carried out or arranged for.
+
+After her supper Rosalind sat on by herself before the fire in the
+front room. She did not want to be unsociable with the nurse; but she
+wanted to think, alone. A weight was on her mind; the thought that the
+dear old friend, who had been her father and refuge, should never know
+that she again possessed her recovered husband on terms almost as good
+as if that deadly passage in her early life had never blasted the
+happiness of both. He would die, and it would have made him so happy to
+know it. Was she right in keeping it back now? Had she ever been right?
+
+But if she told him now, the shock of the news might hasten his
+collapse. Sudden news need not be bad to cause sudden death. And, maybe
+the story would be too strange for him to grasp. Better be silent. But
+oh! if he might have shared her happiness!
+
+Drowsiness was upon her before she knew it. Better perhaps sleep a
+little now, while he was sleeping. She looked in at him, and spoke to
+the nurse. He lay there like a lifeless waxwork--blown through, like
+an apparatus out of order, to simulate breath, and doing it badly.
+How could he sleep when now and then it jerked him so? He could, and
+she left him and lay down, and went suddenly to sleep. After a time
+that was a journey through a desert, without landmarks, she was as
+suddenly waked.
+
+"What?... I thought you spoke...." And so some one had spoken, but
+not to her. She started up, and went to where the nurse was conversing
+through the open window with an inarticulate person in the street
+below, behind the thick window-curtain she had kept overlapped, to
+check the freezing air.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a boy. I can't make out what he says."
+
+"Let me come!" But Rosalind gets no nearer his meaning. She ends up
+with, "I'll come down," and goes. The nurse closes the window and goes
+back to the bedroom.
+
+The street door opens easily, the Chubb lock being the only fastening.
+The moment Rosalind sees the boy near she recognises him. There is no
+doubt about the presumptuous expression, or the cause of it. Also the
+ostentatious absence of the front tooth, clearly accounting for
+inaudibility at a distance.
+
+"What do you want?" asks Rosalind.
+
+"Nothin' at all for myself. I come gratis, I did. There's a many
+wouldn't." He is not too audible, even now; but he would be better
+if he did not suck the cross-rail of the area paling.
+
+"Why did you come?"
+
+"To bring you the nooze. The old bloke's a friend of yours, missis.
+Or p'r'aps he ain't! I can mizzle, you know, and no harm done."
+
+"Oh no, don't mizzle on any account. Tell me about the old bloke.
+Do you mean Major Roper?"
+
+"Supposin' I do, why shouldn't I?" This singular boy seems to have
+no way of communicating with his species except through defiances
+and refutations. Rosalind accepts his question as an ordinary assent,
+and does not make the mistake of entering into argument.
+
+"Is he ill?" The boy nods. "Is he worse?" Another nod. "Has he gone
+home to his club?" The boy evidently has a revelation to make, but
+would consider it undignified to make it except as a denial of
+something to the contrary. He sees his way after a brief reflection.
+
+"He ain't gone. He's been took."
+
+"He's been taken? How has he been taken?"
+
+"On a perambulance. Goin' easy! But he didn't say nothin'. Not harf
+a word!"
+
+"Had he fainted?" But this boy has another characteristic--when he
+cannot understand he will not admit it. He keeps silence, and goes
+on absorbing the railing. Rosalind asks further: "Was he dead?"
+
+"It'd take a lawyer to tell that, missis."
+
+"I can't stand here in the cold, my boy. Come in, and come up and
+tell us." So he comes up, and Rosalind speaks to the nurse in the
+other room, who comes; and then they turn seriously to getting the
+boy's story.
+
+He is all the easier for examination from the fact that he is
+impressed, if not awed, by his surroundings. All the bounce is knocked
+out of him, now that his foot is no longer on his native heath, the
+street. Witness that the subject of his narrative, who would certainly
+have been the old bloke where there was a paling to suck, has become
+a simple pronoun, and no more!
+
+"I see him afore, missis," he says. "That time wot I lighted him
+round for twopence. And he says to come again in three-quarters of
+an hour. And I says yes, I says. And he says not to be late. Nor yet
+I shouldn't, only the water run so slow off the main, and I was
+kep.... Yes, missis--a drorin' of it off in their own pails at the
+balkny house by the mooze, where the supply is froze...."
+
+"I see, you got a job to carry up pails of water from that thing that
+sticks up in the road?"
+
+"Yes, missis; by means of the turncock. Sim'lar I got wet. But I didn't
+go to be late. It warn't much, in the manner of speakin'. I was on his
+'eels, clost."
+
+"You caught him?"
+
+"Heard him hoarckin' in the fog, and I says to my mate--boy by the name
+of 'Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him--I
+says--I says that was my guv'nor, safe and square, by the token of the
+sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin' by the
+sound. My word, missis, he _was_ bad! Wanted to holler me over the
+coals, he did, for behind my time. I could hear him wantin' to do it.
+But he couldn't come by the breath."
+
+Poor Old Jack! The two women look at each other, and then say to the
+boy: "Go on."
+
+"Holdin' by the palins, he was, and goin' slow. Then he choked it
+off like, and got a chanst for a word, and he says: 'Now, you young
+see-saw'--that's what he said, missis, 'see-saw'--'just you stir your
+stumps and cut along to the clubbus: and tell that dam red-faced fool
+Mulberry to look sharp and send one of the young fellers to lend an
+arm, and not to come hisself.' And then he got out a little flat bottle
+of something short, and went for a nip; but the cough took him, and it
+sprouted over his wropper and was wasted."
+
+The women look at each other again. The nurse sees well into the story,
+and says quickly under her breath to Rosalind: "He'd been told what to
+do if he felt it coming. A drop of brandy might have made the
+difference." The boy goes on as soon as he is waited for.
+
+"Mr. Mulberry he comes runnin' hisself, and a couple more on 'em! And
+then they all calls me a young varmint by reason of the guv'nor having
+got lost. But a gentleman what comes up, he says all go opposite ways,
+he says, and you'll hear him in the fog. So I runs up a parsage, and
+in the middle of the parsage I tumbles over the guv'nor lyin' acrost
+the parsage. Then I hollers, and then they come."
+
+"Oh dear!" says Rosalind; for this boy had that terrible power of vivid
+description which flinches at no realism--_seems_ to enjoy the horror
+of it; does not really. Probably it was only his intense anxiety to
+communicate _all_, struggling with his sense of his lack of language--a
+privilege enjoyed by guv'nors. But Rosalind feels the earnestness of
+his brief epic. He winds it up:
+
+"But the guv'nor, he'd done hoarckin'. Nor he never spoke. The
+gentleman I told you, he says leave him lyin' a minute, he says, and
+he runs. Then back he comes with the apoarthecary--him with the red
+light--and they rips the guv'nor's sleeves up, spilin' his coat. And
+they prokes into his arm with a packin'-needle. Much use it done! And
+then they says, it warn't the fog, and I called 'em a liar. 'Cos it's
+a clearin' off, they says. It warn't, not much. I see the perambulance
+come, and they shoved him in, and I hooked it off, and heard 'em
+saying where's that young shaver, they says; he'll be wanted for his
+testament. So I hooked it off."
+
+"And where did you go?"
+
+"To a wisit on a friend, I did. Me and Slimy--him I mentioned afore.
+And he says, he says, to come on here--on'y later. So then I come on
+here."
+
+Rosalind finds herself, in the face of what she feels must mean Old
+Jack's sudden death, thinking how sorry she is she can command no pair
+of trousers of a reasonable size to replace this boy's drenched ones--a
+pair that would need no string. A crude brew of hot toddy, and most of
+the cake that had appealed to Major Roper in vain, and never gone back
+to the cellaret, were the only consolations possible. They seemed
+welcome, but under protest.
+
+"Shan't I carry of 'em outside, missis?"
+
+"On the stairs, then." This assent is really because both women believe
+he will be comfortabler there than in the room. "Where are you going to
+sleep?" Rosalind asks, as he takes the cake and tumbler away to the
+stairs. She puts a gas-jet on half-cock.
+
+"Twopenny doss in Spur Street, off of 'Orseferry Road, Westminster."
+This identification is to help Rosalind, as she may not be able to spot
+this particular doss-house among all she knows.
+
+"Do you always sleep there?"
+
+"No, missis! Weather permitting, in our mooze--on the 'eap. The
+'orse-keeper gives a sack in return for a bit of cleanin', early,
+before comin' away."
+
+"What are you?" says Rosalind. She is thinking aloud more than asking
+a question. But the boy answers:
+
+"I'm a wife, I am. Never learned no tride, ye see!... Oh yes; I've been
+to school--board-school scollard. But they don't learn you no tride.
+You parses your standards and chucks 'em." This incredible boy, who
+deliberately called himself a waif (that was his meaning), was it
+possible that he had passed through a board-school? Well, perhaps he
+was the highest type of competitive examinee, who can learn everything
+and forget everything.
+
+"But you have a father?"
+
+"I could show him you. But he don't hold with teachin' his sons trides,
+by reason of their gettin' some of his wiges. He's in the sanitary
+engineering himself, but he don't do no work." Rosalind looks puzzled.
+"That's his tride--sanitary engineering, lavatries, plumbin', and
+fittin'. Been out of work better than three years. He can jint you off
+puppies' tails, though, at a shillin'. But he don't only get a light
+job now and again, 'cos the tride ain't wot it was. They've been
+shearin' of 'em off of late years. Thank you, missis." The refreshments
+have vanished as by magic, and Rosalind gives the boy the rest of the
+cake and a coin, and he goes away presumably to the doss-house he
+smells so strong of, having been warmed, that a flavour of the heap in
+the mews would have been welcome in exchange. So Rosalind thinks as she
+opens the window a moment and looks out. She can quite see the houses
+opposite. The fog has cleared till the morning.
+
+Perhaps it is the relenting of the atmospheric conditions, or perhaps
+it is the oxygen that the patient has been inhaling off and on, that
+has slightly revived him. Or perhaps it is the champagne that comes up
+through a tap in the cork, and reminds Rosalind's ill-slept brain of
+something heard very lately--what on earth exactly was it? Oh, she
+knows! Of course, the thing in the street the sanitary engineer's
+son drew the pails of water at for the house with the balcony. It is
+pleasanter to know; might have fidgeted her if she had not found out.
+But she is badly in want of sleep, that's the truth!
+
+"I thought Major Roper was gone, Rosey." He can talk through his heavy
+breathing. It must be the purer air.
+
+"So he is, dear. He went two hours ago." She sits by him, taking his
+hand as before. The nurse is, by arrangement, to take her spell of
+sleep now.
+
+"I suppose it's my head. I thought he was here just now--just this
+minute."
+
+"No, dear; you've mixed him up with Gerry, when he came in to say
+good-night. Major Roper went away first. It wasn't seven o'clock." But
+there is something excited and puzzled in the patient's voice as he
+answers--something that makes her feel creepy.
+
+"Are you _sure_? I mean, when he came back into the room with his
+coat on."
+
+"You are dreaming, dear! He never came back. He went straight away."
+
+"Dreaming! Not a bit of it. You weren't here." He is so positive that
+Rosalind thinks best to humour him.
+
+"I suppose I was speaking to Mrs. Kindred. What did he come back to
+say, dear?"
+
+"Oh, nothing! At least, I had told him not to chatter to Sallykin about
+the old story, and he came back, I suppose, to say he wouldn't." He
+seemed to think the incident, as an incident, closed; but presently
+goes on talking about things that arise from it.
+
+"Old Jack's the only one of them all that knew anything about it--that
+Sallykin is likely to come across. Pellew knew, of course; but he's not
+an old chatterbox like Roper."
+
+Ought not Rosalind to tell the news that has just reached her? She asks
+herself the question, and answers it: "Not till he rallies, certainly.
+If he does not rally, why then----!" Why then he either will know or
+won't want to.
+
+She has far less desire to tell him this than she has to talk of
+the identity of her husband. She would almost be glad, as he is to
+die--her old friend--that she should have some certainty beforehand
+of the exact time of his death, so that she might, only for an hour
+a companion in her secrecy. If only he and she might have borne the
+burden of it together! She reproached herself, now that it was too
+late, with her mistrust of his powers of retaining a secret. See how
+keenly alive he was to the need of keeping Sally's parentage in the
+dark! And _that_ was what the whole thing turned on. Gerry's continued
+ignorance might be desirable, but was a mere flea-bite by comparison.
+In her strained, sleepless, overwrought state the wish that "the Major"
+should know of her happiness while they could still speak of it
+together grew from a passing thought of how nice it might have been,
+that could not be, to a dumb dominant longing that it should be. Still,
+after all, the only fear was that he should talk to Gerry; and how easy
+to keep Gerry out of the room! And suppose he did talk! Would Gerry
+believe him? There was risky ground there, though.
+
+She was not sorry when no more speech came through the heavy breathing
+of the invalid. He had talked a good deal, and a semi-stupor followed,
+relieving her from the strong temptation she had felt to lead him back
+to their past memories, and feel for some means of putting him in
+possession of the truth. As the tension of her mind grew less, she
+became aware this would have been no easy thing to do. Then, as she sat
+holding the old hand, and wondering that anything so frail could still
+keep in bond a spirit weary of its prison, drowsiness crept over her
+once more, all the sooner for the monotonous rhythm of the heavy
+breath. Consciousness gave place to a state of mysterious discomfort,
+complicated with intersecting strings and a grave sense of
+responsibility, and then to oblivion. After a few thousand years,
+probably minutes on the clock, a jerk woke her.
+
+"Oh dear! I was asleep."
+
+"You might give me another nip of the champagne, Rosey dear. And then
+you must go and lie down. I shall be all right. Is it late?"
+
+"Not very. About twelve. I'll look at my watch." She does so, and it
+is past one. Then the invalid, being raised up towards his champagne,
+has a sudden attack of coughing, which brings in the nurse as a
+reserve. Presently he is reinstated in semi-comfort, half a tone
+weaker, but with something to say. And so little voice to say it with!
+Rosalind puts her ear close, and repeats what she catches.
+
+"Why did Major Roper come back? He didn't, dear. He went away about
+seven, and has not been here since."
+
+"He was in the room just this minute." The voice is barely audible,
+the conviction of the speaker absolute. He is wandering. The nurse's
+mind decides, in an innermost recess, that it won't be very long now.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Rosalind looked out through a spot she had rubbed clean on the frozen
+window-pane, and saw that it was bright starlight. The fog had gone.
+That boy--he was asleep at the twopenny doss, and the trousers were
+drying. What a good thing that he should be totally insensitive to
+atmosphere, as no doubt he was.
+
+The hardest hours for the watcher by a sick-bed are those that cannot
+be convinced that they belong to the previous day. One o'clock may be
+coaxed or bribed easily enough into winking at a pretence that it is
+only a corollary of twelve; two o'clock protests against it audibly,
+and every quarter-chime endorses its claim to be to-morrow; three
+o'clock makes short work of an imposture only a depraved effrontery
+can endeavour to foist upon it. Rosalind was aware of her unfitness
+to sit up all night--all this next night--but nursed the pretext that
+it had not come, and that it was still to-day, until a sense of the
+morning chill, and something in the way the sound of each belated cab
+confessed to its own scarcity, convinced her of the uselessness of
+further effort. Then she surrendered the point, short of the stroke
+of three, and exchanged posts with the nurse, who promised to call her
+at once should it seem necessary to do so. Sleep came with a rush, and
+dreamless oblivion. Then, immediately, the hand of the nurse on her
+shoulder, and her voice, a sudden shock in the absolute stillness:
+
+"I thought it better to wake you, Mrs. Nightingale. I am _so_
+sorry...."
+
+"Oh dear! how long have I slept?" Rosalind's mind leaped through a
+second of unconsciousness of where she is and what it's all about to
+a state of intense wakefulness. "What o'clock is it?"
+
+"It's half-past six. I should have left you to have your sleep out,
+only he wanted you.... Yes, he woke up and asked for you, and then
+asked again. He's hardly coughed."
+
+"I'll come." Rosalind tried for alacrity, but found she was quite
+stiff. The fire was only a remnant of red glow that collapsed feebly
+as the nurse touched it with the poker. It was a case for a couple of
+little gluey wheels, and a good contribution to the day's fog, already
+in course of formation, with every grate in London panting to take
+shares. Rosalind did not wait to see the black column of smoke start
+for its chimney-pot, but went straight to the patient's bedside.
+
+"Is that Rosey? I can't see very well. Come and sit beside me. I want
+you." He was speaking more easily than before, so his hearer thought.
+Could it be a change for the better? She put her finger on the pulse,
+but it was hard to find. The fever had left him for the time being,
+but its work was done. It was wonderful, though, that he should have
+so much life in him for speech.
+
+"What is it, Major dear?... Let's get the pillow right.... There,
+that's better! Yes, dear; what is it?"
+
+"I've got my marching orders, Rosey. I shall be all right. Shan't be
+sorry ... when it's over.... Rosey girl, I want you to do something
+for me.... Is my watch there, with the keys?"
+
+"Yes, dear; the two little keys."
+
+"The little one opens my desk ... with the brass corners.... Yes, that
+one.... Open the top flap, and look in the little left-hand drawer.
+Got it?"
+
+"Yes; you want the letters out? There's only one packet."
+
+"That's the lot. Read what's written on them."
+
+"Only 'Emily, 1837.'"
+
+"Quite right! That was your aunt, you know--your father's sister.
+Don't cry, darling. Nothing to cry about! I'm only an old chap. There,
+there!" Rosalind sat down again by the bed, keeping the packet of
+letters in her hand. Presently the old man, who had closed his eyes as
+though dozing, opened them and said: "Have you put them on the fire?"
+
+"No. Was I to?"
+
+"That was what I meant. I thought I said so.... Yes; pop 'em on."
+Rosalind went to the fireside and stood hesitating, till the old man
+repeated his last words; then threw the love-letters of sixty years
+ago in a good hot place in the burning coal. A flare, and they were
+white ash trying to escape from a valley of burning rocks; then even
+that was free to rise. Maybe the only one who ever read them would be
+soon--would be a mere attenuated ash, at least, as far as what lay on
+that bed went, so pale and evanescent even now.
+
+"A fool of a boy, Rosey dear," said the old voice, as she took her
+place by the bed again. "Just a fool of a boy, to keep them all those
+years. And _she_ married to another fellow, and a great-grandmother.
+Ah, well!... don't you cry about it, Rosey.... All done now!" She may
+have heard him wrong, for his voice went to a whisper. She wondered at
+the way the cough was sparing him.
+
+Then she thought he was falling asleep again; but presently he spoke.
+"I shall do very well now.... Nothing but a little rest ... that's
+all I want now. Only there's something I wanted to say about ...
+about...."
+
+"About Sally?" Rosalind guessed quickly, and certainly.
+
+"Ah ... about the baby. _Your_ baby, Rosey.... That man that was her
+father ... he's on my mind...."
+
+"Oh me, forget him, dear--forget him! Leave him to God!" Rosalind
+repeated a phrase used twenty years ago by herself in answer to the
+old soldier's first uncontrollable outburst of anger against the man
+who had made her his victim. His voice rose again above a whisper as
+he answered:
+
+"I heard you say so, dear child ... then ... that time. You were
+right, and I was wrong. But what I've said--many a time, God forgive
+me!--that I prayed he was in hell. I would be glad now to think I
+had not said it."
+
+"Don't think of it. Oh, my dear, don't think of it! You never meant
+it...."
+
+"Ah, but I did, though; and would again, mind you, Rosey! Only--not
+now! Better let him go, for Sallykin's sake.... The child's the puzzle
+of it...."
+
+Rosalind thought she saw what he was trying to say, and herself tried
+to supplement it. "You mean, why isn't Sally like him?"
+
+"Ah, to be sure! Like father like son, they say. His son's a chip of
+the old block. But then--he's his mother's son, too. Two such!--and
+then see what comes of 'em. Sallykin's your daughter ... Rosey's
+daughter. Sallykin...." He seemed to be drowsing off from mere
+weakness; but he had something to say, and his mind made for speech
+and found it:
+
+"Yes, Rosey; it's the end of the story. Soon off--I shall be! Not
+very long now. Wasn't it foggy?"
+
+"Yes, dear; it was. But it's clear now. It's snowing."
+
+"Then you could send for Jack Roper. Old Jack! He can tell me
+something I want to know.... I know he can...."
+
+"But it's the middle of the night, dear. We can't send for him now.
+Sally shall go for him again when she comes in the morning. What is
+it you want to know?"
+
+"What became of poor Algernon Palliser.... I know Old Jack knows....
+Something he heard.... I forget things ... my head's not good. Ah,
+Rosey darling! if I'd been there in the first of it ... I could have
+got speech of him. I might have ... might have...."
+
+As the old man's mind wandered back to the terrible time it dragged
+his hearer's with it. Rosalind tried to bear it by thinking of what
+Sally was like in those days, crumpled, violent, vociferous,
+altogether _intransigeante_. But it was only a moment's salve to a
+reeling of the reason she knew must come if this went on. If he slept
+it might be averted. She thought he was dropping off, but he roused
+himself again to say: "What became of poor Palliser--your husband?"
+
+Then Rosalind, whose head was swimming, let the fact slip from her
+that the dying man had never seen or known her husband in the old
+days; only he had always spoken of him as one to be pitied, not
+blamed, even as she herself thought of him. Incautiously she now said,
+"Poor Gerry!" forgetting that Colonel Lund had never known him by that
+name, or so slightly that it did not connect itself. Yet his mind was
+marvellously clear, too; for he immediately replied: "I did not mean
+Fenwick. I meant your first husband. Poor boy! poor fellow! What
+became of him?"
+
+"_His_ name was Algernon, too," was all the answer she could think of.
+It was a sort of forlorn hope in nettle-grasping. Then she saw it had
+little meaning in it for her listener. His voice went on, almost
+whispering:
+
+"Many a time I've thought ... if we could have found the poor boy ...
+and shown him Sally ... he might have ... might have...."
+
+Rosalind could bear it no longer. Whoever reads this story carelessly
+may see little excuse for her that she should lose her head at the
+bedside of a dying man. It was really no matter for surprise that she
+should do so. Consider the perpetual tension of her life, the broken
+insufficient sleep of the last two days, the shock of "Old Jack's"
+sudden death a few hours since! Small blame to her, to our thinking,
+if she did give way! To some it may even seem, as to us, that the
+course she took was best in the end. And, indeed, her self-control
+stood by her to the last; it was a retreat in perfect order, not a
+flight. Nor did she, perhaps, fully measure how near her old friend
+was to his end, or release--a better name, perhaps.
+
+"Major dear, I have something I must tell you." The old eyelids opened,
+and his eyes turned to her, though he remained motionless--quite as
+one who caught the appeal in the tension of her voice and guessed its
+meaning.
+
+"Rosey darling--yes; tell me now." His voice tried to rise above
+a whisper; an effort seemed to be in it to say: "Don't keep anything
+back on my account."
+
+"So I will, dear. Shut your eyes and lie quiet and listen. I want to
+tell you that I know that my first husband is not dead.... Yes, dear;
+don't try to speak. You'll see when I tell you.... Algernon Palliser
+is not dead, though we thought he must be. He went away from Lahore
+after the proceedings, and he did go to Australia, no doubt, as we
+heard at the time; but after that he went to America, and was there
+till two years ago ... and then he came to England." The old man tried
+to speak, but this time his voice failed, and Rosalind thought it best
+to go straight on. "He came to England, dear, and met with a bad
+accident, and lost his memory...."
+
+"_What!_" The word came so suddenly and clearly that it gave her new
+courage to go on. She _must_ tell it all now, and she felt sure he
+was hearing and understanding all she said.
+
+"Yes, dear; it's all true. Let me tell it all. He lost his memory
+completely, so that he did not know his own name...."
+
+"My God!"
+
+"Did not know his own name, dear--did not know his own name--did
+not know the face of the wife he lost twenty years ago--all, all a
+blank!... Yes, yes; it was he himself, and I took him and kept him,
+and I have him now ... and oh, my dear, my dear, he does not know
+it--knows _nothing_! He does not know who I am, nor who he was, nor
+that Sally is the baby; but he loves her dearly, as he never could
+have loved her if ... if...."
+
+She could say no more. The torrent of tears that was the first actual
+relief to the weight upon her heart of two years of secrecy grew and
+grew till speech was overwhelmed. But she knew that her story, however
+scantily told, had reached her listener's mind, though she could not
+have said precisely at what moment he came to know it. The tone of
+his exclamation, "My God!" perhaps had made her take his knowledge for
+granted. Of one thing, however, she felt certain--that details were
+needless, would add nothing to the main fact, which she was quite
+convinced her old friend had grasped with a mind still capable of
+holding it, although it might be in death. Even so one tells a child
+the outcome only of what one tells in full to older ears. Then quick
+on the heels of the relief of sharing her burden with another followed
+the thought of how soon the sympathy she had gained must be lost,
+buried--so runs the code of current speech--in her old friend's grave.
+All her heart poured out in tears on the hand that could still close
+fitfully upon her own as she knelt by the bed on which he would so
+soon lie dying.
+
+Presently his voice came again--a faint whisper she could just catch:
+"Tell it me again, Rosey ... what you told me just now ... just
+now." And she felt his cold hand close on hers as he spoke. Then she
+repeated what she had said before, adding only: "But he may never come
+to know his own story, and Sally must not know it." The old whisper
+came back, and she caught the words: "Then it is true! My God!"
+
+She remained kneeling motionless beside him. His breath, weak and
+intermittent, but seeming more free than when she left him four hours
+since, was less audible than the heavy sleep of the overtaxed nurse
+in the next room, heard through the unclosed door. The familiar early
+noises of the street, the life outside that cares so little for the
+death within, the daily bread and daily milk that wake us too soon in
+the morning, the cynical interchanges of cheerful early risers about
+the comfort of the weather--all grew and gathered towards the coming
+day. But the old Colonel heard none of them. What thought he still had
+could say to him that this was good and that was good, hard though it
+might be to hold it in mind. But one bright golden thread ran clear
+through all the tangled skeins--he would leave Rosey happy at last,
+for all the bitterness her cup of life had held before.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The nurse had slept profoundly, but she was one of those fortunate
+people who can do so at will, and then wake up at an appointed time,
+as many great soldiers have been able to do. As the clock struck
+eight she sat up in the chair she had been sleeping in and listened a
+moment. No sound came from the next room. She rose and pushed the door
+open cautiously and looked in. Mrs. Fenwick was still kneeling by the
+bed, her face hidden, still holding the old man's hand. The nurse
+thought surely the still white face she saw in the intermittent gleams
+of a lamp-flame flickering out was the face of a dead man. Need she
+rouse or disturb the watcher by his side? Not yet, certainly. She
+pulled the door very gently back, not closing it.
+
+A sound came of footsteps on the stairs--footsteps without voices. It
+was Fenwick and Sally, who had passed through the street door, open for
+a negotiation for removal of the snow--for the last two hours had made
+a white world outside. Sally was on a stairflight in the rear. She had
+paused for a word with the boy Chancellorship, who was a candidate for
+snow-removal. He seemed relieved by the snow. It was a tidy lot better
+morning than last night, missis. He had breakfasted--yes--off of
+corfy, and paid for it, and buttered 'arf slices and no stintin', for
+twopence. Sally had a fellow-feeling for this boy's optimism. But he
+had something on his mind, for when Sally asked him if Major Roper had
+got home safe last night, his cheerfulness clouded over, and he said
+first, "Couldn't say, missis;" and then, "He's been got home, you may
+place your dependence on that;" adding, inexplicably to Sally, "He
+won't care about this weather; it won't be no odds!" She couldn't wait
+to find out his meaning, but told him he might go on clearing away
+the snow, and when Mrs. Kindred came he was to say Miss Rosalind
+Nightingale told him he might. She said she would be answerable, and
+then ran to catch up Fenwick.
+
+The nurse came out to meet them on the landing, and in answer to
+Fenwick's half-inquiry or look of inquiry--Sally did not gather
+which--said: "Yes--at least, I think so--just now." Sally made up her
+mind it was death. But it was not, quite; for as the nurse, preceding
+them, pushed the door of the sickroom gently open, the voice of the
+man she believed dead came out almost strong and clear in the silence:
+"Evil has turned to good. God be praised!"
+
+But they were the last words Colonel Lund spoke. He died so quietly
+that the exact moment of dissolution was not distinguishable. Fenwick
+and Sally found Rosalind so overstrained with grief and watching that
+they asked for no explanation of the words. Indeed, they may not have
+ascribed any special meaning to them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+ABOUT SIX MONTHS, AND HOW A CABMAN SAW A GHOST. OF SALLY'S AND THE
+ DOCTOR'S "MODUS VIVENDI," AND THE SHOOSMITH FAMILY. HOW SALLY MADE TEA
+ FOR BUDDHA, AND HOW BUDDHA FORESAW A STEPDAUGHTER. DELIRIUM TREMENS
+
+
+It may make this story easier to read at this point if we tell our
+reader that this twenty-fifth chapter contains little of vital
+import--is, in fact, only a passing reference to one or two
+by-incidents that came about in the half-year that followed. He
+cannot complain that they are superfluous if we give him fair warning
+of their triviality, and enable him to skip them without remorse.
+But they register, to our thinking, what little progress events made
+in six very nice months--a period Time may be said to have skipped.
+And whoso will may follow his example, and lose but little in the
+doing of it.
+
+Very nice months they were--only one cloud worth mention in the blue;
+only one phrase in a minor key. The old familiar figure of "the
+Major"--intermittent, certainly, but none the less invariable; making
+the house his own, or letting it appropriate him, hard to say
+which--was no longer to be seen; but the old sword had been hung in
+a place of honour near a portrait of Paul Nightingale, Mrs. Fenwick's
+stepfather--its old owner's school-friend of seventy years ago. At her
+death it was to be offered to the school; no surviving relative was
+named in the will, if any existed. Everything was left unconditionally
+"to my dear daughter by adoption, Rosalind Nightingale."
+
+Some redistributions of furniture were involved in the importation of
+the movables from the two rooms in Ball Street. The black cabinet, or
+cellaret, with the eagle-talons, found a place in the dining-room in
+the basement into which Fenwick--only it seems so odd to go back to
+it now--was brought on the afternoon of his electrocution. Sally always
+thought of this cabinet as "Major Roper's cabinet," because she got
+the whiskey from it for him before he went off in the fog. If only
+she had made him drunk that evening! Who knows but it might have
+enabled him to fight against that terrible heart-failure that was not
+the result of atmospheric conditions. She never looked at this cabinet
+but the thought passed through her mind.
+
+Her mother certainly told her nothing at this time about her last
+conversation with the Colonel, or almost nothing. Certainly she
+mentioned more than once what she thought a curious circumstance--that
+the invalid, who was utterly ignorant of Old Jack's death, had
+persisted so strongly that he was present in the room when he must
+have been dead some hours. Every one of us has his little bit of
+Psychical Research, which he demands respect for from others, whose
+own cherished private instances he dismisses without investigation.
+This example became Mrs. Fenwick's; who, to be just, had not set
+herself up with one previously, in spite of the temptation the
+Anglo-Indian is always under to espouse Mahatmas and buried Faquirs
+and the like. There seemed a good prospect that it would become
+an article of faith with her; her first verdict--that it was an
+hallucination--having been undermined by a certain contradictiousness,
+produced in her by an undeserved discredit poured on it by pretenders
+to a superior ghost-insight; who, after all, tried to utilise it
+afterward as a peg to hang their own particular ghosts on. Which
+wasn't researching fair.
+
+Sally was no better than the rest of them; if anything, she was a
+little worse. And Rosalind was far from sure that her husband wouldn't
+have been much more reasonable if he hadn't had Sally there to
+encourage him. As it was, the league became, _pro hac vice_, a league
+of Incredulity, a syndicate of Materialists. Rosalind got no quarter
+for the half-belief she had in what the old Colonel had said
+on his death-bed. Her report of his evident earnestness and the
+self-possession of his voice carried no weight; failing powers,
+delirium, effects of opiates, and ten degrees above normal had it all
+their own way. Besides, her superstition was weak-kneed. It only went
+the length of suggesting that it really was very curious when you came
+to think of it, and she couldn't make it out.
+
+That the incident received such very superficial recognition must be
+accounted for by the fact that Krakatoa Villa was not a villa of the
+speculative-thinker class. We have known such villas elsewhere, but
+we are bound to say we have known none where speculative thought has
+tackled the troublesome questions of death-bed appearances, haunted
+houses, _et id genus omne_, with the result of coming to any but very
+speculative conclusions. The male head of this household may have
+felt that he himself, as a problem for the Psychical Researcher, was
+ill-fitted to discuss the subject. He certainly shied off expressing
+any decided opinions.
+
+"What do you really think about ghosts?" said his wife to him one day,
+when Sally wasn't there to come in with her chaff.
+
+"Ghosts belong in titled families. Middle-class ghosts are a poor lot.
+Those in the army and navy cut the best figure, on the whole--Junior
+United Service ghosts...."
+
+"Gerry, be serious, or I'll have a divorce!" This was a powerful grip
+on a stinging-nettle. Rosalind felt braced by the effort. "Did you
+ever see a ghost, old man?"
+
+"Not in the present era, sweetheart. I can't say about B.C." He used
+to speak of his life in this way, but his wife always felt sorry when
+he alluded to it. It seldom happened. "No, I have never seen one to
+my knowledge. I've been seen as a ghost, though, which is very
+unpleasant, I assure you."
+
+Rosalind's mind went back to the fat Baron at Sonnenberg. She supposed
+this to be another case of the same sort. "When was that?" she said.
+
+"Monday. I took a hansom from Cornhill to our bonded warehouse. It's
+under a mile, and I asked the driver to change half-a-crown; I hadn't
+a shilling. He got out a handful of silver, and when he had picked out
+the two shillings and sixpence he looked at me for the first time, and
+started and stared as if I was a ghost in good earnest."
+
+"Oh, Gerry, he must have seen you before--before it happened!"
+Remember that this was, in the spirit of it, a fib, seeing that the
+tone of voice was that of welcome to a possible revelation. To our
+thinking, the more honour to her who spoke it, considering the
+motives. Gerry continued:
+
+"So I thought at first. But listen to what followed. As soon as his
+surprise, whatever caused it, had toned down to mere recognition
+point, he spoke with equanimity. 'I've driven you afore now, mister,'
+said he. 'You won't call me to mind. Parties don't, not when fares;
+when drivers, quite otherwise. I'm by way of taking notice myself.
+You'll excuse _me_?' Then he said, 'War-r-r-p,' to the horse, who was
+trying to eat himself and dig the road up. When they were friends
+again, I asked, Where had he seen me? Might I happen to call to mind
+Livermore's Rents, and that turn-up?--that was his reply. I said I
+mightn't; or didn't, at any rate. I had never been near Livermore's
+Rents, nor any one else's rents, that I could recall the name of. 'Try
+again, guv'nor,' said he. 'You'll recall if you try hard enough. _He_
+recollects it, _I'll_ go bail. My Goard! you _did_ let him have it!'
+Was it a fight? I asked. Well, do you know, darling, that cabby
+addressed me seriously; took me to task for want of candour.
+'That ain't worthy of a guv'nor like you,' he said. 'Why make any
+concealments? Why not treat me open?' I gave him my most solemn honour
+that I was utterly at a loss to guess what he was talking about, on
+which he put me through a sort of retrospective catechism, broken by
+reminders to the horse. '_You_ don't rec'lect goin' easy over the
+bridge for to see the shipping? Nor yet the little narrer court
+right-hand side of the road, with an iron post under an arch and
+parties hollerin' murder at the far end? Nor yet the way you held him
+in hand and played him? Nor yet what you sampled him out at the
+finish? My Goard!' He slapped the top of the cab in a sort of ecstasy.
+'Never saw a neater thing in my life. _No_ unnecessary violence, _no_
+agitation! And him carried off the ground as good as dead! Ah! I made
+inquiry after, and that was _so_.' I then said it must have been some
+one else very like me, and held out my half-crown. He slipped back
+his change into his own pocket, and when he had buttoned it over
+ostentatiously addressed me again with what seemed a last appeal.
+'I take it, guv'nor,' said he, 'you may have such a powerful list of
+fighting fixtures in the week that you don't easy recollect one out
+from the other. But _now_, _do_, _you_, _mean_ to say your memory
+don't serve you in this?--I drove you over to Bishopsgate, 'cross
+London Bridge. Very well! Then you bought a hat--white Panama--and
+took change, seein' your own was lost. And you was going to pay me,
+and I drove off, refusin' to accept a farden under the circumstances.
+Don't you rec'lect that?' I said I didn't. 'Well, I _did_,' said he.
+'And, with your leave, I'll do the same thing now. I'll drive you most
+anywhere you'd like to name in reason, but I won't take a farden.'
+And, do you know, he was off before my surprise allowed me to say
+a word."
+
+"Now, Gerry, was it that made you so glum on Monday when you came
+back? I recollect quite well. So would Sally."
+
+"Oh no; it was uncomfortable at first, but I soon forgot all about it.
+I recollect what it was put me in the dumps quite well. It was a long
+time after the cabby."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"Well, it was as I walked to the station. I went a little way round,
+and passed through an anonymous sort of a churchyard. I saw a box in
+a wall with 'Contributions' on it, and remembering that I really had
+no right to the cabby's shilling or eighteenpence, I dropped a florin
+in. And then, Rosey dear, I had the most horrible recurrence I've had
+for a long time--something about the same place and the same box, and
+some one else putting three shillings in it. And it was all mixed up
+with a bottle of champagne and a bank. I can't explain why these
+things are so painful, but they are. _You_ know, Rosey!"
+
+"I know, dear." His wife's knowledge seemed to make her quite silent
+and absent. She may have seen that the recovery of this cabman would
+supply a clue to her husband's story. Had he taken the number of the
+cab? No, he hadn't. Very stupid of him! But he had no pencil, or he
+could have written it on his shirt-sleeve. He couldn't trust his
+memory. Rosalind didn't feel very sorry the clue was lost. As for him,
+did he, we wonder, really exert himself to remember the cab's number?
+
+But when the story was told afterwards to Sally, the moment the
+Panama hat came on the tapis, she struck in with, "Jeremiah! you
+know quite well you had a Panama hat on the day you were electrocuted.
+And, what's more, it was brand new! And, what's more, it's outside in
+the hall!"
+
+It was brought in, and produced a spurious sense of being detectives
+on the way to a discovery. But nothing came of it.
+
+All through the discussion of this odd cab-incident the fact that
+Fenwick "would have written down the cab-driver's number on his
+shirt-sleeve," was on the watch for a recollection by one of the three
+that a something had been found written on the shirt-cuff Fenwick
+was electrocuted in. The ill-starred shrewdness of Scotland Yard, by
+detecting a mere date in that something, had quite thrown it out of
+gear as an item of evidence. By the way, did no one ever ask why
+should any man, being of sound mind, write the current date on his
+shirt-sleeve? It really is a thing that can look after its own
+interests for twenty-four hours. The fact is that, no sooner do
+coincidences come into court, than sane investigation flies out at
+the skylight.
+
+There was much discussion of this incident, you may be sure; but
+that is all we need to know about it.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Our other chance gleanings of the half-year are in quite another part
+of the field. They relate to Sally and Dr. Vereker's relation to
+one another. If this relation had anything lover-like in it, they
+certainly were not taking Europe into their confidence on the subject.
+Whether their attitude was a spontaneous expression of respectful
+indifference, or a _parti-pris_ to mislead and hoodwink her, of course
+Europe couldn't tell. All that that continent, or the subdivision of
+it known as Shepherd's Bush, could see was a parade of callousness
+and studied civility on the part of both. The only circumstance that
+impaired its integrity or made the bystander doubt the good faith
+of its performers was the fact that one of them was a girl, and an
+attractive one--so attractive that elderly ladies jumped meanly at
+the supposed privileges of their age and sex, and kissed her a great
+deal more than was at all fair or honourable.
+
+The ostentatious exclusion of Cupid from the relationship of these two
+demanded a certain mechanism. Every meeting had to be accounted for,
+or there was no knowing what match-making busybodies wouldn't say; or,
+rather, what they would say would be easily guessable by the lowest
+human insight. Not that either of them ever mentioned precaution to
+the other; all its advantages would have vanished with open
+acknowledgment of its necessity. These arrangements were instinctive
+on the part of both, and each credited the other with a mole-like
+blindness to their existence.
+
+For instance, each was graciously pleased to believe--or, at least, to
+believe that the other believed--in a certain institution that called
+for a vast amount of checking of totals, comparisons of counterfoils,
+inspection of certificates, verification of data--everything, in
+short, of which an institute is capable that could make incessant
+correspondence necessary and frequent personal interviews advisable.
+It could boast of Heaven knows how many titled Patrons and
+Patronesses, Committees and Sub-committees, Referees and Auditors.
+No doubt the mere mention of such an institution was enough to
+render gossip speechless about any single lady and gentleman whom it
+accidentally made known one to another. Its firm of Solicitors alone,
+with a line all to itself in its prospectuses, was enough to put a
+host of Loves to flight.
+
+On which account Ann, at Krakatoa Villa, when she announced, "A person
+for you, Miss Sally," was able to add, "from Dr. Vereker, I think,
+miss," without the faintest shade of humorous reserve, as of one who
+sees, and does not need to be told.
+
+And when Sally had interviewed a hopeless and lopsided female, who
+appeared to be precariously held together by pins, and to have an
+almost superhuman power of evading practical issues, she (fortified
+by this institution) was able to return to the drawing-room and say,
+without a particle of shame, that she supposed she should have to go
+and see Old Prosy about Mrs. Shoosmith to-morrow afternoon. And when
+she called at the doctor's at teatime--because that didn't take him
+from his patients, as he made a point of his tea, because of his
+mother, if it was only ten minutes--both he and she believed
+religiously in Mrs. Shoosmith, and Dr. Vereker filled out her form
+(we believe we have the phrase right) with the most business-like
+gravity at the little table where he wrote his letters.
+
+Mrs. Shoosmith's form called for filling out in more senses than one.
+The doctor's mother's form would not have borne anything further in
+that direction; except, indeed, she had been provided with hooks to
+go over her chair back, and keep her from rolling along the floor,
+as a sphere might if asked to sit down.
+
+A suggestion of the exceptional character of all visits from Sally to
+Dr. Vereker, and _vice-versa_, was fostered by the domestics at his
+house as well as at Krakatoa Villa. The maid Craddock, who responded
+to Sally's knock on this Shoosmith occasion, threw doubt on the
+possibility of the doctor ever being visible again, and kept the door
+mentally on the jar while she spoke through a moral gap an inch wide.
+Of course, that is only our nonsense. Sally was really in the house
+when Craddock heroically, as a forlorn hope in a lost cause, offered
+to "go and see"; and going, said, "Miss Nightingale; and is Dr.
+Vereker expected in to tea?" without varnish of style, or redundance
+of wording. But Sally lent herself to this insincere performance, and
+remained in the hall until she was called on to decide whether she
+would mind coming in and waiting, and Dr. Vereker would perhaps be
+back in a few minutes. All this was part of the system of insincerity
+we have hinted at.
+
+So was the tenor of Sally's remarks, while she waited the few minutes,
+to the effect that it was a burning shame that she should take up
+Mrs. Vereker's time, a crying scandal that she should interrupt her
+knitting, and a matter of penitential reflection that she hadn't
+written instead of coming, which would have done just as well. To
+which Mrs. Vereker, with a certain parade of pretended insincerity
+(to make the real article underneath seem _bona fides_), replied with
+mock-incredible statements about the pleasure she always had in seeing
+Sally, and the rare good fortune which had prompted a visit at this
+time, when, in addition to being unable to knit, owing to her eyes,
+she had been absorbed in longing for news of a current event that
+Sally was sure to know about. She particularised it.
+
+"Oh, it isn't _true_, Mrs. Vereker! You don't mean to say you believed
+_that_ nonsense? The idea! Tishy--just fancy!" Goody Vereker (the name
+Sally thought of her by) couldn't shake her head, the fulness at the
+neck forbade it; but she moved it cosily from side to side
+continuously, much as a practicable image of Buddha might have done.
+
+"My child, I've quite given up believing and disbelieving things.
+I wait to be told, and then I ask if it's true. Now you've told me.
+It isn't true, and that settles the matter."
+
+"But whoever could tell you such _nonsense_, Mrs. Vereker?"
+
+"A little bird, my dear." The image of Buddha left off the movement of
+incredulity, and began a very gentle, slow nod. "A little bird tells
+me these things--all sorts of things. But now I _know_ this one's
+untrue I should never _dream_ of believing it. Not for one moment."
+
+Sally felt inclined to pinch, bite, or otherwise maltreat the
+speaker, so very worthless did her offer of optional disbelief seem,
+and, indeed, so very offensive. But her inclination only went the
+length of wondering how she could get at a vulnerable point through
+so much fat.
+
+"Tishy quarrels with her mother, I _know_," said she. "But as to her
+doing anything like _that_! Besides, she never told me. Besides, I
+should have been asked to the wedding. Besides," etcetera.
+
+For, you see, what this elderly lady had asked the truth about was,
+had or had not Laetitia Wilson and Julius Bradshaw been privately
+married six months ago? Probably, during aeons and epochs of knitting,
+she had dreamed that some one had told her this. Or, even more
+probably, she had invented it on the spot, to see what change she
+could get out of Sally. She knew that Sally, prudently exasperated,
+would give tongue; whereas conciliatory, cosy inquisition--the right
+way to approach the elderly gossip--would only make her reticent. Now
+it was only necessary to knit, and Sally would be sure to develop
+the subject. The line she appeared to take was that it was a horrible
+shame of people to say such things, in view of the fact that it was
+only yesterday that Tishy had quite settled that rash matrimony in
+defiance of her parents would not only be inexcusable but wrong. Sally
+laid a fiery emphasis on the only-ness of yesterday, and seemed to
+imply that, had it been a week ago, there would have been much more
+plausibility in the story of this secret nuptial of six months back.
+
+"Besides," she went on, accumulating items of refutation, "Julius has
+only his salary, and Tishy has nothing--though, of course, she could
+teach. Besides, Julius has his mother and sister, and they have only
+a hundred and fifty a year. It does as long as they all live together.
+But it wouldn't do if Julius married." On which the old Goody (Sally
+told her mother after) embarked on a long analysis of how joint
+housekeeping could be managed if Tishy would consent to be absorbed
+into the Bradshaw household. She made rather a grievance of it that
+Sally could not supply data of the sleeping accommodation at Georgiana
+Terrace, Bayswater. If she had known that, she could have got them
+all billeted on different rooms. As it was, she had to be content
+to enlarge on the many economies the family could achieve if they
+consented to be guided by a person of experience--_e.g._, herself.
+
+"Of course, dinner would have to be late," she said, "because of Mr.
+Bradshaw not getting home till nearly eight. They would have to make
+it supper. And it might be cold; it's a great saving, and makes it so
+easy where there's one servant." Sally shuddered with horror at this
+implied British household. Poor Tishy!
+
+"But they're _not going_ to marry till they see their way," she
+exclaimed in despair. She felt that Tishy and Julius were being
+involved, entangled, immeshed by an old matrimonial octopus in
+gilt-rimmed spectacles--like Professor Wilson's--who could knit
+tranquilly all the while, while she herself could do nothing to save
+them. "It might be cold!!" Every evening, perhaps--who knows?
+
+"Very proper, my dear." Thus the Octopus. "I felt sure such a nice,
+sensible girl as Miss Wilson never would. That is Conrad." It really
+was a sound of a latch-key, but speech is no mere slave to fact.
+
+"And I was really quite glad when Dr. Prosy came in--the way the Goody
+was going on about Tishy!" So Sally said to her mother when she had
+completed her report of the portion of this visit she chose to tell
+about. On which her mother said, "What a dear little humbug you
+are, kitten," and she replied, as we have heard her reply before,
+"We-e-ell, there's nothing in that!" and posed as one who has been
+misrepresented. But her mother stuck to her point, which was that
+Sally knew she was quite glad when Dr. Vereker came in, Tishy or no.
+
+Whatever the reason was that Sally was quite glad at the appearance
+of Dr. Prosy, there could be no doubt about the fact. Her laugh
+reached the cook in the kitchen, who denounced Craddock the
+parlourmaid for not telling her it was Miss Nightingale, when it
+might have been a visitor, seeing no noise come of it. Cook remarked
+she knew how it would be--there was the doctor picking up like--and
+hadn't she told Craddock so? But Craddock said no!
+
+"Mrs. Shoosmith again--the everlasting Mrs. Shoosmith!" exclaimed the
+doctor. It was very unfeeling of them to laugh so over this unhappy
+woman, who was the survivor of two husbands and the proprietor of one,
+and the mother of seven daughters and five sons, each of whom was
+a typical "case," and all of whom sought admission to Institutes on
+their merits. The lives of the whole family were passed in applications
+for testimonials and certificates, alike bearing witness to their
+chronic qualifications for it. Sally was mysteriously hardhearted about
+them, while fully admitting their claims on the public.
+
+"That's right, Dr. Conrad"--Sally had inaugurated this name for
+herself--"Honoria Purvis Shoosmith. Mind you put in the Purvis right.
+Now write down lots of diseases for her to have." Sally is leaning
+over the doctor's chair to see him write as she says this. There is
+something in the atmosphere of the situation that seems to clash with
+the actual business in hand. The doctor endeavours, not seriously
+enough, perhaps, to infuse a flavour of responsibility.
+
+"My professional dignity, Miss Nightingale, will not permit of the
+scheme of diagnosis you indicate. If any disorders entirely without
+symptoms were known to exist, I should be delighted to ascribe the
+whole of them to Mrs. Shoosmith...."
+
+"Don't be prosy, Dr. Conrad. Fire away! You told me lots--you know you
+did! Rheumatic arthritis--gout--pyaemia...."
+
+"Come, I say, Miss Sally, draw it mild. I never said pyaemia. _An_aemia,
+perhaps...."
+
+"Very well, Anne, then! We can let it go at that. Fire away!" The
+doctor looks round his own corner at the rows of pearls and the laugh
+that frames them, the merry eyebrows and the scintillating eyes they
+accentuate. A perilous intoxication, not to be too freely indulged in
+by a serious professional man at any time--in business hours certainly
+not. But if the doctor were quite in earnest over a sort of Spartan
+declaration of policy his heart feels the prudence of, would that
+responsive twinkle flutter in his face behind its mock gravity? He is
+all but head over ears in love with Sally--so why pretend? Really, we
+don't know--and that's the truth.
+
+"Wouldn't it be a good way to consider what it is that is really the
+matter, and make out the statement accordingly?" He goes on looking
+at Sally, scratches himself under the chin with his pen, and waits
+for an answer.
+
+"Good, sensible, general practitioner! See how practical he is! Now,
+I should never have thought of that!"
+
+"Well, what shall we put her down as? Chronic arthritis--spinal
+curvature--tuberculosis of the cervical vertebrae?"
+
+"Those all sound very nice. But I don't think it matters which you
+choose. If she hasn't got it now, she'll develop it if I describe
+it. When I told her mother couldn't get rid of her neuritis, she
+immediately asked to know the symptoms, and forthwith claimed them
+as her own. 'Well, there now, and to think what I was just a-sayin'
+to Shoosmith, this very morning! Just in the crick of the thumb-joint,
+you can't 'ardly abear yourself!' And then she told how she said to
+Shoosmith frequent, where was the use of his getting impatient, and
+exclaimin' the worst expressions? Because his language went beyond
+a quart, and no reasonable excuse."
+
+"Mr. Shoosmith doesn't seem a very promising sort? He's a tailor,
+isn't he?"
+
+"No; he's a messenger. He runs on errands and does odd jobs. But he
+can't run--I've seen him!--he can only shamble. And his voice is
+hoarse and inaudible. And he has a drawback--two drawbacks, in fact.
+He is no sooner giv' coppers on a job than he drinks them."
+
+"What's the other?"
+
+"His susceptibility to intoxicants. His 'ed is that weak that 'most
+anythink upsets him. So you see."
+
+"Poor chap! He's handicapped in the race of life. As for his wife,
+when I saw her she was suffering with acute rheumatism and bad
+feeling--and, I may add, defective reasoning power. However...." The
+doctor fills in blanks, adds a signature, says "There we are!" and
+Mrs. Shoosmith is disposed of as an applicant to the institution, and
+will no doubt reap some benefits we need not know the particulars of.
+But she remains as a subject for the student of human life--also,
+tea comes--also, which is interesting, Sally proceeds to make it.
+
+Now, if the reserves this young lady had made about this visit, if
+her pretence that it was a necessity arising from a charitable
+organization, if the colour that was given to that pretence by her
+interview with the servant Craddock--if any of these things had been
+more or less than the grossest hypocrisy, would it, we ask you, have
+been accepted as a matter of course that she should pull off her
+gloves and sit down to make tea with a mature knowledge of how to get
+the little lynch-pin out of the spirit-lamp, and of how many
+spoonfuls? No; the fact is, Sally was a more frequent visitor to the
+image of Buddha than she chose to admit; and as for the doctor, he
+seized every legitimate opportunity of 'cello practice at Krakatoa
+Villa. But G.P.'s cannot call their time their own.
+
+"The funny part of Mrs. Shoosmith," said Sally, when the pot was full
+up and the lid shut, "is that the moment she is brought into contact
+with warm soapy water and scrubbing-brushes, she seems to renew her
+youth. She brings large pins out of her mouth and secures her apron.
+And then she scrubs. Now you may blow the methylated out and make
+yourself useful, Dr. Conrad."
+
+"Does she put back the pins when she's done scrubbing?" the doctor
+asks, when he has made himself useful.
+
+"She puts them back against another time, so I have understood. I
+suppose they live in her mouth. That's yours with two lumps. That is
+your mother's--no, I won't pour it yet. She's asleep."
+
+For the fact is that the Goody, anxious to invest herself with an
+appearance of forbearance towards the frivolities of youth, readiness
+to forego (from amiability) any share in the conversation, insight
+into the _rapports_ of others (especially male and female _rapports_),
+and general superiority to human weakness, had endeavoured to express
+all these things by laying down her knitting, folding her hands on
+her circumference, and looking as if she knew and could speak if she
+chose. But if you do this, even the maintenance of an attentive
+hypodermic smile is not enough to keep you awake--and off you go! The
+Goody did, and the smile died slowly off into a snore. Never mind! She
+was in want of rest, so she said. It was curious, too, for she seldom
+got anything else.
+
+It would have been unfeeling to wake her, so Dr. Vereker went and sat
+a good deal nearer Sally, not to make more noise than was necessary.
+This reacted, an outsider might have inferred, on the subject-matter
+of the conversation, making it more serious in tone. And as Sally put
+the little Turk's cap over the pot to keep it warm, and the doctor
+knew perfectly well that the blacker the tea was the better his mother
+liked it, this lasted until that lady woke up with a start a long
+time after, and said she must have been asleep. Then, as Cook was
+aware in the kitchen, some more noise came of it, and Sally carried
+off Mrs. Shoosmith's certificate.
+
+"You know, Dr. Conrad, it makes you look like a real medical man," she
+said at the gate, referring to the detention of the doctor's pill-box,
+which awaited him, and he replied that it didn't matter. King, the
+driver, looked as if he thought it _did_, and appeared morose. Is it
+because coachmen always keep their appointments with society and
+society never keeps its appointments with coachmen that a settled
+melancholy seems to brood over them, and their souls seem cankered
+with misanthropy?
+
+The doctor had rather a rough time that evening. For among the
+patients he was going to try to see and get back to dinner (thus ran
+current speech of those concerned) there was a young man from the West
+Indies, who had come into something considerable. But he was afflicted
+with a disorder he called the "jumps," and the doctor's diagnosis, if
+correct, showed that the _vera causa_ of this aptly-named disease was
+alcohol of sp. gr. something, to which the patient was in the habit
+of adding very few atoms of water indeed. The doctor was doing all he
+could to change the regimen, but only succeeded on making his patient
+weak and promise amendment. On this particular evening the latter
+quite unexpectedly went for the doctor's throat, shouting, "I see your
+plans!" and King had to be summoned from his box to help restrain him.
+So Dr. Vereker was tired when he got home late to dinner, and would
+have felt miserable, only he could always shut his eyes and think of
+Sally's hands that had come over his shoulder to discriminate points
+in Mrs. Shoosmith's magna-charta. They had come so near him that he
+could smell the fresh sweet dressing of the new kid gloves--six and
+a half, we believe.
+
+But although he liked his Goody mother to talk to him about the girl
+who had christened her so, he was tired enough this evening to wish
+that her talk had flowed in a less pebbly channel. For she chose this
+opportunity to enlarge upon the duties of young married women towards
+their husbands' parents, their mothers especially. Her conclusion was
+a little unexpected:
+
+"I have said nothing throughout, my dear. I should not dream of doing
+so. But if I had I trust I should have made it clearly understood how
+I regarded Miss Laetitia Wilson's conduct."
+
+"But there wasn't any. Nobody contracted a private marriage."
+
+"My dear Conrad! Have I said that any one has done so? Have I used
+the expression 'private marriage'?"
+
+"Why--no. I don't think you have. Not to-day, at least."
+
+"When have I done so? Have I not, on the contrary, from the very
+beginning told you I should take the first opportunity of disbelieving
+so absurd and mischievous a story? And have I lost a moment? Was it
+not the first word I said to Sally Nightingale before you came in, and
+without a soul in the room to hear? I only ask for justice. But if my
+son misrepresents me, what can I expect from others?" At this point
+patient toleration only.
+
+"But, mother dear, I don't _want_ to misrepresent you. Only I'll be
+hanged if I see why Tishy Wilson is to be hauled over the coals?"
+
+A suggestion of a proper spirit showed itself. "I am accustomed to
+your language, and will say nothing. But, my dear Conrad, for you are
+always my son, and will remain so, whatever your language may be, do
+you, my dear Conrad, do you really sanction the attitude of a young
+lady who refuses to marry--public and private don't come into the
+matter--because of a groundless antipathy? For it is admitted on all
+hands that Mrs. Julius Bradshaw is a person of rather superior class."
+
+"She's Mrs. Bradshaw--not Mrs. Julius. But what makes you suppose
+Tishy Wilson objects to her?"
+
+"My dear Conrad, you know as well as I do that is a mere
+prevarication. Why evade the point? But in my opinion you do wisely
+not to attempt any defence of Laetitia Wilson. It may be true that
+she has not laid herself open to misconstruction in this case, but
+the lack of good feeling is to all intents and purposes the same
+as if she had; and I must say, my dear Conrad, I am surprised
+that a professional man with your qualifications should undertake
+to justify her."
+
+"But Miss Wilson hasn't _done_ anything! What are you wigging away
+at her for, mother dear?"
+
+"Have I not expressly said that she has done nothing whatever? Of
+course she has not, and, I hope, never will. But it is easy for you,
+Conrad, to take refuge in a fact which I have been scrupulously
+careful to admit from the very beginning. And 'wigging away!' What
+language!"
+
+"Never mind the language, mother darling! Tell me what it's all
+about." Tired as he is, he gets up from the chair he has not been
+smoking in (because this is the drawing-room) to go round and kiss
+what is probably the fatty integument of a very selfish old woman,
+but which he believes to be that of an affectionate mother. "What's
+it all about?" he repeats.
+
+"My dear Conrad! Is it not a little unfeeling to ask me what it is
+all about when you know?"
+
+"I _don't_ know, mother dear. I can do any amount of guessing, but
+I don't _know_."
+
+"I think, my dear, if you will light my candle and ring for Craddock
+to shut up, that I had better go to bed." Which her son does, but
+perversely abstains from giving the old lady any assistance to saying
+what is in her mind to say.
+
+But she did not intend to be baffled. For when he had piloted her to
+her state apartment, carrying her candle, under injunctions on no
+account to spill the grease, and a magazine of wraps and wools and
+unintelligible sundries, she contrived to invest an elucidation of
+her ideas with an appearance of benevolence by working in a readiness
+to sacrifice herself to her son's selfish longing for tobacco.
+
+"Only just hear me to the end, my dear, and then you can get away to
+your pipe. What I did _not_ say--for you interrupted me--did not
+relate so much to Miss Laetitia Wilson as to Sally Nightingale. She,
+I am sure, would never come between any man she married and his mother.
+I am making no reference to any one whatever, although, however old I
+am, I have eyes in my head and can see. But I can read character, and
+that is my interpretation of Sally Nightingale's."
+
+"Sally Nightingale and I are not going to make it up, if that's what
+you mean, mother. She wouldn't have me, for one thing----"
+
+"My dear, I am not going to argue the point. It is nearly eleven, and
+unless I get to bed I shan't sleep. Now go away to your pipe, and
+think of what I have said. And don't slam your door and wake me
+when you come up." She offered him a selection to kiss, shutting her
+eyes tight. And he gave place to Craddock, and went away to his
+unwholesome, smelly habit, as his mamma had more than once called it.
+His face was perplexed and uncomfortable; however, it got ease after
+a few puffs of pale returns and a welcome minute of memory of the
+bouquet of those sixes.
+
+But his little happy oasis was a very small one. For a messenger came
+with a furious pull at the night-bell and a summons for the doctor.
+His delirium-tremens case had very nearly qualified its brain for a
+P.M.--at least, if there were any of it left--by getting at a pistol
+and taking a bad aim at it. The unhappy dipsomaniac was half-shot,
+and prompt medical attendance was necessary to prevent the something
+considerable being claimed by his heir-at-law.
+
+Whether this came to pass or not does not concern us. This much is
+certain, that at the end of six months which this chapter represents,
+and which you have probably skipped, he was as much forgotten by the
+doctor as the pipe his patient's suicidal escapade had interrupted, or
+the semi-vexation with his mother he was using it as an anodyne for.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+MORNING AT LADBROKE GROVE ROAD, AND FAMILY DISSENSION. FACCIOLATI,
+ AND A LEGACY. THE LAST CONCERT THIS SEASON. THE GOODY WILL COME TO
+ IGGULDEN'S. BUT FANCY PROSY IN LOVE!
+
+
+Towards the end of the July that very quickly followed Rosalind
+noticed an intensification of what might be called the Ladbroke Grove
+Road Row Chronicle--a record transmitted by Sally to her real and
+adopted parent in the instalments in which she received it from Tishy.
+
+This record on one occasion depicted a battle-royal at breakfast,
+"over the marmalade," Sally said. She added that the Dragon might just
+as well have let the Professor alone. "He was reading," she said,
+"'The Classification of Roots in Prehistoric Dialects,' because I saw
+the back; and Tacitus was on the butter. But the Dragon likes the
+grease to spoil the bindings, and she knows it."
+
+A vision of priceless Groliers soaking passed through Rosalind's mind.
+"Wasn't that what this row was about, then?" she asked.
+
+"I don't think so," said Sally, who had gone home to breakfast with
+Tishy after an early swim. "It's difficult to say what it was about.
+Really, the Professor had hardly said _anything at all_, and the
+Dragon said she thought he was forgetting the servants. Fossett wasn't
+even in the room. And then the Dragon said, 'Yes, shut it,' to Athene.
+Fancy saying 'Yes, shut it,' in a confidential semitone! Really,
+I can't see that it was so very wrong of Egerton, although he _is_
+a booby, to say there was no fun in having a row before breakfast.
+He didn't mean them to think he meant them to hear."
+
+"But how did it get from the marmalade to Tishy's haberdasher?" asked
+Fenwick.
+
+"Can't say, Jeremiah. It all came in a buzz, like a wopses nest. And
+then Egerton said it was rows, rows, rows all day long, and he should
+hook it off and get a situation. It _is_ rows, rows, rows, so it's no
+use pretending it isn't. But it always comes round to the haberdasher
+grievance in the end. This time Tishy went to her father in the
+library, and confessed up about Kensington Gardens."
+
+Both hearers said, "Oh, I see!" and then Sally transmitted the report
+of this interview. It had not been stormy, and may be looked at by the
+light of the Professor's last remark. "The upshot is, Tish, that you
+can marry Julius against your mother's consent right off, and never
+lose a penny of your aunt's legacy."
+
+"Legacy is good, very excellent good," said Fenwick. "How much was
+it, Sarah?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Lots--a good lot--a thousand pounds! The Dragon
+wanted to make out that it was conditional on her consent to Tishy's
+marriage. That was fibs. But what I don't see is that Gaffer Wilson
+ever said a word to Tishy about his own objections to her marrying
+Julius, if he has any!"
+
+"Perhaps," Rosalind suggested, "she hasn't told you all he said." But
+to this Sally replied that Tishy had told her over and over and over
+again, only she said _over_ so often that her adopted parent said for
+Heaven's sake stop, or he should write the word into his letters.
+However, the end of the last despatch was at hand, and he himself
+took up the conversation on signing it.
+
+"Yours faithfully, Algernon Fenwick. That's the lot! I agree with
+the kitten."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"About if he has any. I believe he'd be glad if Miss Wilson took
+the bit in her teeth and bolted."
+
+"You agree with Prosy?" As Sally says this, without a thought in
+a thoughtful face but what belongs to the subject, her mother is
+conscious that she herself is quite prepared to infer that Prosy
+already knows all about it. She has got into the habit of hearing
+that he knows about things.
+
+"What does Vereker say?" Thus Fenwick.
+
+"He'll be here in a minute, and you can ask him. That's him! I mean
+that's his ring."
+
+"It's just like any other ring, chick." It is her mother who speaks.
+But Sally says: "Nonsense! as if I didn't know Prosy's ring!" And
+Dr. Vereker appears, quartet bound, for this was the weekly musical
+evening at Krakatoa Villa.
+
+"Jeremiah wants to know whether you don't think Tishy's male parent
+would be jolly glad if she and Julius took the bit in their teeth and
+bolted?" "I shouldn't be the least surprised if they did," is the
+doctor's reply. But it does not strike Sally as rising to the height
+of her Draconic summary.
+
+"You're not shining, Dr. Conrad," she says; "you're evading the point.
+What do _you_ think Gaffer Bristles thinks, that's the point?" Dr.
+Conrad appears greatly exhilarated and refreshed by Sally, whose mother
+seems to share his feeling, but she enjoins caution, for all that.
+
+"Do take care, kitten," she says. "They're on the stairs." But Sally
+considers "they" are miles off, and will take ages getting upstairs.
+"They've only just met at the door," is her explanatory comment,
+showing appreciation of one human weakness.
+
+"Suppose we were to get it put in more official form!" Fenwick
+suggests. "Would Professor Sales Wilson be very much shocked if his
+daughter and Paganini made a runaway match of it?" The name Paganini
+has somehow leaked out of Cattley's counting-house, and become common
+property.
+
+"I think, if you ask me," says Vereker, speaking to Fenwick, but never
+taking his eyes off Sally, on whom they feed, "that Professor Sales
+Wilson would be very much relieved."
+
+"_That's_ right!" says Sally, speaking as to a pupil who has profited.
+"Now you're being a good little General Practitioner." And then, the
+ages having elapsed with some alacrity, the door opens and the two
+subjects of discussion make their appearance.
+
+The anomalous cousin did not come with them, having subsided. Mrs.
+Fenwick herself had taken the pianoforte parts lately. She had always
+been a fair pianist, and application had made her passable--a good
+make-shift, anyhow. So you may fill out the programme to your
+liking--it really doesn't matter what they played--and consider that
+this musical evening was one of their best that season. It was just
+as well it should be so, as it was their last till the autumn. Sally
+and her mother were going to the seaside all August and some of
+September, and Fenwick was coming with them for a week at first,
+and after that for short week-end spells. He had become a partner
+in the wine-business, and was not so much tied to the desk.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Well, then, it's good-bye, I suppose?" The speaker is Rosalind
+herself, as the Stradivarius is being put to bed. But she hasn't the
+heart to let the verdict stand--at least, as far as the doctor is
+concerned. She softens it, adds a recommendation to mercy. "Unless
+you'll come down and pay us a visit. We'll put you up somewhere."
+
+"I'm afraid it isn't possible," is the answer. But the doctor can't
+get his eyes really off Sally. Even as a small boy might strain at
+the leash to get back to a source of cake against the grasp of an iron
+nurse, even so Dr. Conrad rebels against the grip of professional
+engagements, which is the name of his cold, remorseless tyrant.
+But Sally is harnessing up a coach-and-six to drive through human
+obligations. Her manner of addressing the doctor suggests previous
+talk on the subject.
+
+"You _must_ get the locum, and come. You know you can, and it's all
+nonsense about can't." What would be effrontery in another character
+makes Sally speak through and across the company. A secret confidence
+between herself and the doctor, that you are welcome to the full
+knowledge of, and be hanged to you! is what the manner of the two
+implies.
+
+"I spoke to Neckitt about it, and he can't manage it," says the
+doctor in the same manner. But the first and second violin are waiting
+to take leave.
+
+"We'll say good-night, then--or good-bye, if it's for six weeks."
+Tishy is perfectly unblushing about the _we_. She might be conveying
+Mr. Tishy away. They go, and get away from Dr. Vereker, by-the-bye.
+An awkward third isn't wanted.
+
+"There's plenty more Neckitts where he comes from," pursues Sally,
+as the "other two"--for that is how Fenwick thinks of them--get
+themselves and their instruments out of the house. "So don't be
+nonsensical, Dr. Conrad.... Stop a moment. I _must_ speak to Tishy."
+And Sally gives chase, and overtakes the other two just by the
+fire-alarm, where Fenwick came to a standstill. Do you remember? It
+certainly has been a record effort to "get away first." You know this
+experience yourself at parties? Sally speaks to Tishy in the glorious
+summer night, and the three talk together earnestly under innumerable
+constellations, and one gas-lamp that elbows the starry heavens out
+of the way--a self-asserting, cheeky gas-lamp.
+
+The doctor organizes tactics rapidly. He can hear that Sally's step
+goes up the street, and then the voices at a distance. If he can say
+good-bye and rush away just as Sally does the same, why then they
+will meet outside, don't you see?
+
+Rosalind and her husband seem to have wireless telegrams passing. For
+when Sally vanishes there is a ring as of instruction received in the
+tone of Fenwick's voice as he addresses the doctor:
+
+"Couldn't you manage to get your mother to come too, Vereker? She must
+be terribly in want of a change."
+
+"So I tell her; but she's so difficult to move."
+
+"Have a sedan-chair thing----"
+
+"I don't mean that--not physically difficult. I mean she's got so
+anchored no one can persuade her to move. She hasn't been away for
+ages."
+
+"Sally must go and persuade her." It is Rosalind who says this. "I'm
+sure Sally will manage it."
+
+"She will if any one can," says the doctor. "Of course, I could
+soon get a locum if there was a chance of mother." And then the
+conversation supports itself on the possible impossibility of finding
+a lodging at St. Sennans-on-Sea, and consoles itself with its intense
+improbability till the doctor finds it necessary to depart with the
+promptitude of a fire-engine suddenly rung up.
+
+He had calculated his time to a nicety, for he met Sally just as "the
+other two" got safe round the corner.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Oh no," said Fenwick, replying to a query; "he doesn't mean to carry
+it all the way. He'll pick up a cab at the corner." The query was
+about the violoncello, and Fenwick was coming back to the room
+where his wife was closing the piano in anticipation of Ann. He had
+discreetly launched the instrument and its owner under the stars, and
+left the street door standing wide open--a shallow pretence that he
+believed Sally already in touch with it.
+
+"They _are_ a funny couple," Rosalind said. "Just fancy! They've known
+each other two years, and there they are! But I do like him. It's all
+his mother, you know ... what is?... why, goose--of course I mean he
+would speak at once if it wasn't for that obese mother of his."
+
+"But she's so fond of Sally." In reply to this his wife kisses his
+cheeks, forehead, and chin consecutively, and he says it was right
+that time, only the other way round. This refers to a system founded
+on the crossing incident at Rheims.
+
+"Of course she is, darling; or pretends she is. But he can neither
+divorce his mamma nor ask the kitten to marry her. You see?"
+
+"I see--in fact, I've thought so myself. In confidence, you know.
+But is no compromise possible?" Rosalind shakes a slow, regretful,
+negative head, and her lips form a silent "No!"
+
+"Not with her. The woman has her own share of selfishness, and her
+son's, too. _He_ has none."
+
+"But Sally."
+
+"I see what you mean. Sally goes to the wall one way if she doesn't
+the other. So he works out selfish, poor dear fellow! in the end. But,
+Gerry darling, let me tell you this: you have no idea how impossible
+that young man thinks it that a girl should love _him_. If he thought
+it possible the kitten really cared about, or could care about him,
+he'd go clean off his head. Indeed, I am right."
+
+"Perhaps you are. There she is."
+
+Sally ran straight upstairs, leaving Ann to close the door. She at
+once discharged her mind of its burden, _more suo_.
+
+"Prosy thinks so, too!"
+
+"Thinks what?"
+
+"Thinks they'll go and get married one fine morning, whether or no!"
+
+But she seemed to be the only one much excited about this. Something
+was preoccupying the other two minds, and our Sally had not the
+remotest notion what.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Nevertheless, it came about that before the next Monday--the day of
+Sally's departure with her mother to St. Sennans-on-Sea--that young
+person paid a farewell visit to the obese mother of her medical
+adviser, and found her knitting.
+
+"That, my dear, is what I am constantly saying to Conrad," was her
+reply to a suggestion of Sally's that she wanted change and rest.
+"Only this very morning, when he came into my room to see that I had
+fresh-made toast--because you know, my dear, how tiresome servants are
+about toast--they make it overnight, and warm it up in the morning.
+Cook is no exception, and I have complained till I'm tired. I should
+be sorry to change, she's been here so long, but I did hear the other
+day of such a nice respectable person...."
+
+Sally interrupted, catching at a slight pause: "But when Dr. Conrad
+came into your room, what did he say?"
+
+"My dear, I was going to tell you." She paused, with closed eyes
+and folded hands of aggressive patience, for all trace of human
+interruption to die down; then resumed: "I said to Conrad: 'I think
+you might have thought of that before.' And then he was sorry. I will
+do him that justice. My dear boy has his faults, as I know too well,
+but he is always ready to admit he is wrong."
+
+"We can get you lodgings, you know," said Sally, from sheer intuition,
+for she had not a particle of information, so far, about what passed
+over the toast. The old lady seemed to think the conversation had been
+sufficiently well filled out, for she merely said, "Facing the sea,"
+and went on knitting.
+
+Sally and her mother knew St. Sennan well--had been at his
+watering-place twice before--so she was able, as it were, to forecast
+lodgings on the spot. "I dare say Mrs. Iggulden's is vacant," she
+said. "I wish you could have hers, she's such a nice old body. Her
+husband was a pilot, and she has one son a coastguard and another in
+the navy. And one daughter has no legs, but can do shell-work; and
+the other's married a tax-collector."
+
+But Goody Vereker was not going to be beguiled into making herself
+agreeable. She took up the attitude that Sally was young, and easily
+deceived. She threw a wet blanket over her narrative of the Iggulden
+family, and ignored any murmurs that came from beneath it. "Sea-faring
+folk are all alike," so she said. "When I was your age, my dear, I
+simply worshipped them. My father and all his brothers were devoted
+to the sea, and my Uncle David published an account of his visit to
+the Brazils. But you will learn by experience. At any rate, I trust
+there are no vermin. That is always my terror in these lodging-houses,
+and ill-aired beds."
+
+Was it fair, Sally thought to herself, to expose that dear old Mrs.
+Iggulden, who lived in a wooden dwelling covered with tar, between
+two houses built of black shiny bricks, but consisting chiefly
+of bay-windows with elderly visitors in them looking through
+telescopes at the shipping, and telling the credulous it was brigs or
+schooners--was it fair to expose Mrs. Iggulden to this gilt-spectacled
+lob-worm? Sally didn't know that Mrs. Iggulden could show a proper
+spirit, because in her own case the conditions had never been
+favourable. They had practised no incantations.
+
+"Very well, then, Mrs. Vereker. As soon as ever mamma and I have
+shaken down, we'll see about Iggulden's; and if they can't take you
+somebody else will."
+
+"I am in your hands," said the Goody, smiling faintly and
+submissively. She leaned back with her eyes closed, and was afraid
+she had done too much. She used to have periodical convictions to
+that effect.
+
+Sally had an appointment with Laetitia Wilson at the swimming bath,
+so the Goody, in an access of altruism, perceived that she mustn't
+keep her. She herself would try to rest a little.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+All people, as we suppose, lead two lives, more or less--their outer
+life, that of the world and action, and an inner life they have all
+to themselves. But how different is the proportion of the two lives
+in different subjects! And how much less painful the latter life is
+when we feel we could tell it all if we chose. Only we don't choose,
+because it's no concern of yours or any one else's.
+
+This was Sally's frame of mind. She would not have felt the ghost of
+a reserve of an inmost thought (from her mother, for instance) in the
+face of questions asked, though she kept her own counsel about many
+points whose elucidation was not called for. It may easily be that
+Rosalind asked no questions about some things, because she had no wish
+that her daughter should formulate their answers too decisively. Her
+relation with Conrad Vereker, for example. Was it love, or what? If
+there was to be marrying, and families, and that sort of thing, and
+possible interference with swimming-matches and athletics, and so on,
+would she as soon choose this man for her accomplice as any other she
+knew? Suppose she was to hear to-morrow that Dr. Vereker was engaged
+to Sylvia Peplow, would she be glad or sorry?
+
+Rosalind certainly did ask no such questions. If she had, the answers
+to the first two would have been, we surmise, very clear and decisive.
+What nonsense! Fancy Prosy being in love with anybody, or anybody
+being in love with Prosy! And as for marrying, the great beauty of it
+all was that there was to be no marrying. Did he understand that? Oh
+dear, yes! Prosy understood quite well. But we wonder, is the image
+our mind forms of Sally's answer to the third question correct or
+incorrect? It presents her to us as answering rather petulantly: "Why
+_shouldn't_ Dr. Conrad marry Miss Peplow, if he likes, and _she_
+likes? I dare say _she'd_ be ready enough, though!" and then
+pretending to look out of the window. And shortly afterwards: "I
+suppose Prosy has a right to his private affairs, as much as I have
+to mine." But with lips that tighten over her speech, without a smile.
+Note that this is all pure hypothesis.
+
+But she had nothing to conceal that she knew of, had Sally. What
+a difference there was between her inner world and her mother's, who
+could not breathe a syllable of that world's history to any living soul!
+
+Rosalind acknowledged to herself now how great the relief had been
+when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to
+her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility
+from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one
+other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For
+those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped
+her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, when she
+woke in the stillness of the night, the voice of the old man, a
+whisper struggling through his half-choked respiration, that said
+again and again: "Oh, Rosey darling! can it be true? Thank God! thank
+God!" And the fact that what she had then feared had never come
+to pass--the fact that, contrary to her expectations, he had been
+strangely able to look the wonder in the face, and never flinch from
+it, seeing nothing in it but a priceless boon--this fact seemed to
+give her now the fortitude to bear without help the burden of her
+knowledge--the knowledge of who he was, this man that was beside her
+in the stillness, this man whose steady breathing she could hear,
+whose heart-beats she could count. And her heart dwelt on the old
+soldier's last words, strangely, almost incredibly, resonant, a
+hard-won victory in his dying fight for speech, "Evil has turned to
+good. God be praised!" It had almost seemed as if the parting soul, on
+the verge of the strangest chance man has to face, lost all measure of
+the strangeness of any earthly thing, and was sensible of nothing but
+the wonderment of the great cause of all.
+
+But one thing that she knew (and could not explain) was that this
+secret knowledge, burdensome in itself, relieved the oppression of one
+still more burdensome, and helped her to drive it from her thoughts.
+We speak of the collision of the record in her mind of what her
+daughter was, and whence, with the fact that Sally was winding herself
+more and more, daughterwise, round the heart of the man whose bond
+with her mother she, small and unconscious, had had so large a share
+in rending asunder twenty years ago. It was to her, in its victory
+over crude physical fact, even while it oppressed her, a bewildering
+triumph of spirit over matter, of soul over sense, this firm
+consolidating growth of an affection such as Nature means, but often
+fails to reach, between child and parent. And as it grew and grew, her
+child's actual paternity shrank and dwindled, until it might easily
+have been held a matter for laughter, but for the black cloud of
+Devildom that hung about it, and stamped her as the infant of a
+Nativity in the Venusberg, whose growing after-life had gone far to
+shroud the horror of its lurid caverns with a veil of oblivion.
+
+We say all these things quite seriously of our Sally, in spite of
+her incorrigible slanginess and vulgarity. We can now go on to St.
+Sennans-on-Sea, where we shall find her in full blow, but very sticky
+with the salt water she passes really too much of her time in, even
+for a merpussy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+ST. SENNANS-ON-SEA. MISS GWENDOLEN ARKWRIGHT. WOULD ANY OTHER CHILD HAVE
+ BEEN SALLY? HOW MRS. IGGULDEN'S COUSIN SOLOMON SURRENDERED HIS COUCH
+
+
+St. Sennans-on-Sea consists of two parts--the new and the old. The old
+part is a dear little old place, and the new part is beastly. So Sally
+says, and she must know, because this is her third visit.
+
+The old part consists of Mrs. Iggulden's and the houses we have
+described on either side of her, and maybe two dozen more wooden or
+black-brick dwellings of the same sort; also of the beach and its
+interesting lines of breakwater that are so very jolly to jump off or
+to lie down and read novels under in the sea smell. Only not too near
+the drains, if you know it. If you don't know it, it doesn't matter so
+much, because the smell reminds you of the seaside, and seems right
+and fitting. You must take care how you jump, though, off these
+breakwaters, because where they are not washed inconceivably clean,
+and all their edges smoothed away beyond belief by the tides that come
+and go for ever, they are slippery with green sea-ribbons that cling
+close to them, and green sea-fringes that cling closer still, and
+brown sea-ramifications that are studded with pods that pop if you
+tread on them, but are not quite so slippery; only you may just as
+well be careful, even with them. And we should recommend you, before
+you jump, to be sure you are not hooked over a bolt, not merely
+because you may get caught, and fall over a secluded reading-public
+on the other side, but because the red rust comes off on you and soils
+your white petticoat.
+
+If you don't mind jumping off these breakwaters--and it really is
+rather a lark--you may tramp along the sea front quite near up to
+where the fishing-luggers lie, each with a capstan all to itself,
+under the little extra old town the red-tanned fishing-nets live in,
+in houses that are like sailless windmill-tops whose plank walls have
+almost merged their outlines in innumerable coats of tar, laid by
+long generations back of the forefathers of the men in oil-cloth
+head-and-shoulder hats who repair their nets for ever in the Channel
+wind, unless you want a boat to-day, in which case they will scull you
+about, while you absolutely ache sympathetically with their efforts,
+of which they themselves remain serenely unaware, till you've been out
+long enough. Then they beach you cleverly on the top of a wave, and
+their family circle seizes you, boat and all, and runs you up the
+shingle before the following wave can catch you and splash you, which
+it wants to do.
+
+There is an aroma of the Norman Conquest and of Domesday Book about
+the old town. Research will soon find out, if she looks sharp, that
+there is nothing Norman in the place except the old arch in the
+amorphous church-tower, and a castle at a distance on the flats. But
+the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of
+bygone sea-battles not a century ago, and the names of streets that
+do not antedate the Georges, than in these mere scraps that are always
+open to the reproach of mediaevalism, and are separated from us by a
+great gulf. And it doesn't much matter to us whether the memories are
+of victory or defeat, or the names those of sweeps or heroes. All's
+one to us--we glow; perhaps rashly, for, you see, we really know very
+little about them. And he who has read no history to speak of, if he
+glows about the past on the strength of his imperfect data, may easily
+break his molasses-jug.
+
+So, whether our blood is stirred by Nelson and Trafalgar, whereof
+we have read, or by the Duke of York and Walcheren, whereof we
+haven't--or mighty little--we feel in touch with both these heroes,
+for they are modern. Both have columns, anyhow; and we can dwell upon
+their triumph or defeat almost as if it wasn't history at all, but
+something that really happened, without running any risk of being
+accused of archaism or of deciphering musty tomes. And we can enjoy
+our expedition all the same to the ruined keep in the level pastures,
+where the long-horned black cattle stand and think and flap their
+tails still, just as they did in the days when the basement dungeons,
+now choked up, held real prisoners with real broken hearts.
+
+But there is modern life, too, at St. Sennans--institutions that keep
+abreast of the century. Half the previous century ago, when we went
+there first, the Circulating Library consisted, so far as we can
+recollect it, of a net containing bright leather balls, a collection
+of wooden spades and wheelbarrows, a glass jar with powder-puffs,
+another with tooth-brushes, a rocking-horse--rashly stocked in the
+first heated impulse of an over-confident founder--a few other
+trifles, and, most important of all, a book-case that supplied the
+title-role to the performance. That book-case contained (we are
+confident) _editiones principes_ of Mrs. Ratcliff, Sir Walter Scott,
+Bulwer Lytton, Currer Bell ... well, even Fanny Burney, if you come
+to that. There certainly was a copy of "Frankenstein," and fifty years
+ago our flesh was so compliant as to creep during its perusal. It
+wouldn't now.
+
+But even fifty years ago there was never a volume that had not been
+defaced out of all knowledge by crooked marks of the most inquisitive
+interrogation, and straight marks of the most indignant astonishment,
+by the reading-public in the shadows of the breakwaters. It really
+read, that public did; and, what's more, it often tore out the
+interesting bits to take away. I remember great exasperation when a
+sudden veil was drawn over the future of two lovers just as the young
+gentleman had flung himself into the arms of the young lady. An
+unhallowed fiend had cut off the sequel with scissors and boned it!
+
+That was done, or much of it, when the books were new, and the
+railway-station was miles away; when the church wasn't new, but
+old, which was better. It has been made new since, and has chairs
+in it, and memorial windows by Stick and Co. In those days its
+Sunday-folk were fisherfolk mostly, and a few local magnates or
+parvates--squirophants, they might be called--and a percentage of
+the visitors.
+
+Was St. Sennan glad or sorry, we wonder, when the last two sorts
+subscribed and restored him? If we had been he, one of us would have
+had to have the temper of a saint to keep cool about it. Anyhow, it's
+done now, and can't be undone.
+
+But the bathing-machines are not restored, at any rate. Those
+indescribables yonder, half rabbit-hutch, half dry-dock--a long row
+for ladies and a short one for gentlemen, three hundred yards
+apart--couldn't trust 'em any nearer, bless you!--these superannuated
+God-knows-whats, struggling against disintegration from automatic
+plunges down a rugged beach, and creaking journeys back you are asked
+to hold on through--it's no use going on drying!--these tributes to
+public decorum you can find no room in, and probably swear at--no
+sacrilegious restorer has laid his hand on these. They evidently
+contemplate going on for ever; for though their axes grow more and
+more oblique every day, their self-confidence remains unshaken. But
+then they think they _are_ St. Sennans, and that the wooden houses are
+subordinate accidents, and the church a mere tributary that was a
+little premature--got there first, in its hurry to show respect for
+_them_. And no great wonder, seeing what a figure they cut, seen from
+a boat when you have a row! Or, rather, used to cut; for now the new
+town (which is beastly) has come on the cliff above, and looks for
+all the world as if _it_ was St. Sennans, and speaks contemptuously
+of the real town as the Beach Houses.
+
+The new town can only be described as a tidy nightmare; yet it is
+a successful creation of the brains that conceived it--a successful
+creation of ground-rents. As a development of land ripe for building,
+with more yards of frontage to the main-road than at first sight
+geometry seems able to accommodate, it has been taking advantage of
+unrivalled opportunities for a quarter of a century, backed by
+advances on mortgage. It is the envy of the neighbouring proprietors
+east and west along the coast, who have developed their own eligible
+sites past all remedy and our endurance, and now have to drain their
+purses to meet the obligations to the professional mortgagee, who is
+biding his hour in peace, waiting for the fruit to fall into his mouth
+and murderously sure of his prey. But at St. Sennans a mysterious
+silence reigns behind a local office that yields keys on application,
+and answers all inquiries, and asks ridiculous rents. And this
+silence, or its keeper, is said to have become enormously rich over
+the new town.
+
+The shareholders in the St. Sennans Hotel, Limited, cannot have become
+rich. If they had, surely they would provide something better for a
+hungry paying supplicant than a scorched greasy chop, inflamed at the
+core, and glass bottles containing a little pellucid liquid that parts
+with its carbon dioxide before you can effect a compromise with the
+cork, which pushes in, but not so as to attain its ideal. So your
+Seltzer water doesn't pour fast enough to fizz outside the bottle,
+and your heart is sad. Of course, you can have wine, if you come to
+that, for look at the wine-list! Only the company's ideas of the value
+of wine are not limited, and if you decide not to be sordid, and order
+a three-shilling bottle of Medoc, you will find its contents to be
+very limited indeed. But why say more than that it is an enormous
+hotel at the seaside? You know all about them, and what it feels like
+in rainy weather, when the fat gentleman has got to-day's "Times," and
+means to read all through the advertisement-column before he gives up
+the leaders, and you have to spend your time turning over thick and
+shiny snap-shot journals with a surfeit of pictures in them; or the
+Real Lady, or the Ladylike Lady, or the Titled Lady, the portraits of
+whom--one or other of them--sweep in curves about their folio pages;
+and, while they fascinate you, make you feel that you would falter on
+the threshold of matrimony if only because they couldn't possibly take
+nourishment. Would not the discomfort of meals eaten with a companion
+who could swallow nothing justify a divorce _a mensa_?
+
+A six-shilling volume might be written about the New Hotel, with an
+execration on every page. Don't let us have anything to do with it,
+but keep as much as possible at the Sea Houses under the cliff, which
+constitute the only St. Sennans necessary to this story. We shall be
+able to do so, because when Mrs. and Mr. Fenwick and their daughter
+went for a walk they always went up the cliff-pathway, which had steps
+cut in the chalk, past the boat upside down, where new-laid eggs could
+be bought from a coastguard's wife. And this path avoided the New Town
+altogether, and took them straight to the cliff-track that skirted
+growing wheat and blazing poppies till you began to climb the smooth
+hill-pasture the foolish wheat had encroached upon in the Protection
+days, when it was worth more than South Down mutton. And now every ear
+of it would have been repenting in sackcloth and ashes if it had been
+qualified by Nature to know how little it would fetch per bushel. But
+it wasn't. And when, the day after their arrival, Rosalind and her
+husband were on the beach talking of taking a walk up that way when
+Sally came out, it could have heard, if it would only have stood
+still, the sheep-bells on the slopes above reproaching it, and
+taunting it with its usurpation and its fruitless end. Perhaps it was
+because it felt ashamed that it stooped before the wind that carried
+the reproachful music, and drowned it in a silvery rustle. The barley
+succeeded the best. You listen to the next July barley-field you
+happen on, and hear what it can do when a breeze comes with no noise
+of its own.
+
+Down below on the shingle the sun was hot, and the tide was high, and
+the water was clear and green close to the shore, and jelly-fish
+abounded. You could look down into the green from the last steep ridge
+at high-water mark, and if you looked sharp you might see one abound.
+Only you had to be on the alert to jump back if a heave of the green
+transparency surged across the little pebbles that could gobble it up
+before it was all over your feet--but didn't this time. Oh dear!--how
+hot it was! Sally had the best of it. For the allusion to Sally's
+"coming out" referred to her coming out of the water, and she was
+staying in a long time.
+
+"That child's been twenty-four minutes already," said her mother,
+consulting her watch. "Just look at her out there on the horizon. What
+on earth _are_ they doing?"
+
+It _was_ a little inexplicable. At that moment Sally and her
+friend--it was one Fraeulein Braun, who had learned swimming in the
+baths on the Rhone at Geneva and in Paris--appeared to be nothing but
+two heads, one close behind the other, moving slowly on the water.
+Then the heads parted company, and apparently their owners lay on
+their backs in the water, and kicked up the British Channel.
+
+"They're saving each other's lives," said Gerry. He got up from a nice
+intaglio he had made to lie in, and after shaking off a good bushel of
+small pebbles a new-made beach-acquaintance of four had heaped upon
+him, resorted to a double opera-glass to see them better. "The kitten
+wanted me to get out of my depth for her to tow me in. But I didn't
+fancy it. Besides, a sensitive British public would have been
+scandalised."
+
+"You never learned to swim, then, Gerry----?" She just stopped herself
+in time. The words "after all" were on her lips. Without them her
+speech was mere chat; with them it would have been a match to a mine.
+She sometimes wished in these days that the mine might explode of
+itself, and give her peace.
+
+"I suppose I never did," replied her husband, as a matter of course.
+"At least, I couldn't do it when I tried in the water just now. I
+should imagine I must have tried B.C., or I shouldn't have known how
+to try. It's not a thing one forgets, so they say." He paused a few
+seconds, and then added: "Anyhow, it's quite certain I couldn't do
+it." There was not a trace of consciousness on his part of anything
+in _her_ mind beyond what her words implied. But she felt in peril of
+fire, so close to him, with a resurrection of an image in it--a vivid
+one--of the lawn-tennis garden of twenty years ago, and the speech of
+his friend, the real Fenwick, about his inability to swim.
+
+This sense of peril did not diminish as he continued: "I've found out
+a lot of things I _can_ do in the way of athletics, though; I seem to
+know how to wrestle, which is very funny. I wonder where I learned.
+And you saw how I could ride at Sir Mountmassingham's last month?"
+This referred to a country visit, which has not come into our story.
+"And that was very funny about the boxing. Such a peaceful old fogey
+as your husband! Wasn't it, Rosey darling?"
+
+"Why won't you call the Bart. by his proper name, Gerry? Wasn't what?"
+
+"Funny about the gloves. You know that square fellow? He was a
+well-known prizefighter that young Sales Wilson had picked up and
+brought down to teach the boys. You remember him? He went to church,
+and was very devout...."
+
+"I remember."
+
+"Well, it was in the billiard-room, after dinner. He said quite
+suddenly, 'This gentleman now can make use of his daddles. I can see
+it in him'--meaning me. 'What makes you think that, Mr. Macmorrough?'
+said I. 'We of the fancy, sir,' says he, 'see these things, without
+referrin' to no books, by the light of Nature.' And next day we had
+a set-to with the gloves, and his verdict was 'Only just short of
+professional.' Those boys were delighted. I wonder how and when
+I became such a dab at it?"
+
+"I wonder!" Rosalind doesn't seem keen on the subject. "I wish those
+crazy girls would begin to think of coming in. If it's going to be
+like this every day I shall go home to London, Gerry."
+
+"Perhaps when Vereker comes down on Monday he'll be able to influence.
+Medical authority!"
+
+Here the beach-acquaintance, who had kept up a musical undercurrent of
+disjointed comment, perceived an opportunity for joining more actively
+in the conversation.
+
+"My mummar says--my mummar says--my mummar says...."
+
+"Yes--little pet--what does she say?" Thus Rosalind.
+
+"Yes--Miss Gwendolen Arkwright--what does she say?" Thus Fenwick, on
+whom Miss Arkwright is seated.
+
+"My mummar says se wissus us not to paggle Tundy when the tideses goed
+out. But my mummar says--my mummar says...."
+
+"Yes, darling."
+
+"My mummar says we must paggle Monday up to here." Miss Arkwright
+indicates the exact high-water mark sanctioned, candidly. "Wiv no
+sooze, and no stottins!" She then becomes diffuse. "And my bid sister
+Totey's doll came out in my bed, and Dane dusted her out wiv a
+duster. And I can do thums. And they make free...." At this point Miss
+Arkwright's copy runs short, and she seizes the opportunity for a sort
+of seated dance of satisfaction at her own eloquence--a kind of
+subjective horsemanship.
+
+"I wish I never had to do any sums that made more than three," is the
+putative horse's comment. "But there are only two possible, alas! And
+the totals are stale, as you might say."
+
+"I'm afraid my little girl's being troublesome." Thus the mamma,
+looking round a huge groin of breakwater a few yards off.
+
+"Troublesome, madame?" exclaims Fenwick, using French unexpectedly.
+"She's the best company in Sussex." But Miss Arkwright's nurse Jane
+domineers into the peaceful circle with a clairvoyance that Miss
+Gwendolen is giving trouble, and bears her away rebellious.
+
+"What a shame!" says Gerry _sotto voce_. "But I wonder why I said
+'madame'!"
+
+"I remember you said it once before." And she means to add "the
+first time you saw me," but dubs it, in thought, a needless lie, and
+substitutes, "that day when you were electrocuted." And then imagines
+she has flinched, and adds her original text boldly. She isn't sorry
+when her husband merely says, "That was queer too!" and remains
+looking through his telescope at the swimmers.
+
+"They're coming at last--a couple of young monkeys!" is her comment.
+And, sure enough, after a very short spell of stylish sidestrokes
+Sally's voice and laugh are within hearing ahead of her companion's
+more guttural intonation. Her mother draws a long breath of relief
+as the merpussy vanishes under her awning, and is shouted and tapped
+at to hold tight, while capstan-power tugs and strains to bring her
+dressing-room up a sharp slope out of reach of the sea.
+
+"Well, Jeremiah, and what have _you_ got to say for yourself?" said
+the merpussy soon after, just out of her machine, with a huge mass
+of briny black hair spread out to dry. The tails had to be split and
+sorted and shaken out at intervals to give the air a chance. Sally
+was blue and sticky all over, and her finger-tips and nails all one
+colour. But her spirits were boisterous.
+
+"What about?"
+
+"What about, indeed? About not coming into the water to be pulled out.
+You promised you would, you know you did!"
+
+"I did; but subject to a reasonable interpretation of the compact.
+I should have been out of my depth ever so long before you could reach
+me. Why didn't you come closer?"
+
+"How could I, with a fat, pink party drying himself next door? _You_
+wouldn't have, if it had been you, and him Goody Vereker...."
+
+"Sal-ly! Darling!" Her mother remonstrates.
+
+"We-ell, there's nothing in that! As if we didn't all know what the
+Goody would look like...."
+
+Rosalind is really afraid that the strict mamma of her husband's
+recent incubus will overhear, and sit at another breakwater next day.
+"_Come_ along!" she says, dispersively and emphatically. "We shall
+have the shoulder of mutton spoiled."
+
+"No, we shan't! Shall we, Jeremiah? We've talked it over, me and
+Jeremiah. Haven't we, Gaffer Fenwick?" She is splitting up the salt
+congestions of his mane as she sits by him on the shingle. He confirms
+her statement.
+
+"We have. And we have decided that if we are two hours late it may be
+done enough. But that in any case the so-called gravy will be grey
+hot water."
+
+"Get up and come along, and don't be a mad kitten! I shall go and
+leave you two behind. So now you know." And Rosalind goes away up
+the shingle.
+
+"What makes mother look so serious sometimes, kitten? She did just now."
+
+"She's jealous of you and me flirting like we do. Don't put your hat
+on; let the sun dry you up a bit. Does she really look serious though?
+Do you mean it?"
+
+"Yes, I mean it. It comes and goes. But when I ask her she only laughs
+at me." A painful thought crosses Sally's mind. Is it possible that
+some of her reckless escapades have _froisse_'d her mother? She goes
+off into a moment's contemplation, then suddenly jumps up with, "Come
+along, Jeremiah," and follows her up the beach.
+
+But the gravity on the face of the latter, by now half-way to the
+house, had nothing to do with any of Sally's shocking vulgarities
+and outrageous utterances. No, nor even with the green-eyed monster
+Jealousy her unscrupulous effrontery had not hesitated to impute. She
+allowed it to dominate her expression, as there was no one there to
+see, until the girl overtook her. Then she wrenched her face and her
+thoughts apart with a smile. "You _are_ a mad little goose," said she.
+
+But the thing that weighted her mind--oppressed or puzzled her, as
+might be--what was it?
+
+Had she been obliged to answer the question off-hand she herself might
+have been at a loss to word it, though she knew quite well what it
+was. It was the old clash between the cause of Sally and its result.
+It was the thought that, but for a memory that every year seemed to
+call for a stronger forgetfulness, a more effective oblivion, this
+little warm star that had shone upon and thawed a frozen life, this
+salve for the wound it sprang from, would have remained unborn--a
+nonentity! Yes, she might have had another child--true! But would that
+child have been Sally?
+
+She was so engrossed with her husband, and he with her, that she felt
+she could, as it were, have trusted him with his own identity. But,
+then, how about Sally? Though she might with time show him the need
+for concealment, how be sure that nothing should come out in the very
+confusion of the springing of the mine? She could trust him with
+his identity--yes! Not Sally with hers. Her great surpassing terror
+was--do you see?--not the effect on _him_ of learning about Sally's
+strange _provenance_, but for Sally herself. The terrible knowledge
+she could not grasp the facts without would cast a shadow over her
+whole life.
+
+So she thought and turned and looked down on the beach. There below
+her was this unsolved mystery sitting in the sun beside the man whose
+life it had rent asunder from its mother's twenty years ago. And as
+Rosalind looked at her she saw her capture and detain his hat. "To
+let his mane dry, I suppose," said Rosalind. "I hope he won't get a
+sunstroke." She watched them coming up the shingle, and decided that
+they were going on like a couple of school-children. They were,
+rather.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Perhaps the image in Sally's profane mind of "hers affectionately,
+Rebecca Vereker," before or after an elderly bathe, would not have
+appeared there if she had not received that morning a letter so
+signed, announcing that, subject to a variety of fulfilments--among
+which the Will of God had quite a conspicuous place--she and her
+son would make their appearance next Monday, as our text has already
+hinted. On which day the immature legs of Miss Gwendolen Arkwright
+were to be released from a seclusion by which some religious object,
+undefined, had been attained the day before.
+
+But the conditions which had to be complied with by the lodgings it
+would be possible for this lady to occupy were such as have rarely
+been complied with, even in houses built specially to meet their
+requirements. Each window had to confront, not a particular quarter,
+but a particular ninetieth, of the compass. A full view of the sea
+had to be achieved from a sitting-room not exposed to its glare, an
+attribute destructive of human eyesight, and fraught with curious
+effects on the nerves. But the bedrooms had to look in directions
+foreign to human experience--directions from which no wind ever came
+at night. A house of which every story rotated on an independent
+vertical axis might have answered--nothing else would. Even then space
+would have called for modification, and astronomy and meteorology
+would have had to be patched up. Then with regard to the different
+levels of the floors, concession was implied to "a flat"; but,
+stairways granted, the risers were to be at zero, and the treads at
+boiling-point--a strained simile! As to cookery, the services of a
+_chef_ with great powers of self-subordination seemed to be pointed
+at, a _cordon-bleu_ ready to work in harness. Hygienic precautions,
+such as might have been insisted on by an Athanasian sanitary
+inspector on the premises of an Arian householder, were made a
+_sine qua non_. Freedom from vibration from vehicles was so firmly
+stipulated for that nothing short of a balloon from Shepherd's Bush
+could possibly have met the case. The only relaxation in favour of
+the possible was a diseased readiness to accept shakedowns, sandwiches
+standing, cuts off the cold mutton, and snacks generally on behalf
+of her son.
+
+Mrs. Iggulden, who was empty both sets on Monday, didn't answer in any
+one particular to any of these requisitions. But a spirit of overgrown
+compromise crept in, making a sufficient number of reasons why no one
+of them could be complied with an equivalent of compliance itself.
+Only in respect of certain racks and tortures for the doctor was Mrs.
+Iggulden induced to lend herself to dangerous innovation. "I can't
+have poor Prosy put to sleep in a bed like this," said Sally, punching
+in the centre of one, and finding a hideous cross-bar. Either Mrs.
+Iggulden's nephew must saw it out, and tighten up the sacking from end
+to end, or she must get a Christian bed. Poor Prosy! Whereon Mrs.
+Iggulden explained that her nephew had by an act of self-sacrifice
+surrendered this bed as a luxury for lodgers in the season, having
+himself a strong congenital love of bisection. He hadn't slept nigh
+so sound two months past, and the crossbar would soothe his slumbers.
+
+So it was finally settled that the Goody and her son should come
+to Iggulden's. The question of which set she should occupy being
+left open until she should have inspected the stairs. Thereon Mrs.
+Iggulden's nephew, whose name was Solomon, contrived a chair to carry
+the good lady up them; which she, though faint, declined to avail
+herself of when she arrived, perhaps seeing her way to greater
+embarrassment for her species by being supported slowly upstairs
+with a gasp at each step, and a moan at intervals. However, she was
+got up in the end, and thought she could take a little milk with a
+teaspoonful of brandy in it.
+
+But as to giving any conception of the difficulties that arose at this
+point in determining the choice between above and below, that must be
+left to your imagination. A conclusion _was_ arrived at in time--in
+a great deal of it--and the Goody was actually settled on the ground
+floor at Mrs. Iggulden's, and contriving to battle against collapse
+from exhaustion with an implication that she had no personal interest
+in reviving, but would do it for the sake of others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+HOW SALLY PUT THE FINISHING TOUCH ON THE DOCTOR, WHO COULDN'T SLEEP.
+ OF THE GRAND DUKE OF HESSE-JUNKERSTADT. AND OF AN INTERVIEW OVERHEARD
+
+
+Fenwick was not a witness of this advent, as the Monday on which it
+happened had seen his return to town. He had had his preliminary week,
+and his desk was crying aloud for him. He departed, renewing a solemn
+promise to write every day as the train came into the little station
+at Egbert's Road, for St. Sennans and Growborough. It is only a single
+line, even now, to St. Sennans from here, but as soon as it was done
+it was good-bye to all peace and quiet for St. Sennan.
+
+Rosalind and her daughter came back in the omnibus--not the one for
+the hotel, but the one usually spoken of as Padlock's--the one that
+lived at the Admiral Collingwood, the nearest approach to an inn in
+the old town. The word "omnibus" applied to it was not meant literally
+by Padlock, but only as a declaration of his indifference as to which
+four of the planet's teeming millions rode in it. This time there was
+no one else except a nice old farmer's wife, who spoke _to_ each of
+the ladies as "my dear," and _of_ each of them as "your sister."
+Rosalind was looking wonderfully young and handsome, certainly. They
+secured all the old lady's new-laid eggs, because there would be
+Mrs. Vereker in the evening. We like adhering to these ellipses of
+daily life.
+
+Next morning Sally took Dr. Vereker for a walk round to show him the
+place. Try to fancy the condition of a young man of about thirty, who
+had scarcely taken his hand from the plough of general practice for
+four years--for his holidays had been mighty insignificant--suddenly
+inaugurating three weeks of paradise in _the_ society man most
+covets--of delicious seclusion remote from patients, a happy valley
+where stethoscopes might be forgotten, and carbolic acid was unknown,
+where diagnosis ceased from troubling, and prognosis was at rest. He
+got so intoxicated with Sally that he quite forgot to care if the
+cases he had left to Mr. Neckitt (who had been secured as a substitute
+after all) survived or got terminated fatally. Bother them and their
+moist _rales_ and cardiac symptoms, and effusions of blood on the brain!
+
+Dr. Conrad was a young man of an honest and credulous nature, with a
+turn for music naturally, and an artificial bias towards medicine
+infused into him by his father, who had died while he was yet a boy.
+His honesty had shown itself in the loyalty with which he carried out
+his father's wishes, and his credulity in the readiness with which he
+accepted his mother's self-interested versions of his duty towards
+herself. She had given him to understand from his earliest years that
+she was an unselfish person, and entitled to be ministered unto, and
+that it was the business of every one else to see that she did not
+become the victim of her own self-sacrifice. At the date of this
+writing her son was passing through a stage of perplexity about his
+duty to her in its relation to his possible duty to a wife undefined.
+That he might not be embarrassed by too many puzzles at once, he
+waived the question of who this wife was to be, and ignored the fact
+that would have been palpable to any true reading of his mind, that if
+it had not been for Miss Sally Nightingale this perplexity might never
+have existed. He satisfied his conscience on the point by a pretext
+that Sally was a thing on a pinnacle out of his reach--not for the
+likes of him! He made believe that he was at a loss to find a foothold
+on his greasy pole, but was seeking one in complete ignorance of what
+would be found at the top of it.
+
+This shallow piece of self-deception was ripe for disillusionment when
+Sally took its victim out for a walk round to show him the place.
+It had the feeblest hold on existence during the remainder of the day,
+throughout which our medical friend went on dram-drinking, knowing
+the dangers of his nectar-draughts, but as helpless against them as
+any other dram-drinker. It broke down completely and finally between
+moonrise and midnight--a period that began with Sally calling under
+Iggulden's window, "Come out, Dr. Conrad, and see the phosphorescence
+in the water; it's going to be quite bright presently," and ended
+with, "Good gracious, how late it is! Shan't we catch it?" an
+exclamation both contributed to. For it was certainly past eleven
+o'clock.
+
+But in that little space it had broken down, that delusion; and the
+doctor knew perfectly well, before ten o'clock, certainly, that all
+the abstract possible wives of his perplexity meant Sally, and Sally
+only. And, further, that Sally was at every point of the compass--that
+she was in the phosphorescence of the sea, and the still golden colour
+of the rising moon. That space was full of her, and that each little
+wave-splash at their feet said "Sally," and then gave place to another
+that said "Sally" again. Poor Prosy!
+
+But what did they _say_, the two of them? Little enough--mere merry
+chat. But on his part so rigid a self-constraint underlying it that
+we are not sure some of the little waves didn't say--not Sally at all,
+but--Miss Nightingale! And a persistent sense of a thought that was
+only waiting to be thought as soon as he should be alone--that was
+going to run somewhat thus: "How could it come about? That this girl,
+whom I idolize till my idolatry is almost pain; this girl who has been
+my universe this year past, though I would not confess it; this wonder
+whom I judge no man worthy of, myself least of all--that she should be
+cancelled, made naught of, hushed down, to be the mate of a poor G.P.;
+to visit his patients and leave cards, make up his little accounts,
+perhaps! Certainly to live with his mother...." But he knew under the
+skin that he would be even with that disloyal thought, and would stop
+it off at this point in time to believe he hadn't thought it.
+
+Still, for all that this disturbing serpent would creep into his Eden,
+for all that he would have given worlds to dare a little more--that
+moment in the moonlight, with a glow-flecked water at his feet and
+hers, and the musical shingle below, and a sense of Christy Minstrels
+singing about Billy Pattison somewhere in the warm night-air above,
+and the flash of the great revolving light along the coast answering
+the French lights across the great, dark silent sea--that moment was
+the record moment of his life till then. It would never do to say so
+to Sally, that was all! But it was true for all that. For his life
+had been a dull one, and the only comfort he could get out of the
+story of it so far was that at least there was no black page in it he
+would like to cut out. Sally might read them all, and welcome. Their
+relation to _her_ had become the point to consider. You see, at heart
+he was a slow-coach, a milksop, nothing of the man of the world about
+him. Well, her race had had a dose of the other sort in the last
+generation. Had the breed wearied of it? Was that Sally's unconscious
+reason for liking him?
+
+"How very young Prosy has got all of a sudden!" was Sally's postscript
+to this interview, as she walked back to their own lodgings with her
+mother, who had been relieving guard with the selfless one while the
+doctor went out to see the phosphorescence.
+
+"He's like a boy out for a holiday," her mother answered. "I had no
+idea Dr. Conrad could manage such a colour as that; I thought he was
+pallid and studious."
+
+"Poor dear. _We_ should be pallid and studious if it was cases all
+day long, and his ma at intervals."
+
+"Do you know, kitten darling, I can't help thinking perhaps we do
+that poor woman an injustice...."
+
+"--Can't you?" Thus Sally in a parenthetic voice--
+
+"... and that she really isn't such a very great humbug after all!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because she would be such a _very_ great humbug, don't you see,
+chick?"
+
+"Why shouldn't she? Somebody must, or there'd be no such thing."
+
+"Why should there be any such thing?"
+
+"Because of the word. Somebody must, or there'd be no one to hook it
+to.... Have they stopped, I wonder, or are they going to begin again?"
+This referred to the Ethiopian banjos afar. "I do declare they're
+going to sing Pesky Jane, and it's nearly twelve o'clock!"
+
+"Never mind _them_! How came _you_ to know all the vulgar
+nigger-songs?... I was going to say. It's very difficult to believe
+it's quite all humbug when one hears her talk about her son and his
+welfare, and his prospects and...."
+
+"I know what she talked about. When her dear son marries, she's going
+to devote herself to him and her dear daughter that will be. Wasn't
+that it?"
+
+"Yes; but then she couldn't say more than that all she had would be
+theirs, and she would take her to her bosom, etcetera. Could she?"
+
+"She'll have to pull a long way!" The vulgar child's mind has flown
+straight to the Goody's outline in profile. She is quite incorrigible.
+"But wasn't that what old Mr. Turveydrop said, or very nearly? Of
+course, one has to consider the parties and make allowance."
+
+"Sallykin, what a madcap you are! You don't care _what_ you say."
+
+"We-e-ell! there's nothing in that.... But look here, mammy darling.
+Did that good woman in all she said to-night--all the time she was
+jawing--did she once lose sight of her meritorious attitude?"
+
+"It may only be a _facon de parler_--a sort of habit."
+
+"But it isn't. Jeremiah says so. We've talked it over, us two. He
+says he wouldn't like his daughter--meaning me--to marry poor Prosy,
+because of the Goody."
+
+"Are you sure he meant you? Did you ask him?"
+
+"No, because I wasn't going to twit Jeremiah with being only step.
+We kept it dark who was what. But, of course, he meant me. Like a
+submarine telegraph." Sally stopped a moment in gravity. Then she
+said: "Mother dear!"
+
+"What, kitten?"
+
+"What a pity it is Jeremiah is only step! Just think how nice if
+he'd been real. Now, if you'd only met twenty years sooner...."
+
+A nettle to grasp presented itself--a bad one. Rosalind seized it
+bodily. "I shouldn't have had my kitten," she said.
+
+"I see. I should have been somebody else. But that wouldn't have
+mattered to me."
+
+"It would have--to me!" But this is the most she can do in the way
+of nettle-grasping. She is glad when St. Sennan, from his tower with
+the undoubted piece of Norman, begins to count twelve, and gives her
+an excuse for a recall to duty. "Do think how we're keeping poor Mrs.
+Lobjoit up, you unfeeling child!" is her appeal on behalf of their own
+fisherman's wife. Sally is just taking note of a finale of the Ethiop
+choir. "They've done Pesky Jane, and they're going away to bed," she
+says. "How the black must come off on the sheets!" And then they
+hurried home to sleep sound.
+
+But there was little sleep for the doctor that night, perhaps because
+he had got so young all of a sudden. So it didn't matter much that his
+mother countermanded his proposal that bed should be gone to, on the
+ground that it was so late now that she wouldn't be able to sleep
+a wink. If she _could_ have gone an hour ago it would have been
+different. Now it was too late. An aggressive submissiveness was
+utilized by the good lady to the end of his discomfort and that of
+Mrs. Iggulden, who--perhaps from some memories of the Norman Conquest
+hanging about the neighbourhood--would never go to bed as long as a
+light was burning in the house.
+
+"It is very strange and most unusual, I know," she continued saying
+after she had scarified a place to scratch on. "Your great-uncle
+Everett Gayler did not scruple to call it phenomenal, and that when
+I was the merest child. After eleven no sleep!" She continued her
+knitting with tenacity to illustrate her wakefulness. "But I am glad,
+dear Conrad, that you forgot about me. You were in pleasanter society
+than your old mother's. No one shall have any excuse for saying I am
+a burden on my son. No, my dear boy, my wish is that you shall feel
+_free_." She laid aside the knitting needles, and folding her hands
+across the outline Sally was to be dragged up, or along, dropped her
+eyelids over a meek glare, and sat with a fixed, submissive undersmile
+slightly turned towards her son.
+
+"But I thought, mother, as Mrs. Fenwick was here...." Slow, slight,
+acquiescent nods stopped him; they were enough to derail any speech
+except the multiplication-table or the House-that-Jack-built! But
+she waited with exemplary patience for certainty that the train had
+stopped. Then spoke as one that gives a commission to speech,
+and observes its execution at a distance. Her expression remained
+immutable. "She is a well-meaning person," said she.
+
+"I didn't know how late it was." Poor Dr. Conrad gives up
+self-defence--climbs down. "The time ran away." It _had_ done so,
+there was no doubt about that.
+
+"And you forgot your mother. But Mrs. Fenwick is a well-meaning
+person. We will say no more about it."
+
+Whereupon her son, feeling that silence is golden, said nothing. But
+he went and kissed her for all that. She said inscrutably: "You might
+have kissed me." But whether she was or wasn't referring to the fact
+that she had succeeded in negotiating his kiss on the rim of her
+spectacles, Conrad couldn't tell. Probably she meant he might have
+kissed her before.
+
+There was no doubt, however, about her intention of knitting till past
+one in the morning. She did it enlarging on the medical status of her
+illustrious uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, who had just crept into the
+conversation. Her son wasn't so sorry for this as Mrs. Iggulden, who
+dozed and waked with starts, on principle, outside in the passage
+unseen. _He_ could stand at the wide-open window, and hear the little
+waves plash "Sally" in the moonlight, and the counter-music of the
+down-drawn shingle echo "Sally" back. Sometimes the pebbles and the
+water gave place for a moment to the tread of two persistent walkers
+up and down--men who smoked cigars, and became a little audible and
+died again at every time of passing.
+
+One time the doctor caught a rise of voice--though they did not pass
+so very near--that said: "My idea is to stay here till...."
+
+Then at the next turn the same voice grew from inaudibility to ...
+"So I arranged with the parson here for to-morrow, and we shall
+get...." and died again. At this moment Dr. Everett Gayler was at
+the climax of his fame, having just performed tracheotomy on the
+Grand Duke of Hesse-Junkerstadt, and been created Knight-Commander
+of some Order whose name Mrs. Vereker wasn't sure about.
+
+Next time the men returned, the same voice that seemed to do all the
+talking said: "... Expensive, of course, but she hates the idea of
+a registry-office." They paused, and the listener heard that the other
+voice had said something to which the first replied: "No, not Grundy.
+But she had some friends cooked at one, and they said it was stuffy,
+and they would sooner have endured twenty short homilies...."
+
+A wax vesta scratched, blazed, lighted another cigar, and the second
+voice said, "Oh--ah!" and both grew inaudible again.
+
+Dr. Everett Gayler had just pronounced the Grand Duchess's
+disease--they were an afflicted family--a disease his narrator
+couldn't pronounce at all. Most of her bones, in a state of necrosis,
+had been skilfully removed by the time the smokers had passed back.
+But so much more was Dr. Conrad listening to what the waves said to
+the shingle and the shingle answered back, than to either the Grand
+Duchess or the registry-office, that it never crossed his mind whose
+the voice was who lit the vesta. He heard it say good-night--its owner
+would get back to the hotel--and the other make due response. And
+then nothing was left but the coastguard.
+
+But the Grand Duke's family were not quite done with. It had to be
+recorded how many of his distinguished ancestors had suffered from
+_Plica polonica_. Still, the end did come at last, and the worthy lady
+thought perhaps if she could lie down now she might drop off. So Mrs.
+Iggulden got her release and slept.
+
+Dr. Conrad didn't, not a wink. The whole place was full of Sally. The
+flashlight at intervals, in couplets, seemed to say "Sally" twice when
+it came, and then to leave a blank for him to think about her in. The
+great slow steamer far out to sea showed a green eye of jealousy or a
+red one of anger because it could not come ashore where Sally was, but
+had perforce to go on wherever it was navigated. The millions of black
+sea-elves--did you ever discriminate them?--that the slight observer
+fancies are the interstices of the moonlight on the water, were all
+busy about Sally, though it was hard to follow their movements. And
+every time St. Sennan said what o'clock it was, he added, "One hour
+nearer to Sally to-morrow!"
+
+Poor Prosy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+OF A MARRIAGE BY SPECIAL LICENCE. ROSALIND'S COMPARISONS. OF THE THREE
+ BRIDESMAIDS, AND HOW THE BRIDE WAS A GOOD SAILOR
+
+
+But it never occurred to Dr. Vereker that the voice of the smoking
+gentleman, whose "_she_" knew a couple that had been cooked at a
+registry office, was a voice quite familiar to him. The only effect
+it had on his Sally-dazed mind was to make him wonder four hours after
+what it was that kept putting Julius Bradshaw into his head. If a
+brain-molecule could have been found not preoccupied with Sally he
+might have been able to give her next day a suggestive hint about
+a possibility ahead. But never a word said he to Sally; and when,
+on her return from bathing the following morning, Mrs. Lobjoit, the
+fisherman's wife, surprised her with the news that "the young lady"
+had come and had left her luggage, but would be back in half-an-hour,
+she was first taken aback, and thought it was a mistake next. But
+no--no chance of that! The young lady had asked for Mrs. Algernon
+Fenwick, or, in default, for Miss Sally, quite distinctly. She hadn't
+said any name, but there was a gentleman with her. Mrs. Lobjoit
+seemed to imply that had there been no gentleman she might have been
+nameless. Padlock's omnibus they came in.
+
+So Sally went on being taken aback where she had left off, and was
+still pondering over the phenomenon when her mother followed her
+through the little yard paved with round flints bedded in mortar--all
+except the flower-beds, which were in this case marigold-beds and
+fuschia-beds and tamarisk-shakedowns--and the street door which always
+stood open, and it was very little use ringing, the bell being broken.
+But you could pass through, and there would always be old Mr. Lobjoit
+in the kitchen, even if Mrs. Lobjoit was not there herself.
+
+"Why not look on the boxes, you stupid kitten? There's a name on them,
+or ought to be." Thus Rosalind, after facts told.
+
+"What a thing it is to have a practical maternal parent!" Thus Sally.
+And Mrs. Lobjoit put on record with an amiable smile that that is what
+she kept saying to Miss Nightingale, "Why not look?" Whereas the fact
+is Mrs. Lobjoit never said anything of the sort.
+
+"Here's a go!" says Sally, who gets at the label-side of the trunk
+first. "If it isn't Tishy!" And the mother and daughter look at each
+other's faces, each watching the other's theory forming of what this
+sudden apparition means.
+
+"What do you think, mother?"
+
+"What do _you_ think, kitten?" But the truth is, both wanted time
+to know what to think. And they hadn't got much forwarder with the
+solution of the problem when a light was thrown upon it by the sudden
+apparition of Laetitia herself, accompanied by the young gentleman
+whom Sally did not scruple to speak of--but not in his presence--as
+her counter-jumper. She did this, she said, to "pay Tishy out" for
+what she had said about him before she made his acquaintance.
+
+The couple were in a mixed state of exaltation and confusion--Tishy
+half laughing, a third crying, and a sixth keeping up her dignity.
+Both were saying might they come in, and doing it without waiting for
+an answer.
+
+Rosalind's remark was one of those nonsequences often met with in real
+life: "There's enough lunch--or we can send out." Sally's was: "But
+are you the Julius Bradshaws, or are you not? That's what _I_ want to
+know." Sally won't be trifled with, not she!
+
+"Well, Sally dear, no,--we're not--not just yet." Tishy hesitates.
+Julius shows firmness.
+
+"But we want to be at two o'clock this afternoon, if you'll come...."
+
+"Both of us?"
+
+"Why--of course, both of you."
+
+"Then Mrs. Lobjoit will have to be in time with lunch." It does not
+really matter who were the speakers, nor what the share of each was
+in the following aggregate:
+
+"How did you manage to get it arranged?" "Why _now_? Have you
+quarrelled with your mother?" "How long can you be away? I hate a
+stingy honeymoon!" "You've got no things." "Do you think they'll know
+at home where you are?" "Where are you going afterwards?" "What do you
+think your father will say?" "What I want to know is, what put it into
+your head _now_, more than any other time?"
+
+Responses to the whole of which, much at random, are incorporated in
+what follows: "Julius isn't wanted for three weeks." "I'm sure the
+Professor's on our side, really." "I left a letter to tell them,
+anyhow." "Calais. We shan't be sick, in weather like this. We'll cross
+by the night boat." "I've got a new dress to be married in, and a new
+umbrella--oh yes, and other things." "I'll tell you the whole story,
+Sally dear, as soon as I've had time to turn round." "No--not
+quarrelled--at least, no more than usual." "Special licence, of course."
+
+What time Vereker, who had been to the post-office, which sold all
+sorts of things, to inquire if they had a packet of chemical oatmeal
+(the only thing his mother could digest this morning), and was coming
+back baffled, called in on his way to Mrs. Iggulden's. Not to see
+Sally, but only to take counsel with the family about chemical
+oatmeal. By a curious coincident, the moment he heard of Miss Sales
+Wilson's arrival, he used Sally's expression, and said that there was
+"a go!" Perhaps there was, and that accounted for it.
+
+"Here's Dr. Conrad--he'll have to come too." Thus Sally explicitly.
+To which he replied, "All right. Where?" Sally replied with gravity:
+"To see these two married by special licence." And Julius added: "You
+_must_ come, doctor, to be my bottle-holder."
+
+A small undercurrent of thought in the doctor's mind, in which he can
+still accommodate passing events and the world's trivialities, begins
+to receive impressions of the facts of the case. The great river
+called Sally flows steadily on, on its own account, and makes and
+meddles not. It despises other folk's petty affairs. Dr. Conrad
+masters the position, and goes on to draw inferences.
+
+"Then that must have been _you_ last night, Bradshaw?"
+
+"I dare say it was. When?"
+
+"Walking up and down with another fellow in front here. Smoking
+cigars, both of you."
+
+"Why didn't you sing out?"
+
+"Well, now--why didn't I?" He seems a little unable to account for
+himself, and no wonder. "I think I recollected it was like you after
+you had gone."
+
+"Don't be a brain-case, Dr. Conrad. What would your patients say if
+they heard you go on like that?" Sally said this, of course. Her
+mother thought to herself that perhaps the patients would send for
+a married doctor.
+
+But her mind was taking no strong hold on the current of events,
+considering what a very vital human interest was afloat on them. It
+was wandering back to another wedding-day--her own first wedding-day
+of twenty years ago. As she looked at this bridegroom--all his
+upspring of hope making light of such fears as needs must be in like
+case all the world over--he brought back to her vividly, for all he
+was so unlike him, the face of the much younger man who had met her
+that day at Umballa, whose utter freedom from suspicion as he welcomed
+her almost made her able to forget the weeks gone by--the more so that
+they were like a dream in Hell, and their sequel like an awakening in
+Paradise. Well, at any rate, she had recaptured this man from Chaos,
+and he was hers again. And she had Sally. But at the word the whole
+world reeled and her feet were on quicksands. What and whence was
+Sally?
+
+At least this was true--there was no taint of her father there! Sally
+wasn't an angel--not a bit of it--no such embarrassment to a merely
+human family. But her mother could see her truth, honour, purity--call
+it what you will--in every feature, every movement. As she stood
+there, giving injunctions to Vereker to look alive or he'd be late,
+her huge coil of sea-soaked black hair making her white neck look
+whiter, and her white hands reestablishing hair-pins in the depths of
+it, she seemed the very incarnation of non-inheritance. Not a trace of
+the sire her mother shuddered to think of in the music of her voice,
+in the laughter all who knew her felt in the mirth of her eyebrows and
+the sparkle of her pearly teeth. All her identity was her own. If only
+it could have been known then that she was going to be Sally!... But
+how fruitless all speculation was!
+
+"Perhaps mother knows. Chemical oatmeal, mother, for invalids and
+persons of delicate digestion? They haven't got it at Pemberton's."
+The eyes and the teeth flash round on her mother, and in a twinkling
+the unhallowed shadow of the past is gone. It was only a moment in
+all, though it takes more to record it. Rosalind came back to the life
+of the present, but she knew nothing about chemical oatmeal. Never
+mind. The doctor would find out. And he would be sure to be in time.
+
+He was in time--plenty of time, said public opinion. And the couple
+were duly married, and went away in Padlock's omnibus to catch
+the train for Dover in time for the boat. And Dr. Conrad's eyes
+were on the eldest bridesmaid. For, after all, two others were
+obtained--jury-bridesmaids they might be called--in the persons of
+Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and an even smaller sister, who were somehow
+commandeered by Sally's enterprise, and bribed with promises of
+refreshment. But the smaller sister was an erring sister, for having
+been told she was on no account to speak during the service, she
+was suddenly struck with the unfairness of the whole thing, and,
+pointing at St. Sennans' arch-priest, said very audibly that _he_
+was "peatin'," so why wasn't she to "peat"? However, it was a very
+good wedding, and there was no doubt the principals had really become
+the Julius Bradshaws. They started from Dover on a sea that looked
+like a mill-pond; but Tishy's husband afterwards reported that the
+bride sat with her eyes shut the last half of the _trajet_, and said,
+"Don't speak to me, and I shall be all right."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+That summer night Rosalind and her daughter were looking out over the
+reputed mill-pond at the silver dazzle with the elves in it. The moon
+had come to the scratch later than last night, from a feeling of what
+was due to the almanac, which may (or must) account for an otherwise
+enigmatical remark of Sally's, who, when her mother wondered what time
+it was, replied: "I don't know--it's later than it was yesterday." But
+did that matter, when it was the sort of night you stopped out all
+night on, according to Sally. They came to an anchor on a seat facing
+the sea, and adjourned human obligation _sine die_.
+
+"I wonder if they've done wisely." Rosalind represents married
+thoughtfulness.
+
+Sally shelves misgivings of this sort by reflections on the common lot
+of humanity, and considers that it will be the same for them as every
+one else.
+
+"_They_'ll be all right," she says, with cheerful optimism. "I wonder
+what's become of Prosy."
+
+"He's up there with his mother. I saw him at the window. But I didn't
+mean that: they'll be happy enough together, I've no doubt. I mean,
+has Laetitia done wisely to quarrel with her family?"
+
+"She hasn't; it's only the she-dragon. Tishy told me all about it
+going to church."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And, oh dear, how poor Prosy, who was up there with his mother, did
+long to come out to the voices he could hear plain enough, even as
+far off as that! But then he had been so long away to-day, and he
+knew his excellent parent always liked to finish the tale of her own
+wedding-day when she began it--as she often did. So he listened again
+to the story of the wedding, which was celebrated in the severest
+thunderstorm experienced in these islands since the days of
+Queen Elizabeth, by a heroic clergyman who was suffering from
+pleuro-pneumonia, which made his voice inaudible till a miraculous
+chance produced one of Squilby's cough lozenges (which are not to be
+had now for love or money), and cured him on the spot. And how the
+bridesmaids all had mumps, more or less. And much concerning the
+amazingly dignified appearance of her own father and mother, which
+was proverbial, and therefore no matter of surprise to any one, the
+proverb being no doubt well known to Europe.
+
+But there, it didn't matter! Sally would be there to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+HOW A FORTNIGHT PASSED, AND THE HONEYMOONERS RETURNED. OF A CHAT ON
+ THE BEACH, AND MISS ARKWRIGHT'S SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE. ALMOST THE
+ LAST, LAST, LAST--MAN'S HEAD!
+
+
+Sally to-morrow--and to-morrow--and to-morrow. Sally for fourteen
+morrows. And the moon that had lighted the devoted young man to his
+fate--whatever it was to be--had waned and left the sky clear for
+a new one, on no account to be seen through glass.
+
+They were morrows of inextinguishable, indescribable delight for their
+victims or victim--for how shall we classify Sally? Who shall tread
+the inner temple of a girl's mind? How shall it be known that she
+herself has the key to the Holy of Holies?--that she is not dwelling
+in the outer court, unconscious of her function of priestess, its
+privileges and responsibilities? Or, in plainer language, metaphors
+having been blowed in obedience to a probable wish of the reader's,
+how do we know Sally was not falling in love with the doctor? How do
+we know she was not in love with him already? How did _she_ know?
+
+All we know is that the morrows went on, each one sweeter than the
+last, and all the little incidents went on that were such nothings at
+the time, but were so sure to be borne in mind for ever! _You_ know
+all about it, you who read. Like enough you can remember now, old as
+you are, how you and she (or he, according as your sex is) got lost
+in the wood, and never found where the picnic had come to an anchor
+till all the wings of chicken were gone and only legs left; or how
+there was a bull somewhere; or how next day the cat got caught on the
+shoulder of one of you and had to be detached, hooking horribly, by
+the other; or how you felt hurt (not jealous, but hurt) because she
+(or he) was decently civil to some new he (or she), and how relieved
+you were when you heard it was Mr. or Mrs. Some-name-you've-forgotten.
+Why, if you were to ask now, of that grey man or woman whose life was
+linked with yours, maybe now sixty years agone, did he or she have
+a drumstick, or go on to ham-sandwiches?--or, was it really a bull,
+after all?--or, had that cat's claws passed out of memory?--or, what
+was the name of that lady (or gentleman) at the So-and-so's?--if
+you asked any of these things, she or he might want a repeat into
+a deaf ear but would answer clear enough in the end, and recall
+the drumsticks and the equivocal bull, the cat's claws, and the
+unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the
+little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there;
+and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young
+and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the
+squirrels overhead all those long years ago.
+
+Many a little thing of a like nature--perhaps some identical--made up
+hours that became days in that fortnight we have to skip, and then the
+end was drawing near; and Dr. Conrad would have to go back and write
+prescriptions with nothing that could possibly do any harm in them,
+and abstain with difficulty from telling young ladies with cultivated
+waists they were liars when they said you could get a loaf of bread
+between all round, and it was sheer nonsense. And other little
+enjoyments of a G.P.'s life. Yes, the end was very near. But Sally's
+resolute optimism thrust regrets for the coming chill aside, and
+decided to be jolly while we could, and acted up to its decision.
+
+Besides, an exciting variation gave an interest to the last week of
+the doctor's stay at St. Sennans. The wandering honeymooners, in
+gratitude to that saint, proposed to pay him a visit on their way back
+to London. Perhaps they would stop a week. So the smallest possible
+accommodation worthy of the name was found for them over a brandyball
+and bull's-eye shop in a house that had no back rooms, being laid like
+a vertical plaster against the cliff behind, and having an exit on
+a flat roof where you might bask in the sun and see the bright red
+poppies growing in the chalk, and contribute your share towards
+a settlement of the vexed question of which are brigs. There wasn't
+another room to be had in the real St. Sennans, and it came to that
+or the hotel (which was beastly), and you might just as well be in
+London. Thus Sally, and settled the question.
+
+And this is how it comes to pass that at the beginning of
+this chapter--which we have only just got to, after all this
+circumlocution!--Sally and one of the Julius Bradshaws were sitting
+talking on the beach in the shadow of a breakwater, while the other
+Julius Bradshaw (the original one) was being taken for a walk to the
+extremely white lighthouse three miles off, or nearly five if you
+went by the road, by Dr. Conrad, who by this time knew all the walks
+in the neighbourhood exactly as well as Sally did, neither more nor
+less. And both knew them very well.
+
+The tide had come up quite as far as it had contemplated, and seemed
+to have made up its mind this time not to go back in too great a
+hurry. It was so nice there on the beach, with Tishy and Sally
+and Miss Gwendolen Arkwright, the late bridesmaid, who was having
+an independent chat all to herself about the many glories of the
+pier-end, and the sights to be seen there by visitors for a penny.
+And it--we are speaking of the tide--had got a delightful tangle of
+floating weed (_Fucus Vesiculosus_) and well-washed scraps of wood
+from long-forgotten wrecks--who knows?--and was turning it gently
+to and fro, and over and over, with intermittent musical caresses,
+against the shingle-bank, whose counter-music spoke to the sea of
+the ages it had toiled in vain to grind it down to sand. And the
+tide said, wait, we shall see. The day will come, it said, when not
+a pebble of you all but shall be scattered drifting sand, unless you
+have the luck to be carted up at a shilling a load by permission of
+the authorities, to be made into a concrete of a proper consistency
+according to the local by-laws. But the pebbles said, please, no; we
+will bide our time down here, and you shall have us for your own--play
+with us in the sun at the feet of these two ladies, or make the
+whirling shoals of us, beaten to madness, thunder back your voice when
+it shouts in the storm to the seaman's wife, who stops her ears in the
+dark night alone that she may not hear you heralding her husband's
+death. And the tide said very good; but a day would come when the
+pebbles would be sand, for all that. And even the authority would be
+gone, and the local by-laws. But it would sound upon some shore for
+ever. So it kept on saying. Probably it was mistaken.
+
+This has nothing to do with our story except that it is approximately
+the substance of a statement made by Sally to Miss Arkwright, who was
+interested, and had been promised it all over again to-morrow. For
+the present she could talk about the pier and take her audience for
+granted.
+
+"But was it that Kensington Gardens business that did the job?" asked
+Sally, in the shadow of the breakwater, getting the black hair dry
+after three-quarters of an hour in the sea; because caps, you know,
+are all nonsense as far as keeping water out goes. So Sally had to sit
+ever so long with it out to dry. And the very tiny pebbles you can
+almost see into stick to your hands, as you know, and come off in your
+hair when you run them through it, and have to be combed out. At
+least, Sally's had. But she kept on running the pebbles through her
+still blue fingers for all that as she half lay, half sat by Tishy
+on the beach.
+
+"'Did the job!'" repeats the bride on her honeymoon with some
+indignation. "Sally dear, when will you learn to be more refined in
+your ways of speech? I'm not a _precieuse_, but--'did the job!'
+Really, Sally!..."
+
+"Observe the effect of three weeks in France. The Julius Bradshaws can
+parlay like anything! No, Tishy darling, don't be a stuck-upper, but
+tell me again about Kensington Gardens."
+
+"I told you. It was just like that. Julius and I were walking up the
+avenue--you know...."
+
+"The one that goes up and across, and comes straight like this?"
+Tishy, helped by a demonstration of blue finger-tips, recognises this,
+strange to say.
+
+"No, not that one. It doesn't matter. We didn't see mamma coming till
+she was ever so close, because of the Speke Monument in the way. And
+what could possess her to come home that way from Hertford Street,
+Mayfair, I cannot imagine!"
+
+"Never mind, Tishy dear! It's no use crying over spilled milk. What
+did she say?"
+
+"Nothing, dear. She turned purple, and bowed civilly. To Julius, of
+course. But it included me, whether or no."
+
+"But was that what did the job?... We-ell, I do not see _anything_
+to object to in that expression. Was it?"
+
+"If you mean, dear, was it that that made us, me and Julius, feel that
+matters would get no better by waiting, I think perhaps it was....
+Well, when it comes to meeting one's mother in Kensington Gardens,
+near the Speke Monument, and being bowed civilly to, it seems to me
+it's high time.... Now, isn't it, Sally?"
+
+Sally evaded giving testimony by raising other questions: "What did
+your father say?" "Did the Dragon tell him about the meeting in the
+park?" "What do you think he'll say now?"
+
+"Now? Well, you know, I've got his letter. _He's_ all right--and
+rather dear, _I_ think. What do _you_ think, Sally?"
+
+"I think very."
+
+"Perhaps I should say very. But with papa you never know. He really
+does love us all, after a fashion, except Egerton, only I'm never
+sure he doesn't do it to contradict mamma."
+
+"Why don't they chuck each other and have done with it?" The vulgar
+child lets fly straight into the bull's-eye; then adds thoughtfully:
+"_I_ should, only, then, I'm not a married couple."
+
+Tishy elided the absurd figure of speech and ignored it. The chance
+of patronising was not to be lost.
+
+"You are not married, dear. When you are, you may feel things
+differently. But, of course, papa and mamma _are_ very odd. I used
+to hear them through my door between the rooms at L.B.G. Road. It
+was wrangle, wrangle, wrangle; fight, fight, fight; all through the
+night--till two o'clock sometimes. Oh dear!"
+
+"You're sure they always were quarrelling?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes. I used to catch all the regular words--settlement and
+principal and prevaricate. All that sort of thing, you know. But there
+they are, and there they'll be ten years hence, that's my belief,
+living together, sleeping together, and dining at opposite ends of the
+same table, and never communicating in the daytime except through me
+or Theeny, but quarrelling like cat and dog."
+
+"What shall you do when you go back? Go straight there?"
+
+"I think so. Julius thinks so. After all, papa's the master of the
+house--legally, at any rate."
+
+"Shall you write and say you're coming?"
+
+"Oh, no! Just go and take our chance. We shan't be any nearer if we
+give mamma an opportunity of miffing away somewhere when we come. What
+_is_ that little maid talking about there?" The ex-bridesmaid is three
+or four yards away, and is discoursing eloquently, a word in the above
+conversation having reminded her of a tragic event she has mentioned
+before in this story. "I seeps with my bid sister Totey's dolly," is
+what she appears to be saying.
+
+"Never mind the little poppet, Tishy, till you've told me more about
+it." Sally is full of curiosity. "Did that do the job or did it not?
+That's what I want to know."
+
+"I suppose it did, dear, indirectly. That was on Saturday afternoon.
+Next morning we breakfasted under a thundercloud with Egerton grinning
+inside his skin, and looking like 'Won't you catch it, that's all!'
+at me out of the corner of his eye. That was bad enough, without one's
+married sister up from the country taking one aside to say that _she_
+wasn't going to interfere, and calling one to witness that _she_ had
+said nothing so far. All she said was, 'Me and mamma settle it between
+us.' 'Settle what?' said I; and she didn't answer, and went away to
+the first celebration."
+
+"She's not bad, your married sister," Sally decided thoughtfully.
+
+"Oh no, Clarissa's not bad. Only she wants to run with the hare and
+explain to the hounds when they come up.... What happened next? Why,
+as I went upstairs past papa's room, out comes mamma scarlet with
+anger, and restraining herself in the most offensive way for me to go
+past. I took no notice, and when she was gone I went down and walked
+straight into the library. I said, 'What is it, papa?' I saw he was
+chuckling internally, as if he'd made a hit."
+
+"Wasn't he angry? What did he say?"
+
+"Oh no, _he_ wasn't angry. Let's see ... oh!... what he said was,
+'That depends so entirely on what _it_ is, my dear. But, broadly
+speaking, I should say it was your mother.' 'What has she been saying
+to you?' I asked. And he answered, 'I can only give her exact words
+without pledging myself to their meaning. She stated that she
+"supposed I was going to tell my daughter I approved of her walking
+about Kensington Gardens with _that man's_ arm around her waist."
+I replied--reasonably, as it seems to me--that I supposed that man
+was there himself. Otherwise, it certainly did seem to me a most
+objectionable arrangement, and I hope you'll promise your mother not
+to do it again.'"
+
+"What on earth did he mean?"
+
+"You don't understand papa. He quibbles to irritate mamma. He meant
+like a waistband--separate--don't you see?"
+
+"I see. But it wouldn't bend right." Sally's truthful nature postpones
+laughing at the Professor's absurdity; looks at the case on its
+merits. When she has done justice to this point, she laughs and adds:
+"What did _you_ say, Tishy?"
+
+"Oh, I said what nonsense, and it wasn't tight round like all that;
+only a symptom. And we didn't even know mamma was there because of
+Speke and Grant's obelisk. There wasn't a soul! Papa saw it quite as
+I did, and was most reasonable. So I thought I would feel my way to
+developing an idea we had been broaching, Julius and I, just that very
+time by the obelisk. I asked papa flatly what he would do if I married
+Julius straight off. 'I believe, my dear,' said he, 'that I should
+be bound to disapprove most highly of your conduct and his.' 'But
+_should_ you, papa?' I said. 'I should be _bound_ to, my dear,'
+said he. 'But should you turn us out of the house?' I asked. 'Most
+certainly _not_,' said he emphatically. 'But I should disapprove.'
+I said I should be awfully sorry for that. 'Of course you would,' said
+he. 'Any dutiful daughter would. But I don't exactly see what harm it
+would do _you_.' And you see how his letter begins--that he is bound,
+as a parent, to feel the strongest disapprobation, and so on. No,
+I don't think we need be frightened of papa. As for mamma, of course
+it wouldn't be reasonable to expect her to...."
+
+"To expect her to what?"
+
+"Well, I was going to say keep her hair on. The expression is
+Egerton's, and I'm sorry to say his expressions are not always
+ladylike, however telling they are! So I hesitated. Now what _is_
+that baby talking about down there?"
+
+For through the whole of Tishy's interesting tale that baby had been
+dwelling on the shocking occurrence of her sister's doll as before
+recorded. Her powers of narrative--giving a dramatic form to all
+things, and stimulated by Sally's statements of what the beach said
+to the sea, and the sea said back--had, it seemed, attracted shoals
+of fish from the ocean depths to hear her recital of the tragedy.
+
+"Suppose, now, you come and tell it us up here, Gwenny," says the
+bride to the bridesmaid. And Sally adds: "Yes, delicious little
+Miss Arkwright, come and tell us all about it too." Whereupon Miss
+Arkwright's musical tones are suddenly silent, and her eyes, that are
+so nearly the colour of the sea behind her, remain fixed on her two
+petitioners, their owner not seeming quite sure whether she shall
+acquiesce, or coquette, or possibly even burst into tears. She
+decides, however, on compliance, coming suddenly up the beach on all
+fours, and exclaiming, "Tate me!" flings herself bodily on Sally,
+who welcomes her with, "You sweet little darling!" while Mrs. Julius
+Bradshaw, anticipating requisition, looks in her bag for another
+chocolate. They will spoil that child between them.
+
+"Now tell us about the fisses and dolly," says Sally. But the
+narrator, all the artist rising in her soul, will have everything
+in order.
+
+"I _told_ ze fisses," she says, reproach in her voice.
+
+"I see, ducky. You told the fishes, and now you'll tell us all
+about dolly."
+
+"I seeps wiv dolly, because my bid sister Totey said 'Yes.' Dolly
+seeps in her fings. I seep in my nightgown. Kean from the wass----"
+
+"How nice you must be! Well, then, what next?" Sally may be said to
+imbibe the narrator at intervals. Tishy calls her a selfish girl.
+"You've got her all to yourself," she says. The story goes on:
+
+"I seep vethy thound. Papa seeps vethy thound. Dolly got between
+the theets and the blangticks, and came out. It was a dood dob. Dane
+_said_ it _was_--a dood dob!"
+
+"What did Jane say was a good job? Poor dolly coming out?" A long,
+grave headshake denies this. The constructive difficulties of the tale
+are beyond the young narrator's skill. She has to resort to ellipsis.
+
+"Or I sood have been all over brang and sawduss. Dane _said_ so."
+
+"Don't you see, Sally," says Tishy, "dolly was in another
+compartment--the other side of the sheet." But Sally says, of course,
+_she_ understands, perhaps even suspects Tishy of claiming more
+acquaintance with children than herself because she has been married
+three weeks. This isn't fair patronising.
+
+"Dolly came out at ve stisses"--so the sad tale goes on--"and tyed,
+dolly did. Dane put her head on to ty wiv my pocket-hanshtiff!"
+
+"I see, you little ducky, of course her head had come off, and she
+couldn't cry till it was put on, was that it? Don't dance, but say
+yes or no." This referred to a seated triumphal dance the chronicler
+indulged in at having put so much safely on record. Having subsided,
+she decided on _zass_ as the proper thing to say, but it took time.
+Then she added suddenly: "But I _told_ ze fisses." Sally took a good
+long draught, and said: "Of course you did, darling. You shan't be
+done out of that!" But an addendum or appendix was forthcoming.
+
+"My mummar says I must tate dolly to be socked for a penny where the
+man is wiv buttons--and the man let Totey look froo his pyglass,
+and see all ve long sips, sits miles long--and I shall see when I'm
+a glowed-up little girl, like Totey."
+
+"Coastguard's telescope, evidently," says Sally. "The man up at the
+flagstaff. Six miles long is how far off they were, not the length
+of the ships at all."
+
+"I saw that. But what on earth were the socks? Does his wife sell
+doll's clothes?"
+
+"We must try to find that out." And Sally sets herself to the task.
+But it's none so easy. Some mystery shrouds the approach to this
+passage in dolly's future life. It is connected with "kymin up," and
+"tandin' on a tep," and when it began it went wizzy, wizzy, wizz,
+and e-e-e-e, and never stopped. But Gwendolen had not been alarmed
+whatever it was, because her "puppar" was there. But it was exhausting
+to the intellect to tell of, for the description ended with a musical,
+if vacuous, laugh, and a plunge into Sally's bosom, where the narrator
+remained chuckling, but quite welcome.
+
+"So Gwenny wasn't pitened! What a courageous little poppet! I wonder
+what on earth it was, Sally."
+
+Thus Tishy, at a loss. But Sally is sharper, for in a moment the
+solution dawns upon her.
+
+"What a couple of fools we are, Tishy dear! It wasn't _socks_--it was
+_shocks_. It was the galvanic battery at the end of the pier. A penny
+a time, and you mustn't have it on full up, or you howl. Why on earth
+didn't we think of that before?"
+
+But Nurse Jane comes in on the top of the laughter that follows,
+which Miss Gwendolen is joining in, rather claiming it as a triumph
+for her own dramatic power. She demurs to removal, but goes in the end
+on condition that all present shall come and see dolly galvanised at
+an early date. Jane agrees to replace dolly's vitals and sew her up
+to qualify her for this experience. And so they depart.
+
+"What a dear little mite!" says Mrs. Julius; and then they let the
+mite lapse, and go back to the previous question.
+
+"No, Sally dear, mamma will be mamma to the end of the time. But
+I didn't tell you all papa said, did I?"
+
+"How on earth can _I_ tell, Tishy dear? You had got to 'any dutiful
+daughter would,' etcetera. Cut along! Comes of being in love, I
+suppose." This last is a reflection on the low state of Tishy's
+reasoning powers.
+
+"Well, just after that, when I was going to kiss him and go, papa
+stopped me, and said he had something to say, only he mustn't be too
+long because he had to finish a paper on, I think, 'Some Technical
+Terms in use in Cnidos in the Sixth Century, B.C.' Or was it...?"
+
+"That was it. That one'll do beautifully. Go ahead!"
+
+"Well--of course it doesn't matter. It was like papa, anyhow.... Oh,
+yes--what he said then! It was about Aunt Priscilla's thousand pounds.
+He wanted to repeat that the interest would be paid to me half-yearly
+if by chance I married Julius or any other man without his consent.
+'I wish it to be distinctly understood that if you marry Bradshaw it
+will be against my consent. But I only ask you to promise me this,
+Laetitia, that you won't marry any other man against my consent at
+present.' I promised, and he said I was a dutiful daughter. There
+won't be any trouble with papa."
+
+"Don't look like it! I say, Tishy, that thousand pounds is very nice.
+How much will you have? Forty pounds a year?"
+
+"It's more than that. It's gone up, somehow--sums of money do--or
+down. They're never the same as at first. I'm so glad about it. It's
+not as if I brought Julius absolutely nothing."
+
+"How much is it?" Sally is under the impression that sums of
+money that exist on the word of signed documents only, and whose
+materialisation can only be witnessed by bankers, are like fourpence,
+one of whose properties is that it _is_ fourpence. They are not
+analogous, and Laetitia is being initiated into the higher knowledge.
+
+"Well, dear, you see the stock has gone up, and it's at six
+three-quarters. You must ask Julius. He can do the arithmetic."
+
+"Does that mean it's sixty-seven pounds ten?"
+
+"You'd better ask Julius. Then, you know, there's the interest."
+Sally asked what interest. "Why, you see, Aunt Priscilla left it
+to me eleven years ago, so there's more." But a vendor of mauve
+and magenta woollen goods, known to Sally as "the beach-woman,"
+was working up towards them.
+
+"That woman never goes when she comes," said Sally. "Let's get
+up and go!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We like lingering over this pleasant little time. It helps on but
+little, if at all, with our story. But in years to come this young
+couple, who only slip into it by a side-chance, having really little
+more to do with it than any of the thousand and one collaterals
+that interest the lives of all of us, and come and go and are
+forgotten--this Julius and Laetitia will talk of the pleasant three
+days or so they had at St. Sennans when they came back from France.
+And we, too, having choice of how much we shall tell of those
+three or four days, are in little haste to leave them. Those hours
+of unblushing idleness under a glorious sun--idleness fostered and
+encouraged until it seems one great exertion to call a fly, and
+another to subside into it--idleness on matchless moonlight nights,
+on land or on water--idleness with an affectation of astronomical
+study, just up to speculating on the identity of Aldebaran or Arcturus,
+but scarcely equal to metaphysics--idleness that lends itself readily
+to turning tables and automatic writing, and gets some convincing
+phenomena, and finds out that so-and-so is an extraordinary
+medium--idleness that says that letter will do just as well to-morrow,
+and Smith must wait--such hours as these disintegrate the moral fibre
+and anaesthetize our sense of responsibility, and make us so oblivious
+of musical criticism that we accept brass bands and inexplicable
+serenaders, white or black, and even accordions and hurdy-gurdies, as
+intrinsic features of the _ensemble_--the _fengshui_ of the time and
+place--and give them a penny if we've got one.
+
+That is and will be Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's memory of those
+three days or so, when they have grown quite old together, as we hope
+they may. And if you add memory of an intoxicated delirium of love--of
+love that was on no account to be shown or declared or even hinted
+at--and of a tiresome hitch or qualification, an unselfish parent in
+full blow, you will have the record that is to remain in the mind of
+Conrad Vereker.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+HOW SALLY DIDN'T CONFESS ABOUT THE DOCTOR, AND JEREMIAH CAME TO ST.
+ SENNANS ONCE MORE
+
+
+That evening Sally sat with her mother on the very uncomfortable seat
+they affected on what was known as the Parade, a stone's throw from
+the house for a good stone-thrower. It had a little platform of
+pebbles to stand on, and tamarisks to tickle you from behind when the
+wind was northerly. It was a corrugated and painful seat, and had
+a strange power of finding out your tender vertebrae and pulverising
+them, whatever your stature might be. It fell forward when its
+occupants, goaded to madness, bore too hard on its front bar, and
+convinced them they would do well, henceforward, to hold it
+artificially in its place. But Rosalind and her daughter forgave
+it all these defects--perhaps because they were really too lazy to
+protest even against torture. It was the sea air. Anyhow, there they
+sat that evening, waiting for Padlock's omnibus to come, bringing
+Fenwick from the station. Just at the moment at which the story
+overtakes them, Rosalind was looking wonderfully handsome in the
+sunset light, and Sally was thinking to herself what a beautiful
+mother she had; and how, when the after-glow dies, it will leave its
+memory in the red gold that is somewhere in the rich brown her eyes
+are resting on. Sally was fond of dwelling on her mother's beauty.
+Perhaps doing so satisfied her personal vanity by deputy. She was
+content with her own self, but had no admiration for it.
+
+"You _are_ a dear good mammy. Fancy your losing all the best time
+of the morning indoors!"
+
+"How the best time of the morning, chick?"
+
+"Sitting with that old cat upstairs.... Well, I can't help it. She
+_is_ an old cat."
+
+"You're a perverse little monkey, kitten; that's what _you_ are!"
+Rosalind laughed with an excuse--or caress, it may be--in her laugh.
+"No," she continued, "we are much too hard on that old lady, both of
+us. Do you know, to-day she was quite entertaining--told me all about
+her own wedding-day, and how all the bridesmaids had the mumps."
+
+"Has she never told you that before?"
+
+"Only once. Then she told me about the late-lamented, and what a
+respect he had for her judgment, and how he referred to her at every
+crisis. I didn't think her at all bad company."
+
+"Because you're a darling. I suppose you had it all about how
+Prosy, when he was a boy, wanted to study music, and how his pa
+said that the turning-point in the career of youth lay in the choice
+of a profession."
+
+"Oh yes! And how his strong musical turn came from her side of the
+family. In herself it was dormant. But her Aunt Sophia had never once
+put her finger on a false note of the piano. This was confirmed by
+the authority of her eminent uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, himself no
+mean musician."
+
+"Poor Prosy! I know."
+
+"And how musical faculty--amounting to genius--often remained
+absolutely unsuspected owing to its professor having no inheritance.
+But it would come out in the children. Then, and not till then,
+tardy justice was done.... Well, I don't know exactly how she worked
+it out, but she managed to suggest that she was Handel and Mozart
+in abeyance. Her son's fair complexion clinched matters. It was the
+true prototype of her own. A thoroughly musical complexion,
+bespeaking German ancestry."
+
+"Isn't that the omnibus?" says Sally. But, no, it isn't. She
+continues: "I don't believe in musical complexions. Look at Julius
+Bradshaw--dark, with high cheek-bones, and a thin olive hand with
+blue veins in it. I say, mother...."
+
+"What, chick?"
+
+"He's changed his identity--Julius Bradshaw has. I can't believe he
+was that spooney boy that used to come hankering after me at church."
+And the amusement this memory makes hangs about Sally's lips as the
+two sit on into a pause of silence.
+
+The face of the mother does not catch the amusement, but remains grave
+and thoughtful. She does not speak; but the handsome eyes that rest
+so lovingly on the speaker are full of something from the past--some
+record that it would be an utter bewilderment to Sally to read--a
+bewilderment far beyond that crux of the moment which maybe has struck
+her young mind for the first time--the old familiar puzzle of the
+change that comes to all of us in our transition from first to last
+experience of the strange phenomenon we call a friend. Sally can't
+make it out--the way a silly lad, love-struck about her indifferent
+self so short a while back, has become a totally altered person, the
+husband of her schoolmate, an actual identity of life and thought and
+feeling; he who was in those early days little more than a suit of
+clothes and a new prayer-book.
+
+But if that is so strange to Sally, how measurelessly stranger is she
+herself to her mother beside her! And the man they are waiting and
+watching for, who is somewhere between this and St. Egbert's station
+in Padlock's venerable 'bus, what a crux is _he_, compared now to
+that intoxicated young lover of two-and-twenty years ago, in that
+lawn-tennis garden that has passed so utterly from his memory! And a
+moment's doubt, "But--has it?" is caught and absorbed by what seemed
+to Rosalind now an almost absurd fact--that, a week before, he had
+been nothing but a _fidus Achates_ of that other young man provided
+to make up the lawn-tennis set, and that it was that other young man
+at first, not he, that belonged to _her_. And he had changed away so
+easily to--who was it? Jessie Nairn, to be sure--and left the coast
+clear for his friend. Whatever now _was_ his name? Oh dear, what a
+fool was Rosalind! said she to herself, to have half let slip that it
+was _he_ that was Fenwick, and not Gerry at all. All this compares
+itself with Sally's experience of Bradshaw's metamorphosis, and her
+own seems the stranger.
+
+Then a moment of sharp pain that she cannot talk to Sally of these
+things, but must lead a secret life in her own silent heart. And then
+she comes back into the living world, and finds Sally well on with
+the development of another topic.
+
+"Of course, poor dears! They've not played a note together since the
+row. It's been nothing but Kensington Gardens or the Albert Hall. But
+I'm afraid he's no better. If only he _could_ be, it would make all
+the difference."
+
+"What's that, darling? _Who_ could be...? Not your father?" For, as
+often as not, Rosalind would speak of her husband as Sally's father.
+
+"Not Jeremiah--no. I was talking about Julius B. and his nervous
+system. Wouldn't it?"
+
+"Wouldn't it what?"
+
+"Make all the difference? I mean that he could get his violin-playing
+back. I told you about that letter?"
+
+"No--what letter?"
+
+"From an agent in Paris. Rateau, I think, was the name. Had heard
+Signor Carissimi had recovered his health completely, and was
+playing. Hoped he might be honoured with his instructions to make
+his arrangements in Paris, as he had done so four years ago. Wasn't
+it aggravating?"
+
+"Does it make any difference?"
+
+"Why, of course it does, mother darling. The aggravation! Just think
+now! Suppose he could rely on ten pounds a night, fancy that!"
+
+"Suppose he could!... Yes, that would be nice." But there is a
+preoccupation in her tone, and Sally wants sympathy to be drawn with
+a vigorous outline.
+
+"What's my maternal parent thinking about, as grave as a judge?
+Jeremiah's all right, mammy darling! _He's_ not killed in a railway
+accident. Catch _him_!" This is part of a systematized relationship
+between the two. Each always discredits the possibility of mishap
+to the other. It might be described as chronic reciprocal Christian
+Science.
+
+"I wasn't thinking of Gerry." Which is true in a sense, as she does
+not think of the Gerry her daughter knows. And the partial untruth
+does not cross her mind--a tacit recognition of the powers of change.
+"I was wool-gathering."
+
+"No--what _was_ she thinking of?" For some reason the third person
+is thought more persuasive than the second.
+
+"Thinking of her kitten." And this is true enough, as Rosalind is
+really always thinking of Sally, more or less.
+
+"We-ell, _I'm_ all right. What's the matter with _me_?"
+
+"Nothing at all that I know of, darling." But it does cross the
+speaker's mind that the context of circumstances might make this an
+opportunity for getting at some information she wants. For Sally has
+remained perfectly inscrutable about Conrad Vereker, and Rosalind has
+been asking herself whether it is possible that, after all, there
+_is_ nothing. She doesn't know how to set about it, though. Perhaps
+the best thing would be to take a leaf out of Sally's own book, and
+go straight to the bull's-eye.
+
+"Do you really want to know what I was thinking of, Sallykin?" But
+no sooner has she formulated the intention of asking a question, and
+allowed the intention to creep into her voice than Sally knows all
+about it.
+
+"As if I don't know already. You mean me and Prosy."
+
+"Of course. But how did you know?"
+
+"Mammy _dear_! As if I was born yesterday! If you want people not to
+know things, you mustn't have delicate inflexions of voice. I knew
+you were going to catechize about Prosy the minute you got to 'did
+I really want to know.'"
+
+"But I'm not going to catechize, chick. Only when you ask me what I'm
+thinking about, and really want to know, I tell you. I _was_ thinking
+about you and Conrad Vereker." For some mysterious reason this mention
+of his name in full seems to mature the conversation, and make clearer
+definition necessary.
+
+Our own private opinion is that any one who closely observes human
+communion will see that two-thirds of it runs on lines like the
+foregoing. Very rarely indeed does a human creature say what it means.
+Exhaustive definition, lucid statements, concise terminology--even
+plain English--are foreign to its nature. The congenial soil in which
+the fruit of Intelligence ripens is Suggestion, and the wireless
+telegraphs of the mind are the means by which it rejoices to
+communicate. Don't try to say what you mean--because _you_ can't. You
+are not clever enough. Try to mean what you want to say, and leave the
+dictionary to take care of itself.
+
+This little bit of philosophizing of ours has just given Sally time,
+pondering gravely with the eyebrows all at rest and lips at ease, to
+deal with the developed position created by the mere substitution of
+a name for a nickname.
+
+"Ought there to be ... anything to think about?" Thus Sally; and her
+mother sees, or thinks she sees, a little new colour in the girl's
+cheeks. Or is it only the sunset? Then Rosalind says to herself
+that perhaps she has made a mistake, had better have left it alone.
+Perhaps. But it's done now. She is not one that goes back on her
+resolutions. It is best not to be too tugging and solemn over it. She
+speaks with a laugh.
+
+"It's not my little daughter I'm afraid of, Sallykin. She's got the
+key of the position. It's that dear good boy."
+
+"He's not a boy. He's thirty-one next February. Only he's not got
+a birthday, because it's not leap-year. Going by birthdays he's not
+quite half-past seven."
+
+"Then it won't do to go by birthdays. Even at thirty-one, though,
+some boys are not old enough to know better. He's very inexperienced
+in some things."
+
+"A babe unborn--only he can write prescriptions. Only they don't do
+you any good. ("Ungrateful child!"... "Well, they _don't_.") You see,
+he hasn't any one to go to to ask about things except me. Of course
+_I_ can tell him, if you come to that!"
+
+"There's his mother."
+
+"His mother! That old dianthus! Oh, mammy darling, what different
+sorts of mothers do crop up when you think of it!" And Sally is so
+moved by this scientific marvel that she suddenly kisses her mother,
+there out on the public parade with a gentleman in check trousers
+and an eye-glass coming along!
+
+"Why do you call the old lady a dianthus, chick? Really, the way you
+treat that poor old body!..."
+
+"Not when Prosy's there. I know my place.... We-ell, you know what
+a dianthus's figure is like? When the tentacles are in, I mean."
+
+But Rosalind tacitly condemns the analogy. Is she not herself a
+mother, and bound to take part with her kind, however obese? "What
+were you and the doctor talking about in the boat all that long time
+yesterday?" she asks, skipping an interval which might easily have
+contained a review of Mrs. Vereker inside-out like a sea-anemone.
+Sally is quite equal to it.
+
+"Resuscitation after drowning. Prosy says death is really due to
+carbonic acid poisoning. Anybody would think it was choking, but it's
+nothing of the sort. The arterial blood is insufficiently fed with
+oxygen, and death ensues."
+
+"How long did you talk about that?"
+
+"Ever so long. Till I asked him what he should do if a visitor were
+drowned and couldn't be brought to. Not at the hotel; down here. Me,
+for instance."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"He was jolly solemn over it, Prosy was. Said he should try his
+best, and as soon as he was sure it was no go, put an end to his own
+existence. I said that would be wrong, and besides, he couldn't do
+it. He said, oh yes, he could--he could inject air into a vein, and
+lots of things. He went on a physiological tack, so I quoted Hamlet."
+
+"What did he make of Hamlet?"
+
+"Said the researches of modern science all tended to prove that
+extinction awaited us at death, and he would take his chance. He was
+quite serious over it."
+
+"And then you said?..."
+
+"I said, suppose it turned out that modern science was tommy-rot,
+wouldn't he feel like a fool when all was said and done? He admitted
+that he might, in that case. But he would take his chance, he said.
+And then we had a long argument, Prosy and I."
+
+"Has he ever resuscitated a drowned person?"
+
+"Oh yes, two or three. But he says he should like a little more
+practice, as it's a very interesting subject."
+
+"You really are the most ridiculous little kitten there ever was!
+Talking like the President of the Royal College of Surgeons! Not
+a smile."
+
+"We-ell, there's nothing in _that_." Slightly offended dignity on Miss
+Sally's part. "I say, the 'bus is very late; it's striking seven."
+
+But just as St. Sennan ceases, and leaves the air clear for listening,
+Rosalind exclaims, "Isn't that it?" And this time it is it, and
+by ten minutes past seven Fenwick is in the arms of his family, who
+congratulate him on a beautiful new suit of navy-blue serge, in which
+he looks very handsome.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Often now when she looks back to those days can Rosalind see before
+her the grave young face in the sundown, and hear the tale of Dr.
+Conrad's materialism. And then she sees once more over the smooth
+purple sea of the day before the little boat sculled by Vereker, with
+Sally in the stern steering. And the white sails of the Grace Darling
+of St. Sennans, that had taken a large party out at sixpence each
+person three hours ago, and couldn't get back by herself for want
+of wind, and had to be towed by a row-boat, whose oars sounded
+rhythmically across the mile of intervening water. She was doing
+nothing to help, was Grace, but her sails flopped a little now and
+again, just enough to show how glad she would have been to do so with
+a little encouragement. Rosalind can see it all again quite plain,
+and the little white creamy cloud that had taken pity on the doctor
+sculling in the boat, and made a cool island of shadow, coloured
+imperial purple on the sea, for him and Sally to float in, and talk
+of how some unknown person, fool enough to get drowned, should one
+day be recalled from the gate of Death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+HOW SALLY DIVED OFF THE BOAT, AND SHOCKED THE BEACH. OF THE SENSITIVE
+ DELICACY OF THE OCTOPUS. AND OF DR. EVERETT GAYLER'S OPINIONS
+
+
+Fenwick had been granted, or had appropriated, another week's holiday,
+and the wine-trade was to lose some of his valuable services during
+that time. Not all, because in these days you can do so much by
+telegraph. Consequently the chimney-piece with the rabbits made of
+shells on each side, and the model of the Dreadnought--with real
+planks and a companion-ladder that went too far down, and almost
+serviceable brass carronades ready for action--and a sampler by Mercy
+Lobjoit (1763), showing David much too small for the stitches he was
+composed of, and even Goliath not big enough to have two lips--this
+chimney-piece soon become a magazine of yellow telegrams, which blew
+away when the window and door were open at the same time.
+
+It was on the second of Fenwick's days on this visit that an unusual
+storm of telegrams, as he came in to breakfast after an early dip in
+the sea, confirmed the statement in the paper of the evening before
+that W. and S.W. breezes might be expected later. "Wind freshening,"
+was the phrase in which the forecast threw doubts on the permanency
+of its recent references to a smooth Channel-passage. However, faith
+had already been undermined by current testimony to light easterly
+winds backing north, on the coast of Ireland. Sally was denouncing
+meteorology as imposture when the returning bather produced the effect
+recorded. It interrupted a question on his lips as he entered, and
+postponed it until the telegram papers had all been reinstated and the
+window closed, so that Mrs. Lobjoit might come in with the hot rolls
+and eggs and not have anything blown away. Then peace reigned and the
+question got asked.
+
+"What are we going to do to-day?" said Sally, repeating it. "I know
+what I'm going to do first. I'm going to swim round the buoy."
+
+"My dear, they'll never put the machines down to-day." This was her
+mother.
+
+"They'll do it fast enough, if I tell 'em to. It's half the fun,
+having it a little rough."
+
+"Well, kitten, I suppose you'll go your own way; only I shall be very
+glad when you're back in your machine. Coffee, Gerry?"
+
+"Yes, coffee--in the big cup with the chip, and lots of milk. You're
+a dangerous young monkey, Sarah; and I shall get old Benjamin's boat,
+and hang about. And then you'll be happy, Rosey, eh?"
+
+"No, I shan't! We shall have you getting capsized, too. (I put in
+three lumps of sugar.... No, _not_ little ones--_big_ ones!) What
+a thing it is to be connected with aquatic characters!"
+
+"Never you mind the mother, Jeremiah. You get the boat. I should like
+it to dive off."
+
+"All right, I'll get Vereker, and we'll row out. The doctor's not bad
+as an oarsman. Bradshaw doesn't make much of it. (Yes, thanks; another
+egg. The brown one preferred; don't know why!) Yes, I'll get Dr.
+Conrad, and you shall come and dive off."
+
+All which was duly done, and Sally got into great disgrace by
+scrambling up into the boat with the help of a looped rope hung over
+the side, and was thereafter known to more than one decorous family
+group frequenting the beach as that bold Miss Nightingale. But what
+did Sally care what those stuffy people thought about her, with such
+a set-off against their bad opinion as the glorious plunge down into
+the depths, and the rushing sea-murmur in her ears, the only sound in
+the strange green silence; and then the sudden magic of the change back
+to the dazzling sun on the moving foam, and some human voice that was
+speaking when she dived only just ending off? Surely, after so long a
+plunge down, down, that voice should have passed on to some new topic.
+
+For that black and shining merpussy, during one deep dive into the
+under-world of trackless waters, had had time to recollect an
+appointment with a friend, and had settled in her mind that, as soon
+as she was once more in upper air, she would mention it to the crew
+of the boat she had dived from. She was long enough under for that.
+Then up she came into the rise and fall and ripple overhead like a
+sudden Loreley, and as soon as she could see where the boat had got
+to, and was free of a long stem of floating weed she had caught up
+in the foam, she found her voice. And in it, as it rang out in the
+morning air, was a world of youth and life and hope from which care
+was an outcast, flung to the winds and the waves.
+
+"I say, Jeremiah, we've got to meet a friend of yours on the pier
+this afternoon."
+
+"Time for you to come out of that water, Sarah." This name had
+become nearly invariable on Fenwick's part. "Who's your friend?"
+
+"A young lady for you! She's going to bring her dolly to be
+electrified for a penny. She'll cry if we don't go; so will dolly."
+
+"Then we _must_ go, clearly. The doctor must come to see fair, or
+dolly may get electrocuted, like me." Fenwick very rarely spoke of his
+accident now; most likely would not have done so this time but for a
+motive akin to his wife's nettle-grasping. He knew Sally would think
+of it, and would not have her suppose he shirked speaking of it.
+
+But the laugh goes for a moment out of the face down there in the
+water, and the pearls that glittered in the sun have vanished and the
+eyes are grave beneath their brows. Only for a moment; then all the
+Loreley is back in evidence again, and Sally is petitioning for only
+one more plunge, and then she really will swim in. The crew protests,
+but the Loreley has her way; her sort generally has.
+
+"I always wonder," says Dr. Conrad, as they row to shore with
+studied slowness--one must, to keep down to the pace of the swiftest
+swimmer--"I always wonder whether they found that half-crown." Probably
+he, too, only says this to accentuate the not-necessarily-to-be-avoided
+character of the subject.
+
+The reason Fenwick answered nothing, but remained thoughtfully silent,
+was, as Dr. Vereker perceived after he had spoken, that the half-crown
+was mere hearsay to him, and, as such, naturally enforced speculation
+on the strange "B.C." period of which he knew nothing. Time did
+but little to minimise the painful character of such speculations,
+although it seemed to make them less and less frequent. Vereker said
+no more, partly because he felt this, partly because he was so
+engrossed with the Loreley. He dropped the half-crown.
+
+"You needn't row away yet," said the voice from the water. "The
+machines are miles off. Look here, I'm going to swim under the boat
+and come up on the other side!"
+
+Said Fenwick: "You'll be drowned, Sarah, before you've done! Do
+consider your mother a little!"
+
+Said the Loreley: "All right! good-bye!" and disappeared. She was so
+long under that it was quite a relief when she reappeared, well off
+the boat's counter; for, of course, there was some way on the boat,
+and Sally made none. The crew's eyes had been watching the wrong water
+over the beam.
+
+"Didn't I do that nicely?... 'Beautifully?' Yes, I should rather
+think I did! Good-bye; I must go to my machine! They won't leave it
+down any longer."
+
+Off went the swimmer in the highest spirits, and landed with some
+difficulty, so much had the south-west wind freshened; and the machine
+started up the beach at a brisk canter to rejoin its many unused
+companions on their higher level.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Dr. Conrad, with the exhilaration of the Loreley in his heart, was
+to meet with a damper administered to him by his affectionate parent,
+who had improved immensely in the sea air, and was getting quite an
+appetite.
+
+"There is nothing, my dear, that I detest more cordially than
+interference," said she, after accepting, rather more easily than
+usual, her son's apologies for coming in late to lunch, and also being
+distinctly gracious to Mrs. Iggulden about the beefsteak-pudding.
+"Your father disapproved of it, and the whole of my family. The words
+'never meddle' were on their lips from morning till night. Is it
+wonderful that I abstain from speaking, as I so often do? Whatever I
+see, I am silent." And accordingly was for a few illustrative seconds.
+
+But her son, conceiving that the pause was one very common in cases
+of incipient beefsteak-pudding, and really due to kidneys, made an
+autopsy of the centre of Mrs. Iggulden's masterpiece; but when he had
+differentiated its contents and insulated kidneys beyond a doubt, he
+stood exposed and reproved by the tone in which his mother resumed:
+
+"Not for me; I have oceans. I shall never eat what I have, and it
+_is_ so wasteful!... No, my dear. You ask, 'What is it, then?' But
+I was going to tell you when you interrupted me." Here a pause for
+the Universe to settle down to attention. "There is always so much
+disturbance; but my meaning is plain. When I was a girl young women
+were different.... I dare say it is all right. I do not wish to lay
+myself open to ridicule for my old-fashioned opinions.... What
+_is_ it? I came back early, certainly, because I found the sun so
+tiring; but surely, my dear, you cannot have failed to see that our
+front window commands a full view of the bathing-machines. But I
+am silent.... Mrs. Iggulden does not understand making mustard.
+Hers runs."
+
+Dr. Conrad was not interested in the mustard. He _was_ about the
+cryptic attack on Sally's swimming and diving, which he felt to have
+been dexterously conveyed in his parent's speech with scarcely a
+word really to the point. There was no lack of skill in the Goody's
+method. He flushed slightly, and made no immediate reply--even to
+a superhumanly meek, "I know I shall be told I am wrong"--until after
+he had complied with a requisition for a very little more--so small
+a quantity as to seem somehow to reduce the lady's previous total
+morally, though it added to it physically--and then he spoke, taking
+the indictment for granted:
+
+"I can't see what you find fault with. Not Miss Sally's
+bathing-costume; nobody could!" Which was truth itself, for nothing
+more elegant could have been found in the annals of bathing. "And if
+she has a boat to dive off, somebody must row it. Besides, her mother
+would object if...." But the doctor is impatient and annoyed--a rare
+thing with him. He treats his beefsteak-pudding coldly, causing his
+mother to say: "Then you can ring the bell."
+
+However, she did not intend her text to be spoiled by irruptions
+of Mrs. Iggulden, so she waited until the frequent rice-pudding had
+elapsed, and then resumed at an advantage:
+
+"You were very snappish and peevish with me just now, Conrad, without
+waiting to hear what I had to say. But I overlook it. I am your
+mother. If you had waited, I should have told you that I have no fault
+whatever to find with Miss Nightingale's bathing-dress. It is, no
+doubt, strictly _en regle_. Nor can I say, in these days, what I think
+of girls practising exercises that in _my_ day were thought unwomanly.
+All is changed now, and I am old-fashioned. But this I do say, that
+had your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, been told
+forty years ago that a time would come when it would be thought no
+disgrace for an _English girl_ to jump off a boat with an _unmarried
+man_ in it.... My dear, I am sure the latter would have made one of
+those acrid and biting remarks for which he was celebrated in his own
+circle, and which have even, I believe, been repeated by Royalty. That
+is the only thing I have to say. I say nothing of girls learning to
+swim and dive. I say nothing of their bicycling. Possibly the young
+lady who passed the window this morning with a gentleman _on the same
+bicycle_ was properly engaged to him; or his sister. Even about the
+practice of Sandow, or Japanese wrestling, I have nothing to say. But
+if they are to dive off boats in the open sea, in the face of all the
+beach, at least let the boats be rowed by married men. That is all
+I ask. It is very little."
+
+What fools mothers sometimes are about their sons! They contrive
+that these sons shall pass through youth to early manhood without
+a suspicion that even mothers have human weaknesses. Then, all in
+a moment, just when love has ridden triumphant into the citadel of
+the boys' souls, they will sacrifice all--all they have won in a
+lifetime--to indulge some petty spleen against the new _regime_ that
+threatens their dethronement. And there is no surer way of undermining
+a son's loyalty than to suggest a want of delicate feeling in the new
+Queen--nothing that can make him question the past so effectually as
+to force him to hold his nostrils in a smell of propriety, puffed
+into what seems to him a gale from heaven.
+
+The contrast between the recent merpussy in the freshening seas, and
+this, as it seemed to him, perfectly gratuitous intrusion of moral
+carbolic acid, gave Dr. Conrad a sense of nausea, which his love for
+his mother enjoined ignorance of. His mind cast about, not for ways
+of excusing Sally--the idea!--but of whitewashing his mother, without
+seeming to suggest that her own mind had anything Fescennine about it.
+This is always the great difficulty skywardness has in dealing with
+the moral scavenger. Are not the motives of purity unimpeachable?
+
+Goody Vereker, however, did not suspect herself of being a fool. On
+the contrary, she felt highly satisfied with her speech, and may be
+said to have hugged its peroration. Her son flushed slightly and bit
+his lip, giving the old lady time for a corollary in a subdued and
+chastened voice.
+
+"Had I been asked--had you consulted me, my dear--I should certainly
+have advised that Mr. Fenwick should have been accompanied by another
+married man, certainly not by a young, single gentleman. The man
+himself--I am referring to the owner of the boat--would have done
+quite well, whether married or single. Boatmen are seldom unmarried,
+though frequently tattooed with ladies' names when they have been in
+the navy. You see something to laugh at, Conrad? In your mother! But
+I am used to it." The doctor's smile was in memory of two sun-browned
+arms that had pushed the boat off two hours ago. One had Elinor and
+Kate on it, the other Bessie and a Union Jack.
+
+"Don't you think, mother dear," said the doctor at last, "that if
+Mrs. Fenwick, who knew all about it, had seen anything outrageous
+she would have spoken? She really only seemed anxious none of us
+should get drowned."
+
+"Very likely, my dear; she would be. You will, I am sure, do me this
+justice, that I have throughout said, from the very beginning, that
+Mrs. Fenwick is a most excellent person, though I have sometimes
+found her tiring."
+
+"I am sorry she has tired you. You must always tell her, you know,
+when you're tired, and then she'll come and fetch me." The doctor
+resisted a temptation to ask, "From the very beginning of _what_?"
+For the suggestion that materials for laceration were simmering was
+without foundation; was, in fact, only an example of the speaker's
+method. She followed it with another.
+
+"It is so often the case with women who have passed a good deal of
+time in India."
+
+"Are women tiring when they have passed a good deal of time in India?"
+
+"My dear Conrad, _is it likely_ I should talk such nonsense? You know
+perfectly well what I mean." But the doctor merely awaited natural
+development, which came. "Mind, I do not say I _believe_ Mrs. Julius
+Bradshaw's story. But it would quite account for it--fully!"
+
+What would account for what? Heaven only knew! However, the speaker
+was getting the bit in her teeth, and earth would know very soon. Dr.
+Conrad was conscious at this moment of the sensation which had once
+made Sally speak of his mamma as an Octopus. She threw out a tentacle.
+
+"And, of course, Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story may be nothing but idle
+talk. I am the last person to give credit to mere irresponsible
+gossip. Let us hope it is ill founded."
+
+Whereupon her son, who knew another tentacle would come and entangle
+him if he slipped clear from this one, surrendered at discretion. What
+_was_ Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story? A most uncandid way of putting it,
+for the fact was he had heard it all from Sally in the strictest
+confidence. So the insincerity was compulsory, in a sense.
+
+The Octopus, who was by this time anchored in her knitting-chair
+and awaiting her mixture--two tablespoonfuls after every meal--closed
+her eyes to pursue the subject, but warmed to the chace visibly.
+
+"Are you going to tell me, my dear Conrad, that you do _not_ know
+that it has been said--I vouch for nothing, remember--that Miss
+Nightingale's mother was divorced from her father twenty years ago
+in India?"
+
+"I don't think it's any concern of yours or mine." But having said
+this, he would have liked to recall it and substitute something else.
+It was brusque, and he was not sure that it was a fair way of stating
+the case, especially as this matter had been freely discussed between
+them in the days of their first acquaintance with Sally and her
+mother. Dr. Conrad felt mean for renegading from his apparent
+admission at that time that the divorce was an affair they might
+properly speculate about. Mrs. Vereker knew well that her son would
+be hard on himself for the slightest unfairness, and forthwith climbed
+up to a pinnacle of flawless rectitude, for his confusion.
+
+"My dear, it is absolutely _none_. Am I saying that it is? People's
+past lives are no affair of ours. Am I saying that they are?"
+
+"Well, no!"
+
+"Very well, then, my dear, listen to what I do say, and do not
+misrepresent me. What I say is this--(Are you sure Perkins has mixed
+this medicine the same as the last? The taste's different)--Now
+listen! What I say is, and I can repeat it any number of times, that
+it is useless to expect sensitiveness on such points under such
+circumstances. I am certain that your father, or your great-uncle,
+Dr. Everett Gayler, would not have hesitated to endorse my opinion
+that on the broad question of whether a girl should or should not dive
+off a boat rowed by an unmarried man, no one is less likely to form a
+correct judgment than a lady who was divorced from her husband twenty
+years ago in India. But I say nothing against Mrs. Fenwick. She is, so
+far as she is known to me, an excellent person, and a good wife and
+mother. Now, my dear Conrad, I must rest, for I fear I have talked
+too much."
+
+Poor Prosy! All the edge of his joy of the morning was taken off. But
+never mind! It would very soon be Sally herself again, and his thirsty
+soul would be drinking deep draughts of her at the pier-end, where the
+appointment was to be kept with the young lady and her dolly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+OF AN INTERMITTENT CURRENT AT THE PIER-END, AND OF DOLLY'S FORTITUDE.
+ HOW FENWICK PUT HIS HEAD IN THE JAWS OF THE FUTURE UNAWARES, AND PROSY
+ DIDN'T COME. HOW SALLY AND HER STEP SAW PUNCH, AND OF A THIN END OF A
+ FATAL WEDGE. BUT ROSALIND SAW NO COMING CLOUD
+
+
+An iron pier, with a sense of lattice structure about it, is not to
+our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of
+our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St.
+Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if
+a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all
+through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an
+inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if
+you were too short to see over the advertisements a sordid spirit of
+commercialism had blocked the side-railings with. And if you were
+three or four, and there was nobody to hold you up (because they were
+carrying baby), you did so kneel, and as like as not got tar on your
+knees, and it wouldn't come off. Anyhow, Miss Gwendolen Arkwright did,
+on her way to the appointment, and was reproved therefore. On which
+she also reproved dolly in identical terms, dolly having had a look
+through as well, though, indeed, she can hardly be said to have knelt.
+
+But to console us for the loss of the solid groins and bolted timbers
+of our youth, and to make it palatable to us that the great seas
+should follow each other for ever almost unopposed--instead of being
+broken into floods of drenching foam visitors get wet-through in--this
+unsubstantial-looking piece of cage-work expanded as soon as it was
+well out in the open channel, and almost provided John Bull with
+another "other island." And whereon the pier-company's sordid
+commercialism had suggested the construction of a Chinese joss-house,
+or Indian bungalow--our description is a random one--that lent itself,
+or was lent by the company, at really an almost nominal figure, for
+entertainments in the afternoon all through the season. And round this
+structure were things desirable by all mankind, and supposed to be
+desired by possessors of one penny willing to part with it. For a
+penny-in-the-slot you could learn your fate from a Sibyl, and repent
+of having spent your penny on it. For another you could scent your
+pocket-handkerchief, and be sorry you hadn't kept your penny for
+chocolate. For another you could have the chocolate, and wish you
+had waited and taken a cigarette. And for another you could take the
+cigarette, and realise how ill-assorted are the flavours of chocolate
+and the best Virginian tobacco.
+
+But the pennyworth that seemed the worthiest of its penny was, no
+doubt, the old-fashioned galvanic battery, which shocked you for
+a sixth part of the smallest sum required by literature on first
+publication. It had brass handles you took hold of, and brass basins
+with unholy water in them that made you curl up, and anybody else
+would do so too. And there was a bunch of wires to push in, and
+agonize the victim who, from motives not easily understood, laid
+himself open to torture. And it certainly said "whizzy-wizzy-wizz."
+But Gwenny's description had been wrong in one point. For it was
+yourself, the investigator, not the machine, that said "e-e-e-e!"
+
+Now this machine was in charge of a young woman, who was also the
+custodian of an invisible lady, who was to be seen for a penny each
+person, children half-price. This appeared to be a contradiction in
+terms, but public apathy accepted it without cavil. The taking of
+this phenomenon's gate-money seemed to be almost a sinecure. Not so
+the galvanic battery, which never disappointed any one. It might
+disgust, or repel, those who had had no occasion to study this
+branch of science, but it always acted up to its professions. Those
+investigators who declined to have any more never could go away and
+complain that they had not had enough. And no one had ever been
+discontented with its baneful results when all the bundle of wires
+was put in; indeed, the young person in charge said she had never
+known any one to drain this cup of scientific experience to the dregs.
+"Halfway in's enough for most," was her report of human endurance.
+It was a spirited little machine, though old-fashioned.
+
+Miss Arkwright and her dolly, accompanied, as we have hinted, by
+her Nurse Jane and baby, whose violent temper had condemned his
+perambulator, and compelled his attendant to carry him--so she
+said--were beforehand at the place and hour named. For security
+against possible disappointment a fiction was resorted to that dolly
+wouldn't cry if her mamma talked seriously to her, and it was pointed
+out that Mr. Fenwick was coming, and Mrs. Fenwick was coming, and Miss
+Nightingale was coming, and Dr. Vereker was coming--advantage being
+taken of an infant's love of vain repetitions. But all these four
+events turned on dolly being good and not crying, and the reflex
+action of this stipulation produced goodness in dolly's mamma, with
+the effect that she didn't roar, as, it seemed, she might otherwise
+have done.
+
+Miss Gwendolen was, however, _that_ impatient that no dramatic
+subterfuge, however skilfully engineered, could be relied upon to
+last. Fortunately, a young lady she recognised, and a gentleman
+whom she did not personally know, but had seen on the beach, became
+interested in baby, who took no notice of them, and hiccupped. But,
+then, his eyes were too beady to have any human expression; perhaps
+it was more this than a contempt for vapid compliment that made him
+seem unsympathetic. The young lady, however, congratulated him on his
+_personnel_ and on the variety of his attainments; and this interested
+Miss Gwendolen, who continued not to roar, and presently volunteered
+a statement on her own account.
+
+"My mummar zis a-comin', and Miss Ninedale zis a-comin', and Miss
+Ninedale's mummar zis a-comin', and...." But Nurse Jane interposed,
+on the ground that the lady knew already who was coming. She had no
+reason for supposing this; but a general atmosphere of omniscience
+among grown-up classes is morally desirable. It was, however, limited
+to Clause 1. Miss Gwenny went on to the consideration of Clause 2
+without taking a division.
+
+"To see dolly danvalised for a penny. My mummar says--see--sall--div
+me a penny...."
+
+"To galvanise dolly? How nice that will be!--Isn't she a dear little
+thing, Paggy?--And we're just in time to see it. Now, that _is_ nice!"
+Observe Laetitia's family name for her husband, born of Cattley's.
+
+"Isn't that them coming, Tish?" Yes, it is. They are conscientiously
+negotiating the turnstile at the pier-entrance, where one gets a
+ticket that lets you on all day, and you lose it. Conscientiously,
+because the pier-company often left its side-gate open, and relied
+on public spirit to acquiesce in its turnstile without dispute.
+
+But Bradshaw has the misfortune to fall in Nurse's good opinion. For
+he asks who the important-looking party is, and is called to order.
+
+"Sh-sh-iii-sh, love! Do take care! Gwenny's mamma--Mrs. Chesterfield
+Arkwright. They've a house at Boxley Heath--friends of the Hugh
+Jameses--those very high-flying people." This is not _a pleine voix_,
+and a well-disciplined Nurse knows better than to hear it.
+
+Miss Gwenny and dolly consent to accompany the lady and gentleman to
+meet the party, the former undertaking to point out her mamma. "I sail
+sow you wiss," she says; and then gives descriptive particulars of
+the conduct of the galvanic battery, and forecasts its effect on dolly.
+
+"There's that dear little pet," says Sally; and resumes the operation
+of spoiling the little pet on the spot. She isn't sorry to tally the
+pet (whose phonetics we employ) "dest wunced round the p on her
+soulders, only zis wunced." She is a little silent, is Sally, and
+preoccupied--perhaps won't object to a romp to divert her thoughts.
+Because she is afraid poor Prosy is in the tentacles of the Octopus.
+She evidently is not in love with him; if she were she would be
+feeling piqued at his not being in time to the appointment, not
+fidgeting about his losing the fun. She made some parade, at any rate,
+of her misgivings that poor Dr. Conrad had got hooked by his Goody,
+and would be late. If she _was_ piqued she concealed it. Whichever
+it was, she found it congenial to "tally" Miss Arkwright on her
+"soulders" twiced round the pier-end before the party arrived within
+range of the battery. They meanwhile--that is to say, Rosalind and her
+husband, Laetitia and hers, with Sally and Gwenny's mamma--lingered
+slowly along the pier listening to the experiences of the latter, of
+men, women, and things among the right sort of people.
+
+"You really never know, and one cannot be too careful. So much turns
+on the sort of people you let your daughter get mixed up with. I'm
+sure Mrs. Fenwick will agree with me that Mrs. Hugh James was right.
+You see, I've known her from a child, and a more unworldly creature
+never breathed. But she asked me, and I could only say what I did:
+'Take the child at once to Paris and Ems and Wiesbaden--anywhere for
+a change. Even a tradesman is better than a professional man. In that
+case there may be money. But nowadays none of the professions pay.
+And their connexions are most undesirable.'"
+
+"Now _I_ should call that a brig." Thus Bradshaw, pursuing the great
+controversy. But Fenwick knows better, or thinks he does. She's a
+brigantine, and there are sprits'ls on both masts, and only one square
+sail on the foremast. He may be right, for anything we know. Anyhow,
+her sheets are white in the sun, as she tacks down channel against the
+west or south-west wind, which has freshened. And she is a glorious
+sight as she comes in quite close to the pier-head, and goes into
+stays--(is that right?)--and her great sails flap and swing, and a
+person to whom caution is unknown, and who cares for nothing in heaven
+or earth, sits unconcerned on a string underneath her bowsprit, and
+gets wet through every time she plunges, doing something nautical in
+connexion with her foresail overhead. And then she leans over in the
+breeze, and the white sheets catch it full--so near you can hear the
+boom click as it swings, and the rattle of the cordage as it runs
+through the blocks--and then she gets her way on her, and shoots off
+through a diamond-drench of broken seas, and we who can borrow the
+coastguard's telescope can know that she is the Mary of Penzance, but
+are none the wiser. And a man stripped to the waist, who is washing
+radishes on the poop, continues washing radishes unmoved, and ignores
+all things else.
+
+"As far as the young man himself goes, I believe there is nothing to
+be said. But the mother is quite unpresentable, perfectly impossible.
+And the eldest sister is married to a Dissenting clergyman--a very
+worthy man, no doubt, but not exactly. And the girls are loud, etc.,
+etc., etc." Miss Arkwright's mamma ripples on, even as persons of
+condition ripple; and Tishy, whose views in this direction have
+undergone expansion, manages to forget how she has done the same
+herself--not long ago, neither!--and decides that the woman is
+detestable.
+
+Not so her daughter, who, with Sally as guardian and dolly as ward,
+is awaiting the arrival of the party at the galvanic battery. She is
+yearning for the great event; not for a promised land of jerks and
+spasms for herself, but for her putative offspring. She encourages
+the latter, telling her not to be pitened and kye. Dolly doesn't seem
+apprehensive--shows great self-command, in fact.
+
+But this detestable mother of a lovable daughter and an untempting
+granddaughter is destined to become still more detestable in the eyes
+of the Julius Bradshaws before she exhausts her topic. For as the
+party draws near to the scene of scientific recreation--and progress
+is slow, as she is deliberate as well as detestable; and, of course,
+is the pace-maker--she climbs up to a higher platform, as it were,
+for the contemplation of a lower deep. She assumes, for purposes of
+temporary handling of the subject, the air of one too far removed to
+know more about its details than the seismograph at Greenwich knows
+about the earthquake in the Andes. A dim contemplation of a thing
+afar--to be forgotten on the spot, after record made.
+
+"Luckily, it's not so bad in this case as--(Gwenny, you're tiring
+Miss Nightingale. Come down!)--not so bad in this case as--(no, my
+dear! you _must_ wait for dolly to be galvanised. Come down at once,
+and don't make conditions.)"
+
+"But I love having her dearly--do let me keep her!" from Sally.
+
+And from the human creature on her shoulders, "Miss Ninedale says
+'_No!_'"
+
+"Not so bad, you were saying, as...?" Thus Rosalind, to divert the
+conversation from the child.
+
+"Oh dear! What _was_ I saying? That child! What plagues the little
+things are!" The lady closes her eyes for two seconds behind a
+horizontal gloved hand, a seclusion to recollect in; then continues:
+"Oh yes, when it's a shopman. I dare say you've heard of that very
+painful case--daughter of a well-known Greek Pr...."
+
+But the speaker has tact enough to see her mistake from the
+simultaneous loud speech it provokes. Every one seems to have
+something vociferous to say, and all speak at once. Sally's
+contribution is a suggestion that before dolly is put to the torture
+we shall go into the downstairs place and see the gentleman who's
+fishing catch a big grey mullet. It is adopted. Rosalind only remains
+upstairs, and takes the opportunity to communicate the Julius Bradshaw
+epic to Gwenny's mamma, who will now be more careful than ever about
+the sort of people you pick up at the seaside and drop. She puts
+these words by in her mind, for Gwenny's papa, later on.
+
+The gentleman who is to be seen catching the big grey mullet hadn't
+caught it, so far--not when the party arrived on the strange
+middle-deck of the pier the water reaches at high tide, and persuades
+occasional molluscs to grow on the floor of, with promises of a bath
+next month. The green reflected light from the endless rise and fall
+of the waves Gwenny could see (without getting down) through the
+floor-gaps, seemed to be urging the fisher-gentleman to give it up,
+and pointing out that the grey mullet was down here, and didn't mean
+to be caught. But he paid no attention, and only went on doing all the
+things that fishers do. He ascribed the fishes' reluctance to bite to
+the sort of sky, and not to common-sense on their part. He tried the
+other side instead. He lost his worm, and blamed him for going off the
+hook--which he would have done himself, and he knew it! He believed,
+honestly, that a fish of fabulous dimensions had thought seriously
+of biting, and would have bitten, only you got in the light, or made
+a noise.
+
+But there was no noise to speak of, really, except the clunk-clunk of
+one or two moored rowboats down below, and the sh-r-r-r-r-p (if that
+spells it) of their corrugated plank-sides, as they dipped and dripped
+alternately. They were close to the bottom flight of stairs, whose
+lowest step was left forlorn in the air, and had to be jumped off when
+a real spring-tide came that knew its business.
+
+Gwenny's remark, "Ze man is fissin'," seemed to point to an incubation
+of an idea, familiar to maturer life, that fishing is more truly a
+state than an action. But the addendum--that he didn't cass any
+fiss--betrayed her inexperience. Maturity does not call attention
+to ill-success; or, if it does, it lays it at the door of the fish.
+
+"What a jolly header one could have from here! No railings or
+anything. No--ducky! I won't put you down to look over the edge.
+That's not a thing for little girls to do."
+
+"You'd never get up again, Sarah. You'd have to swim ashore."
+
+"One could swim round the steps, Jeremiah--at least, according to
+the tide. It's slack water now."
+
+"I wish, Mr. Fenwick--(so does Julius)--that you would make that
+girl reasonable. She'll drown herself before she's done."
+
+"I know she will, Mrs. Paganini. Sure and certain! Nobody can stop
+her. But Vereker's going to bring her to."
+
+"Where _is_ the doctor, Tish? Didn't he say he was coming?" This was
+Bradshaw. He usually says things to his wife, and leaves publication
+to her.
+
+"Of course he said he was coming. I wonder if anything's the matter?"
+
+"Oh, no! It's his ma! The Goody's put an embargo on him, and kept him
+at home. Poor Prosy!" Sally is vexed, too. But observe!--she knows
+perfectly well that nothing but the Goody would have kept Prosy from
+his appointment.
+
+No one in particular, but every one more or less, supposes that now
+we must go back for dolly to be galvanised, Tishy rather reluctantly,
+for she does not share her husband's indifference about what the
+detestable one above says on the subject of shopmen; Miss Arkwright
+greedily, being reminded of a higher object in life than mere grey
+mullet catching. She, however, ascribes her avidity to dolly, calling
+on public credulity to believe that the latter has spoken to that
+effect.
+
+The arrangement of dolly in connexion with the two brass handles
+offers difficulties, but a felicitous solution is discovered, for not
+only will dolly remain in contact with both if her arms are thrust
+inside them, but insomuch as her sleeves are stiff and expansive, and
+require a perceptible pull to withdraw them, will remain suspended in
+mid-air without further support, to enjoy the rapture or endure the
+torture of the current, as may prove to be the case. From this
+arises an advantage--namely, that her mamma will be able to give her
+attention to the regulator, and shift the wire bundle in and out,
+with a due regard to dolly's powers of endurance.
+
+What little things the lives of the folk in this story have turned
+on! Now, suppose Gwenny had never been allowed to take charge of that
+regulator! However, this is anticipation.
+
+When dolly had endured unmoved the worst that science could inflict,
+nothing would satisfy Miss Gwenny but that every one else should take
+hold in a circle, as on a previous occasion, and that she should
+retain control of the regulator. The experiment was tried as proposed,
+all present joining in it except Mrs. Arkwright, who excused herself
+owing to the trouble of taking her gloves off. Including nurse, there
+were six persons. However, as nurse couldn't abide it, almost before
+it had begun to say whizzy-wizzy-wizz, this number was reduced to
+five.
+
+"Keep your eye on the kid, my dear," said Fenwick, addressing the
+presiding young lady in his easy-going way; "don't let her put it
+on all at once. Are you ready, Sarah? You ready, Mrs. Paganini? All
+right--fire away!"
+
+The young lady in charge kept a careful hand near Miss Gwenny's,
+who was instructed or guided to increase the current gradually. Her
+attitude was docile and misleading.
+
+"Go on--a little more--yes, a little more.... No, that's enough!...
+Oh, what nonsense! that's nothing!... Oh, Sally, do let _go_!... Oh,
+Tishy, what a goose you are! That's nothing.... E-ow! It's horrible.
+_I_ won't have any more of it." The chorus of exclamations, which
+you may allot at choice, ended in laughter as the galvanised circle
+broke up.
+
+"Well, you are a lot of weak-kneed ... conductivities," said Fenwick,
+feeling for the word. "That was nothing, as Sarah says."
+
+"Look here," suggested Sally. "Me get between you two men, and Gwenny
+stick it in full up." This was done, and Sally heroically endured the
+"full up" current, which, as you doubtless are aware, increases in
+viciousness as it has fewer and fewer victims. But she wasn't sorry
+when it was over, for all that.
+
+"You and I could take it full up," said Fenwick to Bradshaw, who
+assented. But Paganini evidently didn't like it when it came to
+three-quarters. Also, his wife said to him, "You'll spoil your
+fingering, Julius."
+
+Fenwick seemed to think them all over-sensitive. "I could stand that
+by myself," said he, and took both handles.
+
+But just at this moment a strange event happened. Somebody actually
+applied to see the invisible lady. The eyes of the damsel in charge
+were for one moment withdrawn from Miss Gwenny, who promptly seized
+the opportunity to thrust in the regulator "full up."
+
+Fenwick wasn't going to cry for mercy--not he! But his lips clenched
+and his eyes glared, and his hands shook. "How can you be such a
+_goose_, Jeremiah?" said Sally, who was standing close by the battery,
+opposite to Gwenny. She thrust back the regulator, and put an end to
+Fenwick's excruciations.
+
+He said, "What did you do that for, Sarah? I could have stood it for
+six months."
+
+And Sally replied: "For shame, you wicked story! And after you'd been
+electrocuted once, too!"
+
+Fenwick burst into a great laugh, and exclaimed, "What on earth are
+we all torturing ourselves for? Do let's go and get some tea." And
+then carried Gwenny on his shoulders to the pier-entrance, where
+he delivered her to her proprietors, and then they all sauntered
+teawards, laughing and chatting.
+
+Rosalind thought she had never seen Gerry in such health and
+spirits. On their way up to the house they passed Punch, leaning
+over the footlights to rejoice in his iniquity. Few persons of
+healthy sympathies can pass Punch, and these only under the strongest
+temptation, such as tea. Rosalind and Laetitia and her husband belonged
+to the latter class, but Fenwick and Sally elected to see the immortal
+drama to a close. It lasted nearly through the remainder of Fenwick's
+cigar, and then they came away, reluctant, and wanting more of the
+same sort.
+
+It was then that Sally's stepfather said a rather singular thing to
+her--a thing she remembered afterwards, though she noticed it but
+slightly at the time. She had said to him:
+
+"Codling and Short will be quite rich men! What a lot of money you've
+given them, Jeremiah!"
+
+And he had replied: "Don't they deserve it?"
+
+They had then walked on together up the road, he taking her arm in his
+hand, as is the way nowadays, but saying nothing. Presently he said,
+as he threw away the very last end of the cigar:
+
+"It was the first lesson of my early boyhood in retributive injustice.
+It's a poor heart that never rejoices at Punch."
+
+It was the first time Sally had ever heard him speak of his boyhood
+except as a thing he had forgotten.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Much, so much, of this chapter is made up of matter so trifling. Was
+it worth recording? The chronicler might plead again as excuse his
+temptation to linger over the pleasant hours it tells of, the utter
+freedom of its actors from care, and his reluctance to record their
+sequel. But a better apology for his prolixity and detail would be
+found in the wonder felt by those actors when in after-life they
+looked back and recalled them one by one; and the way each memory
+linked itself, in a way unsuspected at the time, with an absolutely
+unanticipated future. For even Rosalind, with all her knowledge of the
+past, had no guess, for all her many misgivings and apprehensions, of
+the way that things would go. Never had she been freer from a sense
+of the shadow of a coming cloud than when she looked out from the
+window while the tea she had just made was mellowing, and saw her
+husband and daughter coming through the little garden gate, linked
+together and in the best of spirits.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+OF THE REV. SAMUEL HERRICK AND A SUNSET. THE WEDGE'S PROGRESS. THE
+ BARON AGAIN, AND THE FLY-WHEEL. HOW FENWICK KNEW HIS NAME RIGHT, AND
+ ROSALIND DIDN'T. HOW SALLY AND HER MEDICAL ADVISER WERE NOT QUITE WET
+ THROUGH. HOW HE HAD MADE HER THE CONFIDANTE OF A LOVE-AFFAIR. OF A
+ GOOD OPENING IN SPECIALISM. MORE PROGRESS OF THE WEDGE. HOW GERRY
+ NEARLY MADE DINNER LATE
+
+
+It was quite true, as Sally had surmised, that poor Prosy had been
+entangled in the meshes of his Octopus. But Sally had also recorded
+her conviction that he would turn up at tea. He did so, with
+apologies. You see, he hadn't liked to come away while his mother
+was asleep, in case she should ask for him when she woke up, and
+she slept rather longer than usual.
+
+"She may have been trying to do too much lately," said he, with a
+beautiful faith in some mysterious activities practised by the Goody
+unseen. Sally cultivated this faith also, to the best of her ability,
+but she can hardly be said to have embraced it. The way in which she
+and her mother lent themselves to it was, nevertheless, edifying.
+
+"You mustn't let her overdo it, doctor," said Rosalind, seriously
+believing herself truthful. And Sally, encouraged by her evident
+earnestness, added, "And make her take plenty of nourishment. That's
+half the battle."
+
+Whereupon Laetitia, swept, as it were, into the vortex of a creed,
+found it in her to say, "As long as she doesn't get low." It was not
+vigorous, and lacked completion, but it reassured and enforced. By the
+time the little performance was done every one in the room believed
+that Mrs. Vereker did down the stairs, or scoured out saucepans, or
+at least dusted. Even her son believed, so forcibly was the unanimity.
+Perhaps there was a taint of the incredulous in the minds of Fenwick
+and Bradshaw. But each thought the other was heart-whole, and neither
+suspected himself of insincerity.
+
+Sally was curious to know exactly what lines the Octopus had operated
+on. That would do later, though. She would get Prosy by himself, and
+make him tell her all about it. In the course of time tea died a
+natural death. Fenwick indulged in a yawn and a great shake, and
+remembered that he had no end of letters to answer. Mr. and Mrs.
+Julius Bradshaw suddenly thought, for no reasonable reason, that they
+ought to be getting back. But they didn't really go home. They went
+for a walk landward; as it was so windy, instead--remember that
+they were only in the third week of their honeymoon! Sally, with
+Talleyrand-like diplomacy, achieved that she and Dr. Conrad should
+go for another walk in another direction. The sea was getting up and
+the glass was going down, and it would be fun to go and see the waves
+break over the jetty. So said Sally, and Dr. Conrad thought so too,
+unequivocally. They walked away in the big sea-wind, fraught with
+a great inheritance from the Atlantic of cool warmth and dry moisture.
+And if you don't know what that means, you know mighty little of the
+ocean in question.
+
+Rosalind watched them through the window, closed perforce, and saw
+them disappear round the flagstaff with the south cone hoisted,
+holding their heads on to all appearance. She said to herself:
+"Foolish fellow, why can't he speak?" And her husband answered either
+her thought or her words--though he could hardly have heard them as
+he sat driving his pen furiously through letters--with: "He'll have
+to confess up, Rosey, you'll see, before he goes."
+
+She made no reply; but, feeling a bit tired, lay down to rest on
+the sofa. And so powerful was the sea air, and the effect of a fair
+allowance of exercise, that she fell into a doze in spite of the
+intensely wakeful properties of Mrs. Lobjoit's horsehair sofa, which
+only a corrugated person could stop on without a maintained effort, so
+that sound sleep was impossible. She never became quite unconscious of
+the scratching pen and the moaning wind; so, as she did not sleep, yet
+did not want to wake, she remained hovering on the borderland of
+dreams. One minute she thought she was thinking, sanely, about Sally
+and her silent lover--always uppermost in her thoughts--the next, she
+was alive to the absurdity of some dream-thing one of them had
+suddenly changed to, unnoticed. Once, half awake, she was beginning
+to consider, seriously, whether she could not legitimately approach
+the Octopus on the subject, but only to find, the moment after, that
+the Octopus (while remaining the same) had become the chubby little
+English clergyman that had married her to Gerry at Umballa, twenty
+years ago. Then she thought she would wake, and took steps towards
+doing it; but, as ill-luck would have it, she began to speak before
+she had achieved her purpose. And the result was: "Do you remember the
+Reverend Samuel Herrick, Gerry, at Umb----Oh dear! I'm not awake....
+I was talking nonsense." Gerry laughed.
+
+"Wake up, love!" said he. "Do your fine intelligence justice! What was
+it you said? Reverend Samuel who?"
+
+"I forget, darling. I was dreaming." Then, with a nettle-grasping
+instinct, as one determined to flinch from nothing, "Reverend Samuel
+Herrick. What did you think I said?"
+
+"Reverend Samuel Herrick or Meyrick.... 'Not negotiable.' I don't mean
+the Reverend Sam, whoever he is, but the payee whose account I'm
+enriching." He folded the cheque he had been writing into its letter
+and enveloped it. But he paused on the brink of its gummed edge,
+looking over it at Rosalind, who was still engaged getting quite
+awake. "I know the name well enough. He's some chap! I expect you saw
+him in the 'Chronicle.'"
+
+"Very likely, darling! He must be some chap, when you come to think
+of it." She says this slightly, as a mere rounding-off speech. Then
+goes behind her husband's chair and kisses him over his shoulder as he
+directs the envelope.
+
+"Marmaduke, Copestake, Dickinson, and Humphreys," says he, as he
+writes the names. "Now I call that a firm-and-a-half. Old Broad
+Street, E.C. _That's_ all!--as far as _he_ goes. Now, how about
+Puckeridge, Limited?"
+
+"Don't write any more, Gerry dear; you'll spoil your eyes. Come and
+look at the sunset. Come along!" For a blood-red forecast of storm in
+the west, surer than the surest human barometer, is blazing through
+the window that cannot be opened for the blow, and turning the
+shell-work rabbit and the story of Goliath into gold and jewels. The
+sun is glancing through a rift in the cloud-bank, to say good-night to
+the winds and seas, and wish them joy of the high old time they mean
+to have in his absence, in the dark.
+
+The lurid level rays that make an indescribable glory of Rosalind's
+halo-growth of hair as Gerry sees it against the window, have no
+ill-boding in them for either--no more, that is, than always has
+belonged to a rough night closing over the sea, and will do so always
+until the sea is ice again on a planet sick to death. As he draws her
+arm round his neck and she his round her waist, and they glance at
+each other in the flaming glow, there is no thought in either of any
+ill impending for themselves.
+
+"I wish Sarah were here to see you now, Rosey."
+
+"So should I, love! Only she would see you too. And then she'd make
+you vainer than you are already. All men are patches of Vanity. But
+I forgive you." She kisses him slightly in confirmation. They certainly
+were a wonderful sight, the two of them, a minute ago, when the light
+was at its best. Yes!--they wish Sally had been there, each on the
+other's account. It was difficult to say which of the two had thought
+of Sally first. Both had this habit of registering the _rapport_ of
+everything to Sally as a first duty.
+
+But a sunset glow, like this one, lasts, maybe, little longer than
+a highest song-note may be sustained. It was to die. But Rosalind and
+Gerry watched it out. His cheek was resting in the thick mass of soft
+gold, just moving slightly to be well aware of it. The sun-ray touched
+it, last of anything in the room, and died....
+
+"What's that, dear love? _Why?_..." It was Rosalind that spoke.
+
+"Nothing, dearest! No, nothing!... Indeed, nothing at all!"
+
+"Gerry, what _was_ it?"
+
+"What was what, dear?"
+
+"What made you leave off so suddenly?"
+
+For the slightly intermittent movement of his cheek on her hair--what
+hairy thing is there that does not love to be stroked?--had stopped;
+and his hand that held hers had slipped from it, and rested for a
+moment on his own forehead.
+
+"It's gone now. It was a sort of recurrence. I haven't been having
+them lately...."
+
+"Come and sit down, love. There, now, don't fidget! What was it
+about?" Does he look pale?--thinks Rosalind--or is it only the
+vanished glow?
+
+He is uncommunicative. Suppose they go out for a turn before dinner,
+he suggests. They can walk down to the jetty, to meet Sarah and her
+medical adviser. Soon said, soon settled. Ten minutes more, and they
+are on their way to the fisher dwellings: experiencing three-quarters
+of a gale, it appears, on the testimony of an Ancient Mariner in a
+blue and white-striped woollen shirt, who knows about things.
+
+"That was _very_ queer, that recurrence!" Thus Gerry, after leaving
+the Ancient Mariner. "It was just as the little edge of the sun went
+behind the bank. And what do you think my mind hooked it on to, of all
+things in the world?" Rosalind couldn't guess, of course. "Why, a big
+wheel I was trying to stop, that went slowly--slowly--like the sun
+vanishing. And then just as the sun went it stopped."
+
+"Was there anything else?" Entire concealment of alarm is all Rosalind
+can attend to.
+
+"No end of things, all mixed up together. One thing very funny. A great
+big German chap.... I say, Rosalind!"
+
+"What, Gerry darling?"
+
+"Do you recollect, when we were in Switzerland, up at that last
+high-up place, Seelisberg--Sonnenberg--do you remember the great fat
+Baron that gave me those cigars, and sang?"
+
+"Remember the Baron? Of course I do. Perfectly!" Rosalind contrived
+a laugh. "Was he in it?" Perhaps this was rash. But then, not to say
+it would have been cowardice, when it was on her tongue-tip. Let the
+nettle be grasped.
+
+"He was in it, singing and all. But the whole thing was mixed up and
+queer. It all went, quite suddenly. And I should have lost him out
+of it, as one loses a dream, if it hadn't been for seeing him in
+Switzerland. It was something to hold on by. Do you understand?"
+
+"I think I do. _I_ had forgotten what I was dreaming about when I
+woke on the sofa and talked that nonsense. But I held on to the name,
+for all that."
+
+"But then that wasn't a real person, the Reverend--what was
+he?--Herrick or Derrick."
+
+Rosalind passed the point by. "Gerry darling! I want you to do as I
+tell you. Don't worry your head about it, but keep quiet. If memory
+is coming back to you, it will come all the quicker for letting your
+mind rest. Let it come gradually."
+
+"I see what you mean. You think it was really a recollection of B.C.?"
+
+"I think so. Why should it not?"
+
+"But it's all gone clean away again! And I can't remember anything
+of it at all--and there was heaps!"
+
+"Never mind! If it was real it will come back. Wait and be patient!"
+
+Rosalind's mind laid down this rule for itself--to think and act
+exactly as though there had been nothing to fear. Even if all the
+past had been easy to face it would have shrunk from suggestions.
+So thought she to herself, perhaps with a little excusable
+self-deception. Otherwise the natural thing would have been to
+repeat to him all the Baron's story.
+
+No! She would not say a word, or give a hint. If it was all to come
+back to him, it would come back. If not, she could not bring it back;
+and she might, in the attempt to do so, merely plunge his injured
+mind into more chaotic confusion. Much safer to do nothing!
+
+But why this sudden stirring of his memory, just now of all times?
+Had anything unusual happened lately? Naturally, the inquiry sent
+her mind back, to yesterday first, then to the day before. No!--there
+was nothing there. Then to generalities. Was it the sea bathing?--the
+sea air? And then on a sudden she thought of the thing nearest at
+hand, that she should have thought of at first. Yes!--she would ask
+Dr. Conrad about _that_: Why hadn't she thought of that before--that
+galvanic battery?
+
+Meanwhile, despite her injunctions to her husband to wait and be
+patient, his mind kept harking back on this curious recollection.
+Luckily, so it seemed to her--at any rate for the present--he did not
+seem to recall the Baron's recognition of himself, or to connect it
+with this illusion or revival. He appeared to recollect the Baron's
+personality, and his liberality with cigars, but little else. If he
+was to be reminded of this, it must be after she had talked over it
+with Vereker.
+
+They struggled with the weather along the seaward face of the little
+old fisher-town. The great wind was blowing the tar-laden atmosphere
+of the nets and the all-pervading smell of tar landward; and
+substituting flecks of driven foam, that it forced to follow landward
+too, for all they tried to stop and rest. The population was mostly
+employed getting the boats up as close to the houses as practice
+permitted, and the capstans were all a-creak with the strain; and one
+shrieked for a dab of lard, and got it, just as they passed. The man
+with Bessie and the anchor on his arms--for it was his--paused in his
+rotations with one elbow on his lever, and one foot still behind
+the taut cable he was crossing. His free hand saluted; and then, his
+position being defined, he was placed on a moral equality with his
+superiors, and could converse. The old-fashioned hat-touch, now dying
+out, is just as much a protest against the way social order parts man
+from man as it is an acknowledgment of its necessity.
+
+The lover of Bessie and Elinor and Kate was disposed to ignore the
+efforts of the wind. There might, he said, be a bit of sea on, come
+two or three in the marn'n--at the full of the tide. The wind might
+get up a bit, if it went round suth'ard. The wind was nothing in
+itself--it was the direction it came from; it got a bad character
+from imputed or vicarious vice. It would be a bit rough to get a
+boat off--the lady might get a wetting.... At which point Rosalind
+interrupted. Nothing was further from her thoughts, she said, than
+navigation in any form. But had the speaker seen her daughter go
+by--the young lady that swam? For Sally was famous. He hadn't,
+himself, but maybe young Benjamin had. Who, taking leave to speak from
+this, announced frankly that he _had_ seen a young lady, in company
+with her sweetheart, go by nigh an hour agone. The tattooed one
+diluted her sweetheart down to "her gentleman" reluctantly. In his
+land, and the one there would soon be for the freckled and blue-eyed
+Benjamin, there was no such artificial nonsense. Perhaps some sense
+of this showed itself in the way he resumed his work. "Now, young
+Benjamin--a-action!" said he; and the two threw themselves again
+against the pole of the mollified capstan.
+
+If Rosalind fancied this little incident had put his previous
+experience out of her husband's mind she was mistaken. He said, as
+they passed on in the direction of the jetty, "I think I should like
+to wind up capstans. It would suit me down to the ground." But then
+became thoughtful; and, just as they were arriving at the jetty,
+showed that his mind had run back by asking suddenly, "What was the
+fat Baron's name?"
+
+"Diedrich Kammerkreutz." Rosalind gave him her nearest recollection,
+seeing nothing to be gained by doing otherwise. Any concealment, too,
+the chances were, would make matters worse instead of better.
+
+"It was Kreutzkammer, in my--dream or whatever you call it." They
+stopped and looked at each other, and Rosalind replied, "It _was_
+Kreutzkammer. Oh dear!" rather as one who had lost breath from some
+kind of blow.
+
+He saw her distress instantly, and was all alive to soothe it.
+"Don't be frightened, darling love!" he cried, and then his great
+good-humoured laugh broke into the tenderness of his speech, without
+spoiling it. He was so like Gerry, the boy that rode away that day
+in the dog-cart, when there was "only mamma for the girl."
+
+"But when all's said and done," said she, harking back for a reprieve,
+"perhaps you only recollected Sonnenberg in your dream better than
+I did ... just now...." She hung fire of repeating the name Herrick.
+
+"_Ach zo_," he answered, teutonically for the moment, from association
+with the Baron. "But suppose it all true, dearest, and that I'm going
+to come to life again, what does it matter? It can't alter _us_, that
+I can see. Could anything that you can imagine? I should be Gerry for
+you, and you would be Rosey for me, to the end of it." Her assent had
+a mere echo of hesitation. But he detected it, and went on: "Unless,
+you mean, I remembered the hypothetical wife?..."
+
+"Ye--es!--partly."
+
+"Well! I tell you honestly, Rosey darling, if I do, I shall keep her
+to myself. A plaguing, intrusive female--to come between _us_. But
+there's no such person!" At which they both laughed, remembering the
+great original non-exister. But even here was a little thorn. For Mrs.
+Harris brought back the name the Baron had known Gerry by. He did not
+seem to have resumed it in his dream.
+
+The jetty ran a little way out to sea. Thus phraseology in use. It
+might have reconsidered itself, and said that the jetty had at some
+very remote time run out to sea and stopped there. Ever since, the sea
+had broken over it at high tides, and if you cared at all about your
+clothes you wouldn't go to the end of it, if you were me. Because the
+salt gets into them and spoils the dye. Besides, you have to change
+everything.
+
+There was a dry place at the end of the jetty, and along the edge of
+the dry place were such things as cables go round and try hard to
+draw, as we drew the teeth of our childhood with string. But they fail
+always, although their pulls are never irresolute. On two of these sat
+Sally and the doctor in earnest conversation.
+
+Rosalind and her husband looked at each other and said, "No!" This
+might have been rendered, "Matters are no forwarder." It connected
+itself (without acknowledgment) with the distance apart of the two
+cable-blocks. Never mind; let them alone!
+
+"Are you going to sit there till the tide goes down?"
+
+"Oh, is that you? We didn't see you coming."
+
+"You'll have to look sharp, or you'll be wet through...."
+
+"No, we _shan't_! You only have to wait a minute and get in
+between...."
+
+Easier said than done! A big wave, that was just in time to overhear
+this conversation imperfectly, thought it would like to wet Sally
+through, and leaped against the bulwark of the jetty. But it spent
+itself in a huge torrential deluge while Sally waited a minute. A
+friend followed it, but made a poor figure by comparison. Then Sally
+got in between, followed by the doctor.... Well! they were really not
+so _very_ wet, after all! Sally was worst, as she was too previous.
+She got implicated in the friend's last dying splash, while Prosy
+got nearly scot-free. So said Sally to Fenwick as they walked briskly
+ahead towards home, leaving the others to make their own pace. Because
+it was a case of changing everything, and dinner was always so early
+at St. Sennans.
+
+"Let them go on in front. I want to talk to you, Dr. Conrad."
+Rosalind, perhaps, thinks his attention won't wander if she takes a
+firm tone; doesn't feel sure about it, otherwise. Maybe Sally is too
+definitely in possession of the citadel to allow of an incursion from
+without. She continues: "I have something to tell you. Don't look
+frightened. It is nothing but what you have predicted yourself. My
+husband's memory is coming back. I don't know whether I ought to say
+I am afraid or I hope it is so...."
+
+"But are you sure it is so?"
+
+"Yes, listen! It has all happened since you and Sally left." And then
+she narrated to the doctor, whose preoccupation had entirely vanished,
+first the story of the recurrence, and Fenwick's description of it
+in full; and then the incident of the Baron at Sonnenberg, but less
+in detail. Then she went on, walking slower, not to reach the
+house too soon. "Now, this is the thing that makes me so sure it is
+recollection: just now, as we were coming to the jetty, he asked me
+suddenly what was the Baron's name. I gave a wrong version of it, and
+he corrected me." This does not meet an assent.
+
+"That was nothing. He had heard it at Sonnenberg. I think much more of
+the story itself; the incident of the wheel and so on. Are you quite
+sure you never repeated this German gentleman's story to Mr. Fenwick?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"H'm...!"
+
+"So, you see, I want you to help me to think."
+
+"May I talk to him about it?--speak openly to him?"
+
+"Yes; to-morrow, not to-day. I want to hear what he says to-night. He
+always talks a great deal when we're alone at the end of the day. He
+will do so this time. But I want you to tell me about an idea I have."
+
+"What idea?"
+
+"Did Sally tell you about the galvanic battery on the pier?" Dr.
+Conrad stopped in his walk, and faced round towards his companion.
+He shook out a low whistle--an _arpeggio_ down. "Did she tell you?"
+repeated Rosalind.
+
+"Miss Sa...."
+
+"Come, come, doctor! Don't be ridiculous. Say Sally!" The young man's
+heart gave a responsive little jump, and then said to itself, "But
+perhaps I'm only a family friend!" and climbed down. However, on
+either count, "Sally" was nicer than "Miss Sally."
+
+"Sally told me about the electric entertainment at the pier-end. I'm
+sorry I missed it. But if _that's_ what's done it, Fenwick must try
+it again."
+
+"_Mustn't_ try it again?"
+
+"No--_must_ try it again. Why, do you think it bad for him to
+remember?"
+
+"I don't know what to think."
+
+"My notion is that a man has a right to his own mind. Anyhow, one
+has no right to keep him out of it."
+
+"Oh no; besides, Gerry isn't out of it in this case. Not out of his
+mind...."
+
+"I didn't mean that way. I meant excluded from participation in
+himself ... you see?"
+
+"Oh yes, I quite understand. Now listen, doctor. I want you to do me a
+kindness. Say nothing, even to Sally, till I tell you. Say _nothing_!"
+
+"You may trust me." Rosalind feels no doubt on that point, the more so
+that the little passage about Sally's name has landed her at some
+haven of the doctor's confidence that neither knows the name of just
+yet. He is not the first man that has felt a welcome in some trifling
+word of a very special daughter's mother. But woe be to the mother who
+is premature and spoils all! Poor Prosy is too far gone to be a risky
+subject of experiment. But _he_ won't say anything--not he! "After
+all, you know," he continues, "it may all turn out a false alarm. Or
+false hope, should I say?"
+
+No answer. And he doesn't press for one. He is in a land of pitfalls.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"What have you and your medical adviser been talking about all the
+while, there in mid-ocean?" Fenwick forgets the late event with
+pleasure. Sally, with her hair threatening to come down in the wind,
+is enough to stampede a troop of nightmares.
+
+"Poor Prosy!" is all the answer that comes at present. Perhaps if that
+uncontrolled black coil will be tractable she will concede more anon.
+You can't get your hair back under your hat and walk quick and talk,
+all at the same time.
+
+"Poorer than usual, Sarah?" But really just at this corner it's as
+much as you can do, if you have skirts, to get along at all; to say
+nothing of the way such loose ends as you indulge in turn on you and
+flagellate your face in the wind. Oh, the vicious energy of that
+stray ribbon! Fancy having to use up one hand to hold that!
+
+But a lull came when the corner was fairly turned, in the lee of a
+home of many nets, where masses of foam-fleck had found a respite, and
+leisure to collapse, a bubble at a time. You could see the prism-scale
+each had to itself, each of the millions, if you looked close enough.
+Collectively, their appearance was slovenly. A chestnut-coloured man
+a year old, who looked as if he meant some day to be a boatswain,
+was seated on a pavement that cannot have soothed his unprotected
+flesh--flint pebbles can't, however round--and enjoying the mysterious
+impalpable nature of this foam. However, even for such hands as
+his--and Sally wanted to kiss them badly--they couldn't stop. She
+got her voice, though, in the lull.
+
+"Yes--a little. I've found out all about Prosy."
+
+"Found out about him?"
+
+"I've made him talk about it. It's all about his ma and a young lady
+he's in love with...." Fenwick's _ha!_ or _h'm!_ or both joined
+together, was probably only meant to hand the speaker on, but the
+tone made her suspicious. She asked him why he said that, imitating
+it; on which he answered, "Why shouldn't he?" "Because," said Sally,
+"if you fancy Prosy's in love with me, you're mistaken."
+
+"Very good! Cut along, Sarah! You've made him talk about the young
+lady he's in love with...?"
+
+"Well, he as good as talked about her, anyhow! _I_ understood quite
+plain. He wants to marry her awfully, but he's afraid to say so to
+her, because of his ma."
+
+"Doesn't Mrs. Vereker like her?"
+
+"Dotes upon her, he says. Ug-g-h! No, it isn't that. It's the lugging
+the poor girl into his ma's sphere of influence. He's conscious of
+his ma, but adores her. Only he's aware she's overwhelming, and always
+gets her own roundabout way. I prefer Tishy's dragon, if you ask
+_me_."
+
+At that point Sally is quite unconscious of Fenwick's amused eyes
+fixed on her, and his smile in ambush. She says the last words
+through a hairpin, while her hands take advantage of the lull to
+make a good job of that rope of black hair. She will go on and tell
+all the story; so Fenwick doesn't speak. Surprised at first by the
+tale of Dr. Conrad's young lady, his ideas have by now fructified.
+Sally continues:
+
+"He's often told me he thought G.P.'s were better single, for their
+wives' sakes--that sounds wrong, somehow!--but it isn't that. It's
+his ma entirely. I suppose he's told you about the epileptiform
+disorders?" No, he hadn't. "Well, now! Fancy Prosy not telling you
+that! He's become quite an authority since those papers he had in
+the 'Lancet,' and he's thinking of giving up general practice. Sir
+Dioscorides Gayler's a cousin of his, you know, and would pass on
+his practice to Prosy on easy terms. House in Seymour Street, Portman
+Square. Great authority on epilepsy and epileptiform disorders. Wants
+a successor who knows about 'em. Naturally. Wants three thousand
+pounds. Naturally. Big fees! But he would make it easy for Prosy."
+
+"That would be all right; soon manage that." Fenwick speaks with
+the confidence of one in a thriving trade. The deity of commerce,
+security, can manage all things. Insecurity is atheism in the City.
+"But then," he adds, "Vereker wouldn't marry, even with a house and
+big-fee consultations, because he's afraid his mother would hector
+over his wife. Is that it?"
+
+"That's it! It's his Goody mother. I say, it _is_ blowing!" It was,
+and they had emerged from the shelter into the wind. No more talk!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+As Fenwick, sea-blown and salted, resorted to the lodging-house
+allowance of fresh water and soap, in a perfunctory and formal
+preparation for dinner, his mind ran continually on Sally's
+communication. As for the other young lady being valid, that he
+dismissed as nonsense not worth consideration. Vereker had been
+resorting to a furtive hint of a declaration, disguised as fiction.
+It was a _fabula narrata de_ Sally, _mutato nomine_. If she didn't
+see through it, and respond in kind, it would show him how merely
+a friend he was, and nothing more. "Perhaps he doesn't understand
+our daughter's character," said Fenwick to Rosalind, when he had
+repeated the conversation to her. "Of course he doesn't," she
+replied. "No young man of his sort understands girls the least.
+The other sort of young man understands the other sort of girls."
+
+And then a passing wonderment had touched her mind, of how strange
+it was that Sally should be one of her own sort, so very distinctly.
+How about inheritance? She grew reflective and silent over it, and
+then roused herself to wonder, illogically, why Gerry hadn't gone
+on talking.
+
+The reason was that as his mind dwelt happy and satisfied on the
+good prospect Vereker would have if he could step into his cousin's
+specialist practice as a consulting physician, with a reputation
+already begun, his thoughts were caught with a strange jerk. What
+and whence was a half-memory of some shadowy store of wealth that was
+to make it the easiest thing in the world for him to finance the new
+departure? It had nothing to do with the vast mysterious possibilities
+of credit. It was a recollection of some resourceful backing he was
+entitled to, somehow; and he was reminded by it of his dream about the
+furniture--(we told you of that?)--but with a reservation. When he
+woke from the sleep-dream of the furniture, he in a short time could
+distinctly identify it as a dream, and was convinced no such furniture
+had ever existed. He could not shake off this waking dream, and it
+clogged his mind painfully, and made him silent.
+
+So much so that when Rosalind, soon completed for the banqueting-board,
+looked into the adjoining room to see what progress Gerry was making,
+and why he was silent, she only saw the back of a powerful frame in
+its shirt-sleeves, and a pair of hands holding on each side an
+unbrushed head. The elbows indispensable to them rested on the
+window-bar.
+
+"Look alive, Gerry darling!--you'll make dinner late.... Anything
+wrong, dear love?" Sudden anxiety in her voice. "Is it another...?"
+Another what? No need to define, exactly!
+
+"A sort of one," Fenwick answers. "Not so bad as the last. Hardly
+describable! Never mind."
+
+He made no effort towards description, and his wife did not press
+him for it. What good end could be gained by fidgeting him?
+
+But she knew now that her life would be weighted with an anxiety
+hard to bear, until his hesitating return of memory should make its
+decision of success or failure. A guarantee of the latter would have
+been most to her liking, but how could she hope for that now?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+HOW A STONE THROWN DROVE THE WEDGE FURTHER YET. OF A TERRIBLE NIGHT
+ IN A BIG GALE, AND A DOOR THAT SLAMMED. THE WEDGE WELL IN
+
+
+The speculative weather-wisdom of the tattooed capstan-driver was
+confirmed when three in the morning came, and the full of the tide.
+The wind must have gone round to the southward, or to some equally
+stimulating quarter, to judge by the work it got through that night in
+the way of roofs blown off and chimney-pots blown down; standing crops
+laid flat and spoiled for reaping; trees too full of leaf to bear such
+rough treatment compelled to tear up half their roots and fall, or pay
+tribute to the gale in boughs snapped asunder in time to spare their
+parent stem. All these results we landsmen could see for ourselves
+next day, after the storm had died down, and when the air was so
+delightful after it that we took walks in the country on purpose to
+enjoy it. But for the mischief it did that night at sea, from
+sportively carrying away the spars of ships, which they wanted for
+their own use, or blowing a stray reefer from the weather-earring, to
+sending a full crew to the depths below, or on jagged rocks no message
+from the white foam above could warn the look-out of in time--for the
+record of this we should have belated intermittent newspaper
+paragraphs, ever so long after.
+
+But the wind had not reached its ideal when, at the end of a pleasant
+evening, Sally and her belongings decided that they must just go down
+to the beach and see the waves before going to bed. Wasn't there a
+moon? Well--yes, there was a moon, but you couldn't see it. That made
+a difference, certainly, but not a conclusive one. It wasn't a bad
+sort of a night, although it certainly was blowing, and the waves
+would be grand seen close. So the party turned out to go down to the
+beach. It included the Julius Bradshaws and Dr. Conrad, who had looked
+in as usual. But the doctor found out that it was past eleven, and,
+recalled by duty, returned to his Octopus.
+
+The waves, seen close, would have been grand if you could have seen
+them from the beach, or as much of it as they had left you to stand
+on. But you really could only guess what was going on out in that
+great dark world of deep thunder, beyond the successive rushes of mad
+foam, each of which made up its mind to tear the coast up this time;
+and then changed it and went back, but always took with it stones
+enough for next attempt. And the indignant clamour of the rushing
+shoals, dragged off to sea against their will, rose and fell in the
+lulls of the thunder beyond. Sally wanted to quote Tennyson's "Maud"
+about them, but she couldn't for the tremendous wind.
+
+The propensity to throw stones into the water, whenever there are
+stones and water, is always a strong one, even when the water is black
+mountain ranges, foam-ridged Sierras coming on to crush us, appalling
+us, even though we know they are sure to die in time. Stones were
+thrown on this occasion by Sally and her stepfather, who was credulous
+enough to suppose that his pebbles passed the undertow and reached
+the sea itself. Sally was prevented by the elements from misusing
+an adjective; for she wanted to say that the effect of a stone thrown
+into such a sea was merely "homoeopathic," and abstained because her
+remark would have been unheard.
+
+Fenwick wanted to say that it was like the way a man dies and vanishes
+into the great unknown. He, too, refrained from this, but only partly
+for the same reason. Its want of novelty made another.
+
+All the others soon wanted to say it was time to go home to bed, and
+tried to say it. But practice seemed easier, and they all turned to
+go, followed by Fenwick and Sally, cheerfully discussing the point of
+whether Sally could have swum out into that sea or not. Sally wanted
+to know what was to prevent her. Obvious enough, one would have said!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+But Rosalind noticed one thing that was a pleasure to her. The
+moment Sally came in, her husband's dream-afflictions went out. Had
+he ever spoken of one in her presence? She could recall no instance.
+This evening the return to absolute cheerfulness dated from the
+reappearance of Sally after she had changed everything, and made her
+hair hold up. It lasted through fried soles and a huge fowl--done
+enough this time--and a bread-and-butter pudding impaired by too many
+raisins. Through the long end of a game of chess begun by Sally and
+Dr. Conrad the evening before, and two rubbers of whist, in which
+everybody else had all the good cards in their hands, as is the case
+in that game. And through the visit to Neptune above recorded.
+
+But when, after half-an-hour's chat over the day's events with
+Rosalind, midnight and an extinguished candle left Fenwick to himself
+and his pillow in the little room next hers with no door between,
+which Mrs. Lobjoit's resources dictated, there came back to him first
+a recollection of his suppressed commonplace about the stone that had
+vanished for ever in the world of waters; then a hazy memory of the
+same thing having happened before and the same remark having been
+made by himself; then a sudden jerk of surprise, when, just as he was
+thinking of sleep, he was able to answer a question Space asked him
+spontaneously about where this happened, with what would have been,
+had he been quite awake, words spoken aloud to himself. "That time
+at Niagara, of course!" And this jerk of surprise left him wide-awake,
+struggling with an army of revived memories that had come on him
+suddenly.
+
+He was so thoroughly waked by them that a difficulty he always had
+of remaining in bed when not asleep dictated a relighted candle
+and a dressing-gown and slippers. It was akin to his aversion to
+over-comfortable chairs; though he acknowledged beds as proper
+implements of sleep, sleep being granted. And sleep seemed now so
+completely out of the question, even if there had been no roaring of
+the gale and no constant thunder of the seas on the beach below,
+that Fenwick surrendered at discretion, and gave himself up a helpless
+prisoner in the grasp of his own past.
+
+Not of the whole of it. But of as much as he could face here and now.
+Another mind that could have commanded some strange insight into the
+whole of this past, and his power or powerlessness to look it in the
+face, might have striven to avert its revival. That blow might have
+been too overwhelming. But there was enough, as we shall see, in
+the recollection that came back of the decade before his return to
+England, to make his breath catch and a shudder run through his strong
+frame as he pressed his palms hard on his eyelids, just as though by
+so doing he could shut it out.
+
+Thank God Rosey was asleep, or would be soon. He would have time to
+think how he could tell the story he could not be silent about--that,
+he felt, might be impossible--and yet keep back one ominous portentous
+fact that had come to him, as a motive force in his former life,
+without the details of his early history that belonged to it. That
+fact Rosey must never know, even if ... well!--so many things turned
+on it. All he could see now--taken by surprise as he was--was that,
+come what might, that fact should always be kept from _her_. But as
+to concealing from her his strange experience altogether, that was
+hardly to be thought of. He would conceal it while he could, though,
+provisionally.
+
+One o'clock by his watch on the dressing-table under the candle. St.
+Sennans must have struck unheard. No wonder--in this wind! Surely it
+had rather increased, if anything. Fenwick paced with noiseless care
+about the little room; he could not be still. The sustained monotone
+of wind and sea was only crossed now and then by a sound of fall or
+breakage, to chronicle some little piece of mischief achieved by the
+former on land, and raise the latter's hopes of some such success in
+its turn before the night should end....
+
+Two o'clock by the dressing-table watch, and still the noiseless
+slippered feet of the sleepless man came and went. Little fear of any
+one else hearing him! For the wind seemed to have got up the bit that
+was predicted of it, and had certainly gone round to the suth'ard. If
+any sleeper could cling to unconsciousness through the rattle of the
+windows and the intermittent banging of a spectral door that defied
+identification--the door that always bangs in storms everywhere--the
+mere movement of a cautious foot would have no effect. If unable to
+sleep for the wind, none would be alive to it. It would be lost in
+the storm....
+
+Three o'clock! Did you, who read this, ever watch through a night
+with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the
+morning--a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the _debut_ of
+a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching,
+feel--not the tedium--but the maddening speed of the hours, the
+cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful
+reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and _your_
+lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was still
+a respite from _his_? Fenwick was; keenly conscious. And when on
+a sudden he heard with a start that a furtive hand was on the
+old-fashioned door-latch, he, knowing it could be none other than
+Rosalind, sleepless in the storm, felt that the lion had stolen a
+march on him, and that he must make up his mind sharp whether he would
+go for complete confidence or partial reserve. Certainly the latter,
+of necessity, said Alacrity. There could be no doubt of it, on her
+account--for the present, at any rate.
+
+For he had recollected, look you, that at the time of that stone-throw
+into the rapids above Niagara he was a married man somehow separated
+from his wife. And the way that he knew this was that he could
+remember plainly that the reason he did not make an offer of marriage,
+there by the great torrent that was rushing to the Falls, to a French
+girl (whose name he got clearly) was that he did not know if his wife
+was dead or living. He did not know it now. The oddity of it was that,
+though he remembered clearly this incident hinging on the fact that
+he was then a married man, he could remember neither the wife he had
+married nor anything connected with her. He strove hard against this
+partial insight into his past, which seemed to him stranger than
+complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy
+vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a
+reflex image--an automatic reaction--from his recent marriage. For
+did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before
+the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her
+predecessor? It was all confusion; no doubt of it.
+
+But his mind had travelled quickly too; for when Rosalind looked in
+at his door he knew what he had to say, for her sake.
+
+"Gerry darling, have you never been to bed?"
+
+"For a bit, dearest. Then I found I couldn't sleep, and got up."
+
+"Isn't it awful, the noise? One hears it so in this house.... Well,
+I suppose it's the same in any house that looks straight over the sea."
+
+"Haven't you slept?"
+
+"Oh yes, a little. But then it woke me. Then I thought I heard you
+moving."
+
+"So I was. Now, suppose we both go to bed, and try to sleep. I shall
+have to, because of my candle. Is that all you've got left?"
+
+"That's all, and it's guttering. And the paper will catch directly."
+She blew it out to avoid this, and added: "Stop a minute and I'll
+take the paper off, and make it do for a bit."
+
+"You can have mine. Leave me yours." For Fenwick's was, even now,
+after burning so long, the better candle-end of the two. He took
+it out of the socket, and slipped its paper roll off, an economy
+suggested by the condition of its fellow.
+
+But as he did so his own light flashed full on his face, and Rosalind
+saw a look on it that scarcely belonged to mere sleeplessness like her
+own--unrest that comes to most of us when the elements are restless.
+
+"Gerry, you've been worrying. You know you have, dear. Speak the
+truth! You've been trying to recollect things."
+
+"I had nobody here to prevent me, you see." He made no denial; in
+fact, thought admission of baffled effort was his safest course. "I
+get worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas when you're not here. But
+it's nothing." Rosalind did not agree to this at all.
+
+"I wish Mrs. Lobjoit could have put us both in one room," she said.
+
+"Well, _we_ didn't see our way, you know," he replied, referring
+to past councils on sleeping arrangements. "It's only for a week,
+after all."
+
+"Yes, darling; but a week's a week, and I can't have you worried to
+death." She made him lie down again, and sat by him, holding his hand.
+So unnerved was he by his glance back into his past, so long unknown
+to him, and so sweet was the comfort of her presence and the touch of
+her living hand after all those hours of perturbation alone, that
+Fenwick made no protest against her remaining beside him. But a
+passiveness that would have belonged to an invalid or a sluggish
+temperament seemed unlike the strong man Rosalind knew him for, and
+she guessed from it that there was more behind. Still, she said
+nothing, and sat on with his hand grasping hers and finding in it his
+refuge from himself. To her its warm pressure was a sure sign that
+his memory had not penetrated the darkness of his earlier time. If
+God willed, it might never do so. Meanwhile, what was there for it
+but patience?
+
+As she sat there listening to the roaring of the gale outside, and
+watching with satisfaction the evident coming of sleep, she said to
+herself that it might easily be that some new thing had come back to
+him which he would be unwilling she should know about, at least until
+his own mind was clearer. He might speak with less reserve to Vereker.
+She would give the doctor leave to talk to him to-morrow. Fear of
+what she would hear may have influenced her in this.
+
+So when, sooner than she had expected, she caught the sound of the
+first breath of indisputable sleep, she rose and slipped away quietly,
+and as she lay down again to rest again asked herself the question:
+Was it the galvanism that had done it?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+HOW FENWICK AND VEREKER WENT FOR A WALK, AND MORE MEMORIES CAME BACK.
+ HOW FENWICK WAS A MILLIONAIRE, OR THEREABOUTS. OF A CLUE THAT KILLED
+ ITSELF. HARRISSON'S AFFAIR NOW! BOTHER THE MILLIONS! IS NOT LOVE
+ BETTER THAN MONEY? ONLY FENWICK'S NAME WASN'T HARRISSON NEITHER
+
+
+"We thought it best to let you have your sleep out, dear. Sally
+agreed. No, leave the pot alone. Mrs. Lobjoit will make some fresh
+coffee."
+
+"Who's the other cup?"
+
+"Vereker. He came in to breakfast; to see if we were blown away."
+
+"I see. Of course. Where are they now?"
+
+"They?... oh, him and Sally! They said they'd go and see if Tishy
+and her husband were blown away."
+
+"Well, I have had my sleep out with a vengeance. It's a quarter
+to ten."
+
+"Never mind, darling. So much the better. Let's have a look at
+you...." And the little self-explanatory colloquy ends with Rosalind
+kissing her husband and examining him with anxious eyes. She sees
+a face less haggard than the one she saw last night, for is it not
+daylight and has not the wind fallen to a mere cheerful breeze you can
+quite stand upright in, leaning slightly seawards? And are not the
+voices and the footsteps of a new day outside, and the swift exchanges
+of sunlight and cloud-shadow that are chasing each other off the
+British Channel? And has not a native of eighty years of age (which
+he ignores) just opened the street door on his own responsibility
+and shouted along the passage that pra'ans are large this morning? He
+is more an institution than a man, and is freely spoken of as "The
+Shrimps." A flavour of a Triton who has got too dry on the beach comes
+in with the sea air, and also a sense of prawns, emptied from a wooden
+measure they have been honourably shaken down into, falling on a dish
+held out to receive them by an ambassador of four, named by Sally
+little Miss Lobjoit, the youngest of her race.
+
+But for all that the rising life of the hours and the subsiding gale
+may do to chase away the memory of the oppressions of the night from
+one who was defenceless in its solitude, Rosalind can see how much
+they leave behind. Her husband may do his best to make light of it--to
+laugh it off as nothing but the common bad night we all know so well;
+may make the most of the noises of the storm, and that abominable
+banging door; but he will not conceal from her the effort that it
+costs him to do so. Besides, had he not admitted, in the night, that
+he "got worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas"? What were these ideas?
+How far had he penetrated into his own past? She was not sorry for the
+few words she had had time to exchange with Dr. Conrad while Sally
+went to seek her hat. She had renewed and confirmed her permission to
+him to speak to her husband freely about himself.
+
+"Are Mr. and Mrs. Paganini gone to sea?" This is said as Fenwick opens
+negotiations rather mechanically with the fresh coffee Mrs. Lobjoit
+has produced, and as that lady constructs for removal a conglomerate
+of plates and effete eggs.
+
+"Gone to sea, Gerry? Not very likely. What's the meaning of that?
+Explain."
+
+"Why, Sally and her doctor are staring out at the offing...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"And didn't you say they had gone to find out if they were blown
+away?"
+
+"I supposed they changed their minds." Rosalind talks absently, as
+if they didn't matter. All her thoughts are on her husband. But she
+doesn't fancy catechizing him about his experiences in the night,
+neither. She had better let him alone, and wait new oblivion or a
+healthy revival.
+
+He is also _distrait_, and when he spoke of Sally and the doctor he
+had shown no interest in his own words. His eyes do not kindle at hers
+in his old way, and might be seeing nothing, for all there is in them
+to tell of it. He makes very short work of a cup of coffee, and a mere
+pretence of anything else; and then, suddenly rousing himself with
+a shake, says this won't do, and he must go out and get a blow. All
+right, says Rosalind, and he'd better get Dr. Conrad, and make him go
+for a walk. Only they are not to fall over the cliff.
+
+"Fall over the cliff!" repeats Fenwick. He laughs, and she is glad at
+the sound. "You couldn't fall over the cliff against such a wind as
+this. I defy any one to." He kisses her and goes out, and she hears
+him singing, as he hunts for a stick that has vanished, an old French
+song:
+
+ "Aupres de ma blond-e
+ Comme c'est bon--c'est bon--c'est bon...."
+
+Only, when he has found the stick and his hat, he does not go at once,
+but comes back, and says, as he kisses her again: "Don't fidget about
+me, darling; I'm all right." Which must have been entirely brain-wave
+or thought-reading, as Rosalind had said never a word of her anxiety,
+so far.
+
+Fenwick walked away briskly towards the flagstaff where Sally and
+Vereker had been looking out to sea. In the dazzling sunshine--all
+the more dazzling for the suddenness of its come and go--and the
+intoxicating rush of well-washed air that each of those crested waves
+out yonder knew so much about--and they were all of a tale--and such a
+companion in the enjoyment of it as that white sea-bird afloat against
+the blue gap of sky or purple underworld of cloud, what could he do
+other than cast away the thoughts the night had left, the cares,
+whatever they were, that the revival of memory had brought back?
+
+If he could not succeed altogether in putting them aside, at least
+he could see his way to bearing them better, with a kiss of his wife
+still on his face, and all St. Sennans about him in the sunshine, and
+Sally to come. However, before he reached the flagstaff he met the
+doctor, and heard that Miss Sally had actually gone down to the
+machines to see if Gabriel wouldn't put one down near the water,
+so that she could run a little way. She was certain she could
+swim in that sea if she could once get through what she called the
+selvage-wave. If Gabriel wouldn't, she should take her things up to
+the house and put them on and walk down to the sea in a cloak. It was
+quite ridiculous, said the merpussy, people making such a fuss about
+a few waves. What was the world coming to?
+
+"She'll be all safe," was Fenwick's comment when he heard this. "They
+won't let her go in, at the machines. They won't let her leave the
+Turkey-twill knickers and the short skirt. She always leaves them
+there to dry. _She's_ all right. Let's take a turn across the field;
+it's too windy for the cliff."
+
+"You had a bad night, Fenwick."
+
+"All of us had. About three in the morning I thought the house would
+blow down. And there was a door banged, etc...."
+
+"You had a worse night than the rest of us. Look at me straight in
+the face. No, I wasn't going to say show me your tongue." They had
+stopped a moment at the top of what was known as The Steps--_par
+excellence_--which was the shortest cut up to the field-path. Dr.
+Conrad looks a second or so, and then goes on: "I thought so. You've
+got black lines under your eyes, and you're evidently conscious of the
+lids. I expect you've got a pain in them, one in each, tied together
+by a string across here." That is to say, from eyebrow to eyebrow,
+as illustrated fingerwise.
+
+Fenwick wasn't prepared to deny it evidently. He drew his own fingers
+across his forehead, as though to feel if the pain were really there.
+It confirmed a suspicion he couldn't have sworn to.
+
+"Yes; I suppose I did have a worse night than the rest of you. At
+least, I hope so, for your sakes." His manner might have seemed to
+warrant immediate speculation or inquiry about the cause of his
+sleeplessness, but Vereker walked on beside him in silence. The way
+was along a short, frustrated street that led to the field-pathway
+that was grass-grown, more or less, all but the heaps of flints that
+were one day to make a new top-dressing, but had been forgotten by the
+local board, and the premature curb-stones whose anticipations about
+traffic had never been fulfilled. The little detached houses on either
+side were unselfish little houses, that only wanted to be useful and
+afford shelter to the wanderer, or provide a refuge for old age. All
+made use, on placards, of the cautious expression "Apartments"; while
+some flung all reserve to the winds and said also they were "To let"
+outright. The least satisfactory one of the lot was almost invisible
+owing to its egotism, but distinguishable from afar because the
+cross-board on a standard that had been placed in the garden-front
+had fallen forward over the palings like Punch's gallows. It didn't
+much matter, because the placard attached was dissolving off in the
+rains, and hanging down so low that a goat was eating it with relish,
+standing against the parapet of the garden-fence.
+
+They reached the point at which Albion Villas had been thwarted by a
+hedge, rich in unripe sloes and green abortive blackberries, in their
+attempt to get across a stubble-field to the new town, and passed in
+instalments through its turnstile, or kissing-gate. Neither spoke,
+except that Fenwick said, "Look at the goat," until, after they had
+turned on to the chalk pathway, nearly dry in the warm sun and wind,
+he added a question:
+
+"Did you ever taste a sloe?"
+
+"Yes, once."
+
+"That is what every one says if you ask him if he ever tasted a sloe.
+Nobody ever does it again."
+
+"But they make sloe-gin of them?"
+
+"That, my dear Vereker, is what everybody always says next. Sally
+told me they did, and she's right. They console themselves for the
+taste of the sloe by an imaginary _liqueur_ like _maraschino_. But
+that's because they never tasted sloe-gin."
+
+Vereker thinks he may conclude that Fenwick is talking for talk's
+sake, and humours him. He can get to the memory-subject later.
+
+"A patient of mine," he says, "who's been living at Spezzia, was
+telling me about a fruit that was very good there, _diosperi_ he
+called them. They must be very unlike sloes by his description."
+
+"And naturally sloes made you think of them. I wonder what they
+are--_diosperi_--_diosperi_----" He repeated the word as though
+trying to recall it. Dr. Conrad helped the identification.
+
+"He said they are what the Japs call jelly-plums--great big fruit,
+very juicy."
+
+"I know. They're persimmons, or a sort of persimmons. We used to get
+lots of them in California, and even up at the Klondyke...."
+
+He stopped abruptly and remained silent. A sudden change in him was
+too marked to escape notice, and there could be no doubt about the
+cause. The doctor walked beside him, also silent, for a few paces.
+Then he spoke:
+
+"You will have to bear this, Fenwick, and keep your head. It is just
+as I told you it would be. It is all coming back." He laid his left
+hand on his companion's shoulder as they stood side-by-side on the
+chalk pathway, and with his right felt the wrist that was nearest
+him. Fenwick was in a quiver all through his frame, and his pulse was
+beating furiously as Dr. Conrad's finger touched it. But he spoke
+with self-control, and his step was steady as they walked on slowly
+together the moment after.
+
+"It's all coming back. It _has_ come back. I shall remember all in
+time." Then he repeated Vereker's words, "I must keep my head. I shall
+have to bear this," and walked on again in silence. The young man
+beside him still felt he had best not speak yet. Just let the physical
+perturbation subside. Talking would only make it worse.
+
+They may have walked so for two minutes before Fenwick spoke again.
+Then he roused himself, to say, with but little hint in his voice of
+any sense of the oddity of his question: "Which is my dream?--this or
+the other?" Then added: "That's the question I want to ask, and nobody
+can answer."
+
+"And of course all the while each of us knows perfectly well the
+answer is simply 'Neither.' You are a man that has had an accident,
+and lost his memory. Be patient, and do not torment yourself. Let it
+take its own time."
+
+"All right, doctor! Patience is the word." He spoke in an undertone--a
+voice of acquiescence, or rather obedience. "Perhaps it will not be so
+bad when I remember more." They walked on again.
+
+Then Vereker, noting that during silence he brooded under the
+oppression of what he had already recovered from the past, and to
+all appearance struck, once or twice, on some new unwelcome vein of
+thought, judging from a start or a momentary tension of the arm that
+now held his, decided that it would be as well to speak to him now,
+and delay no longer.
+
+"Has anything come back to you, so far, that will unsettle your
+present life?"
+
+"No, no--not that, thank God! Not so far as I can see. But much that
+must disquiet it; it cannot be otherwise."
+
+"Do you mind telling me?"
+
+"No, surely, dear fellow!--surely I will tell you. Why should I not?
+But what I say to you don't repeat to Sally or her mother. Not just
+now, you know. Wait!"
+
+There was a recess in the wall of mortar-bedded flints that ran along
+the path, which would give shelter from the wind to light a cigar.
+Fenwick stopped and took two from a cigar-case, Sally's present to him
+last Christmas, and offered one to Dr. Conrad, who, however, didn't
+want to smoke so early. He lighted his own in the recess, with
+only a slight tremor of the hand, barely visible even to Vereker's
+experienced eye; and then, as he threw away the match, said, without
+anything that could be called emotion, though always with an apparent
+sense of his bewilderment at his own words:
+
+"I am that man Harrisson that was in all the newspapers just about
+the time of the--you remember--when I...."
+
+Vereker failed for the moment to grasp the degree of his own
+astonishment, and used the residuum of his previous calmness to say:
+
+"I remember. The time of your accident."
+
+"_Am_ I that man? I mean ought I to say 'I _am_ that man'? I know
+I _was_ that man, in my old dream. I know it now, in this one."
+
+"Well, but--so much the better! You are a millionaire, Fenwick, with
+mines at Klondyke...."
+
+Dr. Conrad had been so taken aback at the suddenness of the
+extraordinary revelation that his amazement was quite at a loss for
+means of expression. A delayed laugh, not unmixed with a gasp,
+expressed nothing--merely recorded a welcome to the good side of it.
+For, of course, when one hears of Golconda one is bound to think it
+good, failing evidence to the contrary.
+
+"Yes, I _was_ that man--Algernon Harrisson. Now, the question is--and
+you'll have to help me here, Vereker. Don't look so thunderstruck,
+old chap--Shall I be that man again or not?"
+
+"Why not, in Heaven's name? How can you help it?" The speaker is too
+dumbfounded, so far, to be able to get the whip hand of the
+circumstances. But the pace may be slacker presently.
+
+"Let's be steady!" Fenwick's voice, as he says this, has a sense of
+ease in it, as though he were relieved by his disclosure. He takes
+Vereker's arm in his again, and as they walk on together is evidently
+on good terms with his cigar--so the doctor thinks--and the tremor has
+gone from his hands. A short pause, and he goes on speaking: "Until
+we pitched on the Klondyke just now I knew nothing of this. I shall
+get it all back in time. Let me see!..."
+
+The doctor recovered his presence of mind. "Stop a minute," said he.
+"Do you know, Fenwick, if I were you I shouldn't try to tell anything
+until you're clearer about the whole thing. Don't talk to me now.
+Wait till you are in a state to know how much you wish to tell."
+But Fenwick would have none of this. He shook his head decidedly.
+
+"I _must_ talk to some one about it. And my wife I cannot...."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You will see. You need not be frightened of too many confidences.
+I haven't recollected any grave misdemeanours yet. I'll keep them
+to myself when they come. Now listen to what I can and do recollect
+pretty clearly." He paused a second, as if his first item was shaky;
+then said, "Yes!--of course." And went on as though the point were
+cleared up.
+
+"Of course! I went up to the Klondyke almost in the first rush, in
+'97. I'll tell you all about that after. Others besides myself became
+enormously rich that summer, but I was one of the luckiest. However,
+I don't want to tell you about Harrisson at Klondyke--(that's how I
+find it easiest to think of myself, third person singular!)--but to get
+at the thing in the dream, that concerns me most _now_. Listen!... Only
+remember this, Vereker dear! I can only recall jagged fragments yet
+awhile. I have been stunned, and can't help that...." He stopped the
+doctor, who was about to speak, with: "I know what you are going to
+say; let it stand over a bit--wait and be patient--all that sort of
+game! All very good and sensible, but I _can't_!"
+
+"Can't?"
+
+"No! Can't--simply _can't_. Because, look you! One of the things
+that has come back is that I am a married man--by which I mean
+that Harrisson was. Oh dear! It _is_ such an ease to me to think of
+Harrisson as somebody else. You can't understand that." But Vereker
+is thoroughly discomposed.
+
+"But didn't you say--only just now--there was nothing--_nothing_--to
+unsettle your present life? No; I can't understand--I _can't_
+understand." His reply is to Fenwick's words, but the reference is
+to the early part of his speech.
+
+"You will understand it better if I tell you more. Let me do it my
+own way, because I get mixed, and feel as if I might lose the clue
+any moment. All the time I was with the Clemenceaux at Ontario I was
+a married man--I mean that I _knew_ I was a married man. And I remember
+knowing it all that time. Indeed, I did! But if you ask me who my wife
+was--she wasn't there, you know; you've got all that clear?--why, I
+can't tell you any more than Adam! All I know is that all that time
+little Ernestine was growing from a girl to a woman, the reason I felt
+there could be no misunderstanding on that score was that Clemenceau
+and his wife knew quite well I had been married and divorced or
+something--there was something rum, long before--and you know Papists
+would rather the Devil outright than have their daughter marry a
+divorced man. But as to who the wife had been, and what it was all
+about...."
+
+He stopped again suddenly, seizing Vereker by the arm with a strong
+hand that trembled as it had done before. His face went very white,
+but he kept self-possession, as it were mechanically; so completely
+that the long ash on his half-smoked cigar remained unbroken. He
+waited a moment, and then spoke in a controlled way.
+
+"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come I _know_
+is only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might
+be well to change the current of his thoughts.
+
+"Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he.
+
+"Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things.
+Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his
+shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived
+almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there--it was
+quite three or four years...."
+
+"And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?"
+
+"Married or divorced--yes. And long before that."
+
+"It is quite impossible for me--you must see it--to form any picture
+in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you."
+
+"Quite."
+
+"It seems--to me--perfectly incredible that you should have no
+recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it
+was...."
+
+"I did not say I had no recollection _at all_. Listen. Don't you know
+this, Vereker?--of course you do, though--how one wakes from a hideous
+dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the
+same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment
+preserved from all one has forgotten of it--something nowise horrible
+in itself, but from its associations in the dream?"
+
+"Oh yes, perfectly!"
+
+"Well--that's my case. When I try to bring back the memories I know
+I _must_ have had at that time in Canada, nothing comes back but a
+horror--something like a story read in boyhood and shuddered at in
+the night--but all details gone. I mean all details with horror in
+them. Because, do you know?..."
+
+"Yes----?" Vereker stopped beside him on the path, as Fenwick stopped
+and hesitated. Utter perplexity almost forbidding speech was the
+impression the doctor received of his condition at this moment. After
+a moment's silence he continued:
+
+"You will hardly believe me, but almost the only thing I can
+revive--that is, have revived so far--is an occurrence that must
+needs at the time have been a happiness and a delight. And yet it now
+presents itself to me as an excruciating torment--as part of some
+tragedy in which I had to be an actor, but of which I can seize no
+detail that does not at once vanish, leaving mere pain and confusion."
+
+"What was it? You don't mind...."
+
+"Mind telling you? Oh no!--why should I? I may be happier if I can
+tell it. It's like this. I am at a railway-station in the heat
+somewhere, and am expecting a girl who is coming to marry me. I can
+remember the heat and our meeting, and then all is Chaos again. Then,
+instead of remembering more, I go over and over again the old thing as
+at first.... No! nothing new presents itself. Only the railway-station
+and the palm-trees in the heat. And the train coming slowly in, and
+my knowing that she is in it, and coming to marry me."
+
+"Do you mean that the vision--or scene--in your mind stops dead, and
+you don't see her get out of the carriage?"
+
+They had walked on slowly again a short distance. Fenwick made another
+halt, and as he flicked away a most successful crop of cigar-ash that
+he had been cultivating--so it struck Vereker--as a kind of gauge or
+test of his own self-control, he answered:
+
+"I couldn't say that. Hardly! I see a girl or woman get out of the
+carriage, but _not her_...!"
+
+Vereker was completely at a loss--began to be a little afraid his
+companion's brain might be giving way. "How _can_ you tell that,"
+said he, "unless you know who she ought to have been?"
+
+Fenwick resumed his walk, and when he replied did so in a voice that
+had less tension in it, as though something less painful had touched
+his mind:
+
+"It's rum, I grant you. But the whole thing is too rum to bear
+thinking of--at least, to bear talking about. As to the exact reason
+_why_ I know it's not her, that's simple enough!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Because Mrs. Fenwick gets out of the train--my Rosey, here, Sally's
+mother. And it's just the same with the only other approach to a
+memory that connects itself with it--a shadowy, indistinct ceremony,
+also in the heat, much more indistinct than the railway-station.
+My real wife's image--Rosey's, here--just takes the place at the
+altar where the other one should be, and prevents my getting at any
+recollection of her. It is the only thing that makes the dream
+bearable."
+
+Vereker said nothing. He did not want to disturb any lull in the storm
+in his companion's mind. After a slight pause the latter continued:
+
+"The way I account for it seems to me sufficient. I cannot conceive
+any woman being to me what ... or, perhaps I should express it better
+by saying I cannot connect the _wife-idea_ with any image except hers.
+And, of course, the strong dominant idea displaces the feeble memory."
+
+Vereker was ready with an unqualified assent at the moment. For though
+Sally, as we have seen, had taken him into her confidence the day
+after her mother's wedding--and, indeed, had talked over the matter
+many times with him since--the actual truth was far too strange to
+suggest itself offhand, as it would have been doing had the doctor
+connected the fact that Sally's mother went out to India to be
+married with this meeting of two lovers at a simmering railway-station,
+name not known. The idea of the _impossible per se_ is probably the
+one a finite intelligence most readily admits, and is always cordially
+welcome in intellectual difficulties--a universal resolution of
+logical discords. In the case of these two men, at that moment, neither
+was capable of knowing the actual truth had he been told it, whatever
+the evidence; still less of catching at slight connecting-links.
+Fenwick went on speaking:
+
+"I don't know whether you will understand it--yes! I think, perhaps,
+you might--that it's a consolation to me this way Mrs. Fenwick comes
+in. It seems to bring fresh air into what else would be--ugh!" He
+shuddered a half-intentional shudder; then, dropping his voice, went
+on, speaking quickly: "The thing makes part of some tragedy--some sad
+story--something best forgotten! If I could only dare to hope I might
+remember no more--might even forget it altogether."
+
+"Perhaps if you could remember the whole the painfulness might
+disappear. Does not anything in the image of the railway-station give
+a clue to its whereabouts?"
+
+"No. It hardly amounts to an image at all--more a fact than an image. But
+the heat was a fact. And the dresses were all white--thin--tropical...."
+
+"Then the Mrs. Fenwick that comes out of the train isn't dressed as she
+dresses here?"
+
+"Why, n-n-no!... No, certainly not. But that's natural, you know.
+Of course, my mind supplies a dress for the heat."
+
+"It doesn't diminish the puzzlement."
+
+"Yes--yes--but it does, though. Because, look here! It's not the
+_only_ thing. I find myself consciously making Rosey look _younger_.
+I can't help my mind--my _now_ mind--working, do what I will! But as
+to where it was, I fancy I have a clue. I can remember remembering--if
+you understand me--that I had been in Australia--remembered it at
+Ontario--talked about it to Tina Clemenceau...."
+
+If Vereker had had any tendency to get on a true scent at this point,
+the reference to Australia would have thrown him off it. And the
+thought of the Canadian girl took Fenwick's mind once more to his
+American life: "It was my thinking of that girl made all this come
+back to me, you know. Just after you left us, when we were throwing
+stones in the sea, last night...."
+
+"Throwing stones in the sea?..."
+
+"Yes--we went down to the waves on the beach, and my throwing a stone
+in reminded me of it all, after. I was just going to get to sleep,
+when, all of a sudden, what must I think of but Niagara!--at least,
+the rapids. I was standing with Mademoiselle Tina--no one else--on
+a rock overlooking the great torrent, and I threw a stone in, and she
+said no one would ever see that stone again. I said, 'Like a man when
+he dies and is forgotten,' or something of that sort. I recollect her
+now--poor child!--turning her eyes full on me and saying, 'But I
+should not forget you, Mr. Harrisson.' You see how it was? Only it
+seems a sort of disloyalty to the poor girl to tell it. It was all
+plain, and she meant it to be. I can't remember now whether I said,
+'I can't marry you, Tina, because I don't know that my wife is dead,'
+or whether I only thought it. But I know that I then knew I was, or
+had been, married and divorced or deserted. And it was that unhappy
+stone that brought it all back to me."
+
+"Are you sure of that?"
+
+"Quite sure that began it. I was just off, and some outlying scrap
+of my mind was behindhand, and that stone saw it and pounced on it.
+I remembered more after that. I know I was rather glad to start off
+to the new gold river, because of Ernestine Clemenceau. I don't think
+I should have cared to marry Ernestine. Anyhow, I didn't. She seems
+to me Harrisson's affair now. Don't laugh at me, doctor!"
+
+"I wasn't laughing." And, indeed, this was true. The doctor was very
+far from laughing.
+
+They had walked some little way inland, keeping along a road sunk in
+the chalk. This now emerged on an exposed hill-side, swept by the
+sea wind; which, though abated, still made talk less easy than in the
+sheltered trench, or behind the long wall where Fenwick lit his cigar.
+Vereker suggested turning back; and, accordingly, they turned. The
+doctor found time to make up his mind that no harm could be done now
+by referring to his interview with Rosalind, the day before.
+
+"Your wife told me yesterday that you had just had a tiresome
+recurrence when you came out after us--at the jetty-end, you know."
+
+"Surely! So I had. Did she tell you what it was?" Evidently, in the
+stress and turmoil of his subsequent experience in the night, it had
+slipped from him. The doctor said a reminding word or two, and it
+came back.
+
+"I know, I know. I've got it now. That was last night. But now--that
+again! _Why_ was it so horrible? That was dear old Kreutzkammer, at
+'Frisco. What could there be horrible about _him_?..." A clear idea
+shot into the doctor's mind--not a bad thing to work on.
+
+"Fenwick!--don't you see how it is? These things are only horrible
+to you _because_ you half recollect them. The pain is only the baffled
+strain on the memory, not the thing you are trying to recover."
+
+"Very likely." He assents, but his mind is dwelling on Kreutzkammer,
+evidently. For he breaks into a really cheerful laugh, pleasant in
+the ears of his companion. "Why, _that_ was Diedrich Kreutzkammer!"
+he exclaims, "up at that Swiss place. And I didn't know him from Adam!"
+
+"Of course it was. But look here, Fenwick--isn't what I say true?
+Half the things that come back to you will be no pain at all when
+you have fairly got hold of them. Only, _wait_! Don't struggle to
+remember, but let them come."
+
+"All right, old chap! I'll be good." But he has no very strong
+convictions on the subject, clearly. The two walk on together in
+silence as far as the low flint wall, in another recess of which
+Fenwick lights another cigar, as before. Then he turns to the doctor
+and says:
+
+"Not a word of this to Rosey--nor to Sallykin!" The doctor seems
+perplexed, but assents and promises. "Honest Injun!--as Sally says,"
+adds Fenwick. And the doctor repeats that affidavit, and then says:
+
+"I shall have to finesse a good deal. I can manage with Mrs. Fenwick.
+But--I wish I felt equally secure with Miss Sally." He feels very
+insecure indeed in that quarter, if the truth is told. And he is
+afflicted with a double embarrassment here, as he has never left Sally
+without her "miss" in speaking to Fenwick, while, on the other hand,
+he holds a definite licence from her mother--is, as it were, a
+chartered libertine. But that's a small matter, after all. The real
+trouble is having to look Sally in the face and conceal anything.
+
+"Miss who?" says Fenwick. "Oh--Sally, you mean! Of course she'll
+rush the position. Trust her!" He can't help laughing as he thinks
+of Sally, with Dr. Conrad vainly trying to protect his outworks.
+
+The momentary hesitation about how to speak of Sally may have
+something to do with Vereker's giving the conversation a twist. It
+turns, however, on a point that has been waiting in his mind all
+through their interview, ever since Fenwick spoke of his identity
+with Harrisson.
+
+"Look here, Fenwick," he says. "It's all very fine your talking about
+keeping Mrs. Fenwick in the dark about this. I know it's for her own
+sake--but you can't."
+
+"And why not? I can't have Rosey know I have another wife living...."
+
+"You don't know she's alive, for one thing!"
+
+"H'm!... I don't _know_, certainly. But I should have known, somehow,
+if she were dead. Of course, if further memory or inquiry proves that
+she _is_ dead, that's another matter."
+
+"But, in the meanwhile, how can you prove your identity with Harrisson
+and claim all your property without her knowing?... What I mean is,
+I can't think it out. There may be a way...."
+
+"My dear boy"--Fenwick says this very quietly--"that's exactly the
+reason why I said you would have to help me to settle whether I should
+be that man again or not. I say _not_, if the decision lies with me."
+
+"Not?--not _at all_?" The doctor fairly gasps; his breath is taken
+away. Never perhaps was a young man freer from thought and influence
+of money than he, more absorbed in professional study and untainted
+by the supremacies of property. But for all that he was human, and
+English, and theoretically accepted gold as the thing of things, the
+one great aim and measure of success. Of other men's success, that
+is, and _their_ aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble
+plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real
+people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind
+of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase.
+It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of
+thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee,
+what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a
+shilling to the sight. It was in the air that he lived in--that all
+of us live in.
+
+So, when Fenwick made in this placid way a choice of conduct that must
+needs involve the sacrifice of sums large enough to be spoken of with
+awe, even in the sacred precincts of a bank, poor Dr. Conrad felt that
+all his powers of counsel had been outshot, and that his mind was
+reeling on its pedestal. That a poor man should give up his savings
+_en bloc_ to help a friend would have seemed to him natural and
+reasonable; that he should do so for honest love of a woman still
+more so; but that a millionaire should renounce his millions! Was
+it decent? was it proper? was it considerate to Mammon? But that
+must have been Fenwick's meaning, too. The doctor did not recover his
+speech before Fenwick spoke again:
+
+"Why should I claim all my property? How should I be the gainer if
+it made Rosey unhappy?"
+
+"I see. I quite see. I feel with you, you know; feel as you do. But
+what will become of the money?"
+
+"The poor darling money? Just think! It will lie neglected at the
+bank, unclaimed, forsaken, doing no more mischief than when it was
+harmless dust and nuggets in the sand of the Klondyke. While it was
+there, gold was a bit--a mighty small bit--dearer than it has become
+since. Now that it is in the keeping of chaps who won't give it up
+half as easily as the Klondyke did, I suppose it has appreciated
+again, as the saying is. The difference of cost between getting it out
+of the ground and out of the bank is a negligible factor...." Fenwick
+seemed to find ease in chatting economics in this way. Some of it was
+so obviously true to Vereker that he at once concluded it would be
+classed among fallacies; he had had experience of this sort of thing.
+But he paid little attention, as he was thinking of how much of this
+interview he could repeat to Sally, to whom every step they took
+brought him nearer. The roar of a lion in his path was every moment
+more audible to the ears of his imagination. And it left him silent;
+but Fenwick went on speaking:
+
+"We won't trouble about the darling dust and nuggets; let them lie
+in pawn, and wait for a claimant. They won't find Mr. Harrisson's
+heir-at-law in a hurry. If ever proof comes of the death of Mrs.
+Harrisson--whoever she was--I'll be Mr. Harrisson again. Till
+then...."
+
+"Till then what?"
+
+"Till then, Vereker dear"--Fenwick said this very seriously, with
+emphasis--"till then we shall do most wisely to say nothing further
+to Mrs. Fenwick or to Sally. You must see that it won't be possible
+to pick and choose, to tell this and reserve that. I shall speak of the
+recurrences of memory that come to me, as too confused for repetition.
+I shall tell lies about them if I think it politic. Because I can't
+have Rosey made miserable on any terms. As for the chick, you'll have
+to manage the best you can."
+
+"I'll do my best," the doctor says, without a particle of confidence
+in his voice. "But about yourself, Fenwick?"
+
+"I shall do very well, as long as I can have a chat with you now and
+again. You've no idea what a lot of good it has done me, this talking
+to you. And, of course, I haven't told you one-tenth of the things
+I remember. There was one thing I wanted to say though just now, and
+we got off the line--what was it now? Oh, I know, about my name. It
+wasn't really Harrisson."
+
+"Not really Harrisson? What was it then?" What next, and next?--is
+the import of the speaker's face.
+
+"I'll be hanged if I know! But it's true, rum as it seems. I know I
+knew it wasn't Harrisson every time I signed a cheque in America. But
+as for what it _was_, that all belongs to the dim time before. Isn't
+that them coming to meet us?"
+
+Yes, it was. And there was something else also the doctor had had it
+on his tongue to say, and it had got away on a siding. But it didn't
+matter--it was only about whether the return of memory had or had not
+been due to the galvanic battery on the pier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+OF THE DOCTOR'S CAUTIOUS RESERVE, AND MRS. FENWICK'S STRONG COMMON-SENSE.
+ AND OF A LADY AT BUDA-PESTH. HOW HARRISSON WAS ONLY PAST FORGOTTEN
+ NEWSPAPERS TO DR. VEREKER. OF THE OCTOPUS'S PULSE, HOW THE HABERDASHER'S
+ BRIDE WOULD TRY ON AT TWO GUAS. A WEEK, AND OF A PLEASANT WALK BACK
+ FROM THE RAILWAY STATION
+
+
+"You never mean to say you've been in the water?"
+
+It was quite clear, from the bluish finger-tips of the gloveless
+merpussy--for at St. Sennans sixes are not _de rigueur_ in the
+morning--that she _has_ been in, and has only just come out. But
+Fenwick, who asked the question, grasped a handful of loose black hair
+for confirmation, and found it wet.
+
+"Haven't I?" says the incorrigible one. "And you should have heard the
+rumpus over getting a machine down."
+
+"She's a selfish little monkey," her mother says, but forgivingly,
+too. "She'll drown herself, and not care a penny about all the trouble
+she gives." You see, Rosalind wouldn't throw her words into this
+callous form if she was really thinking about the merpussy. But just
+now she is too anxious about Gerry to be very particular.
+
+What has passed between him and Dr. Conrad? What does the latter know
+now more than she does herself? She falls back with him, and allows
+the other two to go on in front. Obviously the most natural
+arrangement.
+
+"What has he told you, Dr. Conrad?" This is not unexpected, and the
+answer is a prepared one, preconcerted under pressure between the
+doctor and his conscience.
+
+"I am going to ask you, Mrs. Fenwick, to do me a very great
+kindness--don't say yes without hearing what it is--to ask you to
+allow me to keep back all your husband says to me, and to take for
+granted that he repeats to you all he feels certain of himself in
+his own recollections."
+
+"He _has_ told you more?"
+
+"Yes, he has. But I am far from certain that anything he has said can
+be relied upon--in his present state. Anyway, I should be very sorry
+to take upon myself the responsibility of repeating it."
+
+"He wishes you not to do so?"
+
+"I think so. I should say so. Do you mind?"
+
+"I won't press you to repeat anything you wish to keep back. But is
+his mind easier? After all, that's the main point."
+
+"That is my impression--much easier." He felt he was quite warranted
+in saying this. "And I should say that if he does not himself tell
+you again whatever he has been saying to me, it will only show how
+uncertain and untrustworthy all his present recollections are. I
+cannot tell you how strongly I feel that the best course is to leave
+his mind to its own natural development. It may even be that the
+partial and distorted images of events such as he has been speaking
+of to me...."
+
+"I mustn't ask you what they were?... Yes, go on."
+
+"May again become dim and disappear altogether. If they are to do so,
+nothing can be gained by dwelling on them now--still less by trying
+to verify them--and least of all by using them as a stimulus to further
+recollection."
+
+"You think I had better not ask him questions?"
+
+"Exactly. Leave him to himself. Keep his mind on other matters--healthy
+occupations, surrounding life. I am certain of one thing--that the
+effort to disinter the past is painful to him in itself, quite
+independent of any painful associations in what he is endeavouring to
+recall."
+
+"I have seen that, too, in the slight recurrences he has had when
+I was there. I quite agree with you about the best course to pursue.
+Let us have patience and wait."
+
+Of course, Vereker had not the remotest conception that the less
+Fenwick remembered, the better his wife would be pleased. So the
+principal idea in his mind at that moment was, what a very sensible
+as well as handsome woman he was talking to! It was the way in which
+most people catalogued Rosalind Fenwick. But her ready assent to his
+wishes had intensified the doctor's first item of description. A
+subordinate wave of his thought created an image of the girl Fenwick
+must have pictured to himself coming out of the railway carriage. He
+only repeated: "Let us have patience, and wait," with a feeling of
+relief from possible further catechism.
+
+But in order to avoid showing his wish to abate inquiry, he could talk
+about aspects of the case that would not involve it. He could tell of
+analogous cases well known, or in his own practice. For instance, that
+of a Frenchwoman who wandered away from Amiens, unconscious of her
+past and her identity, and somehow got to Buda-Pesth. There, having
+retained perfect powers of using her mother-tongue, and also speaking
+German fluently, she had all but got a good teachership in a school,
+only she had no certificate of character. With a great effort she
+recalled the name of a lady at Amiens she felt she could write to for
+one, and did so. "Fancy her husband's amazement," said Dr. Conrad,
+"when, on opening a letter addressed to his wife in her own
+handwriting, he found it was an application from Fraeulein Schmidt, or
+some German name, asking for a testimonial!" He referred also to the
+many cases of the caprices of memory he had met with in his studies of
+the _petit-mal_ of epilepsy, a subject to which he had given special
+attention. It may have crossed his mind that his companion had fallen
+very thoroughly in with his views about not dissecting her husband's
+case overmuch for the present. But he put it down, if it did, to her
+strong common-sense. It is rather a singular thing how very ready men
+are to ascribe this quality--whatever it is--to a beautiful woman.
+Especially if she agrees with them.
+
+Nevertheless the doctor was not very sorry when he saw that Sally and
+Fenwick, on in front, had caught up with--or been caught up with by--a
+mixed party, of a sort to suspend, divert, or cancel all conversation
+of a continuous sort. Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and her next eldest
+sister had established themselves on Fenwick's shoulders, and the
+Julius Bradshaws had just intersected them from a side-alley. The
+latter were on the point of extinction; going back to London by the
+3.15, and everything packed but what they had on. It was a clear
+reprieve, till 3.15 at any rate.
+
+There could be no doubt, thought Rosalind to herself, that her
+husband's conversation with Vereker had made him easier in his mind
+than when she saw him last, just after breakfast. No doubt he was all
+the better, too, for the merpussy's account of her exploit on the
+beach; of how she managed to overrule old Gabriel and get a
+machine put down, contrary to precedent, common caution, and public
+opinion--even in the face of urgent remonstrance from her Swiss
+acquaintance, almost as good a swimmer as herself; how she had picked
+out a good big selvage-wave to pop in under, and when she got beyond
+it enjoyed all the comfort incidental to being in bed with the door
+locked. Because, you see, she exaggerated. However, one thing she
+said was quite true. There were no breakers out beyond the said
+selvage-wave, because the wind had fallen a great deal, and seemed
+to have given up the idea of making any more white foam-crests for
+the present. But there would be more wind again in the night, said
+authority. It was only a half-holiday for Neptune.
+
+Sally's bracing influence was all the stronger from the fact of her
+complete unconsciousness of anything unusual. Her mother had said
+nothing to her the day before of the revival of Baron Kreutzkammer,
+nor had Dr. Conrad, acting under cautions given. And all Sally knew of
+the wakeful night was that her mother had found Fenwick walking about,
+unable to sleep, and had said at breakfast he might just as well have
+his sleep out now. To which she had agreed, and had then gone away to
+see if "the Tishies," as she called them, were blown away, and had met
+the doctor coming to see if _she_ was. So she was in the best of moods
+as an antidote to mind-cloudage. And Fenwick, under the remedy, seemed
+to her no more unlike himself than was to be expected after not a wink
+till near daylight. The object of this prolixity is that it may be
+borne in mind that Sally never shared her mother's or her undeclared
+lover's knowledge of the strange mental revival caused--as seemed most
+probable--by the action of the galvanic battery on the previous day.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Vereker walked back to his Octopus, whom he had forsaken for an
+unusually long time, with his brain in a whirl at the strange
+revelation he had just heard. His medical experience had put him well
+on his guard anent one possibility--that the whole thing might be
+delusion on Fenwick's part. How could such an imperfect memory-record
+be said to prove anything without confirmation from without?
+
+His habits of thought had qualified him to keep this possibility
+provisionally in the background without forgetting it. There was
+nothing in the mere knowledge of its existence to prevent his trying
+to recall all he could of the story of the disappearance of Harrisson,
+as he read it in the newspapers a year and a half ago. There had been
+a deal of talk about it at the time, and great efforts had been made
+to trace Harrisson, but without success. The doctor lingered a
+little on his way, conscious that he could recall very little of
+the Harrisson case, but too interested to be able to leave his
+recollections dormant until he should get substantial information.
+The Octopus could recollect all about it no doubt, but how venture to
+apply to her? Or how to Sally? Though, truly, had he done so, it would
+have been with much less hope of a result. Neither Sally nor her
+mother were treasure-houses of the day's gossip, as _his_ mother was.
+"We must have taken mighty little notice of what was going on in the
+world at the time," so thought the doctor to himself.
+
+What _did_ he actually recollect? A paragraph headed "Disappearance
+of a Millionaire" in a hurried perusal of an evening paper as he rode
+to an urgent case; a repetition--several repetitions--on the newspaper
+posters of the name Harrisson during the fortnight following, chiefly
+disclosing supposed discoveries of the missing man, sandwiched with
+other discoveries of their falsehood--clue and disappointment by
+turns. He could remember his own perfectly spurious interest in the
+case, produced by such announcements staring at him from all points
+of the compass, and his own preposterous contributions to talk-making
+about them, such as "Have they found that man Harrisson yet?" knowing
+himself the merest impostor all the while, but feeling it dutiful
+to be up-to-date. How came no one of them all to put two and two
+together?
+
+A gleam of a solution was supplied to the doctor's mind when he
+set himself to answer the question, "How should I have gone about
+suspecting it?" How, indeed? Ordinary every-day people--_you_'s
+and _me_'s--can't lightly admit to our minds the idea that we
+have actually got mixed up with the regular public people in the
+newspapers. Have not even our innocent little announcements that we
+have been born, or died, or got married, always had a look of having
+got in by accident, or under some false pretence? Have we not felt
+inflated when a relation of ours has had a letter to a newspaper
+inserted, in real print, with his own name as bold as brass? Vereker
+was not surprised, on thinking it over, that he personally had missed
+the clue. And if he, why not others? Besides, all the Harrisson talk
+had been superseded by some more exciting matter before it had been
+recognised as possible that Fenwick's memory might never come back.
+
+Just as he arrived at Mrs. Iggulden's a thought struck him--not
+heavily; only a light, reminding flick--and he stopped a minute to
+see what it had to say. It referred to his interview with Scotland
+Yard, some six weeks after Fenwick's first appearance.
+
+He could recall that in the course of his interview one of the
+younger officials spoke in an undertone to his chief; who thereon,
+after consideration, turned to the doctor and said, "Had not your
+man a panama hat? I understood you to say so;" and on receiving an
+affirmative reply, spoke again in an undertone to his subordinate
+to the effect, half-caught by Vereker, that "Alison's hat was black
+felt." Did he say by any chance Harrisson, not Alison? If so, might
+not that account for a rather forbidding or opposive attitude on the
+Yard's part? He remembered something of fictitious claimants coming
+forward, representing themselves as Harrisson--desperate bidders for
+a chance of the Klondyke gold. They might easily have supposed this
+man and his quenched memory another of the same sort. Evidently if
+investigation was not to suffer from overgrown suspicion, only young
+and guileless official instinct could be trusted--plain-clothes
+_ingenus_. Dr. Conrad laughed to himself over a particularly
+outrageous escapade of Sally's, who, when her mother said they always
+sent such very young chicks of constables to Glenmoira Road in the
+morning, impudently ascribed them to inspector's eggs, laid overnight.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"My pulse--feel it!" His Goody mother greeted the doctor with a feeble
+voice from inarticulate lips, and a wrist outstretched. She was being
+moribund; to pay him out for being behindhand.
+
+He skipped all interims, and said, with negligible inaccuracy, "It's
+only a quarter past."
+
+"Don't talk, but feel!" Her failing senses could indulge a little
+impatience; but it was like throwing ballast out of a balloon. She
+meant to be all the worse directly.
+
+Her son felt the outstretched wrist, and was relieved to find it
+normal--almost abnormally normal, just before lunch! But he had to
+pretend. A teaspoonful of brandy in half a glass of water, clearly!
+He knew she hated it, but she had better swallow it down. _That_ was
+right! And he would hurry Mrs. Iggulden with lunch. However, Mrs.
+Iggulden had been beforehand, having seen her good gentleman coming
+and the table all laid ready, so she got the steak on, only she knew
+there would something happen if too much hurry and sure enough she
+broke a decanter. We do not like the responsibility of punctuation
+in this sentence.
+
+"I thought you had forgotten me," quoth the revived Goody to her son,
+assisting her to lunch. But the excellent woman said _me_ (as if it
+was the name of somebody else, and spelt _M_ double _E_) with a
+compassionate moan.
+
+Rosalind was glad to see her husband in good spirits again. He was
+quite like himself before that unfortunate little galvanic battery
+upset everything. Perhaps its effect would go off, and all he had
+remembered of the past grow dim again. It was a puzzle, even to
+Rosalind herself, that her natural curiosity about all Gerry's
+unknown history should become as nothing in view of the unwelcome
+contingencies that history might disclose. It spoke well for the
+happiness of the _status quo_ that she was ready to forego the
+satisfaction of this curiosity altogether rather than confront its
+possible disturbing influences. "If we can only know nothing about
+it, and be as we are!" was the thought uppermost in her mind.
+
+It certainly was a rare piece of good luck that, owing to Sally's
+leaving the house before Fenwick appeared, and running away to her
+madcap swim before he could join her and the doctor, she had just
+avoided seeing him during the worst of his depression. Indeed, his
+remark that he had not slept well seemed to account for all she had
+seen in the morning. And in the afternoon, when the whole party, minus
+the doctor, walked over to St. Egbert's Station for the honeymoon
+portion of it to take its departure for town, and the other three to
+say farewells, Fenwick was quite in his usual form. Only his wife
+watched for any differences, and unless it was that he gave way rather
+more freely than usual to the practice of walking with his arm round
+herself or Sally, or both, she could detect nothing. As the road they
+took was a quiet one, and they met scarcely a soul, no exception on
+the score of dignity was taken to this by Rosalind; and as for Sally,
+her general attitude was "Leave Jeremiah alone--he shall do as he
+likes." Laetitia's mental comment was that it wasn't Oxford Street
+this time, and so it didn't matter.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"I shall walk straight into papa's library," said that young married
+lady in answer to an inquiry from Sally, as they fell back a little
+to chat. "I shall just walk straight in and say we've come back."
+
+"What do you suppose the Professor will say?"
+
+"My dear!--it's the merest toss up. If he's got some very interesting
+Greek or Phoenician nonsense on hand, he'll let me kiss him over
+his shoulder and say, 'All right--I'm busy.' If it's only the
+Cosmocyclopaedia work--which he doesn't care about, only it pays--he
+may look up and kiss me, or even go so far as to say: 'Well!--and
+where's master Julius?' But I don't expect he'll give any active help
+in the collision with mamma, which is sure to come. I rather hope she
+won't be at home the first time."
+
+"Why? Wouldn't it be better to have it over and done with?" Sally
+always wants to clinch everything.
+
+"Yes, of course; only the second time mamma's edge will be all taken
+off, and she'll die down. Besides, the crucial point is Paggy kissing
+her. It's got to be done, and it will be such a deal easier if I can
+get Theeny and Classy kissed first." Classy was the married sister,
+Clarissa. "After all, mamma must have got a shred of common-sense
+somewhere, and she must know that when things can neither be cured
+nor endured you have to pretend, sooner or later."
+
+"You bottle up when it comes to that," said Sally philosophically.
+"But I shouldn't wonder, Tishy, if you found your Goody aggravating,
+too. She'll talk about haberdashers."
+
+"Oh, my dear, haberdashers are a trifle! If that was all she might
+talk herself hoarse. Besides, I can stop that by the mantle
+department."
+
+"What about it? Oh, I know, though!--about your being worth two guineas
+a week to try on. She would know you were not serious, though."
+
+"Would she? I'm not so sure about it myself--not sure I'm not serious,
+I mean."
+
+"Oh, Tishy! You don't mean you would go and try on at two guineas
+a week?"
+
+"I really don't know, Sally dear. If I'm to have my husband's
+profession flung in my face at every turn, I may just as well have the
+advantage of it by a side-wind. Think what two guineas a week means!
+A hundred and four guineas a year--remember! guineas, not pounds.
+And Paggy thinks he could get it arranged for us to go out and dine
+together in the middle of the day at an Italian restaurant...."
+
+"I say, what a lark!" Sally immediately warms up to the scheme. "I
+could come, too. Do you know, Tishy dear, I was just going to twit
+you with the negro and his spots. But now I won't."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Julius Bradshaws must have reached home early, as our story will
+show later that the anticipated collision with the Dragon took place
+the same evening. No great matter for surprise, this, to any one who
+has noticed the energetic impatience for immediate town-event in folk
+just off a holiday. These two were too keen to grapple with their
+domestic problem to allow of delays. So, after getting some dinner in
+a hurry at Georgiana Terrace, Bayswater, they must needs cab straight
+away to Ladbroke Grove Road. As for what happened when they got there,
+we shall know as much as we want of it later. For the present our
+business lies with Fenwick and his wife; to watch, in sympathy with
+the latter, for the next development in the strange mental state of the
+former, and to hope with her, as it must be confessed, for continued
+quiescence; or, better still, for a complete return of oblivion.
+
+It seemed so cruelly hard to Rosalind that it might not be. What had
+she to gain by the revival of a forgotten past--a past her own share
+of which she had for twenty years striven to forget? Utterly guiltless
+as, conceivably, she may have known herself to be, she had striven
+against that past as the guilty strive with the memory of a concealed
+crime. And here was she, at the end of this twenty years, with all
+she most longed for at the beginning in her possession, mysteriously
+attained with a thoroughness no combination of circumstances, no
+patience or forbearance of her own, no self-restraint or generosity of
+her young husband's could possibly have brought about. Think only of
+what we do know of this imperfect story! Conceive that it should have
+been possible for the Algernon Palliser of those days to know and
+understand it to the full; indulge the supposition, however strained
+it may be, that his so knowing it would not have placed him in a
+felon's dock for the prompt and righteous murder of the betrayer--we
+take the first convenient name--of the woman he loved. Convince
+yourself this could have been; figure to yourself a happy wedded
+life for the couple after Miss Sally had made her unconscious _debut_
+with the supremest indifference to her antecedents; construct a
+hypothetical bliss for them at all costs, and then say if you can
+fill out the picture with a relation between Sally and her putative
+father to be compared for a moment to the one chance has favoured
+now for the stepfather and stepdaughter of our story.
+
+Our own imagination is at fault about the would-have-beens and
+might-have-beens in this case. The only picture our mind can form of
+what would have followed a full grasp of all the facts by Algernon
+Palliser may be dictated or suggested by a memory of what sent Mr.
+Salter, of Livermore's Rents, 1808, to the hospital. Rosalind knew
+nothing of Mr. Salter, but she could remember well all Gerry's feats
+of strength in his youth--all the cracking of walnuts in his
+arm-joints and bending of kitchen-pokers across his neck--and also,
+too well, an impotence against his own anger when provoked; it had
+died down now to a trifle, but she could detect the trifle still.
+Was such an executive to be trusted not to take the law into its own
+hands, to fall into the grasp of an offended legislative function
+later--one too dull to be able to define offence so as to avoid the
+condemnation, now and again, of a culprit whose technical crime has
+the applause of the whole human race? Had the author of all her
+wrongs met his death at the hands of her young husband, might not
+this husband of her later life--beside her now--be still serving his
+time at the galleys, with every compulsory sharer in his condemnation
+thinking him a hero?
+
+It was all so much better as it had turned out. Only, could it
+remain so?
+
+At least, nothing was wrong now, at this moment. Whatever her husband
+had said to Vereker in that morning walk, the present hour was a
+breathing-space for Rosalind. The Kreutzkammer recurrence of the
+previous evening was losing its force for her, and there had been
+nothing since that she knew of. "Chaotic ideas"--the phrase he had
+used in the night--might mean anything or nothing.
+
+They came back from the railway-station by what was known to them as
+the long short cut in contradistinction to the short short cut. The
+latter, Sally said, had the courage of its opinions, while the former
+was a time-serving cut. Could she have influenced it at the first
+go-off--when it originally started from the V-shaped stile your skirts
+stuck in, behind the Wheatsheaf--it might have mustered the resolution
+to go straight on, instead of going off at a tangent to Gattrell's
+Farm, half a mile out of the way. Was it intimidated by a statement
+that trespassers would be prosecuted, nailed to an oak-tree, legible
+a hundred years ago, perhaps, when its nails were not rust, and really
+held it tight--instead of, as now, merely countenancing its wish to
+remain from old habit? It may have been so frightened in its timid
+youth; but if so, surely the robust self-assertion of its straight
+start for Gattrell's had in it something of contempt for the poor old
+board, coupled with its well-known intention of turning to the left
+and going slap through the wood the minute you (or it) got there. It
+may even have twitted that board with its apathy in respect of
+trespassers. Had the threat _ever_ been carried out?
+
+The long short cut was, according to the aborigines, a goodish
+step longer than the road, geometrically. But there was some
+inner sense--moral, ethical, spiritual--somehow metaphysical or
+supraphysical--in which it was a short cut, for all that. The road
+was a dale farther, some did say, along of the dust. But, then, there
+was no dust now, because it was all laid. So the reason why was allowed
+to lapse, and the fact to take care of itself for once. Helped by an
+illusion that a path through an undergrowth of nut-trees and an
+overgrowth of oak on such a lovely afternoon as this wasn't distance
+at all--even when you got hooked in the brambles--and by other
+palliative incidents, it was voted a very short cut indeed. Certainly
+not too long for Rosalind's breathing-space, and had it been even
+a longer short cut she would have been well contented.
+
+Every hour passed now, without a new recurrence of some bygone, was
+going to give her--she knew it well beforehand--a sense of greater
+security. And every little incident on the walk that made a
+change in the rhythm of event was welcome. When they paused for
+refreshments--ginger-beer in stone bottles--at Gattrell's, and old
+Mrs. Gattrell, while she undid the corks, outlined the troubles of her
+husband's family and her own, she felt grateful for both to have kept
+clear of India and "the colonies." No memories of California or the
+Arctic Circle could arise from Mrs. Gattrell's twin-sister Debory,
+who suffered from information--internal information, mind you; an
+explanation necessary to correct an impression of overstrain to the
+mind in pursuit of research. Nor from her elder sister Hannah, whose
+neuralgic sick headaches were a martyrdom to herself, but apparently
+a source of pride to her family. Of which the inflation, strange to
+say, was the greater because Dr. Knox was of opinion that they would
+yield to treatment and tonics; though the old lady herself was opposed
+to both, and said elder-flower-water. She was a pleasant old personage,
+Mrs. Gattrell, who always shone out as a beacon of robust health above
+a fever-stricken, paralysed, plague-spotted, debilitated, and
+disintegrating crowd of blood-relations and connexions by marriage.
+But not one of all these had ever left the soil they were born on,
+none of Mrs. Gattrell's people holding with foreign parts. And nothing
+whatever had ever taken place at St. Egbert's till the railway come;
+so it wasn't likely to arouse memories of the ice-fields of the
+northern cold or the tiger-hunts of the southern heat.
+
+Rosalind found herself asking of each new thing as it arose: "Will
+this bring anything fresh to his mind, or will it pass?" The wood-path
+the nut-tree growth all but closed over on either side she decided
+was safe; it could taste of nothing but his English school-boyhood,
+before ever she knew him. But the sudden uprush of the covey of
+partridges from the stubble, and their bee-line for a haven in the
+next field--surely danger lay that way? Think what a shot he was in the
+old days! However, he only said, "Poor dears, they don't know how near
+the thirty-first is," and seemed to be able to know that much from
+past experience without discomfort at not knowing more.
+
+When Sally proposed fortune-telling in connexion with a _bona-fide_
+gipsy woman, who looked (she said) exactly like in "Lavengro," her
+mother's first impulse was to try and recall if she and the Gerry
+of old times had ever been in contact with gipsies, authentic or
+otherwise, and, after decision in the negative, to feel that this
+wanderer was more welcome than not, as having a tendency to conduct
+his mind safely into new channels. Even the conclave of cows he had
+to disperse that they might get through a gate--cows that didn't mind
+how long they waited at it, having time on their hands--suggested the
+same kind of query. She was rapidly getting to look at everything
+from the point of view of what it was going to remind her husband
+of. She must struggle against the habit that was forming, or it
+would become insupportable. But then, again, the thought would come
+back that every hour that passed without an alarm was another step
+towards a safe haven; and who could say that in a week or so things
+might not be, at least, no worse than they were before this pestilent
+little galvanic battery broke in upon her peace?
+
+The fact that he had spoken of new memories to Vereker and had not
+repeated them to her was no additional source of uneasiness; rather,
+if anything, the contrary. For she could not entertain the idea that
+Gerry would keep back from her anything he could tell to Vereker. What
+had actually happened was necessarily inconceivable by her--that
+a _recollected recollection_ of his own marriage with her should be
+interpreted by him as a memory of a marriage with some other woman
+unknown, who might, for anything he knew, be still living; that his
+inference as to the bearing of this on his own conduct was that he
+should refrain, at any cost to himself, from claiming, so to speak,
+his own identity; should accept the personality chance had forced upon
+him for her sake; should even forego the treasure of her sympathy,
+more precious far to him than the heavy score to his credit at the
+banks of New York and San Francisco, rather than dig up what needs
+must throw doubt on the validity of their marriage, and turn her path
+of life, now smooth, to one of stones and thorns. For that was the
+course he had sketched out for himself; and had it only been possible
+for oblivion to draw a sharp line across the slowly reviving record,
+and to say to memory: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther,"
+Fenwick might have persevered in this course successfully till now.
+And then all our story would have been told--at least, as far as
+Rosalind and Fenwick go. And we might say farewell to them at this
+moment as the cows reluctantly surrender passage-way of the long short
+cut, and Gerry saunters on, seemingly at ease from his own mind's
+unwelcome activities, with Sally on one arm and his wife in the other,
+and Mrs. Grundy nowhere. But no conspiracies are possible to memory
+and oblivion. They are a couple that act independently and consult
+nobody's convenience but their own.
+
+It may easily be that Rosalind, had she been mistress of all the facts
+and taken in the full position, would have decided to run the risks
+incidental to confronting her husband with his own past--taken him
+into her confidence and told him. With the chance in view that his
+reason might become unsettled from the chronic torment of constant
+half-revivals of memory, would it not almost be safer to face the
+acute convulsion of a sudden _eclaircissement_--to put happiness
+to the touch, and win or lose it all? Sally could be got out of the
+way for long enough to allow of a resumption of equilibrium after
+the shock of the first disclosure and a completely established
+understanding that she _must not be told_, come what might. Supposing
+that she could tell, and he could hear, the whole story of twenty
+years ago better than when a terrible position warped it for
+teller and hearer in what had since become to her an intolerable
+dream--supposing this done, and each could understand the other, might
+not the very strangeness of the fact that the small new life that
+played so large a part in that dream had become Sally since, and was
+the only means by which Sally could have been established, might not
+this tell for peace? Might it not even raise the question, "What does
+a cloud of twenty years ago matter at all?" and suggest the answer,
+"Nothing? For did not Sally come to us out of the cloud, and could
+we do without her?"
+
+But Rosalind's half-insight into the patchwork of her husband's
+perceptions warranted no step so decisive. Rather, if anything, it
+pointed to a gradual resumption of his _status quo_ of a few days ago.
+After all, had he not had (and completely forgotten) recurrences like
+that of the Baron and the fly-wheel? Well, perhaps the last was a
+shade more vivid than the others. But then see now, had he not
+forgotten it already to all outward seeming?
+
+So that the minds of the two of them worked to a common end--silence.
+Hers in the hope that the effects of the galvanic current--if that did
+it--would die away and leave him rest for his; his in the fear that
+behind the unraised curtain that still hid his early life from himself
+was hidden what might become a baleful power to breed unrest for hers.
+
+But it all depended on his own mastery of himself. Except he told it,
+who should know that he was Harrisson? And _how_ he felt the shelter
+of the gold! Who was going to suspect that a man who could command
+wealth in six figures by disclosing his identity, would keep it
+a secret? And for his wife's sake too! A pitiful four-or five-figure
+man might--yes. But hundreds of thousands!--think of it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+OF AN EXPEDITION AGAINST A GOODY, AND THE WALK BACK TO LOBJOIT'S. AND
+ THE WALK BACK AGAIN TO IGGULDEN'S. HOW FENWICK TOOK VEREKER'S
+ CONFIDENCE BY STORM. OF A COLLIER THAT PUT TO SEA. SUCCESSFUL
+ AMBUSCADE OF THE OCTOPUS. PROVISIONAL EQUILIBRIUM OF FENWICK'S MIND.
+ WHY BOTHER ABOUT HORACE? WHY NOT ABOUT PICKWICK JUST AS MUCH? THE
+ KITTEN WASN'T THERE--CERTAINLY NOT!
+
+
+So it came about that during the remainder of that day and part of the
+next Fenwick either made no further exploration of his past; or, if
+he did so, concealed his discoveries. For he not only kept silence
+with Rosalind, but even with Vereker was absolutely reserved, never
+alluding to their conversation of the morning. And the doctor accepted
+this reserve, and asked no questions.
+
+As for Rosalind, she was only too glad to catch at the support of the
+medical authority and to abstain from question or suggestion; for the
+present certainly, and, unless her silence--as might be--should seem
+to imply a motive on her part, to maintain it until her husband
+revived the subject by disclosing further recollections of the bygone
+time. Happily Sally knew nothing about it; _that_ her mother was
+convinced of. And Sally wasn't likely to know anything, for Vereker's
+professional discretion could be relied on, even if her suspicions
+were excited. And, really, except that Fenwick seemed a little drowsy
+and reflective, and that Rosalind had a semitone of consolation in her
+manner towards him, there was nothing to excite suspicion.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+After the cows--this is an expression borrowed from Sally, later in
+the afternoon--conversation flagged through the rest of the walk home.
+Except for regrets, more than once expressed, that it would be much
+too late for tea when we got in, and a passing word on the fact that
+at the seaside one got as greedy as some celebrated glutton--a Roman
+emperor, perhaps--very few ideas were interchanged. But a little
+conversation was made out of the scarcity of a good deal, for the
+persistent optimism of Sally recognised that it was awfully jolly
+saying nothing on such a lovely evening. Slight fatigue, combined
+with the beauty of sky and sea and distant downland, the lengthening
+shadows of the wheatsheaves, and the scarlet of poppies in the
+stubble, seemed good to justify contemplation and silence. It was an
+hour to caress in years to come, none the less that it was accepted as
+the mere routine of daily life in the short term of its existence. It
+was an hour that came to an end when the party arrived at the hedge of
+the unripe sloes that had checked the onset of Albion Villas towards
+the new town, and passed through the turnstile Fenwick and Vereker had
+passed through in the morning. Then speech came back, and each did
+what all folk invariably do after a long spell of silence--revealed
+what they were being silent about, or seemed to be. Most likely
+Fenwick's contribution was only a blind, as his mind must have been
+full of many thoughts he wished to keep to himself.
+
+"I wonder when Paganini's young woman's row with her mother's going
+to come off--to-day or to-morrow?"
+
+"I was wondering whether it would come off at all. I dare say she'll
+accept the inevitable." Thus Rosalind, and for our part we believe
+this also was not quite candid--in fact, was really suggested by her
+husband's remark. But Sally's was a genuine disclosure, and really
+showed what her mind had been running on.
+
+"I've been meditating a Crusade," she said, with remoteness from
+current topics in her voice. And both her companions immediately
+made concessions to one that seemed to them genuine as compared with
+their own.
+
+"Against whom, kitten?" said her mother.
+
+And Fenwick reinforced her with, "Yes, who's the Crusade to be
+against, Sarah?"
+
+"Against the Octopus." And Sally says this with the most perfectly
+unconscious gravity, as though a Crusade against an octopus was a
+very common occurrence in every-day life. The eyes of her companions
+twinkle a little interchange across her unseen, but are careful to
+keep anything suggesting a smile out of their voices as they apply
+for enlightenment.
+
+"Because of poor Prosy," Sally explains. "You'll see now. She won't
+allow him to come round this evening, you see if she does!" She is
+so intent upon her subject-matter that they might almost have smiled
+aloud without detection, after all.
+
+"When's it to come off, Sarah--the Crusade?"
+
+"I was thinking of going round this evening if he doesn't turn up."
+
+"Suppose we all go," Fenwick suggests. And Rosalind assents.
+The Crusade may be considered organized. "We'll give him till
+eight-forty-five," Sally says, forecasting strategy, "and then if
+he doesn't come we'll go."
+
+Eight-forty-five came, but no doctor. So the Crusade came off as
+arranged, with the result that the Christian forces, on arriving in
+the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, found that the Octopus responsible
+for the personation of the Saracens had just gone to bed. It was an
+ill-advised Crusade, because if the Christians had only had a little
+patience, the released prisoner would have looked round as soon as
+his janitor was asleep. As it turned out, no sooner were the visitors'
+voices audible than the Octopus became alive to the pleasures of
+society, and renounced sleep in its favour. She would slip something
+on and come down, and did so. Her doing so was out of keeping with the
+leading idea of the performance, presenting the Paynim as an obliging
+race; but a meek and suffering one, though it never aired its
+grievances. These, however, were the chief subjects of conversation
+during the visit, which, in spite of every failure in dramatic
+propriety, was always spoken of in after days as "the Crusade." It
+came to an end in due course, the Saracen host retiring to bed, with
+benedictions.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Vereker walked back with our friends to Mrs. Lobjoit's through the
+sweet night-air a considerate little shower of rain, that came down
+while they were sympathetically engaged, had just washed clean.
+Vapour-drifts that were wavering between earth and sky, and
+sacrificing their birthright of either cloudship or foghood, were
+accompanying a warm sea-wind towards the north. Out beyond, and quite
+clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless
+heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and
+passionless eyes perhaps--as Tennyson calls them--and strange fires;
+but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness
+into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked
+and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered
+that Orion's Belt and Aldebaran had been put there to make it a fine
+night for them to laugh and talk and smoke in.
+
+It was pleasant to Vereker, after his walk with Fenwick in the
+morning, to find the latter like his usual cheerful self again. The
+doctor had had rather a trying time with his Goody mother, so that the
+day had been more one of tension than of peace, and it was a heavenly
+respite to him from filial duties dutifully borne, to walk home with
+the goddess of his paradise--the paradise that was so soon to come to
+an end and send him to the release of his "locum," Mr. Neckitt. Never
+mind. The having such a time to look back to in the future was quite
+as much as one general practitioner, with a duty to his mother, could
+in reason expect. Was Dr. Conrad aware, we wonder, how much the
+philosophical resignation that made this attitude of thought possible
+was due to the absence of any other visible favoured applicant for
+Miss Sally, and the certainty that he would see her once or twice
+a week at least after he had gone back to his prescriptions and his
+diary of cases?
+
+Probably he wasn't; and when, on arriving at Lobjoit's, Fenwick
+announced that he didn't want to go in yet, and would accompany the
+doctor back to Iggulden's and take a turn round, the only misgiving
+that could try for an insecure foothold in the mind now given up to a
+delirium it called Sally was one that Fenwick might have some new
+painful memory to tell. But he was soon at rest about this. Fenwick
+wasn't going to talk about himself. Very much the reverse, if one's own
+reverse is some one else. He was going to talk about the doctor, into
+whose arm he slipped his own as soon as he had lighted his second cigar.
+For they had not walked quick from Iggulden's.
+
+"Now tell me about Sir Dioscorides Nayler and the epileptiform
+disorders."
+
+"Miss Sally's been telling you...."
+
+"No, she didn't--Sally did." Both laughed. The doctor will make it
+Sally next time--that's understood. "You told Sally and she told me.
+What's the damage to be?"
+
+"How much did Sally tell you?" The little formality comes easier to
+the doctor's shyness as it figures, this time, quotation-wise. It is
+a repeat of Fenwick's use of it.
+
+"Sally said three thousand."
+
+"Yes, that's what I told her. But it's not official. He may want more.
+He may let me have it for three. Only I don't know why I should have
+it for less than any one else."
+
+"Never you mind why! That's no concern of yours, my dear boy. What
+you've got to think of is of yourself and Mrs. Vereker. Dioscorides
+will take care of himself--trust him!"
+
+"Yes, of course, I have to think of my mother." One can hear in the
+speaker's voice what may be either self-reproach for having neglected
+this aspect of the case, or very tolerant indictment of Fenwick for
+having mistakenly thought he had done so.
+
+"What's the man thinking of? Of course you have, but I didn't mean
+your mother. She's a dear old lady"--this came grudgingly--"but
+I didn't mean her. I meant the Mrs. Vereker that's to come. Your wife,
+dear fellow, your wife."
+
+The way the young man flushed up, hesitated, stammered, couldn't
+organize a sane word, amused Fenwick intensely. Of course he was, so
+to speak, quite at home--understood the position thoroughly. But he
+wasn't going to torment the doctor. He was only making it impossible
+for him to avoid confession, for his own sake. He did not wait for
+the stammering to take form, but continued:
+
+"I mean the young lady you told Sally about--the young lady you
+are hesitating to propose to because there'll be what you call
+complications in medicine--complications about your mamma, to put it
+plainly.... Oh yes, of course, Sally told me all about it directly."
+Vereker cannot resist a laugh, for all his embarrassment, a laugh
+which somehow had the image of Sally in it. "She _would_, you know.
+Sally's the sort of party that--that, if she'd been Greek, would
+have been the daughter of an Arcadian shepherdess and a thunderbolt."
+
+"Of course she would. I say, Fenwick, look here...."
+
+"Have another cigar, old man."
+
+"No, I've smoked enough. That one's lasted all the time since we came
+out. Look here--what I want to say is ... well, that I was a great
+fool--did wrong in fact--to talk to Sally about that young lady...."
+
+"And to that young lady about Sally," Fenwick says quietly. For half
+a second--such alacrity has thought--Vereker takes his meaning wrong;
+thinks he really believes in the other young lady. Then it flashes
+on him, and he knows how his companion has been seeing through him
+all the while. But so lovable is Fenwick, and so much influence is
+there in the repose of his strength, that there is no resentment
+on Vereker's part that he should be thus seen through. He surrenders
+at discretion.
+
+"I see you know," he says helplessly.
+
+"Know you love Sally?--of course I do! So does her mother. So does
+yours, for that matter. So does every one, except herself. Why, even
+you yourself know it! _She_ never will know it unless she hears it on
+the best authority--your own, you know."
+
+"Ought I to tell her? I know I was all wrong about that humbug-girl I
+cooked up to tell her about. I altogether lost my head, and was a fool."
+
+"I can't see what end you proposed to yourself by doing it," says
+Fenwick a little maliciously. "If Sally had recommended you to speak
+up, because it was just possible the young lady might be pining for
+you all the time, you couldn't have asked her _her_ name, and then
+said, 'That's hers--you're her!' like the fat boy in 'Pickwick.'
+No!--I consider, my dear boy, that you didn't do yourself any good by
+that ingenious fiction. You know all the while you wouldn't have been
+sorry to think she understood you."
+
+"I don't know that I didn't think she did. I really don't know what I
+did or didn't think. I quite lost my head over it, that's the truth."
+
+"Highly proper. Quite consistent with human experience! It's the sort
+of job chaps always do lose their heads over. The question now is,
+What are we going to do next?" Which meant what was Vereker going to
+do next? and was understood by his hearer in that sense. He made no
+answer at the moment, and Fenwick was not going to press for one.
+
+A Newcastle collier had come in to deliver her cargo some days since,
+before the wind sprang up, and the coal-carts had been passing and
+repassing across the sands at low water; for there was a new moon
+somewhere in the sky when she came, as thin as a sickle, clinging
+tight round the business moon that saw to the spring-tides, a phantom
+sphere an intrepid star was daring to go close to. This brig had not
+been disappointing her backers, for wagers had been freely laid that
+she would drag her moorings in the wind, and drift. Fenwick and
+Vereker stopped in their walk to lean on the wooden rail above the
+beach that skirted the two inclines, going either way, up which the
+waggons had been a couple of hours ago scrambling over the shingle
+against time, to land one more load yet while the ebb allowed it.
+They could hear the yeo-yeo! of the sail-hoisters at work on the big
+mainsail abaft, and wondered how on earth she was going to be got
+clear with so little sea-way and the wind dead in shore. But they were
+reassured by the ancient mariner with the striped shirt, whose mission
+in life seemed to be to stand about and enlighten land-minds about
+sea-facts. The master of yander craft had doon that much afower, and
+he'd do it again. Why, he'd known him from three year old, the striped
+shirt had! Which settled the matter. Then presently the clink-clink of
+the windlass dragging at the anchor. They watched her in silence till,
+free of her moorings, any one could have sworn she would be on shore
+to a certainty. But she wasn't. She seemed mysteriously to be able to
+manage for herself, and just as a berth for the night on the shingle
+appeared inevitable, leaned over to the wind and crept away from the
+land, triumphant.
+
+Then, the show being over, as Fenwick and Vereker turned to look the
+lateness of the hour in the face, and get home to bed, the latter
+answered the question of the former, as though he had but just asked it.
+
+"Speak to Sally. I shall have to." And then added, with an awestruck
+face and bated breath: "But it's _awful_!" A moment after he was
+laughing at himself, as he said to his companion, referring to a very
+palpable fact, "I don't wonder I made you laugh just now."
+
+They walked on without much said till they came to Iggulden's; when
+the doctor, seeing no light in the sitting-room, hoped his worthy
+mother had fulfilled a promise made when they came away, and gone to
+bed. It was then past eleven. But he was reckoning without his host.
+
+Fenwick said to him, as they stood on Iggulden's threshold and doormat
+respectively--presuming rashly, on imperfect information, to delay
+farewells--"Now look here, Conrad, my dear boy (I like your name
+Conrad), don't you go and boil over to Sally to-morrow, nor next day.
+You'll only spoil the rest of your stay, maybe.... What! well--what
+I mean is that nothing I say prejudices the kitten. You'll understand
+that, I'm sure?"
+
+"Perfectly. Of course, if Sally were to say she knew somebody she
+would like a deal better, there's no reason why she shouldn't....
+I mean _I_ couldn't complain."
+
+"Yes--yes! I see. You'd exonerate her. Good boy! Very proper." And
+indeed the doctor had felt, as the words passed his lips, that he was
+rather a horrid liar. But the point didn't matter. Fenwick laughed it
+off: "Just you take my advice, and refer the matter to the kitten the
+last day you're here. Monday, won't it be? And don't think about it!"
+
+"Oh no! I'm a philosophical sort of chap, I am! Never in extremes.
+Good-night!"
+
+"I see. _Sperat infestis metuit secundis alteram sortem bene
+praeparatum pectus_--Horace." Fenwick ran this through in a breath;
+and the doctor, a little hazy in school-memories of the classics,
+said, "What's that?" and began translating it--"The bosom well
+prepared for either lot, fears...." Fenwick caught him up and
+completed the sentence:
+
+"Fears what is good, and hopes for what is not. Cut away to bed, old
+chap, and sleep sound...." Then he paused a moment, as he saw the
+doctor looking a question at him intently, and just about to speak
+it. He answered it before it came:
+
+"No, no! Nothing more. I mean to forget all about it, and take my life
+as it stands. Bother Mr. Harrisson!" He dropped his voice to say this;
+then raised it again. "Don't you fret about me, doctor. Remember, I'm
+Algernon Fenwick! Good-night!"
+
+"Good-night!" And then the doctor, with the remains of heart-turmoil
+in him, and a brain reeling, more or less, went up into what he
+conceived to be an empty dark room, and was disconcerted by an
+ill-used murmur in the darkness--a meek, submissive voice of one
+accustomed to slights:
+
+"I told her to blow it out and go to bed. It is all--quite--right, my
+dear. So do not complain. Now help me with my things, and I will get
+to bed."
+
+"My dear mother! I _am_ so sorry. I had no idea you had not gone long
+ago!"
+
+"My dear!--it does not matter in the least now. What is done, is done.
+Be careful with the grease over my work. These candles drop
+dreadfully, unless you hold them exactly upright. And gutter. Now give
+me your arm, and I will go to bed. I _think_ I shall sleep." And the
+worthy woman was really--if her son could only have got his eyes freed
+from the scales of domestic superstition, and seen it--intensely happy
+and exultant at this fiendish little piece of discomfort-mongering.
+She had scored; there was no doubt of it. She was even turning it over
+in her own mind whether it would not bear repetition at a future
+time; and quite intended, if so, to enjoy herself over it. Now the
+doctor was contrite and heavy at heart at his cruel conduct; walking
+about--just think!--and talking over his own affairs while his
+self-sacrificing mother was sitting in the dark, with the lamp out!
+To be sure there was no visible reason why she should have had it
+put out, except as a picturesque and imaginative way of rubbing her
+altruism into its nearest victim. Unless, indeed, it was done in order
+that the darkened window should seem to announce to the returning
+truant that she had gone to bed, and to lull his mind to
+unconsciousness of the ambush that awaited him.
+
+Anyhow, the doctor was so impressed with his own delinquency that he
+felt it would be impossible, the lamp having been put out, to take his
+mother into his confidence about his conversation with Fenwick. Which
+he certainly would have done--late as the hour was--if it had been
+left in. So he said good-night, and carried the chaos of his emotions
+away to bed with him, and lay awake with them till cock-crow.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+As Fenwick walked back home, timing his pace by his expectation of
+his cigar's duration, he wondered whether, perhaps, he had not been
+a little rash. He felt obliged to go back on interviews with Sally, in
+which the doctor had been spoken of. He recalled for his justification
+one in particular. The family conclave at Krakatoa Villa had recurred
+to a remark of Rosalind's about the drawback to Vereker's practice of
+his bachelorhood. He was then, as it were, brought up for a second
+reading, and new clauses added to him containing schedules of possible
+wives. Fenwick had noticed, then, that Sally's assent to the insertion
+of any candidate's name turned on two points: one, the lady's consent
+being taken for granted; the other, that every young single female
+human creature known by name or describable by language was actually
+out of the question, or inadmissible in its answer. She rejected
+almost all applicants for the post of a doctor's wife without
+examining their claims, on the ground of moral or physical defect--as,
+for instance, you never would go and tie up poor Prosy to a wife that
+golloped. Sylvia Peplow, indeed! Interrogated about the nature of
+"golloping," Sally could go no nearer than that Miss Peplow looked as
+if she couldn't help it. And her sister was worse: she was perfectly
+pecky, and shut up with a click. And as for the large Miss Baker--why,
+you knew how large _she_ was, and it would be quite ridiculous!
+Besides, her stupidity!
+
+The only candidates that got the least consideration owed their
+success to their names or expectations. Caroline Smith had, or would
+have sometime, a thousand a year. But she squinted. Still, she might
+be thought over. Mrs. Pollicitus Biggs's cousin Isabella would have
+two thousand when her mother died, but the vitality of the latter was
+indescribable. Besides, she was just like her name, Isabella, and did
+her hair religiously. There was Chariclea Epimenides, certainly, who
+had got three thousand, and would have six more. She might be worth
+thinking of....
+
+"Why don't you have him yourself, Sarah?" Fenwick had asked at this
+point. Rosalind had just left the room to speak to Ann. But he didn't
+want Sarah to be obliged to answer, so he went on: "Why are all these
+young ladies' incomes exactly in round thousands?"
+
+To which Sally had replied: "They always are, when you haven't got
+'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said--out of
+the blue--"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party--a vagrant. I
+shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like
+to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out
+of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day
+that had made her think of this? and then he recalled how he afterwards
+heard the kitten singing to herself the old ballad:
+
+ "What care I for my goose-feather bed?
+ What care I for my money oh?"
+
+and hearing her so sing had somehow imputed to the parade of bravado
+in the swing of its rhythm a something that might have belonged to a
+touched chord. Like enough a mistake of his, said Reason. But for all
+that the reminiscence played its part in soothing Fenwick's misgivings
+of his own rashness.
+
+"The kitten's all right," said he to himself. "And if she doesn't want
+Master Conrad, the sooner he knows it the better!" But he had little
+doubt of the course things would take as he stopped to look at that
+venturesome star, that seemed to be going altogether too near the moon
+for safety.
+
+In a few moments he turned again towards home. And then his mind
+must needs go off to the thing of all others he wished not to think
+of--_himself_. He had come to see this much clearly, that until
+the veil floated away from between him and his past and left the
+whole atmosphere transparent, there could be no certainty that a
+recrudescence of that past would not be fatal to his wife's happiness.
+And inevitably, therefore, to his own. Having once formulated the idea
+that for the future _he_ was to be one person and Harrisson another, he
+found its entertainment in practice easier than he had anticipated. He
+had only to say to himself that it was for her sake that he did it, and
+he did not find it altogether impossible to dismiss his own identity
+from the phantasmagoria that kept on coming back and back before his
+mind, and to assign the whole drama to another person; to whom he
+allowed the name of Harrisson all the easier from his knowledge that
+it never had been really his own. Very much the easier, too, no
+doubt, from the sense that the function of memory was still diseased,
+imperfect, untrustworthy. How could it be otherwise when he still was
+unable to force it back beyond a certain limit? It was mainly a vision
+of America, and, previous to that, a mystery of interminable avenues
+of trees, and an inexplicable horror of a struggle with death. There
+he always lost himself. In the hinterland of this there was that vision
+of a wedding somewhere. And then bewilderment, because the image of
+his living wife, his very soul of the world he now dwelt in, the woman
+whose daughter had grown into his heart as his own--yes, not only the
+image, but the very name of her--had come in and supplanted that of the
+forgotten wife of that forgotten day. So much so that more than once,
+in striving to follow the clue given by that railway-carriage, his mind
+had involuntarily called the warm living thing that came into his arms
+from it "Rosey." In the face of that, what was the worth of anything he
+should recollect now, that he should not discard it as a mere phantasm,
+for her sake? How almost easy to say to himself, "that was Harrisson,"
+and then to add, "whoever he was," and dismiss him.
+
+Do you--you who read--find this so very difficult to understand? Can
+you recall no like imperfect memory of your own that, multiplied a
+hundredfold, would supply an analogy, a standpoint to look into
+Fenwick's disordered mind from?
+
+After his delirious collision with his first vigorous revival of the
+past, he was beginning to settle down to face it, helped by the
+talisman of his love for Rosalind, whom it was his first duty to
+shield from whatever it should prove to hold of possible injury to
+her. That happy hour of the dying sunset in the shorn cornfields, with
+her and Sally and the sky above and the sea beyond, had gone far to
+soothe the perturbation of the night. And his talk of the morning with
+this young man he had just left had helped him strongly. For he knew
+in his heart he could safely go to him again if he could not bear his
+own silence, could trust him with whatever he could tell at all to any
+one. Could he not, when he was actually ready to trust him with--Sally?
+
+So, though he was far from feeling at rest, a working equilibrium was
+in sight. He could acquiesce in what came back to him, as it came;
+need never struggle to hasten or retard it. Little things would float
+into his mind, like house-flies into the ray from a shutter-crack in
+a darkened room, and float away again uncaptured, or whizz and burr
+round and against each other as the flies do, and then decide--as the
+flies do--that neither concerns the other and each may go his way. But
+he was nowise bound to catch these things on the wing, or persuade
+them to live in peace with one another. If they came, they came; and
+if they went, they went.
+
+Such a one caught his thoughts, and held them for a moment as,
+satisfied that astronomy would see to that star, he turned to go
+straight home to Lobjoit's. That would just last out the cigar. But
+what was it now? What was the fly that flew into his sun-ray this
+time, that it should make him remember a line of Horace, to be so
+pat with it, and to know what it meant, too?
+
+But this fact, that he could not tell how he came to know its meaning,
+showed him how decisively the barrier line across the memory of his
+boyhood was drawn, or, it might be, his early manhood. He could not
+remember, properly speaking, the whole of his life in the States, but
+he could remember telling a man--one Larpent, a man with a club-foot,
+at Ontario--that he had been there over fifteen years. This man
+has nothing to do with this story, but he happens to serve as an
+illustration of the disjointed way in which small details would tell
+out clear against a background of confusion. Why, Fenwick could
+remember his face plainly--how close-shaven he was, and black over the
+razor-land; how his dentist had inserted an artificial tooth that
+didn't match, and shone out white. But as to the fifteen years he had
+spent in the States, that he had told Mr. Larpent of, they grew dimmer
+and dimmer as he tried to carry his recollection further back. Beyond
+them--or rather, longer ago than they, properly speaking--came that
+endless, intolerable labyrinth of trees, and then, earlier still, that
+railway-carriage. It was getting clearer; but the worst of it was that
+the clearer it got, the clearer grew the Rosey that came out of it.
+As long as that went on, there was nothing of it all he could place
+faith in. He had been told that no man could be convinced, by his own
+reason, of his own hallucination. He would supply a case to the
+contrary. It would amuse him one day, if ever he came to know that
+girl of the railway-carriage was dead, to tell Rosalind all his
+experiences, and how bravely he fought against what he knew to be
+delusion.
+
+But he must make an effort against this sort of thing. Here was he,
+who had just made up his mind--so he phrased it--to remain himself,
+and refuse to be Harrisson, no sooner was he left alone for a few
+minutes than he must needs be raking up the past. And that, too,
+because of a line of Horace!--sound in itself, but quite cut asunder
+from its origin, the book he read it in, or the voice he heard read
+it. What did that line matter? Leave it for Mr. Harrisson in that
+state of pre-existence. As well make a point of recalling the
+_provenance_ of any little thing that had happened in this his present
+life. Well, for instance, Mary and the fat boy in "Pickwick." Rosalind
+had read him that aloud, he knew, but he couldn't say when. Was he
+going to worry himself to recall that which could do him no harm to
+know? Surely not. And if so, why strive to bring back things better
+forgotten? It is useless to endeavour to make the state of Fenwick's
+mind, at this point of the imperfect revival of memory, appear other
+than incredible. A person who has had the painful experience of
+forgetting his own name in a dream would perhaps understand it best.
+Or, without going so far, can no help be got towards it from our
+frequent certainties about some phrase (for instance) that we think we
+cannot possibly forget? about some date that we believe no human power
+will ever obliterate? And in five minutes--gone--utterly gone! Truly,
+there is no evidence but a man's own word for what he does or does
+not, can or cannot, recollect.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"I say, Rosey, when was it you read to me about Mary and the fat boy
+in 'Pickwick'?" Fenwick, having suggested a doubt to himself about his
+power to recall what he supposed to have happened recently, had, of
+course, set about doing it directly. His question was asked of his
+wife as he came into her bedroom on his return. He mounted the stairs
+singing to himself,
+
+ "Que nous mangerons Marott-e,
+ Bec-a-bec et toi et moi,"
+
+till he came in to where Rosalind was sitting reading, with her
+wonderful hair combed free--probably by Sally for a treat. Then he
+asked his question rather suddenly, and it made her start.
+
+"I was in the middle of my book, and you made me jump." He gave her
+a kiss for apology. "What's the question? When did I read to you about
+Mary and the fat boy? I couldn't say. I feel as if I had, though."
+
+"Was it out in the garden at K. Villa? It wasn't here." He usually
+called Krakatoa "K." for working purposes.
+
+"No, it certainty wasn't here. It must have been at home, only I
+can't recollect when. Ask Sally."
+
+"The kitten wasn't there."
+
+"She would know, though. She always knows. She's not asleep yet ...
+Sallykin!" The young person is on the other side of a mere wooden
+partition, congenial to the architecture of Lobjoit's, and her reply
+conveys the idea of a speaker in bed who hasn't moved to answer.
+
+"What? Be quick. I'm going to sleep."
+
+"I'm so sorry, chick. When was it I read to this man Mary and the
+fat boy in 'Pickwick'?"
+
+"How should I know? Not when I was there."
+
+"All right, Sarah." Thus Fenwick, to whom Sarah responds:
+
+"Good-night, Jeremiah. Go to bed, and don't keep decent Christian
+people awake at this hour of the night. Take mother's book away,
+and cut it."
+
+Rosalind closes her book and says: "_I_ don't know, darling, if
+Sally doesn't. Why do you want to know?"
+
+"Couldn't say. It crossed my mind. I know the kitten wasn't there,
+though. Good-night, love.... Oh yes, I shall sleep to-night. Ta, ta,
+Sarah--pleasant dreams!"
+
+But he had not reached the door when the voice of Sarah came again,
+with the implication of a mouth that had come out into the open.
+
+"Stop, Jeremiah!" it said. "It wasn't at K. Villa."
+
+"Why not, chick?"
+
+"Because Pickwick's _lost_! It was lent to those impossible people
+at Turnham Green, and they stole it. I know they did. Name like
+Marylebone."
+
+"The Haliburtons? Why, that's ever so long ago." Thus Rosalind.
+
+"Of course it is. It's been gone ages. I'm going to sleep.
+Good-night!" And Jeremiah said good-night once more and departed.
+
+Sally didn't go straight to sleep, but she made a start on her way
+there. It was not a vigorous start, for she had hardly begun upon
+it when she desisted, and sat up in bed and listened.
+
+"What's that, mother? Nothing wrong, is there?"
+
+"No, darling child, what should be wrong? Go to sleep."
+
+"I thought I heard you gasp, or snuffle, or sigh, or sob, or click
+in your throat. That's all. Sure you didn't?"
+
+"Quite sure. Now, do be a reasonable kitten, and go to sleep; I
+shall be in bed in half-a-second."
+
+And Sally subsides, but first makes a stipulation: "You _will_ sleep
+in your hair, mother darling, won't you? Or, at least, do it up, and
+not that hateful nightcap?"
+
+But though Rosalind felt conscientiously able to disclaim any of
+the sounds Sally had described, something audible had occurred in her
+breathing. Sally's first word had gone nearest, but it was hardly
+a full-grown gasp.
+
+Her husband's question about "Pickwick" had scarcely taken her
+attention off an exciting story-climax, and she really did want to
+know why the Archbishop turned pale as death when the Countess kissed
+him. Gerry was looking well and cheerful again, and there was nothing
+to connect his inquiry with any reminiscence of "B.C." So, as soon
+as he had gone, she reopened her book--not without a mental allusion
+to a dog in Proverbs--and went on where she had left off. The writer
+had not known how to manage his Archbishop and Countess, and the story
+went flat and slushy like an ill-whipped _zabajone_. She put the book
+aside, and wondered whether "Pickwick" really _had_ been alienated by
+the impossible Haliburtons; sat thinking, but only of the thing of
+_now_--nothing of buried records.
+
+So she sat, it might be for two minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she had
+bitten her lip and her brows had wrinkled. And her eyes had locked to
+a fixed look that would stay till she had thought this out. So her
+face said, and the stillness of her hand.
+
+For she had suddenly remembered when and where it was she had read to
+that man about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her
+mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite
+suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to
+utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world--had
+flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an
+astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him,
+because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page
+before he was ready. And his decision that Dickens's characters were
+never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so
+amusing. And then how he got the book from her and went on reading
+while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came
+back found he had only two more pages to read, and then he would
+come and play.
+
+But it spoke well for her husband's chances of a quiet time to-night
+that he should hold this memory in his mind, and yet be secure against
+a complete resurrection of the past. Nothing else might grow from it.
+He evidently thought the reading had been at Shepherd's Bush. He would
+hardly have said, "the kitten wasn't there," unless his ideas had been
+glued to that spot. But then--and Rosalind's mind swam to think of
+it--how very decisively the kitten was "not there" in that other
+garden two-and-twenty years ago.
+
+It was at that moment the gasp, or sigh, or sob, or whatever it
+was, awoke Sally. Her mother had been strong against the mere memory
+of the happy hour of thoughtless long ago; but then, this that was
+to come--this thing the time was thoughtless of! Was it not enough
+to force a gasp from self-control itself? a cry from any creature
+claiming to be human? "_The kitten wasn't there!_" No, truly she
+was not.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+HOW MEMORY CREPT BACK AND BACK, AND FENWICK KEPT HIS OWN COUNSEL.
+ ROSALIND NEED NEVER KNOW IT. OF A JOLLY BIG BLOB OF MELTED CANDLE,
+ AND SALLY'S HALF-BROTHER. OF FENWICK'S IMPROVED GOOD SPIRITS
+
+
+That was a day of many little incidents, and a fine day into the
+bargain. Perhaps the next day was helped to be a flat day by the
+barometer, which had shown its usual untrustworthiness and gone down.
+The wind's grievance--very perceptible to the leeward of keyholes and
+window-cracks--may have been against this instability. It had been
+looking forward to a day's rest, and here this meteorology must needs
+be fussing. Neptune on the contrary was all the fresher for his
+half-holiday, and was trotting out tiny white ponies all over his
+fields, who played bo-peep with each other in and out of the valleys
+of the plough-land. But they were grey valleys now, that yesterday
+were smiling in the sun. And the sky was a mere self-coloured sky
+(a modern expression, as unconvincing as most of its congeners), and
+wanted to make everything else as grey as itself. Also there came
+drifts of fine rain that wetted you through, and your umbrella wasn't
+any good. So a great many of the visitors to St. Sennans thought they
+would stop at home and get those letters written.
+
+Sally wouldn't admit that the day was flat _per se_, but only that it
+had become so owing to the departure of Laetitia and her husband. She
+reviewed the latter a good deal, as one who had recently been well
+under inspection and had stood the test. He was really a very nice
+fellow, haberdasher or no, wasn't he, mother? To which Rosalind
+replied that he was a very nice fellow indeed, only so quiet. If he
+had had his violin with him, he would have been much more perceptible.
+But she supposed it was best to travel with it as little as possible.
+For it had been decided, all things considered, that the precious
+Strad should be left locked up at home. "It's got an insurance policy
+all to itself," said Sally, "for three hundred pounds." She was quite
+awestruck by the three hundred golden sovereigns which these pounds
+would have been if they had had an existence of their own off paper.
+
+"_You_ ought to have an insurance policy all to yourself, Sarah," said
+Fenwick. "Only I don't believe any office would accept you. Fancy your
+swimming out like that yesterday! How far did you go?"
+
+"Round the buoy and aback again. I say, Jeremiah, if ever I get
+drowned, mind you rush to the bathing-machine and see if there's a
+copy of 'Ally Sloper' or 'Tit-Bits'. Because there'd be fifty pounds
+for each. Think of that!" Sally is delighted with these sums, too, to
+the extent of quite losing sight of the sacrifice necessary for their
+acquisition.
+
+"Two whole fifties!" Fenwick says, adding after consideration: "I
+think we had sooner keep our daughter, eh, Rosey?" And Rosalind
+agreed. Only she really was a shocking madcap, the kitten!
+
+Had some flavour of Fenwick's mental history got in the air, that
+Sally, presumably with no direct information about its last chapter,
+should say to him suddenly: "It _is_ such a puzzle to me, Jeremiah,
+that you've never recollected the railway-carriage"? He was saved from
+telling fibs in reply--for he _had_ recollected the railway-carriage,
+and left it, as it were, for Mr. Harrisson--by Sally continuing: "When
+you were Mr. Fenwick, and I wasn't at liberty to kiss you." She did
+so to illustrate.
+
+"I don't see how I could reasonably have resented your kissing me,
+Sarah. And I'm Mr. Fenwick now."
+
+"On the contrary, you're Jeremiah. But if you were he ever so, I'm
+puzzled why Mr. Fenwick _now_ can't remember Mr. Fenwick _then_."
+
+"He _can't_, Sarah dear. He can no more remember Mr. Fenwick
+_then_ than if no such person had ever existed." It was a clever
+equivocation, for though he had so far made nothing of the name on his
+arm, he was quite clear he came back to England Harrisson. His gravity
+and sadness as he said it may have been not so much duplicity as a
+reflection from his turgid current of thought of the last two days.
+It imposed on Sally, who decided in her own mind on changing the topic
+as soon as she could do it without a jerk. Meanwhile, a stepping-stone
+was available--extravagant treatment of the subject with a view to
+help from laughter.
+
+"I wonder what Mr. Fenwick _then_ would have thought if I had kissed
+him in the railway-carriage."
+
+"He'd have thought you must be Sally, only he hadn't noticed it.
+_He_ wouldn't have made a rumpus on high moral grounds, I'm sure. But
+I don't know about the old cock that talked about the terms of the
+Company's charter...."
+
+"Hullo!" Sally interrupts him blankly. He had better have let it
+alone. But it wouldn't do to admit anything.
+
+"What's 'hullo,' Sarah?"
+
+"See how you're recollecting things! Jeremiah's recollecting the
+railway-carriage, mother--the electrocution-carriage."
+
+"Are you, darling?" Rosalind, coming behind his chair, puts her hands
+round his neck. "What have you recollected?"
+
+"I don't think I've recollected anything the kitten hasn't told me,"
+says Fenwick dreamily. But Sally is positive she never told him
+anything about the terms of the Company's charter.
+
+Rosalind adheres to her policy of keeping Sally out of it as much as
+possible. In this case a very small fib indeed serves the purpose:
+"You must have told him, chick; or perhaps I repeated it. I remember
+your telling _me_ about the elderly gentleman who was in a rage with
+the Company." Sally looked doubtful, but gave up the point.
+
+Nevertheless, Fenwick felt certain in his own heart that "the terms
+of the Company's charter" was a bit of private recollection of his
+own. And Rosalind had never heard of it before. But it was true she
+had heard of the elderly gentleman. Near enough!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+As to the crowd of memories that kept coming, some absolutely clear,
+some mere phantoms, into the arena of Fenwick's still disordered mind,
+they would have an interest, and a strong one, for this story if its
+object were the examination of strange freaks of memory. But the only
+point we are nearly concerned with is the rigid barrier drawn across
+the backward pathway of his recollection at some period between ten
+and fifteen years ago. Till this should be removed, and the dim image
+of his forgotten marriage should acquire force and cohesion, he and
+his wife were safe from the intrusion of their former selves on
+the scene of their present happiness--safe possibly from a power of
+interference it might exercise for ill--safe certainly from risk of a
+revelation to Sally of her mother's history and her own parentage--but
+safe at a heavy cost to the one of the three who alone now held the
+key to their disclosure.
+
+However vividly Fenwick had recalled the incidents of his arrival in
+England, and however convinced he was that no part of them was mere
+dream, they all belonged for him to that buried Harrisson whose
+identity he shrank from taking on himself--_would_ have shrunk from,
+at the cost that was to be paid for it, had the prize of its
+inheritance been ten times as great. Still, one or two connecting
+links had caught on either side, the chief one being Sally, who had
+actually spoken with him whilst still Harrisson--although it must be
+admitted she had not kissed him--and the one next in importance, the
+cabman. The pawnbroker made a very bad third--in fact, scarcely
+counted, owing to his own moroseness or reserve. But the cabman! Why,
+Fenwick had it all now at his fingers' ends. He could recall the start
+from New York, the wish to keep the secret of his gold-mining success
+to himself on the ship, and his satisfaction when he found his name
+printed with one _s_ in the list of cabin passengers. Then a pleasant
+voyage on a summer Atlantic, and that nice young American couple whose
+acquaintance he made before they passed Sandy Hook, every penny of
+whose cash had been stolen on board, and how he had financed them,
+careless of his own ready cash. And how then, not being sure if he
+should go to London or to Manchester, he decided on the former, and
+wired his New York banker to send him credit, prompt, at the bank he
+named in London; and then Livermore's Rents, 1808, and the joy of the
+cabman; and then the Twopenny Tube; and then Sally. He tried what he
+could towards putting in order what followed, but could determine
+nothing except that he stooped for the half-crown, and something
+struck him a heavy blow. Thereupon he was immediately a person, or a
+confusion, sitting alone in a cab, to whom a lady came whom he thought
+he knew, and to this lady he wanted to say, "Is that you?" for no
+reason he could now trace, but found he could scarcely articulate.
+
+Recalling everything thus, to the full, he was able to supply links
+in the story that we have found no place for so far. For instance,
+the loss of a small valise on the boat that contained credentials that
+would have made it quite unnecessary for him to cable to New York for
+credit, and also an incident this reminded him of--that he had not
+only parted with most of his cash to the young Americans, but had
+given his purse to the lady to keep her share of it in, saying he had
+a very good cash pocket, and would have plenty of time to buy another,
+whereas _they_ were hurrying through to catch the tidal boat for
+Calais. This accounted for that little new pocket-book without a card
+in it that had given no information at all. He could remember having
+made so free with his cards on the boat and in the train that he had
+only one left when he got to Euston.
+
+He found himself, as the hours passed, better and better able to dream
+and speculate about the life he now chose to imagine was Harrisson's
+property, not his; and the more so the more he felt the force of the
+barrier drawn across the earlier part of it. Had the barrier remained
+intact, he might ultimately have convinced himself, for all practical
+purposes, that Harrisson's life was all dream. Yes, all a dream! The
+cold and the gold of the Klondyke, the French Canadians at Ontario,
+four years on a cattle-ranch in California, five of unsuccessful
+attempts to practise at the American Bar--all, all a dream of another
+man named Harrisson, dreamed by Algernon Fenwick, that big hairy man
+at the wine-merchant's in Bishopsgate, who has a beautiful wife and a
+daughter who swims like a fish. One of the many might-have-beens that
+were not! But a decision against its reality demanded time, and his
+revival of memory was only forty-eight hours old so far.
+
+Of course, he would have liked, of all things, to make full
+confession, and talk it all out--this quasi-dream--to Rosalind; but
+he could not be sure how much he could safely bring to light, how much
+would be best concealed. He could not run the _slightest_ risk when
+the thing at stake was her peace of mind. No, no--Harrisson be hanged!
+Him and his money, too.
+
+So, though things kept coming to his recollection, he could hold his
+peace, and did so. There was nothing to come--not likely to be--that
+could unsay that revelation that he had been a married man, and did
+not know of his wife's death; not even that he and she had been
+divorced, which would have been nearly as bad. He knew the worst of
+it, at any rate, and Rosalind need never know it if he kept it all
+to himself, best and worst.
+
+So that day passed, and there was nothing to note about it, unless
+we mention that Sally was actually kept out of the Channel by
+Neptune's little white ponies aforesaid, which spoiled the swimming
+water--though, of course, it wasn't rough--backed by the fact that
+these little sudden showers wetted you through, right through your
+waterproof, before you knew where you were. Dr. Conrad came in as
+usual in the evening, reporting that his mother was "rather better."
+It was a discouraging habit she had, when she was not known to have
+been any worse than usual. This good lady always caught Commiseration
+napping, if ever that quality took forty winks. The doctor was very
+silent this evening, imbibing Sally without comment. However, St.
+Sennans was drawing to a close for all others. That was enough to
+account for it, Sally thought. It was the last day but one, and poor
+Prosy couldn't be expected to accept her own view--that the awful
+jolliness of being back at Krakatoa Villa would even compensate--more
+than compensate--for the pangs of parting with the Saint. Sally's
+optimism was made of a stuff that would wash, or was all wool.
+
+According to her own account, she had spent the whole day wondering
+whether the battle between Tishy and her mother had come off. She
+said so last thing of all to _her_ mother as she decanted the melted
+paraffin of a bedroom candle whose wick, up to its neck therein, was
+unable to find a scope for its genius, and yielded only a spectral
+blue spark that went out directly if you carried it. Tilted over,
+it would lick in the end--this was Sally's testimony; and if you
+dropped the grease on the back of the soap-dish and thickened it up
+to a good blob, it would come off click when it was cold, and not
+make any mess at all.
+
+"Yes, I've been wondering all day long," said she. "How I should enjoy
+being there to see! How freezing and dignified the Dragon will be!
+Mrs. Sales Wilson! Or perhaps she'll flare. (I wish this wick would;
+and it's such disgraceful waste of good candle!)"
+
+"I do think, kitten, you're unkind to the poor lady. Just think how
+she must have dreamed about the splendid match her handsome daughter
+was going to make! And, you know, it _is_ rather a come down...."
+
+"Yes, of course it's a come down. But I don't pity the Dragon one bit.
+She should have thought more of Tishy's happiness, and less of her
+grandeur. (It's just beginning; the flame will go white directly.)"
+
+"She'd got some one else in view then?" Rosalind was quickly
+perceptive about it.
+
+"Oh yes; don't you know? Sir Penderfield. (That'll do now, nicely;
+there's the white flame!) Sir Oughtred Penderfield. He's a Bart.,
+of course. But he's a horror, and they say his father was even worse.
+Like father, like son! And the Dragon wanted Tishy to accept him."
+
+At the name Rosalind shivered. The thought that followed it sent
+a knife-cut to her heart. This man that Sally had spoken of so
+unconsciously was _her brother_--at least, he was brother enough to
+her by blood to make that thought a blade to penetrate the core of her
+mother's soul. It was a case for her strength to show itself in--a
+case for nettle-grasping with a vengeance. She would grasp this nettle
+directly; but oh, for one moment--only one moment--just to be a little
+less sick with the slice of the chill steel! just to quench the tremor
+she knew would come with her voice if she tried now to say, "What was
+the name? Tishy's _pretendu_'s, I mean; not his father's."
+
+But she could take the whole of a moment, and another, for that
+matter. So she left her words on her tongue's tip to say later, and
+felt secure that Sally would not look up and see the dumb white face
+she herself could see in the mirror she sat before. For, of course,
+she saw Sally's reflection, too, its still thoughtful eyelids half
+shrouded in a broken coil of black hair their owner's pearly teeth
+are detaining an end of, to stop it falling in the paraffin she is
+so intent on, as she watches it cooling on the soap-dish.
+
+"I've made it such a jolly big blob it'll take ever so long to cool.
+You can, you know, if you go gently. Only then the middle stops soft,
+and if you get in a hurry it spoils the clicket." But it is hard
+enough now to risk moving the hair over it, and Sally's voice was free
+to speak as soon as her little white hand had swept the black coils
+back beyond the round white throat. Mrs. Lobjoit's mirror has its
+defects apart from some of the quicksilver having been scratched off;
+but Rosalind can see the merpussy's image plain enough, and knows
+perfectly well that before she looks up she will reap the harvest of
+happiness she has been looking forward to. She will "clicket" off the
+"blob" with her finger.
+
+The moment of fruition comes, and a filbert thumbnail spuds the
+hardened lozenge off the smooth glaze. "There!" says Sally, "didn't
+I tell you? Just like ice.... What, mother?" For her mother's question
+had been asked, very slightly varied, in a nettle-grasping sense. She
+has had time to think.
+
+"_What_ was Tishy's man's name--the other applicant? Christian name,
+I mean; not his father's."
+
+"Sir Oughtred Penderfield. Why?"
+
+"I remember there was a small boy in India, twenty-two years ago,
+named Penderfield. Is Oughtred his only name?" The nettle-grasping
+there was in this! Rosalind felt consoled by her own strength.
+
+"Can't say. He may have a dozen. Never seen him. Don't want to! But
+his hair's as black as mine, Tishy says.... I say, mother, isn't it
+deliciously smooth?" But this refers to the paraffin lozenge, not
+to the hair.
+
+"Yes, darling. Now I want to get to bed, if you've no objection."
+
+"Certainly, mother darling; but say I'm right about the Dragon and
+Sir Penderfield. Because I _am_, you know."
+
+"Of course you are, chick. Only you never told me about him; now,
+did you?"
+
+"Because I was so honourable. It was a secret. Very well, good-night,
+then.... Oh, you poor mother! how cold you are, and I've been keeping
+you up! Good-night!"
+
+And off went Sally, leaving her mother to reason with herself about
+her own unreasonableness. After all, what was there in the fact that
+the little chap she remembered, seven years old, at the Residency at
+Khopal twenty odd years ago had grown up and inherited his father's
+baronetcy? What was there in this to discompose and upset her, to make
+her breath catch and her nerves thrill? A longing came on her that
+Gerry should not look in to say good-night till she was in a position
+to refuse interviewing on the score of impending sleep. She made a
+dash for bed, and got the light out, out-generalling him by perhaps
+a minute.
+
+What could she expect? Not that little Tamerlane, as his father called
+him, should die just to be out of her path. It was no fault of his
+that he was his father's son, with--how could she doubt after what
+Sally had just said?--the curse of his father's form of manhood or
+beasthood upon him. And yet, might it not have been better that he
+should have died, the innocent child she knew him, than live to follow
+his father's footsteps? Better, best of all that the whole evil brood
+should perish and be forgotten.... Stop!
+
+For the thought she had framed caught her breath and held it, caught
+her by the heart and checked its beating, caught her by the brain and
+stopped its thinking; and she was glad when her husband's voice found
+her, dumb and stunned in the silence, and brought a respite to the
+unanswerable enigma she was face to face with.
+
+"Hullo! light out already? Beg your pardon, darling. Good-night!"
+
+"I wasn't asleep." So he came in and said good-night officially and
+departed. His voice and his presence had staved off a nightmare idea
+that was on the watch to seize on her--how if chance had brought Sally
+across this unsuspected relation of hers, and events had forced a full
+declaration of their kinship? Somnus jumped at the chance given by its
+frustration; the sea air asserted itself, and went into partnership
+with him, and Rosalind's mind was carried captive into dreamland.
+
+But not before she had heard her husband stop singing to himself a
+German student's song as he closed his door on himself for the night.
+
+ "War ich zum grossen Herrn geboren, wie Kaiser Maximilian...."
+
+There could be no further unwelcome memories there, thank Heaven!
+No mind oppressed by them could possibly sing "Kram-bam-bambuli,
+krambam-bu-li!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+BATHING WEATHER AGAIN, AND A LETTER FROM TISHY BRADSHAW. THE TRIUMPH
+ OF ORPHEUS. BUT WAS IT EURYDICE OR THE LITTLE BATTERY? THE REV. MR.
+ HERRICK. OF A REVERIE UNDER A BATHING-MACHINE, AND OF GWENDOLEN'S
+ MAMMA'S CONNECTING-LINK. OF DR. CONRAD'S MAMMA'S DONKEY-CHAIR, AND
+ HIS GREAT-AUNT ELIZA. HOW SALLY AND HE STARTED FOR THEIR LAST WALK
+ AT ST. SENNANS
+
+
+The next day the morning was bright and the sea was clear of
+Poseidon's ponies. They had gone somewhere else. Therefore, it
+behooved Mrs. Lobjoit to get breakfast quick, because it was absurd
+to expect anybody to go in directly after, and the water wouldn't be
+good later than half-past ten. Which Sally, coming downstairs at eight,
+impressed on Mrs. Lobjoit, who entered her own recognisances that it
+should appear as by magic the very minute your mamma came down. For
+it is one of the pleasures of anticipation-of-a-joy-to-come to bring
+about its antecedents too soon, and so procure a blank period of
+unqualified existence to indulge Hope in without alloy. Even so, when
+true prudence wishes to catch a train, she orders her cab an hour
+before, and takes tickets twenty minutes before, and arrives on the
+platform eighteen minutes before there is the slightest necessity to
+do so; and then she stands on the said platform and lives for the
+train that is to be, and inquires of every guard, ticket-taker, and
+pointsman with respect to every linear yard of the platform edge,
+whether her train is going to come up there; and they ask each other
+questions, and give prismatic information; and then the train for
+Paradise (let us say) comes reluctantly backwards into the station
+with friends standing on its margin, and prudence seizes her valise
+and goes at a hand-gallop to the other end, where the _n_th class
+is, and is only just in time to get a corner seat.
+
+So, though there was no fear of the tide going out as fast as the
+train for Paradise, Sally, relying on Mrs. Lobjoit, who had become
+a very old friend in eight weeks, felt she had done well to be
+beforehand, and, as breakfast would be twenty minutes, sat down to
+write a letter to Tishy. She wrote epistle-wise, heedless of style
+and stops, and as her mother was also twenty minutes--we are not
+responsible for these expressions--she wrote a heap of it. Then
+events thickened, as Fenwick, returning from an early dip, met the
+postman outside, and came in bearing an expected letter which Sally
+pounced upon.
+
+"All about the row!" said she, attacking an impregnable corner of the
+envelope with a fork-point, in a fever of impatience to get at the
+contents. "Hang these envelopes! There, that's done it! Whatever they
+want to sticky them up so for I can't imagine...."
+
+"Get your breakfast, kitten, and read it after."
+
+"I dare say. Catch me! No, I'm the sort that never waits for
+anything.... No, mummy darling; it shan't get cold. I can gormandize
+and read aloud both at once."
+
+But she doesn't keep her promise, for she dives straight into an
+exploration ahead, and meanly says, "Just half a minute till I see
+what's coming," or, "Only to the end of this sentence," and also
+looks very keen and animated, and throws in short notes of exclamation
+and _well_'s and _there_'s and _think of that_'s till Fenwick enters
+a protest.
+
+"Don't cheat, Sarah!" he says. "Play fair! If you won't read it aloud
+yourself, let somebody else."
+
+"There's the first sheet to keep you quiet, Jeremiah!" Who, however,
+throws it over to Rosalind, who throws it back with a laugh.
+
+"What a couple of big babies you two are!" she exclaims. "As if I
+couldn't possess my soul in peace for five minutes! Do put the letter
+by till you've had your breakfasts."
+
+But this course was not approved, and the contents of Laetitia's
+epistle came out by fits and jerks and starts, and may be said to have
+been mixed with tea and coffee and eggs and bacon and toast. Perhaps
+we had better leave these out, and give the letter intact. Here it is:
+
+ "DEAREST SALLY,
+
+ "I am going to keep my promise, and write you a long letter at
+ once, and tell you all about our reception at home. You will
+ say it wasn't worth writing, especially as you will be back on
+ Monday. However, a promise is a promise!
+
+ "We got to Victoria at seven, and were not so very late
+ considering at G. Terrace; but when we had had something to
+ eat I propounded my idea I told you of, that we should just go
+ straight on, and beard mamma in her own den, and have it out.
+ I knew I shouldn't sleep unless we did. Paggy said, 'Wouldn't
+ it do as well if he called there to-morrow for the
+ Strad--which we had left behind last time as a connecting-link
+ to go and fetch away--and me to meet him as he came from the
+ shop?' But surprise-tactics were better--I knew they would
+ be--and now Paggy admits I was right.
+
+ "Of course, Thomas stared when he saw who it was, and was
+ going to sneak off without announcing us, and Fossett, who
+ just crossed us in the passage, was perfectly comic. Pag said
+ afterwards she was bubbling over with undemonstrativeness,
+ which was clever for him. I simply said to Thomas that I
+ thought he had better announce us, as we weren't expected, and
+ he asked who he was to announce, miss! Actually, I was rather
+ relieved when Pag said, 'Say Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw.'
+ I should have laughed, I know. Thomas looked a model of
+ discretion that wouldn't commit itself either way, and did as
+ he was bid in an apologetic voice; but he turned round on the
+ stairs to say to me, 'I suppose you know, msam, there's two
+ ladies and a gentleman been dining here?' Because he began
+ miss and ended ma'am, and then turned scarlet. Pag said after
+ he thought Thomas wanted to caution us against a bigamist
+ mamma was harbouring.
+
+ "Papa was very nice, really. His allusion to our little
+ escapade was the only one made, and might have meant nothing
+ at all. 'Well, you're a nice couple of people, upon my word!'
+ and then, seeing that mamma remained a block (which she
+ can), he introduced Paggy to one of the two ladies as 'My
+ son-in-law, Mr. Julius Bradshaw.' I'm sure mamma gave a wooden
+ snort and was ashamed of it before visitors, because she did
+ another rather more probable one directly after, and pretended
+ it was only that sort. Really, except a peck for me and saying
+ _howd_ and nothing more to Paggy, she kept herself to herself.
+ But it didn't matter, because of what happened. Really, it
+ quite made me jump--I mean the way the lady Pag was
+ introduced to rushed into his arms. I wasn't sure I hadn't
+ better take him away at once. She was a celebrated German
+ pianiste that had accompanied him in Paris. Mamma was at
+ school with her at Frankfort. She had been inconsolable at
+ the disappearance of the great Carissimi, whose playing of the
+ Kreutzer was the only perfectly sympathetic one she had ever
+ met. Was she never to play it with him again? Alas, no! for
+ she was off to Vienna to-morrow, and then to New York, and if
+ the ship went down she would never play the Kreutzer with
+ Signore Carissimi again!
+
+ "I saw papa's eye looking mischievous, and then he pointed to
+ the Strad, where it was lying on the piano--locked up safe;
+ we saw to that--and said there was Paganini's fiddle, why not
+ play the _Cruet-stand_, or whatever you called it, _now_?
+ Mamma found her voice, but lost her judgment, for she tried
+ to block the performance on a fibby ground. Think how late
+ it was, and how it would be keeping Madame von Hoefenhoffer!
+ She put her head in the lion's mouth there, for the Frau
+ immediately said she would play all night rather than lose
+ a note of Signore Carissimi. The other two went, and nobody
+ wanted them. I've forgotten the woman's second husband's
+ name--he's dead--but her son's the man I told you about. Of
+ course, he hadn't expected to meet me, and I hope he felt like
+ a fool. I was so glad it wasn't him, but Paggy. They played
+ right through the Kreutzer, and didn't want the music, which
+ couldn't be found, and then did bits again, and it was
+ absolutely glorious. Even mamma (she's fond of music--it's her
+ only good quality--and where should I get mine from if she
+ wasn't?) couldn't stop quite stony, though she did her best,
+ I promise you. As for papa, he was chuckling so over mamma's
+ dilemma--because she wanted to trample on Paggy, and it _was_
+ a dilemma--that he didn't care how long it went on. And do you
+ know, dear, it _did_ go on--one thing after another, that Frau
+ glued to the clavier like a limpet not detachable without
+ violence--till nearly one in the morning, having begun at ten
+ about! And there was papa and Egerton and Theeny all
+ sniggering at mamma, I know, in secret, and really proud of
+ the connexion, if the truth were known. Mamma tried to get a
+ little revenge by saying to me freezingly when the Hoefenhoffer
+ had gone: 'I suppose you are going home with Mr. Bradshaw,
+ Laetitia? Good-night.' And then she said _goodn_ to Paggy just
+ as she had said _howd_. I thought Paggy behaved so nicely.
+ However, I'll tell you all about that on Monday.
+
+ "Papa was _very_ nice--came out on the doorstep to say
+ good-night, and, do you know--it really _is_ very odd; it must
+ be the sea air--papa said to Paggy as we were starting: 'How's
+ the head--the nerves, you know--eh, Master Julius?' And
+ actually Paggy said: 'Why, God bless my soul, I had forgotten
+ all about them!' Oh, Sally darling, just think! Suppose they
+ got well, and all because I treated him to a honeymoon! Oh,
+ my gracious, what a long letter!"
+
+"There now! that _is_ a letter and a half. 'With love from us both,'
+mine affectionately. And twelve pages! And Tishy's hand's not so
+large, neither, as all that." This is Sally, as epilogue; but her
+mother puts in a correction:
+
+"It's thirteen pages. There's a bit on a loose page you haven't read."
+Sally has seen that, and it was nothing--so she says; but Fenwick
+picks it up and reads it aloud:
+
+"P.S.--Just a line to say I've remembered that name. She's
+Herrick--married a parson in India soon after her Penderfield
+husband died. She's great on reformatories."
+
+Sally reread her letter with a glow of interest on her face and a
+passing approval or echo now and then. She noticed nothing unusual
+in either her mother or her stepfather; but she did not look up,
+so absorbed was she.
+
+Had she done so she might have wondered why her mother had gone so
+pale suddenly, and why there should be that puzzled absent look on
+the handsome face her eyes remained fixed on across the table; but her
+own mind was far away, deep in her amusement at her friend's letter,
+full of her image of the disconcerted Dragon and the way Paganini
+and Beethoven in alliance had ridden rough-shod over Mrs. Grundy and
+social distinctions. She saw nothing, and finished a cup of coffee
+undisturbed, and asked for more.
+
+Fenwick, caught by some memory or association he could not define or
+give its place to, for the moment looked at neither of his companions.
+Rosalind, only too clear about all the postscript of the letter had
+brought before her own mind, saw reason to dread its effect on his.
+The linking of the name of Penderfield and that of the clergyman who
+had married them at Umballa--a name that, two days since, had had
+a familiar sound to him when she incautiously uttered it--was using
+Suggestion to bait a trap for Memory. She felt she was steering
+through shoal-waters perilously near the wind; but she made no attempt
+to break his reverie. She might do as much harm as good. She only
+watched his face, feeling its contrast to that of the absorbed and
+happy merpussy, rejoicing in the fortunate outcome of her friend's
+anxieties.
+
+It was a great relief when, with a deep breath and a shake, akin to
+a horse's when the flies won't take a hint, Fenwick flung off the
+oppression, whatever it was, and came back into the living world on
+a stepping-stone of the back-talk.
+
+"Well done, Paganini! Nothing like it since Orpheus and Eurydice--only
+this time it was Proserpine, not Pluto, that had to be put to sleep....
+What's the matter, darling? Anything wrong?"
+
+"Nothing at all. I was looking at you."
+
+"Well, _I'm_ all right!" And Sally looked up from her letter for a
+moment to say, "There's nothing the matter with Jeremiah," and went on
+reading as before. Sally's attitude about him always implied a kind of
+proprietorship, as in a large, fairly well-behaved dog. Rosalind felt
+glad she had not looked at _her_.
+
+Presently Fenwick said: "Now, who's coming for a walk with me?" But
+Sally was off directly to find the Swiss girl she sometimes bathed
+with, and Rosalind thought it would be nice in a sheltered place on
+the beach. She really wanted to be alone, and knew the shortest way
+to this was to sit still, especially in the morning; but Gerry had
+better get Vereker to go for a walk. Perhaps she would look in at
+his mother's later. So Fenwick, after a customary caution to Sally
+not to drown herself, went away to find Conrad, as he generally
+called him now.
+
+Rosalind was shirking a problem she dared not face from a cowardly
+conviction of its insolubility. What would she do if Gerry should,
+without some warning, identify her? She had to confess to herself that
+she had no clue at all to the effect it would have, coming suddenly,
+on him. She could at least imagine aspects, attitudes, tones of voice
+for him if it came slowly; but she could not supply any image of
+him, under other circumstances, not more or less founded on her
+recollections of twenty years ago. Might she not lose him again, as
+she lost him then? She _must_ get nearer to safety than she was now.
+Was she not relying on the house not catching fire instead of
+negotiating insurance policies or providing fire extinguishers?
+
+She would go and sit under the shelter of one of the many unemployed
+machines--for only a few daring spirits would follow Sally's example
+to-day--and try to think it out. Just a few instructions to Mrs.
+Lobjoit, and a word or two of caution to Gerry not to fall over
+cliffs, or to get run over at level-crossings or get sunstrokes,
+or get cold, etc., and she would fall back on her own society and
+think....
+
+Yes, that was the question! Might she not lose him again? And if she
+did, how live without him?... Oh yes, she would be no worse off than
+before, in a certain sense. She would have Sally still ... but....
+
+Which would be the worse? The loss of the husband whom every day
+taught her to love more dearly, or the task of explaining the cause
+of her loss to Sally? The one she fixed her mind on always seemed
+intolerable. As for the other contingencies--difficulties of making
+all clear to friends, and so forth--let them go; they were not worth
+a thought. But she _must_ be beforehand, and know how to act, how to
+do her best to avert both, if the thing she dreaded came to pass....
+
+There now! Here she was settled under the lee of a machine--happily
+the shadow-side, for the sun was warm--and the white foam of the
+undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who
+can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to
+come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers,
+and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get
+knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying
+over and over again that she _must_ be ready to meet the coming evil,
+possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so.
+She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the
+strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those
+who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest
+tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the
+tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and
+grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all
+else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half
+an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man
+says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this _it_? Has
+it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace.
+
+What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the
+revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could
+make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say
+or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was
+sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from
+him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment
+ratified. How could she guard against a repetition, in some form
+or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?
+
+As we know, she was still in ignorance of all the revived
+memories he had told to Vereker; but she knew there had been
+something--disjointed, perhaps, and not to be relied on, as the
+doctor had said, but none the less to be feared on that account. She
+had seen the effect of his sleepless night before he went away with
+Vereker, and knew it to be connected with mental disturbance outside
+and beyond mere loss of rest; and she had an uneasy sense that
+something was being kept from her. She could not but believe Gerry's
+cheerfulness was partly assumed. Had he been quite at ease about his
+recollections, surely he would have told them to _her_. Then this
+had all come on the top of that Kreutzkammer one. The most upsetting
+thing of all, though, was the change that had come over him suddenly
+at breakfast, just after he had read aloud the name Herrick--a
+name he had seemed not free from memory of when her tongue was
+betrayed into speaking it--and the name Penderfield. If it was
+due to this last, so much the worse! It was the name of all others
+that was best for oblivion.
+
+How hard it seemed that it must needs force itself to the fore in this
+way! Its present intrusion into her life and surroundings was utterly
+unconnected with anything in the past. Sally's friendship with Laetitia
+began in a music-class six years ago. The Sales Wilsons were people
+to all appearance as un-Indian as any folk need be. Why must Sally's
+friend, of all others, be the object of its owner's unwelcome
+admiration? To think, too, how near she had been to a precipice
+without knowing it! Suppose she had come face to face with that woman
+again! To be sure, her intercourse with Ladbroke Grove Road was
+limited to one stiff exchange of calls in "the season." Still, it
+might have happened ... but where was the use of begging and borrowing
+troubles?
+
+Was it, or was it not, the fact, she asked herself, that now, after
+all these years, she thought of this woman as worse than her husband,
+the iniquity of the accomplice as more diabolical than that of the
+principal? She found she could not answer this in the negative
+off-hand. The paradox was also before her that that incorrigible
+amphibious treasure of hers, whose voice was even now shouting to
+her more timorous friend from beyond the selvage-wave she had just
+contemptuously dived through--that that Sally, inexchangeable for
+anything she could conceive or imagine, must needs have been something
+quite other than she was, had she come of any other technical
+paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some
+terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong
+that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through
+the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add
+to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must
+be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and
+this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name,
+was the use of bruising her brains against the conundrums of the great
+unanswered metaphysical sphinx? Better be contented with the easy
+vernacular solution of the rhymester:
+
+ "Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
+ Evils from circumstances grow."
+
+Because she felt she was getting no nearer the solution of her own
+problem, and was, if anything, wandering from the point.
+
+Another way of looking at the matter was beginning to take form: had
+hung about her mind and forsaken it more than once. Might it not be
+better, after all, to dash at the position and capture it while her
+forces were well under control? To pursue the metaphor, the
+commissariat might not hold out. Better endure the ills we have--of
+course, Rosalind knew all that--than fly to others that we know not
+of. But suppose we have a chance of flying to others we can measure
+the length and breadth of, and staving off thereby an uncalculable
+unknown? She felt she almost knew the worst that could come of taking
+Gerry into her confidence, telling him boldly all about himself,
+provided she could choose her opportunity and make sure Sally was well
+out of the way. The concealment from Sally was the achievement whose
+failure involved the greatest risk. Her husband's mind would bear the
+knowledge of his story well or ill according to the way in which it
+reached him; but the necessity of keeping her girl in ignorance of it
+was a thing absolute. Any idea that Sally's origin could be concealed
+from her, and her stepfather's identity made known, Rosalind dismissed
+as simply fantastic.
+
+A lady who had established herself below high-water mark with many
+more books than she could read, and plant capable of turning out much
+more work than she could do, at this point fled for safety from a rush
+of white foam. It went back for more, meaning to wet her through next
+time; but had to bear its disappointment. Mrs. Arkwright--for it was
+Gwendolen's mamma--being driven from the shadow of the breakwater,
+cast about her for a new lodgment, and perceived one beside Mrs.
+Fenwick, whom she thought very well for the seaside, but not to leave
+cards on. _Might_ she come up there, beside you? Rosalind didn't want
+her, but had to pretend she did, to encourage her advent. It left
+behind it a track of skeins and volumes, which had trickled from the
+fugitive, but were recovered by a domestic, and pronounced dry.
+Besides, they were only library books, and didn't matter.
+
+"I haven't seen you since the other day on the pier, Mrs. Fenwick,
+or I wanted to have asked you more about that charming young couple,
+the Julian Attwoods. Oh dear! I knew I should get the name wrong....
+_Bradshaw!_ Yes, of course." Her vivid perception of what the name
+really is, when apprised of it, almost amounts to a paroxysm. You see,
+on the pier that day, she made a bad blunder over those Bradshaw
+people, and though she had consoled her conscience by admitting to
+her husband that she had "_mis le pied dans le plat_," still, she
+thought, if she was actually going to plump down on Mrs. Fenwick's
+piece of beach, she ought to do a little more apology. By-the-bye,
+why is it that ladies of her sort always resort to snippets of French
+idiom, whenever they get involved in a quagmire of delicacy--or
+indelicacy, as may be? Will Gwendolen grow like her mother? However,
+that doesn't concern us now.
+
+A little stiffness on Rosalind's part was really due to her wish to
+be by herself, but Mrs. Arkwright ascribed it to treasured resentment
+against her blunders of two days since. Now, she was a person who
+could never let anything drop--a tugging person. She proceeded to
+develop the subject.
+
+"Really a most interesting story! I need hardly say that my informants
+had given me no particulars. Very old friends of my husband's. Quite
+possible they really knew nothing of this young gentleman's musical
+gifts. Simply told my husband the tale as I told it to you. Just
+that the daughter of an old friend of theirs, Professor Sales
+Wilson--_the_ Professor Sales Wilson--of course, quite a famous name
+in literature--scholarship--that sort of thing--had run away with a
+shopman! That was what my husband heard, you know. _I_ merely
+repeated it."
+
+"Wasn't it, as things go, rather a malicious way of putting it--on
+their part?"
+
+Mrs. Arkwright gave sagacious nods, indicative of comfortable
+"_we_-know-the-world-we-live-in-and-won't-pretend" relationships
+between herself and the speaker. They advertised perfect mutual
+understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being
+any need for anything else between _us_! they said. Their editor then
+supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a _soupcon_
+of personal feeling in the case--bias, pique, whatever one likes to
+call it. _You_ know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for
+further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a
+breach of confidence, only I know I shall be safe with _you_...."
+
+"Don't tell me any secrets, Mrs. Arkwright. I'm not safe." But Mrs.
+Arkwright was not a person to be put off in this way. Not she! She
+meant elucidation, and nothing short of bayonets would stop her.
+
+"Well, really, perhaps I'm making it of too much importance to talk
+of breaches of confidence. After all, it only amounts to a gentleman
+having been disappointed. Of course, his relations would ... don't
+you see?..."
+
+"Was it some man that was after Tishy?" asked Rosalind, wondering
+how many more rejected suitors were wearing the willow about the
+haberdasher's bride. She had heard of one, only last night. She was
+not putting two and two together.
+
+"I dare say everybody knows it, and it's only my nonsensical caution.
+But one does get _so_ timorous of saying anything. _You_ know, dear
+Mrs. Fenwick! However, it's better to say it out now--of course, quite
+between ourselves, you know. It was Mrs. Samuel Herrick's son, Sir
+Charles Penderfield. He's the present baronet, you know. Father was
+in the army--rather distinguished man, I fancy. Her second husband was
+a clergyman...." Here followed social analysis, some of which Rosalind
+could have corrected. The speaker floundered a little among county
+families, and then resumed the main theme. "Mrs. Herrick is a sort of
+connexion of my husband's (I don't exactly know what; but then, I
+never _do_ know--family is such a bore), and it was _she_ told _him_
+all about this. I always forget these things when they're told _me_.
+But I can quite understand that the young man's mother, in speaking
+of it ... _you_ understand?..."
+
+"Oh, of course, naturally. I think my daughter's coming out. I saw her
+machine-door move." Rosalind began collecting herself for departure.
+
+"But, of course, you won't repeat any of this--but, of course, I know
+I can rely upon you--but, of course, it doesn't really matter...."
+A genial superior tone of toleration for mankind's foibles as seen by
+the two speakers from an elevation comes in at this point juicily. It
+meets an appreciative response in the prolonged first syllable of
+Rosalind's "_Cer_tainly. I never should dream," etc., whose length
+makes up for an imperfect finish--a dispersal of context from which
+a farewell good-morning emerges clear, hand-in-hand with a false
+statement that the speaker has enjoyed sitting there talking.
+
+Rosalind had not enjoyed it at all. She was utilising the merpussy's
+return to land as a means of escape, because, had there been no Mrs.
+Arkwright, and no folk-chatter, Sally would have come scranching up
+the shingle, and flung herself down beside her mother. As it was,
+Rosalind's "Oh, _I am_ so glad to get away from that woman!" told
+a tale. And Sally's truthful soul interpreted the upshot of that
+tale as prohibitive of merely going away and sitting down elsewhere.
+She and her mother were in honour bound to have promised to meet
+somebody somewhere--say, for instance, Mrs. Vereker and her son and
+donkey-chair. Sally said it, for instance, seeing something of the
+sort would soothe the position; and the two of them met the three, or
+rather the three and a half, for we had forgotten the boy to whom the
+control of the donkey was entrusted, and whose interpretation of his
+mission was to beat the donkey incessantly like a carpet, and to drag
+it the other way. The last held good of all directions soever. Which
+the donkey, who was small, but by nature immovable, requited by
+taking absolutely no notice whatever of his exertions.
+
+"What's become of my step-parent? I thought he was going to take you
+for a walk." So spoke Sally to Dr. Conrad as she and her mother met
+the three others, and the half. The doctor replied:
+
+"He's gone for a walk along the cliff by himself. I would have
+gone...." The doctor pauses a moment till the donkey-chair is a few
+paces ahead, accompanied by Mrs. Fenwick. "I would have gone, only,
+you see, it's just mother's last day or two...." Sally apprehends
+perfectly. But he shouldn't have dropped his voice. He was quite
+distant enough to be inaudible by the Octopus as far as overhearing
+words went. But any one can hear when a voice is dropped suddenly,
+and words are no longer audible. Dr. Conrad is a very poor
+Machiavelli, when all is said and done.
+
+"I can hear _every word_ my boy is saying to your girl, Mrs. Fenwick."
+This is delivered with exemplary sweetness by the Octopus, who then
+guesses with diabolical acumen at almost the exact wording of her
+son's speech. Apparently, no amount of woollen wraps, no double
+thickness of green veil to keep the glare out, no smoked glasses with
+flanges to make it harmless if it gets in, can obscure the Goody's
+penetrative powers when invoked for the discomfiture of her kind. "But
+does not my dear boy know," she continues gushily, "that I am _al_ways
+content to be _alone_ as long as I can be _sure_ that he is happily
+employed _elsewhere_. I am a _dull old woman_, I know; but, at least,
+my wish is not to be a burden. That was the wish of my great-aunt
+Eliza--your great-great-aunt, Conrad; you never saw her--in her last
+illness. I borrow her expression--'not to be a burden.'" The Octopus,
+having seized her prey in this tentacle, was then at liberty to
+enlarge upon the unselfish character of her great-aunt, reaping the
+advantages of a vicarious egoism from an hypnotic suggestion that that
+character was also her own. The great-aunt had, it appeared, lost the
+use, broadly speaking, of her anatomy, and could only communicate
+by signs; but when she died she was none the less missed by her
+own circle, whose grief for her loss took the form of a tablet. The
+speaker paused a moment for her hearers to contemplate the tablet,
+and perhaps ask for the inscription, when Sally saw an opening, and
+took advantage of it.
+
+"Dr. Conrad's going to be very selfish this afternoon, Mrs. Vereker,
+and come with us to Chalke, where that dear little church is that
+looks like a barn. I mean to find the sexton and get the key this
+time."
+
+"My dear, I shall be _per_fectly happy knitting. Do not trouble about
+me for one moment. I shall think how you are enjoying yourselves.
+When I was a girl there was nothing I enjoyed more than ransacking
+old churches...."
+
+And so forth. Rosalind felt almost certain that Sally either said or
+telegraphed to the doctor, who was wavering, "You'll come, you know.
+Now, mind; two-thirty punc.," and resolved, if he did _not_ come,
+to go to Iggulden's and extract him from the tentacles of his mamma,
+and remain entangled herself, if necessary.
+
+In fact, this was how the arrangement for the afternoon worked out.
+Dr. Conrad did _not_ turn up, as expected, and Rosalind carried out
+her intention. She rescued the doctor, and sent him round to join her
+husband and Sally, promising to follow shortly and catch them up. The
+three started to walk, but Fenwick, after a little slow walking to
+allow Rosalind to overtake them, had misgivings that she had got
+caught, and went back to rescue her, telling Sally and the doctor it
+was no use to wait--they would follow on, and take their chance. And
+the programme so indicated was acted on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+OF LOVE, CONSIDERED AS A THUNDERSTORM, AND OF AGUR, THE SON OF JAKEH
+ (PROV. XXX.). OF A COUNTRY WALK AND A JUDICIOUSLY RESTORED CHURCH.
+ OF TWO CLASPED HANDS, AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES. NOTHING SO VERY
+ REMARKABLE AFTER ALL!
+
+
+Love, like a thunderstorm, is very much more intelligible in its
+beginnings--to its chronicler, at least--than it becomes when it is,
+so to speak, overhead. We all know the clear-cut magnificence of the
+great thundercloud against the sky, its tremendous deliberation, its
+hills and valleys of curdling mist, fraught with God knows what
+potential of destruction in volts and ohms; the ceaseless muttering
+of its wrath as it speaks to its own heart, and its sullen secrets
+reverberate from cavern to cavern in the very core of its innermost
+blackness. We know the last prismatic benedictions of the sun it means
+to hide from us--the strange gleams of despairing light on the other
+clouds--clouds that are not in it, mere outsiders or spectators. We
+can remember them after we have got home in time to avoid a wetting,
+and can get our moist water-colours out and do a recollection of
+them before they go out of our heads--or think we can.
+
+But we know, too, that there comes a time of a sudden wind and
+agitated panic of the trees, and then big, warm preliminary drops,
+and then the first clap of thunder, clear in its own mind and full of
+purpose. Then the first downpour of rain, that isn't quite so clear,
+and wavers for a breathing-space, till the tart reminder of the first
+swift, decisive lightning-flash recalls it to its duty, and it becomes
+a steady, intolerable torrent that empties roads and streets of
+passers-by, and makes the gutters rivulets. And then the storm
+itself--flash upon flash--peal upon peal--up to the blinding and
+deafening climax, glare and thunderbolt in a breath. And then it's
+overhead, and we are sure something has been struck that time.
+
+It was all plain sailing, two days since, in the love-storm we want
+the foregoing sketch of a thunderstorm to illustrate, that was brewing
+in the firmament of Conrad Vereker's soul. At the point corresponding
+to the first decisive clap of thunder--wherever it was--Chaos set in
+in that firmament. And Chaos was developing rapidly at the time when
+the doctor, rescued by Sally's intrepidity from the maternal clutch,
+started on what he believed would be his last walk with his idol at
+St. Sennans. Now he knew that, when he got back to London, though
+there might be, academically speaking, opportunities of seeing Sally,
+it wasn't going to be the same thing. That was the phrase his mind
+used, and we know quite well what it meant.
+
+Of course, when some peevish author or invalid sends out a servant
+to make you take your organ farther off, a good way down the street,
+you can begin again exactly where you left off, lower down. But a
+barrel-organ has no soul, and one has one oneself, usually. Dr.
+Vereker's soul, on this occasion, was the sport of the love-storm of
+our analogy, and was tossed and driven by whirlwinds, beaten down by
+torrents, dazzled by lightning and deafened by thunder, out of reach
+of all sane record by the most eloquent of chroniclers. It was not in
+a state to accept calmly the idea of transference to Shepherd's Bush.
+A tranquil mind would have said, "By all means, go home and start
+afresh." But no; the music in this case refused to welcome the change.
+Still, he would forget it--make light of it and ignore it--to enjoy
+this last little expedition with Sally to the village church across
+the downs, that had been so sweetly decorated for the harvest
+festival. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. _Carpe diem!_
+
+So Dr. Conrad seemed to have grown younger than ever when he and Sally
+got away from all the world, after Fenwick had fallen back to rescue
+the captive, octopus-caught. Whereat Sally's heart rejoiced; for this
+young man's state of subordination to his skilful and overwhelming
+parent was a constant thorn in her side. To say she felt for him is
+to say nothing. To say that she would have jumped out of her skin with
+joy at hearing that he was engaged to that young lady, unknown; and
+that that young lady had successfully made terms of capitulation,
+involving the disbanding of the Goody, and her ultimate dispersal to
+Bedford Park with a companion--to vouch for this actually happening
+might be rash. But Sally told herself--and her mother, for that
+matter--that she should so jump out of her skin; and you may believe
+her, perhaps. We happen not to; but it may have been true, for all
+that.
+
+Agur, the son of Jakeh (Prov. xxx.), evidently thought the souls of
+women not worth analysis, and the way of a maid with a man not a
+matter for Ithiel and Ucal to spend time and thought over, as they
+seem to have said nothing to King Solomon on the subject. But then
+Agur candidly admitted that he was more brutish than any man, and
+had not the understanding of a man. So he contented himself with
+wondering at the way of a man with a maid, and made no remarks about
+the opposite case. Even with the understanding of a man, would he
+have been any nearer seeing into the mystery of a girl's heart? As
+for ourselves, we give it up. We have to be content with watching
+what Miss Sally will do next, not trying to understand her.
+
+She certainly _believed_ she believed--we may go that far--when she
+started to walk to Chalke Church with a young man she felt a strong
+interest in, and wanted to see happily settled in life--(all her
+words, please, not ours)--that she intended, this walk, to get out
+of Prosy who the young lady was that he had hinted at, and, what was
+more, she knew exactly how she was going to lead up to it. Only
+she wouldn't rush the matter; it would do just as well, or better,
+after they had seen the little church, and were walking back in the
+twilight. They could be jolly and chatty then. Oh yes, certainly a
+good deal better. As for any feeling of shyness about it, of relief at
+postponing it--what _nonsense_! Hadn't they as good as talked it all
+over already? But, for our own part, we believe that this readiness
+to let the subject wait was a concession Sally made towards admitting
+a personal interest in the result of her inquiry--so minute a one that
+maybe you may wonder why we call it a concession at all. Dr. Conrad
+was perhaps paltering a little with the truth, too, when he said to
+himself that he was quite prepared to fulfil his half-promise to
+Fenwick and reveal his mind to Sally; but not till quite the end of
+this walk, in case he should spoil it, and upset Sally. Or, perhaps,
+to-morrow morning, on the way to the train. Our own belief is, he was
+frightened, and it was an excuse.
+
+"We shall go by the beech-forest," was Sally's last speech to Fenwick,
+as he turned back on his mission of rescue. And twenty minutes later
+she and Dr. Conrad were crossing the smooth sheep-pasture that ended
+at the boundary of the said forest--a tract of woodland that was
+always treated with derision on account of its acreage. It was small,
+for a forest, certainly; but, then, it hadn't laid claim to the name
+itself. Sally spoke forgivingly of it as they approached it.
+
+"It's a handy little forest," said she; "only you can't lie down in
+it without sticking out. If you don't expect to, it doesn't matter."
+This was said without a trace of a smile, Sally-fashion. It took its
+reasonableness for granted, and allowed the speaker to continue
+without a pause into conversation sane and unexaggerated.
+
+"What were you and Jeremiah talking about the day before yesterday,
+when you went that long walk?"
+
+"We talked about a good many things. I've forgotten half."
+
+"Which was the one you don't want me to know about? Because you
+haven't forgotten that, you know." Vereker thinks of Sally's putative
+parents, the Arcadian shepherdess and the thunderbolt. Obviously
+a reality! Besides--so ran the doctor's thought--with her looking
+like _that_, what can I do? He felt perfectly helpless, but wouldn't
+confess it. He would make an effort. One thing he was certain of: that
+evasion, with those eyes looking at him, would mean instant shipwreck.
+
+"We had a long talk, dear Miss Sally, about how much Jeremiah"--a
+slight accent on the name has the force of inverted commas in
+text--"can really recollect of his own history." But Sally's reply
+takes a form of protest, without seeming warranty.
+
+"I say, Dr. Conrad, I wish you wouldn't.... However, never mind that
+now. I want to know about Jeremiah. Has he remembered a lot more, and
+not told?"
+
+"He goes on recovering imperfect versions of things. He told me a good
+many such yesterday--so imperfect that I am convinced as his mind
+clears he will find that some of them, though founded on reality, are
+little better than dreams. He can't rely on them himself.... But what
+is it you wish I wouldn't?"
+
+"Oh, nothing!--I'll tell you after. Never mind that now. What are the
+things--I mean, the things he recovers the imperfect versions of? You
+needn't tell me the versions, you know, but you might tell me what
+they were versions of, without any breach of confidence." Dr. Conrad
+has not time for more than a word or two towards the obvious protest
+against this way of stating the case, before Sally becomes frankly
+aware of her own unfairness. "No, I won't worm out and inquisit,"
+she says--and we are bound to give her exact language. "It isn't
+fair on a general practitioner to take him for a walk and get at
+his professional secrets." The merry eyebrows and the pearly teeth,
+slightly in abeyance for a serious moment or two, are all in evidence
+again as the black eyes flash round on the doctor, and, as it were,
+convey his reprieve to him. He acknowledges it in this sense.
+
+"I'm glad you don't insist upon my telling, Miss Sally. If you had
+insisted, I should have had to tell." He paused a second, drawing an
+inference from an expression of Sally's face, then added: "Well, it's
+true...."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of that." This refers to her intention to say
+something, which never fructified; but somehow got communicated,
+magnetically perhaps, to Dr. Conrad. "Never mind what, now. Because
+if your soles are as slippy as mine are, we shall never get up. Catch
+hold!"
+
+This last refers to the necessity two travellers are under, who,
+having to ascend a steep escarpment of slippery grass, can only do so
+by mutual assistance. Sally and the doctor got to the top, and settled
+down to normal progress on a practicable gradient, and all the
+exhilaration of the wide, wind-swept downland. But what had been to
+the unconscious merpussy nothing but a mutual accommodation imposed by
+a common lot--common subjection to the forces of gravitation and the
+extinction of friction by the reaction of short grass on leather--had
+been to her companion a phase of stimulus to the storm that was
+devastating the region of his soul; a new and prolonged peal of
+thunder swift on the heels of a blinding lightning-flash, and a deluge
+to follow such as a real storm makes us run to shelter from. On Dr.
+Conrad's side of the analogy, there was no shelter, and he didn't ask
+for it. Had he asked for anything, it would have been for the power to
+tell Sally what she had become to him, and a new language he did not
+now know in which to tell it. And such a vocabulary!
+
+But Dr. Conrad didn't know how simple the language was that he felt
+the want of--least of all, that there was only one word in its
+vocabulary. And when the two of them got to the top of their slippery
+precipice, breathless, he was no nearer the disclosure he had made up
+his mind to, and as good as promised Fenwick to make, than when they
+were treading the beechmast and listening to the wood-doves in the
+handy little forest they had left below. But oh, the little things
+in this life that are the big ones all the while, and no one ever
+suspects them!
+
+A very little thing indeed was to play a big part, unacknowledged till
+after, in the story of this walk. For it chanced that as they reached
+the hill-top the diminution of the incline was so gradual that at
+no exact point could the lease of Sally's hand to that of the doctor
+be determined by either landlord or tenant. We do not mean that he
+refused to let go, nor that Sally consciously said to herself that it
+would be rude to snatch back the gloveless six-and-a-half that she had
+entrusted to him, the very minute she didn't want his assistance. It
+was a _nuance_ of action or demeanour far, far finer than that on
+the part of either. But it was real all the same. And the facts of
+the case were as clear to Sally's subconsciousness, unadmitted and
+unconfessed, as though Dr. Conrad had found his voice then and there,
+and said out boldly: "There is _no_ young lady I am wavering about
+except it be you; she's a fiction, and a silly one. There is no one
+in the world I care for as I do for you. There is nothing in the world
+that I can name or dream of so precious to me as this hand that I now
+give up with reluctance, under the delusion that I have not held it
+long enough to make you guess the whole of the story." All that was
+said, but what an insignificant little thing it was that said it!
+
+As for Miss Sally, it was only her subself that recognised that any
+one had said anything at all. Her superself dismissed it as a fancy;
+and, therefore, being put on its mettle to justify that action, it
+pointed out to her that, after that, it would be the merest cowardice
+to shirk finding out about Dr. Conrad's young lady. She would
+manage it somehow by the end of this walk. But still an element of
+postponement came in, and had its say. Yet it excited no suspicions
+in her mind, or she ignored them. She was quite within her rights,
+technically, in doing so.
+
+It was necessary, though, to tide over the momentary reciprocity--the
+slight exchange of consciousnesses that, if indulged, must have ended
+in a climax--with a show of stiffness; a little pretence that we were
+a lady and gentleman taking a walk, otherwise undescribed. When the
+doctor relinquished Sally's hand, he felt bound to ignore the fact
+that hers went on ringing like a bell in the palm of his, and sending
+musical messages up his arm; and to talk about dewponds. They occur on
+the tops of downs, and are very scientific. High service and no rate
+are the terms of their water-supply. Dr. Conrad knew all about them,
+and was aware that one they passed was also a relic of prehistoric
+man, who had dug it, and didn't live long enough, poor fellow! to know
+it was a dewpond, or prehistoric. Sally was interested. A little bird
+with very long legs didn't seem to care, and walked away without undue
+hurry, but amazingly quickly, for all that.
+
+"What a little darling!" Sally said. "Did you hear that delicious
+little noise he made? Isn't he a water-ouzel?" Sally took the first
+name that she thought sounded probable. She really was making talk,
+to contribute her share to the fiction about the lady and gentleman.
+So was her companion. He reflected for a moment whether he could say
+anything about Grallae and Scolopacidae, or such like, but decided
+against heaping up instructive matter on the top of the recent
+dewponds. He gave it up, and harked back quite suddenly to congenial
+personalities.
+
+"What was it you wished I wouldn't, Miss Sally?"
+
+Our Sally had it on her lips to say, "Why, do _that_--call me _Miss_
+Sally, of course! I can't _tell_ you how I hate it." But, this time,
+she was seized with a sudden fit of shyness. She could have said it
+quite easily before that trivial hand-occurrence, and the momentary
+stiffness that followed it. Now she backed out in the meanest way, and
+even sought to fortify the lady and gentleman pretext. She looked back
+over the panorama they were leaving behind, and discerned that that
+was Jeremiah and her maternal parent coming through the clover-field.
+But it wasn't, palpably. Nevertheless, Sally held tight to her
+groundless opinion long enough for the previous question to be
+droppable, without effrontery. Then her incorrigible candour bubbled
+up, and she refused to take advantage of her own subterfuge.
+
+"Never mind, Dr. Conrad; I'll tell you presently. I've a bone to pick
+with you. Wait till we've seen the little churchy-wurchy--there it
+is, over there, with a big weathercock--and then we can quarrel and
+go home separate."
+
+Even Agur, the son of Jakeh, would have seen, at this point, the way
+that this particular maid, in addressing this particular man, was
+exaggerating a certain spirit of bravado; and if he had been
+accompanying them unseen from St. Sennans, would certainly have
+deserved his own self-censure if he had failed to trace this spirit
+to its source--the hand-incident. We believe it was only affectation
+in Agur, and that he knew all about the subject, men, maids, and
+every other sort; only he didn't think any of the female sorts worth
+his Oriental consideration. It was a far cry to the dawn of Browning
+in those days.
+
+Down the hill to the flatlands was a steep pathway, where talk paused
+naturally. When you travel in single file on a narrow footway with
+a grass slide to right or left of you, which it does not do to tread
+on with shoe-soles well polished on two miles of previous grass, you
+don't talk--especially if you have come to some point in talk where
+silence is not unwelcome. Sally and the doctor said scarcely a dozen
+words on the way down to the little village that owned the name and
+the church of Chalke. When they arrived in its seclusion they found,
+for purposes of information and reference, no human creatures visible
+except some absolutely brown, white-haired ones whose existence dated
+back only a very few years--not enough to learn English in. So, when
+addressed, they remained a speechless group, too unaccustomed to man
+to be able to say where keys of churches were to be had, or anything
+else. But the eldest, a very little girl in a flexible blue bonnet,
+murmured what Sally, with insight, interpreted into a reference.
+
+"Yes, dear, that's right. You go and tell moarther t' whoam that
+a lady and gentleman want to see inside the church, and ask for the
+key." Whereupon the little maid departs down a passage into a smell
+of wallflowers, and is heard afar rendering her message as a long
+narrative--so long that Dr. Conrad says the child cannot have
+understood right, and they had better prosecute inquiry further.
+Sally thinks otherwise, and says men are impatient fidgets.
+
+The resolute dumbness of one of the small natives must have been
+a _parti-pris_, for it suddenly disappeared during his sister's
+absence, and he gave a narrative of a family dissension, not
+necessarily recent. He appears proud of his own share in it, which
+Sally nevertheless felt she could not appear to sanction by silence.
+
+"You bad little boy," she said. "You smacked your sister Elizabeth in
+t' oy, and your foarther smacked you. I hope he hurt." The bad little
+boy assented with a nod, and supplied some further details. Then he
+asked for a penny before his sister Elizabeth came back. He wanted it
+to buy almond-rock, but he wouldn't give any of it to Jacob, nor to
+his sister Elizabeth, nor to Reuben, nor to many others, whom he
+seemed to exclude from almond-rock with rapture. Asked to whom he
+would give some, then, he replied: "Not you--eat it moyself!" and
+laughed heartlessly. Sally, we regret to say, gave this selfish
+little boy a penny for not being hypocritical. And then his sister
+Elizabeth reappeared with the key, which was out of scale with her,
+like St. Peter's.
+
+The inward splendours of this church had been inferred by Sally from
+a tiptoe view through the window, which commanded its only archaic
+object of interest--the monument of a woolstapler who, three hundred
+and odd years ago, had the effrontery to have two wives and sixteen
+children. He ought to have had one or two more wives, thought Dr.
+Conrad. However, the family was an impressive one now, decorated as
+it was with roses cut out of turnips, and groups of apples and carrots
+and cereals. And no family could have kneeled down more symmetrically,
+even in 1580.
+
+But there was plenty to see in that church, too. Indeed, it was
+for all the world like the advertisement sheets of _Architectonic
+Ecclesiology_ (ask for this paper at your club), and every window was
+brim full of new stained glass, and every inch of floor-space was new
+encaustic tiles. And, what was more, there was a new mosaic over the
+chancel-arch--a modest and wobbly little arch in itself, that seemed
+afflicted with its position, and to want to get away into a quiet
+corner and meditate. Sally said so, and added so should she, if she
+were it.
+
+"I wonder if the woolstapler was married here to one or other of the
+little square women," said she.
+
+"I wonder why the angels up there look so sulky," said Dr. Conrad. And
+then Sally, who seemed absent-minded, found something else to wonder
+about--a certain musical whistling noise that filled the little church.
+But it was only a big bunch of moonwort on a stained-glass-window
+sill, and the wind was blowing through a vacancy that should have been
+a date, and making AEolian music. The little maid with the key found
+her voice over this suddenly. Her bruvver had done that, she said
+with pride. He had oymed a stoo-an when it was putten up, and brokken
+t' glass. So that stained glass was very new indeed, evidently.
+
+"I wonder why they call that stuff 'honesty,' Miss Sally?" said the
+doctor. Sally, feeling that the interest of either in the church was
+really perfunctory, said vaguely--did they? And then, recoiling from
+further wonderment, and, indeed, feeling some terror of becoming
+idiotic if this sort of thing went on much longer, she exclaimed, with
+reality in her voice: "Because it's not pretending to take an interest
+when it doesn't, like us. But I wish you wouldn't, Dr. Conrad; I do
+hate it so."
+
+"Hate what? Taking an interest or calling it honesty? _I_ didn't call
+it honesty. _They_ did, whoever they are!"
+
+"No, no--I don't mean that. Never mind. I'll tell you when we're out.
+Come along--that is, if you've seen enough of the tidy mosaic and the
+tidy stained glass, and the tidy nosegays on the tidy table." The
+doctor came along--seemed well satisfied to do so. But this was the
+third time Sally had wished that Dr. Conrad wouldn't, and this time
+she felt she must explain. She wasn't at all sure that the name of
+that herb hadn't somehow got into the atmosphere--caught on, as it
+were, and twitted her. After all, why shouldn't she speak a plain
+thought to an old friend, as poor Prosy was now? Who could gainsay it?
+Moreover--now, surely this was an inspiration--why shouldn't she kill
+two birds with one stone, and work in her inquiry about the other
+young lady with this plain thought that was on her tongue to speak?
+
+The sun was a sheer blaze of golden light as they stepped out of the
+little church into its farewell efforts on behalf of the hill-shadowed
+land of premature sunsets, and the merpussy looked her best in its
+effulgence. Sally's good looks had never been such as to convince her
+she was a beauty; and we suppose she wasn't, critically speaking. But
+youth and health, and an arrow-straight bearing, and a flawless
+complexion, in a flood of evening light, make a bold bid for beauty
+even in the eyes of others than young men already half-imbecile with
+love. Sally's was, at any rate, enough to dumbfounder the little
+janitress with the key, who stood at gaze with violet eyes in her
+sunbrowned face in the shadow, looking as though for certain they
+would never close again; while, as for Dr. Conrad, he was too far gone
+to want a finishing touch, and if he had been, the faintest animation
+of an extra flush due to embarrassment at what she was meaning to say
+would have done the business for him. What could he do but wonder and
+idolize, even while he almost flinched before his idol; and wait to
+know what it was she wished he wouldn't? What was there in earth or
+heaven he would not, if Sally wished it?
+
+"Dr. Conrad, I'm sure you must know what I mean. I do so hate being
+called 'Miss Sally.' Do make it 'Sally,' and have done with it."
+
+The breezy freshness of her spontaneous ease was infectious, and the
+shy man's answering laugh showed how it had caught his soul. "Is that
+all?" says he. "That's soon done--Sally! You know, I _do_ call you
+Sally when I speak to your mother and...."
+
+"Now, _do_ say father. You've no idea how I like it when people call
+Jeremiah my father, instead of step."
+
+"Well--father, then. I mean, _they_ said call you Sally; so of
+course I do. But speaking to you--don't you see?..." The doctor
+hesitates--doesn't actually blush, perhaps. A slight pause in the
+conversation eases off the context. The little maiden has to lock up
+the church-door with the big key, and to receive sixpence and a kiss
+from Sally. The violet eyes follow the lady and gentleman, fixed in
+wonderment, as they move off towards the hill, and the last glint of
+the sun vanishes. Then Sally goes on where they left off:
+
+"No, I don't see. Speaking to me, what? Be an explicit little general
+practitioner, or we shall quarrel, after all, and go home different
+ways."
+
+"Well, look here! You know Bailey, the young man that drives me round
+in London?"
+
+"Yes. How does he come in?"
+
+"Why, just this way; I've known the youth for years, and the other
+day if it doesn't turn out that he's been married ever so long! And
+when I taxed him with needless secrecy and mistrust of an old friend,
+what does the young humbug say? 'The fact is, sir, I hadn't the cheek
+to tell you.' Well, _I_ was like that. I hadn't the cheek."
+
+"At any rate, you have the grace to call him a young humbug. I'm glad
+you're repentant, Dr. Conrad."
+
+"Come--I say, now--Sally! That's not fair."
+
+"What's not fair?"
+
+"Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. You called me 'Dr.
+Conrad.'"
+
+"We-ell, I don't see anything in _that_. Of course, it's quite a
+different thing--you and me."
+
+"Very well, then. I shall say Miss Sally. Miss Sally!"
+
+Here was Sally's opportunity, clear enough. She had never had a
+chance till now of bringing back the mysterious young lady of the
+jetty-interview into court, and examining her. She felt quite sure of
+herself and her powers of conducting the case--and she was mistaken.
+She knew nothing of the traps and pitfalls that were gaping for her.
+Her opening statement went easily though; it was all prepared.
+
+"Don't you see, Dr. Conrad dear, the cases are quite different? When
+you're married, your wife will call _me_ Sally, of course. But ...
+well, if I had a husband, you know, _he_ would call _you_ Dr. Vereker.
+Sure to!" Sally felt satisfied with the sound of her voice. But the
+doctor said never a word, and his face was grave. She would have to
+go on, unassisted, and she had invented nothing to say, so far. So
+a wavering crept in--nothing in itself at first, apart from her
+consciousness of it. "Besides, though, of course _she_ would call _me_
+Sally, she mightn't quite--not altogether, you know--I mean, she might
+think it...." But ambushes revealed themselves in every hedge, ready
+to break out if she ended this sentence. Dr. Conrad made completion
+unnecessary.
+
+"Whom do you mean by _she_, Sally?"
+
+"Why, of course! Who could I mean but the girl you told me about that
+you think wouldn't agree with your mother?"
+
+"I thought so. See what a mess I made of it! No, Sally, there's no
+such person. Now I shall have to speak the truth, and then I shall
+have to go away from you, and it will all be spoiled...." But Sally
+interposes on the tense speech, and sound of growing determination
+in the doctor's voice:
+
+"Oh no, don't--no, don't! Don't say anything that will change it from
+_now_. See how happy we are! How could it be better? I'll call you
+Conrad, or anything you like. Only, _don't_ make it different."
+
+"Very well, I won't. I promise!" The doctor calms down. "But, Sally
+dearest--I may say Sally dearest, mayn't I?..."
+
+"Well, perhaps. Only you must make that do for the present."
+
+But there is a haunting sense of the Octopus in the conscientious soul
+of her son, and even though he is allowed to say "Sally dearest," the
+burden is on him of knowing that he has been swept away in the turmoil
+of this whirlwind of self, and he is feeling round to say _peccavi_,
+and make amends by confession. He makes "Sally dearest" do for the
+moment, but captures as a set-off the hand that slips readily enough
+into the arm he offers for it, with a caressing other hand, before he
+speaks again. He renews his promise--but with such a compensation in
+the hand that remains at rest in his! and then continues:
+
+"Dearest Sally, I dare say you see how it was--about mother. It was
+very stupid of me, and I did it very badly. I got puzzled, and lost
+my head."
+
+"I thought it was a real young lady, anyhow."
+
+"I saw you did. And I do think--just now--I should have let you
+continue believing in the real young lady ... only when you said
+that...."
+
+"Said what?"
+
+"Said that about your husband, and calling me Conrad. I couldn't
+stand it. It was just like a knife ... no, I'm in earnest, it _was_.
+How could I have borne it--gone on at all--with you married to any
+one else?" He asks this in a tone of serious conviction, of one
+who is diagnosing a strange case, conscientiously. Sally declines
+consultation--won't be too serious over it.
+
+"You would have had to. Men get on capitally when they have to. But
+very likely I won't marry you. Don't be too sure! I haven't committed
+myself, you know." Nevertheless, the hand remains passive in the
+doctor's, as he continues his diagnosis:
+
+"I shouldn't deserve you. But, then, who could?"
+
+Sally tacitly refuses to help in answering this question.
+
+"I vote for neither of us marrying anybody else, but going on like
+now," says she thoughtfully.
+
+Sally, you see, was recovering herself after a momentary alarm,
+produced by the gust of resolution on Dr. Conrad's part. She had shut
+her window on the storm in his soul, and felt safe in resuming her
+identity. All through this walk, ever since the hand-incident, she
+had been hard at work ignoring suggestions of her inner mind that
+her companion was a loaded gun, and not quite safe to play with. Now
+she felt she had established a sort of _modus vivendi_ which would
+not involve her in the horrors of a formal engagement, with the
+concomitants of dissension and bitterness that she had noticed in
+friends' families on such occasions. Why shouldn't she and poor Prosy
+walk about together as much as they liked--yes, even call in at a
+church and get married if they liked--and have no one else fussing
+over them? The sort of semi-trothplight she had just hushed into
+silence would do for a good long time to come, because she understood
+Prosy down to the ground, and, of course, she knew that his
+mistrusting her was out of the question.
+
+As for the doctor, his was the sort of temperament one often meets
+with in very fair men of his type--intensely shy, but with a backing
+of resolution on occasion shown, bred of a capacity for high-strung
+passion. He had formed his intention fully and clearly of telling
+Sally the whole truth before they arrived at St. Sennans that evening,
+and had been hastened to what was virtually an avowal by a premature
+accident, as we have seen. Now the murder was out, and he was walking
+home slowly beside the marvel, the mystery, that had taken possession
+of the inmost recesses of his life--very much in her pocket, if the
+truth must be told--with an almost intolerable searching fire of joy
+finding every moment a new untouched recess in his innermost heart.
+He could have fallen at her feet and kissed them, could have poured
+out his very soul in passionate protestations, could and would have
+done anything that would have given a moment's respite to the tension
+of his love for this all-absorbing other creature that was absolutely
+here--a reality, and no dream--beside him. But he was going to be
+good, at her bidding, and remain a sane and reasonable general
+practitioner, however much his heart beat and his head swam. Poor
+Prosy!
+
+No! On consideration, Agur, the son of Jakeh, didn't know all about
+it. He only knew the Oriental temperament. He was quite up to date,
+no doubt, but neither he nor Ithiel nor Ucal nor King Solomon could
+reckon with spiritual volcanoes. Probably nothing in the world could
+have explained to either of them the meaning of one or two bits of
+music Schubert wrote on this subject of Love--we don't flinch from our
+phraseology; we know that all will understand it whom we care should
+do so. By-the-bye, Dr. Vereker was partly German, and a musician.
+Agur can have had no experience of either. The ancestors of Schubert
+and Beethoven were splendid savages in his day, sleeping on the
+snow-wreaths in the forests of the north; and somewhere among them
+there was a germ of a love-passion that was one day to ring changes
+on the peals that were known to Agur, the son of Jakeh.
+
+But this is wandering from the point, and all the while Sally and her
+lover have been climbing that hill again, and are now walking over the
+lonely down above, towards the sun, and their shadows are long behind
+them--at least, their shadow; for they have but one, and we fancy we
+have let some of our record slip, for the man's arm is round the
+girl's waist. Yes, some further clearer understanding has come into
+their lives, and maybe Sally sees by now that the vote she passed
+_nem. con._ may be rescinded in the end.
+
+If you had been near them then, invisible, we know you would not have
+gone close and listened. You would have been too honourable. But you
+would only have heard this--take our word for it!
+
+"Do you know what I always call you behind your back? I always call
+you Prosy. I don't know why."
+
+"Because I _am_ prosy--level-headed, slow sort of card--but prosy
+beyond a doubt."
+
+"No, you're not. I don't think you know the least what you're like.
+But I shall call you Prosy, all the same, or whatever I choose!"
+
+"You don't take to Conrad, somehow?"
+
+"It sounds so reproachful. It's like William."
+
+"Does William sound reproachful?"
+
+"Of course it does! Willy-yum! A most reproachful name. No, Prosy
+dear, I shall call you Prosy, whatever the consequences may be. People
+must put their own construction upon it."
+
+"Mother calls me Conny very often."
+
+"When she's not taking exception to you ... oh, no! I know. I was only
+joking ... there, then! we won't quarrel and go home opposite ways
+about that. Besides, I'm the young lady...."
+
+"Oh, Sally darling, dearest, it does make me feel such a fool. Please
+don't!"
+
+"Stuff and nonsense, Prosy dear! I shall, if I choose. So there!...
+No, but seriously--_why_ did you think I shouldn't get on well with
+your mother?" Poor Prosy looks very much embarrassed at this point;
+his countenance pleads for respite. But Sally won't let him off. And
+he is as wax in her hands, and she knows it, and also that every word
+that passes her coral lips seems to the poor stricken man a pearl of
+wisdom. And she is girl enough to enjoy her power, is Sally.
+
+"_Why_ do you think I shan't get on with her?" Note the slight
+variation in the question, driving the nail home, leaving no escape.
+The doctor's manner in reply is that of one who appeals to Truth
+herself to help him, before a court that acknowledges no other
+jurisdiction.
+
+"Because ... I must say it because it's true, only it seems so ...
+so disloyal, you might say, to mother...."
+
+"Well! Because what?"
+
+"Because then it won't be the same as _your_ mother. It can't be."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Oh, Sally--dearest love--how can it?"
+
+"Well! Perhaps _why not_ was fibs. And, of course, mother's an angel,
+so it's not fair. But, Prosy dear, I'll tell you one thing I _do_
+think--that affectionate sons make very bad medical attendants for
+their ma's; and I should say the same if they had all the degrees in
+Christendom."
+
+"You think a nervous element comes in?..."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And so the conversation ripples on, a quiet undertone of perfect
+confidence, freedom without reserve as to another self, suddenly
+discovered in the working identity of a fellow-creature. It ripples
+on just thus, all the distance of the walk along the topmost down, in
+the evening sunlight, and then comes a pause to negotiate the descent
+to their handy little forest below. Then a sense that they are coming
+back into a sane, dry world, and must be a lady and a gentleman again.
+But there must be a little farewell to the enchanted land they are
+leaving behind--a recognition of its story, under the beech-trees as
+the last gleam goes, and leaves us our inheritance of twilight.
+
+"Do you remember, darling, how we climbed up there, coming, and had
+hold to the top?" His lips find hers, naturally and without disguise.
+It is the close of the movement, and company-manners will be wanted
+directly. But just a bar or two, and a space, before the music
+dies!...
+
+"I remember," says Sally. "That began it. Oh, what a long time ago
+that does seem now! What a rum start it all is--the whole turn-out!"
+For the merpussy is her incorrigible self, and will be to the last.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When Sally reached home, very late, she was not displeased, though she
+was a little surprised, to find that Mrs. Lobjoit was keeping dinner
+back, and that her mother and Fenwick had not reappeared, having been
+away since they parted. Not displeased, because it gave her time to
+settle down--the expression she made use of, to think with; not with
+any admission, however, that she either felt or looked unusually
+_exaltee_--but surprised, because it was eight o'clock, and she felt
+that even Mrs. Lobjoit's good-nature might have limits.
+
+But while she was settling down, in a happy, excited dream she half
+wondered that she did not wake from, back came the truants; and she
+heard from her room above Mrs. Lobjoit's report that Miss Sally was
+gone upstairs to get ready, with the faintest hint of reproach in the
+tone. Then her mother's "Don't stop to read letters, Gerry--that'll
+do after," and Fenwick's "All right!" not followed by immediate
+obedience. Then, after half a moment's delay, in which she felt
+some surprise at herself for not going out to meet them coming up
+the stairs, her mother's voice approaching, that asked where the
+kitten was.
+
+"Oh, here you are, chick!--how long have you been in? Why, Sallykin!
+what is it, child?... Oh, Gerry--Gerry--come up here and hear this!"
+For the merpussy, in spite of many stoical resolutions, had merged
+a beginning of verbal communication in a burst of happy tears on her
+mother's bosom.
+
+And when Fenwick, coming upstairs three steps at a time, filled the
+whole house with "Hullo, Sarah! what's the latest intelligence?" this
+young lady had only just time to pull herself together into something
+like dignified self-possession, in order to reply ridiculously--how
+could she have been our usual Sally, else?--"We-ell! I don't see that
+it's anything so very remarkable, after all. I've been encouraging
+my medical adviser's attentions, if you want to know, Jeremiah."
+
+Was it only a fancy of Sally's, as she ended off a hurried toilet, for
+Mrs. Lobjoit's sake, or did her mother say to Fenwick, "Well!--_that_
+is something delightful, at any rate"? As though it were in some sense
+a set-off against something not delightful elsewhere.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+OF A RECURRENCE FROM _AS YOU LIKE IT_ AND HOW FENWICK DIDN'T. WHY A
+ SAILOR WOULD NOT LEARN TO SWIM. THE BARON AGAIN. OF A CUTTLE-FISH
+ AND HIS SQUIRT. OF THE POWER OF _A PRIORI_ REASONING. OF SALLY'S
+ CONFESSION, AND HOW FENWICK WENT TO A FIRST-CLASS HOTEL
+
+
+When Fenwick turned back towards home, ostensibly to shorten
+Rosalind's visit to the doctor's mother, he had no intention of doing
+so early enough to allow of his rejoining his companions, however
+slowly they might walk. Neither did he mean to deprive old Mrs.
+Vereker of Rosalind until she had had her full allowance of her. In an
+hour would do--or three-quarters. He discounted twenty-five per cent.,
+owing to a recollection of the green veil and spectacles. Then he felt
+unkind, and said to himself, that, after all, the old woman couldn't
+help it.
+
+Fenwick felt he was making a great concession in giving up
+three-quarters of an hour of Rosalind. As soon as he had had exercise
+enough for the day, and was in a mood to smoke and saunter about idly,
+he wanted Rosalind badly, and was little disposed to give her up. But
+the old Goody was going away to-morrow, and he would be liberal. He
+would take a turn along the sea-front--would have time to get down to
+the jetty--and then would invade the cave of the Octopus and extract
+the prisoner from its tentacles.
+
+His intention in forsaking Sally and the doctor was half suspected by
+the latter, quite clear to himself, and only unperceived by his opaque
+stepdaughter. As he idled down towards the old fisher-dwellings and
+the net-huts, he tried to picture the form the declaration would take,
+and the way it would be received. That this would be favourable he
+never doubted for a moment; but he recalled the speech of Benedict
+to Beatrice, "By my troth I take thee for pity," and fancied Sally's
+response might be of the same complexion. His recollection of these
+words produced a mental recurrence, a distressing and imperfect one,
+connected with the earlier time he could not reach back to, of the
+words being used to himself by a girl who ascribed them to Rosalind
+in _As You Like It_, and a discussion after of their whereabouts in
+Shakespeare.
+
+The indescribable wrench this gave his mind was so painful that he
+was quite relieved to recall Vereker's opinion that it was always
+the imperfection of the memory and the effort that gave pain, not the
+thing remembered. And in this case there could be no doubt that it
+was a mere dream, for the girl not only took the form of his Rosey
+he was going back to directly, but actually claimed her name, saying
+distinctly, "like my namesake, Celia's friend, in Shakespeare." Could
+any clearer proof be given that it was mere brain-froth?
+
+The man with "Bessie" and "Elinor" tattooed on his arm was enjoying
+a pipe and mending a net, not to be too idle. The glass might be
+rising--or not. He was independent of Science. A trifle of wind in
+the night was his verdict, glass or no! The season was drawing nigh
+to a close now for a bathing-resort, as you might say. Come another
+se'nnight, you wouldn't see a machine down, as like as not. But you
+could never say, to a nicety. He'd known every lodging in the old town
+full, times and again, to the end of September month, before now. But
+this year was going to fall early, and your young lady would lose her
+swimming.
+
+"She's a rare lass, too, for the water," he concluded, without any
+consciousness of familiarity in the change of phrase. "Not that I know
+much myself, touching swimming and the like. For I can't swim myself,
+never a stroke."
+
+"That's strange, too, for a seaman," said Fenwick.
+
+"No, sir! Not so strange as you might think it. You ask up and down
+among we, waterside or seafaring, and you'll find a many have never
+studied it, for the purpose. Many that would make swimmers, with a bit
+of practice, will hold off, for the reason I tell you. Overboard in
+mid-ocean, and none to help, and not a spar, would you soonest drown,
+end on, or have to fight for it, like it or no?"
+
+"Drown! The sooner the better." Fenwick has no doubt about the matter.
+
+"Why, sure! So I say, master. And I've put no encouragement on young
+Benjamin, over yonder, to give study to the learning of it, for the
+same reason. And not a stroke can he swim, any more than his father."
+
+"Well! I can't swim myself, so there's three of us!" said Fenwick. "My
+daughter swims enough for the lot." It gave him such pleasure to speak
+thus of Sally boldly, where there need be no exact definition of their
+kinship. The net-mender pursued the subject with the kind of gravity
+on him that always comes on a seaman when drowning is under discussion.
+
+"She's a rare one, for sure. Never but three, or may be fower, have
+I seen in my time to come anigh to her--man nor woman. The best swimmer
+a long way I've known--Peter Burtenshaw by name--I helped bring to
+after drowning. He'd swum--at a guess--the best part of six hours
+afower we heard the cry of him on our boat. Too late a bit we were,
+but we found him, just stone-dead like, and brought him round. It was
+what Peter said of that six hours put me off of letting 'em larn yoong
+Benjamin to swim when he was a yoongster. And when he got to years of
+understanding I told him my mind, and he never put himself to study it."
+
+Fenwick would have liked to go on talking with the fisherman, as his
+mental recurrence about Shakespeare had fidgeted him, and he found
+speech a relief. But some noisy visitors from the new St. Sennans
+on the cliff above had made an irruption into the little old
+fishing-quarter, and the attention of the net-mender was distracted
+by possibilities of a boat-to-day being foisted on their simplicity;
+it was hardly rough enough to forbid the idea. Fenwick, therefore,
+sauntered on towards the jetty, but presently turned to go back, as
+half his time had elapsed.
+
+As he repassed the net-mender with a short word or two for
+valediction, his ear was caught by a loud voice among the party of
+visitors, who were partly sitting on the beach, partly throwing
+stones in the water. Something familiar about that voice, surely!
+
+"I gannod throw stoanss. I am too vat. I shall sit on the peach and
+see effrypotty else throw stoanss. I shall smoke another cigar. Will
+you haff another cigar, Mr. Prown? You will not? Ferry well! Nor you,
+Mrs. Prown? Not for the worlt? Ferry well! Nor you, Mr. Bilkington?
+Ferry well! I shall haff one myself, and you shall throw stoanss."
+And then, as though to remove the slightest doubt about the identity
+of the speaker, the voice broke into song:
+
+ "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden,
+ Einen bessern findst du nicht--"
+
+but ended on "Mein guter Kamerad," exclaiming stentorianly, "Opleitch
+me with a madge," and lighting his cigar in spite of his companions'
+indignation at the music stopping.
+
+Fenwick stood hesitating a moment in doubt what to do. His inclination
+was to go straight down the beach to his old friend, whom--of course,
+you understand?--he now remembered quite well, and explain the strange
+circumstances that had rendered their meeting in Switzerland abortive.
+But then!--what would the effect be on his present life, in his
+relation to Rosalind and (almost as important) to Sally? Diedrich
+Kreutzkammer had been, for some time in California, a most intimate
+friend. Fenwick had made him the confidant of his marriage and his
+early life, all that he had since forgotten, and he had it now in his
+power to recover all this from the past. Strange to say, although he
+could remember the telling of these things, he could only remember
+weak, confused snatches of what he told. It was unaccountable--but
+there!--he could not try to unravel that skein now. He must settle,
+and promptly, whether to speak to the Baron or to run.
+
+He was not long in coming to a decision, especially as he saw
+that hesitation was sure to end in the adoption of the former
+course--probably the wrong one. He just caught the Baron's last
+words--a denunciation of the hotel he was stopping at, loud enough
+to reach the new St. Sennans, of which it was the principal
+constituent--and then walked briskly off. He arrived at Iggulden's
+within the hour he had first conceded to the Octopus, and got
+Rosalind out for a walk, as originally proposed.
+
+There was no apparent reason why the impossibility of overtaking Sally
+and the doctor should be interpreted into an excuse for going in the
+opposite direction; but each accepted it as such, or as a justification
+at least. Rosalind had not so distinct a reason as her husband for
+wishing not to break in upon them, as he had not reported the whole of
+his last talk with Vereker. But though she did not know that Dr. Conrad
+had as good as promised to make a clean breast of it before returning
+to London, she thought nothing was more likely than that he should do
+so, and resolved to leave the stage clear for the leading parts. She
+may even have flattered herself that she was showing tact--keeping
+an unconscious Gerry out of the way, who might else interfere with
+the stars in their courses, in the manner of the tactless. Rosalind
+suspected this of Sally, that whatever she might think she thought,
+and whatever parade she made of an even mind no sentiments whatever
+prevailed in, there was in her inmost heart another Sally, locked in
+and unconfessed, that had strong views on the subject. And she wanted
+this Sally to be let out for a spell, or for poor Prosy to be allowed
+into her cell long enough to speak for himself. Anyhow, this was their
+last chance here, and she wasn't going to spoil it.
+
+She had gone near to making up her mind--after her sufferings from
+Gwenny's mamma in the morning--to attempt, at any rate, a communication
+of their joint story to her husband. But it _must_ depend on
+circumstances and possibilities. She foresaw a long period of
+resolutions undermined by doubts, decisions rescinded at the last
+moment, and suddenly-revealed ambushes, and perhaps in the end
+self-reproach for a mismanaged revelation that might have been so much
+more skilfully done. Never mind--it was all in the day's work! She
+had borne much, and would bear more.
+
+"How do you know they are all nonsense, Gerry darling?" We catch their
+conversation in the middle as they walk along the sands the tide is
+leaving clear, after accommodating the few morning-bathers with every
+opportunity to get out of their depths. "How do you _know_? Surely
+the parts that you _do_ seem to remember clearly _must_ be all right,
+however confused the rest is."
+
+Fenwick gives his head the old shake, dashes his hair across his brow
+and rubs it, then replies: "The worst of the job is, you see, that
+the bits I remember clearest are the greatest gammon. What do you make
+of that?"
+
+Rosalind's hand closes on her nettle. "Instance, Gerry!--give me an
+instance, and I shall know what you mean."
+
+Fenwick is outrageously confident of the safety of his last imperfect
+recollection. He can trust to its absurdity if he can trust to
+anything.
+
+"Well! For instance, just now--an hour ago--I recollected something
+about a girl who would have it Rosalind in _As You Like It_ said,
+'By my troth I take thee for pity,' to Orlando. And all the while it
+was Benedict said it to Beatrice in _All's Well that Ends Well_."
+
+The hand on the nettle tightens. "Gerry _dearest_!" she remonstrates.
+"There's nothing in _that_, as Sallykin says. Of course it _was_
+Benedict said it to Beatrice."
+
+"Yes--but the gammon wasn't in that. It was the girl that said it.
+When I tried to think who it was, she turned into _you_! I mean, she
+became exactly like you."
+
+"But I'm a woman of forty." This was a superb piece of
+nettle-grasping; and there was not a tremor in the voice that said
+it, and the handsome face of the speaker was calm, if a little pale.
+Fenwick noticed nothing.
+
+"Like what I should suppose you were as a girl of eighteen or twenty.
+It's perfectly clear how the thing worked. It was from something else
+I seem to recollect her saying, 'Like my namesake, Celia's friend in
+Shakespeare.' The moment she said that, of course the name Rosalind
+made me think you into the business. It was quite natural."
+
+"Quite natural! And when I was that girl that was what I said." She
+had braced herself up, in all the resolution of her strong nature,
+to the telling of her secret, and his; and she thought this was her
+opportunity. She was mistaken. For as she stood, keeping, as it were,
+a heartquake in abeyance, till she should see him begin to understand,
+he replied without the least perceiving her meaning--evidently
+accounting her speech only a variant on "If I _had_ been that girl,"
+and so forth--"Of course you did, sweetheart," said he, with a laugh
+in his voice, "_when_ you were that girl. And I expect that girl said
+it when she was herself, whoever she was, and the name Rosalind turned
+her into you? Look at this cuttlefish before he squirts."
+
+For a moment Rosalind Fenwick was almost two people, so distinctly did
+the two aspects or conditions of herself strike her mind. The one was
+that of breath drawn freely, of a respite, a reprieve, a heartquake
+escaped; for, indeed, she had begun to feel, as she neared the crisis,
+that the trial might pass her powers of endurance. The other of a new
+terror--that the tale, perhaps, _could not be told at all_! that,
+unassisted by a further revival of her husband's memory, it would
+remain permanently incredible by him, with what effect of a
+half-knowledge of the past God only knew. The sense of reprieve got
+the better of the new-born apprehension--bid it stand over for a
+while, at least. Sufficient for the day was the evil thereof.
+
+Meanwhile, Gerry, absolutely unconscious of her emotion, and seeming
+much less disconcerted over this abortive recollection than over
+previous ones, stood gazing down into the clear rock-pool that
+contained the cuttlefish. "Do come and look at him, Rosey love," said
+he. "His manners are detestable, but there can be no doubt about the
+quality of his black."
+
+She leaned a bit heavily on the arm she took as they left the
+cuttlefish to his ill-conditioned solitude. "Tired, dearest?" said
+her husband; and she answered, "Just a little!" But his mind was a
+clean sheet on which his story would have to be written in ink as
+black as the cuttlefish's Parthian squirt, and in a full round hand
+without abbreviations, unless it should do something to help itself.
+Let it rest while she rested and thought.
+
+She thought and thought--happy for all her strain of nerve and mind,
+on the quiet stretch of sand and outcrop of chalk, slippery with weed,
+that the ebbing tide would leave safe for them for hours to come.
+So thinking, and seeing the way in which her husband's reason was
+entrenched against the facts of his own life, in a citadel defended by
+human experience at bay, she wavered in her resolution of a few hours
+since--or, rather, she saw the impossibility of forcing the position,
+thinking contentedly that at least if it was so impracticable to
+her it would be equally so to other agencies, and he might be relied
+on to remain in the dark. The _status quo_ would be the happiest,
+if it could be preserved. So when, after a two hours' walk through
+the evening glow and the moonrise, Rosalind came home to Sally's
+revelation, as we have seen, the slight exception her voice took
+to universal rejoicing was the barest echo of the tension of her
+absolutely unsuccessful attempt to get in the thin end of the wedge
+of an incredible revelation.
+
+Quite incredible! So hopeless is the case of a mere crude,
+unadulterated fact against an irresistible _a priori_ belief in its
+incredibility.
+
+Sally was reserved about details, but clear about the outcome of her
+expedition with Prosy. They perfectly understood each other, and it
+wasn't anybody else's concern; present company's, of course, excepted.
+Questioned as to plans for the future--inasmuch as a marriage did not
+seem inconsequent under the circumstances--Sally became enigmatical.
+The word "marriage" had not been so much as mentioned. She admitted
+the existence of the institution, but proposed--now and for the
+future--to regard it as premature. Wasn't even sure she would tell
+anybody, except Tishy; and perhaps also Henriette Prince, because she
+was sure to ask, and possibly Karen Braun if she did ask. But she
+didn't seem at all clear what she was going to say to them, as she
+objected to the expression "engaged." A thing called "it" without
+an antecedent, got materialised, and did duty for something more
+intelligible. Yes!--she would tell Tishy about It, and just those
+one or two others. But if It was going to make any difference, or
+there was to be any fuss, she would just break It off, and have done
+with It.
+
+Sentiments of this sort provoked telegraphic interchanges of
+smile-suggestion between her hearers all through the evening meal
+that was so unusually late. This lateness received sanction from the
+fact that Mr. Fenwick would very likely have letters by the morning
+post that would oblige him to return to town by the afternoon train.
+If so, this was his last evening, and clearly nothing mattered.
+Law and order might be blowed, or hanged.
+
+It was, under these circumstances, rather a surprise to his hearers
+when he said, after smoking half through his first cigar, that he
+thought he should walk up to the hotel in the new town, because he
+fancied there was a man there he knew. As to his name, he thought it
+was Pilkington, but wasn't sure. Taunted with reticence, he said it
+was nothing but business. As Rosalind could easily conceive that Gerry
+might not want to introduce all the Pilkingtons he chanced across to
+his family, she didn't press for explanation. "He'll very likely call
+round to see your young man, chick, when he's done with Pilkington."
+To which Sally replied, "Oh, _he'll_ come round here. Told him to!"
+Which he did, at about ten o'clock. But Fenwick had never called at
+Iggulden's, neither had he come back to his own home. It was after
+midnight before his foot was on the stairs, and Sally had retired
+for the night, telling her mother not to fidget--Jeremiah would be
+all right.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+OF AN OBSERVANT AND THOUGHTFUL, BUT SNIFFY, WAITER; AND HOW HE OPENED
+ A NEW BOTTLE OF COGNAC. HOW THE BARON SAW FENWICK HOME, WITHOUT HIS
+ HAT. AN OLD MEMORY FROM ROSALIND'S PAST AND HIS. AND THEN FACE TO FACE
+ WITH THE WHOLE. SLEEP UPON IT! BUT WHAT BECAME OF HIS HORRIBLE BABY?
+
+
+At eleven o'clock that night a respectable man with weak eyes and
+a cold was communing with a commanding Presence that lived in a
+bureau--nothing less!--in the entrance-hall of the big hotel at the
+new St. Sennans. It was that of a matron with jet earrings and
+tube-curls and a tortoise-shell comb, and an educated contempt for
+her species. It lived in that bureau with a speaking-pipe to speak
+to every floor, and a telephone for the universe beyond. He that now
+ventured to address it was a waiter, clearly, for he carried a
+table-napkin, on nobody's behalf and uselessly, but with a feeling
+for emblems which might have made him Rouge Dragon in another sphere.
+As it was, he was the head waiter in the accursed restaurant or
+dining-_salon_ at the excruciating new hotel, where he would bring you
+cold misery from the counter at the other end, or lukewarm depression
+_a la carte_ from the beyond--but nothing that would do you any good
+inside, from anywhere.
+
+"Are those parties going, in eighty-nine, do you make out?" The
+Presence speaks, but with languid interest.
+
+"Hapathetic party, and short customer. Takes you up rather free.
+Name of Pilkington. Not heard 'em say anything!"
+
+"Who did you say was going?"
+
+"The German party. Party of full 'abit. Call at seven in the
+morning. Fried sole and cutlets _a la_ mangtynong and sweet omelet
+at seven-thirty sharp. Too much by way of smoking all day, in my
+thinking! But they say plums and greengages, took all through meals,
+is a set-off."
+
+"I don't pretend to be an authority. Isn't that him, in the
+smoking-room?"
+
+"Goin' on in German? Prob'ly." Both stop and listen. What they hear
+is the Baron, going on very earnestly indeed in German. What keeps
+them listening is that another voice comes in occasionally--a voice
+with more than mere earnestness in it; a voice rather of anguish
+under control. Then both voices pause, and silence comes suddenly.
+
+"Who's the other party?"
+
+"In a blue soote, livin' in one of the sea-'ouses down on the beach.
+Big customer. Prodooces a rousin' impression!"
+
+"Is that his daughter that swims?... That's him--coming away."
+
+But it isn't. It is the Baron, wrathful, shouting, swearing, neither
+in German nor English, but in either or both. Where is that tamned
+kellner? Why does he not answer the pell? This is an _abscheuliches_
+hotel, and every one connected with it is an _Esel_. What he wants
+is some cognac and a doctor forthwith. His friend has fainted, and
+he has been pressing the tamned puddon, and nobody comes.
+
+The attitude of the lady with the earrings epitomizes the complete
+indifference of a hotel-keeper to the private lives of its guests
+nowadays. That bell must be seen to, she says. Otherwise she is
+callous. The respectable waiter hurries for the cognac, and returns
+with a newly-drawn bottle and two glasses to the smoking-room, to find
+that the gentleman has recovered and won't have any. He suggests that
+our young man could step round for Dr. Maccoll; but the proposed
+patient says, "The devil fly away with Dr. Maccoll!" which doesn't
+look like docility. The respectable waiter takes note of his
+appearance, and reports of it to his principal on dramatic grounds,
+not as a matter into which human sympathies enter.
+
+"Very queer he looks. Doo to reaction, or the coatin's of the stomach.
+Affectin' the action of the heart.... No, there's nobody else in the
+smoking-room. Party with the 'ook instead of a hand's watching of 'em
+play penny-pool in the billiard-room." Surely a tale to bring a tear
+to the eye of sensibility! But not to one that sees in mankind only
+a thing that comes and goes and pays its bill--or doesn't. The lady in
+the bureau appears to listen slightly to the voices that come afresh
+from the smoking-room, but their duration is all she is concerned
+with. "He's going now," she says. He is; and he does look queer--very
+queer. His companion does not leave him at the door, but walks out
+into the air with him without his hat, speaking to him volubly
+and earnestly, always in German. His speech suggests affectionate
+exhortation, and the way he takes his arm is affectionate. The voices
+go out of hearing, and it is so long before the Baron returns,
+hatless, that he must have gone all the way to the sea-houses down
+on the beach.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Sally retired to her own couch in order to supply an inducement to her
+mother to go to bed herself, and sit up no longer for Gerry's return,
+which might be any time, of course. Rosalind conceded the point, and
+was left alone under a solemn promise not to be a goose and fidget.
+But she was very deliberate about it; and though she didn't fidget,
+she went all the slower that she might think back on a day--an
+hour--of twenty years ago, and on the incident that Gerry had half
+recalled, quite accurately as far as it went, but strangely
+unsupported by surroundings or concomitants.
+
+It came back to her with both. She could remember even the face of her
+mother's coachman Forsyth, who had driven her with Miss Stanynaught,
+her _chaperon_ in this case, to the dance where she was to meet Gerry,
+as it turned out; and how Forsyth was told not to come for them before
+three in the morning, as he would only have to wait; and how Miss
+Stanynaught, her governess of late, who was over forty, pleaded for
+two, and Forsyth _did_ have to wait; and how she heard the music and
+the dancing above, for they were late; and how they waded upstairs
+against a descending stream of muslin skirts and marked attentions
+going lawnwards towards the summer night, and bent on lemonade and
+ices; and then their entry into the dancing-room, and an excited
+hostess and daughters introducing partners like mad; and an excited
+daughter greeting a gentleman who had come upstairs behind them, with
+"Well, Mr. Palliser, you _are_ late. You don't deserve to be allowed
+to dance at all." And that was Jessie Nairn, of course, who added,
+"I've jilted you for Arthur Fenwick."
+
+How well Rosalind could remember turning round and seeing a splendid
+young chap who said, "What a jolly shame!" and didn't seem to be
+oppressed by that or anything else; also Jessie's further speech,
+apologizing for having also appropriated Miss Graythorpe's partner. So
+they would have to console each other. What a saucy girl Jessie was,
+to be sure! She introduced them with a run, "Mr. Algernon Palliser,
+Miss Rosalind Graythorpe, Miss Rosalind Graythorpe, Mr. Algernon
+Palliser," and fled. And Rosalind was piqued about Arthur Fenwick's
+desertion. It seemed all so strange now--such a vanished world! Just
+fancy!--she had been speculating if she should accept Arthur, if he
+got to the point of offering himself.
+
+But a shaft from Cupid's bow must have been shot from a slack string,
+for Rosalind could remember how quickly she forgot Arthur Fenwick as
+she took a good look at Gerry Palliser, his great friend, whom he had
+so often raved about to her, and who was to be brought to play
+lawn-tennis next Monday. And then to the ear of her mind, listening
+back to long ago, came a voice so like the one she was to hear soon,
+when that footstep should come on the stair.
+
+"I can't waltz like Arthur, Miss Graythorpe. But you'll have to put
+up with me." And the smile that spread over his whole face was so
+like him now. Then came the allusion to _As You Like It_.
+
+"I'll take you for pity, Mr. Palliser--'by my troth,' as my namesake
+Rosalind, Celia's friend, in Shakespeare, says to what's his name ...
+Orlando...."
+
+"Come, I say, Miss Graythorpe, that's not fair. It was Benedict said
+it to Beatrice."
+
+"Did he? And did Beatrice say she wouldn't waltz with him?"
+
+"Oh, please! I'm so sorry. No--it wasn't Benedict--it _was_ Rosalind."
+
+"That's right! Now let me button your glove for you. You'll be for
+ever, with those big fingers." For both of us, thought Rosalind, were
+determined to begin at once and not lose a minute. That dear old time
+... before...!
+
+Then, even clearer still, came back to her the dim summer-dawn in the
+garden, with here and there a Chinese lantern not burned out, and
+the flagging music of the weary musicians afar, and she and Gerry with
+the garden nearly to themselves. She could feel the cool air of the
+morning again, and hear the crowing of a self-important cock. And the
+informal wager which would live the longer--a Chinese lantern at the
+point of death, or the vanishing moon just touching the line of
+tree-tops against the sky, stirred by the morning wind. And the voice
+of Gerry when return to the house and a farewell became inevitable.
+She shut her eyes, and could hear it and her own answer.
+
+"I shall go to India in six weeks, and never see you again."
+
+"Yes, you will; because Arthur Fenwick is to bring you round to
+lawn-tennis...."
+
+"That won't make having to go any better. And then when I come back,
+in ever so many years, I shall find you...."
+
+"Gone to kingdom come?"
+
+"No--married!... Oh no, do stop out--don't go in yet...."
+
+"We ought to go in. Now, don't be silly."
+
+"I can't help it.... Well!--a fellow I know asked a girl to marry
+him he'd only known two hours."
+
+"What very silly friends you must have, Mr. Palliser! Did she marry
+him?"
+
+"No! but they're engaged, and he's in Ceylon. But you wouldn't marry
+me...."
+
+"How on earth can you tell, in such a short time? What a goose you
+are!... There!--the music's stopped, and Mrs. Nairn said that must
+be the last waltz. Come along, or we shall catch it."
+
+They had known each other exactly four hours!
+
+Rosalind remembered it all, word for word. And how Gerry captured
+a torn glove to keep; and when he came, as appointed, to lawn-tennis,
+went back at once to Shakespeare, and said he had looked it up,
+and it _was_ Beatrice and Benedict, and not Rosalind at all. She
+could remember, too, her weary and reproachful _chaperon_, and the
+well-deserved scolding she got for the way she had been going on
+with that young Palliser. Eight dances!
+
+So long ago! And she could think through it all again. And to him it
+had become a memory of shreds and patches. Let it remain so, or become
+again oblivion--vanish with the rest of his forgotten past! Her
+thought that it would do so was confidence itself as she sat there
+waiting for his footstep on the stair. For had she not spoken of
+herself unflinchingly as the girl who said those words from
+Shakespeare, and had not her asseveration slipped from the mind that
+could not receive it as water slips from oil? She could wait there
+without misgiving--could even hope that, whatever it was due to, this
+recent stirring of the dead bones of memory might mean nothing, and
+die away leaving all as it was before.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Sally, acknowledging physical fatigue with reluctance, after her long
+walk and swim in the morning, went to bed. It presented itself to her
+as a thing practicable, and salutary in her state of bewilderment, to
+lie in bed with her eyes closed, and think over the events of the day.
+It would be really quiet. And then she would be awake when Jeremiah
+came in, and would call out for information if there was a sound of
+anything to hear about. But her project fell through, for she had
+scarcely closed her eyes when she fell into a trap laid for her by
+sleep--deep sleep, such as we fancy dreamless. And when Fenwick came
+back she could not have heard his words to her mother, even had they
+risen above the choking undertone in which he spoke, nor her mother's
+reply, more audible in its sudden alarm, but still kept down--for,
+startled as she was at Gerry's unexpected words, she did not lose her
+presence of mind.
+
+"What is it, Gerry darling? What is it, dear love? Has anything
+happened? I'll come."
+
+"Yes--come into my room. Come away from our girl. She mustn't hear."
+
+She knew then at once that his past had come upon him somehow. She
+knew it at once from the tone of his voice, but she could make no
+guess as to the manner of it. She knew, too, that that heartquake was
+upon her--the one she had felt so glad to stave off that day upon the
+beach--and that self-command had to be found in an emergency she might
+not have the strength to meet.
+
+For the shock, coming as it did upon her false confidence--a sudden
+thunderbolt from a cloudless sky--was an overwhelming one. She knew
+she would have a moment's outward calm before her powers gave way, and
+she must use it for Sally's security. What Gerry said was true--their
+girl _must not_ hear.
+
+But oh, how quick thought travels! By the time Rosalind, after
+stopping a second outside Sally's door, listening for any movement,
+had closed that of her husband's room as she followed him in, placing
+the light she carried on a chair as she entered, she had found in the
+words "our girl" a foretaste of water in the desert that might be
+before her.
+
+Another moment and she knew she was safe, so far as Gerry himself
+went. As he had himself said, he would be the same Gerry to her and
+she the same Rosey to him, whatever wild beast should leap out of the
+past to molest them. She knew it was as he caught her to his heart,
+crushing her almost painfully in the great strength that went beyond
+his own control as he shook and trembled like an aspen-leaf under the
+force of an emotion she could only, as yet, guess at the nature of.
+But the guess was not a wrong one, in so far as it said that each was
+there to be the other's shield and guard against ill, past, present,
+and to come--a refuge-haven to fly to from every tempest fate might
+have in store. She could not speak--could not have found utterance
+even had words come to her. She could only rest passive in his arms,
+inert and dumb, feeling in the short gasps that caught his breath
+how he struggled for speech and failed, then strove again. At last
+his voice came--short, spasmodic sentences breaking or broken by like
+spans of silence:
+
+"Oh, my darling, my darling, remember!... remember!... whatever it
+is ... it shall not come between us ... it shall not ... it _shall_
+not.... Oh, my dear!... give me time, and I shall speak ... if I could
+only say at once ... in one word ... could only understand ... that is
+all ... to understand...." He relaxed his hold upon her; but she held
+to him, or she might have fallen, so weak was she, and so unsteady was
+the room and all in it to her sight. The image of him that she saw
+seemed dim and in a cloud, as he pressed his hands upon his eyes and
+stood for a moment speechless; then struggled again to find words
+that for another moment would not come, caught in the gasping of his
+breath. Then he got a longer breath, as for ease, and drawing her face
+towards his own--and this time the touch of his hand was tender as
+a child's--he kissed it repeatedly--kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her
+lips. And in his kiss was security for her, safe again in the haven of
+his love, come what might. She felt how it brought back to her the
+breath she knew would fail her, unless her heart, that had beaten so
+furiously a moment since, and then died away, should resume its life.
+The room became steady, and she saw his face and its pallor plainly,
+and knew that in a moment she should find her voice. But he spoke
+first, again.
+
+"That is what I want, dear love--to understand. Help me to
+understand," he said. And then, as though feeling for the first time
+how she was clinging to him for support, he passed his arm round her
+gently, guiding her to sit down. But he himself remained standing by
+her, as though physically unaffected by the storm of emotion, whatever
+its cause, that had passed over him. Then Rosalind found her voice.
+
+"Gerry darling--let us try and get quiet over it. After all, we are
+both here." As she said this she was not very clear about her own
+meaning, but the words satisfied her. "I see you have remembered more,
+but I cannot tell how much. Now try and tell me--have you remembered
+_all_?"
+
+"I think so, darling." He was speaking more quietly now, as one docile
+to her influence. His manner gave her strength to continue.
+
+"Since you left Mr. Pilkington--your friend at the hotel--didn't you
+say the name Pilkington?"
+
+"No--there was no Pilkington! Oh yes, there was!--a friend of
+Diedrich's...."
+
+"Has it come back, I mean, since you left the house? Who is Diedrich?"
+
+"Stop a bit, dearest love! I shall be able to tell it all directly."
+She, too, was glad of a lull, and welcomed his sitting down beside
+her on the bed-end, drawing her face to his, and keeping it with the
+hand that was not caressing hers. Presently he spoke again, more at
+ease, but always in the undertone, just above a whisper, that meant
+the consciousness of Sally, too, near. Rosalind said, "She won't
+hear," and he replied, "No; it's all right, I think," and continued:
+
+"Diedrich Kreutzkammer--he's Diedrich--don't you remember? Of course
+you do!... I heard him down on the beach to-day singing. I wanted to
+go to him at once, but I had to think of it first, so I came home.
+Then I settled to go to him at the hotel. I had not remembered
+anything then--anything to speak of--I had not remembered IT. Now it
+is all back upon me, in a whirl." He freed the hand that held hers
+for a moment, and pressed his fingers hard upon his eyes; then took
+her hand again, as before. "I wanted to see the dear old fellow and
+talk over old times, at 'Frisco and up at the Gold River--that, of
+course! But I wanted, too, to make him repeat to me all the story
+I had told him of my early marriage--oh, my darling!--_our_ marriage,
+and I did not know it! I know it now--I know it now."
+
+Rosalind could feel the thrill that ran through him as his hand
+tightened on hers. She spoke, to turn his mind for a moment. "How
+came Baron Kreutzkammer at St. Sennans?"
+
+"Diedrich? He has a married niece living at Canterbury. Don't you
+remember? He told you and you told me...." Rosalind had forgotten
+this, but now recalled it. "Well, we talked about the States--all the
+story I shall have to tell you, darling, some time; but, oh dear, how
+confused I get! _That_ wasn't the first. The first was telling him my
+story--the accident, and so on--and it was hard work to convince him
+it was really me at Sonnenberg. That was rather a difficulty, because
+I had sent him in the name I had in America, and he only saw an old
+friend he thought was dead. All _that_ was a trifle; but, oh, the
+complications!..."
+
+"What was the name you had in America?"
+
+Fenwick answered musingly, "Harrisson," and then paused before saying,
+"No, I had better not...." and leaving the sentence unfinished. She
+caught his meaning, and said no more. After all, it could matter very
+little if she never heard his American experiences, and the name
+Harrisson had no association for her. She left him to resume, without
+suggestion.
+
+"He might have reminded me of anything that happened in the States,
+and I should just have come back here and told it you, because, you
+see, I should have been sure it was true, and no dream. It was India.
+I had told him all, don't you see? And I got him to repeat it, and
+then it all came back--all at once, the moment I saw it was _you_, my
+darling--you yourself! It all became quite easy then. It was _us_--you
+and me! I know it now--I know it now!"
+
+"But, dearest, what made you see that it was us?"
+
+"Why, of course, because of the name! He told me all I had told him
+from the beginning in German. We always spoke German. He could not
+remember your first name, but he remembered your mother's--it had
+stayed in his mind--because of the German word _Nachtigall_ being so
+nearly the same. As he said the word my mind got a frightful twist,
+and I thought I was mad. I did, indeed, my dearest love--raving mad!"
+
+"And then you knew it?"
+
+"And then I knew it. I nearly fainted clean off, and he went for
+brandy; but I came round, and the dear old boy saw me to this door
+here. It has all only just happened." He remained silent again for
+a little space, holding her hand, and then said suddenly: "It _has_
+happened, has it not? Is it all true, or am I dreaming?"
+
+"Be patient, darling. It is all true--at least, I think so. It is all
+true if it is like this, because remember, dear, you have told me
+almost nothing.... I only know that it has come back to you that I am
+Rosey and that you are Gerry--the old Rosey and Gerry long ago in
+India...." She broke down over her own words, as her tears, a relief
+in themselves, came freely, taxing her further to keep her voice under
+for Sally's sake. It was only for a moment; then she seemed to brush
+them aside in an effort of self-mastery, and again began, dropping her
+voice even lower. "It is all true if it is like this. I came out to
+marry you in India ... my darling!... and a terrible thing happened
+to me on the way ... the story you know more of now than I could tell
+you then ... for how _could_ I tell it ... think?..."
+
+Her husband started up from her side gasping, beating his head like
+a madman. She was in terror lest she had done wrong in her speech.
+"Gerry, Gerry!" she appealed to him in a scarcely raised voice, "think
+of Sally!" She rose and went to him, repeating, "Think of Sally!" then
+drew him back to his former place. His breath went and came heavily,
+and his forehead was drenched with sweat, as in epilepsy; but the
+paroxysm left him as he sank back beside her, saying only, "My God!
+that miscreant!" but showing that he had heard her by the force of
+the constraint he put upon his voice. It gave her courage to go on.
+
+"I could not get it told then. I did not know the phrases--and you
+were so happy, my darling--so happy when you met me at the station!
+Oh, how could I? But I was wrong. I ought not to have let you marry
+me, not knowing. And then ... it seemed deception, and I could not
+right it...." Her voice broke again, as she hid her face on his
+shoulder; but she knew her safety in the kiss she felt on her free
+hand, and the gentleness of his that stroked her hair. Then she
+heard his almost whispered words above her head, close to her ear:
+
+"Darling, forgive me--forgive me! It was _I_ that was in fault.
+I might have known...."
+
+"Gerry, dear ... no!..."
+
+"Yes, I might. There was a woman there--had been an officer's wife.
+She came to me and spoke rough truths about it--told me her notion of
+the tale in her own language. 'Put her away from you,' she said, 'and
+you won't get another like her, and won't deserve her!' And she was
+right, poor thing! But I was headstrong and obstinate, and would not
+hear her. Oh, my darling, _how_ we have paid for it!"
+
+"But you have found me again, dear love!" He did not answer, but
+raised up her face from his shoulder, parting the loose hair
+tenderly--for it was all free on her shoulders--and gazing straight
+into her eyes with an expression of utter bewilderment. "Yes, darling,
+what is it?" said she, as though he had spoken.
+
+"I am getting fogged!" he said, "and cannot make it out. Was it pure
+accident? Surely something must have happened to bring it about."
+
+"Bring what about?"
+
+"How came we to find each other again, I mean?"
+
+"Oh, I see! Pure accident, I should say, dear! Why not? It would not
+have happened if it had not been possible. Thank God it did!"
+
+"Thank God it did! But think of the strangeness of it all! How came
+Sally in that train?"
+
+"Why not, darling? Where else could she have been? She was coming
+back to tea, as usual."
+
+"And she put me in a cab--bless her!--she and Conrad Vereker--and
+brought me home to you. But did you know me at once, darling?"
+
+"At once."
+
+"But why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"If you had shown the slightest sign of knowing me I should have told
+you, and taken my chance; but you only looked at me and smiled, and
+never knew me! Was mine a good plan? At least, it has answered." A
+clasp and a kiss was the reply. She was glad that he should choose the
+line of conversation, and did not break into the pause that followed.
+The look of fixed bewilderment on his face was painful, but she did
+not dare any suggestion of guidance to his mind. She had succeeded but
+ill before in going back to the cause of their own early severance.
+Yet that was what she naturally had most at heart, and longed to speak
+of. Could she have chosen, she would have liked to resume it once for
+all, in spite of the pain--to look the dreadful past in the face,
+and then agree to forget it together. She was hungry to tell him that
+even when he broke away from her that last time she saw him at
+Umballa--broke away from her so roughly that his action had all the
+force and meaning of a blow--she only saw _his_ image of the wrong she
+had done, or seemed to have done him; that she had nothing for him
+through it all but love and forgiveness. At least, she would have
+tried to make sure that he had been able to connect and compare the
+tale she had told him since their reunion with his new memory of the
+facts of twenty years ago. But she dared say nothing further as yet.
+For his part, at this moment, he seemed strangely willing to let all
+the old story lapse, and to dwell only on the incredible chance that
+had brought them again together. All that eventful day our story began
+with had leaped into the foreground of his mind.
+
+Presently he said, still almost whispering hoarsely, with a constant
+note of amazement and something like panic in his voice: "If it hadn't
+happened--the accident--I suppose I should have gone back to the
+hotel. And what should I have done next? I should never have found
+you and Sally...."
+
+"Were you poor, Gerry darling?"
+
+"Frightfully rich! Gold-fields, mining-place up the Yu-kon. Near the
+Arctic Circle." He went on in a rapid undertone, as if he were trying
+to supply briefly what he knew the woman beside him must be yearning
+to know, if not quite unlike other women. "I wasn't well off
+before--didn't get on at the Bar at St. Louis--but not poor exactly.
+Then I made a small pile cattle-ranching in Texas, and somehow went
+to live at Quebec. There were a lot of French Canadians I took to.
+Then after that, 'Frisco and the gold...."
+
+"Gerry dear!"
+
+"Yes, love, what?"
+
+"Have you any relations living in England?"
+
+"Heaps, but I haven't spoken to one of them for years and years--not
+since _then_. One of them's a Bart. with a fungus on his nose in
+Shropshire. He's an uncle. Then there's my sister, if she's not
+dead--my sister Livy. She's Mrs. Huxtable. I fancy they all think I'm
+dead in the bush in Australia. I had a narrow squeak there...."
+
+"Now, Gerry darling, I'll tell you what I want you to do...."
+
+"Yes, dear, I will."
+
+"You can't tell me all these things now, and you'll be ill; so lie
+down on the bed there, and I'll sit by you till you go to sleep. Or
+look, you get to bed comfortably, and I'll be back in a few minutes
+and sit by you. Just till you go off. Now do as I tell you."
+
+He obeyed like a child. It was wonderful how, in the returning power
+of her self-command, she took him, as it were, in hand, and rescued
+him from the tension of his bewilderment. Apart from the fact that the
+fibre of her nature was exceptionally strong, her experience of this
+last hour had removed the most part of the oppression that had weighed
+her down for more than a twelvemonth--the doubt as to which way a
+discovery of his past would tell on her husband's love for her. She
+had no feeling now but anxiety on his behalf, and this really helped
+her towards facing the situation calmly. All things do that take us
+out of ourselves.
+
+She stood again a moment outside Sally's door to make sure she was not
+moving, then went to her own room, not sorry to be alone. She wanted
+a pause for the whirl in her brain to stop, for the torrent of new
+event that had rushed in upon it to find its equilibrium. If Gerry fell
+asleep before she returned to him so much the better! She did not even
+light her candle, preferring to be in the dark.
+
+But this did not long defer her return to her husband's room. A very
+few minutes in the darkness and the silence of her own were enough for
+her, and she was grateful for both. Then she went back, to find him
+in bed, sitting up and pressing his fingers on his eyes, as one does
+when suffering from nervous headache. But he disclaimed any such
+feeling in answer to her inquiry. She sat down beside him, holding his
+hand, just as she had done in the night of the storm, and begged him
+for her sake and his own to try to sleep. It would all seem so much
+easier and clearer in the morning.
+
+Yes, he would sleep, he said. And, indeed, he had resolved to affect
+sleep, so as to induce her to go away herself and rest. But it was not
+so easy. Half-grasped facts went and came--recollections that he knew
+he should before long be able to marshal in their proper order
+and make harmonious. For the time being, though they had not the
+nightmare character of the recurrences he had suffered from before
+his memory-revival, they stood between him and sleep effectually. But
+he could and would simulate sleep directly, for Rosalind's sake. He
+had looked at his watch and seen that it was near two in the morning.
+Yes, he would sleep; but he must ask one question, or lose his reason
+if she left him alone with it unanswered.
+
+"Rosey darling!"
+
+"What, dearest?"
+
+"We'll forget the old story, won't we, and only think of _now_? That's
+the right way to take it, isn't it?"
+
+She kissed his face as she answered, just as she might have kissed
+a child. "Quite right, dear love," she said; "and now go to sleep. Or
+if you must talk a little more, talk about Conrad and Sally."
+
+"Ah yes!" he answered; "that's all happiness. Conrad and Sally! But
+there's a thing...."
+
+"What thing, dear? What is it?"
+
+"I shall ask it you in the end, so why not now?" She felt in his hand
+a shudder that ran through him, as his hold on her fingers tightened.
+
+"So why not now?" she repeated after him. "Why hesitate?"
+
+The tremor strengthened in her hand and was heard in his voice plainly
+as he answered with an effort: "What became of the baby?"
+
+"What became of the baby!" There was a new terror in Rosalind's voice
+as she repeated the words--a fear for his reason. "What baby?"
+
+"_The_ baby--_his_ baby--_his_ horrible baby!"
+
+"Gerry darling! Gerry _dearest_! do think...." His puzzled eyes,
+bloodshot in his white face, turned full upon her; but he remained
+silent, waiting to hear more. "You have forgotten, darling," she said
+quietly.
+
+His free hand that lay on the coverlid clenched, and a spasm caught
+his arm, as though it longed for something to strike or strangle. "No,
+no!" said he; "I am all right. I mean that damned monster's baby.
+There _was_ a baby?" His voice shook on these last words as though he,
+too, had a fear for his own reason. His face flushed as he awaited
+her reply.
+
+"Oh, Gerry darling! but you _have_ forgotten. His baby was Sally--my
+Sallykin!"
+
+For it was absolutely true that, although he had as complete a
+knowledge, in a certain sense, of Sally's origin as the well-coached
+student has of the subject he is to answer questions in, he had
+forgotten it under the stress of his mental trial as readily as
+the student forgets what his mind has only acquiesced in for its
+purpose, in his joy at recovering his right to ignorance. Sally had
+an existence of her own quite independent of her origin. She was his
+and Rosalind's--a part of _their_ existence, a necessity. It was
+easy and natural for him to dissociate the living, breathing reality
+that filled so much of their lives from its mere beginnings. It was
+less easy for Rosalind, but not an impossibility altogether, helped
+by the forgiveness for the past that grew from the soil of her
+daughter's love.
+
+"You _had_ forgotten, dear," she repeated; "but you know now."
+
+"Yes, I had forgotten, because of Sally herself; but she is _my_
+daughter now...."
+
+She waited, expecting him to say more; but he did not speak again. As
+soon as he was, or seemed to be, asleep, she rose quietly and left him.
+
+She was so anxious that no trace of the tempest that had passed over
+her should be left for Sally to see in the morning that she got as
+quickly as possible to bed; and, with a little effort to tranquillise
+her mind, soon sank into a state of absolute oblivion. It was the
+counterswing of the pendulum--Nature's protest against a strain beyond
+her powers to bear, and its remedy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+OF A CONTRACT JOB FOR REPAIRS. HOW FENWICK HAD ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT
+ AFTER ALL. WHICH IS WHICH, NOW OR TWENTY ODD YEARS AGO? HOW SALLY
+ FOLLOWED JEREMIAH OUT. WHAT A LOT OF TALK ABOUT A LIFE-BELT!
+
+
+A colourless dawn chased a grey twilight from the sea and white cliffs
+of St. Sennans, and a sickly effort of the sun to rise visibly,
+ending above a cloud-bank in a red half-circle that seemed a thing
+quite unconnected with the struggling light, was baffled by a higher
+cloud-bank still that came discouragingly from the west, and quenched
+the hopes of the few early risers who were about as St. Sennans
+tower chimed six. The gull that flew high above the green waste of
+white-flecked waters was whiter still against the inky blue of the
+cloud-curtain that had disallowed the day, and the paler vapour-drifts
+that paused and changed and lost themselves and died; but the air that
+came from the sea was sweet and mild for the time of year, and the
+verdict of the coastguardsman at the flagstaff, who in pursuance of
+his sinecure had seen the night out, was that the day was pretty sure
+to be an uncertain sart, with little froshets on the water, like over
+yander. He seemed to think that a certainty of uncertainty had all the
+value of a forecast, and was as well satisfied with his report as he
+was that he had not seen a smuggler through the telescope he closed
+as he uttered it.
+
+"Well, I should judge it might be fairly doubtful," was the reply
+of the man he was speaking with. It was the man who had "Elinor"
+and "Bessie" tattooed on his arm. They were not legible now, as a
+couple of life-belts, or hencoops, as they are sometimes called,
+hung over the arm and hid them. The boy Benjamin was with his
+father, and carried a third. An explanation of them came in answer
+to interrogation in the eye of the coastguard. "Just to put a touch
+of new paint on 'em against the weather." The speaker made one
+movement of his head say that they had come from the pier-end, and
+another that he had taken them home to repaint by contract.
+
+"What do you make out of S. S. P. C.?" the coastguard asked, scarcely
+as one who had no theory himself, more as one archaeologist addressing
+another, teeming with deference, but ready for controversy. The other
+answered with some paternal pride:
+
+"Ah, there now! Young Benjamin, he made _that_ good, and asked for to
+make it red in place of black himself! Didn't ye, ye young sculping?
+St. Sennans Pier Company, that's all it comes to, followed out. But
+I'm no great schoolmaster myself, and that's God's truth." Both
+contemplated the judicious restoration with satisfaction; and young
+Benjamin, who had turned purple under publicity, murmured that it was
+black afower. He didn't seem to mean anything, but to think it due
+to himself to say something, meaning or no. The coastguardsman merely
+said, "Makes a tidy job!" and the father and son went on their way
+to the pier.
+
+A quarter of an hour before, this coastguard had looked after the
+visitor in a blue serge suit up at Lobjoit's, who had passed him
+going briskly towards the fishing-quarter. He had recognised him
+confidently, for he knew Fenwick well, and saw nothing strange in his
+early appearance. Now that he saw him returning, and could take full
+note of him, he almost suspected he had been mistaken, so wild and
+pallid was the face of this man, who, usually ready with a light word
+for every chance encounter--even with perfect strangers--now passed
+him by ungreeted, and to all seeming unconscious of his presence.
+The coastguard was for a moment in doubt if he should not follow him,
+inferring something in the nature of delirium from his aspect; but
+seeing that he made straight for the pier, and knowing that young
+Benjamin's father was more familiar with him than himself, he was
+contented to record in thought that that was a face with a bad day
+ahead, and leave it.
+
+For Gerry, when Rosalind left him, was rash in assuming he could let
+her do so safely. His well-meant pretext of sleep was not destined to
+grow into a reality. He had really believed that it would, so soothing
+was the touch of her hand in his own. The moment he was alone his mind
+leapt, willy-nilly, to the analysis of one point or other in the past
+that had just come back to him. He tried to silence thought, and to
+sleep, knowing that his best hope was in rest; but each new effort
+only ended in his slipping back to what he had just dismissed. And
+that terrible last interview with Rosey at Umballa, when he parted
+from her, as he thought, never to see her again, was the Rome to which
+all the roads of recollection led. Each involuntary visit there had
+its _rencherissement_ on the previous one, and in the end the image of
+that hour became a brain-oppression, and wrote the word "fever" large
+on the tablets of his apprehension.
+
+He knew now it was not to be sleep; he knew it as he sat up in bed
+feeling his pulse, and stimulating it with his anxiety that it should
+go slow. Was there nothing he could take that would make him sleep?
+Certainly he knew of nothing, anywhere, except it was to be found by
+waking Rosalind, probably sound asleep by now. Out of the question!
+Oh, why, why, with all the warning he had had, had he neglected to
+provide himself with a mysterious thing known to him all his life as
+a soothing-draught? It would have been so useful now, and Conrad would
+have defined it down to the prosaic requirements of pharmacy. But it
+was too late!
+
+So long as her hand was in his, so long as her lips were near his own,
+what did it matter what he recollected? The living present cancelled
+the dead past. But to be there alone in the dark, with the image
+of that Rosalind of former years clinging to him, and crying for
+forgiveness because his mind, warped against her by a false conception
+of the truth, could not forgive; to be defenceless against her last
+words, coming through the long interval to him again just as he heard
+them, twenty years ago, bringing back the other noises of the Indian
+night--the lowing of the bullocks in the compound, the striking of
+the hour on the Kutcherry gongs, the grinding of the Persian wheels
+unceasingly drawing water for the irrigation of the fields--to be
+exposed to this solitude and ever-growing imagination was to become
+the soil for a self-sown crop of terrors--fear of fever, fear of
+madness, fear at the very least of perturbation such that Sally might
+come, through it, to a knowledge that had to be kept from her at all
+costs.
+
+He lighted his candle with a cautious match, and found what might be
+a solace--a lucky newspaper of the morning. If only he could read it
+without audible rustling, unheard by the sleepers!
+
+The print was almost too small to be read by the light of a single
+candle; but there were the usual headings, the usual ranks of capitals
+that tell us so quick that there is nothing we shall care about in
+the pale undecipherable paragraphs below, and that we have spent our
+halfpenny in vain. There was the usual young lady who had bought, or
+was trying on, a large hat, and whose top-story above, in profile,
+had got so far ahead of her other stories below. There were the
+consignments of locust-flights of boots, for this young lady's
+friends, with heels in the instep. And all the advertisements that
+some one _must_ believe, or they would not pay for insertion; but that
+_we_ ignore, incredulous. Fenwick tried hard, for his own sake, to
+make the whole thing mean something, but his dazed brain and feverish
+eyes refused to respond to his efforts, and he let the paper go, and
+gave himself up, a prey to his own memories. After all, the daylight
+was sure to come in the end to save him.
+
+He tried hard to reason with himself, to force himself to feel the
+reality of his own belief that all was well; for he had no doubt of
+it, as an abstract truth. It was the power of getting comfort from it
+that was wanting. If only his heart could stop thumping and his brain
+burning, _he_ would have done the rejoicing that Rosalind was there,
+knowing all he knew, and loving him; that Sally was there, loving him
+too, but knowing nothing, and needing to know nothing; that one of
+his first greetings in the day to come would be from Conrad Vereker,
+probably too much intoxicated with his own happiness to give much
+attention to what he was beginning to acknowledge was some kind of
+physical or nervous fever. If he could only sleep!
+
+But he could not--could hardly close his eyes. He said to himself
+again and again that nothing was the matter; that, if anything, he and
+Rosey were better off than they had been yet; that they had passed
+through a land of peril to a great deliverance. But he did not believe
+his own assurance, and the throng of memories that his feverish
+condition would not let sleep, or that were its cause, came on him
+more and more thickly through all those hours of the dreary night.
+They came, too, with a growing force, each one as it returned having
+more the character of a waking dream, vivid almost to the point of
+reality. But all ended alike. He always found himself breaking away
+from Rosey in the veranda in the bungalow at Umballa, and could hear
+again her cry of despair: "Oh, Gerry, Gerry! It is not as you think.
+Oh, stay, stay! Give me a chance to show you how I love you!" The
+tramp of his horse as he rode away from his home and that white figure
+left prostrate in the veranda above him, became a real sound that beat
+painfully upon his ears; and the voice of the friend he sought--an old
+soldier in camp at Sabatoo, where he rode almost without a halt--as he
+roused him in the dawn of the next day, came to him again almost as
+though spoken in the room beside him: "Left _your_ wife, Palliser!
+My God, sir! what's to come next?" And then the wicked hardness of
+his own heart, and his stubborn refusal to listen to the angry
+remonstrance that followed. "I tell you this, young man! the man's
+a fool--a damned fool--that runs from the woman who loves him!" And the
+asseveration that the speaker would say the same if she was anything
+short of the worst character in camp, only in slightly different
+words. His remorse for his own obduracy, and the cruelty of his
+behaviour then; his shame when he thought of his application, months
+later, to the Court at Lahore--for "relief" from Rosey: just imagine
+it!--these were bad enough to think back on, even from the point of
+view of his previous knowledge; but how infinitely worse when he
+thought what she had been to him, how she had acted towards him two
+years ago!
+
+Even the painful adventure he could now look back to clearly, and with
+a rather amused interest, as to an event with no laceration in it--his
+wandering in an Australian forest, for how many days he could not
+say, and his final resurrection at a town a hundred miles from his
+starting-point--even this led him back in the end to the old story.
+The whole passed through his mind like the scenes of a drama--his
+confidence, having lost the track, that his horse, left to himself,
+would find it again; his terror when, coming back from a stone's-throw
+off, he found the tree deserted he had tied his horse to; his foolish
+starting off to catch him, when the only sane course was to wait for
+his return. But the second act of the drama took his mind again to
+Rosey in her loneliness; for when he was found by a search-party at
+the foot of a telegraph-post he had used his last match to burn down,
+he was inarticulate, and seemed to give his name as Harrisson. As he
+slowly recovered sense and speech at the telegraph-station--for the
+interruption of the current had been his cry for help to its
+occupants--he heard himself addressed by the name and saw the mistake;
+but he did not correct it, being, indeed, not sorry for an incognito,
+sick of his life, as it were, and glad to change his identity. But how
+if Rosey wrote to him then--think of it!--under his old name? Fancy
+_her_ when the time came for a possible reply, with who could say what
+of hope in it! Fancy her many decisions that it was still too soon for
+an answer, followed by as many others as time went on that it was not
+too late! If he had received such a letter from her then, might it
+not all have been different? May she not have written one? He had
+talked so little with her; nothing forbade the idea. And so his mind
+travelled round with monotonous return, always to that old time, and
+those old scenes, and all the pain of them.
+
+It was curious--he noted the oddity himself--that his whole life in
+America took the drama character, and _he_ became the spectator. He
+never caught himself playing his own part over again, with all its
+phases of passion or excitement, as in the earlier story. In that,
+his identification of himself with his past grew and grew, and as his
+fever increased through the small hours of the morning, got more and
+more the force of a waking dream. And when the dawn came at last, and
+the gleam from the languid sun followed it, the man who got up and
+looked out towards its great blue bank of cloud was only half sure he
+was not another former self, looking out towards another sea, twenty
+years ago, to see if he could identify the ship that was to take him
+from Kurachi to Port Jackson.
+
+What did it all mean? Yes, sure enough he had taken his passage, and
+to-morrow leagues of sea would lie between him and Rosey. That would
+end it for ever. No reconciliations, no repentance then!... Was
+there not still time? a chance if he chose to catch at it? Puny
+irresolution! Shake it all off, and have done with it.... He shuddered
+as he thought through his old part again, and then came back with
+a jerk to the strange knowledge that he was opening a closed book,
+a tragedy written twenty years ago; and that there, within a few feet
+of where he gazed with a jaded sight out to the empty sea, was Rosey
+herself, alive and breathing; and in an hour or two he was to see
+her, feel the touch of her hand and lips, be his happy self again of
+three days only gone by, if he could but face masterfully the strange
+knowledge this mysterious revival of a former self had brought upon
+him. And there was Sally....
+
+But at the name, as it came to his mind, came also the shock of
+another mystery--who and what was Sally?
+
+Let him lie down again and try to think quietly. Was not this part
+of his delirium? Could he have got the story right? Surely! Was it not
+of her that Rosey had said, only a few hours since, "_His_ baby was
+Sally--_my_ Sallykin"? And was he not then able to reply collectedly
+and with ease, "She is _my_ daughter now," and to feel the power of
+his choice that it should be so? But the strength of Rosalind was
+beside him then, and now he was here alone. He beat off--fought
+against--that hideous fatherhood of Sally's that he could not bear,
+that image that he felt might drive him mad. Oh, villain, villain!
+Far, far worse to him was--perforce must be--this miscreant's crime
+than that mere murder that shook Hamlet's reason to its foundation. He
+dared not think of it lest he should cry out aloud. But, patience!
+Only two or three hours more, and Rosalind would be there to help him
+to bear it.... What a coward's thought!--to help him to bear what she
+herself had borne in silence for twenty years!
+
+Would he not be better up, now that it was light? Of course! But how
+be sure he should not wake them?
+
+Well, the word was caution; he must be very quiet about it, that was
+all. He slipped on his clothes without washing--it always makes a
+noise--ran a comb through the tangled hair his pillow-tossings of
+four hours had produced, and got away stealthily without accident,
+or meeting any early riser, speech with whom would have betrayed him.
+
+He had little trouble with the door-fastenings, that often perplex
+us in a like case, blocking egress with mysterious mechanisms.
+Housebreakers were rare in St. Sennans. He had more fear his footsteps
+would be audible; but it seemed not, and he walked away towards the
+cliff pathway unnoticed.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The merpussy waked to a consciousness of happiness undefined, a
+sense of welcome to the day. What girl would not have done so, under
+her circumstances? For Sally had no doubt in her mind of her own
+satisfaction at the outcome of yesterday. She might have treated the
+feelings and experience of other lovers--regular ones, prone to
+nonsense--with contempt, but she never questioned the advantages of
+her own position as compared with theirs. Her feast was better cooked,
+altogether more substantial and real than the kickshaws and sweetmeats
+she chose to ascribe to the _menus_ of Arcadia. Naturally; because
+see what a much better sort Conrad was! It was going to be quite a
+different kind of thing this time. And as for the old Goody, she was
+not half bad. Nothing was half bad in Sally's eyes that morning, and
+almost everything was wholly good.
+
+She had slept so sound she was sure it was late. But it was only
+half-past six, and the early greetings of Mrs. Lobjoit below were
+not to the baker, nor even to the milk, but to next door, which was
+dealing with the question of its mat and clean step through the agency
+of its proprietress, whose voice chimed cheerfully with Mrs. Lobjoit's
+over the surprise of the latter finding _her_ street door had been
+opened, and that some one had already passed out. For Mrs. Lobjoit had
+made _that_ sure, the night before, that she had "shot to" the bottom
+bolt that _would_ shet, _because_ she had ignored as useless the top
+bolt that _wouldn't_ shet--the correlation of events so often appealed
+to by witnesses under examination; which Law, stupidly enough, prides
+itself on snubbing them for. Further, Mrs. Lobjoit would have flown
+to the solution that it was her gentleman gone out, only that it was
+quite into the night before they stopped from talking.
+
+Sally heard this because she had pulled down the top sash of her
+window to breathe the sea air, regardless of the fact she well knew,
+and described thus--that the sash-weight stuck and clunkled and
+wouldn't come down. She decided against running the risk of disturbing
+Jeremiah on the strength of Mrs. Lobjoit's impressions; although, if
+he had gone out, she certainly would follow him. But she slipped on
+a dressing-gown and went half-way downstairs, to see if his hat was
+still on its peg. It was gone. So she went back to her room, and
+dressed furtively. Because if they _had_ been talking late into the
+night, it would be just as well for her mother to have her sleep out.
+
+But she had hardly finished washing when she became aware of a
+footstep outside--Jeremiah's certainly. She went to the window, saw
+him approach the house, look up at it, but as though he did not
+recognise that she was there, and then turn away towards the flagstaff
+and the old town. It was odd and unlike him, and Sally was alarmed.
+Besides, how white he looked!
+
+Bear this in mind, that Sally knew absolutely nothing of the cataclysm
+of revived memory in Jeremiah. Remember that the incident of the
+galvanic battery at the pier-end is only four days old. Do not be
+misled by the close details we have given of these four days.
+
+Sally's alarm at the haggard look of her stepfather's face took away
+her breath; at least, she did not find her voice soon enough for him
+to hear her call out--she did not like to shout loud because of her
+mother--as he turned away. Or it seemed so, for that was the only way
+she could account for his walking away so abruptly. In her hurry to
+get dressed and follow him, she caught up an undergarment that lay on
+the floor, without seeing that her own foot was on the tape that was
+to secure it, and a rip and partial disruption was the consequence.
+Never mind, it would hold up till she came in. Or, if it didn't, where
+was that safety-pin that was on her dressing-table yesterday? Not
+there? Again, never mind! She would do, somehow. She hurried on her
+clothes, and her hat and waterproof, and left the house, going quickly
+on what she supposed to be the track of Jeremiah, who was, by now, no
+longer visible.
+
+But she caught sight of him returning, while she was still two or
+three minutes' walk short of the flagstaff he was approaching from the
+other side. He would stop to talk with the coastguard. He always did.
+Surely he would, this time. But no--he didn't.
+
+He may have spoken, but he did not stop. So Sally noted as she
+hesitated an instant, seeing him turn off at an angle and go towards
+the pier. There was a shorter cut to the pier, without going to the
+flagstaff. Sally turned herself, and took it. She would catch him as
+he came back from the pier-end, if he was going to walk along it.
+
+She saw him as she descended the slope that, part pathway and part
+steps, led down towards the sea. He walked straight towards the pier,
+passing as he went a man and boy, who were carrying what she took,
+at that distance, for well-made coils of rope; and then, arriving at
+the pier-turnstile just as they did, pass them, and, leaving them
+apparently in conversation with the gatekeeper, walk steadily on
+towards the pier-end.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"I shouldn't call the paint properly hardened on myself. Nor won't be
+yet-a-piece, if you ask my opinion." It was young Benjamin's father
+said these words to the veteran in charge of the pier-turnstile; who,
+as an early bird, was counting his tickets, so to speak, before they
+were hatched--his actual professional cabinet-seance not having begun.
+For the pier wasn't open yet, and his permission to Fenwick to pass
+the open side-gate was an indulgence to an acquaintance.
+
+His reply to the speaker was that he must bide awhile in patience,
+then. Paint was good to dry while the grass grew, and there was plenty
+else to fret about for them as wanted it. He seemed only to mention
+this from consideration of the wants of others. He either had plenty
+to fret about, or was happier without anything. He ended with, "What
+have you to say to that, Jake Tracy?" showing that the father of
+Benjamin was Jacob, following precedent.
+
+But Jacob preferred not to be led away into ethics. "I should stand
+'em by, in the shadow, for the matter of a day or two," said he.
+"In yander." And the life-belts being safely disposed of, he added:
+"I thought to carry back number fower from the pier-end, and make a
+finish of the job. But looking to the condition of this paint, maybe
+better leave her for service. She'll do as well next week." But the
+moralist inclined to make a finish of the job. Who was going overboard
+afore the end of next week? And supposing they did, the resources of
+civilisation wouldn't be exhausted, for we could throw 'em a clean
+one paint or no.
+
+"Send your lad to fetch her along, Jake. I'll make myself answerable."
+And young Benjamin, confirmed by a nod from his father, departed for
+the mysteriously feminine hencoop.
+
+Just as the boy turned to go, Fenwick came up, and, paying no
+attention to greetings from the two men, passed through the side-gate
+and walked rather briskly away along the pier. Each of the men looked
+at the other, as though asking a question. But neither answered, and
+then both said, "Queer, too!" A nascent discussion of whether one or
+other should not follow him--for the look of his face had gone home
+to both, as he was, of course, well known to them--was cut short by
+Jacob Tracy saying, "Here's his daughter coming to see for him." And,
+just after, Sally had passed them, leaving them pleasantly stirred
+by the bright smile and eye-flash that seemed this morning brighter
+than ever. The boy shouted something from the pier-end, to which his
+father's shouted reply was that he must bide a minute and he would
+come to see himself.
+
+"The yoong beggar's got the use of his eyes," he said, not hurrying.
+"I'll go bail he'll find her. She's there all right, I suppose?" He
+was still referring to the hencoop, not to any lady.
+
+"Ah, _she's_ there, quite safe. You'd best step along and find her.
+Boys are boys, when all's told."
+
+But Jacob wanted Benjamin to distinguish himself, and still didn't
+hurry. The strange appearance of Mrs. Lobjoit's gentleman supplied
+materials for chat. Presently his son shouted again, and he answered,
+"Not there, is she? I'll come." He walked away towards the pier-end
+just as Sally, who had fancied Jeremiah would be somewhere
+alongside of the pagoda-building that nearly covered it, came
+back from her voyage of exploration, and looked down the steps to
+the under-platform, that young Benjamin had just come up shouting.
+
+What little things life and death turn on sometimes!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+OF CONRAD VEREKER'S REVISION OF PARADISE, AND OF FENWICK'S HIGH FEVER.
+ OF AN ENGLISH OFFICER WHO WAVERED AT BOMBAY, AND OF FENWICK'S
+ SURPRISE-BATH IN THE BRITISH CHANNEL. WHY HE DID NOT SINK. THE
+ ELLEN JANE OF ST. SENNANS. ONLY SALLY IS IN THE WATER STILL. MORE
+ BOATS. FOUND!
+
+
+Fenwick, haunted by the phantoms of his own past--always, as his fever
+grew, assuming more and more the force of realities--but convinced of
+their ephemeral nature, and that the crisis of this fever would pass
+and leave him free, had walked quickly along the sea front towards the
+cliff pathway. Had Dr. Conrad seen him as he passed below his window
+and looked up at it, he would probably have suspected something and
+followed him. And then the events of this story would have travelled
+a different road. But Vereker, possessed by quite another sort of
+delirium, had risen even earlier--almost with the dawn--and, taking
+Sally's inaccessibility at that unearthly hour for granted, had gone
+for a long walk over what was now to him a land of enchantment--the
+same ground he and Sally had passed over on the previous evening. He
+and his mother would be on their way to London in a few hours, and he
+would like to see the landmarks that were to be a precious memory for
+all time yet once more while he had the chance. Who could say that
+he would ever visit St. Sennans again?
+
+If Fenwick, in choosing this direction first, had a half-formed
+idea of attracting the doctor's attention, the appearance of Mrs.
+Iggulden's shuttered parlour-window would have discouraged him. It
+told a tale of a household still asleep, and quite truly as far as she
+herself was concerned. For Dr. Conrad, as might have been expected,
+was very late in coming home the night before; and his mother's
+peculiarity of not being able to sleep if kept up till eleven,
+combined with the need of a statement of her position, a declaration
+of policy, and almost a budget, if not quite, on the subject of her
+son's future housekeeping, having resulted in what threatened to
+become an all-night sitting, the good woman's dozes and repentances,
+with jerks, on the stairs overnight, had produced their consequences
+in the morning. Fenwick passed the house, and walked on as far as
+where the path rose to the cliffs; then turned back, and, pausing
+a moment, as we have seen, under Sally's window, failed in his dreamy
+state to see her as she looked over the cross-bar at him, and then
+went on towards the old town. It may be she was not very visible; the
+double glasses of an open sash-window are almost equal to opacity. But
+even with that, the extreme aberration of Fenwick's mind at the moment
+is the only way to account for his not seeing her.
+
+In fact, his mental perturbation came and went by gusts, as his memory
+caught at or relinquished agitating points of reminiscence, always
+dwelling on that parting from Rosalind at Umballa. His brain and
+nervous system were in a state that involved a climax and reaction;
+and, unhappily, this climax, during which his identification of his
+present self with his memory of its past was intensified to the point
+of absolute hallucination, came at an inopportune moment. If he could
+only have kept the phantoms of his imagination at bay until he met
+Sally! But, really, speculation on so strange a frame of mind is
+useless; we can only accept the facts as they stand.
+
+He had no recollection afterwards of what followed when he passed the
+house and failed to see Sally or hear her call out to him. For the
+time being he was back again in his life of twenty years ago. Those
+who find this hard to believe may see no way of accounting for what
+came about but by ascribing to Fenwick an intention of suicide. For
+our part we believe him to have been absolutely incapable of such an
+act from a selfish impulse; and, moreover, it is absurd to impute to
+him such a motive, at this time, however strongly he might have been
+impelled towards it by discovering the injustice and cruelty of his
+own unforgiveness towards his young wife at some previous time--as,
+for instance, in America--when she herself was beyond his reach, and
+a recantation of his error impossible. Unless we accept his conduct
+as the result of a momentary dementia, produced by overstrain, it
+must remain inexplicable.
+
+It appeared to him, so far as he was afterwards able to define or
+record it, that he was no longer walking on the familiar track between
+the few lodging-houses that made up the old St. Sennans, and the still
+older fishing-quarter near the jetty, but that he was again on his way
+from Lahore to Kurachi, from which he was to embark for a new land
+where his broken heart might do its best to heal; for if ever a man
+was utterly broken-hearted it was he when he came away from Lahore,
+after his futile attempt to procure a divorce. He no longer saw the
+cold northern sea under its great blue cloud-curtain that had shrouded
+the coming day; nor the line of fishing-smacks, beached high and dry,
+and their owners' dwellings near at hand, a little town of tar and
+timber in behind the stowage-huts of nets and tackle, nor the white
+escarpment of the cliffs beyond, that the sea had worked so many
+centuries to plunder from the rounded pastures of the sheep above. He
+no longer heard the music of the waves on the shingle, nor the cry of
+the sea-bird that swept over them, nor the tinkle of the sheep-bell
+the wind knows how to carry so far in the stillness of the morning,
+nor the voices of the fisher-children playing in the boats that one
+day may bear them to their death. His mind was far away in the Indian
+heat, parching and suffocated on the long railway journey from Lahore
+to Kurachi, scarcely better when he had reached his first boat that
+was to take him to Bombay, to embark again a day or two later for
+Australia. How little he had forgotten of the short but tedious delay
+in that chaotic emporium of all things European and Asiatic, that
+many-coloured meeting-ground of a thousand nationalities! How little,
+that the whole should come back to him now, and fill his brain with
+its reality, till the living present grew dim and vanished; reviving
+now and again, as fiction, read in early years, revives with a
+suggested doubt--is it true or false?
+
+He sat again on the Esplanade at Bombay, as the sun vanished in a
+flood of rosy gold, and released the world from his heat. He felt
+again the relief of the evening wind; heard again the chat of a group
+of English officers who sipped sherry-cobblers at a table a few paces
+off. "I always change my mind," said one of them, "backwards and
+forwards till the last minute; then I make it the last one." He quite
+understood this man's speech, and thought how like himself! For from
+the time he left Lahore he, too, had gone backwards and forwards, now
+resolving to return, come what might, now telling himself firmly
+there was no remedy but in distance apart, and all there might be of
+oblivion. Was there not yet time? He could still go back, even now.
+But no; the old obduracy was on him. Rosey had deceived him!
+
+Then he seemed to have come again to _his_ last minute. Once he was
+fairly on the ship that was even now coaling for her voyage, once the
+screw was on the move and the shore-lights vanishing, the die would be
+cast. The stars that he and Rosey had seen in that cool English garden
+that night he met her first would vanish, too, and a world would be
+between them. Still, the hour had not come; it was not too late yet.
+But still the inveterate thought came back--she _had_ deceived him.
+
+So his delirium ended as its prototype of over twenty years ago had
+ended. He hardened his heart, thrust aside all thought of forgiveness
+and repentance, and went resolutely down to the quay, as he thought,
+to embark on the little boat for the ship, and so practically put
+all thought of hesitation and return out of his mind. This moment was
+probably what would have been the crisis of his fever, and it was an
+evil hour for him in which the builder of the pier at St. Sennans made
+it so like the platform of that experience of long ago. But the boat
+that he saw before him as he stepped unhesitatingly over its edge
+was only the image of a distempered brain, and in an instant he
+was struggling with the cold, dark water. A sudden shock of chill,
+an intolerable choking agony of breath involuntarily held, an
+instantaneous dissipation of his dream, the natural result of the
+shock, and Fenwick knew himself for what he was, and fought the cruel
+water in his despair. Even so a drowning man fights who in old
+failures to learn swimming has just mastered its barest rudiments.
+A vivid pageant rushed across his mind of all the consequences of what
+seemed to him now his inevitable death, clearest of all a sad vision
+of Sally and Rosalind returning to their home alone--the black dresses
+and the silence. He found voice for one long cry for help, without
+a hope that it could be heard or that help could be at hand.
+
+But he was neither unseen nor unheard, as you will know if we have
+not failed in showing the succession of events. Sally never hesitated
+an instant as she caught sight of the delirious man's involuntary
+plunge into the green waves that had no terrors for _her_. She threw
+off as she ran, fast, fast down the wooden stairway, the only clothes
+she could get rid of--her hat and light summer cloak--and went
+straight, with a well-calculated dive, to follow him and catch him
+as he rose. If only she did not miss him! Let her once pinion his
+arms from behind, and she would get him ashore even if no help came.
+Why, there was no sea to speak of!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The man Jacob Tracy, the father of Benjamin, saw something to quicken
+his speed as he walked along the pier to help in the discovery of the
+life-belt. Why did the swimming young lady from Lobjoit's want to be
+rid of her wrap-up at that rate as she turned so sharp round to run
+down the ladder? He increased a brisk walk to a run as the lad, who
+had followed the young lady down the steps, came running up again;
+for there was hysterical terror in his voice--he was a mere boy--as he
+shouted something that became, as distance lessened, "In t' wa-ater!
+in t' wa-ater! in t' wa-ater! in t' wa-ater!" And he was waving
+something in his hand--a lady's hat surely; for with an instinct of
+swift presence of mind--a quality that is the breath of life to all
+that go down to the sea in ships, mariners or fisher-folk--he had seen
+that the headgear Sally threw away would tell its tale quicker than
+any words he could rely on finding.
+
+"Roon smart, yoong Benjamin--roon for the bo'ats and call out 'oars'!
+Roon, boy--you've no time to lose!" And as the father dashes down the
+steps he spoke of as "the ladder" the son runs for all he is worth to
+carry the alarm to the shore. He shouts, "Oars, oars, oars!" as he was
+told. But it is not needed, for his thought of bringing up the hat has
+done his work already for him. The coastguard, though the pier itself
+hid the two immersions from him, is quick of apprehension and ready
+with his glass, and has seen the boy's return from below; and at the
+same time heard, not his words, but the terror in them, and by some
+mysterious agency has sent a flying word along the beach that has
+brought a population out to help.
+
+A bad time of the tide to get a boat off sharp, and a long shelving
+run of sandy shingle before we reach the sea; for all the boats are
+on the upper strand of the beach, above the last high-water mark, and
+the flow of the tide is scarcely an hour old. There is a short squat
+cobble, flat-bottomed and of intolerable weight, down near the waters,
+and its owner makes for it. Another man drives him out seawards,
+against the constant lift of breaking waves, large enough to be
+troublesome, small enough to be numerous. They give no chance to the
+second man to leap into the boat, so deep has he to go, pushing on
+until the pads are out and the boat controlled; but he has barely time
+to feel the underdraw of the recoiling wave when the straight scour
+of a keel comes down along the sand and pebbles--the Ellen Jane,
+St. Sennans--half-pushed, half-borne by a crew three minutes have
+extemporised. You two in the bows, and you two astarn, and the
+spontaneous natural leader--the man the emergency makes--at the
+tiller-ropes, and Ellen Jane is off, well drenched at the outset. An
+oar swings round high in the air, not to knock one of you two astarn
+into the water, and then, "Give way!" and then the short, quick rhythm
+of the stroke, and four men at their utmost stress, each knowing life
+and death may hang upon the greatness of his effort.
+
+The cobble is soon outshot, but its owner will not give in. He bears
+away from the course of the boat that has passed him, to seek their
+common object where the tide-drift may have swept it, beyond some
+light craft at their moorings which would have hidden it for a while.
+He has the right of it this time, for as he passes, straining at his
+sculls, under the stern of a pleasure-yacht at anchor, his eye is
+caught by a black spot rising on a wave, and he makes for it. Not too
+fast at the last, though, but cautiously, so as to grasp the man with
+the life-belt and hold him firm till help shall come to get him on
+board. He might easily have overshot him; but he has him now, and the
+four-oar sights him as she swings round between the last-moored boat
+and the pier; and comes apace, the quicker for the tide.
+
+"What is it ye say, master? What do ye make it out the gentleman says,
+Peter?" For Fenwick, hauled on board the cobble with the help of a man
+from the other boat, who returns to his oar, is alive and conscious,
+but not much more. A brandy-flask comes from somewhere in the
+steerage, where a mop and a tin pot and a boathook live, and its
+effect is good. The half-drowned man becomes articulate enough to
+justify the report. "It's his daughter he's asking for--overboard,
+too!" and then the man who spoke first says: "You be easy in your
+mind, master; we'll find her. Bear away a bit, and lie to, Tom." Tom
+is the man in the cobble, and he does as he is bidden. He ships his
+sculls and drifts, watching round on all sides for what may be just
+afloat near the surface. The four-oar remains, and the eyes of her
+crew are straining hard to catch a sight of anything that is not mere
+lift and ripple of a wave.
+
+Then more boats one after another, and more, and the gathering crowd
+that lines the shore sees them scatter and lie to, some way apart, to
+watch the greater space of water. All drift, because they know that
+what they seek is drifting, too, and that if they move they lose their
+only chance; for the thing they have to find is so small, so small,
+and that great waste of pitiless sea is so large. It is their only
+chance.
+
+The crowd, always growing, moves along the beach as the flotilla of
+drifting boats move slowly with the tide. They can hear the shouting
+from boat to boat, but catch but little of the words. They follow
+on, with little speech among themselves, and hope dying slowly out
+of their hearts. Gradually towards the jetty, where the girl they are
+seeking sat, only a few days since, beside the man whose heart the
+memory of yesterday is still rejoicing; the only trouble of whose
+unconscious soul is the thought that he and she must soon be parted,
+however short the term of their separation may be. He will know more
+soon.
+
+Suddenly the shouting increases in the boats, and excited voices break
+the silence on the shore. It won't do to hope too much, but surely all
+the boats are thickening to one spot.... No, it's nothing!... Yes, it
+_is_--it _is_ something--one knows what--sighted abaft the Ellen Jane,
+whose steersman catches it with a boathook as the oars we on the beach
+saw suddenly drop back water--slowly, cautiously--and only wait for
+him to drag the light weight athwart the gunwale to row for the dear
+life towards the town. The scattered crowd turns and comes back,
+trampling the shingle, to meet the boat as she lands, and follow what
+she brings to the nearest haven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+AN ERRAND IN VAIN, AND HOW DR. CONRAD CAME TO KNOW. CONCERNING LLOYD'S
+ COFFEEHOUSE, AND THE BATTLE OF CAMPERDOWN. MARSHALL HALL'S SYSTEM AND
+ SILVESTER'S. SOCIAL DISADVANTAGES. A CHAT WITH A CENTENARIAN, AND HOW
+ ROSALIND CAME TO KNOW. THOMAS LOCOCK OF ROCHESTER. ONE O'CLOCK!
+
+
+"Is that you, Dr. Conrad?" It was Rosalind who spoke, through the
+half-open window of her bedroom, to the happy, expectant face of
+the doctor in the little front garden below. "I'm only just up, and
+they're both gone out. I shall be down in a few minutes." For she had
+looked into her husband's room, and then into Sally's, and concluded
+they must have gone out together. So much the better! If Sally was
+with him, no harm could come to him.
+
+"I don't see them anywhere about," said the doctor. Sally had not been
+gone ten minutes, and at this moment had just caught sight of Fenwick
+making for the pier. The short cut down took her out of sight of the
+house. Rosalind considered a minute.
+
+"Very likely they've gone to the hotel--the 'beastly hotel,' you
+know." There is the sound of a laugh, and the caress in her voice, as
+she thinks of Sally, whom she is quoting. "Gerry found a friend there
+last night--a German gentleman--who was to go at seven-fifty. Very
+likely he's walked up to say good-bye to him. Suppose you go to meet
+them! How's Mrs. Vereker this morning?"
+
+"Do you know, I haven't seen her yet! We talked rather late, so I
+left without waking her. I've been for a walk."
+
+"Well, go and meet Gerry. I feel pretty sure he's gone there." And
+thereon Dr. Conrad departed, and so, departing towards the new town,
+lost sight for the time being of the pier and the coast. He went by
+the steps and Albion Villas, and as he caught a glimpse therefrom
+of the pier-end in the distance, had an impression of a man running
+along it and shouting; but he drew no inferences, although it struck
+him there was panic, with the energy of sudden action, in this man's
+voice.
+
+He arrived at the hotel, of course without meeting either Sally or
+Fenwick. He had accepted them as probably there, on perhaps too slight
+evidence. But they might be in the hotel. Had the German gentleman
+gone?--he asked. The stony woman he addressed replied from her
+precinct, with no apparent consciousness that she was addressing a
+fellow-creature, that No. 148, if you meant him, had paid and gone by
+last 'bus. She spoke as to space, but as one too indifferent on all
+points to care much who overheard her.
+
+Vereker thanked her, and turned to go. As he departed he caught a
+fragment of conversation between her and the waiter who had produced
+the brandy the evening before. He was in undress uniform--a holland or
+white-jean jacket, and a red woollen comforter. He had lost his voice,
+or most of it, and croaked; and his cold had got worse in the night.
+He was shedding tears copiously, and wiping them on a cruet-stand he
+carried in one hand. The other was engaged by an empty coal-scuttle
+with a pair of slippers in it, inexplicably.
+
+"There's a start down there. Party over the pier-end! Dr. Maccoll
+he's been 'phoned for."
+
+"Party from this hotel?"
+
+"Couldn't say. Porcibly. No partic'lars to identify, so far."
+
+"They're not bringing him here?"
+
+"Couldn't say, miss; but I should say they wasn't myself."
+
+"If you know you can say. Who told you, and what did _he_ say? Make
+yourself understood."
+
+"Dr. Maccoll he's been 'phoned for. You can inquire and see if I
+ain't right. Beyond that I take no responsibility."
+
+The Lady of the Bureau came out; moved, no doubt, by an image of
+a drowned man whose resources would not meet the credits she might
+be compelled to give him. She came out to the front through the
+swing-door, looked up and down the road, and seemed to go back happier.
+Dr. Conrad's curiosity was roused, and he started at once for the
+beach, but absolutely without a trace of personal misgiving. No doubt
+the tendency we all have to impute public mishaps to a special class
+of people outside our own circle had something to do with this. As he
+passed down an alley behind some cottages--a short way to the pier--he
+was aware of a boy telling a tale in a terrified voice to a man and an
+elderly woman. It was the man with the striped shirt, and the boy was
+young Benjamin. He had passed on a few paces when the man called to
+him, and came running after him, followed by the woman and boy.
+
+"I ask your pardon, sir--I ask your pardon...." What he has to say
+will not allow him to speak, and his words will not come. He turns for
+help to his companion. "_You_ tell him, Martha woman," he says, and
+gives in.
+
+"My master thinks, sir, you may find something on the beach...."
+
+"Something on the beach!..." Fear is coming into Dr. Conrad's face
+and voice.
+
+"Find something has happened on the beach. But they've got him
+out...."
+
+"Got him out! Got whom out? Speak up, for Heaven's sake!"
+
+"It might be the gentleman you know, sir, and...." But the speaker's
+husband, having left the telling to his wife, unfairly strikes in
+here, to have the satisfaction of lightening the communication. "But
+_he's_ out safe, sir. You may rely on the yoong lad." He has made
+it harder for his wife to tell the rest, and she hesitates. But Dr.
+Conrad has stayed for no more. He is going at a run down the sloped
+passage that leads to the sea. The boy follows him, and by some
+dexterous use of private thoroughfares, known to him, but not to the
+doctor, arrives first, and is soon visible ahead, running towards the
+scattered groups that line the beach. The man and woman follow more
+slowly.
+
+Few of those who read this, we hope, have ever had to face a shock so
+appalling as the one that Conrad Vereker sustained when he came to
+know what it was that was being carried up the beach from the boat
+that had just been driven stern on to the shingle, as he emerged to
+a full view of the sea and the running crowd, thickening as its last
+stragglers arrived to meet it. But most of us who are not young have
+unhappily had some experience of the sort, and many will recognise
+(if we can describe it) the feeling that was his in excess when a
+chance bystander--not unconcerned, for no one was that--used in his
+hearing a phrase that drove the story home to him, and forced him to
+understand. "It's the swimming girl from Lobjoit's, and she's
+drooned." It was as well, for he had to know. What did it matter how
+he became the blank thing standing there, able to say to itself, "Then
+Sally is dead," and to attach their meaning to the words, but not to
+comprehend why he went on living? One way of learning the thing that
+closes over our lives and veils the sun for all time is as good as
+another; but how came he to be so colourlessly calm about it?
+
+If we could know how each man feels who hears in the felon's dock the
+sentence of penal servitude for life, it may be we should find that
+Vereker's sense of being for the moment a cold, unexplained unit in an
+infinite unfeeling void, was no unusual experience. But this unit knew
+mechanically what had happened perfectly well, and its duty was clear
+before it. Just half a second for this sickness to go off, and he
+would act.
+
+It was a longer pause than it seemed to him, as all things appeared to
+happen quickly in it, somewhat as in a photographic life-picture when
+the films are run too quick. At least, that remained his memory of
+it. And during that time he stood and wondered why he could not feel.
+He thought of her mother and of Fenwick, and said to himself they
+were to be pitied more than he; for they were human, and _could_ feel
+it--could really know what jewel they had lost--had hearts to grieve
+and eyes to weep with. He had nothing--was a stupid blank! Oh, he had
+been mistaken about himself and his love: he was a stone.
+
+A few moments later than his first sight of that silent crowd--moments
+in which the world had changed and the sun had become a curse;
+in which he had for some reason--not grief, for he could not
+grieve--resolved on death, except in an event he dared not hope
+for--he found himself speaking to the men who had borne up the beach
+the thing whose germ of life, if it survived, was _his_ only chance
+of life hereafter.
+
+"I am a doctor; let me come." The place they had brought it to was a
+timber structure that was held as common property by the fisher-world,
+and known as Lloyd's Coffeehouse. It was not a coffeehouse, but
+a kind of spontaneous club-room, where the old men sat and smoked
+churchwarden pipes, and told each other tales of storm and wreck, and
+how the news of old sea-battles came to St. Sennans in their boyhood;
+of wives made widows for their country's good, and men all sound of
+limb when the first gun said "Death!" across the water, crippled for
+all time when the last said "Victory!" and there was silence and the
+smell of blood. Over the mantel was an old print of the battle of
+Camperdown, with three-deckers in the smoke, flanked by portraits of
+Rodney and Nelson. There was a long table down the centre that had
+been there since the days of Rodney, and on this was laid what an hour
+ago was Sally; what each man present fears to uncover the face of, but
+less on his own account than for the sake of the only man who seems
+fearless, and lays hands on the cover to remove it; for all knew, or
+guessed, what this dead woman might be--might have been--to this man.
+
+"I am a doctor; let me come."
+
+"Are ye sure ye know, young master? Are ye sure, boy?" The speaker,
+a very old man, interposes a trembling hand to save Vereker from what
+he may not anticipate, perhaps has it in mind to beseech him to give
+place to the local doctor, just arriving. But the answer is merely, "I
+know." And the hand that uncovers the dead face never wavers, and then
+that white thing we see is all there is of Sally--that coil and tangle
+of black hair, all mixed with weed and sea-foam, is the rich mass that
+was drying in the sun that day she sat with Fenwick on the beach;
+those eyes that strain behind the half-closed eyelids were the merry
+eyes that looked up from the water at the boat she dived from two days
+since; those lips are the lips the man who stands beside her kissed
+but yesterday for the first time. The memory of that kiss is on him
+now as he wipes the sea-slime from them and takes the first prompt
+steps for their salvation.
+
+The old Scotch doctor, who came in a moment later, wondered at the
+resolute decision and energy Vereker was showing. He had been told
+credibly of the circumstances of the case, and gave way on technical
+points connected with resuscitation, surrendering views he would
+otherwise have contended for about Marshall Hall's and Silvester's
+respective systems. Perhaps one reason for this was that auscultation
+of the heart convinced him that the case was hopeless, and he may
+have reflected that if any other method than Dr. Vereker's was used
+that gentleman was sure to believe the patient might have been saved.
+Better leave him to himself.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Rosalind returned to her dressing, after Dr. Conrad walked away from
+the house, with a feeling--not a logical one--that now she need not
+hurry. Why having spoken with him and forwarded him on to look for
+Sally and Gerry should make any difference was not at all clear,
+and she did not account to herself for it. She accepted it as an
+occurrence that put her somehow in touch with the events of the
+day--made her a part of what was going on elsewhere. She had felt
+lapsed, for the moment, when, waking suddenly to advanced daylight,
+she had gone first to her husband's room and then to Sally's, and
+found both empty. The few words spoken from her window with her
+recently determined son-in-law had switched on her current again,
+metaphorically speaking.
+
+So she took matters easily, and was at rest about her husband, in
+spite of the episode of the previous evening--rather, we should have
+said, of the small hours of that morning. The fact is, it was her
+first sleep she had waked from, an unusually long and sound one
+after severe tension, and in the ordinary course of events she would
+probably have gone to sleep again. Instead, she had got up at once,
+and gone to her husband's room to relieve her mind about him.
+A momentary anxiety at finding it empty disappeared when she found
+Sally's empty also; but by that time she was effectually waked, and
+rang for Mrs. Lobjoit and the hot water.
+
+If Mrs. Lobjoit, when she appeared with it, had been able to give
+particulars of Sally's departure, and to say that she and Mr. Fenwick
+had gone out separately, Rosalind would have felt less at ease about
+him; but nothing transpired to show that they had not gone out
+together. Mrs. Lobjoit's data were all based on the fact that she
+found the street door open when she went to do down her step, and she
+had finished this job and gone back into the kitchen by the time Sally
+followed Fenwick out. Of course, she never came upstairs to see what
+rooms were empty; why should she? And as no reason for inquiry
+presented itself, the question was never raised by Rosalind. Sally
+was naturally an earlier bird than herself, and quite as often as
+not she would join Gerry in his walk before breakfast.
+
+How thankful she felt, now that the revelation was over, that Sally
+was within reach to help in calming down the mind that had been so
+terribly shaken by it; for all her thoughts were of Gerry; on her
+own behalf she felt nothing but contentment. Think what her daily
+existence had been! What had she to lose by a complete removal of
+the darkness that had shrouded her husband's early life with her--or
+rather, what had she not to gain? Now that it had been assured to her
+that nothing in the past could make a new rift between them, the only
+weight upon her mind was the possible necessity for revealing to Sally
+in the end the story of her parentage. What mother, to whom a like
+story of her own early days was neither more nor less than a glimpse
+into Hell, could have felt otherwise about communicating it to her
+child? She felt, too, the old feeling of the difficulty there would be
+in making Sally understand. The girl had not chanced across devildom
+enough to make her an easy recipient of such a tale.
+
+Oh, the pleasure with which she recalled his last words of the night
+before: "She is _my_ daughter now!" It was the final ratification of
+the protest of her life against the "rights" that Law and Usage grant
+to technical paternity; rights that can only be abrogated or ignored
+by a child's actual parent--its mother--at the cost of insult and
+contumely from a world that worships its own folly and ignores its own
+gods. Sally was hers--her own--hard as the terms of her possession had
+been, and she had assigned a moiety of her rights in her to the man
+she loved. What was the fatherhood of blood alone to set against
+the one her motherhood had a right to concede, and had conceded, in
+response to the spontaneous growth of a father's love? What claim had
+devilish cruelty and treachery to any share in their result--a result
+that, after all, was the only compensation possible to their victim?
+
+We do not make this endeavour to describe Rosalind's frame of mind
+with a view to either endorsing or disclaiming her opinions. We merely
+record them as those of a woman whose life-story was an uncommon one;
+but not without a certain sympathy for the new definition of paternity
+their philosophy involves, backed by a feeling that its truth is
+to some extent acknowledged in the existing marriage-law of several
+countries. As a set-off against this, no woman can have a child
+entirely her own except by incurring what are called "social
+disadvantages." The hare that breaks covert incurs social
+disadvantages. A happy turn of events had shielded Rosalind from
+the hounds, or they had found better sport elsewhere. And her child
+was her own.
+
+But even as the thought was registered in her mind, that child lay
+lifeless; and her husband, stunned and dumb in his despair, dared not
+even long that she, too, should know, to share his burden.
+
+"Those people are taking their time," said she. Not that she was
+pressingly anxious for them to come home. It was early still, and the
+more Gerry lived in the present the better. Sally and her lover were
+far and away the best foreground for the panorama of his mind just
+now, and she herself would be quite happy in the middle distance.
+There would be time and enough hereafter, when the storm had subsided,
+for a revelation of all those vanished chapters of his life in Canada
+and elsewhere.
+
+It was restful to her, after the tension and trial of the night, to
+feel that he was happy with Sally and poor Prosy. What did it really
+matter how long they dawdled? She could hear in anticipation their
+voices and the laughter that would tell her of their coming. In a very
+little while it would be a reality, and, after all, the pleasure of a
+good symposium over Sally's betrothal was still to come. She and Gerry
+and the two principals had not spoken of it together yet. That would
+be a real happiness. How seldom it was that an engagement to marry
+gave such complete satisfaction to bystanders! And, after all, _they_
+are the ones to be consulted; not the insignificant bride and
+bridegroom elect. Perhaps, though, she was premature in this case.
+Was there not the Octopus? But then she remembered with pleasure
+that Conrad had represented his mother as phenomenally genial in her
+attitude towards the new arrangement; as having, in fact, a claim to
+be considered not only a bestower of benign consent, but an accomplice
+before the fact. Still, Rosalind felt her own reserves on the subject,
+although she had always taken the part of the Octopus on principle
+when she thought Sally had become too disrespectful towards her.
+Anyhow, no use to beg and borrow troubles! Let her dwell on the
+happiness only that was before them all. She pictured a variety of
+homes for Sally in the time to come, peopling them with beautiful
+grandchildren--only, mind you, this was to be many, many years ahead!
+She could not cast herself for the part of grandmother while she
+twined that glorious hair into its place with hands that for softness
+and whiteness would have borne comparison with Sally's own.
+
+In the old days, before the news of evil travelled fast, the widowed
+wife would live for days, weeks, months, unclouded by the knowledge
+of her loneliness, rejoicing in the coming hour that was to bring her
+wanderer back; and even as her heart laughed to think how now, at
+last, the time was drawing near for his return, his heart had ceased
+to beat, and, it may be, his bones were already bleaching where the
+assassin's knife had left him in the desert; or were swaying to and
+fro in perpetual monotonous response to the ground-swell, in some
+strange green reflected light of a sea-cavern no man's eye had ever
+seen; or buried nameless in a common tomb with other victims of battle
+or of plague; or, worst of all, penned in some dungeon, mad to think
+of home, waking from dreams of _her_ to the terror of the intolerable
+night, its choking heat or deadly chill. And all those weeks or months
+the dearth of news would seem just the chance of a lost letter, no
+more--a thing that may happen any day to any of us. And she would live
+on in content and hope, jesting even in anticipation of his return.
+
+Even so Rosalind, happy and undisturbed, dwelt on the days that were
+to come for the merpussy and poor Prosy, as she still had chosen to
+call him, for her husband and herself; and all the while _there_,
+so near her, was the end of it all, written in letters of death.
+
+They were taking their time, certainly, those people; so she would
+put her hat on and go to meet them. Mrs. Lobjoit wasn't to hurry
+breakfast, but wait till they came. All right!
+
+It looked as if it would rain later, so it was just as well to get out
+a little now. Rosalind was glad of the sweet air off the sea, for the
+night still hung about her. The tension of it was on her still, for
+all that she counted herself so much the better, so much the safer,
+for that interview with Gerry. But oh, what a thing to think that
+now he knew _her_ as she had known him from the beginning! How much
+they would have to tell each other, when once they were well in calm
+water!... Why were those girls running, and why did that young man on
+the beach below shout to some one who followed him, "It's over at the
+pier"?
+
+"Is anything the matter?" She asked the question of a very old man,
+whom she knew well by sight, who was hurrying his best in the same
+direction. But his best was but little, as speed, though it did credit
+to his age; for old Simon was said to be in his hundredth year.
+Rosalind walked easily beside him as he answered:
+
+"I oondersta'and, missis, there's been a fall from the pier-head....
+Oh yes, they've getten un out; ye may easy your mind o' that." But,
+for all that, Rosalind wasn't sorry her party were up at the hotel.
+She had believed them there long enough to have forgotten that she
+had no reason for the belief to speak of.
+
+"You've no idea who it is?"
+
+"Some do say a lady and a gentleman." Rosalind felt still gladder of
+her confidence that Sally and Gerry were out of the way. "'Ary one of
+'em would be bound to drown but for the boats smart and handy--barring
+belike a swimmer like your young lady! She's a rare one, to tell of!"
+
+"I believe she is. She swam round the Cat Buoy in a worse sea than
+this two days ago."
+
+"And she would, too!" Then the old boy's voice changed as he went on,
+garrulous: "But there be seas, missis, no man can swim in. My fower
+boys, they were fine swimmers--all fower!"
+
+"But were they?..." Rosalind did not like to say drowned; but old
+Simon took it as spoken.
+
+"All fower of 'em--fine lads all--put off to the wreck--wreck o' th'
+brig Thyrsis, on th' Goodwins--and ne'er a one come back. And I had
+the telling of it to their mother. And the youngest, he never was
+found; and the others was stone dead ashore, nigh on to the Foreland.
+There was none to help. Fifty-three year ago come this Michaelmas."
+
+"Is their mother still living?" Rosalind asked, interested. Old Simon
+had got to that stage in which the pain of the past is less than
+the pleasure of talking it over. "Died, she did," said he, almost as
+though he were unconcerned, "thirty-five year ago--five year afower
+ever I married my old missis yander." Rosalind felt less sympathy. If
+she were to lose Sally or Gerry, would she ever be able to talk like
+this, even if she lived to be ninety-nine? Possibly yes--only she
+could not know it now. She felt too curious about what had happened
+at the pier to think of going back, and walked on with old Simon,
+not answering him much. He seemed quite content to talk.
+
+She did not trouble herself on the point of her party returning
+and not finding her. Ten chances to one they would hear about the
+accident, and guess where she had gone. Most likely they would follow
+her. Besides, she meant to go back as soon as ever she knew what had
+happened.
+
+Certainly there were a great many people down there round about
+Lloyd's Coffeehouse! Had a life been lost? How she hoped not! What
+a sad end it would be to such a happy holiday as theirs had been! She
+said something to this effect to the old man beside her. His reply
+was: "Ye may doubt of it, in my judgment, missis. The rowboats were
+not long enough agone for that. Mayhap he'll take a bit of nursing
+round, though." But he quickened his pace, and Rosalind was sorry that
+a sort of courtesy towards him stood in her way. She would have liked
+to go much quicker.
+
+She could not quite understand the scared look of a girl to whom she
+said, "Is it a bad accident? Do you know who it is?" nor why this girl
+muttered something under her breath, then got away, nor why so many
+eyes, all tearful, should be fixed on _her_. She asked again of the
+woman nearest her, "Do you know who it is?" but the woman gasped, and
+became hysterical, making her afraid she had accosted some anxious
+relative or near friend, who could not bear to speak of it. And still
+all the eyes were fixed upon her. A shudder ran through her. Could
+that be pity she saw in them--pity for _her_?
+
+"For God's sake, tell me at once! Tell me what this is...."
+
+Still silence! She could hear through it sobs here and there in the
+crowd, and then two women pointed to where an elderly man who looked
+like a doctor came from a doorway close by. She heard the hysterical
+woman break down outright, and her removal by friends, and then the
+strong Scotch accent of the doctor-like man making a too transparent
+effort towards an encouraging tone.
+
+"There's nae reason to anteecipate a fatal tairmination, so far.
+I wouldna undertake myself to say the seestolic motion of the heart
+was...." But he hesitated, with a puzzled look, as Rosalind caught his
+arm and hung to it, crying out: "Why do you tell _me_ this? For God's
+sake, speak plain! I am stronger than you think."
+
+His answer came slowly, in an abated voice, but clearly: "Because they
+tauld me ye were the girl's mither."
+
+In the short time that had passed since Rosalind's mind first admitted
+an apprehension of evil the worst possibility it had conceived was
+that Vereker or her husband was in danger. No misgiving about Sally
+had entered it, except so far as a swift thought followed the fear
+of mishap to one of them. "How shall Sally be told of this? When and
+where will she know?"
+
+Two of the women caught her as she fell, and carried her at the Scotch
+doctor's bidding into a house adjoining, where Fenwick had been
+carried in a half-insensible collapse that had followed his landing
+from the cobble-boat in which he was sculled ashore.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Tell me what has happened. Where is Dr. Vereker?" Rosalind asks the
+question of any of the fisher-folk round her as soon as returning
+consciousness brings speech. They look at each other, and the woman
+the cottage seems to belong to says interrogatively, "The young
+doctor-gentleman?" and then answers the last question. He is looking
+to the young lady in at the Coffeehouse. But no one says what has
+happened. Rosalind looks beseechingly round.
+
+"Will you not tell me now? Oh, tell me--tell me the whole!"
+
+"It's such a little we know ourselves, ma'am. But my husband will be
+here directly. It was he brought the gentleman ashore...."
+
+"Where is the gentleman?" Rosalind has caught up the speaker with
+a decisive rally. Her natural strength is returning, prompted by
+something akin to desperation.
+
+"We have him in here, ma'am. But he's bad, too! Here's my husband.
+Have ye the brandy, Tom?"
+
+Rosalind struggles to her feet from the little settee they had laid
+her on. Her head is swimming, and she is sick, but she says: "Let
+me come!" She has gathered this much--that whatever has happened to
+Sally, Vereker is there beside her, and the other doctor she knows
+of. She can do nothing, and Gerry is close at hand. They let her
+come, and the woman and her husband follow. The one or two others
+go quietly out; there were too many for the tiny house.
+
+That is Gerry, she can see, on the trestle-bedstead near the window
+with the flowerpots in it. He seems only half conscious, and his hands
+and face are cold. She cannot be sure that he has recognised her.
+Then she knows she is being spoken to. It is the fisherman's wife
+who speaks.
+
+"We could find no way to get the gentleman's wet garments from him,
+but we might make a shift to try again. He's a bit hard to move. Not
+too much at once, Tom." Her husband is pouring brandy from his flask
+into a mug.
+
+"Has he had any brandy?"
+
+"Barely to speak of. Tell the lady, Tom!"
+
+"No more than the leaving of a flask nigh empty out in my boat. It did
+him good, too. He got the speech to tell of the young lady, else--God
+help us!--we might have rowed him in, and lost the bit of water she
+was under. But we had the luck to find her." It was the owner of the
+cobble who spoke.
+
+"Gerry, drink some of this at once. It's me--Rosey--your wife!" She is
+afraid his head may fail, for anything may happen now; but the brandy
+the fisherman's wife has handed to her revives him. No one speaks for
+awhile, and Rosalind, in the dazed state that so perversely notes and
+dwells on some small thing of no importance, and cannot grasp the
+great issue of some crisis we are living through, is keenly aware of
+the solemn ticking of a high grandfather clock, and of the name of the
+maker on its face--"Thomas Locock, Rochester." She sees it through
+the door into the front room, and wonders what the certificate or
+testimonial in a frame beside it is; and whether the Bible on the table
+below it, beside the fat blue jug with a ship and inscriptions on it,
+has illustrations and the Stem of Jesse rendered pictorially. Or is it
+"Pilgrim's Progress," and no Bible at all? Who or what is she, that can
+sit and think of this and that, knowing that a world--her world and her
+husband's--is at stake, and that a terrible game is being played to
+save it, there within twenty yards of them? If she could only have
+given active help! But that she knows is impossible. She knows enough
+to be satisfied that all that can be done is being done; that even
+warmth and stimulants are useless, perhaps even injurious, till
+artificial respiration has done its work. She can recall Sally's voice
+telling her of these things. Yes, she is best here beside her husband.
+
+What is it that he says in a gasping whisper? Can any one tell him
+what it is has happened? She cannot--perhaps could not if she
+knew--and she does not yet know herself. She repeats her question
+to the fisherman and his wife. They look at each other and say young
+Ben Tracy was on the pier. Call him in. It is something to know that
+what has happened was on the pier. While young Ben is hunted up the
+opportunity is taken to make the change of wet clothes for
+extemporised dry ones. The half-drowned, all-chilled, and bewildered
+man is reviving, and can help, though rigidly and with difficulty.
+Then Ben is brought in, appalled and breathless.
+
+The red-eyed and tear-stained boy is in bad trim for giving evidence,
+but under exhortation to speak up and tell the lady he articulates his
+story through his sobs. He is young, and can cry. He goes back to the
+beginning.
+
+His father told him to run and hunt round for the life-belt, and he
+went to left instead of to right, and missed of seeing it. And he
+was at the top o' the ladder, shooat'un aloud to his father, and the
+gentleman--he nodded towards Fenwick--was walking down below. Then the
+young lady came to the top stair of the ladder. The narrator threw all
+his powers of description into the simultaneousness of Sally's arrival
+at this point and the gentleman walking straight over the pier-edge.
+"And then the young lady she threw away her hat, and come runnin'
+down, runnin' down, and threw away her cloak, she _did_, and stra'at
+she went for t' wa'ater!" Young Benjamin's story and his control over
+his sobs come to an end at the same time, and his father, just
+arrived, takes up the tale.
+
+"I saw there was mishap in it," he says, "by the manner of my young
+lad with the lady's hat, and I went direct for the life-belt, for
+I'm no swimmer myself. Tom, man, tell the lady I'm no swimmer...."
+Tom nodded assent, "... or I might have tried my luck. It was a bad
+business that the life-belt was well away at the far end, and I had no
+chance to handle it in time. It was the run of the tide took them out
+beyond the length of the line, and I was bound to make the best throw
+I could, and signal to shore for a boat." He was going to tell how the
+only little boat at the pier-end had got water-logged in the night,
+when Rosalind interrupted him.
+
+"Did you see them both in the water?"
+
+"Plain. The young lady swimming behind and keeping the gentleman's
+head above the water. I could hear her laughing like, and talking.
+Then I sent the belt out, nigh half-way, and she saw it and swam
+for it. Then I followed my young lad for to get out a shore-boat."
+
+It was the thought of the merpussy laughing like and talking in the
+cruel sea that was to engulf her that brought a heart-broken choking
+moan from her mother. Then, all being told, the fisher-folk glanced
+at each other, and by common consent went noiselessly from the room
+and lingered whispering outside. They closed the outer door, leaving
+the cottage entirely to Rosalind and her husband, and then they two
+were alone in the darkened world; and Conrad Vereker, whom they could
+not help, was striving--striving against despair--to bring back life
+to Sally.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A terrible strain--an almost killing strain--had been put upon
+Fenwick's powers of endurance. Probably the sudden shock of his
+immersion, the abrupt suppression of an actual fever almost at the
+cost of sanity, had quite as much to do with this as what he was at
+first able to grasp of the extent of the disaster. But actual chill
+and exposure had contributed their share to the state of semi-collapse
+in which Rosalind found him. Had the rower of the cobble turned
+in-shore at once, some of this might have been saved; but that would
+have been one pair of eyes the fewer, and every boat was wanted. Now
+that his powerful constitution had the chance to reassert itself, his
+revival went quickly. He was awakening to a world with a black grief
+in it; but Rosey was there, and had to be lived for, and think of his
+debt to her! Think of the great wrong he did her in that old time that
+he had only regained the knowledge of yesterday! Her hand in his gave
+him strength to speak, and though his voice was weak it would reach
+the head that rested on his bosom.
+
+"I can tell you now, darling, what I remember. I went off feverish
+in the night after you left me, and I suppose my brain gave way, in
+a sense. I went out early to shake it off, and a sort of delusion
+completely got the better of me. I fancied I was back at Bombay, going
+on the boat for Australia, and I just stepped off the pier-edge. Our
+darling must have been there. Oh, Sally, Sally!..." He had to pause
+and wait.
+
+"Hope is not all dead--not yet, not yet!" Rosalind's voice seemed
+to plead against despair.
+
+"I know, Rosey dearest--not yet. I heard her voice ... oh, her
+voice!... call to me to be still, and she would save me. And then
+I felt her dear hand ... first my arm, then my head, on each side."
+Again his voice was choking, but he recovered. "Then, somehow, the
+life-belt was round me--I can't tell how, but she made me hold it so
+as to be safe. She was talking and laughing, but I could not hear
+much. I know, however, that she said quite suddenly, 'I had better
+swim back to the pier. Hold on tight, Jeremiah!'..." He faltered again
+before ending. "I don't know why she went, but she said, 'I must go,'
+and swam away."
+
+That was all Fenwick could tell. The explanation came later. It was
+that unhappy petticoat-tape! A swimmer's leg-stroke may be encumbered
+in a calm sea, or when the only question is of keeping afloat for
+awhile. But in moderately rough water, and in a struggle against
+a running tide--which makes a certain speed imperative--the conditions
+are altered. Sally may have judged wrongly in trying to return to the
+pier, but remember--she could not in the first moments know that the
+mishap had been seen, and help was near at hand. Least of all could
+she estimate the difficulty of swimming in a loosened encumbered
+skirt. In our judgment, she would have done better to remain near the
+life-belt, even if she, too, had ultimately had to depend on it. The
+additional risk for Fenwick would have been small.
+
+After he had ended what he had to tell he remained quite still, and
+scarcely spoke during the hour that followed. Twice or three times
+during that hour Rosalind rose to go out and ask if there was any
+change. But, turning to him with her hand on the door, and asking
+"Shall I go?" she was always met with "What good will it do? Conrad
+will tell us at once," and returned to her place beside him. After
+all, what she heard might be the end of Hope. Better stave off Despair
+to the last.
+
+She watched the deliberate hands of the clock going cruelly on,
+unfaltering, ready to register in cold blood the moment that should
+say that Sally, as they knew her, was no more. Thomas Locock, of
+Rochester, had taken care of that. Where would those hands be on that
+clock-face when all attempt at resuscitation had to stop? And why live
+after it?
+
+She fancied she could hear, at intervals, Dr. Conrad's voice giving
+instructions; and the voice of the Scotsman, less doubtfully, which
+always sounded like that of a medical man, for some reason not
+defined. As the clock-hand pointed to ten, she heard both quite
+near--outside Lloyd's Coffeehouse, evidently. Then she knew why she
+had so readily relinquished her purpose of getting at Dr. Conrad
+for news. It was the dread of seeing anything of the necessary
+manipulation of the body. Could she have helped, it would have been
+different. No, if she must look upon her darling dead, let it be
+later. But now there was that poor fellow-sufferer within reach,
+and she could see him without fear. She went out quickly.
+
+"Can you come away?"
+
+"Quite safely for a minute. The others have done it before."
+
+"Is there a chance?"
+
+"There is a chance." Dr. Conrad's hand as she grasps it is so cold
+that it makes her wonder at the warmth of her own. She is strangely
+alive to little things. "Yes--there _is_ a chance," he repeats, more
+emphatically, as one who has been contradicted. But the old Scotch
+doctor had only said cautiously, "It would be airly times to be
+geevin' up hopes," in answer to a half-suggestion of reference to him
+in the words just spoken. Rosalind keeps the cold hand that has taken
+hers, and the crushing weight of her own misery almost gives place to
+her utter pity for the ash-white face before her, and the tale there
+is in it of a soul in torture.
+
+"What is the longest time ... the longest time...?" she cannot frame
+her question, but both doctors take its meaning at once, repeating
+together or between them, "The longest insensibility after immersion?
+Many hours."
+
+"But how many?" Six, certainly, is Dr. Conrad's testimony. But the
+Scotchman's conscience plagues him; he must needs be truthful. "Vara
+likely you're right," he says. "I couldna have borne testimony
+pairsonally to more than two. But vara sairtainly you're more likely
+to be right than I." His conscience has a chilling effect.
+
+Fenwick, a haggard spectacle, has staggered to the door of the
+cottage. He wants to get the attention of some one in the crowd that
+stands about in silence, never intrusively near. It is the father of
+young Benjamin, who comes being summoned.
+
+"That man you told me about...." Fenwick begins.
+
+"Peter Burtenshaw?"
+
+"Ah! How long was he insensible?"
+
+"Eight hours--rather better! We got him aboard just before eight bells
+of the second dog-watch, and it was eight bells of the middle watch
+afore he spoke. Safe and sure! Wasn't I on the morning-watch myself,
+and beside him four hours of the night before, and turned in at eight
+bells? He'll tell you the same tale himself. Peter Burtenshaw--he's
+a stevedore now, at the new docks at Southampton." Much of this was
+quite unintelligible--ship's time is always a problem--but it was
+reassuring, and Rosalind felt grateful to the speaker, whether what he
+said was true or not. In that curious frame of mind that observed the
+smallest things, she was just aware of the difficulty in the way of
+a reference to Peter Burtenshaw at the new docks at Southampton. Then
+she felt a qualm of added sickness at heart as she all but thought,
+"How that will amuse Sally when I come to tell it to her!"
+
+The old Scotchman had to keep an appointment--connected with birth,
+not death. "I've geen my pledge to the wench's husband," he said, and
+went his way. Rosalind saw him stopped as he walked through the groups
+that were lingering silently for a chance of good news; and guessed
+that he had none to give, by the way his questioners fell back
+disappointed. She was conscious that the world was beginning to reel
+and swim about her; was half asking herself what could it all
+mean--the waiting crowds of fisher-folk speaking in undertones among
+themselves; the pitying eyes fixed on her and withdrawn as they met
+her own; the fixed pallor and tense speech of the man who held her
+hand, then left her to return again to an awful task that had, surely,
+something to do with her Sally, there in that cramped tarred-wood
+structure close down upon the beach. What did his words mean: "I must
+go back; it is best for you to keep away"? Oh, yes; now she knew, and
+it was all true. She saw how right he was, but she read in his eyes
+the reason why he was so strong to face the terror that she knew was
+_there_--in _there_! It was that he knew so well that death would be
+open to him if defeat was to be the end of the battle he was fighting.
+But there should be no panic. Not an inch of ground should be
+uncontested.
+
+Back again in the little cottage with Gerry, but some one had helped
+her back. Surely, though, his voice had become his own again as he
+said: "We are no use, Rosey darling. We are best here. Conrad knows
+what he's about." And there was a rally of real hope, or a bold bid
+for it, when his old self spoke in his words: "Why does that solemn
+old fool of a Scotch doctor want to put such a bad face on the matter?
+Patience, sweetheart, patience!"
+
+For them there was nothing else. They could hinder, but they could not
+help, outside there. Nothing for it now but to count the minutes as
+they passed, to feel the cruelty of that inexorable clock in the
+stillness; for the minutes passed too quickly. How could it be else,
+when each one of them might have heralded a hope and did not; when
+each bequeathed its little legacy of despair? But was there need
+that each new clock-tick as it came should say, as the last had said:
+"Another second has gone of the little hour that is left; another inch
+of the space that parts us from the sentence that knows no respite or
+reprieve"? Was it not enough that the end must come, without the throb
+of that monotonous reminder: "Nearer still!--nearer still!"
+
+Neither spoke but a bare word or two, till the eleventh stroke of the
+clock, at the hour, left it resonant and angry, and St. Sennans tower
+answered from without. Then Rosalind said, "Shall I go out and see,
+now?" and Fenwick replied, "Do, darling, if you wish to. But he would
+tell us at once, if there were anything." She answered, "Yes, perhaps
+it's no use," and fell back into silence.
+
+She was conscious that the crowd outside had increased, in spite of a
+fine rain that had followed the overclouding of the morning. She could
+hear the voices of other than the fisher-folk--some she recognised as
+those of beach acquaintance. That was Mrs. Arkwright, the mother of
+Gwenny. And that was Gwenny herself, crying bitterly. Rosalind knew
+quite well, though she could hear no words, that Gwenny was being told
+that she could not go to Miss Nightingale now. She half thought she
+would like to have Gwenny in, to cry on her and make her perhaps feel
+less like a granite-block in pain. But, then, was not Sally a baby of
+three once? She could remember the pleasure the dear old Major had at
+seeing baby in her bath, and how he squeezed a sponge over her head,
+and she screwed her eyes up. He had died in good time, and escaped
+this inheritance of sorrow. How could she have told him of it?
+
+What was she that had outlived him to bear all this? Much, so much,
+of her was two dry, burning eyes, each in a ring of pain, that had
+forgotten tears and what they meant. How was it that now, when that
+Arkwright woman's voice brought back her talk upon the beach, not
+four-and-twenty hours since, and her unwelcome stirring of the dead
+embers of a burned-out past--how was it that that past, at its worst,
+seemed easier to bear than this intolerable _now_? How had it come
+about that a memory of twenty years ago, a memory of how she had
+prayed that her unborn baby might die, rather than live to remind her
+of that black stain upon the daylight, its father, had become in the
+end worse to her, in her heart of hearts, than the thing that caused
+it? And then she fell to wondering when it was that her child first
+took hold upon her life; first crept into it, then slowly filled it
+up. She went back on little incidents of that early time, asking
+herself, was it then, or then, I first saw that she was Sally? She
+could recall, without adding another pang to her dull, insensate
+suffering, the moment when the baby, as the Major and General Pellew
+sat playing chess upon the deck, captured the white king, and sent
+him flying into the Mediterranean; and though she could not smile now,
+could know how she would have smiled another time. Was that white king
+afloat upon the water still? A score of little memories of a like sort
+chased one another as her mind ran on, all through the childhood and
+girlhood of their subject. And now--it was all to end....
+
+And throughout those years this silent man beside her, this man
+she meant to live for still, for all it should be in a darkened
+world--this man was ... where? To think of it--in all those years,
+no Sally for him! See what she had become to him in so short a
+time--such a little hour of life! Think of the waste of it--of
+what she might have been! And it was she, the little unconscious
+thing herself, that sprang from what had parted them. If she
+had to face all the horrors of her life anew for it, would she
+flinch from one of them, only to hear that the heart that had
+stopped its beating would beat again, that the voice that was
+still would sound in her ears once more?
+
+Another hour! The clock gave out its warning that it meant to strike,
+in deadly earnest with its long premonitory roll. Then all those
+twelve strokes so quick upon the heels of those that sounded but now,
+as it seemed. Another hour from the tale of those still left but
+reasonable hope; another hour nearer to despair. The reverberations
+died away, and left the cold insensate tick to measure out the next
+one, while St. Sennans tower gave its answer as before.
+
+"Shall I go now, Gerry, to see?"
+
+"I say not, darling; but go, if you like." He could not bear to hear
+it, if it was to be the death-sentence. So Rosalind still sat on to
+the ticking of the clock.
+
+Her brain and powers of thought were getting numbed. Trivial things
+came out of the bygone times, and drew her into dreams--back into
+the past again--to give a moment's spurious peace; then forsook her
+treacherously to an awakening, each time deadlier than the last. Each
+time to ask anew, what could it all mean? Sally dead or dying--Sally
+dead or dying! Each time she repeated the awful words to herself, to
+try to get a hold she was not sure she had upon their meaning. Each
+time she slipped again into a new dream and lost it.
+
+Back again now, in the old days of her girlhood! Back in that little
+front garden of her mother's house, twenty odd years ago, and Gerry's
+hand in hers--the hand she held to now; and Gerry's face that now,
+beside her, looked so still and white and heart-broken, all aglow with
+life and thoughtless youth and hope. Again she felt upon her lips his
+farewell kiss, not to be renewed until ... but at the thought she
+shuddered away, horror-stricken, from the nightmare that any memory
+must be of what then crossed her life, and robbed them both of
+happiness. And then her powers of reason simply reeled and swam, and
+her brain throbbed as she caught the thought forming in it: "Better
+happiness so lost, and all the misery over again, than this blow that
+has come upon us now! Sally dead or dying--Sally dead or dying!" For
+what was _she_, the thing we could not bear to lose, but the living
+record, the very outcome, of the poisoned soil in that field of her
+life her memory shrank from treading?
+
+What was that old Scotchman--he seemed to have come back--what was
+he saying outside there? Yes, listen! Fenwick starts up, all his
+life roused into his face. If only that clock would end that long
+unnecessary roll of warning, and strike! But before the long-deferred
+single stroke comes to say another hour has passed, he is up and at
+the door, with Rosalind clinging to him terrified.
+
+"What's the news, doctor? Tell it out, man!--never fear." Rosalind
+dares not ask; her heart gives a great bound, and stops, and her teeth
+chatter and close tight. She could not speak if she tried.
+
+"I wouldna like to be over-confeedent, Mr. Fenwick, and ye'll
+understand I'm only geevin' ye my own eempression...."
+
+"Yes, quite right--go on...."
+
+"Vara parteecularly because our young friend Dr. Vereker is unwulling
+to commeet himself ... but I should say a pairceptible...."
+
+He is interrupted. For with a loud shout Dr. Conrad himself,
+dishevelled and ashy-white of face, comes running from the door
+opposite. The word he has shouted so loudly he repeats twice; then
+turns as though to go back. But he does not reach the door, for he
+staggers suddenly, like a man struck by a bullet, and falls heavily,
+insensible.
+
+There is a movement and a shouting among the scattered groups that
+have been waiting, three hours past, as those nearest at hand run to
+help and raise him; and the sound of voices and exultation passes
+from group to group. For what he shouted was the one word "Breath!"
+And Rosalind knew its meaning as her head swam and she heard no more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+WAS IT THE LITTLE GALVANIC BATTERY? THE LAST CHAPTER RETOLD BY THE
+ PRESS. A PROPER RAILING. BUT THEY _WEREN'T_ DROWNED. WHAT'S THE FUSS?
+ MASTER CHANCELLORSHIP APPEARS AND VANISHES. ELECTUARY OF ST. SENNA.
+ AT GEORGIANA TERRACE. A LETTER FROM SALLY. ANOTHER FROM CONRAD.
+ EVERYTHING VANISHES!
+
+
+Professor Sales Wilson, Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's papa, was enjoying
+himself thoroughly. He was the sole occupant of 260, Ladbroke Grove
+Road, servants apart. All his blood-connected household had departed
+two days after the musical evening described in Chapter XL., and
+there was nothing that pleased him better than to have London to
+himself--that is to say, to himself and five millions of perfect
+strangers. He had it now, and could wallow unmolested in Sabellian
+researches, and tear the flimsy theories of Bopsius--whose name we
+haven't got quite right--to tatters. Indeed, we are not really sure
+the researches _were_ Sabellian. But no matter!
+
+Just at the moment at which we find him, the Professor was not engaged
+in any researches at all, unless running one's eye down the columns
+of a leading journal, to make sure there is nothing in them, is a
+research. That is what he was doing in his library. And he was also
+talking to himself--a person from whom he had no reserves or
+concealments. What he had to say ran in this wise:
+
+"H'm!--h'm!--'The Cyclopean Cyclopaedia.' Forty volumes in calf. Net
+price thirty-five pounds. A digest of human knowledge, past, present,
+and probable. With a brief appendix enumerating the things of which
+we are still ignorant, and of our future ignorance of which we are
+scientifically certain ... h'm! h'm!... not dear at the price. But
+stop a bit! 'Until twelve o'clock on Saturday next copies of the
+above, with revolving bookcase, can be secured for the low price of
+seven pounds ten.'..." This did not seem to increase the speaker's
+confidence and he continued, as he wrestled with a rearrangement of
+the sheet: "Shiny paper, and every volume weighs a ton. Very full of
+matter--everything in it except the thing you want to know. By-the-bye
+... what a singular thing it is, when you come to think of it, that
+so many people will sell you a thing worth a pound for sixpence, who
+won't give you a shilling outright on any terms! It must have to do
+with their unwillingness to encourage mendicancy. A noble self-denial,
+prompted by charity organizations! Hullo!--what's this? 'Heroic rescue
+from drowning at St. Sennans-on-Sea.' H'm--h'm--h'm!--can't read all
+that. But _that's_ where the married couple went--St. Sennans-on-Sea.
+The bride announced her intention yesterday of looking in at five
+to-day for tea. So I suppose I shall be disturbed shortly."
+
+The soliloquist thought it necessary to repeat his last words twice
+to convince himself and the atmosphere that his position was one of
+grievance. Having done this, and feeling he ought to substantiate his
+suggestion that he was just on the point of putting salt on the tail
+of an unidentified Samnite, or a finishing touch on the demolition of
+Bopsius, he folded his newspaper, which we suspect he had not been
+reading candidly from, and resumed his writing.
+
+Did you ever have a quarter of an hour of absolutely unalloyed
+happiness? Probably not, if you have never known the joys of profound
+antiquarian erudition, with an unelucidated past behind you, and
+inexpensive publication before. The Professor's fifteen minutes that
+followed were not only without alloy, but had this additional
+zest--that that girl would come bothering in directly, and he would
+get his grievance, and work it. And at no serious expense, for he was
+really very partial to his daughter, and meant, _au fond de soi_, to
+enjoy her visit. Nevertheless, discipline had to be maintained, if
+only for purposes of self-deception, and the Professor really believed
+in his own "Humph! I supposed it would be that," when Laetitia's knock
+came at the street door.
+
+"Such a shame to disturb you, papa dear! But you'll have to give me
+tea--you said you would."
+
+"It isn't five o'clock yet. Well--never mind. Sit down and don't
+fidget. I shall have done presently.... No! make yourself useful now
+you _are_ here. Get me 'Passeri Picturae Etruscorum,' volume three,
+out of shelf C near the window ... that's right. Very good find for
+a young married woman. Now sit down and read the paper--there's
+something will interest you. You may ring for tea, only don't talk."
+
+The Professor then became demonstratively absorbed in the Sabellians,
+or Bopsius, or both, and Laetitia acted as instructed, but without
+coming on the newspaper-paragraph. She couldn't ask for a clue after
+so broad a hint, so she had to be contented with supposing her father
+referred to the return of Sir Charles Penderfield, Bart., as a Home
+Rule Unionist and Protectionist Free Trader. Only if it was that, it
+was the first she had ever known of her father being aware of the
+Bart.'s admiration for herself. So she made the tea, and waited
+till the pen-scratching stopped, and the Sabellians or Bopsius were
+blotted, glanced through, and ratified.
+
+"There, that'll do for that, I suppose." His tone surrendered the
+grievance as an act of liberality, but maintained the principle.
+"Well, have we found it?"
+
+"Found what?"
+
+"The heroic rescue--at your place--Saint Somebody--Saint Senanus...."
+
+"No! Do show me that." Laetitia forms a mental image of a lifeboat
+going out to a wreck. How excited Sally must have been!
+
+"Here, give it me and I'll find it.... Yes--that's right--a big lump
+and a little lump. I'm to take less sugar because of gout. Very good!
+Oh ... yes ... here we are. 'Heroic Rescue at St. Sennans' ... just
+under 'Startling Elopement at Clapham Rise'.... Got it?"
+
+Laetitia supplied the cup of tea, poured one for herself, and took
+the paper from her father without the slightest suspicion of what was
+coming. "It will have to wait a minute till I've had some tea," she
+said. "I'm as thirsty as I can be. I've been to see my mother-in-law
+and Constance"--this was Julius's sister--"off to Southend. And just
+fancy, papa; Pag and I played from nine till a quarter-to-one last
+night, and he never felt it, nor had any headache nor anything." The
+topic is so interesting that the unread paragraph has to wait.
+
+The Professor cannot think of any form of perversion better than
+"Very discreditable to him. I hope you blew him well up?"
+
+"Now, papa, don't be nonsensical! Do you know, I'm really beginning
+to believe Pag's right, and it _was_ the little galvanic battery.
+Shouldn't you say so, though, seriously?"
+
+"Why, yes. If there wasn't a big galvanic battery, it must have been
+the little one. It stands to reason. But _what_ does my musical
+son-in-law think was the little galvanic battery?"
+
+"Oh dear, papa, how ridiculous you are! Why, of course, his nerves
+going away--as they really _have_ done, you know; and I can't see
+any good pretending they haven't. Yesterday was the fourth evening
+he hasn't felt them...."
+
+"Stop a bit! There is a lack of scientific precision in the structure
+of your sentences. A young married woman ought really to be more
+accurate. Now let's look it over, and do a little considering.
+I gather, in the first place, that my son-in-law's nerves going away
+was, or were, a little galvanic battery...."
+
+"Dear papa, don't paradox and catch me out. Just this once, be
+reasonable! Think what a glorious thing it would be for us if his
+nerves _had_ gone for good. Another cup? Was the last one right?"
+
+"My position is peculiar. (Yes, the tea was all right.) I find
+myself requested to be reasonable, and to embark on a career
+of reasonableness by considering the substantial advantages to
+my daughter and her husband of the disappearance of his nervous
+system...."
+
+"Oh, I wish you wouldn't! _Do_ be serious...." The Professor looked
+at her reflectively as he drank the cup of tea, and it seemed to dawn
+on him slowly that his daughter _was_ serious. The fact is, Tishy was
+very serious indeed, and was longing for sympathy over a matter for
+great elation. She and Julius had been purposely playing continuously
+for long hours to test the apparent suspension or cessation of his
+nervous affection, and had not so far seen a sign of a return; but
+they were dreadfully afraid of counting their chickens in advance.
+
+"I noticed the other evening"--the Professor has surrendered, and
+become serious--"that Julius wasn't any the worse, and he had played
+a long time. What should you do?" Tishy looked inquiringly. "Well,
+I mean what steps could be taken if it were...?"
+
+"If we could trust to it? Oh, no difficulty at all! Any number of
+engagements directly."
+
+"It would please your mother." Tishy cannot help a passing thought
+on the oddity of her parents' relations to one another. Even though
+he spoke of the Dragon as a connexion of his daughter he was but
+little concerned with, the first thought that crossed his mind was
+a sort of satisfaction under protest that she would have something
+to be pleased about. Tishy wondered whether she and Julius would
+end up like that. Of course they wouldn't! What pity people's
+parents were so unreasonable!
+
+"Yes; mamma wouldn't be at all sorry. Fiddlers are not Baronets, but
+anything is better than haberdashing. _I'm_ not ashamed of it, you
+know." She had subjected herself gratuitously to her own suspicion
+that she might be, and resented it.
+
+Her father looked at her with an amused face; looked down at these
+social fads of poor humanity from the height of his Olympus. If he
+knew anything about the Unionist Home Ruler's aspirations for Laetitia,
+he said nothing. Then he asked a natural question--what _was_ the
+little galvanic battery? Tishy gave her account of it, but before she
+had done the Professor was thinking about Sabines or Lucanians. The
+fact is that Tishy was never at her best with her father. She was
+always so anxious to please him that she tumbled over her own anxiety,
+and in this present case didn't tell her story as well as she might
+have done. He began considering how he could get back to the shreds
+of Bopsius, if any were left, and looked at his watch.
+
+"Well, that was very funny--very funny!" said he absently. "Now,
+don't forget the heroic rescue before you go."
+
+Tishy perceived the delicate hint, and picked up the paper with "I
+declare I was forgetting all about it!" But she had scarcely cast her
+eyes on it when she gave a cry. "Oh, papa, papa; it's _Sally_! Oh
+dear!" And then: "Oh dear, oh dear! I can hardly see to make it out.
+But I'm sure she's all right! They say so." And kept on trying to
+read. Her father did what was, under the circumstances, the best
+thing to do--took the paper from her, and as she sank back with a
+beating heart and flushed face on the chair she had just risen from
+read the paragraph to her as follows:
+
+"HEROIC RESCUE FROM DROWNING AT ST. SENNANS-ON-SEA.--Early this
+morning, as Mr. Algernon Fenwick, of Shepherd's Bush, at present on
+a visit at the old town, was walking on the pier-end, at the point
+where there is no rail or rope for the security of the public, his
+foot slipped, and he was precipitated into the sea, a height of at
+least ten feet. Not being a swimmer, his life was for some minutes
+in the greatest danger; but fortunately for him his stepdaughter, Miss
+Rosalind Nightingale, whose daring and brilliant feats in swimming
+have been for some weeks past the admiration and envy of all the
+visitors to the bathing quarter of this most attractive of south-coast
+watering-places, was close at hand, and without a moment's hesitation
+plunged in to his rescue. Encumbered as she was by clothing, she was
+nevertheless able to keep Mr. Fenwick above water, and ultimately to
+reach a life-buoy that was thrown from the pier. Unfortunately, having
+established Mr. Fenwick in a position of safety, she thought her best
+course would be to return to the pier. She was unable in the end to
+reach it, and her strength giving way, she was picked up, after an
+immersion of more than twenty minutes, by the boats that put off
+from the shore. It will readily be imagined that a scene of great
+excitement ensued, and that a period of most painful anxiety followed,
+for it was not till nearly four hours afterwards that, thanks to the
+skill and assiduity of Dr. Fergus Maccoll, of 22A, Albion Crescent,
+assisted by Dr. Vereker, of London, the young lady showed signs of
+life. We are happy to say that the latest bulletins appear to point to
+a speedy and complete recovery, with no worse consequences than a bad
+fright. We understand that the expediency of placing a proper railing
+at all dangerous points on the pier is being made the subject of a
+numerously signed petition to the Town Council."
+
+"That seems all right," said the Professor. And he said nothing
+further, but remained rubbing his shaved surface in a sort of
+compromising way--a way that invited or permitted exception to be
+taken to his remark.
+
+"All right? Yes, but--oh, papa, do think what might have happened!
+They might both have been drowned."
+
+"But they weren't!"
+
+"Of course they weren't! But they _might_ have been."
+
+"Well, it would have proved that people are best away from the seaside.
+Not that any further proof is necessary. Now, good-bye, my dear; I must
+get back to my work."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+That afternoon Julius Bradshaw went on a business mission to Cornhill,
+and was detained in the city till past five o'clock. It was then too
+late to return to the office, as six was the closing hour; so he
+decided on the Twopenny Tube to Lancaster Gate, the nearest point to
+home. There was a great shouting of evening papers round the opening
+into the bowels of the earth at the corner of the Bank, and Julius's
+attention was caught by an unearthly boy with a strange accent.
+
+"'Mail and Echo,' third edition, all the latest news for a 'apeny.
+Fullest partic'lars in my copies. Alderman froze to death on the
+Halps. Shocking neglect of twins. 'Oxton man biles his third wife
+alive. Cricket this day--Surrey going strong. More about heroic rescue
+from drowning at St. Senna's. Full and ack'rate partic'lars in my
+copies only. Catch hold!..." Julius caught hold, and thought the boy
+amusing. Conversation followed, during cash settlements.
+
+"Who's been heroically rescued?"
+
+"Friend of mine--young lady--fished her governor out--got drownded
+over it herself, and was brought to. 'Mail' a 'apeny; torkin' a penny
+extra! Another 'apeny." Julius acquiesced, but felt entitled to more
+talking.
+
+"Where was it?"
+
+"St. Senna's, where they make the lectury--black stuff.... Yes, it
+_was_ a friend o' mine, mister, so I tell you, and no lies! Miss
+Rosalind Nightingale. I see her in the fog round Piccadilly way....
+No, no lies at all! Told me her name of her own accord, and went
+indoors." Julius would have tried to get to the bottom of this if he
+had not been so taken aback by it, even at the cost of more pence for
+conversation; but by the time he had found that his informant had
+certainly read the paragraph, or at least mastered Sally's name right,
+the boy had vanished. Of course, he was the boy with the gap in his
+teeth that she had seen in the fog when Colonel Lund was dying. We
+can only hope that his shrewdness and prudence in worldly matters
+have since brought him the success they deserve, as his disappearance
+was final.
+
+Even the Twopenny Tube was too slow for Julius Bradshaw, so mad was
+he with impatience to get to Georgiana Terrace. When he got there,
+and went upstairs two steps at a time, and "I say, Tishy dearest, look
+at _this_!" on his lips, he was met half-way by his young wife, also
+extending a newspaper, and "Paggy, just _fancy_ what's happened! Look
+at _this_!"
+
+They were so wild with excitement that they refused food--at least,
+when it took the form of second helpings--and when the banquet was
+over Laetitia could do nothing but walk continually about the room with
+gleaming eyes and a flushed face waiting furiously for the post; for
+she was sure it would bring her a letter from Sally or her mother.
+And she was right, for the rush to the street door that followed the
+postman's knock resulted firstly in denunciations of an intransitive
+letter-box nobody but a fool would ever have tried to stuff all those
+into, and secondly in a pounce by Laetitia on Sally's own handwriting.
+
+"You may just as well read it upstairs comfortably, Tish," says
+Julius, meanly affecting stoicism now that it is perfectly clear--for
+the arrival of the letter practically shows it--that nobody is
+incapacitated by the accident. "Come along up!"
+
+"All right!" says his wife. "Why, mine's written in pencil! Who's
+yours from?"
+
+"I haven't opened it yet. Come along. Don't be a goose!" This was a
+little cheap stoicism, worth deferring satisfaction of curiosity three
+minutes for.
+
+"Whose handwriting is it?" She goes on devouring, intensely absorbed,
+though she speaks.
+
+"It looks like the doctor's."
+
+"Of course! You'll see directly.... All right, I'm coming!"
+
+Take your last look at the Julius Bradshaws, as they settle down with
+animated faces to serious perusal of their letters. They may just as
+well drink their coffee, though, and Julius will presently light his
+cigar for anything we know to the contrary; but we shall not see it,
+for when we have transcribed the two letters they are reading we
+shall lay down our pen, and then, if you want to know any more about
+the people in this story, you must inquire of the originals, all of
+whom are still living except Dr. Vereker's mother, who died last year,
+we believe. Here are the letters:
+
+ "MY DEAREST TISHY,
+
+ "I have a piece of news to tell that will be a great surprise
+ to you. I am engaged to Conrad Vereker. Perhaps, though, I
+ oughtn't to say as much as that, because it hasn't gone any
+ farther at present than me promising not to marry any one
+ else, and as far as I can see I might have promised any man
+ that.
+
+ "Now, don't write and say you expected it all along, because
+ I shan't believe you.
+
+ "Of course, tell anybody you like--only I hope they'll all say
+ that's no concern of theirs. I should be so much obliged to
+ them. Besides, so very little has transpired to go by that I
+ can't see exactly what they could either congratulate or twit
+ about. Being engaged is so very shadowy. Do you remember our
+ dancing-mistress at school, who had been engaged seven years
+ to a dancing-master, and then they broke it off by mutual
+ consent, and she married a Creole? And they'd saved up enough
+ for a school of their own all the time! However, as long as
+ it's distinctly understood there's to be no marrying at
+ present, I don't think the arrangement a bad one. Of course,
+ you'll understand I mean other girls, and the sort of men they
+ get engaged to. With Prosy it's different; one knows where one
+ is. Only I shouldn't consider it honourable to jilt Prosy,
+ even for the sake of remaining single. You see what I mean.
+
+ "The reason of pencil (don't be alarmed!) is that I am writing
+ this in bed, having been too long in the water. It's to please
+ Prosy, because my System has had a shake. I _am_ feeling very
+ queer still, and can't control my thumb to write. I must tell
+ you about it, or you'll get the story somewhere else and be
+ frightened.
+
+ "It was all Jeremiah's fault, and I really can't think what
+ he was doing. He admits that he was seedy, and had had a bad
+ night. Anyhow, it was like this: I followed him down to the
+ pier very early before breakfast, and you remember where the
+ man was fishing and caught nothing that day? Well, what does
+ Jeremiah do but just walk plump over the edge. I had all but
+ got to him, by good luck, and of course I went straight for
+ him and caught him before he sank. I induced him not to kick
+ and flounder, and got him inside a life-belt they threw from
+ the pier, and then I settled to leave him alone and swim to
+ the steps, because you've no idea how I felt my clothes, and
+ it would have been all right, only a horrible heavy petticoat
+ got loose and demoralised me. I don't know how it happened,
+ but I got all wrong somehow, and a breaker caught me. _Don't
+ get drowned_, Tishy; or, if you do, _don't be revived again_!
+ I don't know which is worst, but I think reviving. I can't
+ write about it. I'll tell you when I come back.
+
+ "They won't tell me how long I was coming to, but it must have
+ been much longer than I thought, when one comes to think of
+ it. Only I can't tell, because when poor dear Prosy had got me
+ to[A]--down at Lloyd's Coffeehouse, where old Simon sits all
+ day--and I had been wrapped up in what I heard a Scotchman
+ call 'weel-warmed blawnkets,' and brought home in a closed fly
+ from Padlock's livery stables, I went off sound asleep with my
+ fingers and toes tingling, and never knew the time nor
+ anything. (Continuation bit.) This is being written, to tell
+ you the truth, in the small hours of the morning, in secrecy
+ with a guttering candle. It seems to have been really quite
+ a terrible alarm to poor darling mother and Jeremiah, and much
+ about the same to my medical adviser, who resuscitated me on
+ Marshall Hall's system, followed by Silvester's, and finally
+ opened a vein. And there was I alive all the time, and not
+ grateful to Prosy at all, I can tell you, for bringing me to.
+ I have requested not to be brought to next time. The oddity
+ of it all was indescribable. And there, now I come to think
+ of it, I've never so much as seen the Octopus since Prosy and
+ I got engaged. I shall have to go round as soon as I'm up.
+ (Later continuation bit--after breakfast.) Do you know, it
+ makes me quite miserable to think what an anxiety I've been to
+ all of them! Mother and J. can't take their eyes off me, and
+ look quite wasted and resigned. And poor dear Prosy! How ever
+ shall I make it up to him? Do you know, as soon as it was
+ known I was to,[B] the dear fellow actually tumbled down
+ insensible! I had no idea of the turn-out there's been until
+ just now, when mother and Jeremiah confessed up. Just fancy
+ it! Now I must shut up to catch the post.
+
+ "Your ever affect. friend,
+
+ "SALLY."
+
+ [Footnote A: Part of a verb to _get to_, or _bring to_. Not
+ very intelligible!]
+
+ [Footnote B: See note, p. 563.][Transcriber's Note: This
+ footnote refers to Footnote A]
+
+
+ "MY DEAR BRADSHAW,
+
+ "I am so very much afraid you and your wife may be alarmed
+ by hearing of the events of this morning--possibly by a
+ press-paragraph, for these things get about--that I think it
+ best to send you a line to say that, though we have all had
+ a terrible time of anxiety, no further disastrous consequences
+ need be anticipated. Briefly, the affair may be stated thus:
+
+ "Fenwick and Miss Nightingale were on the pier early this
+ morning, and from some unexplained false step F. fell from the
+ lower stage into the water. Miss N. immediately plunged in to
+ his rescue, and brought him in safety to a life-buoy that was
+ thrown from the pier. It seemed that she then started to swim
+ back, being satisfied of his safety till other help came, but
+ got entangled with her clothes and went under. She was brought
+ ashore insensible, and remained so nearly four hours. For a
+ long time I was almost without hope, but we persevered against
+ every discouragement, with complete final success. I am a good
+ deal more afraid now of the effect of the shock on Mrs.
+ Fenwick and her husband than for anything that may happen to
+ Miss N., whose buoyancy of constitution is most remarkable.
+ You will guess that I had rather a rough time (the news came
+ rather suddenly to me), and all the more (but I know you will
+ be glad to hear this) that Miss N. and your humble servant had
+ only just entered on an engagement to be married at some date
+ hereafter not specified. I am ashamed to say I showed weakness
+ (but not till I was sure the lungs were acting naturally), and
+ had to be revived with stimulants! I am all right now, and, do
+ you know, I really believe my mother will be all the better
+ for it; for when she heard what had happened, she actually got
+ up and _ran_--yes, ran--to Lloyd's Coffeehouse (you remember
+ it?), where I was just coming round, and had the satisfaction
+ of telling her the news. I cannot help suspecting that her
+ case may have been wrongly diagnosed, and that the splanchnic
+ ganglion and solar plexus are really the seat of the evil. If
+ so, the treatment has been entirely at fault.
+
+ "I shall most likely be back to-morrow, so keep your congrats.
+ for me, old chap. No time for a letter. Love from us all to
+ yourself and Mrs. J. B.
+
+ "Yours ever,
+
+ "CONRAD VEREKER.
+
+ "P.S.--I reopen this (which I wrote late last night) to say
+ that Miss N., so far from having acquired a horror of the
+ water (as is usual in such cases), talks of 'swimming over the
+ ground' if the weather clears. I fear she is incorrigible."
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+ BY WILLIAM DE MORGAN
+
+
+ JOSEPH VANCE
+
+ A novel of life near London in the 50's. $1.75.
+
+ "The best thing in fiction since Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy;
+ must take its place, by virtue of its tenderness and pathos,
+ its wit and humor, its love of human kind, and its virile
+ characterization, as the first great English novel that has
+ appeared in the twentieth century."--LEWIS MELVILLE in _New
+ York Times Saturday Review_.
+
+ "If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield' and 'Peter
+ Ibbetson' he can find the two books in this one."--_The
+ Independent._
+
+
+ ALICE-FOR-SHORT
+
+ The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends
+ and family, with some decidedly dramatic happenings. $1.75.
+
+ "Really worth reading and praising.... If any writer of the
+ present era is read a half century hence, a quarter century,
+ or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."--_Boston
+ Transcript._
+
+ "It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in these rich,
+ interesting, overcrowded books.... Everywhere are wit,
+ learning and scholarship.... Will be remembered as Dickens's
+ novels are remembered."--_Springfield Republican._
+
+
+ HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+ PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+=WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD=
+
+ After years of separation from his wife, the hero, during a complete
+ suspension of memory and loss of identity, accidentally finds shelter
+ in her home. This situation seems very simple, but the developments
+ are far from simple, and form a story of complicated motives and
+ experiences which holds the reader closely.
+
+ An almost grown-up daughter, ignorant of the situation, heightens the
+ tension of the plot, and furnishes her share of two charming stories
+ of young love.
+
+ "Somehow Good" is, in the unanimous opinion of the publishers' readers,
+ an advance upon anything of Mr. De Morgan's yet publisht. $1.75.
+
+
+=WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S ALICE-FOR-SHORT=
+
+ The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends and family,
+ with some decidedly dramatic happenings. Sixth printing. $1.75.
+
+ "'Joseph Vance' was far and away the best novel of the year, and of
+ many years.... Mr. De Morgan's second novel ... proves to be no less
+ remarkable, and equally productive of almost unalloyed delight.... The
+ reader ... is hereby warned that if he skims 'Alice-for-Short' it will
+ be to his own serious loss.... A remarkable example of the art of
+ fiction at its noblest."--_Dial._
+
+ "Really worth reading and praising ... will be hailed as a
+ masterpiece. If any writer of the present era is read a half century
+ hence, a quarter century, or even a decade, that writer is William De
+ Morgan."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+
+=WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE=
+
+ A novel of life near London in the 50's. Sixth printing. $1.75.
+
+ "The book of the last decade; the best thing in fiction since Mr.
+ Meredith and Mr. Hardy; must take its place, by virtue of its
+ tenderness and pathos, its wit and humor, its love of human kind, and
+ its virile characterization, as the first great English novel that has
+ appeared in the twentieth century."--LEWIS MELVILLE in _New York Times
+ Saturday Review_.
+
+ "A perfect piece of writing."--_New York Tribune._
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+=MAY SINCLAIR'S THE HELPMATE=
+
+ A story of married life. Third printing. $1.50.
+
+ "An advance upon 'The Divine Fire.'"--_London Times._
+
+ "The one novel on the divorce question."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+ "A noteworthy book.... There are things said in these pages, and
+ said very plainly, which need to be said, which are rarely enough
+ said--almost never so well said. The book contains unforgettable
+ scenes, persons, phrases, and such a picture of the hardness of a
+ good woman as exists nowhere else in our literature."--_New York
+ Times Saturday Review._
+
+ "Masterly ... artistic to the core."--_Boston Advertiser._
+
+ "No criticism of trifles can leave in doubt the great distinction of
+ her craftsmanship. Very certainly she must have made her reputation
+ by this book, if it had not been already won."--_Punch_ (London).
+
+
+=MAY SINCLAIR'S THE DIVINE FIRE=
+
+ A story of a London poet. 13th printing. $1.50.
+
+ "In all our new fiction I have found nothing worthy to compare with
+ 'The Divine Fire.'"--MARY MOSS in _The Atlantic Monthly._
+
+ "A full-length study of the poetic temperament, framed in a varied
+ and curiously interesting environment, and drawn with a firmness of
+ hand that excites one's admiration.... Moreover, a real distinction
+ of style, besides being of absorbing interest from cover to
+ cover."--_Dial._
+
+ "I find her book the most remarkable that I have read for many
+ years."--OWEN SEAMAN in _Punch_ (London).
+
+
+=MAY SINCLAIR'S THE TYSONS= 4th printing. $1.50
+
+ "Maintains a clinging grip upon the mind and senses, compelling one
+ to acknowledge the author's genius."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+
+=MAY SINCLAIR'S SUPERSEDED= 2nd printing. $1.25
+
+ "Makes one wonder if in future years the quiet little English woman
+ may not be recognized as a new Jane Austen."--_New York Sun._
+
+
+=MAY SINCLAIR'S AUDREY CRAVEN= 2nd printing. $1.50
+
+ "It ranks high in originality, interest and power.... Audrey is a
+ distinct creation."--_Times Review._
+
+ * * * * *
+
+* * * If the reader will send his name and address the publisher will
+send, from time to time, information regarding their new books.
+
+ HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+"THE RETURN OF THE ESSAY"
+
+
+=OVER AGAINST GREEN PEAK=
+
+ By MISS ZEPHINE HUMPHREY
+
+ The homely experiences of a bright young woman and her Aunt Susan, not
+ to mention the "hired girl," in New England country life. $1.25 net;
+ by mail, $1.33.
+
+ "The obvious friendliness of the little book was immediately disarming.
+ It is leisurely, restful, delightful. Throughout runs a vein of gentle
+ humor, of spontaneity, of unaffected enthusiasm, of a spirit keenly alive
+ to beauty and eager to share its delights."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+
+=COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT=
+
+ By J. A. SPENDER, editor of "The Westminster Gazette." $1.25 net;
+ by mail, $1.33.
+
+ Delightful comments upon a great range of subjects, including
+ "Friendship," "Bores," "The Eleventh-Hour Man," "Shyness," "Wealth,"
+ "Poverty," "The Needy and the Greedy," "Women's Morality," etc.
+
+ _The Spectator_ (London)--"While affording the easiest of reading,
+ nevertheless touches deep issues deeply and fine issues finely. Not
+ only thinks himself, but makes you think ... wise and witty....
+ Whether dealing with death and immortality, or riches and Socialism,
+ he always contrives to be pungent and interesting and yet urbane, for
+ there is no attempt either at flashy cynicism or cheap epigram....
+ We advise our readers to read carefully the admirable passage about
+ Socialism and Bagshot's defence of Aristotle's 'magnificent man.'"
+
+
+=WORDS TO THE WISE--AND OTHERS=
+
+ By MISS ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.60.
+
+ The Root and Foliage of Style--When Steel Strikes Punk--Our Kin and
+ Others--At the End of the Rainbow--Modern Letter Writing, with various
+ actual examples--Our Comedie Humaine--The Slain That Are Not Numbered.
+
+ _Boston Transcript_--"A freshness and piquancy wholly delightful....
+ Opens fresh doors into delightful thoughts and fancies."
+
+ _San Francisco Chronicle_--"Some of these essays are among the best
+ in the English language."
+
+ _Chicago Record-Herald_--"Considered in connection with countless
+ other excellent works of the crowded literary season it resembles
+ 'an oasis green in deserts dry.'"
+
+
+=TAPER LIGHTS=
+
+ By MISS ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN. $1.25 net; by mail, $1.34.
+
+ _Springfield Republican_--"The first satisfactory stopping-place is
+ the last page.... A second and even a third reading is pretty likely
+ to end at the same place."
+
+
+
+
+FIVE DELIGHTFUL ANTHOLOGIES
+
+
+=POEMS FOR TRAVELERS=
+
+ Compiled by MARY R. J. DUBOIS. 16mo.
+
+ Covers France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece in
+ some three hundred poems (nearly one-third of them by Americans) from
+ about one hundred and thirty poets. All but some forty of these poems
+ were originally written in English.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The three following books are uniform, with full gilt flexible covers
+and pictured cover linings. 16mo. Each, cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.50.
+
+
+=THE POETIC OLD WORLD=
+
+ Compiled by MISS L. H. HUMPHREY.
+
+ Covers Europe, including Spain, Belgium and the British Isles, in some
+ two hundred poems from about ninety poets. Some thirty, not originally
+ written in English, are given in both the original and the best
+ available translation.
+
+
+=THE OPEN ROAD=
+
+ A little book for wayfarers. Compiled by E. V. LUCAS.
+
+ Some 125 poems from over 60 authors, including Fitzgerald, Shelley,
+ Shakespeare, Kenneth Grahame, Stevenson, Whitman, Browning, Keats,
+ Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, William Morris, Maurice Hewlett,
+ Isaak Walton, William Barnes, Herrick, Dobson, Lamb, Milton, Whittier,
+ etc., etc.
+
+ "A very charming book from cover to cover."--_Dial._
+
+
+=THE FRIENDLY TOWN=
+
+ A little book for the urbane, compiled by E. V. LUCAS.
+
+ Over 200 selections in verse and prose from 100 authors, including:
+ James R. Lowell, Burroughs, Herrick, Thackeray, Scott, Vaughn, Milton,
+ Cowley, Browning, Stevenson, Henley, Longfellow, Keats, Swift,
+ Meredith, Lamb, Lang, Dobson, Fitzgerald, Pepys, Addison, Kemble,
+ Boswell, Holmes, Walpole, and Lovelace.
+
+ "Would have delighted Charles Lamb."--_The Nation._
+
+ * * * * *
+
+=A BOOK OF VERSES FOR CHILDREN=
+
+ Over 200 poems representing some 80 authors. Compiled by E. V. LUCAS.
+ With decorations by F. D. BEDFORD. _Revised edition_. $2.00. Library
+ edition, $1.00 net.
+
+ "We know of no other anthology for children so complete and well
+ arranged."--_Critic._
+
+
+ PUBLISHERS
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+This ebook retains the spelling variations of the original text.
+
+Advertisements from the front of the original text have been moved to
+the back of this ebook. Ellipses have been standardized.
+
+The following typographical corrections have been made to this text:
+
+ Table of Contents: Changed CONRADE to CONRAD
+ (CONRAD VEREKER'S)
+
+ Page 98: Changed heathrug to hearthrug
+ (side of the hearthrug)
+
+ Page 110: Changed things to thing
+ (this sort of thing)
+
+ Page 119: Changed Sallikin to Sallykin
+ (My Sallykin has been)
+
+ Page 132: Removed duplicate word 'to'
+ (one word to save us)
+
+ Page 169: Changed Rosy to Rosey
+ (Rosey had found a guardian)
+
+ Page 188: Changed use to us
+ (both of us drowned)
+
+ Page 242: Changed Simly to Simply
+ (Simply this: to show you)
+
+ Page 270: Added missing single-quote
+ (to come hisself.')
+
+ Page 281: Added missing word 'on'
+ (Sally was on a stairflight)
+
+ Page 304: Removed duplicate word 'together'
+ (talk together earnestly)
+
+ Page 342: Changed you to your
+ (promise your mother)
+
+ Page 382: Added missing period
+ (recollection of B.C.)
+
+ Page 383: Changed tan-laden to tar-laden
+ (blowing the tar-laden)
+
+ Page 399: Changed explantory to explanatory
+ (self-explanatory colloquy)
+
+ Page 413: Added missing close-quotes
+ ("Not?--not at all?")
+
+ Page 426: Changed Rosanlind to Rosalind
+ (breathing-space for Rosalind)
+
+ Page 433: Changed bendictions to benedictions
+ (bed, with benedictions)
+
+ Page 437: Added missing close-quotes
+ ("But it's awful!")
+
+ Page 449: Changed same to some
+ (Had some flavour)
+
+ Page 459: Changed suprise to surprise
+ (surprise-tactics)
+
+ Page 471: Changed lighting-flash to lightning-flash
+ (decisive lightning-flash)
+
+ Page 476: Changed he to be
+ (be determined by either landlord)
+
+ Page 491: Changed elasped to elapsed
+ (his time had elapsed)
+
+ Page 494: Removed extraneous close-quotes
+ (trust to anything.)
+
+ Page 500: Changed skirits to skirts
+ (muslin skirts)
+
+ Page 505: Changed Kruetzkammer to Kreutzkammer
+ (Kreutzkammer--he's Diedrich)
+
+ Page 520: Changed new to knew
+ (she well knew)
+
+ Page 559: Changed recue to rescue
+ (plunged in to his rescue)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Somehow Good, by William de Morgan
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOMEHOW GOOD ***
+
+***** This file should be named 28345.txt or 28345.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ https://www.gutenberg.org/2/8/3/4/28345/
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, C. St. Charleskindt and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
+ owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+ has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+ Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
+ must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+ prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+ returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+ sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+ address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+ the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or
+ destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+ and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+ Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+ money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+ of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+ https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-03-15 17:10:59 +0000